MP and former leader of the Conservative Party Erin O’Toole used his farewell speech in Parliament on Monday to attack the tendency of elected officials to seek only social media clicks, and so on. aggravate rampant polarization in Canada.
“Social media didn’t build this great country, it’s starting to destroy this democracy,” Mr O’Toole said during his address to Parliament.
The resigning Conservative leader devoted long minutes of his last speech as an MP to warn his colleagues “on all sides of the House” of an evil of which he himself was guilty, by his own admission .
“We are becoming elected officials who judge our worth by the number of likes we receive on social media, rather than by the number of lives we change in real life,” he continued.
The evils of social media are such, he says, that “a whole generation of young leaders have never even heard a point of view different from theirs”. This would gradually lead to the depreciation of the opinions of others. And elected officials are directly responsible for it, he believes.
“The politics of performance fuels polarization. Moral reporting replaces discussion. And far too often we use this room to generate clips. Not to launch national debates. »
Polarized on both sides
As an example, Erin O’Toole criticized politicians who misrepresent hunters as a threat to society “to secure some political points in the suburbs”.
A barely veiled reference to the debates surrounding Liberal Bill C-21. One of his amendments to ban a long list of weapons was dropped following criticism from hunters and Indigenous people, including hockey player Carey Price.
However, the conservative politician also denounced the exaggerations of his own political family. “Today, too often, conspiracy theories about the UN are allowed to pass [Organisation des Nations Unies] or the World Economic Forum. We attribute sinister motives to these organizations”, he dropped, not without recalling that Canada helped to build the main international organizations.
The new Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, has promised to ban the participation of elected Conservatives in meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos, a theme he has cultivated since the COVID-19 pandemic, when he was a simple deputy.
Change first in the Commons
His predecessor, Erin O’Toole, aptly illustrated his point by the fact that members of the same family no longer speak to each other because of their irreconcilable position on the vaccination against COVID-19.
“If we want to change that, and start having serious and respectful discussions again, Mr. Speaker, that change needs to start from here, from the House of Commons of Canada,” he chanted.
At the beginning of his speech, Mr. O’Toole first thanked his family, reviewed his career as a politician and praised his main achievements, including the recognition of the Quebec nation under the Harper government. Representatives of all parties then paid tribute to him in their own way.
Son of an Ontario politician and ex-serviceman, Erin O’Toole was first elected to his riding of Durham in a by-election in 2012. He succeeded Andrew Scheer as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada in 2020 , making him the Leader of the Official Opposition.
After a disappointing result for the Conservatives in the 2021 general election, Mr. O’Toole was ousted as leader by the other elected members of his caucus in February 2022, in the midst of the crisis of the “convoy of the freedom” in Ottawa. A year later, last March, the Ontario MP announced that he was leaving politics at the end of this current parliamentary session, in June.