Will vitriol turn into violence?
The growth of populism is lending an increasingly jagged edge to political protests,
If it had been just the pebbles, that would not have been far outside the realm of expectation for a Canadian election, said Amarnath Amarasingam, a Queen’s University expert in extremism who’s been watching the crowds protesting Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau with trepidation.
It’s a federal election, after all. It’s conceivable to imagine someone very angry at a prime minister losing their cool and letting loose some gravel. The same may have happened to former prime ministers Stephen Harper or Paul Martin. Former prime minister Jean Chrétien can confirm — he got a pie in the face during a campaign stop in 2000.
But it wasn’t just the pebbles. And there wasn’t any “cool” left for the crowd of angry protesters in London, Ont., to lose by the time at least one of them launched tiny rocks at Trudeau, hitting but not injuring him and some people around him. The clarion call of the hundred or so people protesting Trudeau was not just to vote him out of office — it was, as they chanted, to brand him “traitor” and, as the now-infamous saying goes, “lock him up.”
“What used to be (normal) policy differences has become elevated to something kind of cosmic. It’s become a conversation of good and evil,” Amarasingam said. “Once you get to that level of conversation, it does start to become extremist speech: He should be hanged, he is a traitor.”
Several experts on politics and extremism who spoke to the Star agreed that the 2021 election has shifted into a space of political unease that is new for Canada. While it does not rise to the level of political violence seen in Canada’s past with the October Crisis of 1970, it does contain more than a taste of the impassioned populist attitudes that have led to extreme protests and even violence in the U.S., such as in the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6.
The key, experts say, is the context of this election — with COVID-19 restrictions as a ballot box issue, and conspiracytheory laden opposition to the restrictions gaining popularity.
Amarasingam has observed what he calls the “melding of different far-right groups” to promote anti-government messaging in the time of COVID-19. Suddenly, anti-vaccination campaigners, anti-government libertarians and far-right nationalists are aligned against Trudeau when it comes to the handling of the pandemic.
At least one blogger leading a racist nationalist group called Canada First was photographed at the London protest, raising concerns that the antivaccination campaigns could be a gateway to hate.
One indication of the increasing support for right-wing populism in Canada is that the People’s Party of Canada, led by Maxime Bernier, which promotes ending lockdowns and vaccine mandates, is enjoying higher polling numbers than the party did in 2019. EKOS polling had, as of Wednesday, three straight days with eight per cent of poll respondents saying they would vote PPC if the election was held that day. They got 1.6 per cent of the vote in 2019.
“The different movements have found a kind of common cause,” Amarasingam said. “The optimistic interpretation of that is once the common cause disappears, everyone will go back to what they were doing beforehand.”
The risk, Amarasingam said, is that Canada is instead seeing a strengthening right-wing populist base — and that the high temperature of the protests could boil over into full-scale violence.
“Once people are in these movements and they get a bit of a sense of community from yelling in a crowd, they want to keep doing it because it feels like they’re doing something bigger than themselves,” he said.
But he doesn’t think the country is at risk of severe violence yet.
“Until you start seeing people getting arrested, overt planning to assassinate politicians or something like that, that’s when it gets into the next level of concern.”
Andrew McDougall, a political scientist at the University of Toronto Scarborough, said the apparent support for the PPC seems to be driven by anger over pandemic restrictions, and that it makes sense this rising political force is making others uneasy.
“This is a new party, it’s more of a fringe party and so people are a little skittish because throwing gravel in this context may take on overtones that it wouldn’t in another election,” McDougall said.
But at the same time, he said there are reasons Bernier’s opponents would want to emphasize the intended violence behind the throwing incident, even if not warranted.
“Politicians having stuff thrown at them is nothing new,” he said, pointing to the pie-face incident of 2000, and agriculture minister Eugene Whelan getting doused in milk by protesters in 1976. “There’s an incentive to paint the PPC as extremist and its supporters are extremist, and every election has its dirty moments.”
Trudeau has said he will not give in to the protesters, calling them “anti-vaxxer mobs.”
“As we see little pockets of people lashing out in ways that remind us of horrific events like the storming of the Capitol, Canadians need to know that their leaders, that their country is standing firm to not let that happen,” Trudeau said in Montreal Tuesday.
Chris Cochrane, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, said he does not recall any time in modern Canadian politics when aggression against a leader was so intense and sustained.
“We can dismiss rock throwing as a minor show of violence, but it does have a feeling of a gateway to something beyond social aggression,” Cochrane said.
“I think this kind of atmosphere poses a threat to politicians and particularly to the prime minister that I haven’t seen in Canada in my lifetime.”
Cochrane and Amarasingam agree that anti-coronavirus restriction content originating in the U.S. is driving the Canadian protests at least in part. What reassures them that these protests may not boil over into something like the Jan. 6 riots here in Canada is leadership.
“One thing we have in Canada that Americans didn’t have is that we don’t have political leaders calling for these sorts of activities,” Cochrane said.
Bernier, Cochrane said, may be in the best position to reach protesters and try to turn down the temperature of their actions toward Trudeau. As Cochrane saw it, he disavowed the violence of the pebble-throwing while not disavowing the language used to describe Trudeau by protesters.
“He made a comment that people are expressing themselves using their words. That could be a defence of socially aggressive language,” Cochrane said.
Over Twitter, Bernier wrote on Tuesday that the pebblethrowing was wrong.
“Some idiot threw pebbles at Mr. Trudeau yesterday. I condemn it,” he wrote. “Words are our weapons. But physical violence is ALWAYS wrong.”