© ERROL MCGIHON /PostmediaProtesters in downtown Ottawa on Saturday, Jan. 29, 2022.
No Molotov cocktails.
No vulgar harassment of police — no "All cops are bastards" signs.
No rocks for every Starbucks window and those of small businesses. No blizzard of break-ins, no store owners standing guard on their shops. No arson or looting.
Jan. 6 insurrection Canadian edition? Ha! It is to laugh. I've seen more threatening picnics thrown by a few nuns.
Yet if you listened to much of the established press predictions, Ottawa over the weekend was supposed to be like Rome waiting for the Visigoths. Ooooh — the end of cottage government as we've come to know it. A full-scale assault on our Zoom Parliament.
Plain, straight reportage uninflected by the personal dispositions or ideological pre-sets of the reporters or the corporations they work for was hard to come by. Our stern reporters, always ready to squeak agreement to power, worked to set a context.
They perspired with eagerness that an almost completely incident-free protest might turn into a gathering of "yahoos." That an angry diesel mob fired up by Boston creams and cold coffee would storm the House of Cottage and end democracy in Canada, such as we know it. They leaped at trivial individual mischiefs and tried to brand the entire protest as negative and even hateful.
The bottom line — they did not cover this protest in the gentle, generally approving manner they have covered so many others, from the Summit of the Americas demonstrations in Quebec City in 2001 to Black Lives Matter in 2020. I believe that Justin Trudeau joined that one.
The contributions over the course of this protest from the prime minister and the NDP's Jagmeet Singh were viciously demeaning.
Trudeau was extremely derogatory, to the point of calculated insult, concerning all who were not in line with his view of things. And he acted as a woke Pope in assuming the right to make the judgment on which views of Canadians were "unacceptable." And to declare the protesters a band of racists and misogynists.
Does he not know the meaning of the words he recklessly threw out to brand Canadian citizens? "Racist" is the dynamite word of our time. Throwing the word "racists" at a collection of Canadians is mean, nasty, and false.
It must be remarked that a quadruple black-face prime minister is not the best centurion to stand guard against racism, or to accuse others, who incidentally are not so addicted to facial cosmetics as he plainly is.
You know what the saddest part in all of this is? A walk down to the protest, an easy talk with random truckers, with Trudeau saying his piece, and the drivers theirs — that would have been a Canadian moment. The civilized, respectful thing to do.
It was never to be however. Hard politics is better than harmony. Sunny Days has morphed into Mr. Thunder-cloud.
Then there was the other party leader, Jagmeet Singh, the scaffold and support of Trudeau's stay as prime minister. Of Mr. Singh let us say it must be very hard to have the instincts of a demagogue without the talent to carry it off. But to give him credit, he does try.
First, just to set the stage, is it really that hard to believe that after two years of a pandemic regime some Canadians are not "on-board" with current policies? Hard to believe that people living and working (or trying these days to get work) far from Ottawa and power, feel left out and frustrated?
More to the point, is it also that hard for a Canadian political leader to believe that some Canadians act on principle, and out of concern for their personal autonomy?
Was not the NDP once, of all parties, populist in a positive sense, more tuned to the "working man and woman" than any other? Those days are obviously long gone and the dimmest memory. Instead what we got from the current and most-urban NDP leader was a smearing of the protest, citing a comment from one individual who claimed "the superiority of the white bloodline" as an index of the thinking of the other leaders, and by insinuation, the whole convoy. A crumb is not the whole cake. Let me put it to the reader: Is this tweet a fair description of the convoy:
Mr. Singh: "Conservative MPs have endorsed a convoy led by those that claim the superiority of the white bloodline and equate Islam to a disease ." (Italics mine.)
The convoy of Canadian truckers, of multiple ethnicities, may be many things. But it is not composed of men and women who subscribe to, use, or think in such crapulous terms. In my judgment Singh's comments were the lowest of the whole weekend — and he had some stiff competition in that department.
Singh is either desperate to out-Trudeau Trudeau in demonizing the truckers, or there is a serious wobble in the runners on his cushioned rocking chair.
Final point: Is it really that hard for Trudeau and Singh not to acknowledge that the full majority of people who went all the way to Ottawa are just decent people? Not racists. Not women haters? Not orcs. That these protesters may be as at least as fair-minded and decent as the politicians who govern them.
A talk with a dozen or more of these folk may not have changed minds, on either side, but would have had a touch of Canadian respect and politeness, and taken the charge of sheer politics out of this whole episode.
Far too much to ask I suppose when politics is a cynical game, the press are an essential part of the same game, and some guys in a truck, on the edge of making a living, travel across the country to say a few things to their government. After all ... who are they?
PS. As I was writing this, the Conservatives, with their superb sense of political timing, were behind closed doors busily disembowelling themselves. More on that in the next column.
Re-read what you wrote immediately above as many times as it takes to have the idiocy of that sentence sink in, then fix it.