Roundup: Bernier’s dog whistles

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While we’re on the topic of bozo eruptions, we got another one from Maxime Bernier over Twitter on Sunday evening, railing about Justin Trudeau’s declaration that diversity is our strength. While I won’t reproduce all of Bernier’s feed, some of the commentary around it has been interesting, and in particular, just what kinds of dog whistles and language that Bernier employs in his language – and likely not a coincidence that this happened on a day of counter-protests to white supremacists in the United States. Also worth noting that his tweets were in rapid succession and in both official languages, which indicates that they were premeditated and not spur of the moment, and that does mean something as well.

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/1028812175673094146

https://twitter.com/StephanieCarvin/status/1028834166849368064

I might be willing to suspend enough disbelief around Bernier to suppose that he’s really not all that bright and that he really doesn’t know what he’s doing when he tweets stuff like this, but the people who surrounded him in his leadership campaign absolutely knew what they were doing when they tweeted things like red pill memes, and one presumes that they’re still in Bernier’s orbit. But Bernier has consistently demonstrated that he doesn’t have particularly adept political sensibilities (witness his ejection from shadow cabinet), and the fact that he went from going to Pride parades during his leadership campaign to insist that his libertarian values meant that he valued freedom over social conservatism, to becoming a Jordan Peterson convert who was paranoid about “enforced speech” and the bogus fears about being jailed for mis-gendering someone. But as is pointed out below, we are two weeks away from the Conservative policy convention, and it’s possible that this dog whistling is also about Bernier trying to gather support to oppose Scheer in some capacity or other.

Michelle Rempel also put out a tweet thread in response (which again, I’m not going to repeat), and some of the points she made seemed to be refuting Bernier, but at the same time, she makes her own coded appeals about planned migration and the language of pitting groups of newcomers against each other, in very Jason Kenney-esque ways.

Ultimately, however, we are back to the notion of where the adult supervision is with this party, and we recall the reasons why Harper put the party into communications lockdown – before they won in 2006, they went into lockdown because the 2004 election saw them lose because of precisely these kinds of bozo eruptions from the likes of Cheryl Gallant and others. And the strict message discipline seemed to work, but it causes as many problems as it solves (not to mention it’s terrible for democracy). But with this kind of tire fire over the past couple of weeks, you have to imagine that Scheer, whose own Twitter strategy is a lot of lies, obfuscation, narrative building and populist memes, is all for this kind of air war that he thinks will rile the base in ways that appear to have worked for both Trump and Ford. Maybe this kind of “shitposting” (as it is colloquially known) is the message discipline, in which case, we’re probably all doomed.

https://twitter.com/aradwanski/status/1028816033610575872

https://twitter.com/aradwanski/status/1028816045262307328

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/1028416748331126785

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau met with the families of the two Fredericton police officers killed in Friday’s shooting, before attending that city’s Pride celebration.
  • Liberals have spent the past week showcasing infrastructure projects in communities across the country to remind people of what they’ve been doing.
  • New intergovernmental affairs minister Dominic LeBlanc talks about finding common ground with the provinces to solve mounting disputes.
  • The government will begin new consultations in the fall about granting paid leave for survivors of domestic violence.
  • Here’s a look at the uphill battle that some business will face to get exemptions from the retaliatory tariffs imposed against the Americans.
  • While the Saudis have threatened to boycott Canadian wheat and barley, shortages in other countries may force them to turn to Canada after all.
  • A veteran is launching a new class action lawsuit against the government over what he says is a flawed disability benefits formula.
  • My weekend column looked at how Senator Harder’s website is painting a narrative about his office and his duties that he won’t even live up to.

Odds and ends:

Here’s a look at the politics of beer in Canada, which has been used by politicians since before Confederation.

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3 thoughts on “Roundup: Bernier’s dog whistles”

  1. The most consequential bozo eruption remains the Trudeau government’s Tweets to the Saudis.

    In his quietly devastating way, Rex Murphy addressed that topic in this weekend’s
    National Post    .

    He even volunteered a rationale for why our allies are avoiding us like the plague (hint: Canada is now perceived as a less-than-serious country, more dilettante than diplomat).

    • That doesn’t even make sense, considering that the tweets Trudeau and Freeland made were no different from ones Conservatives made over their time in office.

      • That was then, this is now, and now means a different and aggressive Saudi leadership.

        So yes, it does make sense, eminently.

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