On Monday, October 21st, millions of Canadians went to the polls, exercised their democratic franchise, and sent a message to Ottawa with a resounding “meh.” Voter turnout was slightly lower than in 2015 at 65.95% of total eligible voters and the result was a Liberal minority government. The Conservatives did worse than they expected, the Bloc Quebecois did better, and the NDP managed to stay relevant and energized despite not having all that good a night in objective terms.
It was, in many ways, an absolutely normal Canadian election.
In other ways, not so much. The presence of the extreme-right “People’s Party of Canada” under Maxime Bernier revealed a vein of populism, racism and outright xenophobia that runs right through the Canadian political landscape. The PPC quickly became popular with Canada’s white-supremacist/fascist/neo-Nazi subculture who saw in the rise of a populist party a way to get their ideas into the mainstream political discussion. Of course, these fascist chuds very quickly convinced themselves that the PPC was the vanguard of the long-awaited populist wave which would rise up and sweep all the filthy immigrants, godless faggots and ANTIFA terrorists into the sea.
Clearly, this was not what happened… mostly because the alt-right goofs continue to ignore the fact that bots can’t vote.
That only 1.6% of the electorate cast a ballot for the PPC is in some ways a positive thing; but on the other hand something like 300,000 Canadians were comfortable voting for a party which spoke in xenophobic dog whistles and openly supported racist and homophobic policies.
Look: The systemic bedrock of racism, homophobia and colonialism which Canada is built upon is not news to those who look at our country without rose-coloured glasses. Minorities, people of colour and above all indigenous people face entrenched and systemic racism every day. This is a problem in Canadian culture, and despite genuine progress being made (slowly, though, far too slowly) the cognitive dissonance which occurs when white Canadians refuse to admit that racism is part of the very foundation of this country causes a lot of division and resentment. That cognitive dissonance is what causes hate-groups like Yellow Vests Canada and yes, political parties like the PPC to be viewed as some kind of viable alternative when it should just be laughed off the political stage.
Now that the election is over, Bernier’s temper tantrum/ego project is set to fade into an obscure historical footnote and even right-wing media sources are stating the PPC’s failure proves the futility of pushing mainstream political parties further to the right. Which, of course, has enraged the alt-right conspiracy-theory machine which helped drive what little support the PPC ever enjoyed… so enter “Hashtag-Wexit” and the latest far-right absurdity supported by a tediously familiar cast of characters.
If you’re not familiar with it (and oh, how I envy your ignorance) Wexit is a portmanteau for “Western Exit” derived from the name for a minor and ever-so-successful British political situation. (Hashtag-Sarcasm.)
Allegedly, “Canadian Patriots” are so upset at the election outcome that the four western provinces — BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, are going to rise up and form their own country without Ontario, Quebec and the rest of the country because… reasons?
It’s an absolutely stupid “movement.”
So of course, the same alt-right chuds who support Yellow Vests Canada, PEGIDA, and similar hate groups have jumped right on the bandwagon and are calling for the west to withdraw from Confederation and form a new state in North America, which will fund itself by building pipelines, cutting timber, extracting oil from the tar sands, etc. It’s notable that many supporters of Wexit are also calling for the establishment of a “European ethno-state“, which will fix all the problems because… sigh.
I can’t even quote these dumbasses without rolling my eyes so hard the screen blurs.
There is no Wexit movement. There’s the just a few dozen alt-right keyboard-warriors supported by Russian bots. Last weekend’s “Wexit rally” in Red Deer, which called for thousands of “true patriots” to flood the streets and “send a message to Justin Turd-o”… was five chilly idiots with misspelled signs. And I’m willing to bet that it’s the same five people — and only those five — who have propped up the Yellow Vests Canada movement in Red Deer for months or years. (It’s the bot problem that the alt-right keeps running into.)
That is not to deny that westerners, particularly Albertans, do have legitimate political criticisms that need to be made. Canadians of every region have their own particular concerns and interests; and they have every right to bring those concerns and interests to Parliament and to have them treated seriously and addressed with the gravity and decency which they deserve. We call that “democracy.” Everything else is details. Everybody’s got concerns and balancing those concerns is frankly one of the few reasons why we should bother to put up with the federal government. And as for those people decrying the growth of “regionalism”: Where have you been? Regional interests, like colonialism and oppressing the indigenous population, were built into Confederation from the start.
And while Hashtag-Wexit is a non-starter, Canada still has a hate-group problem; You can’t live in or near Hamilton Ontario and not know that. Maxime Bernier tried to tap into the festering wellspring of resentment, disenfranchisement and racism that spawns these groups in order to drive the PPC’s political engine, only to discover that there weren’t nearly enough people who were comfortable his party’s frank embrace of neo-fascist rhetoric and violence to win even a single seat in Parliament. For all the repugnant efforts of the alt-right, Canadians soundly rejected their message, and rightly so.
From the media coverage recently, it’s increasingly obvious that Canada doesn’t really have a western-separatism problem. What it has is the very same hate-group problem we’ve been dealing with, re-branded.
Hashtag-Wexit is a pointless argument in any case: Nobody is going to separate from Canada — even if there were a broad base of support (as in Quebec twenty-five years ago) there’s an entire constitutional framework in place to regulate a province leaving Confederation. And that framework is deliberately designed not to make it easy. There are also serious unresolved questions about the role and placement of the First Nations in any such discussion, so there’s another hurdle right there. Also, you’d never get British Columbia or Manitoba to go along with Wexit, which means an Alberta-Saskatchewan Wexit would create a landlocked oil-exporting state which would still be beholden to Canada for pipeline access to the sea, improving nothing and in fact adding another layer of diplomatic and economic problems.
But the most telling argument, to me, is that the only people who actually support Wexit are the same people who voted for the PPC. Which means something less than two percent of the population. Which means it’s a no-go right from the start. At best, it’s going to generate a few stories on a slow news day.
Hashtag-Wexit is a post-election silly-season flash in the pan. It’s entire value is that it’s a sort of rorschach test for the intentions and opinions of the alt-right. The results of that test aren’t all that surprising, of course, but they are revealing.
