October 2019 – The Hungover Pundit

No Justice, No Peace

Last Wednesday, 23 October, the Hamilton Police Service began arresting left-wing activists for so-called “criminal offences” committed at the protest at Mohawk College. Charges against these activists include “intimidation”, “cause disturbance”, “obstruct police” and “theft under $5000”. That “theft” charge, by the way, was levelled against a female anti-fascist protester who was attacked by neo-Nazi Andre Chiasson; her “theft” involved grabbing the Canadian flag he had fastened to a hockey stick which he had converted into a sort of spear, complete with sharpened point and custom grip… and which he was actively attacking the woman with.

She was charged with theft for defending herself while being attacked by an armed neo-Nazi in the presence of police.

This is typical of the police response to right-wing violence in Hamilton. Frankly, all the charges were trumped-up and all the people charged were victims of violence from far-right groups… groups which, it is now clear by their own boasting, deliberately attended the event to commit violent acts against protesters and on behalf of the People’s Party of Canada. Under the guise of “working security”, they committed multiple felony assaults against left-wing protesters… with the apparent cooperation and approval of the Hamilton Police Service.

The Morning After

It’s the 22nd of October and yesterday, of course, was Election Day. And of course, I stayed up until about 02:00 watching the results come in.

Long story short, it was clear very early in the evening that the Liberals would stay the government, but that they would lose their majority. It was a very tight race… and one which seemed to follow regional lines quite closely. For my part, I was mostly interested in how strong the Liberal minority would be, and seeing whether the NDP or the BQ would garner enough seats that they could make a deal propping up Trudeau. Both parties have enough seats that they can individually support the Liberals; it will be interesting to see whether the middle-of-the-road Liberals ally with the centre-left-progressive NDP or the progressive-but-separatist Bloc Quebecois. (My money’s on the NDP: openly allying with the BQ wouldn’t do much for the Lib’s popularity outside of Quebec.)

Election Day

Monday is election day here in Canada. We’re having a federal election (for my American readers, Canada has three tiers of government: Federal, provincial and municipal) and all the polls are showing that it’s a neck-and-neck race between the incumbent Liberal party under Justin Trudeau and the Conservatives under Andrew Scheer. The popular vote projection at 338Canada.com shows the gap between the two parties as less than the margin of statistical error. (For my American readers again, there are three-hundred and thirty-eight seats in the House of Commons, hence the name. In order to have a “majority” government, one party needs to hold at least 169 seats.)

While the outcome is impossible to predict, it’s clear the Liberals are going to lose the majority they’ve enjoyed — and done very little with — over the last four years. Whether we end up with a minority Liberal government or a minority Conservative government is… well, it’s too close to call, really. It’s so close that I haven’t even bothered to have a bet riding on this one, although my personal preferred outcome would be a weak Liberal minority government with the NDP holding the balance of power in either a formal or informal coalition agreement.

An Open Reply

As promised, I’m trying to get back to a regular schedule of writing after a couple of weeks that have included a family emergency, doctors appointments, coordinating multiple travel plans over hundreds of kilometres and varying levels of mobility, a heavier-than-usual round of threats and harassment from the far right… and an increasingly bleak online search for news of the whereabouts and well-being of a friend in Rojava. (I’m not going to touch too much on that last in this blog post, but it’s been a constant source of low-grade anxiety for the last several days.)

Since the Mohawk College protest the alt-right’s online hate machine has been working overtime. I’ve caught some of the splash, having been identified by the Proud Boys as someone who one of their members punched and therefore as someone who has to be slagged in order to justify a coward’s criminal assault on a protester. Far worse, though, is the harassment that was (and still is) directed at Soufi’s restaurant in Toronto because one of their family was identified as a protester; the Hamilton Centre for Civic Inclusion has also been the subject of a number of threats, many of which seem to be instigated and coordinated by the same group of co-conspirators.

No Post This Week

Astute readers of my blog will notice that I’ve missed a couple of posts on the schedule recently. This was due to family responsibilities. I’m not going to go into details publicly, but suffice it to say that this year our family Thanksgiving holiday schedule includes an entry titled “internment of the ashes.”

It’s my hope to be able resume a normal posting schedule after this holiday weekend, because there’s certainly a lot going on in the world that I want to unpack including the Canadian federal election; the far-right’s continued attack on activists (including the closure of Soufi’s restaurant following a campaign of cowardly threats by white supremacists and hate groups); the threats against HCCI by the same hate groups and apparently by an official representative of the PPC; the latest news on the continuing fallout from the Pride attack by (you guessed it) those same hate groups; antisemitic graffiti left at a synagogue and the harassment and intimidation of Muslims in their mosque in Hamilton; the community reaction to the horrifying murder of a bullied teenager in Hamilton; the attack in Halle by yet another far-right shooter; and of course the betrayal of the Kurds and the opening stages of a feared genocide in Rojava.

…

It’s been a bad week.