Oh, Canada. :-(
August 26, 2016 § 5 Comments
Earlier this week, I wrote of some vile tweets about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the wake of the Tragically Hip’s final show in Kingston lat Saturday night. It turns out this was hardly the worst.
I read this article on The Walrus’ site last night. This is disgusting. There are people on Facebook blatantly calling for Trudeau’s assassination. Others, riffing on the Conservative Party of Canada’s pathetic milk carton ad, have descended to hoping the Prime Minister dies in an avalanche like his younger brother, Michel did in British Columbia in 1998.
I got into a discussion with an old friend on Facebook in the wake of Monday’s post. He was of the opinion that this animus against Trudeau was really nothing new, recalling the Mulroney era. I argued otherwise. That this IS new, it is the Americanisation of our political discourse.
I also wonder where the hell the RCMP is in all of this? Should it not be investigating calls to assassinate the Prime Minister?
Matthew Barlow 
You are dead right on this one
It is the nasty influence of the Trumpist bunch that is having a negative influence. He is not mentally fit to be anything more than a talk show host a la Limbaugh. Sad decline in discourse.
But the rise of this vileness pre-dates Trump, he is just the avatar of this hatred and intolerance. This is all deeply wrong, political discourse cannot descend to this, because it will lead to violence.
[…] I thought this rhetoric about the Prime Minister couldn’t get worse. Turns out I was wrong; it can. And it has been for some […]
Out of curiosity I searched one of the vile posters in your previous post, and not surprised to find it to be an Alberta based individual with a widely spread effort to be offended and detail his response. Our New Democrat premier has also faced death threats.This measure of vitriol finds fertile soil out here, but it is not the order of the day when one actually lives here. Alberta is a much more progressive and diverse society than this type of hateful rant suggests.
Yeah, I went looking through @FACLC’s timeline, and when I initially re-tweeted his offensive tweet, he tried to play coy with me. He is a troll.
And you’re right about Rachel Notley. The article in The Walrus I link to also notes her in a side-bar kind of way. I have seen people post sexualised threats to her on Twitter, much like what I’ve seen towards Hillary Clinton in the States.
And of course Alberta is more than these idiots. I get your frustration. I am Canadian, but I live in the US, in the South, and the South is a lot like the Alberta you describe, lots of fertile soil for the vitriol and hatred, but a lot more progressive and diverse than you would think from the stereotypes.