Canadians have a long-held belief that when other people try to describe what makes us distinctly Canadian, the only thing they can come up with is that we are not Americans. We’ve all heard it… we are the “polite” North Americans…the “I’m sorry” North Americans…the “after you” North Americans”… the “we welcome immigrants and multiculturalism” North Americans etc. etc.
It will come as no surprise, therefore, that many of us are kind of smug about our politics. From our perch in the northern half of the continent we often look down our noses on the ugly, unruly politics south of the border, or the insensitive immigration policies of countries in Europe, and thank our luck stars we don’t live there. That would never happen here. Canadians clearly know how to govern so much better.
We’ve taken to believing all the things you say about us.
If that is how we have tended to see ourselves in the past, it is getting harder and harder to do so in the present. As some will have noticed, Canadians today are struggling to come to terms with how the colonizing, white, European-origin part of Canada could have treated Indigenous, Black, and Asian Canadians so badly. And frankly, why some of that treatment continues to this day. We are working on these issues, but it is apparent that some of us seem to be having a hard time to accept there are amends to make, reconciliation to achieve and new attitudes to live by.
But, significantly, there is much more smoldering in Canada.
This past weekend thousands of truck drivers and an assortment of hangers-on descended on Ottawa to notionally protest a requirement for truckers to be vaccinated against Covid 19. But their actions in the downtown, as they occupy Parliament Hill and threaten to disrupt the return of the House of Commons from its break today, bely much more. More than an anti-vax protest, it has been a toxic mix of rejection of government policies and authority in the name of individual freedom, racism and Islamophobia , hard-right wing January 6 wannabees, plain old ignorance and assorted other causes. Some talk of forcing the government to resign and holding show trials for the “traitorous” government leadership. From waving Nazi swastika and Confederate flags, to promoting white supremacist ideas, to dancing and jumping on the National War Memorial and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, to threatening homeless and shelter staff with violence in an effort to extort free meals, it has been ugly. These are some of our fellow Canadians, who have raised about $10M in “GoFundMe” money to launch, and presumably continue, the protests.
Just to be clear, this so-called Truckers Freedom Convoy is really no more than a rump group. Industry estimates that over 90% of Canadian truckers are vaccinated against Covid, mirroring the vaccination rate of Canadians as whole. But they are loud and have managed to gather a number of disgruntled people and their various anti-government, anti-authority issues to their cause. So they can’t simply be ignored.
I’ve been on Twitter for a while now. It can be a great place to find interesting analysis of what is going on in the world. It can also be a hot mess. And it seems that on Twitter as well, Canada has cause to reconsider our understanding of ourselves. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) has released several reports that suggest Canada has a right wing extremist social media footprint higher than in the U.S. and UK.
An Online Environmental Scan of Right-wing Extremism in Canada – ISD, 2020
An Online Environmental Scan of Right-wing Extremism in Canada – ISD, 2021
I am still digesting these reports. But if even somewhat accurate they suggest that Canadians need to be concerned for our political environment.
One would expect that our political leaders would be seeking to calm the waters. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
We have a Liberal Prime Minister who leads from a place of smugness, who sees divisions in society as means to create political wedges against his political opponents and cannot resist doing so. A performative leader he is always ready to describe those who disagree with his policies as rascist, anti-science, mysoginistic or otherwise morally corrupt.
We have a Leader of the Conservative Opposition who is weak and unable to command respect. He seems to have no fundamental position of principle other than vacillation. He is preoccupied with fighting for his job, (threatened both from within his party by hard right anti-vaxers, and from upstart splinter rightwing parties even more to the right) and many of his statements seem to provide support or justification for hard right views.
And we have some powerful provincial Premiers who derive support from the right, who are always ready to govern, or at least make gestures, in that direction.
Much of the political division today also seems to shake down to an urban/rural divide.
It would be far too easy to say that what we are seeing develop in Canada is a by-product of living next door to, and being exposed to, the base politics of what calls itself US democracy these days. But that cannot be used an excuse. There is something ugly going on (and that has been going on for some time) in Canada that is of our own making. And we had better figure out soon how to deal with it.
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