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 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. As it turns out, dictators can enjoy ironic wordplay as much as the rest of us. 

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.  

Don’t throw the pollsters out with Angus Reid’s bathwater

You know you’ve had a rough weekend on the internet when you have to delete your Twitter account. That’s what happened to Angus Reid, the namesake and founder of the Angus Reid Institute and a legend of sorts among pollsters in Canada, after he made some deeply ill-advised social media posts — and an even more ill-advised apology for them. 

His account came back briefly so he could try to spin his departure, but he failed to address the reputational damage he’s done to both his own non-profit and the broader polling industry. Just days after a deceptive edit of Pierre Poilievre sparked a national conversation about ethics in media, Reid fell for a flagrantly deceptive edit of the prime minister’s words back in 2021 about church burnings. “Shame on Trudeau,” Reid wrote on social media. “Completely unacceptable for our PM to legitimize church burning.”

That’s not what he did, though. It’s worth transcribing Trudeau’s entire remarks, if only so we can see the context that was elided in the clip Reid shared: 

It is unacceptable and wrong that acts of vandalism and arson are being seen across the country,” Trudeau said, “including against Catholic churches. One of my reflections is that I understand the anger that’s out there against the federal government, against institutions like the Catholic church. It is real, and it is fully understandable given the shameful history that we are all becoming more and more aware of and engaging ourselves to do better as Canadians. 

But I can’t help but think that burning down churches is actually depriving people who are in need of grieving and healing and mourning from places where they can actually grieve and reflect and look for support. 

We shouldn’t be lashing out at buildings that can provide solace to some of our fellow citizens, but we should be every day committing ourselves, each and every one of us, to the hard work we need to do to actually rebuild a path forward that reflects the terrible intergenerational trauma and present day realities of suffering that we are all collectively responsible for.

Does this sound like someone trying to “legitimize” church burning? Or does it sound like someone who’s trying to understand the situation with the correct measures of empathy and thoughtfulness? 

But I digress. The real issue here isn’t the Prime Minister’s approach to ongoing burning of churches in Canada, many of which have ties to the residential school system. It’s the impact that Reid’s comments will have on the perception of public opinion research in Canada, a field that’s already on shaky ground with a lot of members of the public. It’s yet another blow to trust in institutions at a time when we can least afford it — one struck, ironically, by perhaps the most famous pollster in Canada. 

That blow is being most keenly felt on the progressive side of the partisan ledger. For more than a year now, the polls — all of them — have shown that the Trudeau government is staring down the barrel of an increasingly inevitable defeat at the hands of Poilievre’s CPC. It’s led some folks to suggest that pollsters are actually trying to create this outcome rather than measure it, whether that’s by deliberately juking their results or allowing them to be weaponized by others. 

This is nonsense. As Evan Scrimshaw noted on his Substack, “There is no meaningful difference in opinion polling based on pollster methods, partisan/ideological belief of the public-facing head of the company, or anything else.” Case in point: the Angus Reid Institute’s most obvious so-called “house effect” (translation: apparent bias in results of its polls) is pro-Ontario NDP, while it consistently under-sold the BC Conservative Party’s rise to prominence. As Scrimshaw writes, “If he was putting his thumb on the scale I doubt he’d be doing so for Marit Stiles, Andrea Horwath, and Kevin Falcon. Quito Maggi [the owner of Mainstreet, another polling firm] is a member of the Ontario Liberal Party. Frank Graves, for all his bravado and his tweets, has the CPC lead in his last release at 15.6%, and that’s because EKOS has a slightly lower NDP reading than some others. There’s no conspiracy here.”

I understand the desire to find something or someone to blame for Poilievre’s rise from annoying pipsqueak to Thanos-like inevitability. I’m happy to grant that the media ecosystem in Canada, one that leans heavily to the right, has helped shield Poilievre (so far, anyways) from a lot of scrutiny that his decisions deserve. I’m downright anxious to point out the corrosive effect that social media — and especially right-wing social media — is having on our collective ability to sort political fact from fiction. In some ways, Reid’s remarks were a reminder of how that can impact even the people who should otherwise know better. 

 But this doesn’t mean the media is somehow complicit in the government’s woeful polling numbers — and that goes double for the people and firms gathering them. The government is, in the main, the architect of its own political misfortunes, both because of decisions it’s made and the drag that incumbency exerts after nearly a decade in office. 

If Liberal partisans want to see their party’s numbers improve, they should encourage their party’s leaders to make some different choices. Blaming the pollsters or the media only leads down the same dark and dangerous roads that Republicans have spent the last eight years mapping out in excruciating detail.  

Conservatives say they love free speech. So why are they so afraid of it? 

Donald Trump’s decision to avoid another presidential debate with Kamala Harris was understandable, given the absolute thrashing she gave him in their Sept. 10 encounter. But he’s hardly the only conservative politician to duck out of a public debate these days. If anything, it’s become a trend — and a worrying one for those who care about the state of democracy in Canada. 

In New Brunswick, for example, Progressive Conservative leader Blaine Higgs begged off on a second debate with his Liberal and NDP opponents on the basis of a “scheduling conflict.” In BC’s election, Conservative candidates are avoiding town halls and other public forums practically as a matter of policy. In Kelowna, the Conservative candidate even refused an invitation from the local chamber of commerce. “I find it sad that people who want to represent people in their riding and be an elected official are deciding to not get themselves out in front of the electorate, and hear from the people,” the chamber’s acting chief executive officer Colleen Clark told the Kelowna Daily Courier. “I’ve never seen this before, and I’ve been doing all-candidate forums since 1994, where candidates from a main party decline to show up.”

Rustad’s party pushed things even further at a press conference on Tuesday, when the moderator tried to control the topics that journalists could ask about — and cut off the Times Colonist’s Les Leyne when he refused to comply with the edict. As longtime political journalist and legislative reporter Vaughn Palmer noted, “I’ve not seen that happen with David Eby, who takes questions on all topics.”

Maybe these cowardly Conservatives are taking their cue from Pierre Poilievre, whose campaign (in)famously paid a $50,000 fine to avoid a third debate during his party’s 2022 leadership race. It didn’t seem to hurt him, after all. But whatever tactical merits this duck-and-cover strategy might have for individual candidates, the damage it does to the broader democratic system should be obvious. 

We should have more debates — way more. Anyone who wants to serve in public office should be required to subject their ideas, values and beliefs to scrutiny, whether it’s coming from a group of journalists or an open public forum. Hiding inside a narrowly-drawn and heavily guarded bubble might prevent them from making mistakes, but that just speaks to why those bubbles need to be pierced.

And if there’s any political party that should support my call for more debates — more speech — it’s the conservative ones. They are, after all, the folks who talk most passionately and volubly about the importance of free speech in our society. Their refusal to exercise said speech at the very moment when the public is being given an opportunity to assess its contents is, I think, a pretty obvious tell. 

But, then, rank hypocrisy has never been much of a stumbling block for conservative politicians. Just ask Donald Trump. 

Recommended reading

In The Narwhal, Drew Anderson has an excellent piece on the anti-renewables opposition in rural Alberta and what’s really informing it. I’ll just say this much: the pictures here are worth more than a thousand words, although the words around them are damned fine on their own. 

At The Bulletin, Florida atmospheric and environmental scientist, meteorologist and hurricane expert John Morales wrote about his evolution into a climate activist — one that’s especially timely as Hurricane Milton bears down on the state. “For decades I had felt in control,” he writes. “Not in control of the weather, of course. But in control of the message that, if my audience was prepared and well informed, I could confidently guide them through any weather threat, and we’d all make it through safely. Today as a result of so many compounding climate-driven factors, the warming world has forcibly shifted my manner from calm concern to agitated dismay.”

And over at The Guardian, Oliver Milman writes about the latest findings from Dr. Robert Howarth on LNG’s environmental footprint. “The idea that coal is worse for the climate is mistaken – LNG has a larger greenhouse gas footprint than any other fuel,” the Cornell University professor and environmental scientist says. The peer-reviewed work is the latest challenge to the narrative spun by the gas industry — and the politicians in their thrall — that LNG is an unalloyed environmental good. 

The industry will, of course, dispute his findings, especially around the upstream methane leakage coming from older wells and pipes. They will point to their own data, much of it self-reported by companies, that suggest much lower levels. But with a growing number of satellites tracking these operations and their emissions, it’s only a matter of time before the truth comes out. The only question left then will be whether we actually listen to it.