A Moment for Canada’s Far Right, Still Struggling for Support - The New York Times
The country’s political system has made it hard for fringe groups to gain influence. But a new cause, and fund-raising across borders, could begin to fuel Canadian populists.
B.J. Dichter, who was listed on the convoy’s official fund-raiser alongside Ms. Lich, has said that “political Islam” is “rotting away at our society like syphilis.”
The organizers are mostly fringe activists, rather than truck drivers, an overwhelming majority of whom are vaccinated.
Pat King, who is listed as an official contact for a regional group involved in the protest and has been a prominent champion of the protests online, has called Covid a “man-made bioweapon” and claimed that international financiers seek to “depopulate the Anglo-Saxon race.” He has said of lockdowns, “The only way that this is going to be solved is with bullets.”
“You did have far-right populism — historically it was there — but it was isolated,” said Jeffrey S. Kopstein, a Canadian political scientist at the University of California, Irvine.
Canada’s populist right has lagged, Dr. Kopstein said, in part because the typical drivers of such movements — cultural polarization and white racial resentment — are less prevalent in the country than in other Western nations.
The country’s large and politically well-organized immigrant populations mean that both major parties see greater gain in courting immigrants than in cultivating white backlash.
As a result, Canada’s Conservative leaders have neither embraced nor been co-opted by the more extreme elements in their base to the same degree as some other right-wing parties.
Romana Didulo, a Canadian QAnon activist who has called for military executions of doctors who vaccinate children.
Canada’s populist right, though homegrown, is also heavily influenced by its far more numerous and better-resourced American counterparts. This helps provide the movement with energy and direction, though often in ways that hinder its influence in Canada, where Donald J. Trump is deeply unpopular.
But in years since, populist movements across the Western world have continued to rise and to coordinate across borders, helping to aid their Canadian counterparts’ slow but steady growth.
In a demonstration of this effect in action, a number of American political and media figures, including Mr. Trump, have forcefully endorsed or promoted the trucker protests. Americans are thought to have provided much of the $8 million raised online for the convoy.
And there is another change: Canada’s Conservative Party, after a difficult year, may be rethinking its longstanding practice of isolating conservative fringes.
Party officials recently ousted Erin O’Toole, the party leader, in part, they said, for insufficiently embracing the truck protests.
The new interim leader attracted controversy last year when a photo surfaced showing her wearing a Make America Great Again hat. Several Conservative lawmakers have since visited the protests in support. One was photographed alongside Mr. King, the white nationalist and conspiracy theorist, though later issued a statement condemning “any violent rhetoric.”
In some ways, support for the protests seems to reflect public opinion oscillations related more to the pandemic than to the far right.
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