NEEDLES AND SPINS
Not all Liberal candidates have been fully jabbed, says Trudeau.
In two decades covering federal politics, I have never seen the kind of frenzied contempt directed at a politician as that aimed at Justin Trudeau at campaign events in Ontario on Friday.
The hostility was focused on Trudeau’s vaccine policies but it was a broader, deeply malicious sense that Trudeau has changed the country in ways the protesters find unacceptable. The Liberal leader said he witnessed a level of anger he’d never seen — not in 12 years as a politician, or as the son of a prime minister. He said the event was cancelled because the safety of the people in attendance could not be guaranteed.
There’s no doubt that if the 200 or so protesters in Bolton, a town 50 km northwest of Toronto, had been able to get their hands on the Liberal leader, they would have torn him limb from limb, such was the manic rage. That was clearly the judgment of Trudeau’s security detail, which pulled the plug on a planned evening rally because of the threat.
Pre-election polls that suggested most Canadians are comfortable with the direction in which the country is heading clearly did not talk to anyone present at the campaign stop in Nobleton, Ont., or in Bolton.
There is a level of coordination in the protests — many of the same people attended both. In Nobleton, one woman with a child screamed that the Liberal leader is a “f---ing a--hole.” Another with a baby on her hip could be seen flipping the bird in Trudeau’s direction.
The Liberal leader held an impromptu press conference with reporters and candidates on a Brampton sports field after the cancelled rally. He was asked about his impressions. “In the past 18 months, we have seen an increase in anxiety, anger and frustration — a sense of powerlessness in a bunch of people that the world is unfolding in ways that they can’t control,” he said.
“We all need to reflect on whether we want to go down that path of anger, division and intolerance.”
He is right. But that feeling of being under siege by the engines of change is not happening in isolation. Trudeau wants to go forward and create a world made in his progressive image. “I’m ready to do big things,” he said.
Yet he has no tolerance for anyone who dissents from his vision of the future. Those who disagree are not just in error, but in sin. There is no recognition in this vision that it is as divisive, if not more so, than Stephen Harper’s brand of hardball politics.
The anti-vaccine protesters are a crackpot fringe. One woman in Nobleton bellowed that she had COVID. “It’s a f---ing cold,” she screamed. But they are only the most vocal representation of a significant minority of Canadians who don’t want to go forward into Trudeau’s brave new world; they would prefer to go backward to a world where their status and place in the world was more assured.
They are entitled to their opinions, if not the shameful way their resentment was expressed — always with an undercurrent of violence.
Trudeau said he is confident Canadians will reject the sentiments being expressed. “It’s not who we are as a country. We are comfortable with differences,” he said.
He is right about that too. Reasonable Canadians will repudiate such tactics and look more sympathetically on Trudeau because they find the protests not only inexplicable but abhorrent.
The agitators should reflect that all their antics are likely to achieve is the return to power of their nemesis.