Does PM need a public anger ministry?
They came to the campaign trail, they saw Justin Trudeau — and they were conquered.
It’s a fascinating footnote to all those ugly protests that dogged Trudeau throughout the election. In all but a couple of the ridings where the angriest demonstrations took place, voters sent Trudeau’s Liberals to Parliament.
Liberals won in London North Centre, where Trudeau was pelted with rocks in early September. The Liberals also won in Burnaby, B.C., where Trudeau snapped back at a protester who had been hurling insults at his wife. They won in Newmarket-Aurora, scene of one of the campaign’s earliest protests against Trudeau. The Liberal candidate, Bryan May, was ultimately victorious in Cambridge, Ont., where a horde of about 100 yelling demonstrators tried to shout down a Trudeau event on a sunny Sunday in late August.
In Bolton, where Trudeau cancelled an event because of security fears, the Liberals didn’t win, but they placed a strong second to incumbent Conservative Kyle Seeback.
So if the mission of all this campaign disruption was to unseat Trudeau, the protest project can be deemed an abysmal failure.
The People’s Party of Canada, which seemed to be an increasing favourite of the demonstrators as the campaign wore on, didn’t manage to win one seat.
As for the fierce, anti-vaxxer sentiments that fuelled many of the participants in those raucous crowds, there’s been zero impact on government policy.
Since winning re-election, in fact, Trudeau has dug in further on mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations, vaccine passports and promises to crack down on protests that threaten healthcare workers and institutions.
In many ways, then, those ugly scenes of Campaign 2021 are already distant memories. Politically, Trudeau and his team could fairly say that they didn’t do much damage overall to the Liberals. They may have even helped them.
But can any government afford to ignore that undercurrent of rage, now that it’s been exposed to full public view?
“We can’t hope it’s just going to go away,” says Steven Guilbeault, who remains heritage minister at least until Trudeau unveils his new cabinet at the end of this month.
Guilbeault is one of the ministers who has had to think more than most about what kind of anger is lurking out there in Canada, because much of it is being fuelled in dark corners of the internet — the same places and platforms that the heritage ministry has been trying to regulate.
Guilbeault says the protests were ample proof of the need to get more accountability out of the tech giants and to rein in hate speech on the internet, which Trudeau’s team has already tagged as big priorities for its first months in office. Whether it’s Guilbeault or someone else in charge of these files, they will be at the top of the to-do list for the minister of heritage.
Trudeau is currently in the midst of creating a new cabinet, which presumably will reflect lessons learned during the campaign — including what Canadians saw at those protests. The prime minister is not likely to create a ministry of public anger, but he also can’t afford to ignore how the pandemic has pushed some citizens — and not just protesters — to worrying heights of frustration and despair.
Mental-health initiatives could well assume greater prominence for the government, for instance, along with heightened attention to pandemic-ravaged businesses and livelihoods. Some of those demonstrators were shouting about jobs they had lost, and the toll on their families and friends. Those frustrations haven’t faded away with the election protests.
Naheed Nenshi, the outgoing Calgary mayor, was in Ottawa this week and we chatted briefly about the unsettling spectacle of all those election demonstrations. Nenshi has seen his own share of nasty protests during his time in public life, but was still disturbed by the scenes of the anti-Trudeau crowds in August and September. He’s not of the view that it’s wise to see them as a thing of the past.
“They’re still out there,” Nenshi said, and so is some of the racism and outright antigovernment sentiment that bubbled up along the campaign trail.
Trudeau — and Canada, for that matter — escaped any serious political damage from the fury that punctuated the 2021 election. Unlike the radical insurrectionists in the United States, no angry citizens are disputing our election results or continuing to stalk politicians on the road.
But as the U.S. has also demonstrated, seeing these protesters merely as a radical fringe is a mistake too. They may have failed in their bid to topple Trudeau, but that kind of rage is always out looking for new targets.