As world churns, Tories celebrate … milk
How will you remember Monday, June 1, 2020? I’ll remember it like this: A coward emerged from the bowels of the White House to convince the world he wasn’t a coward. He convinced no one. On Monday, amid mass demonstrations against anti-Black racism and police brutality in the United States, police and National Guard troops used tear gas to clear a Washington area of peaceful protesters.
They did this ostensibly so that President Donald Trump could walk unbothered from the White House to a nearby Episcopal church for a bizarre photo op.
When Trump arrived at his destination, he fiddled with a Bible for a few seconds and then held it up in the air in the fashion of a bored construction worker directing traffic. The cameras flashed.
Meanwhile, the protesters whose civil liberties were squashed only moments earlier so that this inane spectacle could go forward nursed their wounds out of view. How will I remember Monday, June 1, 2020? Not as “World Milk Day.”
And yet, this is how the Conservative Party of Canada will likely remember it, as it was the importance of dairy, not civil disobedience, that they chose to highlight on their social media feed that day. (World Milk Day, by the way, is a United Nations-led international day of recognition of the importance of milk; it’s arguably one of few UN initiatives many Conservatives get excited about).
On Monday, the official Opposition retweeted a photo of Conservative MP Lianne Rood. In it, she is sitting at her computer with a glass of chocolate milk in her hand and a big smile on her face. The caption reads: “Celebrating the 20th anniversary of #WorldMilkDay with a delicious glass of chocolate milk. #EnjoyDairy.” She wasn’t the only one sipping a tall cold one at home.
Peter MacKay, a candidate for the federal Conservative leadership, tweeted a photo of himself in his kitchen holding a glass of milk to his mouth. Like Rood, there is a big smile on the candidate’s face, as well as a pronounced milk moustache. “I raise my glass to the dairy farmers across Canada,” he wrote. CPC Leader Andrew Scheer also extolled the virtues of dairy Monday, with a post about “delicious” milk products and a photo of himself petting a cow.
I mean no disrespect to dairy farmers, nor do I believe human beings are incapable of caring about two things at once (the day prior, MacKay released a statement condemning anti-Black racism), but it is surreal to witness, as the world burns, some of your nation’s most prominent leaders launching the Conservative party version of a “Got Milk” ad.
Yet this milk episode serves as a kind of metaphor for the federal Conservative party’s MO in recent months: i.e. weird, tone-deaf and irrelevant.
To recap: Earlier this year, Andrew Scheer positioned himself as a noble defender of the taxpayer, but his concern that “fraudsters” and “criminals” are benefitting from federal aid money during a pandemic in which millions of
Canadians are struggling financially came off as petty and harsh to many taxpayers who are themselves recipients of aid.
CPC leadership candidate Derek Sloan is currently fixated with “Antifa”— an entity virtually unknown to most Canadians but which he’s promised to designate a terrorist organization if he is elected. In April, he questioned Dr. Theresa Tam’s loyalties to Canada, a move many characterized as outright racist. MacKay seems to spend about as much time managing the fallout of his campaign’s social media blunders as he does campaigning.
And this week, fellow candidate Erin O’Toole released a totally oxymoronic statement promoting “racial equality” on the one hand and himself as a “tough on crime” candidate on the other.
All of this is to say that many prominent Conservatives consistently appear determined to raise tensions and confuse people. But to what end? According to a new study from the Angus Reid Institute, “the Liberal Party of Canada now holds a six-point advantage in national vote intention.” Clearly something isn’t working and it’s unlikely that bluster and milk moustaches will provide the answer.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau paused for a total of 21 seconds before giving an arguably soft answer to a reporter’s question about violent crackdowns on protests in the United States.
The bar for decisive moral leadership is already fairly low in this country. However, instead of raising it, prominent Conservative leaders appear intent on setting it ever lower.