It Could Happen Here - Canadian Fascism Eh? Part 2

Episode Date: October 15, 2021

Oh sorry, did you happen to catch a little fascism there eh?The second part of our dive into the Canadian Far-Right, this episode we cover 2019-present day. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, uh, blah. Nope, that's not it.

Nope, that's it. Garrison, we've started the episode. No. Yes, we did. I did it a little too late. The episode has begun. It cannot be unbegunnited. Oh, that's horrible. Let's roll right into it. Let's talk more about fascism in Canada, we did. I didn't know it was too late. The episode has begun. It cannot be unbegunnited. Oh, that's horrible.

Let's roll right into it. Let's talk more about fascism in Canada, Garrison. So, welcome to This Is It Could Happen Here. Today, the here is Canada. That is where it could happen. This is going to be part two of my little deep dive into Canadian fascism and the far-right rumblings in general in the Great White North. Oh, God, that is a bad, bad nickname for Canada, the Great White North. Not inaccurate.

Did not really think that one through. Oopsie doodle. Maybe they did. Maybe they, yeah, there's a good chance they did. Anyway, in the last episode, we left off with the Canadian yellow vests and a frightening increase in Islamophobia and anti-immigration rhetoric around late 2017 and 2018 after Trump's election. And we started the last episode by talking about one of Canada's first fascist political parties. And we're going to start part two by talking about Canada's new neo-fascist political party that also got started inside the province of Quebec, just like the National Unity Party did. This one is called the People's Party of Canada. Before we get into the People's

Party, I'm first going to give some background on the founder of the party, Maxime Bernier. And that's how I'm going to say his name. No one at me. It's good enough. Bernier was born in Quebec in 1963 and is the son of a conservative talk radio host turned politician. Isn't that funny? Isn't that funny how that keeps happening?

Yep. Huh. Yeah, so Bernier entered politics in 2006. He ran as the Conservative Party candidate for the House of Commons in the same rioting district that his father had represented in the 80s and 90s. Stephen Harper, leader of the new United Conservative Party, initially wanted Maxine's father to reenter politics, but Bernier Sr. was less keen on that idea and instead told Harper that perhaps his son should run in his place. Oh, radio

and nepotism. Amazing. Radio and nepotism. Yep, and politicians and, yeah. Starting great. It is starting great. So at this point, Bernier was more of like a free market libertarian libertarian-y type guy. You know, still with some of the same like

conservative immigration stuff that's common in Quebec, but he was more of just like a libertarian dude. Bernier easily won the writing, writings are what we call districts here in the States, ranking at 67% of the popular vote, which was the largest majority for a conservative politician outside of the province of Alberta. So he did very well. Bernier, who had a background in business, quickly rose through the ranks of the Conservative Party. Within the same year, he was appointed to be a cabinet minister in the Harper government. And he worked as an industry minister from 2006 to 2007, before being promoted to a foreign affairs minister. And then in 2011, he was appointed as minister of the state.

So in spring of 2016, after the 2015 federal election, Bernier put in his bid to be the new elected Conservative Party leader. So I'm going to briefly explain how Canadian elections work. You don't vote for a prime minister. You vote for a party within your specific district. If your party wins, they get a seat in parliament. Whoever has the most seats in parliament, that's whose prime minister gets elected. So whoever is the leader of the party, they will be prime minister if that party gets the most seats.

whoever is the leader of the party, they will be prime minister if that party gets the most seats. So in 2016, Bernier put in his bid to be the new conservative party leader. He got remarkably close just securing the spot as leader of the conservatives. In the final round of voting, he received 49.05% of the vote, losing to Saskatchewan conservative politician Andrew Scheer, who got 50.9%. So, less than a 2% difference. He was so close to becoming leader of the Conservative Party. Like, ridiculous. So, yeah, after his extremely slight loss, he continued to work in Scheer's Conservative

Party for a few years. If you remember from the last episode, around this time was when the Islamophobia and anti-immigration talking points were starting to gain a new popularity. And Bernier followed along with this trend. He would tweet out about the dangers of extreme multiculturalism, and he had like an increasingly racist and divisive rhetoric, and that kind of caused some drama within the conservative establishment. So in August of 2018, around the same time the Yellow Vest movement in Canada was starting up, Bernier resigned from the Conservative Party with the stated intention of forming a new federal populist far-right political party.

Here's a segment from his resignation speech, and he does talk in a very thick French accent. I'm not going to do that. Uh-huh. No. No. No. I'm helping here.

Yeah, you're really helping channel the energy. Sacre bleu. Wow, I really hated that. That was just direct audio from his speech. Yeah, that was. Instead of leading as a principled conservative and defending the interests of Canada and Canadians, Andrew Scheer is following the Trudeau liberals.

I was told that internal polling is showing that the liberals' response to Trump is popular and that in six months, if the polls change, the party's stand may change too. The same thing happened in reaction to my tweets on diversity and multiculturalism. This is another crucial debate for the future of our country. Do we want to emphasize

our ethnic and religious differences or exploit them to buy votes as the liberals are doing? Or emphasize what unites us and the values that can guarantee social cohesion? Just like other Western societies grappling with this issue, a large number of Canadians, and certainly the vast majority of Conservatives, are worried

that we are heading in the wrong direction. But it's not perfectly correct to raise such questions. So yeah, I think, honestly, one of the main reasons why Bernier hasn't been super successful is because of his accent.

It's harder for Protestant white Canadians to support him because he talks with a french canadian accent um if if he talked in like good english i think he would have he would have won conservative leadership um and his populist party would be way more popular than than it is now so critical support to other french racism is preventing the racist from being racist enough yes you love to see love to see it you certainly see it we do we do see it so bernier faced some pushback from his conservative colleagues including stephen harper of trying to divide the right and split the right of center vote. And some of the less socially conservative members of

the main conservative party decried Bernier's departure and subsequent New People's Party as just a plain attempt to pander to xenophobia and racist right-wingers. But Bernier went right to work and ran enough candidates under his new party to secure a spot in the federal election debates that were like, you know, how we watch presidential debates. Same thing, but these have multiple candidates because there are multiple parties. Same thing. But basically, he was able to get in the televised debates. Party of Canada. I'm just going to say the PPC now, because it sounds funny. They started going viral on the internet after pictures of massive billboards with Berners' face and big text that said, say no to mass immigration. This got very meme-y around 2019, these big PPC billboards. I'm going to read a bit from a write-up, and it's going down by some local Montreal anti-fascists. There have been suggestions that the PPC spokesperson and architect of its public relations strategy, Martin Mass, has been key to its embrace of the far right. Mass was owner of the publisher of the Quebecois Libre, which is an online libertarian news outlet that shut down in 2016.

But that PPC's cozy relationship with racists is primarily due to the influence of this one person is highly doubtful. However, it's the PPC's positioning itself as the option of choice for those who find the Conservative Party insufficiently right-wing. Racism is clearly just one of the most effective tools for such a strategy. Witnessing PPC billboards and tweets against mass immigration, also tweets about being against Antifa, and Bernier's diatribe about radical Islam being the biggest threat to freedom and peace and security in the world today, and how he complains about other parties are complacent and pandering to Islamists, and promising that the PPC will make no compromise with the totalitarian ideology. A number of media articles have revealed the far-right connections

to people active in the PPC as organizers and members whose signatures were used for the PPC to gain official party status. For instance, Derek Horne, the PPC volunteer and a security agent who accompanied Bernier at a variety of events and media interviews, he has been revealed to be a founding member of the neo-fascist Canadian Nationalist Party, which we briefly mentioned in the last

episode. Sean Walker is an American immigrant and organizer with the PPC in St. Catherine's, as well as one of the people who signed on for PPC to be an official party. He was revealed to be the president of the National Alliance, a US-based neo-Nazi organization in 2007.

Yay! National Alliance! He was also convicted of hate crimes at the time for violence against people of color. Following these revelations, Walker was expelled from the PPC, and Bernair claimed that he'd slipped through the party's vetting process. However, it was also revealed that Bernair follows him on Twitter. Others who signed up for the PPC to be an official party include Janice Balch, a founding member of the Patriotic Europeans against the Islamification of Auxent. And also

Justin L. Smith, leader of this, of the Sudbury chapter of the Soldiers of Odin. So a whole bunch of, whole bunch of fascist people are working, working for the party. Um, and unsurprisingly, a number of, a number of candidates have made headlines as their social media posts from the past and present have surfaced featuring racism, Islamophobia, and a lot of spreading of far-right conspiracy theories.

That was just kind of common. There's too many, honestly, to mention. And it's not just that the PPC has a few bad apples in it. It's like the whole party is rife with these kind of sentiments. One gauge of this, and a sign that this is intentional, is looking at the candidates who have left the party or have been kicked out when it became clear that there would be no condemnation of the far right from the upper ranks. There was like, just in 2019 alone, there was like three candidates who were, who left or were either kicked out because they, you know, had objections to the

racism rampant within the party. They were like complaining about, hey, these guys seem kind of racist. And then they were kicked out of the party or, or, or, or they left. So yeah, that's, that's not a good problem to have. So, finishing up this little quote here. Indeed, a cursory look at the Facebook pages of PPC candidates reveals what's been really noteworthy is how selective the news stories about racist tweets or Facebook posts have been. Almost every PPC candidate in Quebec has recently and repeatedly shared articles from climate denialist sources, including many with a conspiratorial bent. A candidate for Papineau even produced his own YouTube expose revealing how George Soros is behind an international globalist conspiracy theory to crash economies and make money spending panic about climate change. Secondary to climate denial, there's a lot of fears around free speech and mass immigration,

which are both recurring themes in the PPC candidates. And roughly one in five have recently shared news articles from what we would deem national populist or far-right sources, including lessmanchettes.com, which is the website of the French language translator

of the Christchurch manifesto. The guy who runs that website is also involved with organizing the Montreal was of the French language translator of the Christchurch Manifesto. Jesus. And the guy who runs that website is also involved with organizing in the Montreal, in the Montreal chapter of the Yellow Vests. Sorry. Yeah, so he both translated the manifesto and he's also running the Montreal Yellow Vest Movement.

So that's fun. It's not fun, it's bad. Andre Piteri, Piteri piter wow that is so you remember so i didn't learn french in canada because i was in a weird christian private school otherwise i could be a lot better at this job um yeah but so anyway uh there's there's a there's a there's a there's just like a far-right youtube channel with this guy called Studio, who a lot of his stuff was shared. And there's a more eccentric and sporadic mix of other news sources, including Unite the Right attendee Faith Goldie, who also ran for mayor of Toronto and got third place. Quebec-based QAnon figure Alexis Trudel, and the alt-right YouTuber Black Pigeon Speaks.

on figure Alexis Trudell, and the alt-right YouTuber Black Pigeon Speaks. Of course, the main Yellow Vest page was shared a lot, and also sources from the highly racist The Voice of Europe. So, yeah, a lot of not great news sources being shared by the PPC. So, that is the gist of the People's Party as of 2019. Overall, their performance in the 2019 election was kind of a flop. Bernier lost his own seat in Quebec. No PPC candidates got into office. And the party only managed to get 1.6% of the total national popular vote. So that's good.

It only got 1.6% of all of the votes in Canada. So we're going to take a break from the People's Party for now, and we will circle back towards it at the end. But after an ad break, we will talk about what the main Conservative Party was up to during this time and a little bit after the 2019 election. Yeah. Yep.

And now the cat's just blocking the whole thing. All right. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows The End we're back the cat is in the bathroom i moved my cat walking the camera hello um people's party not doing great in the first election that's fun let's see what the regular conservatives were up to i'm sure it was things that are just good and cool if i know anything about conservatives it's that they're not not hashtag problematic yeah yeah you just let's just go okay just go i'll just be sad over here and the audience can know that i'm sad the whole

time you're talking i would rather this episode be not such a not such a downer but it's it's hard to make these kind of an upper it's uh i'll make a bargain with the audience that if they listen i will i will do my french accent at least one more time oh boy i will say doing the french accent this is the happiest i have seen robert all day like well he does look very tired you you did say earlier garrison and this was very funny that you'd be better at your job if you could speak french but given what we are here at at cool Media, you would actually be much worse at your job if you could pronounce anything.

And in fact, if you were to speak French, I would fire you immediately. It's actually a requirement that you can't pronounce things to work for our network. Certainly not French. There's other languages you're allowed to know how to pronounce,

but not French. No habla francais? A raise! He gets a raise! So let's pick up right after Maxine Bernier lost the conservative leadership to Andrew Scheer in 2017. Scheer won the leadership on a platform of classical financial conservatism and a slightly more socially moderate platform um when sheer got into office though one of the things he faced criticism for even among the conservative caucus was his association with a little media with was his association with a little media outlet called rebel media oh. Oh, no. So, most listeners may not know what Rebel Media

is, but you've certainly seen their stuff or felt their effect. Yeah. It's like the rough draft of Breitbart and also Canadian. And Canadian, yes. Yeah. So, Rebel Media is a Canadian far-right, neo-fascist propaganda outlet started in 2015

that has a lot of Breitbart-y vibes. Breitbart-esque? Yeah, Breitbart-esque. Rebel Media hosts and contributors have included white nationalist and white genocide proponent Lauren Southern and Proud Boy founder Gavin McGinnis. McGinnis produced a, quote, satirical video for Rebel called 10 Things I Hate About the Jews. Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah.

Yeah. It is worth noting that both Southern and McGuinness are Canadian. There are actually a lot of alt-right figures that are Canadian. Of course, we have Lauren Southern, Gavin McGuinness, we have Stephen Crowder,

Stefan Molyneux, and of course, Jordan Peterson. All of those people are Canadian. Dr. Jordan Balthazar Peterson, yeah. Most of them still live in Canada. Is he still alive? Yes, he's still alive. He made an insane tweet the other day. God, he made

the most unhinged tweet. No, that was such a good tweet. No, that tweet made it all worthwhile, baby. God, everyone go check his Twitter feed. It is amazing. You can hear his brain shorting out when you read that tweet. You need to go find this. You need to find the tweet. It is the most beautiful piece of poetry I've ever read.

It's like somebody taught a stroke how to type. It makes no sense. God, it's so good. I'm going to quote an article by GlobalNews.ca on Andrew Scheer and rebel media. Quote, despite a string of controversies

faced by Canadian right-wing media outlet The Rebel, including allegations of downplaying the Holocaust, newly minted Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer has so far continued to make himself available to the company that other prominent Conservative politicians have criticized for its controversial reporting and activism. Scheer's campaign organization also has a direct connection to the rebel. His campaign manager, Hamish Marshall, is listed as the director of the company's Federal Incorporation Records, which show its most recent annual gathering meeting was in February of this year. Following the leadership election in Toronto on Saturday, Scheer granted one-on-one interviews

with a handful of major media organizations, including a face-to-face interview with the rebel's Ottawa correspondent, Brian Lilly. Prior to his convention interview, Scheer appeared on The Rebel in February in a studio interview with host Faith Goldie on her show On the Hunt. At the end of the discussion, Goldie asked Scheer if he would agree to go on a duck hunting trip with her after he wins the leadership on Canada Day, which he agreed to. We briefly mentioned Faith Goldie

earlier in her connection to the People's Party and her brief campaign for the Toronto Mayor, but here's some more background on her and her coverage of the Unite the Right rally for Rebel Media, quoting from Winnipeg Free Press. In the course of her

dispatches, Goldie argued the events in Charlottesville were evidence of a rising white racial consciousness that was going to change the political landscape in America. All right, well, she's actually not wrong there. That was, yeah, she's not wrong. That's not incorrect. She's on the other side of the aisle on whether this is a good or bad thing. Yeah. She went to great lengths to laud the 20-point Metapolitical Manifesto composed by white nationalist leader Richard Spencer,

a document that includes calls to organize states along ethnic and racial divides, and celebrates the superiority of white America. Faith Goldie describes Spencer's manifesto as robust and well thought out. Goldie was fired by Rebel in mid-August in 2017, but not due to her participation in Unite the Right. She was fired for appearing on a Daily Stormer podcast to discuss Unite the Right. Oh, good. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, that's fine. So, yeah, nice to have her interviewing conservative leader Andrew Scheer. Asked for his reaction to Unite the Right and Rebel Media after what happened in Charlottesville in 2017. Scheer, who had previously been interviewed by

Rebel multiple times, finally disavowed the outlets, saying, Look, I believe there's a fine line between covering events and giving a platform to groups who are promoting a vile and disgusting point of view. I won't be granting interviews going forward. So, that's nice that it took someone dying in Charlottesville to realize that you probably shouldn't talk to the fascist media source.

So in the aftermath of Unite the Right, the mainstream conservatives kind of had to tread carefully around social issues because it's like, oh yeah, they're still Nazis. We probably shouldn't be pandering to them. But as more time and distance let the air cool, some conservatives went back to the same old rhetoric around the 2019 election.

For instance, in his 2019 election campaign, Tom Kamik, one of the parliamentary representatives for Calgary, Alberta, wrote out and spread flyers with the all-caps header of CRISIS AT THE BORDER, with text reading, Dear Constituent, The Independent Auditor General of Canada has published a scathing report confirming that the Ottawa Liberals have failed to safely and responsibly manage Canada's borders. Since Justin Trudeau irresponsibly tweeted out that Canada would open its borders to anyone seeking entry,

the number of people illegally crossing the border into Canada from the United States has surged past 1,000 a month, with almost 20,000 people illegally entering in 2018 alone. And while speaking to voters, Quebec repeatedly insisted that all the problems of people illegally crossing the Canadian border isn't a symptom of a failure of systems to respond to a growing crisis, but merely a failure for Border Patrol to assert control over people. Quotes and flyer courtesy about this Tom Kemic guy are courtesy of Dan Olson of Folding Ideas. He's a great Canadian documentarian who released a magnificent piece on QAnon

and conspiracy theories last year on his YouTube channel, Folding Ideas. Overall, I really like Dan. He makes very good stuff. So thank you to him for sending me those flyers. Anyway, during the 2019 election, Scheer led the Conservatives to gain a total of 26 seats inside Parliament, going from 95 up to 121. parliament, going from 95 up to 121. But they did finish 36 seats behind the liberals, despite beating the liberals in the popular vote by 1.3%. So that was 34.4% for conservatives and 33.1% of the popular vote for liberals. The margin was just over like 240,000 votes. The liberals lost 20 seats in the election and the NDP lost 15 seats. And this was the first

time since 1979 that a party won the most seats without also winning the popular vote. What pushed the Conservatives over on the popular vote was due to, you know, extremely high Conservative turnout in various ridings. So basically more conservatives voted in certain ridings than they usually do. So even if the liberals still win the district, there were still more conservative votes to be counted. And also they basically swept the prairie provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, where they won 70% of the vote and 65% of the vote, respectively. But their victories in those states and their higher turnout did not convert into many seats, because the less population dense areas have fewer federal

ridings and fewer available seats. And the liberals had to rely heavily for seats in Ontario, the most populous province that includes cities like Toronto, and, you know, a few other big cities. So, you know, Canada doesn't have the most democratic system. So the same way, you know, a few other big cities. So, you know, Canada doesn't have the most democratic system. So the same way, you know, in the States, we're familiar with, you know, people losing popular votes, but still getting elected president and stuff. You know, in Canada, it's a little bit different because of how you vote for parties in your own little district. But, you know, it's still not perfect, right? Because, like, it does feel weird for the leader of the country to not have, his party

to not have also won the popular vote because of how, you know, districts work out and how higher turnout in some areas doesn't mean that it's going to have more seats. You know, but the other side of things here is that, like, Canada also doesn't have ranked choice. So, like, still, the majority of people voted for left-of-center candidates, if you include, you know, the Green Party, the NDP, and the Liberals. So even though Liberals lost the popular vote, there still was like a majority left of center voting. So if they had ranked choice, maybe the results would have been different. So Canada's system, it definitely isn't perfect for how they do elections. I would prefer ranked choices, you know, basically,

I would prefer that for like every country if they're going to have elections. I would prefer ranked choices. Basically, I would prefer that for every country if they're going to have elections. So yeah, just kind of explaining why they can lose the popular vote but still win a majority controlling government. So after the election, Scheer announced he was resigning as head of the conservatives in December of 2019.

This was after it was revealed that he had used party funds for his children's own private schooling. So, good for him. A new bid for conservative leadership went into effect. We're going to mainly focus on two candidates here. There was Aaron O'Toole and Derek Solon. O'Toole fancies himself as another kind of, like,

classic financial conservative and a social moderate. He feels more like the old progressive conservative candidates from back before the 2003 Unite the Right merger. We got some like John McCain vibes here. But Derek Solon is more similar to the farther right parts of the US's current Republican Party, like anti-abortion, anti-LGBT, racist tweets, etc. But as a whole, Solon's extremism was rejected by Canadian Conservatives. He got fourth place with 15% of the vote during the first round of voting. And ultimately, O'Toole won leadership after three rounds of votes. And O'Toole now has the new challenge of trying to appeal

to the Canadian Conservatives' more moderate wing, as well as the more Trumpian wing that's developed the past few years. He's been relatively successful in crafting a boring, polite Canadian version of Trump's nationalism with slogans like Canada first and take Canada back, despite supporting trade deals outsourcing Canadian jobs to cheaper overseas markets, because they never actually mean what they say. And as the liberals have grown more aware of Canada's bloody history and have like toned down the red and white maple leaf patriotism, the Conservative Party under O'Toole has seized on this opportunity to make Canadian patriotism more of a right-leaning staple, just like patriotism is more of a right-wing thing in the States. So basically, after we were like, oh yeah, residential schools were bad, Canada's kind of fucked up, liberals are like, okay, we maybe shouldn't be waving our maple leaf flags everywhere. Maybe we're not a perfect country.

The conservatives are like, no, you have to be proud to be Canadian. So they've kind of taken patriotism to be their new thing, while previously it was much more of like a liberal thing. The Islamophobia and overt religious bigotry under O'Toole has been slightly trimmed down and climate change has at least been mentioned as existing.

But there has also been increased discussion on trying to hack down Canada's healthcare and privatize more aspects of it. Which, yeah, good job guys. Take away the only good part of Canada. The province of Alberta under Jason Kenney has done this to a disastrous effect, raising the cost of medical care for lower class people, many of whom voted conservative. I have family in Alberta, and just the past five years, the changes to the health care

system there has been horrible. It's not great. So, basically, what O'Toole wants is he wants to just privatize more elements of it. He has a specific term he uses, like, he wants to split the taxpayer healthcare and privatized healthcare into two

sections, and you can choose which one to join in. Anyway, it's silly. O'Toole did take a wee little stance to distance himself from the more extreme wings of his party when he decided to remove MP Derek Solon from the caucus. O'Toole announced that Solon would not be allowed to run as a candidate for the Conservative Party in the next election either, saying, Racism is a disease of the soul, repugnant to our core values. It has no place in our country and has no place in the Conservative Party of Canada. I won't tolerate it.

Also, last year, O'Toole refused to say whether he thinks systemic racism exists. But the decision to remove Solon was made after it was revealed that he accepted a donation from the Canadian Nazi Paul Fromm during Solon's bid for conservative leadership. Back in the 90s, Fromm was a figurehead of the Canadian far-right movement, appearing at heritage front rallies, and also caught on video at a party celebrating Hitler's birthday, which he lost his high school teaching job over. Well, look, it's just polite to celebrate a guy's birthday, you know, whether or not he's Hitler. Under no circumstances do you gotta celebrate Hitler's birthday.

This isn't a hot take. So there has been a bit of a rift in the Conservative Party over how much Trumpian rhetoric should be allowed in the Canadian Conservative Party. And this kind of rift has definitely increased after January 6th. The problem for Conservative politicians is that to win elections, they need to appeal to the largest swath of voters. And that includes more socially conservative and increasingly far-right rural folks. But if they go too far, they'll lose the moderates to the Liberal Party. So you have to take this delicate balance. But to kind of give you like an overview of what the current state of the conservative like votership is, four in ten of the Conservative Party of Canada members, so you know people signed up to vote in the party,

you know regular people, four in ten would say that they would have voted for Trump, four in ten say that they think Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. And four in ten say that the conservative and four in ten believe that the January 6th riot was staged or was done by the Democrats or done by Antifa.

So that's kind of the state of the conservative party in Canada for the voters. So politicians have to kind of, in order to win, they still need to appeal to those people, but they don't want to do that thing usually. They usually don't,

usually they're, a big talking point is rejecting the divisive politics of the United States. That's a big thing people say in Canada. They don't want it to become a fighting match. The other main difference between Canada's elections and America's elections is

America is always in election season. Even after each election, you feel like campaigns start right up again. Canada's campaigns only run a few months before the election. It is not always a thing. Yeah, that's one of those things you guys do objectively better than us. And a few months before the election. Like it is not like always a thing. Yeah, that's one of those things you guys do objectively better than us. And a lot of the world does.

It's not just Canada. The idea that like, oh, elections are terrible. We should spend as little time as possible having them. It's like two or three months of campaigning. That's it. It's not like a two-year, four-year thing. No, that is a thing that we should absolutely – the election should be about 11 minutes. From the start of the campaign to the vote everybody gets a minute to explain their uh

their politics and then we vote and then we throw them into the sea yeah so all right trying to trying to craft marketing to the divided right wing it's been interesting to watch you know there's like videos of a tool walking through know, downtowns with pride flags in the background and, you know, featuring visible, like minority Canadians intermingling. But then you also have O'Toole like railing against cancel culture, fueling suggestions that the liberal government's pandemic response is part of a socialist great reset and pulling out the dog whistle on like China and the coronavirus, you know, as often as he can. O'Toole's in the past also downplayed Canadians' residential schools program and described the efforts of activists pushing

to removal of statues of the residential school architects as stupid. So I do think O'Toole prefers a Conservative Party resistant to far-right branding, but he knows he needs to appeal to those voters in order to win elections. So, it's just, it's a thing that's not great, but it's interesting to watch. In August of 2021, Justin Trudeau, noted blackface appreciator, called a

snap election in an effort to gain more parliamentary seats in hopes of getting a majority liberal government. Something a prime minister should not be allowed to do, by the way. A prime minister should not be able to decide when to do way. Like, a prime minister should not be able to decide when to do elections. That is like, should totally not be a thing. Like, what? No.

You shouldn't do that. But anyway, as the 2021 snap election ramped up, the conservative party under O'Toole made some extremely questionable choices for their marketings and their slogans. What does the phrase, secure secure the future bring to mind?

Anything? The 14 words. So that became the new tagline for the entire conservative party under O'Toole. Great. Okay. Sure. We got secure the future billboards. We got websites,

conservative.ca slash secure the future. We got got we got we got websites conservative.ca secure the future uh we got mailers magazine covers all emblazoned with secure the future or secure our future um and you know what'll secure our future garrison the the chevron ads that keep popping up uh-huh yeah we keep trying to get rid of securing our future yeah it's great you're welcome it's a great time. Chevron appreciators. Chevron appreciators. Which is everyone. Welcome.

I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. Presented by iHeart and Sonoro. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Duda Podcast Network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. It's just appreciating Chevron. Just like Justin Trudeau appreciates just like justin trudeau

yeah so secure the future great slogan not a good slogan bad um i'm gonna read a bit from a mailer that went out to conservative party members after a tool one leadership quote okay i firmly believe canada has everything it has everything it takes to recover from COVID-19 and enjoy a prosperous future. If we have a government that knows how to secure the future, if the Trudeau liberals stay in power, they'll continue spending taxpayer money at pandemic-era levels long after the virus is behind us. The result? All the things we love about Canada will be in serious jeopardy. Our debt will become out of control, and they'll never be able to get back the Canada you and I grew up in, the kind of Canada our children and grandchildren deserve. So later on in the page, O'Toole says we need to stand up to the Chinese Communist Party and hold Beijing accountable for sabotaging our economy and taking jobs from Canadian workers.

And on August 16th, the Canadian Conservative Party Twitter account tweeted out, and I quote, 16th, the Canadian Conservative Party Twitter account tweeted out, and I quote, Canada's recovery program will secure the future for you, your children, and your grandchildren. So, that's fun.

Also, guess how many words is in that last sentence? 14? It's 14 of them. Yeah, we're going back to calling Canada Clanada again. It's like a dog whistle, but except for a dog whistle, only dogs can hear it. Except everybody hears it.

It's just a whistle. It's just a regular whistle. It's that he just tweeted it. Tweet. Yeah. Anyway, as O'Toole was getting all Secure the Future pilled, Canada's actual far-right

populist party, the People's Party, was gaining much more popularity amid the pandemic and the anti-mask, anti-lockdown, anti-vax protests. The COVID-19 pandemic was a gift to the far-right in general, as it allowed the injection and proliferation of conspiracy theories to accelerate at levels almost never before seen, and provided fair recruiting ground to gain new followers. The PPC latched onto this and was extremely successful. They were, you know, they sponsored protests, they did a whole bunch of campaigns that are around, like, anti-mask stuff, anti-vaccine, you know, all of it. So the PPC was able to be not just a safe harbor for anti-immigration, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and other far-right groups, but also now more mainstream anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine, anti-government protesters, as well as, you know, gun rights activists and some general rule workers feeling left behind from even the conservative party. So the PPC has changed from a niche white nationalist party to a full-blown far-right

populist force. What Bernier and the PPC have done so effectively since the pandemic is to use the broad concerns around COVID and freedom and the more mainstream concerns about economic anxieties, job loss, loss of businesses, immigration, and changing culture, and manage to roll all of these things up into one tight package, which is really appealing to a lot of Canadians who are very anxious about the state of their country, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic. So the results of the September snap election,

which was, you know, last month, were basically the same as the 2019 election, except the PPC went from 1.6% of the vote to 5% of the vote, a big change. That means they were ranking above the Green Party and nearly tying the bloc Quebecois. So they made like... Quebecois!

I know like 1% to 5% doesn't seem like tons, but like this is a really big jump for a brand new party. Especially if they're ahead of the Green Party and tying the bloc party. That is like a notable shift. The University

of Gulov professor of political science, Tamara Small, said this after the results of the last snap election, quote, I think the only leader who's ecstatic about last night's results is Bernier. I don't think they're going anywhere. I think it seems that he's taken the populism and attached it to far-right politics. The idea that Canada was immune to this sort of far-right populism, the idea that Canada was going to be free from the populism that we saw in Europe, like what Nigel Farage is in the UK.

But I think lots of people are wondering if Bonner is just going to say, I'm not here to form an actual government, I'm just here to challenge the system and use that as a way of gaining massive support. After CTV News emailed the PPC for comment for their post-election story, the party spokesperson sent back a one-line email response, I don't respond to requests from leftist activists masquerading as journalists. Get lost. So that's fun. Also in late September, Bernier's Twitter account was temporarily suspended for encouraging his supporters to attack journalists. Ah, great. Yeah, just not like, I'm okay with criticizing journalists and stuff because most journalists are like, not great. but when you're using your political twitter account to just like tell people to just go attack the press usually it's a bad sign of like a political party usually it's just like yeah

political parties when they do that usually leads to bad things um we are going to talk about one kind of wrapping up here we're talking about one one Ontario People's Party candidate named Mario Greco, who is another high school teacher and self-proclaimed game developer. A few years ago, I see Chris's wincing because, like, you know this can't lead to good

things. The gamers, it can't be good. So, a few years ago, Greco made a video game called Happy Culture Shootout. Oh be good. So a few years ago, Greco made a video game called Happy Culture Shootout. Oh, good. Quoting an article from PressProgress.ca, Happy Culture Shootout

is a Space Invaders style game that allows players to control a spaceship that shoots laser beams at characters of various identity groups. Quote, this game is about an alien

ordered to invade Earth and transport all humans to happy land, Greco says on his personal website, which includes other games that he authored like Die Mar, which is about an alien ordered to invade Earth and transport all humans to Happy Land, Greco says on his personal website, which includes other games that he authored, like Die Mar, which is about a young misunderstood hero who seeks to liberate post-war Germany. In a since-deleted video obtained by Press Progress, the People's Party candidate delivered a presentation to university students several years ago, offering his post-m mortem on the game. Greco expressed surprise that his students and faculty reacted negatively to

the game, with one calling it the most racist game I've ever played. Greco says his game was not racist in the slightest, noting that he made fun of his own Italian heritage. He also claimed that some students thought his gay pride parade level was hilarious. My friends and I love people of all cultures, and we also love humor of all types. That includes harmless racist jokes, Greco said in the video. The game was intended to make a joke about how ridiculous cultural stereotypes are, so we can laugh about it together and move on with our lives. During the presentation, the People's Party candidate offered an interesting side note about the game's Israel level.

According to Greco, a faculty member at the university strongly recommended that he remove Jewish stereotypes from the game. He was like, no, get rid of it immediately. Don't have any religious content whatsoever. I know that subject is very, very touchy. So, yeah, this is just a game where you mass shoot minority people um anyway in 26 and in 2017 uh greco posted a photo on facebook of an illustration of pepe the frog which he said was drawn by one of his students in in the whiteboard of his york region high school um pepe had a little speech bubble that said free kekistan great yeah so now look the gamers are nazis so currently greco is spending his time tweeting about critical race theory and trying to get into office under the

people's party banner um in his twitter bio he calls himself an egalitarian libertarian nationalist and he still also teaches computer science at Ontario High School. I have a fun different way people call themselves fascists. I know. It's really great. It's not fun. These people are all the worst, most scum. And one more thing before we sign off. Last month, right before the September election, I was forwarded some pictures of some People's Party of Canada posters and flyers put up linking to their campaign website that someone came across around town.

Not Portland, like somewhere in Canada. Under the PPC logo, there was pictures of people's faces and big black text that said, it's okay to be white. Oh, great. Rad. So that's the liberal utopia of Canada, everybody. I'd love to see it. Basically, yeah, the reason why I wanted to put these episodes together

is because we make a lot of jokes about escaping to Canada as the States gets too fascist. And I just want to say, I'm not saying Canada's getting accelerated at the same rate, but Canada's not immune to the same thing. It's there.

Yeah, you can't escape this problem of creeping authoritarianism by moving. No. Yeah. Unless you move to a country with no history of authoritarianism, like, I don't know, Germany. Uh-huh. Yeah, and I think the other thing that's important with Canada particularly is that that like canada is like affected by american political trends and you see this absolutely like like one of the things that i remember looking at when i was when i was looking into sort of uh if you look at the history of like anti-asian riots for example so there's this huge wave in

1907 that goes it goes all the way up the west coast a lot of them and it ends in toronto yeah a lot of you know yeah and you see you see that like and you see that like today too where it's like yeah the toronto i think has the highest rate of anti-asian attacks like in north america that's not surprising pretty impressive considering like the absolute shit show going on in like new york and la and seattle and it's like no toronto's worse no it's real bad there's i I talk a lot about how the far right's gaining a lot stronger of an influence in Alberta, and it is spreading into other eastern provinces,

not just inside Quebec. There was the incel attack in Toronto a few years ago that killed, I think, a dozen people. Of course, there was the Quebec mosque shooting. There's been a lot of these kind of things popping off, and there's even more starting in British Columbia as well, Of course, there was the Quebec mosque shooting. There's been a lot of these kind of things popping off. And, you know, there's even more starting in, like, British Columbia as well, which has a decent far-right kind of influence,

at least on the eastern side of BC, away from, like, Victoria and from Vancouver. So, yeah, I just wanted to, like, put these together and be like, hey, you know, it's worth looking at these countries that we usually view as, you know, generally doing better and be like, no, like, it's the same thing that's happening there. And it's all part of the same overarching slide rightward that we've seen in both in, like, the UK. We were even seeing it now in Germany. We're seeing it, you know, in obviously the states under Trump and in Canada, even though the liberals have won the past few elections, it's still scooting

rightward. So yeah, I just wanted to put this thing together. If you want to keep up to date on Canadian stuff, you can check out the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, which does work tracking extremism in Canada. And yeah, that is what I put together. Thanks, Garrison. Yeah, you're welcome, everyone. You're welcome.

Well, that's the episode. That's gonna do it for us here at It Could Happen Here today. Come back tomorrow or, you know, whenever and we'll talk about another part of the world. Maybe, I don't know, Portugal. Fuck it. I don't have stuff pulled for a Portugal episode. You have to give me way more

heads up for that. You better get ready by tomorrow. No. That's what we're doing now. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram at ItCouldHen Here, Pod, and Cool Zone Media. Leave five-star reviews, whatever. Goodbye. Goodbye. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us

out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.