In The Fullness Of Hypocrisy

 

Those who read this blog with any regularity will know that I am a strong advocate of newspaper readership. Despite their flaws, mainstream media have something to offer that simply gleaning news from the internet lacks: reports and perspectives on a wide array of issues. Unlike the echo chamber that the pick-and-choose Web has become, they provide something sorely lacking in many people's perspectives: wide context with which to evaluate the world, and our place in it. Local, national and international reports and views have the potential to take us out of our limited bubble, rather than reinforce it as happens with those who attend the university of the internet.

With that is mind, I am taking the unusual step of reproducing a large portion of a column today, written by Althia Raj, as she addresses some of the fundamental and farcical hypocrisy evident in the Conservative Party of Canada and. to a lesser extent as asserted by Raj (although I don't really agree with her on this point), by Justin Trudeau that has emerged in the truckers' kidnapping of Ottawa:

Shockingly, the demonstrators have received the nearly incomprehensible blessing of Conservative MPs. Writing in the Toronto Sun Friday, Rachael Thomas (Lethbridge) said it an “honour and a joy” to walk among the protesters; she expressed pride that the trucking convoy was sparking mimics in other countries, and called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to dialogue with the protesters — whose organizers have called for the overthrow of his democratically elected government.

Last week, interim leader Candice Bergen (Portage-Lisgar), who has cheered the convoy since the beginning, saying their demands for freedom and respect were not too much to ask, also called on Trudeau to extend an olive branch to the protesters. Carleton MP and declared Conservative leadership contestant Pierre Poilievre also made a point of posing for pictures with the protesters, as have Leslyn Lewis (Haldimand-Norfolk) and several Saskatchewan MPs.

The Tory caucus is not united. But for every Pierre Paul-Hus, a Quebec MP and former lieutenant-colonel, who called for the streets be cleared and the occupation “controlled by radicals and anarchist groups” stopped, or a Shelby Kramp-Neuman (Hastings—Lennox and Addington), who tweeted that the increasing amount of bad-faith actors were not a legitimate protest, there is a Lianne Rood (Lambton-Kent-Middlesex) or Dean Allison (Niagara West) who “strongly disagree,” and see in Ottawa a peaceful assembly. Social media is full of Conservative MPs, such as Greg McLean (Calgary Centre) who decry “unbalanced media coverage,” choosing to focus on the protest’s “winter carnival” feeling rather than its lawlessness.

Who among us believes that if the truck convoy occupiers were anti-pipeline advocates, bringing a joyful message of hope for a greener and cleaner future while urinating on the streets, and blocking these MPs’ constituents from going about their daily lives or sleeping at night, there wouldn’t be a very different message from the Tory caucus?

Back in 2020, during the Indigenous-led railway blockades, Poilievre seemed to be standing on principle when he said, on CBC News Network: “You have the right to swing your fist, but that freedom stops at the tip of another person’s nose. And right now, these blockaders are taking away the freedom of other people to move their goods and themselves where they want to go, and that is wrong.”

Now, we see the double standard.

Most concerning in all this is the noticeable lack of voices decrying the use of foreign money supporting this occupation — a fact the police chief mentioned Wednesday and was later confirmed by attorneys general in Florida, West Virginia and Louisiana.

In 2012, the Conservatives were hell-bent on stopping the foreign funding of charities. Joe Oliver, then natural resources minister, suggested American interests were funding “radicals” who were preventing Canada’s natural resources projects from going ahead.

As more than $10 million was amassed on the GoFundMe platform, and at least $1 million more collected through other avenues, where is the Conservative outrage about outside funding for the convoy? Whether or not you think some of those protesting are just fed-up Canadians — and many are — there is no denying some also share a desire to destabilize the state.

While Ottawa residents deplore the vacuum of policing, there is also a vacuum of leadership.

Trudeau, by referring to the anti-vax as a “small fringe minority” with “unacceptable views,” likely emboldened a movement and encouraged the vaccine-hesitant to join a community that felt aggrieved and misunderstood by the majority. He should be called upon to explain why he sent ministers to dialogue with pipeline protesters but won’t do the same for those on the Hill. Thus far, the prime minister has said strikingly little about the occupation on his office doorstep.

Similarly, Ontario Premier Doug Ford needs to explain just what he’s ready to do to bring order to Ottawa. Saying the city’s police force just needs to ask for help has proven to be insufficient.

All of this is good to know and good to keep in mind, as long as large numbers of people don't get distracted too much by the next viral internet meme or conspiracy theory. 

So Many Possible Labels, None Of Them Positive

There are many labels one could affix to the Conservative Party of Canada: opportunistic, divisive, demagogic, dishonest and principleless are but five that readily come to mind. However, perhaps the most immediately appropriate and withering is hypocritical.

Hypocrisy is to be found in political parties of all stripes, but it appears that the others are mere pretenders to the crown worn by the Conservatives. Cloaking themselves in the self-righteous garment sported by the morally weak, it is surely only the untutored mind that fails to see through their shameful dissembling.

Take, for example, the recent displays of Peter Kent and Michelle Rempel, pretending to channel Canadian outrage over the Khadr settlement as they practised their own political opportunism through American media.

That, according to the Star's Tim Harper, is a damning indictment of their seemingly endless capacity to speak out of both sides of their mouths.

Citing the time that Tom Mulcair went south to express his opposition to the Keystone pipeline, Harper reminds us of the Conservative fury that met his return:

A senior minister of the day, John Baird, accused Mulcair of “trash talking” and “badmouthing” Canada. Another former minister, Joe Oliver, marched to the microphones in the Commons foyer to denounce Mulcair for not leaving politics at the border. He also took to the keyboard for the Globe and Mail to tell the country “a responsible politician would not travel to a foreign capital to score cheap political points.”

You can see where this is going, of course.

Speaking specifically of the quisling-like behaviour of both Rempel and Kent, Harper says,

Both Kent and Rempel have ignored an old, time-honoured dictum which has now been repeatedly discredited — you stash your partisan politics on this side of the border.

For years, Canadian prime ministers did not take partisan shots at opponents back home while travelling abroad because they were representing Canada, not the Liberals or the Conservatives.

Rempel didn’t need to fly to the U.S. to tell Tucker Carlson on Fox that Canadians were outraged. Kent didn’t need to write an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal to be, as he said, “honest” with our allies and inform them.

Yes, this is the same Kent who, as Harper’s environment minister, attacked two NDP MPs, Megan Leslie and Claude Gravelle, for speaking about Keystone in Washington — yes, that issue again.

According to Kent, they were taking “the treacherous course of leaving the domestic debate and heading abroad to attack a legitimate Canadian resource which is being responsibly developed and regulated.”

Perhaps the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. They are, after all, only doing what their former leader and master, Stephen Harper, did:

As leader of the Canadian Alliance, he and Stockwell Day took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal in 2003 to assure Americans Jean Chrétien had made a mistake in staying out of George W. Bush’s “coalition of the willing” invading Iraq, and to tell them Canadians stood with them. (They didn’t.)

When he represented Canada at the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, Harper couldn’t wait until his plane landed in Canada to take a poke at Trudeau over the then squeaky new Liberal leader’s comments about “root causes” of terrorism in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.

No one in the press pack asked him about Trudeau’s comments. Harper raised them unsolicited.

Those who follow politics closely are not likely to be surprised by any of this, given that faux outrage and deceit are two of the black arts practised so adeptly by the Conservative Party of Canada. However, even the uninitiated and the cultishly Con Party faithful should at least occasionally put on their underutilized critical-thinking caps to see the massive and shameless manipulation being perpetrated on them.

It beats being mindless mouthpieces for a party that hardly has their best interests at heart.