Why I Fear the PPC and You Should as Well.

Leader of the People's Party of Canada, Maxine Bernier being arrested in June of 2021.

Tragically for decent people everywhere, one of the winners of tomorrows election seems likely to be the fledgling Peoples Party of Canada (PPC), who have managed to get themselves close to 10% in popular support in the prairie provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba in recent opinion polls. Whether they are able to elect anyone remains to be seen, but just the thought of one of them winning scares the hell of out me, and I think it should scare you too.

Before we go any further, let's recap how the 2021 federal election has gone for the PPC. So far in this campaign, the People's Party of Canada:

• ·Had a candidate who has a life coaching business that offers “testicular breathing workshops” that help young men work on “semen retention” by resisting the urge to masturbate

• Had another candidate who made a video game where the object of the game was to shoot minorities (such as gay people at pride) for fun

• Has a party leader who was arrested at a campaign stop for violating public health orders

• Had a riding association president who was arrested for throwing rocks at the Prime Minister at a tour stop

• Participated in anti-mask, anti-vaccine protests, most repulsively, in front of hospitals

• Had a candidate, Renate Siekmann, who distributed a leaflet with an image of Indigenous children forced to attend Naniamo Residential School arguing that vaccine mandates/passports are similar discrimination

• The same candidate also put out a video calling for Dr Bonnie Henry, BC Provincial Health Officer, to be “immediately arrested” because of COVID public health orders and vaccines

This is just the most notable of their bozo eruptions, I am sure there is more but I decided to stop looking. I think this makes it clear: if even one PPC MP is elected, it will be too many. One MP is how it starts. One MP gets an office with taxpayer funded staff. One MP gets to ask questions in the House of Commons, which then get broadcast on national television, clipped for the evening news, and endlessly circulated on social media. One MP means the PPC qualifies for an invitation to the national televised Leaders Debate, as this is what is needed to meet the consortiums criteria. 2% in the national popular vote means that Elections Canada will rebate 50% of the PPC’s central campaign costs; given that they raised over 2.6 million during the 2019 election cycle, this is likely to be a large cheque. One seat is all they need to force every other party to respond to them, to talk about their issues, to give credibility to the dangerous anti-science ignorant nonsense they pass off as party platform. One seat is all that is needed to force the larger Conservative Party of Canada to pay close attention. How long would it be before the CPC is forced to consider merging with the PPC, following a similar path as the Reform Party, which started with Deb Gray’s one seat in 1989 and ended with Stephen Harper spending 2006 to 2015 in the Prime Ministers office? The PPC is already having an impact on conservative politics in our most conservative province, Alberta, where COVID cases are skyrocketing out of control. Things have gotten so bad in AB that many patients are being sent out of province to receive care that Alberta’s over stretched health care system can no longer provide. The governing party in AB, the United Conservative Party, sold hats that said “Best Summer Ever” to celebrate the lifting of COVID restrictions and ending the pandemic. But “Best Summer Ever” became “fuck around and find out fall” with the fourth largest province in the country having the highest number of daily new covid cases (a stunning fact when you remember there are millions more people in Ontario). The PPC is strongly opposed to all COVID health measures and protections, and Alberta’s conservatives have been slow to act on COVID because they know anything they do has the potential to drive their anti-vax supporters into the open arms of the PPC.

The Conservative’s hired Topham Guerin, a PR company founded in New Zealand well known for their memes. Early in the election campaign, the Conservatives tweeted out a poorly edited video clip from the 1971 version of ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ with Justin Trudeau’s face pasted on top of the character Veruca Salt, a character whose defining trait is that she is the spoiled child of a rich father. The video was mocked for its poor quality and rightly condemned for its offensiveness. Then, there was an image of a door hanger leaflet from the Conservatives that went viral because its text was riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. Again, more mockery and condemnation online. But these memes weren’t really mistakes. Rather, they appear to be calculated efforts to go viral in any way possible, to grow the size and reach of the social media account that shared this content, so that when the party does want to release a serious political message, a bigger audience sees it.

Viewed under this lens, the PPC’s “testicular breathing candidate” is less funny and more diabolical. PPC candidates going viral for doing horribly offensive or comically ignorant things has the same effect as mocking the Conservative door hanger filled with spelling errors – it doesn’t really matter that most of the traffic generated is negative, it still grows the audience and helps the campaign reach new supporters.

But wait, my progressive partisan friends say, the PPC at 10% would “split the vote” on the right and would help non-Conservatives get elected! In the short term, this analysis is probably correct, as market research does seem to suggest most (but not all) PPC voters are unhappy former Conservative voters. But the longer-term consequences of this thinking are frightening to contemplate. Any progressive gains made by a vote split on the right would likely be eventually wiped out when the right wing stops arguing with itself and remembers who its actual opponents are.

There is innate privilege to excitement about the benefits of a potential vote split on the right. It neglects to contemplate the very real harm that occurs when dangerously ignorant, unqualified people are given positions of power. As a cisgender white man with all the privilege that entails, I cannot begin to imagine how it would feel to be an Indigenous person in a riding represented by a PPC MP, knowing your MP is so ignorantly racist they think vaccine passports are the same as residential schools. I could not imagine what it would be like to be a Syrian or Afghan refugee with an MP who has been as openly hostile to immigrants as the PPC has. How will health care workers, who have sacrificed a great deal over the last 18 months, feel about having an MP who hurls conspiracy theories at them for just doing their job? If the PPC wins one seat, it will cause real harm for real people and it is not okay to ignore this harm because you think your preferred candidate will benefit from a vote split.

It is foolish for us to underestimate the PPC, just as it was foolish for Hillary Clinton to underestimate Donald Trump. The bar for success for the PPC tomorrow is very low, they only need to win one seat. This has likely been a nothing-burger election where we end up right where we started. Which leads me to wonder, how will history remember this campaign? What is the most significant story of the election, the one that will last over time? Will it be how a man threw a rock at the Prime Minister and then his party was elected to parliament? Decent people everywhere should be hoping that it isn't.