Niagara Falls Review e-edition

Politicians judged by their company

GEOFFREY STEVENS CAMBRIDGE RESIDENT GEOFFREY STEVENS IS AN AUTHOR AND FORMER OTTAWA COLUMNIST AND MANAGING EDITOR OF THE GLOBE AND MAIL AND MACLEAN’S. HE WELCOMES COMMENTS AT GEOFFSTEVENS40@GMAIL.COM

“He that goeth to bedde wyth Dogges, aryseth with fleas.”— English author/translator James Sanford in “Garden of Pleasure,” 1573

This is the earliest known reference in the English language of the well-known proverb or idiom. It appears again in1612 in John Webster’s play, “The White Devi1,” where it is rendered as “For they that sleep with dogs, shall rise with fleas.”

In other words, we are known by the company we keep. If we associate with characters of ill-repute, we can expect society to hold us in the same low esteem.

Which brings us to Pierre Poilievre.

He’s been around the political game long enough, a member of Parliament since 2004, to appreciate the importance of a clean reputation, and to know how readily it can be lost. So what was this experienced practitioner doing last February during the “Freedom Convoy” occupation of Ottawa?

He was busy squeezing every possible drop of political advantage out of the truckers’ anti-vaxx movement. He posed for the cameras with Jeremy MacKenzie, the leader of the most militant faction in the protest, and he told the crowd he shared their cause: freedom from the Liberal government’s vaccine mandates.

Only much later did Poilievre say that he had not known in February who MacKenzie was, that his was just one of many hands he had shaken.

OK. In that case, he would not have been aware of MacKenzie’s arrest record, and, like most Canadians, he would never have heard of Diagolon, the online, far-right “community” founded by MacKenzie with some similarly disillusioned veterans of the war in Afghanistan.

That’s fair enough. But it doesn’t excuse Poilievre. He has eyes and ears. He could see and hear what MacKenzie’s followers and hangers-on were doing on Parliament Hill in February. It boggles the mind that a politician with aspirations of national leadership would be so blinded by ambition that he would cast his lot with extremists who defaced the Canadian flag, trotted around with a reproduction of the prime minister’s head impaled on a pike, and called for the overthrow of the country’s democratically elected government.

This supposedly savvy politico deliberately lay down with MacKenzie’s pack of dogs. That he arose with fleas mattered not a whit to the members of the Conservative Party of Canada who overwhelmingly elected him leader last month. Nor did they care, or notice, that he had made no effort to shake off the fleas.

As new charges, most of them weapons-related, were added to the MacKenzie dossier this year, there were opportunities — in March, June and July — for Poilievre to recant, to apologize for having endorsed the extremists’ cause. But it wasn’t until a week ago — after a tipsy MacKenzie suggested to supporters during an online forum that they could show off their power by raping Poilievre’s wife, Anaida — that the man who would be prime minister confronted the reality that he had been playing for the wrong team.

“These men are dirtbags. They are all odious,” he said. His words had a rare ring of genuine emotion: “This kind of garbage has no place in Canada. No one should face this abuse. Leave my family alone.”

Where, one asks, was Poilievre when women journalists, especially racialized ones, were being threatened with rape and worse by these same odious dirtbags while they were covering the trucker convoy and the Conservative leadership campaign? Not a word of understanding or support from the man who thinks he has what it takes to be the leader of all Canadians.

OPINION

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2022-10-03T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-10-03T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://niagarafallsreview.pressreader.com/article/281582359516114

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