The western alliance has moved quicker and implemented more sanctions than anyone would have predicted just a week ago. Yachts are being seized, flights are cancelled, central bank reserves are frozen, and markets have crashed. Pretty much every possible sanction be it legal, economic, or political has now been applied to Russia. It is true that in many cases the world could go further, but not by much.
And, unfortunately, this historically harsh set of sanctions has failed to move Putin. In fact, judging by the most recent phone call between the Russian President and his French counterpart Emmanuelle Macron, Putin may even be digging in deeper. With no more obvious sticks, short of entering the war directly, the world must turn to the idea of carrots, but there are few obvious options.
This is partly because Russia has violated so many international norms—including now the intentional bombing of civilian populations—that it’s hard to imagine a politically viable way western leaders could offer Moscow any reward for even an immediate and complete withdrawal.
Furthermore, it is increasingly apparent that Putin would not be tempted by even the largest carrots. He has staked his empire on this war, and anything less than the complete occupation of Ukraine could mean his political, and possibly even personal, demise.
Perhaps, then, the west should consider an alliance wide-strategy of offering a million little carrots aimed not at Russia, but at Russians.
For example, the Ukrainian government is now promising Russian deserters 5 million rubles (approximately US$47,000), which is 450 times more than what the Kremlin pays the families of soldiers killed in action. NATO and the EU could match that and add an offer of asylum for them and their families. In fact, some legal scholars believe that under international law, western nations would be obligated to treat deserters as refugees.
Even if each deserting Russian soldier was offered a huge bounty, say $100,000, it would still be incredibly cost effective when you weigh it against the price of supporting a protracted war, or the cost in men and material to remove that soldier from the battlefield in the traditional fashion.
This strategy could be applied more widely. For example, some of these million little carrots could be offered to Russian diplomats. We have already seen at least one resign in protest, but there could be hundreds more if the western alliance also dangled in front of them a path to citizenship and a stipend to cover living costs. This may seem unfair, but the world needs to be pragmatic about this and realize that bigger fish will require larger bait.
For senior military staff or Kremlin officials in Moscow, maybe even notable journalists or celebrities, we could also offer a path to citizenship and an even larger stipend. And while it is harder to defect to the west from within Russia itself, it would still only require a short walk to the nearest Embassy. (Where, I grant you, they may end up waiting awhile, so best to pick a mission with a good chef.)
And for the biggest fish, the oligarchs, the carrots could be very large—the west could offer the return of half of their seized assets (the other half being given to Ukraine as reparations).
But for them and all the rest, there would be one very important catch. All of these little carrots would require a recorded video statement explaining their opposition to the war and urging others to join them.
If thousands of these testimonials were shared in the media and online, coming from powerful Russians and lowly conscripts both, it would be almost impossible for the Kremlin to control the narrative domestically. It would be a body blow to morale, and it would handicap further attempts at disinformation and propaganda.
But, most importantly, a million little carrots strategy would remove Russian boots on the ground. If you consider the slow progress of the Russian military after (according to Pentagon estimates) 90 per cent of the troops assigned to this invasion have already been deployed, it is clear that even a small number of deserters will have a disproportionately large impact on Moscow’s ability to fight this war. (And the west shouldn’t discount the disruption caused by removing bureaucratic butts from desks, either.)
In previous wars, bounties for defectors were communicated by dropping leaflets behind enemy lines. Luckily, in the 21st century, dangling a million little carrots in front of Russians could be done much more easily. Our intelligence agencies have the cell phone numbers of every senior official in Moscow, every diplomat abroad, and every officer on the ground—and for them a simple text message or even a call would suffice. (Interestingly, the Ukrainian government is now sending automated calls to Russian numbers.) For the rest, social media, broadcast radio, and billboards on the road to Kyiv would work fine.
There has never been an opportunity in the past for one side of an armed conflict to reach out so immediately and directly to the populace of the other side, and to offer each of those citizens a very personal bounty for helping to end the war. And there has rarely been the unity we now see among the western allies, which would allow for such a sweeping strategy, and the requisite costs and absorption of asylum seekers.
Implementing a million little carrots strategy would require alliance-wide coordination. But, over the course of the first week of this war we have learned our leaders, our parliaments, and our governments are capable of moving extremely fast and moving together when the stakes are this high.
The western alliance has moved quicker and implemented more sanctions than anyone would have predicted just a week ago. Yachts are being seized, flights are cancelled, central bank reserves are frozen, and markets have crashed. Pretty much every possible sanction be it legal, economic, or political has now been applied to Russia. It is true that in many cases the world could go further, but not by much.
And, unfortunately, this historically harsh set of sanctions has failed to move Putin. In fact, judging by the most recent phone call between the Russian President and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, Putin may even be digging in deeper. With no more obvious sticks, short of entering the war directly, the world must turn to the idea of carrots, but there are few obvious options.
This is partly because Russia has violated so many international norms—including now the intentional bombing of civilian populations—that it’s hard to imagine a politically viable way western leaders could offer Moscow any reward for even an immediate and complete withdrawal.
Furthermore, it is increasingly apparent that Putin would not be tempted by even the largest carrots. He has staked his empire on this war, and anything less than the complete occupation of Ukraine could mean his political, and possibly even personal, demise.
Perhaps, then, the west should consider an alliance wide-strategy of offering a million little carrots aimed not at Russia, but at Russians.
For example, the Ukrainian government is now promising Russian deserters 5 million rubles (approximately US$47,000), which is 450 times more than what the Kremlin pays the families of soldiers killed in action. NATO and the EU could match that and add an offer of asylum for them and their families. In fact, some legal scholars believe that under international law, western nations would be obligated to treat deserters as refugees.
Even if each deserting Russian soldier was offered a huge bounty, say $100,000, it would still be incredibly cost effective when you weigh it against the price of supporting a protracted war, or the cost in men and material to remove that soldier from the battlefield in the traditional fashion.
This strategy could be applied more widely. For example, some of these million little carrots could be offered to Russian diplomats. We have already seen at least one resign in protest, but there could be hundreds more if the western alliance also dangled in front of them a path to citizenship and a stipend to cover living costs. This may seem unfair, but the world needs to be pragmatic about this and realize that bigger fish will require larger bait.
For senior military staff or Kremlin officials in Moscow, maybe even notable journalists or celebrities, we could also offer a path to citizenship and an even larger stipend. And while it is harder to defect to the west from within Russia itself, it would still only require a short walk to the nearest Embassy. (Where, I grant you, they may end up waiting awhile, so best to pick a mission with a good chef.)
And for the biggest fish, the oligarchs, the carrots could be very large—the west could offer the return of half of their seized assets (the other half being given to Ukraine as reparations).
But for them and all the rest, there would be one very important catch. All of these little carrots would require a recorded video statement explaining their opposition to the war and urging others to join them.
If thousands of these testimonials were shared in the media and online, coming from powerful Russians and lowly conscripts both, it would be almost impossible for the Kremlin to control the narrative domestically. It would be a body blow to morale, and it would handicap further attempts at disinformation and propaganda.
But, most importantly, a million little carrots strategy would remove Russian boots on the ground. If you consider the slow progress of the Russian military after (according to Pentagon estimates) 90 per cent of the troops assigned to this invasion have already been deployed, it is clear that even a small number of deserters will have a disproportionately large impact on Moscow’s ability to fight this war. (And the west shouldn’t discount the disruption caused by removing bureaucratic butts from desks, either.)
In previous wars, bounties for defectors were communicated by dropping leaflets behind enemy lines. Luckily, in the 21st century, dangling a million little carrots in front of Russians could be done much more easily. Our intelligence agencies have the cell phone numbers of every senior official in Moscow, every diplomat abroad, and every officer on the ground—and for them a simple text message or even a call would suffice. (Interestingly, the Ukrainian government is now sending automated calls to Russian numbers.) For the rest, social media, broadcast radio, and billboards on the road to Kyiv would work fine.
There has never been an opportunity in the past for one side of an armed conflict to reach out so immediately and directly to the populace of the other side, and to offer each of those citizens a very personal bounty for helping to end the war. And there has rarely been the unity we now see among the western allies, which would allow for such a sweeping strategy, and the requisite costs and absorption of asylum seekers.
Implementing a million little carrots strategy would require alliance-wide coordination. But, over the course of the first week of this war we have learned our leaders, our parliaments, and our governments are capable of moving extremely fast and moving together when the stakes are this high.
In 2021, amid report after report of presumed grave sites being found on the former grounds of residential schools, non-Indigenous Canadians experienced what’s been generously described as an awakening. Everyone from random citizens doing TV street interviews to the Prime Minister himself voiced horror and dismay, as if blindsided by the fact that the assimilationist project this country ran for the better part of a century had claimed the lives of children. Many, many children.
We were not, of course. The deaths of young Indigenous kids at residential schools were described widely in the accounts of former students, who shared the knowledge with their children and grandchildren; they were meticulously reported by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015.
No wonder, then, that as the news sank in, a strikingly different theme emerged in the remarks of Indigenous leaders. If Canada had indeed awakened, they asked, would it now act? Or would it leave First Nations people to keep curating this dreadful history, passing it between generations in the hope that someday, at long last, it would move their non-Indigenous neighbours to repair a broken relationship?
Cadmus Delorme, the chief of the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan, put it best: “We have one of two options right now,” he told Global News in November. “To address the truth, accept the truth, then move to reconciliation; or be ignorant to the reality and make our children figure it out. I am one to not wait for our children to figure it out.”
Write it in the sky. Again and again, Indigenous children have borne the brunt of tragically misguided government policy. Over successive generations, they were abused in the schools and exposed to disease, plucked from their loved ones to be raised by white families and traumatized by intergenerational fallout. For decades, they’ve been voiceless and forgotten. Surely this moment of self-realization is our chance to change that.
Here, in brief, is the thinking behind our decision to place the unknown victims of residential schools at the top of our annual Power List (page 30). The children who rest in graves at Tk’emlúps, Cowessess, Williams Lake, B.C., and elsewhere are lost to their communities. But the shared knowledge of their existence, of their fates, has its own compelling power. We failed to hear them when they lived. Without question, we are obliged to hear them now.
Before making this choice, Maclean’s consulted privately with Indigenous, Métis and Inuit leaders, who unanimously approved of, and in some cases applauded, the idea. The grave finds, they agreed, changed the tone and substance of debate over Indigenous rights. Whether that change yields action, they’re waiting to see. But it has already proved pivotal in forcing Ottawa to negotiate its landmark $40-billion settlement on Indigenous child welfare.
To be heard is to have influence, so this year’s ranking also features a number of prominent First Nations people to whom the country has turned its ear—RoseAnne Archibald, the first woman to lead the Assembly of First Nations; Niigaan Sinclair, a writer, political commentator and community activist; and Autumn Peltier, the water defender, among them.
As in 2021, our ranking hews toward good-faith actors in the service of positive change, even if their approaches, or their notions of positive, are not universally shared. Pierre Poilievre is not every Canadian’s first choice as a seatmate on a long flight. But the Tory MP excels in his role as an opposition critic, holding the government’s feet to the fire.
And again, we’ve looked beyond mere status. The nabobs of banking, lobbying, telecom and other arms of the establishment must do more than occupy corner offices to merit berths on our ranking. Simply making noise in the town square isn’t enough, either. Dog-whistlers, conspiracy theorists and censorious pedants are ineligible.
The result, we believe, is a ranking that reflects the pressing issues facing the country, and the opportunities ahead. Attentive readers will notice that Canadians who guided us through the first years of the pandemic—public health leaders, epidemiologists—have given way in this year’s ranking to those who will guide us out of it.
It’s our version of cautious optimism. With luck and good sense, we’ll emerge from Omicron into a world where COVID-19 is a managed risk, refocused on the challenges that define Canada and its place in the world. As ever, our ability to navigate these challenges will rest heavily on our brightest, most dauntless and most accomplished. Remember their names, and lend them your ears.
In 2021, amid report after report of presumed grave sites being found on the former grounds of residential schools, non-Indigenous Canadians experienced what’s been generously described as an awakening. Everyone from random citizens doing TV street interviews to the Prime Minister himself voiced horror and dismay, as if blindsided by the fact that the assimilationist project this country ran for the better part of a century had claimed the lives of children. Many, many children.
We were not, of course. The deaths of young Indigenous kids at residential schools were described widely in the accounts of former students, who shared the knowledge with their children and grandchildren; they were meticulously reported by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015.
No wonder, then, that as the news sank in, a strikingly different theme emerged in the remarks of Indigenous leaders. If Canada had indeed awakened, they asked, would it now act? Or would it leave First Nations people to keep curating this dreadful history, passing it between generations in the hope that someday, at long last, it would move their non-Indigenous neighbours to repair a broken relationship?
Cadmus Delorme, the chief of the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan, put it best: “We have one of two options right now,” he told Global News in November. “To address the truth, accept the truth, then move to reconciliation; or be ignorant to the reality and make our children figure it out. I am one to not wait for our children to figure it out.”
Write it in the sky. Again and again, Indigenous children have borne the brunt of tragically misguided government policy. Over successive generations, they were abused in the schools and exposed to disease, plucked from their loved ones to be raised by white families and traumatized by intergenerational fallout. For decades, they’ve been voiceless and forgotten. Surely this moment of self-realization is our chance to change that.
Here, in brief, is the thinking behind our decision to place the unknown victims of residential schools at the top of our annual Power List (page 30). The children who rest in graves at Tk’emlúps, Cowessess, Williams Lake, B.C., and elsewhere are lost to their communities. But the shared knowledge of their existence, of their fates, has its own compelling power. We failed to hear them when they lived. Without question, we are obliged to hear them now.
Before making this choice, Maclean’s consulted privately with Indigenous, Métis and Inuit leaders, who unanimously approved of, and in some cases applauded, the idea. The grave finds, they agreed, changed the tone and substance of debate over Indigenous rights. Whether that change yields action, they’re waiting to see. But it has already proved pivotal in forcing Ottawa to negotiate its landmark $40-billion settlement on Indigenous child welfare.
To be heard is to have influence, so this year’s ranking also features a number of prominent First Nations people to whom the country has turned its ear—RoseAnne Archibald, the first woman to lead the Assembly of First Nations; Niigaan Sinclair, a writer, political commentator and community activist; and Autumn Peltier, the water defender, among them.
As in 2021, our ranking hews toward good-faith actors in the service of positive change, even if their approaches, or their notions of positive, are not universally shared. Pierre Poilievre is not every Canadian’s first choice as a seatmate on a long flight. But the Tory MP excels in his role as an opposition critic, holding the government’s feet to the fire.
And again, we’ve looked beyond mere status. The nabobs of banking, lobbying, telecom and other arms of the establishment must do more than occupy corner offices to merit berths on our ranking. Simply making noise in the town square isn’t enough, either. Dog-whistlers, conspiracy theorists and censorious pedants are ineligible.
The result, we believe, is a ranking that reflects the pressing issues facing the country, and the opportunities ahead. Attentive readers will notice that Canadians who guided us through the first years of the pandemic—public health leaders, epidemiologists—have given way in this year’s ranking to those who will guide us out of it.
It’s our version of cautious optimism. With luck and good sense, we’ll emerge from Omicron into a world where COVID-19 is a managed risk, refocused on the challenges that define Canada and its place in the world. As ever, our ability to navigate these challenges will rest heavily on our brightest, most dauntless and most accomplished. Remember their names, and lend them your ears.
Ever since a column of trucks, campers, and cars set off for Ottawa in January with a song in their hearts and a plan to remove our democratically-elected government, the members of the now-leaderless Conservative Party have been trying to find a way to greet them as liberators.
No matter how many photos of Nazi and Confederate flags have flown in the crowd, or how often the protesters have called for Justin Trudeau to be tried for treason, the Tories have tripped over themselves to find common cause with the occupiers.
Pierre Poilievre, a likely next leader of the party, has taken every opportunity to ingratiate himself with the occupiers, glad-handing with the crowd that wants our government removed from office: “I’m showing up here to support freedom and an end to unnecessary mandates that have no support, no backing by science,” he told some of the protesters Tuesday.
Saskatchewan MP Jeremy Patzer came out and took some photos with organizers Pat King and Chris Barber. One-time leadership contender Leslyn Lewis was ambling through the crowd on Sunday, and was effusive: “It’s been great to see Canadians come together,” she told me. Marilyn Gladu and Candice Bergen, now interim leader, enjoyed some pizza with two of the protesters. Michael Cooper wandered into the crowd on Parliament Hill to express his solidarity with those fighting against having to be vaccinated.
With everybody joining the convoy party, embattled Erin O’Toole couldn’t help but catch the current: “The trucker convoy is a symbol of fatigue in our country,” he insisted. (His caucus’ vocal support for the convoy may have been a symbol of fatigue with their leader, as O’Toole was ousted on Wednesday.)
But every foray into the occupied territories of Centretown meant grappling with the fact that a key organizers of the convoy have identified with QAnon and made various disparaging and odious remarks.
Once the video of the Patzer-King meeting emerged, the Saskatchewan MP insisted: “I fully condemn any violent rhetoric on the part of Mr. King or any other participant of the convoy.”
Lewis was positive that “the majority” of the crowd was in Ottawa to protest vaccine mandates, despite having walked past a man wearing a PUREBLOOD sweater. (“Unmasked, unvaxxed, unafraid,” it read) and just as a speaker screamed into the blaring sound system that vaccines were “medical experiments,” to great applause. Nevertheless, Lewis told me, “I am seeing more signs about the mandates.”
Cooper, too, had to explain that he didn’t support the protester who stood behind him proudly displaying an upside-down Canadian flag emblazoned with a swastika. The Conservative MPs kept insisting that no true trucker would endorse such odious things.
O’Toole himself tried to launder the reputation of the mob: “The convoy is being used by others. So I condemn all those groups,” he said during a press conference last Friday. When I pointed out that it was the organizers, not shadowy agitators, who had endorsed such unpalatable things, O’Toole insisted the organizers didn’t represent the protesters they had convened.
“I’m meeting with truckers that are part of the convoy,” he retorted. “I am not meeting with the organizers of the convoy.”
This has been the furious game of Frogger the Conservatives have played all week, desperately trying to cross from one end of the convoy to the other without standing next to a sign marked “vaccines=genocide,” or “Trudeau 4 Gitmo,” appearing underneath one of the many Confederate flags.
This isn’t just injurious to these politicians’ own credibility—an asset in short supply these days—but it’s emboldening this movement.
When powerful people lend these movements credibility, it only entrenches these paranoid delusions. In the closed information environments of the convoy’s Facebook and Telegram channels, there is a whole alternate reality: Where the vaccines don’t work; where COVID-19 is a bioweapon; where Trudeau is set to impose a Chinese-style social credit system. We need to reject that worldview, not explain around it.
Take the contentious question of how big the crowd is: Ex-MP Derek Sloan told the crowd that they numbered in the hundreds of thousands, insisting that it was “the largest gathering ever on Parliament Hill.” The fact that the crowd was almost certainly in the 10,000 range, a modest showing for a demonstration on the Hill, is impossible to get across to this lot.
There is a baseless fallacy that no true protester would fly a Confederate flag. That belief was only endorsed when MP Cathy Waganthall shared a tweet accusing the Prime Minister’s official photographer of being planted in the crowd to photograph a Confederate banner: Proof that it was a real false flag operation. She later deleted the post, because it was nonsense.
It’s fairly clear that these politicians are too concerned about their own political standing, and the upcoming leadership race, to give much of a thought about what their support for this convoy really means.
Some have, seemingly, realized that encouraging protesters to camp downtown indefinitely was a bad idea. MP Michelle Ferreri went from calling the convoy “inspiring” last week to insisting that the Trudeau government needs to develop a plan to clear the protesters: “Will the residents of Ottawa have to listen to air horns indefinitely?” she asked. Quebec MP Pierre-Paul Hus similarly seemed to grow tired of the occupiers by mid-week.
But all the credibility-lending has been a real shot in the arm for those who don’t want a shot in the arm.
Despite their animosity towards the establishment, this crew desperately wants validation that they are broadly popular. They are tired of being told they are a minority—indeed, I heard at least a dozen people muttering to themselves, incredulous at the Prime Minister’s description of their movement: “Small fringe minority, huh?”
And yet, that’s exactly what they are: Nearly 90 per cent of eligible Canadians have gotten at least one dose of the vaccine. That 10 per cent who remain unvaccinated are predominantly hesitant, not hostile, to the vaccines. Which makes this anti-vaccine crowd the fringes of the minority.
Even a vaguely-worded question from Abacus Data found that only about a third of respondents said they had a lot “in common” with the protesters.
Of course the organizers have insisted they are not anti-vaccine, only anti-vaccine mandate. But that’s not very convincing. Several of the groups participating in the event are responsible for peddling junk science which claims the vaccines are deadly. One of the participating groups, Action4Canada — a group which argues that COVID-19 public health measures are “egregious crimes against the citizens of this nation” and that every politician who supported them must “pay for their crimes.”
Even if we accept that the calls of “freedom,” which have been barely audible over the honking, are about the mandates themselves, that still leaves this crowd in the margins: According to an Ipsos poll, more than 80 per cent of the country supports mandatory vaccines for a litany of jobs and upwards of 70 per cent support vaccine passports.
Wander through the crowd and it’s clear pretty quickly that the protesters are, at best, a cross-section of those who supported Maxime Bernier’s People Party.
Some signs showed Trudeau’s strings being pulled by a demonic (and anti-Semitic) caricature of George Soros. There were hundreds of anti-vaccine signs. Speakers on stage repeatedly questioned the safety and efficacy of the vaccines. Masks have been eschewed by the vast majority of the protesters. Attendees were proselytizing about the, debunked, efficacy of antiparasitic drug Ivermectin. When one speaker asked the crowd to cheer if they were double-vaccinated, nary a peep was heard. (One protester gingerly raised their hand, before quickly putting it back down.)
The warnings of a slippery slope towards autocracy haven’t found much purchase in Canadians who aren’t terribly put off by showing their proof-of-vaccine before grabbing a pint or seeing a movie. And the bleating about the imposition on the unvaccinated’s civil liberties hasn’t found much sympathy in a population who see anti-vaxxers as a risk to our creaking health-care system and a main reason for the constant lockdowns and restrictions.
Certainly, it is everyone’s right to avoid the shot. But sometimes exercising your rights means accepting the consequences. And, indeed, consequences are exactly the point of these mandates, even if they are really quite mild. You may lose your job hauling goods if you refuse to get vaccinated, sure: You would also lose your job if you refused to renew your drivers’ license.
Taking responsibility for their actions isn’t something the crowd wants to do. They want the rest of us to accommodate them. Which is why it’s particularly absurd to hear Poilievre hector the media to not ascribe the racist and conspiratorial symbols on full display to the rest of the crowd — those flying the Confederate flags “should be individually responsible for the things they say and do,” he said.
This is a sort of perverse take on personal responsibility: We can’t hold them responsible for refusing to get a vaccine, nor can we hold them responsible for holding a rally where yellow Stars of David are being handed out to underline the supposed war crimes being perpetrated by these whiners.
The Conservatives know this is wrong. But the pretenders to O’Toole’s still-warm throne desperately want to sway those 850,000 voters who lined up behind Bernier last September.
While Ipsos found that two-thirds of Conservatives supported the passports, some 90 per cent of People’s Party voters opposed them. (Albeit with a small sample of Bernier supporters.)
There is certainly a way to harness the raw populist energy of groups like this — look no further to Donald Trump’s masterful, if cravenly self-interested and dangerous, wrangling of the QAnon movement. With a few well-orchestrated winks and nudges, he won the fealty of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of conspiracy theorists without too much blowback from his broader base. And, no wonder, Trump had already inoculated his supporters against any bad words from the media. Any wrongdoing, like those who stormed the capital, could be blamed on Antifa. Because no true MAGA supporter would commit acts of violence.
Conservative politicians in this country drool at the idea of commanding such a broad base of supporters who have enveloped themselves in a cocoon of misinformation. Also: The convoy has raised $10 million.
Putting aside the obvious dangers to our democracy, this is destined to blow up in their face. Canada isn’t the United States, the Conservative Party is not the GOP, and Pierre Poilievre is no Donald Trump.
Canadians have proved incredibly prickly about being recruited into the culture wars. They have shown no love to politicians who have found common cause with anti-vaxxers and white supremacists, and they have rolled their eyes at efforts to explain around the particularly odious figures.
Poilievre may well win the battle to take over the Conservative Party, and lead his party to another failure against Trudeau—who, for his many faults, still represents where most of the country is at on the pandemic.
There is another way.
There is tremendous room for some Conservative to use this ongoing honk-fest as an opportunity to stop the furtive attempt to explain that no true conservative would desecrate the National War Memorial. They could stop coddling this convoy, twisting themselves into knots to be both pro-vaccine and anti-mandate, in order to play for Bernier’s anti-government base.
Given protesters are heading to Victoria, Toronto and Quebec City in the coming days, the great honkening is only going to get worse. The Conservatives don’t even need to condemn and admonish the protesters per se: It is their right to hold a peaceful demonstration in Ottawa, even if it is annoying and inconvenient. But they should plead with these people to go home. (Unfortunately, new interim leader Candice Bergen has advocated against that, in order to own the Libs.)
But it is high time that an adult vies to lead the Conservative Party by refusing to make common cause with the rump of the country that has become deranged in their opposition to Trudeau and the vaccines. A politician who can simultaneously oppose the ham-fisted lockdowns, travel restrictions, and curfews while simultaneously offering a clear message on vaccines and masks as effective tools to get us out of this mess.
Freedom, yes, but for everyone: Not just the unvaccinated.
Ever since a column of trucks, campers, and cars set off for Ottawa in January with a song in their hearts and a plan to remove our democratically-elected government, the members of the now-leaderless Conservative Party have been trying to find a way to greet them as liberators.
No matter how many photos of Nazi and Confederate flags have flown in the crowd, or how often the protesters have called for Justin Trudeau to be tried for treason, the Tories have tripped over themselves to find common cause with the occupiers.
Pierre Poilievre, a likely next leader of the party, has taken every opportunity to ingratiate himself with the occupiers, glad-handing with the crowd that wants our government removed from office: “I’m showing up here to support freedom and an end to unnecessary mandates that have no support, no backing by science,” he told some of the protesters Tuesday.
Saskatchewan MP Jeremy Patzer came out and took some photos with organizers Pat King and Chris Barber. One-time leadership contender Leslyn Lewis was ambling through the crowd on Sunday, and was effusive: “It’s been great to see Canadians come together,” she told me. Marilyn Gladu and Candice Bergen, now interim leader, enjoyed some pizza with two of the protesters. Michael Cooper wandered into the crowd on Parliament Hill to express his solidarity with those fighting against having to be vaccinated.
With everybody joining the convoy party, embattled Erin O’Toole couldn’t help but catch the current: “The trucker convoy is a symbol of fatigue in our country,” he insisted. (His caucus’ vocal support for the convoy may have been a symbol of fatigue with their leader, as O’Toole was ousted on Wednesday.)
But every foray into the occupied territories of Centretown meant grappling with the fact that a key organizers of the convoy have identified with QAnon and made various disparaging and odious remarks.
Once the video of the Patzer-King meeting emerged, the Saskatchewan MP insisted: “I fully condemn any violent rhetoric on the part of Mr. King or any other participant of the convoy.”
Lewis was positive that “the majority” of the crowd was in Ottawa to protest vaccine mandates, despite having walked past a man wearing a PUREBLOOD sweater. (“Unmasked, unvaxxed, unafraid,” it read) and just as a speaker screamed into the blaring sound system that vaccines were “medical experiments,” to great applause. Nevertheless, Lewis told me, “I am seeing more signs about the mandates.”
Cooper, too, had to explain that he didn’t support the protester who stood behind him proudly displaying an upside-down Canadian flag emblazoned with a swastika. The Conservative MPs kept insisting that no true trucker would endorse such odious things.
O’Toole himself tried to launder the reputation of the mob: “The convoy is being used by others. So I condemn all those groups,” he said during a press conference last Friday. When I pointed out that it was the organizers, not shadowy agitators, who had endorsed such unpalatable things, O’Toole insisted the organizers didn’t represent the protesters they had convened.
“I’m meeting with truckers that are part of the convoy,” he retorted. “I am not meeting with the organizers of the convoy.”
This has been the furious game of Frogger the Conservatives have played all week, desperately trying to cross from one end of the convoy to the other without standing next to a sign marked “vaccines=genocide,” or “Trudeau 4 Gitmo,” appearing underneath one of the many Confederate flags.
This isn’t just injurious to these politicians’ own credibility—an asset in short supply these days—but it’s emboldening this movement.
When powerful people lend these movements credibility, it only entrenches these paranoid delusions. In the closed information environments of the convoy’s Facebook and Telegram channels, there is a whole alternate reality: Where the vaccines don’t work; where COVID-19 is a bioweapon; where Trudeau is set to impose a Chinese-style social credit system. We need to reject that worldview, not explain around it.
Take the contentious question of how big the crowd is: Ex-MP Derek Sloan told the crowd that they numbered in the hundreds of thousands, insisting that it was “the largest gathering ever on Parliament Hill.” The fact that the crowd was almost certainly in the 10,000 range, a modest showing for a demonstration on the Hill, is impossible to get across to this lot.
There is a baseless fallacy that no true protester would fly a Confederate flag. That belief was only endorsed when MP Cathy Waganthall shared a tweet accusing the Prime Minister’s official photographer of being planted in the crowd to photograph a Confederate banner: Proof that it was a real false flag operation. She later deleted the post, because it was nonsense.
It’s fairly clear that these politicians are too concerned about their own political standing, and the upcoming leadership race, to give much of a thought about what their support for this convoy really means.
Some have, seemingly, realized that encouraging protesters to camp downtown indefinitely was a bad idea. MP Michelle Ferreri went from calling the convoy “inspiring” last week to insisting that the Trudeau government needs to develop a plan to clear the protesters: “Will the residents of Ottawa have to listen to air horns indefinitely?” she asked. Quebec MP Pierre-Paul Hus similarly seemed to grow tired of the occupiers by mid-week.
But all the credibility-lending has been a real shot in the arm for those who don’t want a shot in the arm.
Despite their animosity towards the establishment, this crew desperately wants validation that they are broadly popular. They are tired of being told they are a minority—indeed, I heard at least a dozen people muttering to themselves, incredulous at the Prime Minister’s description of their movement: “Small fringe minority, huh?”
And yet, that’s exactly what they are: Nearly 90 per cent of eligible Canadians have gotten at least one dose of the vaccine. That 10 per cent who remain unvaccinated are predominantly hesitant, not hostile, to the vaccines. Which makes this anti-vaccine crowd the fringes of the minority.
Even a vaguely-worded question from Abacus Data found that only about a third of respondents said they had a lot “in common” with the protesters.
Of course the organizers have insisted they are not anti-vaccine, only anti-vaccine mandate. But that’s not very convincing. Several of the groups participating in the event are responsible for peddling junk science which claims the vaccines are deadly. One of the participating groups, Action4Canada — a group which argues that COVID-19 public health measures are “egregious crimes against the citizens of this nation” and that every politician who supported them must “pay for their crimes.”
Even if we accept that the calls of “freedom,” which have been barely audible over the honking, are about the mandates themselves, that still leaves this crowd in the margins: According to an Ipsos poll, more than 80 per cent of the country supports mandatory vaccines for a litany of jobs and upwards of 70 per cent support vaccine passports.
Wander through the crowd and it’s clear pretty quickly that the protesters are, at best, a cross-section of those who supported Maxime Bernier’s People Party.
Some signs showed Trudeau’s strings being pulled by a demonic (and anti-Semitic) caricature of George Soros. There were hundreds of anti-vaccine signs. Speakers on stage repeatedly questioned the safety and efficacy of the vaccines. Masks have been eschewed by the vast majority of the protesters. Attendees were proselytizing about the, debunked, efficacy of antiparasitic drug Ivermectin. When one speaker asked the crowd to cheer if they were double-vaccinated, nary a peep was heard. (One protester gingerly raised their hand, before quickly putting it back down.)
The warnings of a slippery slope towards autocracy haven’t found much purchase in Canadians who aren’t terribly put off by showing their proof-of-vaccine before grabbing a pint or seeing a movie. And the bleating about the imposition on the unvaccinated’s civil liberties hasn’t found much sympathy in a population who see anti-vaxxers as a risk to our creaking health-care system and a main reason for the constant lockdowns and restrictions.
Certainly, it is everyone’s right to avoid the shot. But sometimes exercising your rights means accepting the consequences. And, indeed, consequences are exactly the point of these mandates, even if they are really quite mild. You may lose your job hauling goods if you refuse to get vaccinated, sure: You would also lose your job if you refused to renew your drivers’ license.
Taking responsibility for their actions isn’t something the crowd wants to do. They want the rest of us to accommodate them. Which is why it’s particularly absurd to hear Poilievre hector the media to not ascribe the racist and conspiratorial symbols on full display to the rest of the crowd — those flying the Confederate flags “should be individually responsible for the things they say and do,” he said.
This is a sort of perverse take on personal responsibility: We can’t hold them responsible for refusing to get a vaccine, nor can we hold them responsible for holding a rally where yellow Stars of David are being handed out to underline the supposed war crimes being perpetrated by these whiners.
The Conservatives know this is wrong. But the pretenders to O’Toole’s still-warm throne desperately want to sway those 850,000 voters who lined up behind Bernier last September.
While Ipsos found that two-thirds of Conservatives supported the passports, some 90 per cent of People’s Party voters opposed them. (Albeit with a small sample of Bernier supporters.)
There is certainly a way to harness the raw populist energy of groups like this — look no further to Donald Trump’s masterful, if cravenly self-interested and dangerous, wrangling of the QAnon movement. With a few well-orchestrated winks and nudges, he won the fealty of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of conspiracy theorists without too much blowback from his broader base. And, no wonder, Trump had already inoculated his supporters against any bad words from the media. Any wrongdoing, like those who stormed the capital, could be blamed on Antifa. Because no true MAGA supporter would commit acts of violence.
Conservative politicians in this country drool at the idea of commanding such a broad base of supporters who have enveloped themselves in a cocoon of misinformation. Also: The convoy has raised $10 million.
Putting aside the obvious dangers to our democracy, this is destined to blow up in their face. Canada isn’t the United States, the Conservative Party is not the GOP, and Pierre Poilievre is no Donald Trump.
Canadians have proved incredibly prickly about being recruited into the culture wars. They have shown no love to politicians who have found common cause with anti-vaxxers and white supremacists, and they have rolled their eyes at efforts to explain around the particularly odious figures.
Poilievre may well win the battle to take over the Conservative Party, and lead his party to another failure against Trudeau—who, for his many faults, still represents where most of the country is at on the pandemic.
There is another way.
There is tremendous room for some Conservative to use this ongoing honk-fest as an opportunity to stop the furtive attempt to explain that no true conservative would desecrate the National War Memorial. They could stop coddling this convoy, twisting themselves into knots to be both pro-vaccine and anti-mandate, in order to play for Bernier’s anti-government base.
Given protesters are heading to Victoria, Toronto and Quebec City in the coming days, the great honkening is only going to get worse. The Conservatives don’t even need to condemn and admonish the protesters per se: It is their right to hold a peaceful demonstration in Ottawa, even if it is annoying and inconvenient. But they should plead with these people to go home. (Unfortunately, new interim leader Candice Bergen has advocated against that, in order to own the Libs.)
But it is high time that an adult vies to lead the Conservative Party by refusing to make common cause with the rump of the country that has become deranged in their opposition to Trudeau and the vaccines. A politician who can simultaneously oppose the ham-fisted lockdowns, travel restrictions, and curfews while simultaneously offering a clear message on vaccines and masks as effective tools to get us out of this mess.
Freedom, yes, but for everyone: Not just the unvaccinated.
Well, it looks like the Conservative caucus has decided to do the stupid thing.
Shortly after the election, I wrote here at Maclean’s that dumping leader Erin O’Toole would be short-sighted—regardless of how angry anyone was over the disappointing results or their leader’s performance. Very few nail it on their first time out, and there were plenty of indicators suggesting O’Toole’s moderate conservatism did, in fact, make inroads on the crucial 905 region.
Alas, after the trucker convoy pulled into Ottawa, drawing support from Conservative MPs and a meeting with O’Toole himself, a substantive majority of the Conservative caucus decided that my argument wasn’t compelling enough to warrant giving O’Toole another shot at becoming Prime Minister. And so they decided to oust him at the moment of maximum chaos, when a manifestation of inchoate anger at long-running—and sometimes illogical—COVID restrictions has descended on the capital, along with a handful of Confederate-flag and swastika waving extremists. Great timing, everyone.
I’m sure that this is all going to be very reassuring to the Canadian swing voters who are sick of the Liberals but were too concerned with the wingnuts in the Conservative caucus to pull the switch. I wrote during the election that there was something about the Conservatives that didn’t feel ready for prime time; and real concerns that O’Toole didn’t have a handle on his caucus. Those who stuck with the Liberals on these grounds have been justified.
Very well, then. The Conservative Party is now confronted with a full-blown crisis of identity, and none of the incentives bend toward moderation. Now that they’ve booted the last leader for flip-flopping and failing to be Conservative enough, any future leader will be required to placate the most extreme elements in the caucus room. It’s possible that this will not lead to a bad outcome.
It’s possible that I have misdiagnosed the electorate, and that the more conservative Conservatives are correct; that swing voters are not looking for a skim-milk Conservative Party, and that they are instead eagerly seeking a robust right-wing alternative. After all, why throw your lot for the unknowns when all they’re offering you is a slightly modified version of the Liberal Devil They Already Know?
I find at least one aspect of this argument compelling.
Conservative voices have already pointed out that the party’s failure to articulate sensible opposition to the more nonsensical COVID restrictions has pushed otherwise sensible people to the fringes of politics. We are seeing this in the rise of the People’s Party of Canada, and in the trucker convoy itself.
It would have been awfully nice to have a true opposition party in Parliament in recent months; one that was willing to point out that our dependence on lockdowns is predicated on the fragility of our health-care system compared to peer nations. Our drive to make our universal health-care system more efficient in recent decades left it ill-equipped to manage the historic demands of a once-in a generation pandemic. Our lack of surge capacity is a systemic problem we’re going to need to confront. That process is going to challenge old pieties about the status quo about how health care is funded and delivered.
Many would have welcomed an opposition that felt much more empowered to point out that the vaccine mandate on truckers actually won’t do much to staunch the spread of Omicron while needlessly placing fragile supply chains at risk. Or maybe the CPC could have been more vocal in pointing out that requiring PCR testing for vaccinated travellers presents a ridiculously expensive and onerous restriction on free movement—and unnecessary one when rapid antigen tests are widely available.
And two years into this pandemic, what is the real value of vaccine passports when Omicron is clearly blowing through vaccine-acquired immunity? By the way, those cloth masks aren’t doing much good for you anymore, either.
At this point, it’s pretty hard to ignore some uncomfortable truths; some COVID restrictions still make sense. Others do not. And some are guided more by politics, optics and tribalism than by science. An opposition party really shouldn’t be afraid to make that point.
Perhaps if the sizeable and growing minority of anti-lockdown protestors felt that they had a voice in Parliament, they wouldn’t be descending on major cities and border crossings en masse. The wobbly-eyed chickens are coming home to roost, and they’re driving very large trucks that the Ottawa police department has admitted it is helpless to manage.
Anyway, it’s quite possible that after several years of increasingly nonsensical COVID restrictions, and however many years of a Liberal government, a plurality of Canadians really won’t be looking for Liberals painted blue. It’s possible that the charm of performative politics that papers over our crumbling institutions, declining capacity, and a self-flagellating political culture will have very much worn off. It’s possible people are going to be looking for something very different.
Perhaps there will be room for a Conservative Party to articulate rational and sensible opposition on the host of problems that face this country—from economic woes and institutional capacity challenges to fear-and-panic driven COVID restrictions.
But can we trust a party of sh–posters to stay rational and sensible in the face of an exhausted, angry and increasingly polarized electorate? Nothing about how this party has behaved in recent days gives me hope that this caucus is as clever or politically savvy as it imagines itself to be.
Well, it looks like the Conservative caucus has decided to do the stupid thing.
Shortly after the election, I wrote here at Maclean’s that dumping leader Erin O’Toole would be short-sighted—regardless of how angry anyone was over the disappointing results or their leader’s performance. Very few nail it on their first time out, and there were plenty of indicators suggesting O’Toole’s moderate conservatism did, in fact, make inroads on the crucial 905 region.
Alas, after the trucker convoy pulled into Ottawa, drawing support from Conservative MPs and a meeting with O’Toole himself, a substantive majority of the Conservative caucus decided that my argument wasn’t compelling enough to warrant giving O’Toole another shot at becoming Prime Minister. And so they decided to oust him at the moment of maximum chaos, when a manifestation of inchoate anger at long-running—and sometimes illogical—COVID restrictions has descended on the capital, along with a handful of Confederate-flag and swastika waving extremists. Great timing, everyone.
I’m sure that this is all going to be very reassuring to the Canadian swing voters who are sick of the Liberals but were too concerned with the wingnuts in the Conservative caucus to pull the switch. I wrote during the election that there was something about the Conservatives that didn’t feel ready for prime time; and real concerns that O’Toole didn’t have a handle on his caucus. Those who stuck with the Liberals on these grounds have been justified.
Very well, then. The Conservative Party is now confronted with a full-blown crisis of identity, and none of the incentives bend toward moderation. Now that they’ve booted the last leader for flip-flopping and failing to be Conservative enough, any future leader will be required to placate the most extreme elements in the caucus room. It’s possible that this will not lead to a bad outcome.
It’s possible that I have misdiagnosed the electorate, and that the more conservative Conservatives are correct; that swing voters are not looking for a skim-milk Conservative Party, and that they are instead eagerly seeking a robust right-wing alternative. After all, why throw your lot for the unknowns when all they’re offering you is a slightly modified version of the Liberal Devil They Already Know?
I find at least one aspect of this argument compelling.
Conservative voices have already pointed out that the party’s failure to articulate sensible opposition to the more nonsensical COVID restrictions has pushed otherwise sensible people to the fringes of politics. We are seeing this in the rise of the People’s Party of Canada, and in the trucker convoy itself.
It would have been awfully nice to have a true opposition party in Parliament in recent months; one that was willing to point out that our dependence on lockdowns is predicated on the fragility of our health-care system compared to peer nations. Our drive to make our universal health-care system more efficient in recent decades left it ill-equipped to manage the historic demands of a once-in a generation pandemic. Our lack of surge capacity is a systemic problem we’re going to need to confront. That process is going to challenge old pieties about the status quo about how health care is funded and delivered.
Many would have welcomed an opposition that felt much more empowered to point out that the vaccine mandate on truckers actually won’t do much to staunch the spread of Omicron while needlessly placing fragile supply chains at risk. Or maybe the CPC could have been more vocal in pointing out that requiring PCR testing for vaccinated travellers presents a ridiculously expensive and onerous restriction on free movement—and unnecessary one when rapid antigen tests are widely available.
And two years into this pandemic, what is the real value of vaccine passports when Omicron is clearly blowing through vaccine-acquired immunity? By the way, those cloth masks aren’t doing much good for you anymore, either.
At this point, it’s pretty hard to ignore some uncomfortable truths; some COVID restrictions still make sense. Others do not. And some are guided more by politics, optics and tribalism than by science. An opposition party really shouldn’t be afraid to make that point.
Perhaps if the sizeable and growing minority of anti-lockdown protestors felt that they had a voice in Parliament, they wouldn’t be descending on major cities and border crossings en masse. The wobbly-eyed chickens are coming home to roost, and they’re driving very large trucks that the Ottawa police department has admitted it is helpless to manage.
Anyway, it’s quite possible that after several years of increasingly nonsensical COVID restrictions, and however many years of a Liberal government, a plurality of Canadians really won’t be looking for Liberals painted blue. It’s possible that the charm of performative politics that papers over our crumbling institutions, declining capacity, and a self-flagellating political culture will have very much worn off. It’s possible people are going to be looking for something very different.
Perhaps there will be room for a Conservative Party to articulate rational and sensible opposition on the host of problems that face this country—from economic woes and institutional capacity challenges to fear-and-panic driven COVID restrictions.
But can we trust a party of sh–posters to stay rational and sensible in the face of an exhausted, angry and increasingly polarized electorate? Nothing about how this party has behaved in recent days gives me hope that this caucus is as clever or politically savvy as it imagines itself to be.
I would like to express my appreciation for Katie Underwood’s article on Céline Dion (“Coming back to us now,” Torch Song, December 2021). It was beautifully written, funny and touching. Underwood mounts a compelling defence of Dion, and of the role singers play in sustaining our emotional lives. Musicians, poets and performers have always been the ones to get us through a crisis. Remember poet Anna Akhmatova and the siege of Stalingrad! While artists are often treated as trivial in our society, they are, in fact, vital to our survival.
–Gillian McCann, North Bay, Ont.
Your contributor writes that Canada has never needed Céline Dion more. I’m reasonably sure I need less Céline and more Stompin’ Tom—unless, of course, she knows all the words to Sudbury Saturday Night.
The somewhat superficial depiction of the “obsession” of Pat Bouchard’s cataloguing of beetle species belies the seriousness of his work (“Beetlemania,” Obsessions, December 2021). Insects are the movers and shakers of terrestrial ecosystems—without them, nature as we know it would collapse. In Canada, we have about 39,000 species of insects with names and at least 20,000 without them. Although concerns about biodiversity generally centre around fish, caribou and other large vertebrates, the real crisis lies with these small creatures. “Ecologically based” forest practices and the like do not consider this biodiversity. There have been huge declines in virtually all insect populations throughout the globe over the past decades, with high extinction rates. We desperately need more information on all the species we have if we are to make sound decisions regarding how best to live with the nature we’re blessed with.
The Olympics are athletic events and should be free of political interference (“Why are we playing games in China?” January 2022). Choosing the site for any Olympic Games does involve political and many other concerns, but Beijing was chosen for this Olympic Games. Governments should be assisting athletes of all levels, genders and abilities. This requires a financial commitment, providing facilities and equipment and making available well-qualified coaches. People who have had the opportunity to be involved in sports and athletics always gain in physical health, mental focus and goal setting, and improved social attitudes. Tragically, peoples and cultures continue to be attacked. Those now opposed to the Beijing Olympics are focusing on the plight of the Uighurs, even calling this a form of genocide. Canada is still reconciling itself to the “treatment” of Indigenous people, who for centuries were isolated and deprived of their cultures. Call it assimilation or genocide or a softer reference, the impact was the same. Canada needs to clean its house first. Canadian athletes make us proud and bring our nation together. Go Canada Go.
The picture on pages 28 and 29 of the army of cabinet ministers (37) says a lot (“The life of the party,” January 2022). Our main G7 partners have the following number of cabinet posts, including prime minister and cabinet, or president and cabinet: U.K., 26; U.S., 24; Japan, 20; France, 17; and Germany, 16. All those nations have much larger populations than ours, especially the U.S., with 10 times as many citizens. Surely we do not need this many positions for an efficient government, and with all the staff and salaries, the cost must be enormous. A good trimming would go down well with Canadian taxpayers.
In my 30 years serving with the Canadian Armed Forces and the Canadian Military Engineers from Victoria to Goose Bay, N.L., and as far north as Alert, Nunavut, I have been an environmentalist as well as a consumer of hydrocarbons (“The last gasp,” January 2022). A world without carbon is beyond the dreams of even the most fervent environmentalists, who continue to use asphalt shingles, cellphones and fossil fuels. We would sooner buy cheap products produced in China or India and fuelled by coal-powered electrical plants than transmit by pipeline natural gas or other oil products from Canada. Let’s have a walk-to-work day in sub-zero temperatures and deep snow, or better still a swim-to-work day when we cannot use diesel-fuelled generators to pump out flood water. My question to Canadians and politicians is this: individually or collectively, what are you willing to give up forever in your life? Be honest and do it, or continue to lie to yourselves.
–Claude R. Lalonde, Edmonton
Amazing Agnes
In December, we celebrated the 100th anniversary of Agnes Macphail’s landmark election to the House of Commons by republishing our 1933 profile of her. Macphail was the first woman to be elected as a Member of Parliament.
Loved the archival profile about Agnes Macphail (“Miss Macphail,” From the Archive, December 2021)! It made me go to Google to find out more about her. Such an interesting woman—she founded the Elizabeth Fry Society of Canada and championed pensions for seniors and workers’ rights, etc. Plus, she was a single working woman at a time when that was rare.
After reading Jason Markusoff’s article about Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s atrocious handling of COVID-19, it has become even clearer to me that conservative provincial governments have not fared at all well (“The incredible sinking man,” December 2021). Right-wing thinking simply does not jibe with the available science and fails at the logic that’s needed for decision-making during this kind of crisis. Kenney, Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe and Ontario’s Doug Ford have proven beyond a doubt that they are the wrong leaders during this pandemic. And unfortunately, we are not out of the woods yet.
Your article about Whistler Blackcomb’s reopening this fall/winter is misleading (“Openings,” Bearings, November 2021). It suggests that only the vaccinated are being welcomed back. Not so! Indoor restaurants, patios and bars will require proof of vaccination, but there is no such requirement to purchase ski tickets or, most irresponsibly, to board the closed gondolas. Despite its claim to the contrary, Whistler Blackcomb couldn’t care less about public safety unless it is mandated by the provincial health authorities.
I enjoyed Paul Wells’s piece on the Liberal election victory (“The triumph of Justin Trudeau,” November 2021). Why do we allow our political parties to write platforms that are all pie in the sky, so to speak? The NDP’s national pharmacare program? Great idea, but how? Meeting carbon emissions targets before the planet is unlivable? Awesome! How? Solving systemic racism that goes back to the birth of our Canada? Another superb idea! How? We cannot just leave it up to the politicians. We, as the citizens of this country, need to make some tough choices and do some difficult work in order to progress as a country and as a civilized society.
–Ben Perrier, Belleville, Ont.
These letters appear in print in the February 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine.
I would like to express my appreciation for Katie Underwood’s article on Céline Dion (“Coming back to us now,” Torch Song, December 2021). It was beautifully written, funny and touching. Underwood mounts a compelling defence of Dion, and of the role singers play in sustaining our emotional lives. Musicians, poets and performers have always been the ones to get us through a crisis. Remember poet Anna Akhmatova and the siege of Stalingrad! While artists are often treated as trivial in our society, they are, in fact, vital to our survival.
–Gillian McCann, North Bay, Ont.
Your contributor writes that Canada has never needed Céline Dion more. I’m reasonably sure I need less Céline and more Stompin’ Tom—unless, of course, she knows all the words to Sudbury Saturday Night.
The somewhat superficial depiction of the “obsession” of Pat Bouchard’s cataloguing of beetle species belies the seriousness of his work (“Beetlemania,” Obsessions, December 2021). Insects are the movers and shakers of terrestrial ecosystems—without them, nature as we know it would collapse. In Canada, we have about 39,000 species of insects with names and at least 20,000 without them. Although concerns about biodiversity generally centre around fish, caribou and other large vertebrates, the real crisis lies with these small creatures. “Ecologically based” forest practices and the like do not consider this biodiversity. There have been huge declines in virtually all insect populations throughout the globe over the past decades, with high extinction rates. We desperately need more information on all the species we have if we are to make sound decisions regarding how best to live with the nature we’re blessed with.
The Olympics are athletic events and should be free of political interference (“Why are we playing games in China?” January 2022). Choosing the site for any Olympic Games does involve political and many other concerns, but Beijing was chosen for this Olympic Games. Governments should be assisting athletes of all levels, genders and abilities. This requires a financial commitment, providing facilities and equipment and making available well-qualified coaches. People who have had the opportunity to be involved in sports and athletics always gain in physical health, mental focus and goal setting, and improved social attitudes. Tragically, peoples and cultures continue to be attacked. Those now opposed to the Beijing Olympics are focusing on the plight of the Uighurs, even calling this a form of genocide. Canada is still reconciling itself to the “treatment” of Indigenous people, who for centuries were isolated and deprived of their cultures. Call it assimilation or genocide or a softer reference, the impact was the same. Canada needs to clean its house first. Canadian athletes make us proud and bring our nation together. Go Canada Go.
The picture on pages 28 and 29 of the army of cabinet ministers (37) says a lot (“The life of the party,” January 2022). Our main G7 partners have the following number of cabinet posts, including prime minister and cabinet, or president and cabinet: U.K., 26; U.S., 24; Japan, 20; France, 17; and Germany, 16. All those nations have much larger populations than ours, especially the U.S., with 10 times as many citizens. Surely we do not need this many positions for an efficient government, and with all the staff and salaries, the cost must be enormous. A good trimming would go down well with Canadian taxpayers.
In my 30 years serving with the Canadian Armed Forces and the Canadian Military Engineers from Victoria to Goose Bay, N.L., and as far north as Alert, Nunavut, I have been an environmentalist as well as a consumer of hydrocarbons (“The last gasp,” January 2022). A world without carbon is beyond the dreams of even the most fervent environmentalists, who continue to use asphalt shingles, cellphones and fossil fuels. We would sooner buy cheap products produced in China or India and fuelled by coal-powered electrical plants than transmit by pipeline natural gas or other oil products from Canada. Let’s have a walk-to-work day in sub-zero temperatures and deep snow, or better still a swim-to-work day when we cannot use diesel-fuelled generators to pump out flood water. My question to Canadians and politicians is this: individually or collectively, what are you willing to give up forever in your life? Be honest and do it, or continue to lie to yourselves.
–Claude R. Lalonde, Edmonton
Amazing Agnes
In December, we celebrated the 100th anniversary of Agnes Macphail’s landmark election to the House of Commons by republishing our 1933 profile of her. Macphail was the first woman to be elected as a Member of Parliament.
Loved the archival profile about Agnes Macphail (“Miss Macphail,” From the Archive, December 2021)! It made me go to Google to find out more about her. Such an interesting woman—she founded the Elizabeth Fry Society of Canada and championed pensions for seniors and workers’ rights, etc. Plus, she was a single working woman at a time when that was rare.
After reading Jason Markusoff’s article about Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s atrocious handling of COVID-19, it has become even clearer to me that conservative provincial governments have not fared at all well (“The incredible sinking man,” December 2021). Right-wing thinking simply does not jibe with the available science and fails at the logic that’s needed for decision-making during this kind of crisis. Kenney, Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe and Ontario’s Doug Ford have proven beyond a doubt that they are the wrong leaders during this pandemic. And unfortunately, we are not out of the woods yet.
Your article about Whistler Blackcomb’s reopening this fall/winter is misleading (“Openings,” Bearings, November 2021). It suggests that only the vaccinated are being welcomed back. Not so! Indoor restaurants, patios and bars will require proof of vaccination, but there is no such requirement to purchase ski tickets or, most irresponsibly, to board the closed gondolas. Despite its claim to the contrary, Whistler Blackcomb couldn’t care less about public safety unless it is mandated by the provincial health authorities.
I enjoyed Paul Wells’s piece on the Liberal election victory (“The triumph of Justin Trudeau,” November 2021). Why do we allow our political parties to write platforms that are all pie in the sky, so to speak? The NDP’s national pharmacare program? Great idea, but how? Meeting carbon emissions targets before the planet is unlivable? Awesome! How? Solving systemic racism that goes back to the birth of our Canada? Another superb idea! How? We cannot just leave it up to the politicians. We, as the citizens of this country, need to make some tough choices and do some difficult work in order to progress as a country and as a civilized society.
–Ben Perrier, Belleville, Ont.
These letters appear in print in the February 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine.
