Delacourt: It’s time to talk about this rage against Justin Trudeau

2021/08/30 Leave a comment

Good commentary. It may also be time to call out some of the enablers and fomenters, Rebel and “True” North, given their frequent invective (which at time of writing this Sunday afternoon, have not covered or commented on the rage). Both Erin O’Toole and Jagmeet Singh strongly condemned the mob’s actions but did not see anything from the Greens or Bloc. PPC tweet:

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-partner=”tweetdeck”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Trudeau doesn’t respect democracy. He uses billions in taxpayer money to overtly buy votes. He violates the Constitution. He demonizes opponents. He curtails our rights. He’s a wannabe fascist tyrant. But yeah, protesters yelling at him are the problem. <a href=”https://t.co/uaUbTmP9gd”>https://t.co/uaUbTmP9gd</a></p>&mdash; Maxime Bernier (@MaximeBernier) <a href=”https://twitter.com/MaximeBernier/status/1431986988765360133?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>August 29, 2021</a></blockquote>

It’s time to talk about this rage against Justin Trudeau — not just the mob spectacles on the campaign trail, but all the toxic strains of that fury simmering through Canadian politics for some time now.

The incredible scene of Trudeau haters in Bolton, Ont., their faces contorted in gleeful rage, has elevated this phenomenon from an ugly undercurrent to a force that needs to be reckoned with in the current election campaign.

On one level, what was on display was deeply and intensely personal against the man who has been prime minister of Canada through six challenging years for the country. But as Trudeau himself suggested after the incident on Friday night, it is also a boiling cauldron of populist discontent, fuelled by a pandemic — and, I would add, stoked by the grievous state of the political culture.

“We all had a difficult year and those folks out protesting, they had a difficult year too, and I know and I hear the anger, the frustration, perhaps the fear, and I hear that,” Trudeau said after his campaign had to flee the mob.

There is a chance here, not just for Trudeau, but for all politicians and voters in Canada, to look this toxicity in the eye and take the full measure of it right now, in a way the United States has failed to do, even after the storming of the Capitol earlier this year. The disgrace in Bolton on Friday night wasn’t of the same magnitude, but it comes from a similar place — the point where political disruption crosses into all-out eruption.

All politicians rile up some segments of the population and the RCMP isn’t accompanying them just to err on the side of caution. No one should need reminding that in July 2020, a military reservist named Corey Hurren crashed his truck full of weapons through the gates of Rideau Hall, looking to do damage to Trudeau. This was a day after a rally on Parliament Hill calling for Trudeau’s arrest for treason.

The threats are real, and they have been for as long as I’ve been covering federal politics. One of my first out-of-town assignments after being posted to the capital, in fact, was a rally in New Brunswick where Mila Mulroney, wife of prime minister Brian Mulroney, was jabbed in the ribs by a protester’s sign.

But the poisonous rage that is directed toward Trudeau on a daily basis, churning through social media 24/7, landing as flaming parcels every day in reporters’ email inboxes, and now manifesting itself as a high-level security threat in small-town Ontario, is another order altogether. It is woven with threads of racism, xenophobia, sexism, conspiracy theorists and COVID/vaccine deniers. It has been emboldened by a small cottage industry of commentary that portrays a “woke” Trudeau as the destroyer of all that holds the old Canada together.

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole couldn’t have been more clear on Saturday after the incident in Bolton, where some of his party’s supporters were participants in the cursing and howling throng. Those people, O’Toole said, ”will no longer be involved with our campaign, full stop. I expect professionalism, I expect respect. I respect my opponents.”

Yet on the very eve of the current election campaign, O’Toole’s own party put out a video depicting Trudeau as a spoiled, flouncing girl having a temper tantrum. This wasn’t some rogue partisan, cobbling together a video in his parents’ basement. It appeared (now revoked for copyright reasons) on the official Twitter account of the Conservative party.

And this business of feminizing Trudeau to demonize him has deep, enduring roots. (Note to email correspondents: calling him “Justine” is neither original nor witty.) For years, Trudeau haters have been spewing the same kind of bile they usually hurl at women politicians; mocking his hair, his family and casting any success as the product of smarter men around them.

There’s a direct line between that mockery and the taunting hordes on the campaign trail; the sneering contempt.

The immediate questions revolve around whether Bolton will help or hurt Trudeau — is this a turning point, when the Liberal leader gets to cast himself as the underdog/victim? Is it like the moment in 1993, when Jean Chrétien stood up to Conservatives’ mockery of his face?

There’s an old Jerry Seinfeld joke about those detergent ads you see on TV. “If you’ve got a T-shirt with a bloodstain all over it, maybe laundry isn’t your biggest problem.” All the speculation about how the Bolton incident will affect the election campaign feels a bit to me like seeing the problem as laundry. It’s not just about politicians cleaning up their strategic act for this election, but what is causing the stain on the political fabric of this country.

The faces of those protesters, accompanied by children chanting foul-mouthed curses at a prime minister, is not a sight that can be bleached from the memory of this campaign.

To paraphrase that Seinfeld joke, if you have mobs of citizens openly threatening harm to Trudeau, the biggest problem isn’t Trudeau.

Source: It’s time to talk about this rage against Justin Trudeau

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Delacourt: Perry Bellegarde has some advice for non-Indigenous Canadians

2021/07/06 Leave a comment

Good and relevant reflections:

Nearly seven years ago, when Perry Bellegarde took on the top job at the Assembly of First Nations, one of his major missions was getting Indigenous people out to vote in a looming federal election in Canada. 

“Closing the gap” was the rallying cry in the lead-up to the campaign of 2015, which put Justin Trudeau and his Liberals in power. Indigenous people would only see a difference in their lives, Bellegarde and the AFN argued, if they made a difference at the ballot box in this election. Nonparticipation in Canada’s democracy — too often the practice for Indigenous people — kept them as outsiders in the nation. 

The results were impressive. On-reserve voting shot up from around 48 per cent in 2011 to more than 61 per cent in 2015. Some reserves ran out of ballots. Bellegarde says that Indigenous people alone helped “flip” more than 20 ridings across the country that year. 

Thanks in part to those efforts, Bellegarde’s years as AFN chief have run roughly parallel with those of Trudeau; the prime minister who has made Indigenous issues a bigger priority than any of his predecessors. 

Sitting in his soon-to-vacated office in Ottawa this past week, with time ticking down to the end of his long reign as AFN national chief, Bellegarde smiles at the memory of that first year after he was elected chief in December 2014. 

It’s a long way from there to the here and now, when Bellegarde is preoccupied with almost the opposite problem. In 2015, his prime concern was getting Indigenous people engaged in politics and democracy. In 2021, it’s the non-Indigenous population of Canada that he wants to get mobilized, as he and other leaders wonder how to seize a moment gripping the nation. “What’s changed is that Canadians now have opened their eyes,” Bellegarde says, reflecting on the past month of discovery — or rediscovery — of the truth about residential schools and the hundreds buried in unmarked graves around the country. 

“There’s this discourse in Canada, like people are willing to open their eyes now and have a tough conversation and see the truth in history.” 

But here is the question for Bellegarde — what exactly are non-Indigenous people being mobilized to do? Seven years ago, voting was a tangible thing he could ask people to do to close that famous gap; something real, visible and measurable on election day. 

If it is true that non-Indigenous Canadians are in a mood to do something, anything to reckon with the brutal history of residential schools, what action is Bellegarde urging them to take? 

“This is what I tell you to do,” he says. “Read the (Truth and Reconciliation) Commission’s report and get familiarized with the 94 calls to action. … Lobby! Help lobby and advocate to your member of Parliament to end the boil-water advisories, help lobby to the Pope to come to Canada, to apologize for the role of the Catholic Church. Lobby to do the research and investigation into the missing children and all the residential school sites.” 

Politely, tactfully, I ask: is that it? We talk about how this long last year of the pandemic has also been an exercise in mobilization of individuals. Fighting COVID was literally in people’s own hands, following public health measures, from wearing a mask to accepting huge limits on work and social life.

If Canada is in a moment of reconciliation, it seems that somehow there should be an equivalent call for action to citizens on individual, hands-on terms. Is it enough to ask them to lobby their governments and politicians to do something? 

Bellegarde considers the question. Yes, he says, this can work on an individual level. 

“Learn about First Nations’ culture, language, and dance, First Nations foods. You know, integration can work both ways. And so that’s something that individual people can do.” 

The chief has just returned from his home province of Saskatchewan and a Sun Dance ceremony there and his conversation is laced with the importance of connections between all of creation: between land and “two-legged” creatures (that’s we humans;) between the Earth and the stars; between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. 

His talk of unity, ironically, comes just as the AFN is closing in on the last days of the election to choose his successor, which naturally is going to divide an organization that is notoriously fractious. Bellegarde’s main advice to his successor, whomever that turns out to be among the seven candidates, is simple. “AFN has to be united,” he says.

When I ask Bellegarde what his main job has been — managing the AFN or representing it to others, he doesn’t hesitate. Serving as a spokesman, he says, as the voice of the Indigenous community is clearly the priority for anyone who wants to lead this organization that says it speaks for more than 900,000 people living in 634 First Nation communities. 

“It has to be relevant. People need to see the relevancy of the AFN in order for it to be effective. We’re an advocacy organization and you advocate for policy and legislative change. And the most important thing you influence is that federal budgeting cycle every year.” 

It’s why he also smiles when presented with the familiar criticism — not unique to him, either — that this AFN chief got too close to the federal government, whose time in office has run in parallel to his own. Bellegarde has heard that before; so did the AFN chiefs who came before him. 

“You have to be able to communicate and collaborate and have access to the policy, legislative decision makers,” he says. “If you can’t do that, what good are you as a national team? How effective are you as national chief?” 

He also stresses that he is on good terms with all the federal political party leaders; not just Trudeau or his ministers. On the coffee table in front of him is a new pamphlet: an updated version of the “Closing the Gap” manifesto of 2015, which he’s been pressing into the hands of politicos of all stripes since 2019. It’s called “Honouring Promises” and runs to 16 pages of demands that the AFN wants to see in any party’s election platform. 

The whole debate around Canada Day and whether to celebrate it was not one on which Bellegarde wanted to take a side — not because it divided the political world, but because it was one on which chiefs of the AFN were not united either. It reminds him a bit of the debate around whether to vote in 2015. Some Indigenous people argued that elections — such as the one that may come again soon in Canada — have nothing to do with their own nations and democracy within them. None of their business — part of the non-Indigenous Canada so problematic through their history. 

Bellegarde has an easy answer for that. “I embrace dual citizenship,” he says. 

As he walks around the office that will soon belong to a new chief, he points out the photographs he will soon be taking down. There he is in Paris in late 2015, posing with Barack Obama while Trudeau takes a photo. They were all there for the talks that led to the Paris agreement on climate change Catherine McKenna, the minister who resigned this week and boasted that Paris agreement as one of her earliest victories, is in the shot too, as a newly sworn-in environment minister. In another photo on the AFN’s office wall, Bellegarde is posing with former finance minister Bill Morneau, focus of much of his lobbying efforts in the early years of the Trudeau government. 

He spoke to McKenna as she was resigning this week; both of them focused on turning a page. Not coincidentally, they both said they intend to spend the summer relaxing and considering what to do next. They are, in their own ways, snapshots themselves of an earlier era of Trudeau government. 

I ask Bellegarde how he’s changed since 2015. He has to think, then says: “I’ve learned to be more patient.” 

Source: https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/2021/07/04/perry-bellegarde-has-some-advice-for-non-indigenous-canadians.html?li_source=LI&li_medium=thestar_politics

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Delacourt: There’s a line Justin Trudeau won’t cross when it comes to fighting Islamophobia

2021/06/10 Leave a comment

Unfortunate. Perspective of former CPC candidate Jeff Bennett revealing:

Justin Trudeau has made his clearest statement yet on what he will and will not do to stand up against Islamophobia in Canada.

The prime minister says he will call out anti-Muslim crime, using the strongest words possible — “terrorism” — to condemn the killing of a family in London, Ont.

Trudeau will not, however, call out Quebec for the secularism law that has made Muslims feel unwelcome in that province — Bill 21, which forces Muslims to relinquish any religious clothing if they want to work in public professions.

“No,” Trudeau said bluntly on Tuesday when asked whether Bill 21 bred intolerance of Muslims. He talked of how Quebec had a right to make its own laws, how people in Quebec might be having “conversations” and “reflecting” on the law in days ahead, and said his government would be “watching” and “following.”

In other words, not leading.

So, to recap: anti-Muslim sentiment is wrong. Anti-Muslim crime is terrorism. Legislation that denies religious expression to Muslims is something to be discussed, but not by this prime minister or other political leaders.

None of the fine-sounding speeches in the House of Commons on Monday came anywhere near mention of the legislation in Quebec.

“Right now, people are talking to their families and saying maybe they should not go for a walk,” New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh said in an emotional speech. “There are people literally thinking about whether they should walk out their front door in our country.”

Singh was not talking about Bill 21.

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole spoke from the heart about the nine-year-old child who survived the attack, and what kind of Canada he should be allowed to grow up in.

“He deserves a Canada where Muslim women of faith can wear a hijab without fear of being accosted or harassed in public,” O’Toole said.

He wasn’t talking about Bill 21 either, or his own Conservative party’s dog-whistle record on everything from “veiled voting” to “barbaric cultural practices” in the 2015 election.

What makes the silence so breathtaking is that all of Canada’s political leaders have just emerged from two weeks of hard talk about how governments in the past did too little about racism toward Indigenous people.

They are all collectively, retrospectively sorry that an entire culture suffered at the hands of successive politicians who were not courageous enough to stand up to the widespread racism at the time.

Would Canada’s blotted history be improved if we unearthed a speech of John A. Macdonald saying he was following events closely at residential schools and hoped Canadians were having conversations about them?

The contrast between Trudeau’s strong words in the Commons on Tuesday and his tiptoeing around Bill 21 was striking, and the latter may cancel out the former. The prime minister did allow that he has long opposed Bill 21, but he clearly doesn’t intend to use the weight of his office or his words to change the reality of it.

For real political bravery on Tuesday, one had to look in more out-of-the way places — to London, in fact, where a former candidate for the provincial Progressive Conservative party decided to tell the difficult-to-hear truth of racism in politics.

Jeff Bennett, who ran for the PCs in the 2014 election, recounted in a Facebook post how people in his riding were happy to see that he had replaced the former candidate, a man named Ali Chahbar. Loyal Conservatives in London told Bennett they were relieved that “his name was English and his skin was white.” Bennett remembered how Chahbar had been smeared on local talk radio with talk of sharia law and other nonsense.

Bennett wrote that he was tired of people saying London was better than what happened on Sunday. “Bullshit. I knocked on thousands of doors in the very neighbourhood this atrocity occurred. This terrorist may have been alone in that truck on that day, but he was not acting alone. He was raised in a racist city that pretends it isn’t.”

Bennett came in second in London West in 2014 and has likely abandoned any aspirations to be elected again, given his willingness to tell voters what they don’t want to hear about themselves.

This of course explains the silence on Bill 21 on Tuesday, even as the political leaders are making bold proclamations about intolerance towards Muslims. An election looms, Quebec is a crucial battleground and Bill 21 is popular.

Canadian history has been on trial, rightly, for the past two weeks, and Bill 21 is indeed making its own way through the courts. One wonders how history will judge the failure of political leaders to speak up against that legislation when they could have seized the moment.

Source: There’s a line Justin Trudeau won’t cross when it comes to fighting Islamophobia

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Delacourt: ‘The nudge unit’: Ottawa’s behavioural-science team investigates how Canadians feel about vaccines, public health and who to trust

2021/02/23 Leave a comment

Innovative and appropriate:

Vaccines are one miracle of science in this pandemic. But another scientific experiment has also produced surprisingly speedy and widespread results over the past year. It happened in the realm of behaviour science — and ordinary citizens were the laboratory subjects. 

One year ago, few people would have believed that science would come up with a vaccine, ready for mass immunization around the world, by the start of 2021. 

But who would have also predicted that citizens could be persuaded to turn their lives upside down, wear masks and isolate themselves from their families and friends for months on end? 

“I know we’re asking a lot,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in early April, when no one knew just how much COVID-19 would force Canadians into behaviour change on a grand scale. “A lot” is an understatement: not since wartime has the government had to request this much of the citizenry for so long. 

Yet while the government’s medical scientists have been front and centre on the public stage almost every day since last March, the behavioural scientists have mostly been operating under the radar. If you know where to look, though, evidence of the behaviour-nudging team keeps peeking out under all those public proclamations from Canada’s COVID-19 crisis managers. 

When Trudeau and the premiers use their podiums to calm fears or tell hard truths about the pandemic, for example, their words don’t just come from hunch or political instincts. Reams of behavioural data is being collected by government throughout the pandemic, on everything from people’s general emotions about COVID-19 to their willingness to get vaccinated. 

Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, spoke earlier this month about the problem of vaccine hesitancy in this country and what the government knows about it. It was one of the few times that public officials have made direct reference to the behaviour-studying unit inside government. 

“Some of the studies are actually carried out by the Privy Council Office, where there is a behavioural insight team,” Tam said. “We do know that the intention for Canadians to get the vaccine is actually quite high and I think has improved since we started the vaccine campaign itself.” 

Tam went on to explain how people’s views on vaccines are shaped by where they get their information. Since you are reading this story in a mainstream news medium, you might be interested to know that you’re more likely to feel positive about getting immunized. Consumers of traditional information sources tend to have more trust in vaccines and what the government is saying about them. Conversely, if you’re the kind of person who gets your news from social media, you’re likely more wary of vaccines. 

So the government is doing some fine-tuning of its communication channels, Tam explained at this Feb. 5 briefing. “We know that we have to work with the internet and social media companies and that has been happening with Facebook, Google, YouTube and others,” she said. 

That behavioural-insight team Tam mentioned is actually called the “impact and innovation unit” of government, which was set up within the PCO in 2017, meant for more low-key work than it has been doing, now that the pandemic suddenly created an urgent need for its insights into how citizens behave.

Headed up by veteran public servant Rodney Ghali, this group has kept its eye on the huge social-science experiment of the COVID-19 crisis. (Ontario too has a behavioural insights unit, which has been working closely with the federal government over the course of the pandemic.) 

In normal times, this federal team would have been researching questions such as what would motivate people to invest more in RRSPs or cut down on food waste. 

Its members prefer to remain low-profile — a couple of them talked to me for this article, but on condition that they would not be named or quoted.

Results of the team’s research are quite public, though — anyone can check them out on their web page, along with reports of some communication campaigns they’ve tested on the population and what the ads were supposed to achieve. The most visible ad — one Canadians may remember — is one that depicted COVID-19 as a green cloud, spreading noxiously over the buttons in an elevator. 

The behaviour being studied by the government has shifted as the pandemic has dragged on, naturally. In the beginning, the research focused a lot on compliance with public health measures, what it would take to get people to wear masks, and so on. 

Nowadays, the main concern is with vaccines and whether enough people will take them to achieve herd immunity. Medical science handles the immunity part of that equation — behavioural scientists have to build the herd. For that to happen, the government has to know where and how to administer the nudging. 

“Nudge” is the operative word. Britain blazed the trail for the use of behavioural insights in government back in 2010 when it set up a team inside the cabinet office nicknamed ‘the nudge unit.” The name comes from the hugely influential book “Nudge” by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, which laid out how people could be influenced to make better choices in their lives. 

Sunstein is now the chair of an advisory group for the World Health Organization, set up specifically to use behavioural insights in COVID-19 management. And that leads us right back to Canada, which has taken the WHO’s tool for tapping behavioural insights in the pandemic and put it to comprehensive use in this country for nearly a year now. According to officials inside the behaviour unit, Canada has made the most comprehensive use of the WHO tool, creating a chronicle of behavioural ups and downs throughout the COVID-19 crisis. 

Since last April, a static group of about 2,000 Canadians — chosen randomly but in proportion to statistical, demographic considerations — have been taking part in a rolling series of surveys, plumbing their attitudes and behaviour on all things pandemic-related. The process is called “COVID-19 snapshot monitoring,” which has been shortened to COSMO.

In the early months, the COSMO respondents were a dreary lot, reporting that they believed things would get worse before they got better. But they were keen on vaccines — keener than they are now, in fact. Last April, more than 70 per cent of respondents were interested in a vaccine if it was either safe or effective. By the end of 2020, that enthusiasm had dropped to the low and mid-sixties. 

Herd immunity is generally accepted to be around 70 per cent, so governments — with the help of the behaviour scientists — need to get those numbers up again. 

The COSMO group has also been asked regularly about which people they trust to provide information — perhaps one of the more important pieces of insight sought by government in this pandemic. If you’re going to nudge the population in one direction or another, after all, it’s crucial to know who should do the nudging. 

Repeated waves of data on this issue show that public health officials rank high on the trusted list, whereas politicians and the news media rank lower. This would explain why Tam and her provincial colleagues have become household names over the past year (the provincial public-health chiefs have actually been rated slightly higher for trust than their federal counterparts). 

On top of vaccine hesitancy, the biggest concern right now for the behaviour monitors is simple COVID-19 fatigue. For almost a year now, governments have been asking, imploring, begging and arguing for citizens to keep large areas of their lives on hold. The same tools that worked last April, when Trudeau was “asking a lot,” may not keep working over the long term. 

In December, the COSMO participants started being asked about pandemic fatigue. Here’s what the behaviour unit learned: “Adherence to key protective behaviours remains reportedly high, and many participants are not getting tired of having to wash their hands frequently, physical distancing or wearing a mask. However, most participants (80 per cent) indicate they are getting tired or somewhat tired of having to avoid gathering with loved ones.”

It’s probably safe to assume that the weariness has only grown since then, but the results of more recent surveys haven’t yet gone online. 

Whenever the pandemic is over, most Canadians may be too busy getting back to their normal lives to reflect on the massive social-science experiment that has taken place over the planet this past year. But that radical change in people’s lives is the other great scientific achievement of COVID-19, one that may have given government important clues on how to modify citizens’ behaviour for other big global issues — such as climate change, for instance. 

“The behaviour and choices made by each and every one of us matter a great deal,” Tam said in a briefing earlier this year, which is why a small behavioural-science unit inside government suddenly became a big deal in 2020. 

Source: https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/2021/02/21/the-nudge-unit-ottawas-behavioural-science-team-investigates-how-canadians-feel-about-vaccines-public-health-and-who-to-trust.html

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Delacourt: Canada’s federal leaders will defend your right to wear a poppy, Just don’t ask them to stick up for your freedom of religion

2020/11/13 Leave a comment

Nails the virtue signalling and hypocrisy:

The great furor over the poppy ban at Whole Foods lasted less than one news cycle last week, thanks to the full-throated outrage from political leaders all over Canada.

Imagine how long Quebec’s secularism bill — which bans a lot more than poppy-wearing — would have lasted with similar shock and condemnation from those same politicians.

Sanctimony is never in short supply in the realm of politics, but we seem to have entered the season for freedom-of-expression lectures in Canada.

Politicians have waded into the frays over saying the N-word in the classroom, wearing poppies in upscale supermarkets and the publication of religiously offensive cartoons in France. There’s no end of courage — almost no end — when it comes to standing up for the right to make a statement.

Bloc Québécois Leader Yves François Blanchet has been the most strident, but by no means has he been the only one. Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole has put out videos proclaiming himself as a free-speech champion in the face of what he sees as worrying ambivalence by Justin Trudeau after acts of terrorism in France.

Funny, though, not one of them rushed to the podium over the stories being told in a Quebec court last week about the lives ruined by Bill 21’s limits on the rights of religious expression. Several constitutional challenges have been launched against that legislation, which bans the wearing of religious symbols in public, and one is now underway.

Even though it’s freedom-of-expression season in federal politics, not one party leader — not Blanchet, not O’Toole, not Trudeau or NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh — has offered comment on the tales being told in the Bill 21 trial. There have been stories of teachers having to choose between their careers and their religion, and Muslims being targets of hate and bigotry because of the law. And from the selective free-speech champions in Ottawa? Silence.

Trudeau and Singh have said they don’t like Bill 21, but they’re going to let the courts do what they do. O’Toole has said the law is “difficult,” but he’s not touching it because he doesn’t think it’s any of the federal government’s business — unlike poppies in supermarkets or acts of violence in Europe.

Blanchet has said he supports Bill 21 because it has majority support in Quebec, even though allowing minority rights to be settled by majority opinion has always been a sketchy kind of argument when it comes to constitutional matters. Where do we get that idea? Oh yes, from Quebec.

To its credit, Whole Foods didn’t try that one with its poppy ban, though it’s kind of fun to imagine how over-the-top the political outrage would have been if the Amazon-owned outlet had said, “Most people who work for us don’t want to wear poppies.”

Let’s face it, though, it was pretty easy to be mad at Whole Foods. No one in politics wants to be associated with billion-dollar companies, tech giants or overpriced food these days, so it was simply a matter of hearing about the poppy ban and pressing “play” on the outrage tape.

It’s a little harder, apparently, to work up the nerve to say that Bill 21 is a flagrant slap in the face of freedom of expression and, worse yet, that it is inflicting real, not symbolic damage on real citizens.

It’s politics, naturally. No one wants to get on the wrong side of that majority opinion in Quebec, or worse, get accused of trying to interfere with provinces’ rights to make their own laws. We may be enthusiastic rights champions in Canada, but we are also very polite about poking our noses into constitutional-jurisdiction matters. See O’Toole’s arguments, above.

As for why politicians are suddenly falling over each other to climb aboard the freedom-of-expression these days, there may be an easy explanation: It’s the pandemic, and especially this second wave of COVID-19, which is proving to be a real freedom-wrecker.

People are angry, frustrated and fatigued with limits on their lives. The addition of one more constraint, even if it extends to their speech alone, gives the public and politicians a way to vent a little emotion about how unfree we’re all feeling behind our masks and closed doors.

But the sanctimony of the free-speech champions at the podium in Ottawa is a little hard to take while Bill 21 is sitting on the books as a stain on Charter rights in Canada.

These staunch champions of rights are of course free to proclaim they believe in freedom of expression day after day at their political pulpits. But we should feel free to take note of what freedoms — and whose freedoms — they are also failing to defend.

Source: Canada’s federal leaders will defend your right to wear a poppy, Just don’t ask them to stick up for your freedom of religion

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Susan Delacourt: COVID-19 has made Canada wary of newcomers. So how can Ottawa make the case for the immigrants we so desperately need?

2020/05/18 Leave a comment

More on Minister Mendicino’s thinking:

On the fateful day in March that the COVID-19 virus officially became an international pandemic, Canada’s immigration minister, Marco Mendicino, was paying tribute to employers who hire newcomers to this country.

The ceremony was held at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa on March 11 and, as the proceedings were getting under way, the host read aloud a bracing bulletin from German chancellor Angela Merkel. The virus, Merkel had just declared, could infect up to 70 per cent of Germans.

Mendicino was stopped in his tracks. A little over a week before, he had been sitting beside Merkel at an immigration-themed event in Berlin, where he had been invited to share stories of how Canada handled the integration of newcomers.

That event had been a big deal for a rookie minister, only sworn into cabinet a few months earlier. But this news from Merkel in Germany was suddenly a much bigger deal.

“That was the moment. That was enough to give me and everybody else in the room pause,” Mendicino said. “It was the moment that the world changed for me.”

What made this moment even more surreal is that it came only one day before Mendicino was due to make the annual announcement on how many immigrants would be welcomed to Canada in the years ahead — 341,00 for the coming year; 361,000 by 2022.

Even as Mendicino was gamely rolling out this plan on the Thursday of that week, however, the world was closing its doors. Donald Trump had shut down entry of all travellers from Europe the night before. Canada’s own prime minister, Justin Trudeau, went into isolation that day, after his wife tested positive for the coronavirus.

Mendicino was asked at his March 12 news conference about how he could possibly be talking about welcoming more immigrants to Canada while borders were slamming shut all over the planet.

“We are at a moment where we are responding to COVID-19, but we also are planning for the future,” he said. “The future of this country depends on immigration. We need to continue to grow because we have an aging population, an aging workforce.”

Making the case for immigration in an increasingly insular, inward-looking world was already a hard sell. Mendicino says that he and Trudeau talked about this candidly when he was asked to take on the job after the last election. Canada is a lot more polarized over immigration today than it was in the heady days for Trudeau after the 2015 election, when one of the first big gestures of the new Liberal government was to welcome floods of Syrian refugees to Canada.

Since then, Trump has become president; Britain has voted to leave the European Union; and repeated polls in this country show that sentiments about immigration are hardening.

In the midst of this, COVID-19 has very conveniently handed a big win to all those political forces looking for larger walls between nations and stricter limits on who gets into their countries. Add to that the record unemployment the pandemic is causing and, one assumes, accompanying resentment at anyone coming to this country to do jobs Canadians could do.

It didn’t help fans of immigration either that in the early days of the crisis almost all the cases of COVID-19 had come to this country from abroad. Xenophobia, meet germophobia.

Where has that put Canada’s immigration minister in this crisis? I joked to Mendicino before interviewing him this week about whether he is now the Maytag repairman of cabinet, on lonely call, but presiding over a system that has effectively been shut down until further notice.

Mendicino emphatically disagrees with the premise of that joke. For the past two months, he’s set up his office in the basement of his home in Toronto and he hasn’t been short of things to do. While he remains vague on what’s happened to that 341,000 immigrants target — “we’ll have more to say in the fall” — Mendicino would say that people are still arriving here.

According to rough counts from Mendicino’s department, about 3,000 permanent residents arrived in Canada in April — a massive decline from the usual 25,000 or so who arrive as permanent residents each month during normal times. In the first three months of this year, Canada took in nearly 70,000 permanent residents, but the numbers started to tail markedly downward in the last half of March, once the pandemic hit. In addition, the immigration department was busy in April welcoming a little more than 20,000 temporary foreign workers into the country.

Canada still needs immigrants, maybe more now than ever before, Mendicino says, as the pandemic exposes just how dependent this country is on those who come here from abroad to work in essential businesses.

“The notion that somehow immigration has stopped doesn’t square with the reality that we are continuing to welcome temporary workers, international students and continuing to land those who wish to come to Canada, and lend their experience, their hard work to our country,” Mendicino says.

It should be said that for all the help that COVID-19 has given to arguments for closed borders, the pandemic has also forced Canadians to look at how much the economy depends on welcoming workers from elsewhere.

The havoc that the pandemic has been wreaking in long-term-care homes, for instance, has shone a light on how that whole sector is highly dependent on immigrants. Hospitals are similarly reliant. According to StatsCan, one in every four health-care workers in this country is a newcomer to Canada. More than a third of family physicians are immigrants; roughly the same proportions are seen in the fields of nursing, nursing aides and other related occupations.

Then there are the temporary workers in agriculture, urgently needed this spring when planting season was under way across Canada. Universities are already worrying about what will happen if they lose international students, whose high tuition costs account for about half of universities’ tuition revenue by some estimates.

Mendicino believes that all these facts are going to help make the case for immigration, once it’s safe to open the borders again. “Immigration has been a lifeline during the pandemic by safeguarding our food supply, recruiting additional support for our essential services on the front lines of our hospitals,” he says.

But here’s the blunt question: how do you get Canadians feeling good about opening up borders when they’re still extremely cautious about what’s going in and out of their own front doors? Two months of isolationism is going to be a hard habit to break, especially when it comes to envisioning thousands once again at Canada’s gates.

“We’ve adapted our immigration processes so that everyone is screened at the border, not only immigrants but returning Canadians too,” Mendicino says.

This still relatively new immigration minister refuses to be drawn into any questions about whether his job is tougher now or how he’s going to modify his arguments in favour of immigration in a world that has been locked down for two months.

“I have faith that Canadians believe in immigration,” he says. “That’s because they relate to it. It’s part of who we are. At its core, immigration is about people coming together to build a stronger country, which is what we’ve seen throughout our history, throughout this pandemic and, I’m confident, what we will see in the future.”

As with everything around this pandemic, though, no one knows whether this experience will make Canada more closed, or more aware of how much this country is connected to the world. Attitudes to immigration — and Mendicino — will be at the centre of that debate.

Source: Susan Delacourt: COVID-19 has made Canada wary of newcomers. So how can Ottawa make the case for the immigrants we so desperately need?

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Delacourt: Canadians aren’t rebelling against Dr. Theresa Tam’s orders, but they might be starting to bristle

2020/04/17 Leave a comment

Couldn’t resist posting given its reference to my Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism with respect to Alberta Premier Kenney’s critique of Dr. Tam:

Sooner or later, someone was going to say it: Who made Dr. Theresa Tam the boss of all Canadians?

The fact that it was Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is not surprising, historically or politically.

But Kenney’s words on Monday were a crack in a wall of remarkable deference to the authority of Canada’s chief medical officer over a month of national lockdown. As we now head into month two, the question is whether Canadians more generally are starting to bristle at the doctor’s orders.

The federal government issued an emphatic “no” on Tuesday.

“Canadians have demonstrated that they have a tremendous level of trust and confidence in our public health officials and in our medical system,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said. “And we are going to continue work with top medical officials like Dr. Theresa Tam to make sure that we’re doing everything we need to do.”

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said that Tam and other provincial public health officers have been conferred with the authority of “rock stars” in this crisis.

But Kenney’s remarks on Monday broke a united front of assent to Tam’s advice — not just as it applies to the future, but to the past as well.

The premier said that Alberta was going to seek out tests and medication to fight the pandemic without waiting for approval from federal Health bureaucrats. Then, in a bit of a drive-by swipe at Tam personally, he also threw doubt on the advice the doctor had already given in the early days of the virus outbreak.

“This is the same Dr. Tam who is telling us that we shouldn’t close our borders to countries with high levels of infection and who in January was repeating talking points out of the (People’s Republic of China)about the no evidence of human-to-human transmission,” Kenney said in an interview on CBC’s Power and Politics program.

There’s an old joke about how you get 50 Canadians out of a pool. You say: “Canadians, get out of the pool.” This pandemic, by and large, has made that joke feel a little too close to home, as a whole nation has put life as we know it on hold to comply with medical orders to contain the COVID-19 virus.

Deferential as we are, we likely wouldn’t have gone to these extraordinary lengths on the basis of political advice alone.

The federal government spent $30-million on a wave of ads with Dr. Tam as the sole spokesperson. (And no, that’s not the voice of Trudeau at the end of the ad, though it does sound an awful lot like him. I asked and the answer was no.)

Day after day, premiers and political leaders line up at podiums to give public briefings, backed by the latest information from the doctors in charge. Whenever a question is asked about what’s going to happen next, the unfailing answer is that governments will be heeding the instructions of the top doctors.

This in itself is evidence that we’re living in unusual times. We don’t always listen to doctors and medical experts, on matters of smoking, obesity, exercise or even climate science, for instance. Statistics aren’t always as persuasive as they are these days, when we’re all scouring charts for flattened curves.

Kenney, as mentioned earlier, has a long history of skepticism about stats and evidence as they’re used in the federal government. One of his own former bureaucrats in the citizenship and multiculturalism department, Andrew Griffith, has written some compelling work about how Kenney forced the public service to rebalance evidence and political considerations while he was minister.

The idea was that politicians are in government to weigh all kinds of public interests against the weight of impersonal numbers and charts, including the intelligence the political types gain from mixing with people outside the corridors of the civil service. So as I said, it’s not that surprising to see Kenney balking again at blind subservience to public servants’ advice, even from Canada’s top doctor.

Is that such a bad thing? Reasonable people might well agree, in fact, that while the medical health of Canadians has to be a priority in this pandemic, the economic health of citizens is owed some due deference too, especially as the financial devastation deepens.

Dr. Tam, for her part, stayed right out of the dispute on Tuesday when asked about Kenney’s remarks, saying only that it’s her job to take many things into consideration, including advice and insights from other countries.

It would be grossly unfair and probably unproductive to make Tam a target, even if Canadians are increasingly bristling at life under doctor’s orders.

But deference to authority in general is a fragile commodity, especially in a nation undergoing an endurance test of indefinite length. Canadians aren’t rebelling, at least not yet, but their deference has time limits.

Source: Susan Delacourt: Canadians aren’t rebelling against Dr. Theresa Tam’s orders, but they might be starting to bristle

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Delacourt: Are you a good Canadian? Justin Trudeau offers the coronavirus as a lesson in responsible citizenship

2020/03/13 Leave a comment

Good commentary and yes, a lesson in civic responsibility, one that the PM has had to personally demonstrate given his self-quarantine and cancellation of the FPT meeting given his wife having tested positive:

Ask not what the federal government is doing for you about the COVID-19 pandemic, but ask instead what you are doing to keep Canadians healthy.

Justin Trudeau didn’t exactly borrow from John F. Kennedy’s immortal lines about civic responsibility at his news conference on Wednesday, but the prime minister also, very deliberately, cast the virus crisis as a crash course for all of us in good citizenship.

“Often there are global crises or events when the average citizen does not feel particularly powerful to affect the fate of the economy. We are in a situation where the choices our citizens make will have a direct impact on the health of Canada and on the Canadian economy,” Trudeau said in French toward the end of his morning appearance in the National Press Theatre.

It was billed as a high-level update on what the Canadian government is doing for citizens as the novel coronavirus spreads its damage throughout Canada and the world. “We get it and we’re on it,” Trudeau said.

But slipped into all the talk of government having our backs — another new, favourite phrase from Trudeau’s team this year — was a gentle reminder or two that citizenship is a two-way street. The government is in a giving frame of mind, but a taking one too, in terms of what it’s asking of average Canadian citizens to keep the virus contained.

Canada’s chief public health officer, Theresa Tam, spoke at the news conference of how citizens — not the state or even the health-care system — would ultimately determine the trajectory of this virus.

“The advantage of being in the Canadian system is that people will be supported to do what public health has asked them to do but everyone can change the dynamic of that curve,” Dr. Tam said. “That`s such an important message that I don’t want people to lose sight of. Individual physicians can’t do it, public health units on their own can’t do it. Everyone has to contribute.”

The prime minister followed up with reinforcement. “At this point our strongest recommendation is for Canadians to be involved in keeping themselves and their families safe,” Trudeau said.

Asking people to change their behaviour for the sake of the country is a very 20th century concept in North America, when war, duty and sacrifice were part of the political lexicon. In this century, political appeals to people’s selflessness is usually framed as: do it for your kids, or the next generation.

But governments are still keenly interested in what they can do to change individuals’ behaviour to align with national or state goals, especially when it comes to climate change, for instance. Britain set up its famous “nudge unit” within its cabinet office in the early 2000s to study how behavioural-economic insights could be turned into public policy. And Canada, for its part, has something called the “impact and innovation unit” inside government, inspired in part by the British example.

The COVID-19 virus, now a pandemic, could well become a laboratory into how governments nudge their citizens into different behaviour. Certainly that old British unit, now a separate company called the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) has been having thoughts in that direction.

In a recent blog post, BIT laid out some thoughts on “how do we encourage the right behaviours during an epidemic?” It’s not easy, BIT acknowledged: the incentives for changed citizen behaviour are neither clear nor immediate. “People have no way of knowing if taking preventive steps will actually stop them contracting the virus. You’ll never know what didn’t happen.”

The blog post talks about the importance of public-health officials being front and centre to cultivate trust and why governments should be transparent, but also sparing about details,

“In some cases, less rather than more information leads to more accurate judgments,” BIT’s blog post states. “Communicating simple instructions that are easy to remember makes it more likely that people will follow them.”

I don’t know whether anyone inside the government is reading the BIT blog, but Trudeau’s news conference on Wednesday revealed a high degree of interest in the social science — as well as the medical science — of managing a pandemic.

“This is on all of us,” federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu told reporters later on Monday.

Canadian citizens have been asking a lot of their federal government in the past few months — from requests to fix snarled train traffic to the rescue of Canadians in trouble abroad. COVID-19 has turned that equation upside down. As Kennedy might have put it, this pandemic is forcing citizens to ask not what the country can do for them, but what they can do for the country.

Source: Susan DelacourtAre you a good Canadian? Justin Trudeau offers the coronavirus as a lesson in responsible citizenship

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Meet Trudeau’s lead on multicultural communications, PMO press secretary Amreet Kaur

2018/01/31 Leave a comment

While much of the article is a personal profile, some interesting comments on ethnic media strategy and tactics:

Canadian political parties are increasingly emphasizing multicultural communications and outreach work, and as the Liberal government’s lead staffer focused on communicating with the country’s many multicultural communities and news outlets, PMO press secretary Amreet Kaur plays a “vital” role in the office.

“The component of multicultural outreach remains one of the vital components of any party’s outreach strategy, and Amreet, from her experience … really is singular,” said John Delacourt, a vice president at Ensight Canada who served as director of communications for the Liberal caucus’ research bureau on the Hill from January 2016 to January 2017.

“I think PMO relies on her [Ms. Kaur’s] working rapport with the multicultural outlets,” he said.

“She just has an intuitive ability to work with a full range of communities across the country, has a strong sense of regional issues, [and] knows the GTA and the 905 area and the Greater Vancouver area really well,” said Mr. Delacourt.

She also has a great “working rapport” across the Liberal caucus and with Canada’s various multicultural outlets, and keeps a political, “strategic lens on everything that she’s doing,” he said.

Ms. Kaur is one of four press secretaries currently working in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s (Papineau, Que.) office—the others being Eleanore Catenaro, Chantal Gagnon, and Vanessa Hage-Moussa, all led by Kate Purchase as communications director—but is the only one focused specifically on multicultural communications and outreach for the office. She’s been in the PMO since January 2016, having arrived straight from a job with the Ontario Liberals at Queen’s Park.

In her current role, Ms. Kaur tackles media relations work—drafting press releases, ensuring they’re disseminated and that outlets are aware of government announcements or other initiatives, helping plan events, and managing incoming media requests—and also does a “great deal” of stakeholder engagement and outreach, all focused on multicultural communities, explained Mr. Delacourt.

“She would cover it from the cabinet side. … All of the components that go into what we call the larger cabinet communications rollout,” said Mr. Delacourt.

The idea of pursuing specific multicultural communications outreach is one that’s been on the rise in modern Canadian politics.

It’s part of the “big shift” that pollster Darrell Bricker and columnist John Ibbitson explored in their 2013 book, The Big Shift: The Seismic Change In Canadian Politics, Business, and Culture and What It Means For Our Future. And while the 2015 federal election results have since tangibly countered their argument that Canada’s immigrant—or ethnic—communities largely lean conservative, the electoral importance, power, and influence of these voting groups was borne out.

The vast majority of ridings with high immigrant or visible minority populations swung Liberal in 2015, and were key to elevating the party to its current majority government status. They’re expected to be equally important in 2019.

Of the 41 federal ridings in Canada with a visible minority population of 50 per cent or more, 27 are located in Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area (one represented by a Conservative MP, the rest Liberal), nine are in Vancouver and its surrounding area (two represented by NDP MPs, one by a Conservative MP, and the rest Liberal), two in the Montreal area (both Liberal), and two in Calgary (now held by one Liberal, one Independent). Rounding out that list is Liberal MP Kevin Lamoureux’s riding of Winnipeg North, Man.

By another indicator, based on the 2016 census, the top five largest concentrations of immigrant populations in Canada are located in: Peel region, at 51.5 per cent; Toronto, with 47 per cent; York region, at 46.8 per cent; the Greater Vancouver census division, with 40.8 per cent; and Montreal, at 34 per cent.

The Durham and York regions account for 15 federal ridings; Toronto has 25; Brampton, Mississauga, and Oakville have 13 ridings; Vancouver and the Lower Mainland include 15 ridings; and central Montreal contains 10, with another 13 seats in city’s suburbs and Laval—that’s 91 ridings, out of 338 federal seats in all.

Almost 23 per cent of Canadians’ first language is one other than French or English, according to the 2016 census.

“As the government gets ready for the next election, diverse communities are critical to their success—to any political party—so her [Ms. Kaur’s] role becomes even more important,” said Gabriela Gonzalez, a consultant for Crestview Strategy who previously worked alongside Ms. Kaur at Queen’s Park and described her as a friend.

While previously, the “mainstream media approach” largely defined “how media relations was done” in politics, a little over a decade ago—around the start of Stephen Harper’s first Conservative government—focus began to shift towards specific multicultural communications outreach, said Mr. Delacourt. He said in part, this shift was a result of Conservative polling on the question of same-sex marriage legalization in Canada in 2005.

“The Conservatives polled on it and realized that you could almost map, in terms of value questions, map [based] on [ethnic] communities across the country,” he said. “Jason Kenney was one of the key figures in this—they did extensive work with communities across the country.”

In short order, other political parties also came to realize that as multicultural communities evolved across the country, so too did “the opportunities for political engagement” and participation, and that they weren’t being “cultivated to the degree that they should be,” said Mr. Delacourt.

Plenty of ink has been spilled over the previous Conservative government’s multicultural communications and outreach efforts. That includes former citizenship and immigration minister Jason Kenney’s much-touted work to court various ethnic communities in Canada—leading some to dub him the ‘Minister of Curry-in-a-Hurry.’

By September 2014, a manager of cultural media was added to the Harper PMO’s communications team, in addition to a small team of regional communications advisers—and separate from the slate of other, general communications strategists and officers working in the office.

“Multicultural media didn’t really grow until I’d say the last eight years or so. It’s really taken on a life of its own,” said a Liberal source familiar with Ms. Kaur’s work for the party federally and provincially.

A directory developed by the Canadian Ethnic Media Association last year (which is locked to non-members) lists more than 1,200 ethnic media outlets, from print to radio to online to television, according to a piece from the Ryerson Journalism Research Centre last September. That includes the Sing Tao Daily, Radio Tibet, CHIN TV and Radio, OMNI-TV, PTC Punjabi, The Eastern News, New Tang Dynasty TV, among many others.

Currently in her late 20s, Ms. Kaur hails from Mississauga, Ont., and studied an undergrad in political science at the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus. Her parents are originally from India….

via The Hill Times

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The Rebel’s fast running out of friends. Better late than never, I suppose.

2017/08/17 Leave a comment

Great column by Susan Delacourt:

It’s been a remarkable few days for political penitence.

Just as Donald Trump finally got around to disavowing neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan (it only took him two days), the founders of Rebel Media in Canada also decided that now was the time to make a stand against racism.

Ezra Levant, one of those founders, declared that Rebel Media would have nothing to do with the alt-right, while Brian Lilley simply walked away from the online outlet, saying he could no longer put up with “a lack of editorial and behavioural judgment, that left unchecked, will destroy it and those around it.”

Was anyone else reminded of that scene in Casablanca where the police captain pronounces himself “shocked, shocked” to learn there’s gambling going on at Rick’s — just before the croupier hands him his winnings? Did it truly take Levant and Lilley this long to become troubled by the thought that that their online outlet — a bizarre spinoff of the defunct Sun TV — might be whipping up hatred toward other races and cultures?

While it’s good to see MPs like Michelle Rempel and Lisa Raitt distancing themselves from the racist strain of modern conservatism, one really has to ask the question: Why now? Shouldn’t the last straw have come long before now — say (just to pick an example out of the air), when one of Rebel’s commentators, Gavin McInnes, went off the anti-Semitic deep end during a trip to Israel last spring?

Perhaps we should be relieved that events in Charlottesville this weekend are axing the connections between mainstream conservatives and the racists in the base. But a lot of damage had been done before last weekend, too. It’s a shame that the disavowals can’t be retroactive.

In one of her Twitter posts on Monday, Rempel stated: “Flirting with or giving a wink and a nod to Nazism and white supremacy for clicks and likes is disgusting.” Yes, that’s definitely true today. It’s been true for a while, actually.

Reminds me of another Casablanca quote: “Welcome back to the fight.” Once upon a time, conservatives and progressives could agree that racism was a blight on society and democracy. Now it’s a wedge issue. Worse yet, it’s a business model.

The worst kind of politics cuddles up to racists to get votes. The worst kind of business makes a profit from hate. Make no mistake: Rebel Media has been flirting with both practices for some time now.

Start with the politics. For an example of just how far some conservative politicians were willing to go to woo racist votes, take a look back to not so long ago — earlier this year, in fact, when Rebel Media was holding rallies against the anti-Islamophobia motion introduced in the Commons after the Quebec mosque massacre.

open quote 761b1bAppeals to the head and heart may not work on those who have calculated that there’s big money to be made in whipping up intolerance. Hitting them in the wallet might work better.

It is completely defensible in a democratic society to disagree with government motions in the Commons. But some of the stuff being uttered at these rallies was absolutely vile and racist — so disgraceful I wouldn’t repeat it here in this column.

Faith Goldy, the same Rebel Media personality who was at the Charlottesville rallies last weekend, was whipping up the crowd at a Toronto rally last February, mocking critics who called the rally racist, even as one woman in the crowd seemed moved to give a Nazi salute. No kidding. You can check it out on the Torontoist website, which called the rally “bonkers” and “chilling.” (Look at the raw video coverage and you might agree with that appraisal.)

I don’t recall much contrition from Rebel Media back then over that flirtation with Nazi symbolism, nor any official disavowals from many voices on the right at the time either.

In fact, Rebel Media was seen by many as an player to be cultivated during the Conservative leadership race. At that same Toronto rally, held at Canada Christian College, leadership hopefuls Kellie Leitch, Chris Alexander, Brad Trost and Pierre Lemieux came to address the audience. Not one of these candidates acknowledged the racism elephant in the room.

“It’s good to be in a room with severely normal people,” Leitch actually told the crowd. None of these would-be Conservative leaders won the race, of course, though Lemieux and Trost, combined, did remarkably well with their armies of anti-abortion advocates.

Andrew Scheer won the leadership. His campaign manager, Hamish Marshall, was listed as a director on Rebel Media’s federal incorporation records. At a pro-Trump rally held on Parliament Hill, long after Scheer’s victory, Goldy proclaimed Scheer to be one of “our people.”

Perhaps it’s Scheer’s influence reining in the racism at Rebel Media now. One would think that anyone who wants to be prime minister in Canada wouldn’t want to be carrying that kind of baggage during the next campaign.

Optimists believe Trump’s approach to politics is still toxic here. Cynics might suggest that the business model for racist media outlets is crumbling. Is that why Levant and Lilley needed to clean up Rebel Media’s act?

As iPolitics’ own Bea Britneff has been reporting, an anonymous outfit called Sleeping Giants has been aggressively campaigning to stop firms from advertising on Rebel Media.

That’s a very good thing, because — and it’s sad to have to say this — the best way to fight the spread of this online toxin is to go after the money that fuels it. Appeals to the head and heart may not work on those who have calculated that there’s big money to be made in whipping up intolerance. Hitting them in the wallet might work better.

Rebel Media has been making serious money and gaining serious ground abroad. Take a look at this excellent piece by Jason Markusoff in Maclean’s from a few months ago, which shows how Rebel Media has been expanding its international reach by making its message ever more outrageous and unhinged.

The most lamentable thing about Rebel Media isn’t just what its commentators have said. It’s that it has shown there is a considerable market for racism in this country — money to be made, careers to be built, from sowing hate and intolerance.

So here’s the good news: The experiences of the past few days suggest the market has reached a limit. Or so we hope.

Source: The Rebel’s fast running out of friends. Better late than never, I suppose.

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