Brad Trost

Uh-oh! We’re about to be “Bradsplained”!

Bradsplaining, a useful coinage by my colleague and fellow blogger Dave Cournoyer, happens “when a Saskatchewan politician named Brad tries to tell Albertans what’s good for them.”

Usually the Bradsplainer is Brad Wall, the climate-change-denying premier of the province next door, the one with the five per cent sales tax plus a current deficit that according to the Royal Bank of Canada’s federal and provincial fiscal tables is exactly the same size as Alberta’s as a percentage of GDP. Just sayin’.

Lately, though, it’s been Brad Trost, the social conservative Saskatchewan MP who spends a lot of time fretting about trans-gender washrooms and other provinces’ sex-education curricula.

Nowadays, Trost is also a candidate to replace Stephen Harper as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, so his opinions get a lot more attention from both mainstream media and denizens of the blogosphere than they deserve. Lately, as a result, he’s been able to Bradsplain about how it’s entirely proper for mobs of far-right Albertans to chant “lock her up” at the mention of Premier Rachel Notley’s name.

Trost took particular issue with his leader in the House of Commons, Alberta MP Rona Ambrose, for telling media she thought the chanting amounted to “people acting like idiots.”

 

 

“@RonaAmbrose should apologize for being out o touch & calling those grass roots Albertans ‘idiots,'” he Bradsplained in a Tweet.

Now Trost is going to come to Alberta to Bradsplain to us some more at one of “journalist” Ezra Levant’s Rebel Media rallies, this one scheduled to take place on 2 p.m. Sunday in Calgary.

Given the repudiation by mainstream conservative politicians of what the mob did at last Saturday’s Rebel Media hoedown in front of the Alberta Legislature in Edmonton, it’s apparently harder now for Levant to line up guests for these events. Leastways, Rebel Media’s announcement of the rally in an expensive downtown Calgary hotel ballroom so far includes only two political guests: Trost and Wildrose finance critic Derek Fildebrandt, doubtless there in defiance of his leader’s wishes.

Well, perhaps as Brian Jean did at the Legislature on Saturday, Fildebrandt will leave the venue before the crowd breaks into demi-fascist chanting. If so, Trost will be there to egg them on and contribute more Bradsplaining about what’s good for Albertans.

If Trost continues his mission to the Albertans, or if any more Brads from Saskatchewan join the chorus, this will require an additional new coinage: Bradspreading.

This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, AlbertaPolitics.ca.

David J. Climenhaga

David J. Climenhaga

David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike...