Prior to August 26th, if one of my friends had asked me if I’d ever heard of someone named “Elliot McDavid”, I most likely would have said “No”, and followed it up with some cutting wisecrack as to my friend spending too much time on the Edmonton Oilers web site and Ancestry.com tracing the lineage of his favourite players. Now, I not only know who this man is, but am beginning to wonder when Canadians in general are going to realize that, unlike our previous friendly condescension of American politics and values, we now have as many know-nothing “intellectuals” spouting nonsense and assaulting our sense of free speech as does the Donald Trump rendition of the Republican Party.
For those of you not aware of this thug’s “history”, on that very Friday, just as Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland was walking into an elevator in Grande Prairie’s City Hall for a meeting with the Mayor, McDavid entered the lobby, shouted her name, then proceeded to verbally abuse her, shouting among other things, “What the f* are you doing in Alberta? You fing traitor; fing bitch; get the f* out of the province.”
Were this to have happened to ANY woman in, say, a sleepy and deeply religious rural community such as Premier Moe’s own Rosthern, this man would now be facing assault charges and possibly being confined to the local Crowbar Hotel until trial. However, this is Alberta, where the currently governing United Conservative Party is having its own leadership race to replace Jason Kenney, whose own jingoistic political verbiage and that of the candidates to replace him, Danielle Smith and Brian Jean, continue to insinuate that Ottawa is the one true enemy of an Alberta striving to attain economic and social justice for its belaboured and constantly harangued citizenry.
“The Tyee” investigative reporter Charles Rusnell recently and brilliantly described this sickening tactic being used by the political right, “rage farming”, to enhance their political standings. Out here in the fly-over province we have a premier busily trolling the fertile waters of the rebranded “Carbon Convoy” thanking them for their continued support in creating humiliating scenarios for the federal government and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Empowered by an increased but temporary oil royalty stream created by the war between Russia and Ukraine, they have now announced that such manna will be shared by all of our “taxpaying” subjects in the form of $500 cheques – bribing us with our own money.
The outcome of our ingesting this nonsense of historical misinterpretation is that now the political process becomes a Petri dish of deviant opportunity to portray those whose thoughts do not follow the same logical pathway as our own in a less favourable continuum. If this platform script does not immediately lead to victory, we now no longer criticize the platform from which we preached its potential value, but instead challenge the sermon that delivered its message – and it is THIS form of inverted and illogical thinking that now leaves Canada’s conservative voices to, for the THIRD time in less than five years, trying to install Pierre Poilievre as the reincarnation of the former, much despised Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
It was Harper’s “manifest destiny” to turn the Liberal Party of Canada into an irrelevancy. In 2015 he attempted to deliver his coup de grace to an immature and thoroughly unprepared newly elected leader, Justin Trudeau, by ridiculing his potential weakness to not only understand Liberal policy objectives, but implement them to the satisfaction of Canadian voters. He failed – miserably so, simply because the tactic sickened Canadian voters who were growing tired of Harper’s own arrogance. By Poilievre continuing today to preach this message of contempt plagiarized from Harper, he is assuring us that Canada will have NO prime minister in this country for at least the next 10 years that is NOT a Liberal.
From Russnel’s perspective, McDavid is the perfect pawn spreading Poilievre’s message, for he exudes no philosophy to call his own. Ms. Freeland is “selling out the country”. How – by failing to acknowledge the loss of invisible “rights” to which Saskatchewan’s “Karen” Party perceive as incontrovertibly “lost” to Canadians, and whose nonsense Saskatchewan Rivers MLA Nadine Wilson now wants to give voice? And are his thoughts about the alleged thousands upon thousands of children who allegedly are dead from receiving an anti-Covid vaccine more “real” than the actual thousands of such graves being interred on the grounds of Canada’s former residential schools?
Mr. McDavid is no intellectual giant; he merely feeds his mind with the droppings of an extreme right movement that believes “change”, no matter how good for ourselves, our nation or our planet, must be violently opposed. He is not alone, and more to the point, his unhinged “maleness” does not just mean that we should just be focusing our attention upon the violence projected in his attack against Freeland.
Why aren’t we also calling into question the behaviour of the woman who ACCOMPANIED McDavid as he verbally abused Ms. Freeland, ending his diatribe by saying, “You’re not welcome here,” then snapping a picture of the women huddling in fear in the City Hall’s elevator, waiting for someone to rescue them from this ordeal? To many of my women friends, the very idea of this picture eventually ending up on some page of an extremist dark web site – which it will – is as psychologically damaging as intimate pictures of themselves meeting the same end.
McDavid may be all that he is ascribed to be: misogynist, bully, coward, brainwashed, unthinking follower, and contemptuous of the evolution in defining human rights, but the term “incel” does not apply to this couple’s behaviour. He is but part of a movement that feeds on perceived slights, and is supplemented in his violent psychological weaponry by women in a political war about which most Canadians know nothing about and have no idea what its effects may be should this “side” win.
Unfortunately, Mr. Poilievre knows that people aren’t listening to what he is really saying as opposed to what it is that he’s attacking. And unfortunately, that makes him and the soulmates who will vote for this intellectual imposter even more dangerous than either McDavid and his female partner ever could hope to be.
