Ousting Sloan obscures the bigger picture
Conservative party Leader Erin O’Toole says the far right has no place in his party. He is so intolerant of it, he wants to remove former leadership contender Derek Sloan from the party caucus for accepting a donation from a known white supremacist.
Sounds good. Except that Canada’s shared history with the U.S., our revulsion in this moment of American histrionics and the serious fracturing that faces our country demand much more from the Conservative party than cosmetic gestures of distancing themselves from Donald Trumpinspired white supremacy, the very one they have courted from time to time.
That Sloan shouldn’t be given a political platform is a sound decision. It should have been amply clear when he signed an anti-COVID vaccine petition, when he questioned Theresa Tam’s loyalty to Canada relying on the ever-present racist trope of non-whites as outsiders, when he voted against a bill that would ban so-called conversion therapy — the discredited practice of trying to change one’s sexual orientation.
That Sloan should be ousted because he accepted $131 from a known white supremacist — who holds a membership in the Conservative party — makes the decision look performative. It gives Sloan an out. Something along the lines of: “I get lots of donations, I don’t vet every single one.” “This is a set-up.”
Every so often in the past four erratic years, as a dysfunctional White House regularly invoked racist language and enacted racist policies, there arose circumstances so extraordinarily outrageous that they prompted political parties in Canada to distance themselves from the Trump brand of politicking.
Back when Trump was elected in 2016, and the U.K. had voted to exit the European Union, Canada was in the throes of debating a Conservative leader’s breathtakingly racist “Canadian values test” for immigrants. In soon electing Andrew Scheer as leader, party members appeared to have defeated that shameless attempt to exploit nativist tendencies. But the man who helped Scheer win was Hamish Marshall, a former director of the far-right Rebel Media.
This fall, Erin O’Toole campaigned for the party leadership — and won it — using “Take back Canada” as his slogan. The cleverly vague wording with its MAGA overtones offered a paper-thin veneer of plausible deniability. Still, the question remained: Take back Canada from whom? Or, take back Canada to where?
But then Trump struck again. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness,” he told a crowd gathered in Washington on Jan. 6, before urging them to march to the Capitol. “We’re going to try and give them (Democrats and ‘weak’ Republicans) the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”
With that, Trump unwittingly but explicitly linked “take back” with MAGA. It didn’t help that a photo of Conservative deputy leader Candice Bergen wearing a hat saying “Make America Great Again” circulated widely on social media a day after the insurrection.
Back in August 2017, when Trump supported an openly white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., Canada flinched. Even Rebel News was forced to distance itself from that particular brand of hate on display, after neo-Nazis marched with tiki torches, chanting their anti-Semitic slogans.
Yet, not two years later, in February 2019, we had our own United We Roll rally, with a convoy of trucks rolling from Alberta to Ottawa. Its ostensible purpose was to unite Canadians who supported pipelines, but the convoy displayed signs typically seen on far-right forums: denouncing open borders, protesting the “globalists” in Canada (a vague catch-all alt-right term linked to conspiracy theories) and accusing the prime minister of treason.
Instead of examining why such a rally would attract white supremacists, instead of denouncing the racist and xenophobic elements in the group, Scheer told the congregation, “We’re standing with you.”
Today, instead of examining why white supremacists are comfortable giving donations to his party members, O’Toole is engaging in a checkbox sanitization of his party image.
The act of taking Sloan out over this donation would not erase the concerns of moderates or right-leaning Liberals about being lumped in with the rabid right.
Unless they mean to relitigate the meaning of Canada and the values of equality and liberty
for all, this ought to be a time of existential reckoning for the Conservatives. What do they stand for? Can they be fiscally conservative but socially progressive? Does real social justice have any place in their party?
If Conservatism traditionally stands for “Let’s keep things as they are,” and its radical wing says “Let’s go back to this (mythical) time in the past when things were great,” neither vision works for Canada, where entire groups of people have been marginalized since its inception.
The seriousness of this moment calls for the moral and political courage to not just denounce overt white supremacists but to reject specific beliefs and actions they hanker after.
Such a reckoning is necessary for all political parties, but it is more urgent for the Conservatives who have long played a delicate and dangerous dance with the far right even as it spirals into violence unhinged from reality.