The Right, The Far Right, And The Not Right
The far right has a bizarre fascination with two big things: disinformation — and Russia. As we mark the 4th anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine just weeks after the Conservatives doubled down on their far-right leader, and the US and Israel are waging a new war in Iran, this seems particularly relevant.
The Conservatives, in having to protect their right flank from the full-on looney tunes People’s Party, are stuck embracing both Russia and disinformation. It is worth going back a decade for a moment to explore this.
In May of 2017, just a few months after Donald Trump was sworn into the presidency for the first time, Andrew Scheer beat Maxime Bernier for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada by a razor-thin margin of 50.95% to 49.05% in the 13th round of counting on the party’s preferential ballot — the same preferential ballot that the party opposes for the rest of us in federal elections.
Bernier won the first 12 rounds of that Conservative leadership race, with Scheer winning as the second-to-last choice of just enough supporters of the other 11 candidates to win in that final reallocated count. There is no escaping the fact that Maxime Bernier represents how a significant portion of that party saw itself at that time.
After losing, Bernier tried to split the Conservatives back into its pre-Harper constituent pieces by creating the People’s Party of Canada. As leader of his own party, he fully embraced the most extreme of right wing views, forcing the Conservative party ever-further to the right to counteract that division.
The People’s Party website today lists these platform highlights, nearly all of which raise red flags right in their framing:
Foreign Policy - Focusing on the Security & Prosperity of Canadians
Public Finance - Balancing the Budget and Then Cutting Taxes
The Media Ecosystem Observatory released a report this week entitled “Conspiratorial Claims and Institutional Distrust in Canada’s Online Ecosystem” exploring on-line disinformation and its sources and effects. Their study focused on 8 areas of on-line disinformation. They list them in the report as:
Health threats: Public health threats (e.g. COVID-19) are exaggerated to expand government control.
Gender indoctrination: Schools are indoctrinating kids with radical gender ideology.
Media-elite collusion: Major Canadian media outlets conspire with political elites to manipulate public opinion.
Election fraud: Vote counts are faked during elections in Canada.
Deep state: A secretive group of elites (‘Deep State’) holds most of the real power in Canada.
Digital ID: Digital IDs are used by the government to secretly control Canadians.
Intentional wildfires: Wildfires in Canada are intentionally started to advance the eco-agenda.
Climate hoax: Canada fakes environmental data to expand government control over Canadians.
The overlap between these high disinformation topics and the PPC platform highlights may not be comprehensive, but it is noteworthy, particularly on gender indoctrination and climate change. COVID is on the PPC complete platform as well, just not in the highlight reel. In all those cases, the PPC platform falls directly within the parameters of the studied disinformation, and it is not on the side of the evidence.
While they do not name the accounts, the study notes:
100 online users account for 68% of conspiratorial posts, capturing 90% of views and 86% of likes. The same users generally promote multiple conspiratorial claims, particularly about the deep state, election fraud, and media-elite collusion, and gain attention primarily by posting around high-profile events.
Keeping this all in mind, PPC leader Maxime Bernier wrote on Tuesday:
The West must understand that Ukraine has lost the war.
He doubled down Wednesday, reposting his own call last fall for Russia to keep the territory it has already conquered.
When trying to understand the Conservative Party and why they chose and re-chose Pierre Poilievre, remember that the adversary they are most concerned about is not Mark Carney or the Liberal Party, whose honeymoon they believe must eventually end, rather it is the right flank in the form of the People’s Party.
Built around disinformation, supporting Russia in their war against Ukraine and the West, Canada’s far right is threatening the uneasy coalition of Canada’s Conservatives. The long game for Poilievre is keeping that right wing coalition together, knowing that if the right is divided, winning will never again be possible.
In accepting that keeping the conservative movement together does not require facts, the promotion and exploitation of politically effective misinformation makes more sense. Conspiracy theories and disinformation are easier to sell than ideas and proposals. They are also harder for opponents to fight. It is difficult to argue facts with someone who believes patent falsehoods.
By embracing convoy politics, anti-vaccine rhetoric, immigration dogwhistles, climate change denial, and other extreme views in what we have come to nickname “Maple MAGA,” the Conservatives of Pierre Poilievre have succeeded in the most important part of their long game: Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party has yet to win a seat.
Why the far right in Canada and the United States is so willing to support Russia is related. The Russian propaganda machine uses disinformation to destabilise the West and has been doing so for at least a decade. This helps the far right, whose core message is that government is bad. The useful idiots have moved from being pro-Communist to pro-Putin.
For the unity of the right wing, disinformation is their fire, and the Russian money keeping it going is its fuel. Opposing Russia would be to bite the hand that feeds them.
It is also why, when the right needs to create a war of distraction, they choose a new war in the middle east over defending our ostensible allies in Ukraine.
This speaks to the need for the left in Canada to get itself back together as a full counterweight to the Liberals who, if the trend described above continues, will be in power practically forever. The NDP and Greens need to step up their game. And the lessons of conservative parties worldwide is that trying to accommodate their right fringe only moves the whole party too far to the right to be able to make a distinction between the old, tired and outmoded conservatives and the tough and invigorated far right insurgents who have weaponized disinformation and stoked hatred everywhere and are thus gaining ground with a public tired of how things are and looking for a change, without considering what such a change will bring.