LOS CAMIONEROS SUPREMACISTAS
Las protestas de los camioneros han cambiado a Canadá en forma irreversible - y para mejor.
Autor: Gerald Warner
Nota original: https://reaction.life/freedom-truckers-have-changed-canada-irreversibly-and-for-the-better/
Reproducción de la nota original en inglés al pie.
Traducción: Hyspasia
Comentario de la traductora: El Sr. Warner es escocés y conservador. Duro opositor del nuevo orden mundial y de las políticas liberales, marca maldades, estupideces y contradicciones de la élite gobernante a cada oportunidad. En este artículo, y por eso es tan interesante, señala con precisión el discurso oficial de quienes gobiernan, tanto sobre la supuesta pandemia de corona virus como sobre las resistencias a su plan maestro las cuales han surgido en Occidente como hongos. Les pido por favor que presten atención a la descripción hecha por los medios de comunicación que responden al poder (casi todos) de lo que no es más que una marcha más de trabajadores. En forma adicional, agrego al pie de página (sin traducir) una nota sobre los camioneros canadienses publicada por Foreign Affairs, el órgano oficial del Partido Demócrata de EEUU y por lo tanto, del nuevo orden. La nota original de Gerald Warner también consta al pie. Si leen inglés, disfruten porque su pluma es insuperable.
El convoy de la Libertad
Del Panteón de demonios del establishment surge de repente esta última amenaza contra la conformista civilización globalista neomarxista: Los Camioneros Supremacistas Blancos. El término suena como el título de una película de terror clase B y tiene la misma relación con la realidad que dicha película. Fue Justin Trudeau, una persona con absoluto desconocimiento de la veracidad, aún para los estándares de cualquier político, quien primero intentó demonizar a los camioneros del Convoy de la Libertad con una sarta de difamaciones que rápidamente fueron levantada por los medios de comunicación, o como los manifestantes y un creciente número de personas por todo el mundo, comenzó a llamar legacy media [medios del poder o medios del legado].
Desde que el Convoy de la Libertad se acercó a los suburbios de Ottawa, Justin Trudeau se ha vuelto levemente menos accesible que Kim Jong-un. Llevado de apuro por personal de seguridad a un destino desconocido, supuestamente por miedo a su seguridad personal en manos de los demoníacos camioneros que cantan, danzan y cocinan parrilladas y hacen bromas en el centro de Ottawa. Desde el principio, el objetivo fue presentar a los manifestantes como fascistas violentos, que constituyen una amenaza al orden público y al gobierno electo. Los innumerables videos que se volvieron virales, que muestran escenas más propias de una kermesse, familias con niños incluidas, han convertido a las extravagantes exposiciones - mentiras - del gobierno en el hazmerreír de todo el mundo.
Esta porkiesfest fue iniciada por Justin Trudeau. Emergió brevemente de su caverna o de otro santuario desde el cual gobierna Canadá, el primer ministro lanzó lo que debe ser el más reprochable y repugnante calumnia contra sus propios compatriotas perpetrado por un líder democrático. Luego de disminuir a los manifestantes como una "pequeña minoría marginal", una imbecilidad por la cual él es ahora burlado por Elon Musk, Trudeau a continuación se jugó con una diatriba mendaz.
Citó al retirado ministro de justicia, de 81 años, en un intento de proveerle gravitas a sus desvaríos. Trudeau declaró: "Como mi amigo Irwin Cotler dijo el sábado, la libertad de expresión, de reunión y de asociación son los pilares de la democracia, pero el simbolismo nazi, los íconos racistas y la profanación de los cenotafios de caídos en la guerra no lo son... No estamos intimidados por aquellos que lanzan insultos y abusan de los trabajadores de pequeños negocios y roban comida a la gente en situación de calle. No cederemos ante aquellos que portan banderas racistas, no cederemos ante aquellos que vandalizan o faltan el respeto a la memoria de nuestros veteranos".
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| Ilustración de George Alexopoulos (@GPrime85) |
Omitió agregar los cargos de patear perros, romper juguetes de niños; si obviamos estas faltas, la denuncia era bastante completa. Al punto, los colaboracionistas de los medios de comunicación tomaron el testimonio y corrieron con él. A las horas, proyectaron la imagen a todo el mundo de violentos fascistas ocupando Ottawa, orinando en los monumentos a los caídos en la guerra, vandalizando estatuas, robando la comida a los crotos que duermen en las calles y golpeando a todo aquel que se les cruzara en el camino. En este escenario distópico, en el único momento en que el mar de banderas confederadas se disipaba era cuando le daba lugar al bosque de pendones nazis con esvásticas, de una magnitud tal que hacía parecer el Rally de Nuremberg una iniciativa amateur.
La sola extravagancia de las acusaciones debería haber hecho dudar a los periodistas; pero ninguna acusación woke [progre] es demasiado extrema para los medios de comunicación legacy [del poder]. Aún con una simple mirada a los videos disponibles del Convoy de la Libertad - es uno de los eventos contemporáneos más filmado - hubiera demostrado la sinrazón de las acusacines de Trudeau.
¿Simbología nazi? Sí, un desconocido apareció de la nada con una bandera nazi. Estaba solo y enmascarado (lo que por sí solo sugiere su falta de compromiso con la protesta); rápidamente fue rodeado y forzado a abandonar el lugar, incidente filmado. Se sospecha que pudo ser un agente provocateur y se está investigando su origen.
Lo mismo pasó con un desventurado individuo que se mostró con la bandera confederada, a pesar de que el emblema no tiene la misma resonancia en Canadá que al sur de la frontera. En un esfuerzo de darle mayor contexto a un incidente aislado, la Corporación Canadiense de Radiodifusión (CBC) reportó: "al menos una bandera confederada". A esto Jordan Peterson tuiteó: " 'Al menos una bandera confederada' @CBC, ¿cómo pueden ser ustedes tan consistente y espantosamente patéticos?".
¿Imaginería racista? ¿Dónde? Una de las más prominentes organizadoras es una mujer indígena de la tribu métis; Tamara Lich; su colega organizador es Benjamin Dichter, judío. Hay numerosos e identificables organizadores que pertenecen a la colectividad sikh [de la India]. Parece la organización "supremacista blanca" más extraña de todos los tiempos. Entonces, ¿queda "profanación de cenotafios de héroes de guerra"? Nuevamente, sí, algunos pajueranos que nunca fueron a la capital, sin darse cuenta, estacionaron sus autos en la vereda que rodea al monumento, cercanos a los escalones a los pies del monumento. La policía se los hizo notar y rápidamente movieron sus autos, en lo que la policía de Ottawa describió como un intercambio cordial sin incidentes. Más tarde, algunos fuegos de artificio fueron prendidos en las cercanías, pero no en el cenotafio.
¿Robarle comida a la gente en situación de calle? Un grupo de gente, supuestamente parte de l convoy, se presentó a sí misma en una cola de distribución de comida de un centro de ayuda a homeless. A cambio, miembros del convoy cocinaron comidas calientes para la comunidad de gente en situación de calle [crotos] y continuó dándoles de comer. Luego tenemos la estatua de Terry Fox, la heroica figura que trató de cruzar Canadá al trote con una prótesis en una pierna con el fin de recaudar dinero para la investigación de curas del cáncer. En ese caso, Trudeau usó el francés para condenar el vandalismo. Algunos camioneros decoraron la estatua con la bandera de Canadá y con trapos con slogans, al igual que todos los manifestantes que lo han hecho en forma reiterada; pero porque lo hizo gente opositora a la ortodoxia woke, en esta instancia, fue una profanación.
Vale la pena hacer notar que Trudeau, quien expresa su preocupación por la profanación de estatuas y cenotafios, ha formado parte de manifestaciones del movimiento BLM [Blak Lives Matter], a pesar de que la organización promueve la profanación de estatuas y monumentos. En el año 2020 "took a knee" [puso una rodilla en tierra] en un mitín BLM - apabullante conversión por parte del hombre que se hizo fotografiar en su juventud maquillado de hombre negro.
La más damnificada fue la credibilidad de los medios de comunicación. Lejanos quedaron los días cuando los periodistas corrián a cubrir un evento, descubrían todo lo que podían, y luego hacían un reporte de los hechos. Hoy los reporteros, al igual que los empleados públicos, reconocen que hay "una línea a seguir". Vacunas para salvar vidas, estas personas se oponen de alguna manera a las vacunas, por lo tanto son Malos, son asesinos; deben ser destruidos. Por lo tanto, derecho al teclado y a mostrarlos como racistas.
Algunos periodistas se han revelado en contra de esta alcahuetería. Tara Henley, quien dejó CBC para irse a Substack, dijo que su empleador le pedía "repetir como loro la ortodoxia, le exigían lealtad al dogma". El ex editor de Vancouver Sun, Gordon Clark, denunció que sus ex colegas por dejar que la moralina termine con su profesionalismo. Actualmente los periodistas no reportan noticias, sino que son replicadores de las gacetillas del gobierno o del consenso liberal. La última extravagancia de la CBC es sugerir que las protestas de los camioneros fue instigada por Rusia. (¿Por qué no?; esa cantinela ya fue usada contra Trump).
No es milagro entonces, que la gente abandone los medios de comunicación legacy. Sin embargo, Trudeau tiene una respuesta a eso: en el caso de que los ilotas escaparen del menú de las fake news que proveen los medios de comunicación masivos, intenta censurar internet. Llevó al parlamento un indignante proyecto de ley para instaurar censura, proyecto que ya le han rechazado en dos oportunidades. Bajo esta propuesta, la Comisión de Radio-Televisión y Telecomunicaciones Canadiense recibiría atribuciones para regular el contenidos de los medios sociales creados por canadienses. Es el principio de una barrera de fuego al estilo chino.
Canadá se volvió el país más progre [woke] del mundo. La ley que prohíbe la "terapia de conversión" empieza una guerra a los términos cristianos. El discurso público es monitoreado en grados represivos; el país de los leñadores es hoy una jungla de susceptibilidades en el uso de pronombres inclusivos.
Tan enamorado de sus propias iniciativas está Trudeau, que roza la conducta insana. Su gobierno ha declarado a todos los productos plásticos como tóxicos - hay 10.000 productos caratulados como tales y cualquiera de ellos pueden ser prohibidos de un minuto al otro. Hay 370.000 empleos canadienses en juego, de los cuales 60.000 enfrentan reducciones en forma inmediata por el primer tramo de prohibiciones. La pérdida del empaquetamiento para comida le va a costar a la economía canadiense U$D 5.000 millones anuales.
Esto es lo que sucede en una sociedad cuando el estado usurpa poder en exceso, y es conducido por la ideología. Pero puede ser que todo se vaya por la alcantarilla ahora. El Convoy de la Libertad es por mucho más que por las restricciones establecidas por el COVID, incluido las vacunaciones mandatorias en la frontera. Se ha expandido hasta alcanzar el descontento que sienten los canadienses sobre una multitud de temas: luego de ser atados en camisa de fuerza por el estado, los canadienses quieren respirar en libertad. Quienes apoyan a Trudeau, estúpidamente, están haciendo una encuesta que muestra que "sólo" el 32% de los canadienses apoyan a los camioneros (cuatro puntos más que la semana pasada): ¿desde cuándo un tercio de la población de una nación es descripta como "una pequeña minoría marginal"?
Todo el camino a Ottawa, decenas de miles de adultos y niños hacen flamear banderas canadienses, y vivan al convoy a su paso. Ahora, al menos en una provincia, estas personas son amenazadas con arresto por la policía. ¿Es creíble, en una democracia occidental? De todas formas, esto está cambiando. Recientemente, Canadá ha sido descripta como el primer estado post-nacional - un ícono de la globalización. No más: la proliferación de banderas canadienses, reminiscente de la preocupación de EEUU con sus emblemas nacionales, señales de que los canadienses han redescubierto su identidad nacional y patriota.
La inminente resolución de la protesta - ya sea que los camioneros obtengan lo que piden o no - es, a esta altura, académica. Luego del espectáculo del streaming del Convoy por la LIbertad, de 72 km de largo, a través de toda la nación, nada será igual. Si los canadienses necesitaran un llamado de atención adicional, fue provisto cuando GoFundMe intervino en la alocación de 10 millones de dólares canadienses de las donaciones a los camioneros. Para Trudeau su situación estaba escrita en la pared cuando en la última elección no obtuvo la mayoría.
Canadá tiene su momento "Tea Party", si bien es incierto si encontrará su sísmica continuación en algún tipo de "Trump". Lo que sí es cierto es que el conservadurismo ha vuelto a Canadá, y surge desde sus raíces; nunca más los comisariados estatales dictarán hasta el más mínimo detalle de la vida cotidiana sin que alguien no se lo discuta. El gobierno liberal luce patético: "¡Ottawa ha sido paralizada por diez días!" lloriquea la gente que detuvo a Canadá por dos años. Las mentiras y los insultos de Trudeau y sus alcahuetes no serán olvidados. El futuro luce muy distinto del presente para Canadá.
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Nota de la traductora:
A continuación está la nota original de Gerald Warner en inglés. Al pie de página está la nota de Foreign Affairs donde describe el Convoy de la Libertad en Canadá según la visión del stablishment.
Trucker protestors have changed Canada irreversibly – and for the better
Out of the pantheon of establishment demons there suddenly emerges the latest threat to conformist, neo-Marxist globalist civilisation: White Supremacist Truckers. The term sounds like the title of a ‘B’ movie horror feature and has as much resemblance to reality. It was Justin Trudeau, even by politicians’ standards a stranger to veracity, who first attempted to demonise the truckers of the Freedom Convoy with a string of slanders that were quickly taken up by the mainstream, or as the protesters and a growing number of people elsewhere call them, the legacy media.
Since the Freedom Convoy first approached the suburbs of Ottawa, Justin Trudeau has become slightly less accessible than Kim Jong-un. Rushed by security men to an unknown destination, allegedly out of fear for his safety at the hands of the demon truckers singing, dancing, cooking barbecues and indulging in much hilarity in down-town Ottawa. From the beginning, the aim was to depict the protesters as violent fascists, constituting a threat to public order and lawful government. The innumerable videos going viral, showing scenes of carnival-like conviviality involving families and children, have made a laughing stock of the Canadian government’s extravagant misrepresentations – or, in other words, lies.
This porkiefest was initiated by Justin Trudeau. Emerging briefly from the cave or other sanctuary from which he governs Canada, the Canadian premier launched into what must be the most reprehensible and rebarbative slandering of his own compatriots perpetrated by any democratic leader. Having already dismissed the protesters as a “small fringe minority”, a piece of idiocy for which he is now being taunted by Elon Musk, Trudeau subsequently launched into a mendacious diatribe.
Citing the retired former justice minister, aged 81, in an attempt to lend gravitas to his ravings, Trudeau declared: “As my friend Irwin Cotler said on Saturday, freedom of expression, assembly and association are cornerstones of democracy, but Nazi symbolism, racist imagery and desecration of war memorials are not… We are not intimidated by those who hurl insults and abuse at small business workers and steal food from the homeless. We won’t give in to those who fly racist flags, we won’t cave to those who engage in vandalism or dishonour the memory of our veterans.”
He omitted to charge his targets with kicking dogs or trampling on children’s toys, but otherwise the denunciation was pretty comprehensive. On cue, the collaborationist media grabbed the baton and ran with it. Within hours, an image had been projected globally of violent fascists occupying Ottawa, urinating on war memorials, desecrating statues, robbing homeless people of their food and assaulting anyone who got in their way. In this dystopian scenario, the only time the sea of Confederate flags waving over the protesters was dissipated was when it gave way to a forest of Nazi swastika banners on a scale that made the Nuremberg Rally look understated.
The very extravagance of the accusations ought to have given pause to journalists; but no woke accusation is too extreme for the legacy media. Even a brief glance online at video footage – the Freedom Convoy is one of the most extensively filmed events to have taken place – would have demonstrated the nonsensical nature of Trudeau’s claims.
Nazi symbolism? Yes, one interloper did appear with a Nazi flag, alone and masked (which itself suggests his disaffection from the protest); he was instantly surrounded and forced to leave, the incident recorded on camera. He was widely suspected of being an agent provocateur and investigations into his origins are ongoing.
The same happened to a hapless individual who appeared with a Confederate flag, though that emblem does not have the same resonance in Canada as south of the border. In an effort to give that isolated incident a seemingly wider context, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported “at least one Confederate flag”. To this Jordan Peterson tweeted: “‘At least one Confederate flag’ @CBC how can you be so consistently and appallingly pathetic?”
Racist imagery? Where? One of the most prominent organisers of the truckers protest, Tamara Lich, is an Indigenous woman from the Métis tribe; her colleague Benjamin Dichter is Jewish. Numbers of easily identifiable Sikhs have been to the fore in convoy activities. This looks like the strangest “white supremacist” rally of all time. So, what about “desecration of war memorials”? Again, yes, some out-of-towners unthinkingly parked their cars close to the steps of the memorial; when police pointed this out they immediately moved, in what Ottawa Police described as a very cordial endeavour with no issues. Later, some fireworks were let off nearby, but not on the memorial.
Stealing food from the homeless? One group of people, allegedly part of the convoy, did present themselves at a food distribution centre for homeless people. In return, the convoy members cooked hot meals for the homeless community and have continued to feed them. Then there is the statue of Terry Fox, the heroic figure who tried to run across Canada with a prosthetic leg, to raise money for cancer research; switching to French in his statement, Trudeau condemned its desecration. Some truckers decorated the statue with a Canadian flag and placards with slogans, as demonstrators of every stamp have regularly done before; but because it was done by people opposed to woke orthodoxy, in this instance it was “desecration”.
It is worth noting that Trudeau, who expresses such concern about desecration of statues and memorials, has attended BLM demonstrations, despite that organisation’s record regarding statues and monuments. In 2020 he “took the knee” at a BLM rally – rather a Damascene conversion for a man of whom few photographs exist prior to the age of 30 with his face unobscured by black makeup.
Among the worst casualties of the protests is the credibility of the media. Long gone are the days when journalists rushed to an event, discovered everything they could about it and then wrote a factual report. Today journalists, like civil servants, recognise there is a “line to take”. Vaccines save lives, these people are opposed in some way to vaccines, therefore they are Bad, they are killers; they must be destroyed. So, straight to the keyboard and no parleying with racists.
Some journalists have rebelled against this travesty of news reporting. Tara Henley, who left CBC for Substack, said her employer had demanded “the parroting of orthodoxies, the demonstration of fealty to dogma”. The former opinion editor of the Vancouver Sun, Gordon Clark, has denounced his former colleagues for letting moralism trump professionalism. Contemporary journalists are not news reporters, but government or liberal-consensus copy-takers. The latest extravagance from CBC is the suggestion that the truckers’ protest was instigated by Russia. (Why not, it was used against Trump?)
No wonder people are abandoning the legacy media. However, Trudeau has an answer to that: lest his helots should escape from the fake news menu of the mainstream media, he intends to censor the internet. He has just brought back to parliament the outrageous censorship legislation he has twice before attempted to pass. Under it, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission will be empowered to regulate social media content created by Canadians. It is the beginning of a Chinese-style firewall.
Canada has become the most woke nation on earth. The extreme character of the law banning “conversion therapy” signalled a war on the Christian denominations. Speech is already policed to a repressive degree; the land of lusty lumberjacks is now a jungle of pronoun sensitivity.
So infatuated are some of Trudeau’s initiatives, they verge on insanity. His government has just declared all manufactured plastic products toxic – there are 10,000 of them and any of them can now be prohibited. There are 370,000 Canadians involved in plastics manufacture, of whom 60,000 now face redundancy under the first tranche of bans. Loss of plastic packaging for food could cost the Canadian economy up to $5bn a year.
This is what happens in a society where the state usurps excessive power, driven by ideology. But it may all be heading for the buffers now. The Freedom Convoy is about a lot more than Covid restrictions, including vaccination mandates at the border . It has expanded to embrace the mounting discontent of Canadians over a multitude of issues: after being strait-jacketed by the state, Canadians want to breathe freely. Trudeau’s supporters, stupidly, are touting a poll showing that “only” 32 per cent of Canadians support the truckers (up four points over a week): since when could one-third of the nation be described as a “small fringe minority”?
All the way to Ottawa, tens of thousands of adults and children waving Canadian flags, cheered the convoy as it passed. Now, in at least one province, these people are threatened with arrest. Is that credible, in a western democracy? However, that is changing. Recently, Canada has been described as the first post-national state – a globalist icon. No longer: the proliferation of Canadian flags, reminiscent of the preoccupation with the national emblem in the United States, signals that Canadians have rediscovered a national patriotic identity.
The immediate outcome of the protest – whether the truckers gain their demands or not – is now academic. After the spectacle of the Freedom Convoy streaming, 45 miles-long, across the nation, nothing will ever be the same again. If Canadians needed a further wake-up call it was supplied by GoFundMe intervening in the allocation of more than $10m in donations to the truckers. For Trudeau the writing was on the wall when the last, completely unnecessary, general election denied him a majority.
Canada is having its Tea Party moment; when it will find its seismic Trump follow-up experience is uncertain. What is certain is that conservatism has returned to Canada, springing up from the grass roots; no longer will the state commissars dictate the minutiae of everyday life unchallenged. The Liberal government looks pathetic: “Ottawa has been brought to a standstill for ten days!” wail the people who have brought Canada to a standstill for two years. The lies and insults from Trudeau and his minions will not be forgotten. The future looks very different from the present. O Canada…
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Foreign Affairs
Nota original: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/canada/2022-02-16/paranoid-style-canadian-politics
For the last three weeks, Canada’s capital has been occupied by a swarm of angry truckers and anti-vaccine protesters. This self-styled “freedom convoy” has intimidated Ottawa’s pedestrians, kept its residents awake at night with incessant horn honking, and forced many of its businesses to shutter. Elsewhere in the country, demonstrators used their vehicles to successfully blockade important border crossings, most notably the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit, Michigan, to Windsor, Ontario. They have forced the mayor of Ottawa, the premier of Ontario, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to declare emergencies. The protests are, in short, perhaps the strongest challenge to the rule of law Canada has faced in the last four decades.
The convoy protests were initially motivated by opposition to vaccine mandates imposed on the trucking industry, but they quickly began targeting a wider range of COVID-19 restrictions. Even more troubling, the protesters have also embraced a stridently antigovernment, far-right agenda. Some have waved Nazi symbols and Confederate flags, called for the arrest of political figures, and threatened violence. Leaders have demanded the overthrow of Canada’s democratically elected government in favor of a convoy-led coalition. It is not hard to see shades of the United States’ January 6 insurrection.
These protests do not have as much popular support as did the January 6 riots, and it is highly unlikely that they will be able to inflict the same degree of literal or institutional damage. Polling shows that three quarters of Canadians want the demonstrators to go home, and 68 percent support using the military to clear out the protests. (An overwhelming majority of Canadians, including more than 80 percent of self-identified Conservative Party voters and some 90 percent of truckers, are vaccinated against COVID-19.) But even if they are in the minority, millions of voters support the convoy, and the Conservative Party—the main opposition party—appears keenly interested in winning them over. As a result, many Conservative members of parliament have enthusiastically supported the protesters, including their party’s interim leader and the front-runner to replace her as permanent leader.
If the Conservative Party does embrace right-wing populism, it would be a departure from its traditional moderation—one with troubling consequences for Canadian democracy. Appealing to less than a third of Canada’s populace may not usually be a winning campaign strategy, but Canada uses a first-past-the-post electoral system, which could allow the Conservatives to win power while coming far short of a popular vote majority, as they have before. Even if a radicalized Conservative Party can’t form a government, it could still inflict substantial damage on Canadian society. So far, Canada’s politicians have largely kept nativism and authoritarianism out of the discourse. But by playing footsy with the convoy, the Conservatives are inviting these ideologies into the fold.
THE RIGHT’S WRONG TRACK
Over the last two decades, many democracies have struggled with rising political tensions, growing divisions, and successful illiberal movements. Not Canada. Unlike the United States, it does not exhibit strong patterns of “social polarization”—where partisan tribes are increasingly divided by race, religion, and other deeply held identities. Most Canadians do not wall themselves off from their political opponents, and there are few signs that they are becoming more extreme in their beliefs. India, the United States, and most of Europe have been hit by aggressive, powerful anti-immigrant movements, but Canadians remain broadly welcoming. The country’s residents are not open to undermining core democratic institutions in the pursuit of political power, and they broadly trust experts. Large majorities of Canadians continue to support restrictions and vaccine mandates to fight COVID-19, and 67 percent want further constraints imposed on the unvaccinated, whom they blame for prolonging the pandemic. The convoy protests are not tapping into a far-right zeitgeist.
But Canada is not free of nativists or other right-wing radicals, and they are making inroads in the Conservative Party. The party has long been torn between its moderate and right-wing factions, and traditionally, the former has kept a lid on the more extreme elements of the latter. Now, however, the right-wingers are calling the shots. Earlier this month, the party ousted its previous leader—Erin O’Toole, a moderate who had criticized the convoy protests—and adopted a decidedly populist tact. After years of taking stances on the pandemic broadly aligned with public health directives, the Conservative Party now opposes COVID-19 mandates and restrictions, irrespective of public health conditions. It has made common cause with the convoy protesters. The party’s interim leader is Candice Bergen, a Manitoban who was once seen wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat and has argued that there are “good people on both sides” of the demonstrations. Pierre Poilievre, the front-runner in the race to replace her, referred to the convoy as “peaceful, kind and patriotic.”
Why would the party link up with an unpopular movement? There is an internal compulsion: as the leadership race heats up, some Conservative members of parliament clearly believe the demonstrators will be useful voters, organizers, and donors. But there is also an external calculus. Many analysts attribute the party’s close defeat in the 2021 federal election not to the success of the Liberal Party but to the gains made by the fringe People’s Party of Canada—a far-right outfit that took five percent of the vote. The Conservative Party spent much of that campaign pivoting to the center, and some of its leaders believe that if they had run to the right and won the People’s Party five percent, they would have edged out the Liberals.
These leaders are mistaken. The People’s Party received much of its support from people who did not vote in the 2019 election, and it is far from clear that these voters would ever have supported the Conservative Party. Nonetheless, the Conservative Party’s elite appears to believe that they can simultaneously court far-right elements while retaining control of their party, keeping it electorally competitive with mainstream voices at the helm. This is the same dangerous gambit that U.S. Republican Party elites made when they embraced Trump after he won their primary. Instead, Republicans found themselves consumed by and beholden to the former president and his acolytes.
POISONING THE WELL
Canada, of course, is not the United States. It does not have political institutions that overrepresent the interests of right-wing demographics. Instead, Canada’s federal elections are most often decided by swing districts in culturally diverse Toronto and its suburbs, places where the Conservatives are already struggling to win. Lurching right is not a recipe for success.
But observers should still be concerned. Even if they can’t form a government, a far-right, antisystem Conservative Party could make Canadian politics more polarized and hostile. Political leaders shape public opinion, and a more extreme Conservative Party might radicalize millions of people, endangering disadvantaged communities. The United States experienced a troubling rise in hate crimes after Trump declared his candidacy, including before he took office. If one of Canada’s two major parties embraced a far-right ideology, it could lead to a similar upswing.
A more extreme Conservative Party might radicalize millions of people.
What’s more, a radical Conservative Party wouldn’t necessarily be locked out of power forever. Conservatives often benefit from the Canadian electoral system (although not in the same way as Republicans benefit from U.S. electoral and political institutions). Most Canadians may be left of center, but these progressive voters are split between the Liberal, Green, and New Democratic parties. The Conservative Party, by contrast, faces no serious challenge on the right, allowing it to win elections and form governments with much less than 40 percent of the vote. The more progressives divide, the easier the Conservatives’ path to victory. If they win power after making a hard-right turn, nativism and populism could become policy. The party could pass laws that restrict immigration. It could divorce health and climate policies from scientific research.
And if the Conservative Party finds that it is no longer competitive, Canadian democracy could suffer in a different way. When political parties stop needing to worry about elections, they tend toward complacency and, ultimately, poor governance. Authoritarian regimes provide the clearest examples, but democracies dominated by one party also run into problems. Canada, in fact, is a case and point. The Liberal Party controlled Ottawa for much of the twentieth century without serious opposition, and it regularly got mired in major corruption scandals.
The Trudeau government has already had its own share of ethical lapses, including allegations that it sought to protect a Liberal-friendly engineering company, SNC-Lavalin, from prosecution. Like any administration, it would benefit from a powerful and scrupulous opposition party that can keep it honest by seriously contending for power. But in order for that to happen, the Conservative Party cannot lose itself to extremism. Otherwise, it risks relegating itself to the wilderness—and poisoning Canada’s political discourse on its way out.
