When you're the Minister of Foreign Affairs and you forget classified national security documents in the apartment of your Hell's Angels adjacent girlfriend, that really should be the end of your political career. But not for Maxime Bernier. After having to resign in one of the dumbest scandals in Canadian political history, Bernier rose again, getting back into Steven Harper's cabinet in 2015. He then ran for the Conservative leadership in 2016 and narrowly lost to Andrew Scheer. Unhappy with not being at the forefront, Bernier decided to form his own party, the People's Party of Canada.
The PPC, Canada's version of a far-right party, combines libertarianism with populist resentment. It's a cynical formula that requires Bernier to perform a cute little puppet show. First, he puts on his happy libertarian face and appeals to the self-professed rugged individualists, people who don't like taxes and regulations, and think they are too smart for anyone to tell them what to do. The problem is most people understand that libertarianism is a free-for-all that only benefits the super-wealthy. Libertarianism wants government to do nothing but the minimum required to keep the peace. Basically, their mantra is: 'We have problems? Well, don't expect us to do anything about it.' If you want a peek at what libertarianism looks like, read a Dickens novel.
So, to attract wider support, Bernier switches gears and becomes a ranting populist, attacking immigrants, multiculturalism, political correctness and all the other bogeymen that send the uninitiated into a tizzy. Mimicking Trump, Bernier has babbled about building a wall on the US border and has promised to radically remake immigration policy to fit "our cultural heritage", i.e. more white people . The PPC's anti-immigrant rhetoric is the usual inflammatory and dishonest junk we've come to expect from this crowd. For example, immigrants are accused of being a financial burden on Canada (they are not), while at the same time they somehow magically drive up housing prices, which is a neat trick if you think about it. Bernier also claims immigrants don't learn our languages or make much effort to integrate into our society; statistics show over 93 percent are at least conversational in English or French.
While Bernier vehemently denies he or his party tolerates racists, he sure does hang out with a lot of them, not to mention letting them run for office under his party's banner. If your rhetoric and policies attract the support of a trash bag filled with white supremacists, neo-Nazis and conspiracy loons, it's probably a clue that you should take a hard look at your party and what you stand for. Instead, Bernier derides every expose of the racists under his bed as just unfair and biased media coverage. Denial is the go-to play for the far-right everywhere. If you deny reality long enough and forcefully enough, eventually some people decide you must be on to something. So Covid is just a flu, climate change is no big deal, and immigrants are stealing jobs from honest, hard-working Canadians.
The PPC's web page is full of these sorts of amateurish arguments and easily refutable lies, some of which veer towards unintentional comedy. They claim there is no consensus that climate change is man-made (there is) and that more CO2 is actually beneficial for agriculture because CO2 is "needed for plant growth." They are apparently counting on their supporters being scientifically illiterate, which is probably a reasonable assumption. So yeah, buy an extra ATV and leave it idling on your front lawn 24/7. You'll be helping to grow corn.
Or this: "Ottawa's health care transfers to the provinces have doubled since 2006, from $20 billion to $40 billion in 2019-20, with nothing to show for it." Really, nothing? So I guess every single patient during those years died? The numbers cited are irrelevant, as health care costs have risen dramatically all over the world during the last two decades. A much more telling statistic is that the US, which has the free market health care system that the PPC wants us to have, spends 64 percent more on health care than Canada ($11,582 vs. $7,064 per person) and yet by every measure has worse health outcomes. Of course, you won't see these numbers anywhere on the PPC website.
Fortunately, Bernier has neither the intelligence nor charisma to be a successful populist and while his twitter feed is bilious and filled with falsehoods, it's still a few notches above the Trumpian sewer system of gaslighting, alternative facts and conspiracy fantasies. In the last federal election, the PPC received only 294,000 votes, or 1.62 percent of the popular vote, and Bernier convincingly lost the seat he'd held for thirteen years. When Bernier subsequently ran in the 2020 by-election for Bill Morneau's old seat in York, he got a whopping 642 votes.
Still, it might be a mistake to summarily dismiss the PPC. The far-right is ascending all over the world. While Bernier is unlikely to ever get anywhere, who's to say that a far more skilled demagogue won't come along in the future? The PPC playbook, utterly cynical as it is, has been proven to work throughout the history of democracy, going all the way back to Athens. The simplistic dualism - us vs. them, whoever the us is at the moment- has great appeal to people who can't handle complexity. We are living in a time tailor made for this sort of easy messaging. The changes brought on by technology have been too rapid, resulting in alienation, anxiety and economic hardship. It would be a shock if the far-right hadn't appeared to try to take advantage.
Democracy is hard. To work it requires a lot more of its citizens than letting themselves be conned into a rage by every lowlife opportunist who comes along. Extremism is never the answer, because all it does is force the people who disagree with you into taking a more extreme position themselves. The back and forth between the two sides feeds more extremism and degrades, if not destroys, the political process. Soon you have a society that is wholly dysfunctional and where nothing can be accomplished. It can lead to violence and even civil war. When this happens, who wins? Only the politicians who divided us in the first place, no one else. It's happened over and over again, all through history, in every corner of the world. You'd think we'd have learned by now.
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