A Canadian way to handle protest and a U.S. one

While Donald Trump was lashing out over mass civil unrest in his country on Monday, Canadians were getting “practical protest advice” from top-level government officials in Ottawa.

The political-culture divide between Canada and the U.S. has rarely seemed so sharp as during the COVID-19 lockdown. But the chasm has widened even further with the scenes of riots and cities in flames across the U.S. over the past few days.

The idea that the Canada-U.S. border will be reopened in three weeks, as scheduled, seems an almost preposterous suggestion right now.

Canada is tiptoeing out of isolation; America is exploding out of it. Trump is calling for dissent to be crushed; Justin Trudeau’s government is telling civil rights activists to wear masks and consider alternatives to shouting, because, well, yelling spreads the virus.

These very divergent developments really happened during the space of a couple of hours on Monday.

Trump held an angry call with U.S. governors in the morning and, according to news outlets with access to the audio recording, the president thundered, “You have to dominate. If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run over you. You’re going to look like a bunch of jerks.”

If Trump was concerned about the spread of the coronavirus during the widespread riots, that wasn’t reflected in initial reports of his conference call with the governors.

Meanwhile, in Canada, Health Minister Patty Hajdu and chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam were giving very different marching orders to protest-minded Canadians.

At their daily briefing, Hajdu and Tam were asked about the public health risks associated with protest during a pandemic. While not encouraging Canadians to spill into the streets, they didn’t discourage protests either, even offering what Hajdu called practical protest advice.

“Listen, I think it’s people’s right to express their support and in some cases concern about things that are unfolding both here in our country and across the world,” Hajdu said. “There are ways to do it more safely.” She recommended hand sanitizer and masks as good protest accessories to pack along with placards and banners.

Tam had another suggestion: “Shouting and making really loud projections can potentially increase the risk, and so you might want to choose other means of showing or messaging, whether it be signage or making noise using other instruments, for example.”

It’s all about avoiding the “droplets,” Tam explained — or, as Trudeau might say, trying not to protest moistly.

In the U.S., the COVID-19 virus and all the risks of reopening seem to have taken a back seat to the larger scenes of protest and conflagration in American cities in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minnesota last week.

“I can’t breathe” — Floyd’s words as a police officer knelt on his neck — may well become 2020’s three most searing words in a nation that has recently surpassed 100,000 deaths from a virus that also takes people’s breath away.

In Canada, where the death tally sits now at just over 7,300, the pandemic remains the more urgent concern for government.

But Trudeau used his daily briefing with the media on Monday to warn that this country has its own racist demons to wrestle with as well, calling the images coming out of the U.S. “all too familiar.”

“As a country, we can’t pretend that racism doesn’t exist here. Anti-Black racism is real. Unconscious bias is real and systemic discrimination is real, and they happen here in Canada.”

He praised the thousands of peaceful protesters who turned out on Canadian streets over the weekend and chided those who would disrupt them.

If Trudeau’s government has made a decision to take the opposite line from Trump’s on everything from the pandemic to panic in the streets, it is too cautious (or diplomatic) to say so out loud. But the comparisons are unavoidable — whatever Trump does, Trudeau’s government does the opposite, right up to its reaction to the chaos in the United States.

A border that physically closed nearly three months ago seems even more sealed now, politically. Recent polls have shown that Canadians are disturbed by what they’re seeing in the U.S. by way of pandemic response. An Earnscliffe Insights survey released a couple of weeks ago showed that a full 61 per cent of respondents described the U.S. handling of COVID-19 to be “poor” or “terrible.”

Nothing that’s happened in the past week seems likely to persuade Canadians that the United States has this situation in hand — particularly in light of heightened tension in American streets.

The two countries still share much in common, but crisis management is not one of them, especially now.