And here we are again.
Anger, all around.
Death threats to whomever you don’t like it seems.
A week ago, we saw Canada’s deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland get verbally attacked and accosted while at an event in Grande Prairie. She was told to leave the province (although she was born and raised here). The group of three women with Freeland were intimidated by a large, clearly angry man, who laughed on a video after he left the building. As if he enjoyed it.
This week, we find out Brian Jean and Travis Toews have received death threats. I’m sure Danielle Smith has as well. As I’ve said before, no matter what your political affiliation is, you should not fear for your life because you simply did your job. Given the political landscape, geopolitically and locally, I am not surprised. I want to be, but every day I see the threats and every day I’m left to wonder where this is going to end up.
It goes back to what I talked about last week, the easy access people have to make threats is unlike any point in history. There’s no cooling-off period, there’s no chance to take a step back when people see something a politician did or said that angers them.
For the man in Grande Prairie, that was something much different. That’s hate that has been manifesting for a long time and has been perpetuated by a number of groups in Alberta and frankly, across the country.
Anecdotally, I’ve heard of several other ministers who have received credible threats based on the COVID-19 policies of the current Alberta government and my sense is that was just the tip of the iceberg. Members of Parliament in Ottawa have been issued panic buttons, according to a CBC report in June. The temperature has risen significantly since then.
The political landscape is so supercharged with anger right now, it seems like violence is really the only way it can end. The threats can only fester for so long before someone finally decides to take matters into their own hands.
These people have families. They are not only fearful for their own life now, but their family–for simply doing their job, but now they have to extend that worry well beyond that.
What can be done to turn the temperature down? Not much and a lot all at the same time.
In one instance, it’s hard to put the proverbial genie back in the bottle on this one.
The COVID-19 pandemic was hard on everyone across the political spectrum and even those who never had even a passing interest in politics. There were other catalysts for the anger, but for a lot of people, this is where it really took on a new life.
What the pandemic did was create an information vacuum for a lot of people. With social isolation, people were left to read more information on their phones, without a sounding board for how credible that information might be. Instead, they found communities of people online who shared their viewpoints about what they felt were the hypocrisies going on in the world.
And lord knows the internet is a big enough place that if you’ve got a theory, there’s somebody out there who’s crazy enough to believe it and even has the amateur research to back it up.
With a little bit of positive feedback on some homegrown research or theories, those people became emboldened with other ideas that would earn them more praise from the community– the wackier the better it seems. If the idea picked up steam, more and more praise means the hunt for conspiracy theories continues to spiral.
But then, we returned to the real world, out of isolation and those people were sent out into the world with their theories and the backing of their online community. They were angry, for a laundry list of reasons.
Society has captured that anger, with politicians feeding off it (which they have done for centuries to a much lesser extent) and social media platforms feeding the beast by showing those angry people more and more videos that make them angrier. Or they gain approval on a social media platform and turn that rage into a persona, one that gains them followers or praise that they had missed out on. If they stop? So does the praise. In an era of instant gratification, few would dare to risk losing that kind of social capital. So they stayed angry. And the politicians noticed.
That anger is coming to the forefront more and more these days and the politicians who rubbed the proverbial “anger” bottle don’t have any intention of trying to shove it back in.
They just want power, it’s all they ever wanted and most, who capture this kind of sentiment won’t ever admit it’s what they’re doing.
Unfortunately, they’re the only ones who have a chance to dose the wildfire of anger that’s festering in Canada.
Byron Hackett is the Managing Editor of The Red Deer Advocate.