I haven’t written anything in a while, as I hope at least someone noticed. I have been reading a lot though, and a lot of what I’ve read makes me nuts.
We like to think here in Canada that we are doing better as a society than our noisy neighbours to the south, but sometimes I wonder. In their election in 2016, social media was full of memes and posts nudging voters to be angry and move toward the political right, ie vote for Trump. The conjecture is that many of these posts were made by the Russians and that it was interference from a foreign country. We have an election coming up in the fall, and I have seen dozens of posts on Facebook about how badly Canada is doing, how repressive the current government is, how our Prime Minister is a chicken/spoiled brat/wiener who has ruined the country etc. Most of the time I scroll by, in the interest of preserving my sanity, but every so often I research the subject and find that it is nearly always false.
Every time I correct the facts, I get verbally assaulted for defending Trudeau and all his sins. Fact is, I never defend him, and if someone suggests this or that about him as an opinion, I let it go. Opinions are fine, but telling lies to sway others’ opinions is not. I suppose if I saw a post that told some huge half truths about Andrew Scheer I would stop and correct them, too, but I never see such a thing. The fact is that every single meme and post that is breathlessly angry and full of exaggerations comes from the right side of centre, aiming at the political left. It is the same modus operandi and political slant that the Americans dealt with three years ago. Do these posts originate in Russia too? I saw warnings early on that they might interfere here, but I haven’t seen anyone connect this wave of bullshit to them yet. Key word: yet.
A few examples of the crap I have wrestled with the pigs over:
-The Liberal government has lost its moral authority to govern based on the SNC-Lavalin scandal and the five, count ’em, five, times they have been investigated for ethics violations. I had to remind the torch wielding mob that their hero Stephen Harper abused his power 70 times, which got me called some choice names until I actually posted all 70 for their enjoyment.
-A meme of an angry guy who writes on his tax return that millions of illegal immigrants, poor people in far away places and various criminals and drug addicts are his deductible dependents. I crunched the numbers and found out that his numbers were hugely inflated. Also we give less to foreign aid than we did when Harper was PM, and in fact we give the least per capita of any developed country. Then I mentioned that Angry Meme Guy’s biggest dependents were, by far, seniors and veterans which he should be proud to support.
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-A super right wing Christian newsletter says Canada is forbidding Christians from demonstrating, and it showed a picture of that commie Trudeau. I didn’t really set out to defend the guy, but what the site was referring to is a new piece of legislature in Ontario that prevents people with hate agendas to gather and spout nonsense. (Funny the Christians think that applies to them, isn’t it?) Doug Ford’s government came up with that Bill, but he’s conservative like they are, so they don’t want to cast him in a bad light. Why not just post a picture of Trudeau so the person scrolling by gets another negative image of him?
-The price of gas is super high now because of the Carbon Tax, so we need to get a new government to save us from this family-killing tax. Fact is, since 2012 the Carbon Tax has gone up 2.2 cents per litre. I drive 112 km a day to work and back, so I figure it is bringing poverty my way at about a dollar a week. I sure hope I can hold on! Besides Canada is only producing 1.6% of the world’s carbon pollution, so why do we bother? Well, that makes us the third worst polluters in the world – our carbon emissions are more than twice the per capita rate of China – so there’s that to think about.
If all these memes and posts were true, changing governments would be a great idea. My fear is that there will be a lot of people who will vote based on this crap, and won’t bother to question anything. Maybe we as a society are complacent about our information, assuming if it’s published it must be true. We should either teach critical thinking or have some resource or watchdog to keep ‘facts’ factual.
I’m a little disenchanted with the government too, to be honest. If someone comes along with something other than mudslinging and baloney, I am willing to listen. But if your campaign strategy is character assassinations of your rivals, then no thanks. Every candidate running must have ideas of what they’ll do when they get elected, why not spend a few advertising dollars on telling us what they are? Rampant negativity is what got everyone sick of Harper in the end. He wasn’t doing a terrible job, but his campaign was nothing but attack ads, which I read afterward had everyone tuning him out.
Just take this stuff with a grain of salt and don’t be afraid to do some research if the facts seem a little over the top. Think of it as a boil water advisory for your mind. I’d almost welcome a chance to be fair and defend Andrew Scheer and Jagmeet Singh, but so far I haven’t encountered any angry hordes calling for their heads.