Chip Wilson might be a billionaire, but he can’t buy himself a clue when it comes to politics. It’s not for a lack of trying: the Lululemon founder has dabbled in more partisan affairs of late, including throwing $380,000 at something called the “Pacific Prosperity Network” (also known as the Pacific Prosperity Foundation) in 2022 and trying to defeat the “socialists” who were running for Vancouver city council.
Now, as the BC Conservative Party tries to upend the NDP government — and, presumably, lower Wilson’s taxes — he decided it was time to go even further with his red baiting. In the process, he unwittingly made the election’s single biggest in-kind donation to the BC NDP.
It came in the form of a giant sign on his $81 million compound in Point Grey, one that was discovered — and widely mocked — by social media users. “David Eby will tell you the Conservatives are ‘far right’ but neglects saying that the NDP is ‘communist,’” the sign reads. Eby, to his credit, didn’t miss the opportunity Wilson inadvertently created for him here. “We increased the property taxes on his home, as a home over $3 million,” Eby said. “We use that money to do things like breakfast programs for kids, to expand healthcare … we use that to support the rest of British Columbians who are really struggling with affordability.”
Wilson’s sign was such obvious political poison that even John Rustad’s social media team tried to distance their campaign from it. But Rustad himself? Well, he doubled down on Wilson’s political illiteracy. “I don’t disagree with him when he calls David Eby a communist,” he told reporters.
This is becoming a theme for the BC Conservative Party leader, who keeps sounding more like a conspiracy-addled grandpa on Facebook than the potential next premier of British Columbia. But it’s also becoming a theme for Conservatives across the country, who either no longer understand what the term communism actually means or insist on pretending otherwise.
Take Wyatt Claypool, a failed candidate for a federal Conservative nomination in Calgary who is now working on the campaign of Abbotsford-South MLA Bruce Banman. “David Eby is a Communist,” he tweeted on Oct. 4. This wasn’t the only bizarre belief he volunteered on social media. "The NDP is running a fascist candidate in Surrey-Newton,” he said in a recent video unearthed by another social media user. “Trade unionism translated into Italian means fascism."
This raises some pretty obvious questions about what they teach in the political science departments at Mount Royal University and the University of Calgary, where Claypool received his pair of degrees. But it also raises some far more important ones about what’s happening within Canada’s Conservative culture and why its young acolytes are being led to believe these sorts of manifestly (and at times hilariously) incorrect things about their opponents.
As it happens, I have the answer: Pierre Poilievre. He has, for example, repeatedly tried to pretend that the Nazis and fascists were, in fact, actually socialists, all historical evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. As he said on social media in 2021, “Woke left goes crazy when people point out the undeniable historical fact that ‘national socialists’ in Germany & Italy were, as the name proves, ‘socialists.’” By this logic, the Democratic Republic of North Korea would be a democracy, not an authoritarian dictatorship. Dictators can enjoy ironic wordplay as much as the rest of us, after all.
Getting fact-checked by a literal Holocaust educator on his nonsensical statement didn’t slow him down, either. Poilievre continues to imply that Justin Trudeau is, at the very least, communism-curious. “Sign here to have a Prime Minister who doesn't admire basic communist dictatorships,” he wrote on social media in July, pointing his followers to yet another email harvesting exercise disguised as a petition.
As David Moscrop wrote for Jacobin, a lefty publication that knows a thing or two about socialism, “Trudeau is the direct descendant of the sort of Liberal that Marx warned about. Trudeau does his party’s name proud. He may be a progressive liberal, but he believes in capitalism and the free market, globalism, and the necessity of private ownership and capital at home and across borders.”
In other words: not a communist, not a Marxist, and not remotely close to either. Neither is David Eby, or any other progressive leader that Conservatives might feel the need to disparage. Do they believe in things like the greater good and the need to protect our shared commons? They do. So did Conservatives in this country once upon a time.
Now? Not so much, it seems. Instead, they’ve bought into the same hyper-partisan rhetorical inflation that’s come to define political discourse in the Trump era. Maybe, just maybe, we can put it behind us if America decides to send him packing (again) in November. But until people start paying a price for practicing this sort of politics, it’s likely to persist no matter what happens in America. Sending the BC Conservatives packing on Oct. 19 would be a good start.
Comments
Thanks for this Max. Poilievre et al.'s strategy appears to be to throw sh*t at their opponents, see what sticks, and then double down on that. Their disregard for honest discourse is disgusting and, as you say, they need to be held accountable. One day in the penalty box in the House of Commons is merely a slap on the wrist. At some point the Justice system needs to intervene.
Wilson and Poilievre and obviously too young to remember the 50s
when we used to call those of a liberal bent commie rats.
I wonder if Claypool was that guy (we all had one) in PoliSci who sat at the back and dozed through most of the lectures (I admit that some of the Profs could be prescribed as anti-insomnia remedies). As a result, he only picked up bits and pieces of the lectures on communism, capitalism, fascism, etc. Then, between his sleep deprivation and the over caffeinated counter effects, he somehow got the whole thing scrambled. How else can he claim that a communist, David Eby, could have a fascist as one of the candidates running for the same party?
Chipper may be a billionaire but he certainly doesn’t appear to be too bright
So lefties are commies, Nazies and fascists. That, according to the lazy, ignorant narrative of right wing populists and their wealthy backers seeking tax cuts from the devil.
Well, let's see. Adolf Hitler, the granddaddy of the most extreme right wing populists, couldn't win a free and fair election against the deeply democratic Communist Party of Germany in the early 1930s. Though his Nazi Party only won a minority in the Bundestag in 1933, the king still appointed Hitler as Chancellor by royal ascent, probably on the advice of big money from the Prussian elite of the day.
Hitler's party then initiated a simple false flag operation where Nazi sympathizers surreptitiously burnt down part of the Bundestag (parliament) building and paid "witnesses" to identify Communist Party personnel as the arsonists. That gave Hitler the excuse he needed to quickly round up and jail his Communist opponents, which in turn freed up the power to close down democratic institutions altogether in the coming weeks.
Sound familiar? Lately we've been seeing a lot of media on the US Republican Party's / Trump's Project 2025 that outlines a similar, if less overt plan over 900+ pages to deconstruct American democracy. It's come to that in the 21st Century, but it's an old idea from Europe that ended 12 years after it began with the total destruction of Germany and a number of other nations.
The German Communists believed deeply in the Russian version of rhetoric about elevating the worker proletariat and enhancing the common good, but their belief was shattered when Russia was invaded by Germany, and it hit back and overran eastern Europe financed with about (2024) US$80 billion in lend-lease military assistance from their then Western allies. That money was never repaid and went on to prop up the Soviets when they switched to Hitlerian totalitarian rule after WWII. Both the extreme right and left ironically assume totalitarian characteristics.
The irony is that Germany's Communist Party's had another main political opponent over 90 years ago in the Social Democrats who are in power today in a coalition with the Green Party, albeit with a sadly weak-kneed leader.
David Downing's station series books are an excellent read. The six novels that take place in Germany before, during and after WWII offer a riveting continuing saga with one main protagonist that places the reader in Berlin when it was a very liberal town until Hitler changed everything, and brilliantly interweaves history lessons into the description of the destruction, liberation and division of that city up to 1949 using the real trials and tribulations of the day imposed on two fictional main characters. Downing used Berlin's U-Bahn system as a unique thematic anchor for the series. One surprising fact I learned is that the largely Communist railway unions of the day practiced some of the most effective internal resistance against the Nazis during the war. The notable rivalry between the early 1930s Communists and Social Democrats offered Hitler a divided opposition that was easy to defeat once he became the Chancellor.
Lessons from history are important, because history truly does repeat itself. Germany 1933 >>> Project 2025.
Pointing out facts to these people will accomplish little. But for those amenable to reason, it should be understood that the basis of fascism and Nazism is an emphasis on the ethnic community, embodied in a authoritarian state, with a supreme leader who supposedly expresses the will of the nation. The ideal of universal equality, whether of individuals or peoples, is strongly rejected.
With this in mind, Mussolini said: "Such a conception of life makes Fascism the complete opposite of that doctrine, the base of the so-called scientific and Marxian Socialism, the materialist conception of history; according to which the history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various social groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production." ("The Doctrine of Fascism", 1932)
In a 1926 speech “Lenin or Hitler?”, Joseph Goebbels said: "The Socialism that we want has nothing at all to do with the international-Marxist-Jewish levelling out process. We want Socialism as the doctrine of the community. We want Socialism as the ancient German idea of destiny."
I see the loose definitions of socialism today much like the ubiquitous yellow lines painted down the centre of the public road network. A valued free asset to many, a government control device to others.
You have to wonder if the conservative right in Canada just now is suffering from a touch of bat sh**t crazy.....they certainly have never been anywhere near a political science class.
Perhaps they're just unscrupulous politicians who took graduate courses in dog whistles, red herrings and other logical fallacies good at stirring up the ignorant, the paranoid, and the proud 'wealth creators' who have done so well under neoliberalism.
But seriously Canada....are we going to fall for stupid? Watch while the lap dogs of the 1% convince us to stick with private big pharma, destroy our single payer medical care system, and push labour unions into extinction?? Because affordability has become an issue for many of us, are we actually going to fall into the lap of those who get rich creating unaffordability??
I'd like to personally remind Rustad and company: The communist scare tactic is most often used by fascists. Once fascists achieve power we'll all get a swift lesson of how unregulated capitalism likes to work....
It won't be pretty.