OTTAWA—Despite the need for the country to pull together in this emergency, Canada’s right-wingers appear incapable of resisting a Donald Trump-style campaign of inflammatory, xenophobic hype designed to spark anger and divide Canadians.
At the federal level, it’s obvious the Conservative can’t stand it that the COVID-19 crisis has deprived them of the opportunity to hold the fact of a Liberal minority government over Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s head daily and sabre-rattle about forcing an election ASAP.
It’s a continuation of the Conservatives’ refusal to come to terms with their inability to actually defeat the Liberals last fall, given Trudeau’s troubles over SNC-Lavalin and his old blackface misadventures.
Searching for way to get off the sidelines in a series of events that have revived Canadians’ recognition of the importance of government, the Conservatives seem inevitably drawn to the tactics of President Donald Trump in the U.S.
There, the shock, devastation, and frustration from the pandemic have unleashed a tsunami of craziness, some of it egged on by the person who more than anyone should be emphasizing the need for a calm, level-headed approach to the crisis—the president.
In a desperate bid to cover up his own deadly mishandling of COVID-19 early this year, Trump is pulling out all the stops to blame the catastrophe on foreigners and the multinational community. His targets are China and the World Health Organization (WHO), the latter of which the president is defunding for “mismanaging” the virus and allegedly not holding Beijing to account. (Never mind that Trump repeatedly praised China’s anti-virus efforts back in the winter.) And Trump has gone further, lending credence on the weekend to the blatant conspiracy theory that China purposely created COVID-19.
In a desperate bid to cover up his own deadly mishandling of COVID-19 early this year, U.S. President Donald Trump is pulling out all the stops to blame the catastrophe on foreigners and the multinational community, writes Les Whittington. White House photograph by Tia Dufour
China may have a lot to answer for and, as Trudeau has pointed out, there needs to be a reckoning once the emergency passes. But the Conservatives’ Andrew Scheer, who always seemed to be trying to channel a bit of Trump’s populist appeal (see Scheer’s constant personalizing of his attacks on Trudeau as a callous, rich elitist, and the Conservatives’ basically non-existent climate policy), has seized on the issue of China’s handling of the outbreak as a way to slam the Liberals today.
Scheer has criticized Trudeau for not publicly admonishing China over its COVID-19 response and accused the WHO of being a front for Beijing, saying “let’s stop vouching for the communist regime in China.” Conservative Party leadership front-runners Peter MacKay and Erin O’Toole readily joined this campaign to demonize China, signing an open letter saying Chinese leaders’ apparent failure to quickly provide information on the virus outbreak amounts to “China’s Chernobyl moment.”
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, who, like Trump, his seen his popularity decline during the pandemic, also jumped in. In what can only be seen as Trump-like racial dog whistling to his base, Kenney attacked Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam, asserting she has just been “repeating talking points” from China’s communists.
In Scheer’s reluctance to join other opposition parties in accepting a compromise on how to configure parliamentary sessions during the crisis, he has confirmed what was obvious since October. That is, that despite the usual expectations from the public that the election of a minority Parliament conveys a responsibility on all parties to work together to try to get things done for Canadians, the Conservatives never had any intention of co-operating with the Liberal minority. Scheer’s approach to MPs’ sittings was seen by many as political game-playing at the worst possible time, with Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet accusing the Conservatives of holding Parliament “hostage” and MP Elizabeth May angrily saying that “giving the Conservatives a spotlight in Question Period is not a reason to reconvene.”
While the virus has moved the Conservatives largely off-stage by postponing the leadership contest, Scheer is obviously struggling to regain some profile for the party. The one advantage the Conservatives have at this point is that Scheer is already damaged goods. It doesn’t matter how opportunistic and irrelevant he appears, since he will be gone as leader shortly in any case.
With its heavy dose of rage and divisiveness, the Trump-derived anti-WHO, anti-China thrust may keep the Conservatives’ right-wing supporters in Western Canada on-side. But anything that aligns politicians in Canada with Trump’s gruesomely failed approach to the pandemic is unlikely to be acceptable among Canadian voters as a whole. And the wider danger is the risk of long-term damage to the party’s credibility if the positions taken by Scheer, MacKay, and O’Toole seem out of touch and driven more by attention-seeking than any serious response to the crisis.
Les Whittington is a regular columnist for The Hill Times.
The Hill Times
