For a few years now, we Canadians have witnessed a near-constant swirl of political leadership contests. I don’t mean elections, national and provincial, because those have to be spaced apart to allow time for governance. Party leadership contests, however, can pop up any old time. I’ve chosen this moment to comment because the latest leadership races (Alberta UCP and Conservative Party of Canada) are over, and the folks who voted haven’t had time (yet) to start hating the winners. It’s a narrow window, and I’m jumping through it while I can.
The newly annointed leaders are taking their bows. They’re snug (and smug) as bugs in a rug. With cheers still echoing and the banners still waving in their minds, they think they will be loved forever. Poor fools. Naïveté is a minor crime but it’s punished hard.
One day these new leaders will lose an election, and they will be stunned by how quickly their loyal followers turn on them. The turnaround time between lavishings of love and lashings of hate seems to shorten between one election and the next. As Canadians become increasingly rage-prone, the endings of political careers have become progressively messier. After a defeat, voters and party members turn on their defeated leaders (and the most visible ex-ministers) with near-hatred. They look at them and see nothing but failure, an embarrassing wreck. And what do you do with a wreck? You tow it out to sea and sink it. You send it to a yard to be cut into scrap. The wrecking yard for dispatched CPC leaders is piled particularly high.
I cannot say that Jason Kenney has ever struck me as a brilliant politician, but he has shown canniness in choosing his way out of the UCP leadership. Quitting when the pre-vote on his leadership came in just above 50 per cent was inspired. It kept him off the ice floe. By even more mysterious sleight of hand, he finagled the interim leader job while the UCP hopefuls played Survivor on the island. For Kenney, this little cloud above the fray must have been blissful, perhaps the happiest place he’d been in politics since he and Skippy Poilievre were political children, hecklers-in-chief on Harper’s opposition back bench.
But something about Canada has become a little weird, hasn’t it? These tumbrels spin night and day. The dumping of the old. The ascent of the new. At every stage: rage.
In a slower world, with long spaces between each jolt of annoyance, people had to really work to sustain a rage.
Looked at from the outside, Canada is one of the most admired nations in the world, chosen top five for freedom and prosperity year after year, applauded for its debt-to-GDP ratio, boasting one of the lowest inflation rates amid the recent world price surge. But the nation, on the inside, is a boiling fudge of discontent. Truly a rage machine.
As for why this is happening, I’m going to incur a little wrath myself by singling out social media. I won’t claim that social media is the sole cause. Would that it could be so simple. But as it’s the factor I keep noticing, I’ll elaborate.
Whether the “news” of the day be information or misinformation, it arrives instantly. Consider for a moment that not so many decades ago many rural Canadians waited a week between mail deliveries, and your mailbox could be a mile or more from the house. Even in cities, there was no minute-by-minute updating of local, national and international news stories. News was something people sat down to at the end of the working day.
Gossip was even more difficult to move than news. Unless the object of a rumour was Elizabeth Taylor, a malicious story would fall flat long before a reputation could be ruined. Even if a rumour were to succeed, it could take weeks or months. When you finally did hear about the affair or the suspected financial malfeasance, what would you do with the information? Tell a couple of acquaintances, maybe. What you couldn’t do was tweet it to 5,000 followers.
In a slower world, people had to really work to sustain a rage. With long spaces between each jolt of annoyance, distractions flowed in and piled up, the normal tides of sensory and experiential data. For normal folks, the anger would wash away, would be cooled into insignificance. Naturally there were people then, as now, who didn’t need others to corroborate or sustain their rage. The grumpy and the rage-prone have always been with us. I remember walking along a downtown street in Ottawa and seeing a man in a fury beat up a light standard. But let’s just say these self-feeders of rage were no one’s heroes. They were people to avoid. Not someone you’d vote for or roll with in a convoy.
P.S.: In this age of great fickleness, if you find a political party that can lose an election without dumping its leader, you might want to bookmark that, for you might just have located a last bastion of Canadian calmness and decency. Such a party might be a good place to park your vote next time around.
Fred Stenson’s novels include Who By Fire, The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo.
