Charlie Angus may be retiring from federal politics, but there’s nothing retiring about the veteran New Democrat MP for Timmins-James Bay who showed up in Edmonton Sunday afternoon on the latest stop on what is being billed as his national Resistance tour.
Angus, who is 62, is pretty much an NDP rock star – literally, actually – and an exuberant crowd packed St. Basil’s Cultural Centre to hear him rip into U.S. President Donald Trump, federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, Preston Manning, and the whole Maple MAGA crowd. He didn’t mince words.
The Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral hall south of Whyte Ave. can seat about 700 people. It was packed, with folks without tickets being turned away at the door – so if the NDP had been using Conservative math, I suppose, the rally would go down in history as a crowd of thousands, maybe more!
Be that as it may, after being introduced by Edmonton Strathcona MP Heather McPherson, Angus tore with evangelical fervor into those well-known Conservative politicians who badmouth our country, try to divide its citizens, and cozy up to the Trump Administration.
How, Angus asked rhetorically, did Canadian resistance begin to Trump’s insults and economic depredations, not to mention the support, passive and active, the U.S. President gets from certain Conservative politicians with ties to Alberta?
“It started with you waking up and saying, ‘I am not going to let my country be taken away from me,’” he said, to cheers. “When you saw that Quisling traitor go down to Mar-a-Lago to hang out with Kevin O’Leary, and you said, ‘She doesn’t represent us. She doesn’t!’ And you knew you had to do something. That’s how the resistance began!”
“Have I mentioned I went to see the Legislature this morning? I was hoping to meet Danielle Smith,” Angus continued. “I’m just glad she hasn’t put up the Stars and Bars and the Confederate rebel flag on the Legislature yet!”
(I confess, Dear Readers, I’m giggling as I transcribe this, imagining the faux outrage of Premier Smith’s supporters, including the ones with Confederate Battle Flag plates on the front of their trucks, if they were to read this. Well, there appeared to be no mainstream media there, so most of them will be spared the agony.)
On the topic of Premier Smith’s version of diplomacy with the Trump Administration, Mr. Angus wondered: “What’s with that? With MAGA? Meeting with a guy who planned the tariff war that’s out to destroy our jobs, and our economy, and our families? And she was hanging out with him?
“She should have been here, defending the people of Alberta who are being hammered by the tariffs!” Well, to be fair, we have all heard Smith dispute that interpretation of her conduct, and no doubt we will again.
Speaking of flags, Angus had some thoughts on the use and abuse of Canada’s Maple Leaf Flag, which was in plentiful supply at the Palm Sunday event attended by most Alberta NDP candidates.
“For a long time, we’ve been sleepwalking as a nation,” he said. “We’ve been disconnected from each other. We’ve been allowing the voices of disinformation and rage, and the Danielle Smiths and the Pierre Poilievres, to pick apart our nation. Our flag was stolen from us by conspiracy haters who hung our flag upside down and paraded it through the streets.”
Well, he said, “we’re taking our flag, and taking it back, and flying it right side up!” (More cheers.)
“But there’s a difference about why we can raise the flag,” he added. “We are on a journey of understanding that there can be no resistance without reconciliation. The crimes committed in the residential schools have to be atoned for. And we cannot change what happened before, but we can change where we’re going.”
On the topic of President Trump, Angus was scathing: “I don’t fear Donald Trump. He’s just a decrepit, creepy predator. He might have fooled some people there, but he doesn’t fool us. He’s now come against Canada. And what do we have? We have the Juno Beach gene in us! Once the fight starts, we don’t stop that fight till the job is done.” He had uncles, he added, who “kicked Nazi asses all over Europe.”
As for the federal Conservative leader, Angus said, “We cannot let Pierre Poilievre and the politics of disinformation, and rage, and Canada-is-broken, ever get in.”
In 21 years as an MP, he noted, “there are many Conservatives that I know, that I may not agree with … but I respect.” But of Poilievre, he continued, “I do not respect what I see with the hate slogans, and the disinformation, and the refusal to even disassociate himself from the likes of Alex Jones. You know? That’s who he is.
“I never actually heard him say that he had a problem with Danielle Smith threatening to break up our country. He’s never said that either.”
“Do not let us be divided from each other,” Angus implored the crowd. “That’s what Danielle Smith and the Premier Moe have been doing. That’s what Preston Manning is doing.”
“Who,” he asked, “in the moment when a nation is under threat from a foreign fascist power, starts talking about breaking up the country? Shame! Them and their straw army!”
“So don’t let us get divided from each other. Quebec is strong. The Maritimes is strong. The North is strong. The West is strong. We are strong together. And we are strong from respecting that we are on Indigenous lands.”
It’s impossible, of course, to say if things would be different for the federal NDP this year if Angus had won the NDP leadership back in 2017, but he certainly seems to be generating more energy nowadays than the winner of that contest, party Leader Jagmeet Singh.
It may not mean anything, but it’s an alternative history that’s interesting to ponder.
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