The video pans shakily across what looks like a lobby in any mid-sized administrative building in the country, before zeroing in on its target — a woman in a black dress who wheels around when her name is called.
But the tone changes abruptly when the tall, bearded man calls out to Chrystia Freeland again: “What the f— are you doing in Alberta? You f—ing traitor,” he calls, as he and another woman follow Freeland and her staff into a waiting elevator.
That scene Friday — as Deputy Prime Minister Freeland, herself the daughter of a northern Alberta farmer, made a stop in the province — has drawn near-universal condemnation.
But it’s also tapped a vein of political rage in this country that experts say had been festering quietly for years before being exacerbated by a global pandemic and fed by politicians offering easy answers to complex problems — and then being dumped into the social media churn.
“What we saw on the weekend was video of someone who was doing this to intimidate Minister Freeland, but also to have a video of themselves doing this to show it off to their friends, and that’s relatively new,” said Lisa Young, a political scientist at the University of Calgary.
In some ways the encounter follows on the heels of what experts say is a degeneration of how politicians are treated in this country — a crowd threw small rocks at Prime Justin Trudeau in London, Ont., last September, while NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was approached by protesters yelling profanity and calling him a “piece of s–t” at a Peterborough campaign stop in May.
But the fact that this incident was captured in a close-up on a smartphone, one showing Freeland, who once tweeted she was “5’2” on a good day,” being approached by a much taller man shouting profanities, seems to have hit a chord.
Politicians from various parties, as well as political scientists and security experts, have recently expressed concerns about the dangers of public life in the face of social-media toxicity, anti-establishment populism and the prevalence of false information. Those concerns were reiterated on Monday.
Federal Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino says rising threats against politicians and journalists are imperilling the Canadian political system, and the government is exploring “all options” to keep MPs safe from the people they represent.
“The threats that we see don’t only impact the individuals, their families and their teams. It represents a threat to our democracy,” Mendicino said. “We really need to bring the temperature down and just remember that we’re all trying to make the country better.”
It may never have been easy to be in the public eye, but many experts say it’s getting worse. In a study about online abuse during the 2019 federal election, University of British Columbia researchers found digital abuse was often accompanied by offline threats, harassment and marginalization, particularly for women and racialized candidates.
That study recommended better laws and police procedures to address online threats, defamation, and hate speech, and that social media channels develop better enforcement of their terms.
Though a comparable study wasn’t conducted after COVID, professor and researcher Heidi Tworek said she believes threats have since increased, pointing to a 2021 Ipsos survey showing 72 per cent of journalists reported experiencing harassment in the last year.
“I really do feel that this has become more of a problem over the last couple of years,” she said.
Marci Ien, the Toronto MP and former longtime broadcaster who is now the Liberal minister for women and gender equality and youth, said her top concern before entering politics was the likelihood she would get threats.
“As a Black journalist, the level of threats that I got on my life, the life of my children — to run for office was not a small decision. This is real,” Ien said.
“I agree with my colleagues who say we have to take the temperature down, but I will say that the temperature has been decidedly high for people of colour, for racialized people, Indigenous people in this country … This is a time for everybody to step up and speak out, because I will say too that people of colour are tired of bearing the brunt of every single thing.”
The pandemic — and the health protections brought in — seem to have functioned as an extra trigger for people who already felt like they were being left behind by their government, or that their livelihoods are being eroded, says Jared Wesley, a professor of political science at the University of Alberta and lead researcher for a project called Common Ground, which studies political culture in Western Canada.
He argues that feeling of being left behind is mingling with growing political tribalism — meaning, the idea that your political opponents aren’t just people who disagree, but opponents to be vanquished — to create a tension that is simmering across the Prairies.
It’s arguably being fed by politicians doing something he calls “rage farming” — a term he says was recently coined by the Atlantic — to deliberately whip up their own base for political gain.
“I think we have to be careful here, and I don’t think it’s that mainstream politicians are advocating political violence,” he says. “I think that they are taking steps that are contributing to it.”
In Manitoba, leadership candidate Shelly Glover, who refused to concede to Heather Stefanson last year in the race to lead that province’s Progressive Conservative party, he points out.
In Alberta, leadership candidate Danielle Smith has also proposed a Sovereignty Act which, she argues, would allow the province to disregard some federal laws.
Smith, who is widely considered to be a likely contender to be Alberta’s next premier, has yet to join the chorus of politicians condemning the abuse of Freeland.
In an interview with the Tyee published on Saturday, a man named Elliot McDavid said he was the man in the video, and that he was proud of his behaviour and unconcerned about the public backlash. (The Star was unable to reach McDavid.)
“Why did I do that? Because I want the rest of the country to wake up and realize that she is a traitor to the country. She is selling out the country,” he told the Tyee.
The publication describes McDavid as an organizer of a truck convoy in Grande Prairie who also talked about the Canadian government being part of a conspiracy involving the World Economic Forum and vaccines being responsible for the death of thousands, neither of which is supported by evidence.
While it can be hard to pin down how much misinformation is out there, there’s no question that it’s becoming more normalized, particularly on the right wing of the political spectrum, says Tim Caulfield, a Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy at the University of Alberta.
“There’s research that says if you want to mobilize the community use emotionally-laden language, and make it negative,” says Caulfield, who wrote a book calling for rigour in health science called ‘Is Gwyneth Paltrow wrong about everything?’ “So it’s emotional, it’s negative, and it plays to morality or ideology.”
He points to a study recently published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology that found a possible link between economic inequality — and the perception that society is unfair — and the tendency to believe in conspiracies.
“In other words, those who feel the most aggrieved are more likely, and I think they’re looking for answers,” he says. “They’re looking for some type of meta narrative that explains their situation.”
Whatever the reason, Young, of the University of Calgary, says our politics will suffer if those who step up to lead continue to face the threat of abuse.
Freeland was in northern Alberta, where she grew up, to meet with local farmers and tradespeople. Incident like this mean she’s less likely to come back, or, when she does, to be required to travel with security, which will keep her one step removed from the people who are clamouring to be heard by their political leadership, Young says.
“In the grand scheme of things, we probably want federal cabinet ministers to be visiting municipal offices from time to time to talk to people about the things that matter to them,” she says.
“If we make that harder than governance gets a little bit worse.”
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