Down With the Sickness: Canadian Politics 2022

It's infuriating; it's also impossible to not be cynical about "why"

It's jaw-dropping, thinking about how many people were arrested during the G20 protests in Toronto or how aggressive the police response was to the Printemps érable in Montreal. They can't even give these people parking tickets?

OTM

Is a positive test even news anymore?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-protest-ottawa-1.6333316

Good piece about the explicit connections between this shit far right white supremacism: https://www.antihate.ca/the_freedom_convoy_is_nothing_but_a_vehicle_for_the_far_right

At what age does conspiratorial thinking set in? I mentioned to a grade 6 class today about Trudeau testing positive; "He's not really positive, he's just hiding from the truckers."

Not sure that's a conspiracy per se, although it may be an implicit admission that the protest is not so peaceful.

I destroyed one sign today and flipped people off while walking on the sidewalk. Starting to lose it. The city has basically isolated Centretown and handed us over to these nutters: https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/troster-trucker-convoy-ottawas-centretown-has-been-abandoned-to-the-mob

From a viewer just now: “I am disabled and live within blocks of parliament. I’ve been trying to get groceries for days now and because of the mess down here I am unable to have them delivered…I haven’t had food for days now” #ottnews

— Graham Richardson (@grahamctv) January 31, 2022

The idea that the PM would release false test results to dodge a difficult situation--not least coming from an 11-year-old--strikes me as very conspiratorial. I'm guessing the idea didn't formulate in his own mind.

Oh, tbc, it's bullshit and makes no sense anyway. Trudeau was hiding just fine before he got sick.

Funny...On a related note, a different kid in the same class, when I brought up Hiroshima on Friday (in connection to Jackson Pollock), said the Japanese deserved the atomic bomb. Flabbergasted, to say the least.

Uh, are your students' parents parked around here rn, by any chance?

The minute they get their licenses...

O'Toole may be getting ousted?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/erin-otoole-leadership-review-caucus-1.6334491

(xpost) I misread your post--parents, yeah...I don't want to characterize the whole school, I've been there a lot this year and most of the kids are just fine, but obviously a few of them are getting very creative history lessons around the dinner table.

No paramedics were hurt following an incident on Parliament Hill where rocks were thrown at an Ottawa ambulance vehicle during the third day of the “Freedom Convoy” protest.

Darryl Wilton, president of the Ottawa Paramedic Association, confirmed the news to CityNews on Monday, January 31, adding that one of their paramedics had also been subjected to anti-Asian racial slurs during the same incident as he checked on the status of the vehicle.

https://ottawa.citynews.ca/local-news/rocks-hurled-at-ottawa-ambulance-at-downtown-truck-convoy-5011107

clem how did you respond to the 11yo?

Pretty sharply both times (again, two different kids). I let the kid on Friday know how cruel he was being, even if that wasn't his intention, and with the kid today, I basically said "That's absurd." It's a bit of a balancing act to the degree that any kind of engagement with these topics is, in the abstract, better than no engagement, so I tried to stop short of "You have no idea what you're talking about so just shut up." They were all respectful when I talked about Jackie Robinson today (birthday), so I'm sure it's just random nonsense they're picking up from home.

i have to say i do view clemenza's student's viewpoint as conspiratorial. an increasing amount of people on the right are taking advantage of trudeau's low approval rating by blatantly making up lies about him and the people around him.

have a look at this CBC piece from today:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/adam-scotti-accusations-protest-1.6334213

this is a CPC MP posting on facebook. sure, she removed her post but this just flames so much conspiratorial thinking. while there's no direct link between what that news piece says and trudeau avoiding the protests, it's very obvious we're seeing a nascent US-style conspiratorial and hate culture in canada, which is so extremely demoralizing. i'm starting to believe we truly are the US on a delay

once this "seed" is planted in chamber, we will see all kinds of people fill in the blanks with wild ideas when posts are removed or conservative MPs are viewed as being "silenced"

in terms of when would conspiratorial thinking set in, i'm still a relatively young person with no children, but i believe this kind of thinking is embedded in subtle ways as an infant, to the point where it is difficult for a child to even identify her or his own thoughts as conspiratorial unless exposed to a variety of ideas and challenged intellectually. once rationality is thrown out the window, they're pretty much a lost cause, but i tend to give educational institutions a lot of credit. also, unfortunately, and i think this overlaps with some conservative viewpoints sadly (especially from the US, where a lot of this is coming from), i do believe that lack of government transparency also gives way to this kind of thinking and i believe most governments we've had have failed us in this regard. i wouldn't be surprised if our government is one of the least transparent, as are the corporations that have established themselves here

there is a reddit post that describes all the horrible things that have happened at these protests:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ottawa/comments/sh62nr/convoy_megathread_27/hv0k0xk/

I thought conspiracy theories usually involve multiple powerful parties colluding in secret to enact a hidden agenda? Not sure who the conspirators are in a 'theory' about a politician telling a lie (something that politicians do); it just seems baseless and unlikely in this case. Or is the idea that the health care system and media are also in on the conspiracy?

Anyway lol Saskatchewan

"I asked … why you can't start ticketing [ on Queen Elizabeth Driveway ], it's far enough away. And they said they'd get on their CB [ radio ] and there would be another 20 truckers there smashing down the barricade."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-protest-convoy-length-ticket-tow-mayor-1.6333497

Are these people under the impression no one remembers stuff like this? https://thetyee.ca/News/2019/12/20/RCMP-Planned-Snipers-Wetsuweten-Pipeline-Protest/

(tbc I'm not advocating the Ottawa police start sniping people)

Reading about this and the border crossing blockade, I'm reminded of how many liberal/progressive/etc people told me they couldn't support police abolition, because without cops there'd be no one to defend them from armed right-wingers. Turns out you don't even need a gun or a militia just some big cars and they're powerless. Of course the answer will probably be "we need to give the police military-grade vehicles" (which they will never use against white people)

Not important, but I'm trying to sort this out in my mind...When you refer to JFK conspiracists, you're not saying they're part of the original plot, but rather that they, under the influence of other like-minded people, have come to construct and believe far-fetched narratives about Kennedy's assassination (or Q people obsessed with Hillary and pedophiles and Pizzagate). That's why I call that kid a nascent conspiracist: prompted by his parents or the internet, he's propagating some scenario where the truckers are being ignored by a PM who's hiding out under the false pretense of COVID. And I'm sure that's only one part of a bigger and wilder story about how the protestors are being undermined.

Well, both of those are theories about conspiracies: Oswald didn't act alone but was a pawn in a conspiracy involving the people within the CIA or Castro or KGB colluding; that the Clintons, Obama, George Soros, and Bill Gates are secretly meeting to worship Satan and traffic children or something. Maybe there is a wider narrative about a conspiracy to suppress the truckers and protect Trudeau but "he's lying about the test results to avoid dealing with them" doesn't sound like a conspiracy to me on its own. Never thought "conspiracy theory" referred to a conspiracy among the people who are developing the theory.

Anyway I do get that there's a little bit of a difference between sending the RCMP or military out to a protest blocking pipeline access roads in the middle of nowhere and authorizing them to use force to remove protesters vs sending soldiers or snipers out to an urban downtown core with 50,000 civilian residents and risking the incitement of violence from people who are already using their trucks to ram through barricades. This does seem to be the angle that Watson and Sloly are taking and maybe they're right - it's true that no one has been seriously injured or killed so far. However, if that's true and "the threat of violence has been too great" to enforce the law as per Watson, can we stop treating this event that is "unique in nature, massive in scale, polarizing in context, and dangerous in literally every other aspect" in Chief Sloly's words*, as a peaceful demonstration and officially recognize it for what it is, namely, terrorism? Let's not let Tories get away with endorsing it without being clear that that's what they're endorsing.

*around 13:40 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kycmhtiyou0

well put Sund4r. Perhaps it's worth distinguishing the Alberta border crossing blockade from the Ottawa occupation. The former is such a direct threat to state power I am reeling a bit at how chill the coverage of it is

What a clusterfuck. https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/rcmp-enforcement-possible-as-coutts-border-blockade-reaches-fourth-day

i hear you guys are having truck demon issues
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VLHXe5Ub488/WxH55FOOR3I/AAAAAAAAAZI/ERB_VQXIkzIv3r7wDtEX5Gg5mn-FWQMJQCLcBGAs/s1600/MO+first.jpg

There are a couple of guys here who'd sometimes get extremely upset when I'd post something jokey in the American politics thread--it was like I'd breached some unspoken but sacred line, and I needed to be called out on how awful this was. I'm 100% fine with your post; it just reminded me of how weird that was.

That’s the most Canadian way of saying “Dick move, forks.”

Not at all! That's my point--such posts are fine. It's bizarre to get complain about them.

("get upset" or "complain"; "get complain" a little weird)

So a couple of things I'd noticed (and that came out in the photos I took) were: i) a lot of Christian and Biblical messages on signs and sides of vans ii) a lot of QC flags, French signs, and QC accents with no evidence of separatist sentiment - a lot of the people with QC flags also had Canadian flags; some signs were even bilingual. (Bernier/PPC stuff was v popular otoh, which is virtually unheard of in Ottawa.) A friend in Mtl sent me this article, which goes some way to explaining both phenomena: https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/2022-02-02/recherche-sur-le-complotisme/la-pandemie-a-cree-des-ponts-entre-le-quebec-et-l-ouest.php . It's about a report by researcher Martin Geoffroy and his research team on the "ethnography of conspiratorial thought" during the pandemic - where he notes that far-right nationalists in QC, typically loath to unite with anglos, have actually found common cause with Western separatists and reactionaries in their opposition to sanitary measures. He compares the decentralized structure of the movement, reflecting both the diversity of goals but also a strategy that makes surveillance or governmental influence more difficult, to the Black Panthers in the 60s. They identify the components of the coalition as belonging to two broad categories: a political far right 'matrix' (further divided into "sovereign citizens", white identitarians, and survivalists) and a spiritual/religious 'matrix' who are united by their opposition to mainstream science and rationality (broken down into the New Age network, some of whose views he thinks border on eugenics, traditional Catholics, and fundamentalist Protestants).

The scary part is the possibility that someone like P01l13vr3 could harness this kind of coalition to win government.

Dans le groupe associé à l’extrême droite, Martin Geoffroy inclut les groupes identitaires, comme les Farfadaas, qui participent au blocus dans les rues d’Ottawa. Ces groupes sont nés de l’opposition à l’immigration, mais ont reformaté leur discours avec la pandémie. Leur objectif n’est pas d’influencer les décideurs publics, mais plutôt de « transformer la façon dont les citoyens eux-mêmes perçoivent le monde », note le rapport de recherche du CEFIR.

Okay, I was curious about that Farfadaa group. I saw a bunch of them on the Ottawalks livestream (Saturday, I think), but there was almost nothing about them online. Figured they'd be something like this.

o'toole out
(wow)

seems bad tbh

yeah—i mean i think o'toole had a legit chance to be prime minister (in a relatively centrist mode)

whereas now whoever replaces him will likely lurch the party to the ugly right, which gives more voice to canadian trumpism and strengthens trudeau

neither situation is particularly good for a listless NDP, but i would have favoured the one without an energized alt right

I don't follow closely enough to answer this: was he on his way out already, or did the last week's events precipitate this? If the latter, that would seem like a problem.

he was under threat since the election, where he was perceived to have underperformed

but the critique even then was coming mostly from the trucker-style conservatives

o'toole seemed like he genuinely wanted to renew the conservatives as a "modern" tory party, similar i think to Boris Johnson's vibe. the kind of party that would take some action on climate change (not enough), would probably have done something like CERB (not enough), but more "responsibly" and pro-business/anti-tax/anti-woke than the liberals

i think it woulda worked! a kinder stephen harper kinda thing. canadians (sigh) like that.

but now they'll be riven by ugly forces for a while and promote bullshit and radicalize even more people

Farfadaa group

Does their name have something to do with leprechauns or...?

A bunch of grade 7/8 kids at my son’s school, staged a protest today against covid safety measures like recess zones etc. Can’t imagine where they got the idea.

wow that's pretty infuriating given how much authority you constantly submit to as a student (like "recess" is what they have in prison you dolts). At least the justification is transparent when it's covid safety!

Haven't been to a school yet that strictly monitors that kind of thing once outside--maybe we should, but it's pretty difficult. And for what it's worth, my old school (a K-8), and many schools, had recess zones before COVID: you try to keep young kids and older kids separate, so the young kids don't get trampled running in the middle of a soccer or football game. (Not applicable if your son goes to a middle school.)

CBC reporter summarizing Ottawa Police Chief Sloly's statement:

To sum it up:
Thousands more Convoy protestors expected this weekend.
Convoy being funded by American$
Counter protestors are also going to show
Ottawa Police can't handle this occupation on own
Mayor says need provincial and federal help
Military may need to be called in

— Judy Trinh (@judyatrinh) February 2, 2022

We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas

many xps but i share your derision and frustration with these truck demons, they seem dickish and i'm not trying to add additional dickishness to the equation

Just got an email from my local hospital saying that they are CANCELLING THEIR URGENT CARE CLINIC on Saturday due to expected trucknutz in the neighbourhood...