A Distorted Reality

I will readily admit to holding a long-time smugness about Canada and its citizens; a deep feeling of superiority seemed inevitable when comparing us with the United States, a country that has been unravelling before our eyes for a long, long time.

Unfortunately, some Canadians' response to the pandemic, and the truck convoy's illegal occupation of Ottawa, went a long way toward humbling my hubris. We are not as special as I thought we were.

That fact was much on full display last week when the aspirants for the Conservative Party's leadership had their first debate. Bruce Arthur writes about how the participants spoke of the convoy:

The truckers were heroes. The truckers were misrepresented. The CBC is Pravda, or worse.

 And perhaps worst of all, there was a brief competition over who was more loyal to the convoy. It was like watching two fans of the same band argue over who went to the earliest concerts and bought the first albums, before the band made it big. First, former Ontario MPP Roman Baber seemed to argue that public health restrictions were an attack on democracy and freedom, which taken to its logical policy conclusion would have meant a lot of Canadians dying in hospital parking lots. Then came the squabble.

The squabble was over who showed the most fealty to the insurrectionists' notion of freedom:

“Well, I did stand up for freedom during the pandemic from the very beginning,” said MP and leadership favourite Pierre Poilievre.

“That’s not true. You were not one of the loudest voices, Mr. Poilievre,” said MP Leslyn Lewis, who later took a reference from fellow leadership candidate Scott Aitchison about conspiracy theories to be a statement about her. “You did not even speak up until it was convenient for you. You did not even go to the trucker protests, you actually went and you took a picture in your neighbourhood at a local stop.”

“That’s not true,” said Poilievre. “I was there at the trucker protests. I was on the street. I was supporting those who are fighting for their freedoms.”

The implications of such stout defences are chilling.

And despite their previous support of the movement, even before it hit Ottawa, it was striking to see that the Conservative party could consider support of a lawless insurrection a purity test of sorts. Yes, Jean Charest called the convoy an illegal occupation — and was booed, as part of a rough ride — and the absent Patrick Brown has previously stated he didn’t support it. And Aitchison, too, appears to be an actual adult.

We all know, as Bruce Arthur writes, that the convoy consisted of an array of unsavoury elements, ranging from racists to homophobes to conspiracy theorists and anarchists, all fueled by 'dark money,' a Trumpian dream writ large.

And even if you remove all that and examine the ostensible motivations for the convoy as Poilievre describes them, it is a fundamental rejection of public health measures by a man who also rejected the very idea of government-delivered financial supports. 

 This is where the Conservative party appears to be going, unless someone can derail Poilievre. There was no talk of the nearly 40,000 Canadians who have died of COVID, which is just short of how many Canadians died in the Second World War. There was barely talk of the human toll of the virus at all. There was just a party whose dominant wing traffics in right-wing buzzwords and reflexive rejection of public health as a measure of partisan affiliation.

I am old enough to remember a time when there was no stigma attached to being a supporter of the Progressive Conservative Party. Those days are long gone, and that party, of course, no longer exists, either in name or spirit. 

All of us are the poorer for it.

 

 

 

 

All The Lonely People: Where Do They All Come From?

Before the advent of our current troubles, the Toronto Star's Bruce Arthur won widespread acclaim for his sports reporting. Since the arrival of the pandemic, however, his writing has achieved an entirely new level; his coverage of various aspects of the disease, especially the social consequences, has been superb.

In his latest column, Arthur turns his sights on the irrational protests that have been occurring outside of hospitals, some resulting in obstruction of patient and healthcare worker access. His analysis is well-worth the read.

“You’ve all got blood on your hands! You’re worse than the Nazis!” one middle-aged man yelled at the TV cameras, outside Toronto General Hospital. “You’ll have rocks thrown at you, next!” A few yelled Fake News like they were at karaoke. Mostly, they rejected vaccines. Society, too.

But at ground level there was something piteous about it, malignancy and all. The trappings of a brain-poisoned movement dotted the crowd: a couple of red Make America Great Again hats, some purple People’s Party of Canada gear, a hat from a disgraced barbecue joint. There was a one-page anti-mask, anti-lockdown, ivermectin-boosting, hydroxychloroquine-boosting pamphlet handed out that claimed a vaccine passport was the mark of the beast.

Arthur considers who is so lost as to be protesting a hospital. Some of the misbegotten, of course, are the rabid anti-vaxxers, along with rag-tag followers of the People's Party of Canada. But Arthur offers an interesting perspective about many of the others.

… most people protesting outside the hospital were clearly lost souls. One carried a giant wooden cross; one had tattoos drawn on with a marker; one had a sign that misspelled the mayor’s name as J. Tori. Some seemed hungry for confrontation that never really came, but it was largely social: they swapped conspiracy theories, or recorded one another. More than anything, they seemed lonely. But then, so do QAnon fanatics, or Trumpian rallygoers. Lonely people are easy prey for conspiracies.

One of the more rational attendees was 35-year-old Torontonian Radu Dragon, who posts videos of protests to TikTok and YouTube. A smoker who refuses to get vaccinated, he seems to have found a new fellowship.

So he comes to the protests, and the people there have replaced his former circle of friends, even dotted as it is with the paranoid, the stressed, and people who vibrate on strange, off-reality frequencies. Society has always had people like this. But if you communicate on Facebook, Telegram, Instagram and TikTok, it can become a social circuit.

And for many, there seems to be no coming back, and outreach to them will prove futile.

There is a school of thought that if only we are nicer to people who think health-care workers are criminals and vaccine advocates violate the Nuremberg Code, then they will come around.

But there is an anger out there in Canada living at the conservative end of the spectrum, as the PPC surges in the polls.

“Some of these movements are like a bug light for more radical groups,” says Amarnath Amarasingam, an assistant professor at Queen’s University who specializes in the study of extremism. “It’s not something you can just not have a police presence for, otherwise you wind up with a smaller version of Jan. 6. The vast majority of people on Jan. 6 weren’t violent, but some were.

 “A lot of these groups are getting their content from abroad as well; there’s this theory that our crazies are not as crazy as America’s. Yeah, but they’re reading American content. They’re talking to them on Facebook … these movements are transnational.

 There is an anger and misinformation virus in this country that has been encouraged by some pretend and even mainstream media, and it could absolutely eat our conservative movement. This time there was no violence, and no ambulances were blocked. Thank goodness.

Instead it was mostly a bunch of sad lonely people together on a sidewalk, loosely united in a cause, feeling like they had a purpose, and unaware, while outside a hospital filled with the truly sick, that they had become the monsters.

And it is precisely this aspect of the pandemic for which there is no real treatment available.