Anti-vaxxers a factor on campaign trail

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/09/2021 (1465 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The federal election, now just over two weeks away, has turned into the horse race no one expected, with Erin O’Toole’s Conservative Party currently ahead in the polls and, depending on how the votes shake out, possibly on course to boot Justin Trudeau’s Liberals from power. With so much at stake, and with control of the government seemingly up for grabs, the campaign has taken on a frenzied, intense tone.

As Trudeau’s lead slipped away over the past two weeks, the current prime minister responded by reaching deep into the Liberal bag of tricks. The result was a flurry of “greatest hits” attacks on O’Toole: the Conservatives would privatize health care, reopen the abortion debate, defund child care, and on and on.

But the attacks seem not to have gained much traction. Indeed, one misleadingly edited video of O’Toole talking about health care, tweeted out by finance minister Chrystia Freeland, gained a “manipulated media” warning from Twitter, a rare and notable rebuke to the campaign.

Trudeau’s flailing attacks have been quite the spectacle, but even more eye-catching has been the intensity of crowds gathering to boo and goad the prime minister. Last week, protesters organized to hector both Trudeau and the journalists accompanying him to a campaign stop in Bolton, Ont. Video of the footage shows scores of Canadians, grimacing and snarling as they screamed and hurled curses at the prime minister. Notably, several seemed to be doing so with their kids standing beside them.

A poster displayed at one protest accused Trudeau of high treason and portrayed him being led to a noose. These images are unsettling. They give the impression that our democracy is coming undone before our eyes.

The truth, however, is that Canadian democracy has always featured intense, hard-fought election campaigns. Even the unsettling imagery is nothing new. A recent example includes a 2019 protest against Ontario Premier Doug Ford which featured a mock guillotine — complete with red spray-painted on the blade — with protesters holding a sign saying, “May history repeat itself chop chop.”

The tradition goes far back. Following the First World War, a cartoon portrayed prime minister Arthur Meighen, who as solicitor general in 1917 had participated in drafting the government’s previous conscription bill, handing a Canadian soldier to a pair of clawed, blood-dripping hands emblazoned with “Imperialism.”

French academic and political writer André Siegfried first travelled from France to Canada to learn about our country in 1898, and returned to observe the 1904 federal election campaign. In his remarkable 1906 treatise on Canada, Siegfried noted, among many other observations, that elections in Canada are fiercely contested. In fact, Siegfried thought electoral politics in Canada was more bitterly fought than in any other country he had observed.

Nevertheless, we are in somewhat uncharted territory in 2021. The intensity of the current campaign has received a jolt from the COVID-19 pandemic. While Trudeau has not come up for much criticism of his government’s handling of the pandemic, opponents of vaccination, lockdowns and vaccine passports have become major players in the campaign.

The protests again Trudeau have been riddled with anti-vaccine and anti-mask sentiment. And the online venom that has come to plague Canadian politics has been super-charged by conspiracy theorists and vaccine skeptics.

Public disapproval of this anti-vaccine and anti-mask activism appears to have presented a political opportunity to the listless Liberal campaign. Increasingly, the Liberals have sought to link these sentiments to the Conservative Party. The Tories, for their part, have provided some irresistible targets for the Liberals to exploit.

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The Liberal campaign, for example, dug up a video of Conservative MP Cheryl Gallant conspiratorially fretting about a coming “climate lockdown” if the Liberals are re-elected. Given the opportunity to condemn Gallant’s comments, O’Toole declined to do so. And some of the attendees at the disgraceful Bolton protest were volunteers with nearby Conservative campaigns.

But in fairness, O’Toole has tried mightily to put distance between his party and the extremes of the anti-vaccine protests. “The threatening images and behaviour are disgusting,” the party categorically tweeted out. “This needs to stop immediately. Canada is better than this.” And the party gave the boot to its campaign workers who were identified among the Bolton rabble.

The fact the Liberal campaign seems to willingly expose itself to protests — allowing Trudeau to be drowned out by howling protesters while the video cameras are rolling, when every other campaign would never allow a leader to speak so close to groups of protesters — suggests they think there is potential electoral benefit to keeping this misbehaviour front and centre.

After all, campaigning against O’Toole has done little to blunt the Conservatives’ rise in the polls. Who can blame Trudeau for instead wanting to campaign against the almost universally unliked anti-vaxxers?

Royce Koop is a professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba and academic director of the Centre for Social Science Research and Policy.