Canada Has Its Share Of Kooks, Too
Its Conservative Party leader would be right at home in MAGA's fascist-friendly, white-supremacist-supporting cult.
Pierre Poilievre is the latest leader of Canada’s Conservative Party. He is on the wrong side of every issue imaginable, cozy with fascists and white supremacists, and his embrace of easily-and-often-debunked conspiracy theories would make him perfectly at home in the far-right extremist MAGA movement.
The Breach (February 2022):
[Poilievre] greeted the arrival of the “Freedom Convoy” to Ottawa from a highway overpass in late January, and has been diligently collecting contact information from its supporters. . . .
Over his career, Poilievre has made a lot of promises . . . corporate tax cuts, privatization and an all-out assault on the public sector workforce and welfare state. . . . As the pandemic has unleashed new dynamics into Canadian society, he has built up greater support, lashing out at “gatekeepers” in speeches peppered with conspiracy theory dog-whistling and appeals to the anti-vaccine movement. . . .
In 2004, at the age of 24 and just a few years out of university, Poilievre was elected to parliament with the recently-unified Conservative Party . . .
In 2005, he voted against gay marriage, and vowed that the “meaning of the term ‘marriage’ ought to be preserved as a union between one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others.” He has also voted against legalizing marijuana and transgender rights legislation, and in favor of a number of restrictions on abortion procedures. . . .
In 2008, he also suggested “withholding” transfer money to stop provincial health plans from paying for gender transition services. . . .[In 2009, Poilievre] become a reliable attack dog for the Conservative Party against unions. He led the charge on a bill to allow the government to roll back wage gains in public sector collective agreements. . . . That same year, Poilievre came out staunchly in favor of “right-to-work” legislation, which would allow workers to opt-out of union membership even after a democratic vote to unionize among workers. Poilievre’s proposals were modeled explicitly on similar legislation in Michigan. . . .
In an August 2012 op-ed titled “Escaping big government,” Poilievre called for new, deeper cuts to social programs in Canada to aid the post-financial crash recovery. He urged the government to “cut welfare programs,” “employee wages” and “government jobs” and privatize the “major symbols of the remaining government influence on the economy.”
In 2015, Poilievre would display a characteristic lack of sympathy for migrant workers facing deportation, remarking: “That’s why they’re called temporary foreign workers.” . . .
[In 2017] Poilievre suggested moving people with disabilities into private sector work at “competitive wages,” privatizing housing on reserves, slashing economic development programs and changing funding formulas for Employment Agencies to serve employers. . . .
He suggested following Milton Friedman by replacing “the entire welfare state” with “a tiny survival stipend for all low-income people.”
He was explicit that this would mean “eliminating all other programs, including housing, drug plans, child care and the bureaucrats who administer it all”—something the Conservative Party MPs have rarely been so open about.
More recently, in 2020, Poilievre further insisted that cutting unemployment benefits and social programs to pay for a similar line of corporate tax cuts would mean “getting our businesses making things back in Canada.” . . .
Should these plans fail, however, Poilievre has an alternative—Bitcoin.
He has expressed hopes that Bitcoin—a decentralized digital currency that has been heavily influenced by far-right wing libertarian thinking—might supplant “the government monopoly on our cash.” . . .
Poilievre’s crypto outreach strategy is only slightly stranger than his apparent sympathies for opponents of public health precautions. Over the past two years, as Poilievre has defended far-right anti-vaxxer protesters, voted against vaccine mandates, and denounced the federal government’s supposed plot for a “great reset,” he has built up a considerable following. . . .
Nearly 70 per cent of [Conservative Party] voters believe Canada has “too many non-white immigrants,” the party has been plagued for months by anti-vaccine MPs and members, and past party leaders have been confronted by Pizzagate and “cultural marxism” conspiracy theories within their own ranks.
It is yet to be seen if Poiliere can assemble anti-vaxxers, conspiracy groups and crypto bros into an effective base, let alone win an elections as Conservative leader. But regardless of whether he succeeds, it is a sign that Canada’s right-wing is becoming more noxious.
Spring (July 2022):
The policies that Poilievre embraces exist at the extreme edge of Tory politics. He doesn’t concern himself with any ‘compassionate conservative’ credentials. He gushes over the material put out by the Fraser Institute and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Among his idols are Margaret Thatcher and Jordan Peterson. He adamantly opposed the Canada Emergency Response Benefit that was provided to hard pressed people as the pandemic led to economic shutdown, arguing that ‘government should not put down the credit card.’ He is in favour of gutting income support systems and providing only a ‘tiny survival stipend for all low-income people,’ which he promotes as a Milton Friedman-style basic income.
In Poilievre’s view, the present cost of living crisis can best be dealt with by attacking trade unions and imposing massive cuts to systems of social provision in Canada. As one commentator put it, he ‘is a reactionary austerity monger in the mold of a Jason Kenney, someone who will fight unions, suffocate the public sector, and cut welfare, even if those policies prove highly unpopular.’ . . .
Poilievre is by no means the first Conservative politician to lend support to the far right-initiated ‘trucker’ convoys . . . In June, he ostentatiously marched through the streets of Ottawa with convoy supporters. He was unapologetic when the inevitable far right extremist ties among the ‘truckers’ emerged and, in the face of criticism, defiantly tweeted, ‘End all mandates. Restore our freedoms. Let people take back control of their lives.’
Poilievre is fully aware that his political base is entirely supportive of right wing protests against public health measures and is, at best, unconcerned if those behind such actions are linked to fascist or white supremacist groups. . . .
We have already seen ‘the biggest protest organized by the Canadian far right since the 1930s,’ the so-called ‘Freedom Convoy,’ make its way across the country with the main organizations of the working class doing very little to oppose it. Now, a dangerous hard right populist is poised to capture the leadership of the party of mainstream conservatism in Canada.
Both of these developments point to something very clear and obvious. In these volatile and dangerous times, the right is going to advance, on the electoral front and in the streets. It won’t be contained by the squeamish moderates of the establishment. . . . The politics of Pierre Poilievre are a very major threat but they are also a symptom of societal crisis and the lack of a fighting response on the left.
As The Conservative Party Goes Full MAGA, We All Lose
Erica Ifill, The Hill Times, April 27, 2022:
The Conservatives have removed their patina of integrity and propriety to go full MAGA. Finally. They’ve been swirling around this bowl for a while. If former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, who infamously defended the residential school system, was their great moderate hope, they have some serious problems.
We are at a crossroads in this country. Society is fractured and tearing at the seams, and we have a tepid, duplicitous Liberal Party, which—judging from the release of Budget 2022—is also out of touch.
In other words, we’re screwed.
Canadians have been quite smug and supercilious about the political transformation of American politics into MAGA-ness; many laughed and pointed the finger at the mania of our cousins down south, others wagged their finger at Republicans’ sometimes violent assault on human and civil rights. The made-up cultural controversies are to ensure that a white, Christian, powerful minority shapes the future of that country for at least another generation. The “culture wars” are the currencies of political support that place the actors in this circus in powerful positions to realize their goals. Cancel culture, free speech, critical race theory, feminists, Black Lives Matter, “globalists” (read: Jews), wokeness, groomers, and whatever other whiny escapades in white fragility they offer. These trends are now firmly in Canada, as evidenced by the Ottawa Convoy, whose biker buddies will be revisiting the issue in Ottawa this coming weekend. . . .
The Conservative Party has ensured that these trends are integrated into Canadian politics and policy. In an interview with the CBC’s Vassy Kapelos, Conservative Party leadership candidate Leslyn Lewis asserted that Canada would be giving up its health-care sovereignty to the World Health Organization (WHO) if it signs on to a new accord on pandemic prevention. . . . The WHO is a boogeyman for right-wing voters, as the pandemic created a vacuum of consistent government messaging, only to be filled by misinformation and disinformation campaigns. . . . Former Conservative leader Andrew Scheer said he had “‘serious concerns’ about the WHO” according to the National Observer.
And guess who started it? Trump.
In order to cover up for his incompetence in killing hundreds of thousands of Americans through flagrant incompetence and lies, former U.S. president Donald Trump shifted blame to the WHO by halting funding to the organization. . . .
Speaking of [former Conservative MP Derek] Sloan, guess who is advising his campaign for Ontario’s June election (via his Ontario Party)? It’s none other than Roger Stone, the former Trump adviser and ex-con, whose sentence was commuted by his friend, the Donald. And the grift continues.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith was sworn in on Tuesday, October 11. It took only a few hours for her to put her foot in her mouth with a tone-deaf, offensive and MAGA-esque comment. Smith, 51, expressed the deluded opinion that unvaccinated people “have been the most discriminated against group that I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime”, an imaginary turn of events she said was “unacceptable”.
Naturally, Smith was then forced to release a statement (though not an apology) assuring everyone that — despite the unmistakable meaning of her easy-to-understand words — she “did not intend to trivialize in any way the discrimination faced by minority communities and other persecuted groups both here in Canada and around the world or to create any false equivalencies to the terrible historical discrimination and persecution suffered by so many minority groups over the last decades and centuries”.
Smith is no stranger to broadcasting her idiocy and ignorance. She has promised to amend the Alberta Human Rights Act to add vaccination status to the categories protected from discrimination. She claimed hydroxychloroquine “cures 100 per cent of coronavirus patients within six days of treatment" and hyped ivermectin (the infamous horse deworming medicine) as COVID treatments. Neither drug can treat the coronavirus. She also gave airtime on her Global News radio show to a quack who described COVID as “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated”. Smith has claimed that it is “completely within your control” to cure any non-Stage 4 cancer you might have. At a rally for Smith in Calgary, former hockey player Theo Fleury said the trauma from his sexual abuse was similar to the trauma of government pandemic rules.
And, in a possible nod to Donald Trump’s scam of raising $250,000 for his Official Election Defense Fund (a fund that actually did not exist), Smith raised more than $100,000 for a COVID treatment lawsuit against the Canadian government that will never be filed.