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For those still making up their minds about who to vote for in the biggest election in Canada, watch this. My guy John Tory goes head-to-head with a real pro, Steve Paikin.

Oh, me and Nick get talked about at the end. I’ll bet 99.9 per cent of voters couldn’t tell you who we are, even if they were offered 500 million bucks (which is what Ms. Keesmaat’s reckless promises will cost you annually, BTW. A seventeen per cent increase in your property taxes.).

Live Now: Seeking Toronto's Top Job https://t.co/02nZNQpj8w

— The Agenda | TVO (@TheAgenda) October 11, 2018

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Hypocrisy, nailed to a cross.

It is about three feet high, and it is found at the very centre of a massive, baroque throne. It rather resembles something one would find at Versailles, in fact. At a minimum, it is more ornate and more conspicuous than something one would see above the tabernacle, in a church.

And that is what Maurice Duplessis intended, one presumes, when he had it affixed to the blue walls of the National Assembly more than 80 years ago: to resemble a church. Back then, Duplessis – an autocrat and a bigot who ordered Jehovah’s Witnesses arrested for practicing their religion, and who led anti-Semitic campaigns to keep out Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Europe – called his province “the only Catholic government in North America.”

At the time of its installation in 1936, then, the crucifix was regarded as a literal embodiment of the solemn bond that then existed between the Quebec state and the Quebec church, when more than 90 per cent of the province’s population were Roman Catholic. But the crucifix even survived the Quiet Revolution, after which Quebec finally became a secular state.

Over the years, there have been reports written about it, and debates about it. In 2008, academics Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor recommended removing the cross. They said that “it seems preferable for the very place where elected representatives deliberate and legislate not to be identified with a specific religion. The National Assembly is the assembly of all Quebeckers.” All of the politicians in the National Assembly disagreed. They voted unanimously to keep it, in its hallowed spot above the Speaker’s throne.

Aware, perhaps, that they are intensely hypocritical for maintaining the crucifix, some Quebec legislators have argued that the Christian symbol has historical value. But this, too, is a lie. The original crucifix is long gone. The one that is up there, now, is a copy, surreptitiously nailed to the wall in 1982.

During one of the more-recent debates, last Fall – when controversy was raging about “Liberal” government’s bill that would force women to remove veils when getting on a city bus, or going to see their doctor – Francois Legault, the leader of the CAQ, was asked about the decidedly-unsecular symbol hanging above his head in his workplace. Legault shrugged. He said the crucifix should stay. “We have a Christian heritage in Quebec and we cannot decide tomorrow that we can change our past,” said the leader whose very party name is about Quebec’s future. “I don’t see any problem keeping it.”

“A Christian heritage.”

Therein lies the problem, of course. Legault is no longer a mere member of the opposition in the provincial legislature. In a few days’ time, he will be Premier of Quebec, presiding over a massive majority in the National Assembly.

At his very first press conference after the election, then, Legault dispensed with any notion that he would be the Premier of all Quebecois. To the Muslims (with their headscarves), and the Jews (with their kippahs), and the Mennonites and the Amish (with their traditional styles of dress), and the Hindus (with their tilaka markings on their faces), Legault’s message was plain: I don’t represent you. I don’t care about you. You are second-class citizens – or worse.

Here’s what he said, at that first press encounter: “The vast majority of Quebeckers would like to have a framework where people in authority positions must not wear religious signs.” And then, knowing what he wants is wholly contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and every human rights code extant, he went even further: “If we have to use the notwithstanding clause to apply what we want, the majority of Quebeckers will agree.”

From the man who said he would march newcomers to the border who lack the ability to properly conjugate verbs, and expel them – to…where? Cornwall? Vermont? Newfoundland and Labrador? – we shouldn’t be surprised, one supposes. Francois Legault has already revealed himself to be another petty, pitiful aspirant to Maurice Duplessis’ throne. He’s a hypocrite.

Andrew Scheer, however, is seemingly fine with all of that. The Conservative leader was on the phone to Legault mere moments after the polls closed, heaping praise on the Premier-elect, promising future cooperation and all that. Justin Trudeau – looking and sounding like a Prime Minister should – was much more circumspect.

As he has done before, the Prime Minister said “the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is there to protect our rights and freedoms, obviously,” adding that the state should not “tell a woman what she can or cannot wear.”

He went on: “It’s not something that should be done lightly because to remove or avoid defending the fundamental rights of Canadians, I think it’s something [about] which you have to pay careful attention.”

And we are paying attention, now. Before he is even installed, Francois Legault is making national headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Jesus, from his lonely, lofty spot above the National Assembly, might remind Monsieur Legault about what he said in Matthew 23:3. You know:

“Do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach.”

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From next week’s Hill Times:

During one of the more-recent debates, last Fall – when controversy was raging about “Liberal” government’s bill that would force women to remove veils when getting on a city bus, or going to see their doctor – Francois Legault, the leader of the CAQ, was asked about the decidedly-unsecular symbol hanging above his head in his workplace.  Legault shrugged.  He said the crucifix should stay. “We have a Christian heritage in Quebec and we cannot decide tomorrow that we can change our past,” said the leader whose very party name is about Quebec’s future.  “I don’t seen any problem keeping it.”

“A Christian heritage.”

Therein lies a problem, of course.  Legault is no longer a mere member of the opposition in the provincial legislature.  In a few days’ time, he will be Premier of Quebec, presiding over a massive majority in the National Assembly.

At his very first press conference after the election, then, Legault dispensed with any notion that he would be the Premier of all Quebecois.  To the Muslims (with their headscarves), and the Jews (with their kippahs), and the Mennonites and the Amish (with their traditional styles of dress), and the Hindus (with their tilaka markings on their faces), Legault’s message was plain: I don’t represent you.  I don’t care about you.  You are second-class citizens – or worse.

Here’s what he said, at that first press encounter: “The vast majority of Quebeckers would like to have a framework where people in authority positions must not wear religious signs.”  And then, knowing what he wants is wholly contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and every human rights code extant, he went even further: “If we have to use the notwithstanding clause to apply what we want, the majority of Quebeckers will agree.”

From the man who said he would march newcomers to the border who lack the ability to properly conjugate verbs, and expel them – to…where? Cornwall? Vermont? Newfoundland and Labrador? – we shouldn’t be surprised, one supposes.  Francois Legault has already revealed himself to be another petty, pitiful aspirant to Maurice Duplessis’ throne. 

He’s a hypocrite.

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One of the first things François Legault said, after he won the Quebec election, was this:

François Legault, the premier-designate of Quebec, says he will invoke the notwithstanding clause to work around the Charter of Rights and Freedoms so that his government can ban people in positions of authority in the province from wearing religious symbols.

The Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) Leader said on Tuesday the plan would prevent public servants, including teachers, police officers and judges, from wearing religious garments such as the Muslim hijab and Jewish kippa while performing their public functions. He would also amend Quebec’s charter of rights to impose the ban, which is long-standing party policy, but barely came up on the campaign trail.

I’ve written a lot on this subject, some of which you can see here and here. Basically, my view (as a church-going Catholic, no less) is that the secular State should never interfere with the peaceful, divine Church (and synagogue, temple and mosque).  Nor the reverse.  Neither should be dictating to the other.

But the worst thing about Legault’s bigoted, unconstitutional declaration – in these ugly and brutish times – is this, of course: his rank hypocrisy.

This guy wants to ban “religious symbols” where Quebec public servants can be found, and use the notwithstanding clause to ram through his law, does he?  Except, what about this, found on the big wall where he works, and where he does his work as a public servant?

 Pictured: law-breaking in Quebec.

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The first indication that the far Right was back was right there, right in front. Right outside the glass doors of the Corus studios in Toronto.

I stepped outside of the building, past a worried-looking pair of security guards. There they were: the ones who are neo-Nazi, white supremacist, Holocaust-denying Hitlerian InfoWars freaks. And the ones who have been “shadowbanned” on Twitter. And the birthers, the truthers, the losers. And the ones who love guns and hate people with darker skin.

The Faith Goldy herd. More than a hundred of them, at least.

They were there to protest the absence of their She-Wolf of the Clueless,Fräulein Faith, from the Global TV Toronto mayoral debate. I was there because I am helping Toronto Mayor John Tory in his re-election campaign.

When I stepped onto the sidewalk, the Goldy mob erupted in screeches and booing. They don’t like me much, apparently. A couple Toronto police officers approached as some of Faith’s flock started to follow.

“We think we should escort you to your car,” one of the cops said, and the Goldy goons peeled away. I told the cop I didn’t think that was necessary.

“We think it is,” he said. “We will escort you to your car.”

Welcome to Toronto’s 2018 mayoral campaign, folks. It’s been something.

Everywhere you look, Faith Goldy can be seen, like some foul, unkillable virus you can’t remove from your computer. There she is, slithering onto the stage at the Arts debate, her rightist goons chanting for “free speech” for them (but not for anyone else), and then calling everyone present “communists.” Goldy got led out by the police at that one. But she also got what she wanted most: the bulk of the news coverage that night.

There she is at Ford Fest – and not for the first time, either – posing for that now-infamous photo with Ontario’s Premier. Only after being pressured by the Opposition and anti-hate groups does Doug Ford tweet out his condemnation of bigotry – and, sort of, Faith Goldy.

Goldy is undeterred. She cheerily tweets back at him: “Proud to stand up for all Canadians alongside ya, Doug!”

There she is at the transit debate – or her goons, at least – doing their utmost to disrupt the proceedings. Shouting at those who are present.

I’ve been writing about the racist Right – and the anti-Semites and women-haters and the National Socialist types – for three decades. What Faith Goldy has on offer isn’t particularly new.

It’s all been done before: the plan to restrict immigration to white Europeans (as she does). The promotion of a book calling for “the elimination” of Jews (as she did). The willingness to suggest that the Nazis had “robust ideas” (as she did, too). The recitation of “the fourteen words” – the neo-Nazi pledge that was pioneered by a founder of The Order, after he helped murder a Jewish talk show host.

All of Faith Goldy’s hate and bigotry has been done before. It isn’t new. What’s different, what’s new, is what she is doing down here in Toronto – and how she is doing it.

Goldy, you see, is following in the footsteps of former Knights of the Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke – who retweets Faith’s stuff, by the by – and presenting a kinder, gentler face of hate. You’ll never catch her, then, at a cross-burning or in a Klansman’s robes. She’s too clever for that.

Goldy does what Duke did – and what Donald Trump’s acolytes do. She spews hatred and division, sure. But she does so in pithy soundbites, using code words, and the practiced smile of a telegenic panellist on Fox news. She’s good at it.

The results can’t be disputed: she’s running third in the mayoralty race, she’s raising money, she’s got plenty of followers, and she’s even doing robocalls and TV ads. Debates or not, she is making her loathsome presence felt.

Anyway. I got to my car, and I drove slowly away, a few haters hollering at me as I did.

The beast of hate is awake, folks, and he is slouching our way, too. Not just in the States, not just here and there in Europe. Here.

Faith Goldy isn’t going to win the Toronto mayor’s race. She never expected to. She had her sights set on something else.

Watching her mob in my rear view mirror, I reckon she’s already got it.

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Here:

Clow would not speak for this story.

But someone who trained him in working war rooms was happy to share some thoughts about him and the job. It was Warren Kinsella who brought the modern campaign war room to Canada in 1993, modelled on Bill Clinton’s 1992 run, and who also authored, “Kicking Ass In Canadian Politics.”

Kinsella demands three attributes from war-room staff: Keeping your mouth shut about the war room. Working fast. Doing thorough research.

These campaign operations shape news coverage by providing key components of a story, quickly, to journalists operating in a tougher environment of 24-hour news and declining research budgets: quotes, facts, and people willing to be interviewed.

“(Clinton aide James) Carville told me, ‘The media atom has split.’… You can’t just take (reporters) out to lunch and spin them and the story appears two days later,”‘ Kinsella said.

“(A war room is) basically a newsroom.”

It also provides a central hub so different offices are in contact, and don’t contradict each other. The Canada-U.S. unit includes the PMO’s Butts and Telford, Freeland, ambassador to Washington David MacNaughton, and writer Michael Den Tandt.

Kinsella was impressed with Clow’s speed, cool, and ability to pump out video content while he worked on the 2007 and 2011 Ontario Liberal campaigns.

The Trump mission is infinitely harder, Kinsella said.

Kinsella joked that in elections all his job entailed was pulling pins from grenades and lobbing them. This team must prevent explosions, while working with thousands of officials, multiple government departments, two countries, industry groups, one global economic superpower, and an unpredictable president.

The unit got to conduct early test runs.

When Trump complained about Canadian dairy and lumber, and threatened a NAFTA pullout, it handled the response. The Canadian side kept the temperature down; it responded to heated rhetoric with statistics and telephone calls, and things quickly cooled down.

“They can’t declare war on Trump,” Kinsella said. “In this situation you can’t throw hand grenades — we’re David, they’re Goliath.”

NAFTA negotiations last week offered a glimpse of the unit’s work.

The U.S. government began by complaining about Canada’s historic trade surpluses. Canadian officials were later in the lobby, handing out fact sheets showing a trade deficit.

“We used to call those ‘heat sheets,” Kinsella explained. He’d have his team slip them under hotel-room doors while reporters were sleeping, so they might shape the next day’s news.

“You build an incremental case,” Kinsella said.

“That’s how you win a campaign.”

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She says it better than I ever could:

I so loathe those people – the ones who (with Paul Martin) destroyed the Liberal Party of Canada in 2006, and the ones who (with Kathleen Wynne) have destroyed the Liberal Party of Ontario in 2018 – I won’t even utter their names.  They are beneath contempt.

Despite receiving literally hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in party and government contracts – and those latter contracts are the ones that the Premier was referring to, by the way, when he said this week that subpoenas are coming – this is the pathetic record of that loathsome crew:

• the worst-run campaign in Ontario history
• the worst result for the Ontario Liberal Party in history
• a rump that doesn’t even have party status in the Legislature
• a massive, multi-million-dollar debt, one that will now be impossible to pay off
• a decade or more in the political wilderness – without a leader, without direction, without a hope

That is the record of the Wizard and the Board.  That is what they will be remembered for.

No one should be shocked that they show up at OLP Provincial Council this weekend. So great is their arrogance – so complete is their cognitive dissonance – I would expect nothing else.

Besides, guess where they were right after the Ontario election faded into memory?

They were in New Brunswick – propelling a majority Liberal government to fewer seats and, ultimately, loss.

That, after all, is what they do best.

Losing.

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From my brother of another mother, Bernie Farber, in the Star:

Goldy is well-known to Ford. She was a colleague of the premier’s when they both appeared on SUN News panels. He was also interviewed by Goldy before she was fired from the ultra-right Rebel Media for her support of neo-Nazis in Charlottesville.

Goldy has a short but sordid history with white nationalist extremism. She didn’t start out that way. Articulate and engaging, Goldy was a devout Christian and a graduate of Trinity College at the University of Toronto. At Trinity, she received a Gordon Cressy Student Leadership Award recognizing outstanding extra-curricular contributions to the school.

From there Goldy took a sharp turn to the right. In 2015, Goldy was a co-host of a live public affairs program for Zoomer Media. I was asked to participate in a discussion on the Syrian refugee crisis. At first congenial and warm, Goldy turned right before my eyes into an anti-immigrant loudmouth hardly disguising her animus, permitting raucous racist comments from the partisan crowd.

Shortly thereafter, Goldy began her stint with Rebel Media. It seems that the influence of commentators there who engaged in anti-Semitic, racist and Islamophobic rhetoric helped turn her mind. And it was from her perch at Rebel Media that Goldy went fully into the nightmare world of white supremacy.

Warren Kinsella, author of the Web of Hate and a recognized expert on Canadian hate groups had this to say about Goldy’s experience in Charlottesville:

“The breaking point came in Charlottesville, which she was sent to cover for Ezra’s online lunatic asylum, where she’d be seen doing a stand-up not far from the woman who was mowed down by a white supremacist. That terrible week, Faith appeared on the pro-Nazi Daily Stormer, opining that there was a need for a rise in “white racial consciousness.” She also proclaimed that National Socialist types have “robust” and “well-thought-out” ideas on “the Jewish question.” Levant, a Jew and no anti-Semite himself, finally fired her.”

From that point on, her descent was rapid. She began to appear on white supremacist media sites where she recited the infamous “14 words.” (We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.) It is the credo of white supremacy evolved by David Lane, leader of the neo-Nazi terrorist group “The Order.” Lane was convicted and sentenced for violating the civil rights of Alan Berg, then a Jewish talk show host who was murdered in June 1984. Three members of “The Order” shot Berg in his driveway. Lane drove the get-away car.

Goldy’s meteoric rise in the far right continued. Appearing on a far- right television program, Goldy hyped the anti-Semitic tome For My Legionaries. Written in the 1930s, the renowned Southern Poverty Law Center describes it as “the canonical works of global fascism.” It advocated the genocide of Jews even before Hitler enacted the Holocaust. Goldy described it as “very, very, very, very spot on. . .”

 

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Defeat, in politics, is almost always preceded by some sort of an overreaction.

You know: Paul Martin, desperate to avoid defeat in the 2006 federal election, declares that he will take away the federal government’s ability to use the notwithstanding clause.  Didn’t work. He lost.

The Grant Devine government in Saskatchewan used it in 1986, desperate to ensure some public sector workers were forced back to work.  His government was subsequently defeated, and a bunch of his MLAs and staffers later served time for expense account fraud, too. For good measure, the federal Conservatives wouldn’t even let Devine run for them.

Ralph Klein, desperate to keep social conservative knuckle-draggers happy, mused about using the notwithstanding clause back in 2005, to prevent same-sex couples from getting married.  A few years earlier, in 1998, he wheezed that he’d also use section 33 of the Constitution to prevent compensation for thousands of innocents who had been subjected to forced sterilization by Alberta’s government between 1927 and 1972.

He didn’t, though, in either case.  Klein’s willingness to use brute constitutional force against gay people who love each other – and against people who had been sterilized simply because they had disabilities – will follow his name throughout time, like a foul curse.

Quebec, however, wasn’t nearly as shy as Ralph Klein.  From 1982 to 1987, in fact, the separatist Parti Quebecois government actually inserted the wording of the notwithstanding clause into every single piece of legislation it passed – so desperate were they to prevent any of their laws from being challenged in court. That all was a bit too reminiscent of a certain European nation in the 1930s, so the PQ was sent packing in 1987, and the practice stopped by the Québec Liberals.

In 1988, however, the Quebec Liberals were eventually desperate, too. So they invoked the clause to prevent people from putting English words on signs.  They got condemned by the United Nations for that, so the Robert Bourassa Liberals rewrote their anti-English law to make it somehow conform with the Charter of Rights.  Bourassa went on to quit politics, and his successor got wiped out by the PQ after just a few months in power.

See the threads weaving through all of that?  See that? Desperation, and the notwithstanding clause.  In Canada, the two go hand-in-hand: desperate politicians use the notwithstanding clause – or say they’re going to, or simply start talking about it – and then they pay a steep, steep price.

The Ontario Progressive Conservative government didn’t end up using section 33. But, so desperate were they to winnow down a municipal council by a few puny seats, they said they would if they had to.

Asked for some justification, the Ontario PCs went on and on about how judges are appointed, and how politicians aren’t. (Forgetting, apparently, that it is the politicians who do the judicial appointing, up here in Canada.)

But logic is irrelevant, among the desperate. No one knew why they were so desperate, really – would it have killed them to wait a little bit, and pass their law when an election wasn’t already underway? – but desperate they were.

So: they were condemned by one of the authors of the Constitution, Jean Chretien. They were condemned by Brian Mulroney – a fellow Conservative who (like Kim Campbell, like Stephen Harper) never, ever used the notwithstanding clause. They were condemned by another Ontario Progressive Premier, the much-revered Bill Davis.

Most notably, they were condemned by the people. Across Toronto, across Ontario, across Canada: people were mad at the Ontario Tories. The polls showed it. Whatever honeymoon the weeks-old Ontario PC government was enjoying was effectively obliterated by the constitution desperation.

Does the same fate await them that befell the others? Will they carry the notwithstanding curse to the political graveyard?

Who knows. Time will tell.

But their stated willingness to use a constitutional nuclear bomb – and their sheer desperation – will not be forgotten anytime soon.

It shouldn’t be.

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