What is happening in Ottawa is amazing. For a week, the city center has been occupied by demonstrators who behave like hooligans.
Posted at 6:00 a.m.
With loud honks, at all hours of the day and night, these demonstrators who participate in the most beautiful role-playing game of their lives – libârtéééé – piss off an entire city.
And our William Wallaces1 Quebecois now aim to make a revival of the film Braveheart“ Braveheart by truck”, in Quebec, to also have their 15 minutes of gloriole.
The center of the city of Ottawa is therefore occupied, a siege tolerated by a municipal police who seem to be afraid of these good old canadian boys who parked their trucks as if the street belonged to them. The RCMP is an absent subscriber.
We note in Ottawa acts of vandalism, intimidation towards residents who dare to wear the mask as well as scripted incivility in businesses that apply health standards…
All this repeatedly, day and night.
Ah, I know, I know: the protesters (and their supporters) talk about exceptions to the rule…
Bullshit.
We saw. We read. We see. We understand. The accounts of hooligan behavior in Ottawa are too numerous and too easy to find to believe that it is only the work of a few bad apples.2.
It’s one thing for angry citizens to show their anger. But what we see in Ottawa, this kind of “revolt” organized by people who want a coup d’etat, who are demonstrating in Ottawa for demands that fall under provincial jurisdiction, is a form of childhood illness of a healthy democracy: the measles of an open society.
The demonstrators in Ottawa – and their imitators who want to occupy Quebec – have incarnated the only power of antisanitary activists, for 18 months: a power of nuisance.
But, sometimes, a hell of a big nuisance.
Few political parties have tried to instrumentalize this anger. We can think of the People’s Party of Canada and the Conservative Party of Quebec. Maxime Bernier and Éric Duhaime have brilliantly proven that they have no qualms about playing with matches on the gas tank of ignorance, misinformation and populism.
But the established parties have stayed away from that small percentage of citizens who think that FUCK LEGAULT and FUCK TRUDEAU are legitimate political programs and that our heads of governments are traitors who should be hanged to end the ” dictatorship”…
Until this week.
Over the past week, the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) has started flirting openly with that vocal portion of the electorate who thinks the Prime Minister of Canada is a traitor and that Canada is not a free country. For the past week, Conservative MPs – not all of them – have shamelessly stuck to the Ottawa demonstration. I remember a time when far-right agitators3 were snubbed by the entire Canadian political class. That era seems to be over.
This flirtation of the more radical elements of the CCP with protesters divorced from reality has exposed the cracks between the lucid and paranoid wings of the conservative caucus. This was the last nail in the coffin of leader Erin O’Toole, expelled the day before yesterday at the instigation of the Trumpist wing of his party.
I have always thought that Canada and Quebec were immune to the national-populist poison of the National Front – early Trumpists – because far-right ideas have almost no political relay here. But I look at what is happening in the Conservative Party of Canada and I am sorry to see that it is changing. I’m not the only one. The newspaper Globe and Mailtwo columnists not particularly on the left – Andrew Coyne and John Ibbitson – speak openly of a party on the verge of imploding under the influence of its radicals.
Coyne4 “In a nutshell, the Conservative Party’s problem is extremism, which even if it doesn’t define the entire party is enough to smear it entirely. »
Ibbitson5 “The big problem is that the militant base of the Conservative Party is becoming more extreme: it is adding opposition to vaccines to its mantra of support for the right to arms, opposition to abortion and skepticism about the severity of the changes climatic. »
I know full well that in our first-past-the-post political system, a Conservative Party that fully and openly embraces Trumpism would have little chance of forming government in this country.
But the problem is elsewhere: the nuisance of those who are raging with blows of FUCK LEGAULT FUCK TRUDEAU ON VA JAMMER FUCK FULL FREEDOM will soon obtain solid political relays in the Parliament of Canada.
It was one thing to woo social conservatives who want to make abortion illegal. It’s quite another to woo followers of far-right fanatics who think we live in a dictatorship, that everyone is corrupt, and that elected political leaders should be arrested for treason.
Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson has harshly criticized Conservative MPs – like former leader Andrew Scheer – who lashed out at the hooligans crippling his city, terrorizing its residents, saying it was shameful (in disgrace)6.
That’s the right word to describe the Conservative Party’s flirtation with misinformed and paranoid national-populism.