Wake me up when September ends
Oh no! Instead of maps, we get sad stuff.
In this week’s edition of The Sewer Socialists:
Civility in politics • The anti-children crusade • Uphill battles • Trustee checkup • Cool facts for cool people
But first…
Another programming note!
A few weeks ago, I set out a schedule for what the next few editions of the newsletter would look like. I spent wayyy too long on last week’s edition (it was a lot of fun, don’t get me wrong) which ended up messing with my schedule. I have other deadlines and commitments to meet, and I’ve been putting off those things to work on this newsletter. I had a big look at land use planning in Hamilton scheduled for today, but I realized earlier this week that I’d need more time to work on something I’d be satisfied to publish while still putting in hours with my day job. So that look at land use planning will come out next week. We’re just bumping the projected schedule by a bit. But, hey, at least I keep to a tighter schedule than Metrolinx.
Plus, I have to admit, I’ve been feeling pretty bleh about things lately. The animosity, anger, pettiness, hatred, and selfishness on full display in our politics, in our neighbourhoods, and online has really dimmed the ol’ spark in me. Things have been tough recently. Last week alone I was involved a very tense community association meeting and a massive counter-protest, where a group of amazing allies stood with those of us in the queer community against the bigotry and hatred of the emboldened far-right and religious extremists. While these were both necessary expressions of democratic citizenship, they were draining beyond words.
Reading The Spec (sorry to my progressive friends) has become a chore, particularly sifting through the opinion discourse that’s equal parts crib notes from the worst of what AM talk-radio has to offer and the musings of a suburban dad with anger issues. I don’t know how well our community is served when the most prominent pieces of commentary are purposefully ill-informed contributions of our community’s loudest and least pleasant members.
Beyond all that, social media’s gone to hell, going out in public carries a 50/50 chance you’ll encounter one of those loud, unpleasant members of our community, and it is getting harder and harder to afford the basics of everyday life.
I love doing deep dives into interesting things that happen in Hamilton, Canada, and around the world. But when anger is the prevailing mood of the moment, it sometimes feels like all my energy is directed into just being in this society, rather than researching and writing about the things I love. Anyway, all that’s to say: sorry for changing the schedule around. On with the show!
Painting a target on your own back
Angus, Peterson, and Hate
Directly related to my opening thoughts, I really wanted to share this excellent opinion piece from Timmins-James Bay NDP MP Charlie Angus who, I should note, I supported in the last NDP leadership race.
Angus starts by saying that he recently needed to call the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) into his office to answer the phones because of the sheer number of violent threats being directed at him, his family, and his staff.
On August 27, Angus re-tweeted a post from fellow Substacker Alheli Picazo who was, herself, calling out Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre for standing behind Roman Barber, a fringe former MPP so extreme in his anti-vaxx views, Doug Ford removed him from the Ontario PC caucus. Barber is now the federal Conservative candidate in York Centre and spends ample time online sharing COVID-related misinformation and anti-vaxx nonsense.
Backstory on the OG tweet: an Alberta woman with a terminal illness could have been saved if she received an organ transplant. She did not want to get the COVID-19 vaccine, but doctors told her that she would need to in order for them to do the transplant because of how susceptible transplant recipients are to serious illnesses. She refused and later died. The anti-vaxx hard right has been saying she was killed for standing up for her freedoms while everyone else is saying she was a victim of misinformation about the vaccine which is, as if this needed to be said, safe and effective. There’s a whole National Observer piece on her if you want more background.
A slew of Canada’s fringe right jumped on Angus for apparently wishing death upon the unvaccinated. Jordan Peterson’s tweets about him were particularly incendiary and, as a result, Angus has been subjected to so many violent threats, the OPP is now stationed in his constituency office. As Angus writes in the piece:
When he [Peterson] claimed that I wanted a woman to die for her political views it turned the hate machine against me into overdrive. This is the power of amplification and validation.1
Angus goes on to note that, prior to 2020, he had not received any death threats. While plenty of political figures, journalists, and public personalities have been on the receiving end of threats against their lives for centuries, the onset of the pandemic and the mass hysteria fueled by right wing online rage has created conditions such that everyone, from prospective candidates for school board trustee to the Prime Minister himself can expect some form of violent hatred lobbed their way.
At that community association meeting I referenced at the beginning of his newsletter, a neighbour threatened those of us gathered with violence if they weren’t given a chance to speak. This was an explicit threat made while holding something they intended to use as a weapon. At a neighbourhood association meeting. On a boring Monday night in a sleepy part of town when all we wanted to do was talk about putting on a community event. This kind of violence is everywhere, shutting down public meetings and dissuading people from having their say.
Run
At this point, it should not be a secret that I’ve long harboured political ambitions. I mean, I’ve run for office before (badly), but I’m always looking for ways to use my skills and knowledge to help my community. Being an elected official is, in theory, an excellent way to do that. I’ve often thought that, at some point in the next few years, I would seriously consider putting my name on a ballot again. Municipal and provincial are my two priorities, but there’s a lot that can be done federally too. Regardless, I’d love to run for public office again soon.
But hot damn, does the current political climate ever make that look like a very foolish thing to do, especially for someone with progressive values. Establishment media is being gutted, replaced with skeletons of once-respectable publications that peddle right-wing nonsense while every social media platform is filled to the brim with a level of anger that is like Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate on steroids. All of the hate and criticism and misinformation is directed at people even slightly to the left of centre. Speak up against COVID misinformation and you get death threats. Spread COVID misinformation and you get sympathetic pieces about how you’re a crusader for personal freedom.
When I was 18, I walked into my local NDP campaign office and asked to volunteer on my MP’s 2008 re-election bid. They put me to work immediately, answering phones, assembling signs, doing data entry, and, most importantly, canvassing. I would bounce up to people’s doors all across Hamilton Mountain all by myself without a care in the world. I couldn’t even imagine doing that now in a time when canvassers have to be sent out in teams and are given numbers to call if things get too unsafe.
Immediately after last year’s municipal election, CBC Hamilton reporter Bobby Hristova published an article outlining the violence candidates faced while engaging in one of the most fundamentally important aspects of our democracy, namely campaigning for public office. Ahona Mehdi had someone spit in their face. Nrinder Nann was greeted at a door by someone who said “Not that brown bitch” and had another person menace her campaign office for weeks. Andrea Horwath’s signs were vandalized with violent misogynistic graffiti while Kojo Damptey had a white supremacist sticker placed on one of his bus stop ads. Trans candidates were attacked online, others had people threaten their families, and some incumbents received so much hate, they decided to not seek re-election.
The message sent now is that, if you’re even moderately forward thinking, expect regular threats to your personal safety for engaging in the democratic process.
The glorification of violence
All this violence and hate keeps reminding me of some of the core elements of fascism. I know it might sound extreme (there are some who shriek “fascism” at everything they don’t like), but the elements are all here.
The Italian historian and philosopher Umberto Eco’s groundbreaking essay “Ur-Fascism” (meaning “eternal” fascism) outlines the 14 characteristics of the movement:
A cult of tradition
A rejection of modernism
Action for action’s sake
An inability to withstand analytical criticism
A fear of difference
Derived from individual and social frustration
Obsession with “a plot”
Focused on the humiliation caused by the apparent “wealth” and “force” of their enemies
Obsession with permanent warfare (believing life is and should be a struggle)
Contempt for the weak
A cult of heroism and death
An obsession with machismo and masculinity
A selective populism (including and excluding some from an understanding of who “the people” are)
Use of “newspeak” (a new vocabulary they use and control)
These are similar to the criteria established by Robert O. Paxton in his The Anatomy of Fascism, which notes some of the mobilizing passions of the movement are a sense of overwhelming crisis, primacy of one’s “group”, recognition that the group is under attack, fixation on the group’s decline because of outsiders, the desire to create a “pure community” free from corrupting influences, and a belief in the redemptive beauty of violence.2
Violence toward enemies, both internal and external, is central to fascist thought. Indeed, fascists are characterized by their willingness to call for the use of redemptive violence to remove those seen as threats to their community and to the traditional order they wish to maintain.
Paxton, one of the foremost scholars of fascism in North America, had, for example, resisted calling people like Donald Trump fascists…until January 6th. At that point, it was clear that redemptive violence had become a core component of the contemporary American far-right’s political agenda.
There is a growing subset of the Canadian population who is all in for violence. The people threatening Angus are among them. Some of the protesters attacking trans and queer folks last week appeared ready to get in on the violence. The man who attacked those marching at Take Back The Night and the people who spray painted homophobic slurs on Tanya Ritchie’s door are using violence as a political tactic.
As of yet, there is no major Canadian political leader willing to call for violence. Even extremists like Maxime Bernier have denounced violence on the campaign trail (while less-than-subtly encouraging it through their rhetoric and actions). But the community is there and waiting.
All this makes the idea of standing for office terrifying. I’ll admit, even just thinking about canvassing now gives me anxiety. And, if I’m thinking it, I know others are too. How many amazing people out there with great ideas and ample ambition will be dissuaded from participating fully in our democracy because there are some proto-fascists in our community ready to use brute force to silence debate?
I don’t know how we move forward. I know I’m all about a positive, action-oriented solution, but, this time, I don’t have one. Part of me wants to hide away until this all blows over. Part of me thinks we should never be afraid to use our democratic rights.
The War on Children
In more sad news, the far-right’s War on Children escalated dramatically over the past days, as students in Hamilton’s public schools were subject to back-to-back bomb threats. High schools and elementary schools across the city received 16 emailed and phone threats over four days, massively disrupting the learning environment.
Thursday’s threats were obtained by The Spec, and made reference to pedophilia, “subhuman” educators, and the indiscriminate killing of civilians in the future. Some also focused on a shop teacher believed to be the same individual at the centre of some controversy last year. While one of the threats originated with a local 13-year-old, the others have not yet been solved.
This isn’t just happening in Hamilton. The far-right influencer Chaya Raichik, who posts under “Libs of TikTok” regularly directs her millions of followers to harass teachers, doctors, and schools she believes are engaged in promoting queer issues. The awesome Substack Erin in the Morning has a report on how Raichik’s followers recently threatened to bomb an elementary school.
In Canada, these events happened after last week’s anti-trans rallies held around the country. As The Tyee reported, many of these events featured a who’s who of the far right, bringing together anti-vaxxers, Convoyists, white nationalists, anti-Semites, and your garden variety homophobes.
But, in many cases, it seemed like the counter-protests outnumbered the actual protests by a noticeable margin. The political and religious extremists behind these protests hoped to gather support to push their ideas into the mainstream, but the jury’s still out on whether that happened. Sure, Pierre Poilievre went full transphobe and Scott Moe has decided to use the Notwithstanding Clause to push his anti-trans legislation in Saskatchewan, but there has also been some good news.
Moncton East New Brunswick PC Party riding association president Marc Savoie announced he was resigning in opposition to that province’s new anti-trans policies and to support his own trans son. The political turmoil caused in that province by the anti-trans politics of their hard right premier, Blaine Higgs, may send New Brunswick into an early election that the opposition Liberals have a good shot at winning.
So the hard right is still betting that a war on children will either (in the case of the politicians pushing this stuff) distract from the cruelty of capitalism or (in the case of the everyday people pushing this stuff) make them feel better about their lives that have been so negatively impacted by capitalism. Whether that ends up going anywhere remains to be seen. But, in the meantime, students are being terrified and their learning environments are being disrupted by those threatening to bomb schools full of children to…checks notes…save those children.
Uphill battles
Just so we’re clear: the opinion pages of The Spec have been full of right-wing indignation over $10,000 allocated to a city Poet-in-Residence - a sum that accounts for 0.0000094% of 2023’s tax revenue - because the Spec’s sports-writer-turned-opinion-lead whipped up every bitter crank in town with horror stories of a near 15% tax increase and fruity lefty pinko bus riders who will nationalize your dog and make the HSR mandatory instead of providing any context as to why taxes are going up (paying for past council mistakes like increasing taxes less than inflation each year, dealing with provincial downloading, inflation and supply chain issues, etc.), but the golden child of council’s conservative caucus gets a pass for trying to bring back an underused and inefficient bus for $3,000,000 right before an anticipated system redesign.
We’ve just stopped having fact-based conversations about what we can do in municipalities, apparently. Progressives get elected and face down threats to their safety, manufactured rage, and efforts by entrenched forces to put a stop to their agendas. Right wingers get elected and the press praises them for showing up while they pander to an increasingly small electorate and work to make their rich donors wealthier/look appealing to right-wing parties for their next career move.
Running theme through this whole edition, but it is worth repeating: This is exhausting. Absolutely exhausting.
The Trustee Checkup
Canada’s school boards: always overlooked, always interesting.
Just down the road in Niagara, a Niagara Catholic District School Board trustee is taking a leave of absence for the next four months. Natalia Benoit, the trustee who compared the Pride flag to that of the Nazis, will be off the job until the end of January, but will still receive her paycheque. Benoit hasn’t given a reason and will likely return to the job after January 29.
A Newmarket trustee, on the other hand, won’t be attending any more meetings of the York Catholic District School Board (YCDRB). Trustee Theresa McNichol was banned from meetings for the rest of the year after being accused of “anti-Italian” discrimination. The whole story is really weird and dates back to before the last municipal election. McNichol wanted the board to perform a land acknowledgement before their prayers to start meetings, but other board members objected, saying that was an affront to their Catholicity. She said other trustees had “lost it” with her and she feared for her safety. Then she asked for extra security at the meeting, but did so…in Italian. She then posted on Facebook in English and Italian, which the other board members felt was discriminatory. A later report found that McNichol’s Italian-language communication “were done deliberately to annoy, taunt and/or mock her colleagues.” The board took the unprecedented step of banning her from every single meeting from now until 2026 and former trustees have been pushing her to resign. The whole thing is a mess and definitely leaves the YCDRB in a bad spot.
Lastly, we head back to Red Deer and the ongoing saga of Monique LaGrange, the trustee who compared Pride to Nazi indoctrination (wow, trustees really like that stuff, don’t they?). LaGrange has been banned from special committee meetings until the end of the term in 2025, but can still attend board meetings. A request to dismiss the trustee was made to the Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools board, but, this past Tuesday, they declined to remove her from office.
All of this speaks to how messy school board politics can be sometimes. Petty factionalism and big personalities can stall the proceedings of a board for an entire term while those trustees who bring Godwin’s Law into the real world can carry on their careers for as long as they want. Fun stuff!
Cool facts for cool people
I’m going to keep this one short for folks:
Here’s a really cool article about how faith communities are repurposing land to provide much-needed housing for people experiencing homelessness or at risk of becoming homeless.
Check out this article on a Tiny Homes project in Fredericton that’s giving people hope and plans to expand considerably over the next few years.
Pickering councillor Lisa Robinson is calling herself a “modern-day slave” after her colleagues docked her 30-days pay for bullying community members. Is that the worst thing a local politician has said all week? Maybe.
Charlie Angus (2023) “Death threats, Jordan Peterson and me: My journey into the world of Pitchfork Politics” Hamilton Spectator/Toronto Star, Sept. 24, 2023 - Link
Robert O. Paxton (2005) The Anatomy of Fascism. Vintage Books. pp. 219-220.
These newsletters are really great, Chris. Thank you for putting the work in.
I fully understand and relate to your feelings about the change in the political and social climate. Anger is everywhere and it's scary. Children are being raised in households where the go-to emotion is anger, and I see signs of it in older children at the playground with my grandson. I don't know what the solution is, honestly. Better investment in schools/education. It seems the more we cut and starve our social programs, the sicker and angrier our society gets. Who knew?
I for some reason am still paying for a Spec subscription, but I promise I won't continue for 3 more years of constant belt fed Scott Radley roganesque shenanigans. Someone get that man a sport to write about