When the political class use tactics once reserved for opponents to turn citizens on each other we must fight back
And so, we have come to this: citizens nose-to-nose in fury from Corner Brook to Victoria over the use of a four-letter word.
They/them.
We lack adequate housing, are facing down forest fires that can’t be extinguished, and feeding our families according to the Canada Food Guide is increasingly unaffordable. Still, it is drag queens and trans kids that drove Canadians to the streets last week, with arrests made in British Columbia, Ontario and Nova Scotia.
Socially conservative politicians, their advisors and allies have chosen to use drag queens and trans kids to drive wedges between neighbours in their pursuit of power.
There is a concerted campaign rolling out in Canada to isolate and render powerless non-social conservative voices and voters, and it is using the issue of trans kids in schools to do it.
New Brunswick got the ball rolling in New Brunswick, then Saskatchewan with it, and now their non-elected allies are trying to take it across the country.
Hence, the angry words and arrests last week.
We have a name for this type of political operative: ratf*cker. I insert the asterisk in deference to email spam filters.
The term first came into wide use via investigative journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and their chronicling of the Watergate scandal in All the President’s Men.
In it, they explained the term was slang for political sabotage or dirty tricks, precisely what happened when burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in June 1972.
It’s important to note that Watergate wasn’t the first appearance of ratf*cking in the political sphere; it was just the first (and last) time a sitting U.S. president was forced to resign because of it.
New Brunswickers celebrate and revere an earlier generation’s practitioner, Miramichi-born Max Aitken, benighted Lord Beaverbrook for his role as Winston Churchill’s chief propagandist.
He may have been a ratf*cker, but he was ours, so we erect statues and name buildings after him.
Because that’s the thing about political propaganda, sabotage and dirty tricks; we only denounce the practice when it’s done to us, not when it’s done for us.
When I covered politics, I spent a lot of time in the company of ratf*ckers.
Some of my best sources were expert practitioners. No modern party has ever gained power without them.
We’d seek each other out in the bar after political events and when we wanted to exchange information in quiet places not frequented by the political set.
I freely admit that I enjoyed listening to them regale me on past acts of sabotage, the times they almost got caught, and the times their candidate got cornered by a trick perpetrated by the other side.
To them, politics was and still is a rigged game, which meant their job was to exploit and manipulate it to their advantage by any means necessary.
However, most of the time, Canadian political operatives limited casualties to those who willingly played the game.
They scored political points when they mortally wounded a competitor in the eyes of voters or ridiculed and sidelined a formidable issues-based advocate or journalist.
But that isn’t what is playing out now.
They’ve crossed that line by literally crossing the street to side with counter-protesters against other citizens.
As a friend from Alberta observed recently, this new breed of politician doesn’t seek to cull opponents within their party; they seek to cull all citizens who oppose them.
To hinder their political opponents, citizens may be harmed.
Whether we like it or not, we have entered a new political arena, and those of us who seek political stability and peace can ill afford to stay on the sidelines.
It’s time for more of us – a heck of a lot more – to push back against these agents of division and work to help and heal our liberal democracy, one issue at a time.
