'Lock-her-up' chant shows post-fact mood of Alberta politicsChanting aside, Premier Rachel Notley faces constant allegations that she’s against jobs and pipelines.
“Well, I don’t know what to say about that,” Notley said when asked for her reaction.
“I don’t know if the people who say that are real or just Twitter constructs. I hope we haven’t moved into the post-fact world to quite that degree.”
If Alberta isn’t quite there yet, we’re moving fast.
The day after Notley made the comment, people shouted “lock her up” at a big legislature rally against the carbon tax and virtually everything NDP.
Then she went to Vancouver to promote the Kinder Morgan pipeline.
Her schedule on the coast is deliberately short on detail, so that pipeline opponents can’t make her the focus of a protest.
The sentiment in that crew, mostly left-wing, would be pretty much the same — lock her up.
The Alberta right calls her an enemy of the economy; the coastal left says she’s an enemy of the climate.
Notley makes light of the chanting. On Monday she even came close to congratulating right-wing activist Ezra Levant for organizing the rally — “good on him,” she said.
The trouble is that there’s no nuance, no middle ground. We seem to be heading into the dark American world where truth is defined by the intensity of anger and emotion, not by fact.
Alberta’s conservative parties obsess over the fact that two members of the government’s 18-person oilsands advisory panel, Tzeporah Berman and Karen Mahon, oppose the pipeline.
This must be proof of secret sabotage, even though it’s obvious those people have no impact on the NDP’s pipeline policy.
The fact (the original kind) is that Notley launched a climate policy upheaval in order to secure a pipeline.
But now, even though Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the policy helped win approval, she must be against pipelines.
The “lock her up” chant, of course, was used against Hillary Clinton at Donald Trump rallies during the U.S. election campaign.
It was based on suspicion about her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. Although the FBI found no grounds for charges, there was cause for public concern.
What’s the case for locking up Notley? There is none — no scandal, no hint of wrongdoing, no family foundation with a sketchy history.
The American attacks on Clinton led to president-elect Trumps’s first broken promise. He now says he won’t prosecute her. Even he must have realized what a horrible precedent that would have been, especially for himself.
But post-fact is on the loose.
On Sunday a man named Edgar Maddison Welch walked into a Washington, D.C., restaurant called Comet Ping Pong and fired a rifle. He was “self-investigating” a report that Clinton ran a child sex abuse ring out of the restaurant.
This vicious and preposterous claim began on a fake news site, the kind that now gets more readers than news organizations with trained reporters and ethical standards.
Only a few months ago, most people were assuming all this was a disturbing but minor social trend that would never gain power in the U.S., and certainly not in Canada.
Now, Trump continues to spout outlandish conspiracy theories. The son of his nominee for the National Security Agency retweeted the fake story about Clinton. The post-fact era has come to the White House.
This is not just a right-wing phenomenon. Trolls on the left can be just as nasty. Every word from Jason Kenney, as he seeks the PC leadership, is assumed to be evidence of a devious plot.
Conservative leaders quickly disowned the “lock her up” crew. We’re Canadian, after all. We circle American trends cautiously before adopting them.
But it’s becoming ominously clear that some politicians are testing the market for post-fact politics. It can get out of hand, very quickly.
Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald
Twitter: @DonBraid
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https://www.facebook.com/DonHBraid/
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