Conservatives are hitching their wagon to some very dark forces

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/02/2022 (1048 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There are almost 37 million of us now, Statistics Canada reported this week, our population growing by 5.2 per cent between 2016 and 2021 despite COVID-19.

That news is much to be cheered.

The difficulty will be deciding how, given the way things have played out in recent weeks, we intend to get along once the pandemic abates.

If anything has become clear from the chaos at various sites around the country, it is that present rifts and rancour will not be easily healed.

The scenes playing out on our streets and at our borders show how deluded many Canadians are about what freedom means and how democracy works.

Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson aptly compared the utterings of the blockaders to something out of “a Monty Python sketch.”

“They’re living in a parallel universe that just does not make any sense,” he said.

Worse than their ignorance, however, is the number of political leaders who have been recklessly complicit in their cause.

It’s one thing to struggle finding solutions to the standoff, as the federal government and Ottawa police have done. It’s quite another to inflame extremists and make a bad situation very much worse.

In Ottawa, key Conservative Party figures have contributed to the ongoing toxification of politics, giving succour to extremists and abdicating principle in favour of opportunism.

Strolling about to visit and pose for photos with those who would usurp the legitimate authority of an elected government is beyond unacceptable.

It is an affront to every Canadian who fought, suffered and died to defend our freedoms from similar thugs and demagogues.

Only belatedly, once it dawned on Conservatives just what they had hitched their wagon to, did interim federal leader Candice Bergen call for an end to the blockade.

The Conservatives were like chastened adolescents, claiming they had no idea that just because they were tossing lit matches on the hay bales, fire might ensue.

It was only once blockades spread to international bridges in Windsor and Sarnia this week – economic vandalism that prompted shutdowns at auto plants dependent on the timely arrival of parts – that Conservative MPs twigged to the whirlwind hitting the economy and began to say publicly that enough is enough.

By then, those they had welcomed to Ottawa were blocking the capital’s airport, jamming local police lines and musing about convoying around local schools. Schools!

How the federal Conservatives think throwing their lot in with the most extreme will win them support in the suburban swaths of central Canada essential to their returning to power is a mystery.

How they imagine that idling thousands of autoworkers makes them champions of the working class defies understanding.

Once the Conservative Party rid itself of former leader Erin O’Toole — and his view that moderation and maturity were needed to regain government — it appears to be going all-in along the path favoured by the likes of leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre.

Former Conservative minister James Moore was among those to recognize folly when he saw it.

“Crash the Ontario auto sector, that’ll win you friends and influence,” he tweeted. “This is madness. Also, get vaccinated.”

This was a bad week for conservatives of various stripe and jurisdiction across the country.

From Alberta and Saskatchewan, premiers Jason Kenney and Scott Moe – after presiding over the most egregious COVID responses – raced to become the first to scrap public health measures.

Kenney (though he did apologize after realizing the outrageousness of his comment) had the cheek to say anti-vaxxers were being treated with the same loathing once reserved for HIV-AIDS patients.

His comment would have been absurd enough had it not been uttered by a man who once mounted campaigns of vilification against those facing that scourge.

If the hypocrisy by Kenney is breathtaking, so too is the neglect of duty elsewhere.

In Ontario, Premier Doug Ford acted as if Ottawa was some foreign city-state rather than part of his own province.

Shockingly, the federal government reported this week that there had been no Ontario representatives at its emergency table set up to address the standoff.

Let’s leave aside for now the loaded question of whether there are “good people” on both sides.

The gross behaviour, the inanity, the want of consideration or empathy, the lack of self-restraint or any eye for consequences, come almost wholly from one side this week.

It is a dark and dangerous thing Conservatives have attached themselves to – forces that, once loosed, often become ungovernable.

The 37 million are surely taking note.