Somewhat unsurprisingly for those present at the time, the gang of young accusatory sign-wavers were Conservative party interns, sent forth from the prime minister’s office to disrupt the announcement, Raj reports. As Trudeau tried to tell the press about his party’s new plan to offer expense disclosures starting in the fall, the students (as they identified themselves to RCMP at the time) held up signs suggesting Trudeau’s stance on disgraced Liberal Senator Mac Harb (that once he’d repayed his debts, he could again join the party caucus) was upholding the status quo.
“Liberal party researchers and journalists identified several participants in the demonstration — among them Maddy Stieva, Carl-Olivier Rouleau, Stav Nitka, Nick Young, James Mitchell and Grant Dingwall,” Raj reported Tuesday morning. “None returned messages requesting comment.”
Over at Maclean’s, Aaron Wherry notes that while this isn’t necessarily revelatory information (Twitter was almost immediately rife that day with pictures of some of the “protesters” that linked back to Conservative ties), but that it’s interesting to study “even if only to convey the extent (or depths) to which those who manage political parties will go in pursuit of victory.”
How far they would go was certainly obvious at the time, based simply on how little nuance there was to the whole thing. It was so on-the-nose, that some suspected it might have even been the New Democrats, craftily staging a “Conservative” protest to undermine both the government and the Liberals at the same time. That it was the Conservatives who sent minions out to brashly hoist placards plastered with lines lifted directly from party advertising and talking points was, while somewhat unsurprising, at least a bit galling.
It so happens that at the Globe and Mail Tuesday, David McLaughlin, the former deputy minister to the New Brunswick Commission on Legislative Democracy, lamented that, “faithful to the partisan glue binding them to their parties, our political class is doing everything possible to diminish, demean, and destroy the precious commodity they actually hold in common: their own political integrity.”
Their relentless attacks, he says, “devalue political currency,” and voters end up the losers for it.
That depends, of course, on how one defines “integrity.” How do we define it? How do we expect our leaders to? And what happens when their definition of it differs from ours? It remains somewhat unclear whether we have collectively decided what the answers to the first two of those ought to be, but given our endorsement of the attack ads and the farcical talking points – either directly, by holding them as truths on which to base a vote, or tacitly, by not voting at all – we seem to be okay with the way the parties have outlined its meaning so far. Which basically answers the third question. We may like to think we have a different, stricter and more nostalgic definition of “integrity,” but darned if we’ve held anyone to it lately.
So, perhaps we must conclude that if our definition of integrity is simply the ability to take a strong, yet mostly stupid and reactionary stand on something, then arguably, in a warped world (ie. this one), protesting a partisan event with another partisan event is something of that kind. What could show more integrity than launching one PR stunt to compete against another?
Thinking back on that grey morning, it now strikes that perhaps the most galling part of the “protest” against Trudeau’s statement wasn’t really that it was a partisan attack, but that it was happening outside in front of hundreds of people – even if they were distracted by their weekly mass yoga routine on the Parliamentary lawn – rather than in the safety of the House of Commons, where we can all at least pretend to believe nobody notices it.
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