How the radical left divides Canadians with its toxic talk

By Gagandeep Ghuman

I have spent the last month in silent agitation, weighed down by two tweets from a far-left commentator. The tweet came from a Montreal based journalist and activist Nora Loreto, who managed to assign a devious motivation to why Canadians donated close to $16 million for the Humboldt Broncos.

This is what she wrote: “I’m trying to not get cynical about what is a totally devastating tragedy, but the maleness, the youthfulness and the whiteness of the victims are, of course, playing a significant role.”

Assuming that Canadians wouldn’t have donated if the victims were not young or white, Nora Loreto, with whom I have interacted when I was a student at Ryerson University, qualified her earlier tweet with this observation: “I don’t want less for the families and survivors of this tragedy. I want justice and more for so many other grieving parents and communities.”

Her tweet has since stirred a blizzard of criticism, but it was her second tweet that angered me enough to share a story of remarkable generosity shown by ordinary Canadians in Squamish, a town where I have lived for the last nine years. I jokingly call it my home town even though I wasn’t born here.

I’m not a mere chronicler in this story. It is a story in which I and my wife played an active part and saw first-hand how a town came together when a collision on Highway 99 claimed the lives of two people and injured five others.

The victims in this accident were not white, but the response to their suffering from the community was a colour-blind outpouring of love and donations.

It was late in the evening when we first received a call from a friend informing us that there had been an accident involving seven members of the Indo-Canadian community. They were coming home to Squamish from Whistler when a pickup truck crossed over the median and rammed into their van. We knew the people. One of them was a new father who lived with his young family just down the street, the others I met at the Sikh temple and community events.

The phone kept ringing that night with more shocking news: At least two of them had died on the spot and others had suffered grievous injuries and were taken to hospitals in Vancouver.

As we made the rounds of hospitals the next day, we could hear the murmuring anxieties in the tight-knit Indo-Canadian community. These were working class men who did housekeeping work in Whistler hotels and rarely missed a day of work. One of them lived with his grandmother who was solely dependent on him, and the other was a young international student with no family in Canada.

We decided to set up a Go Fund Me page and at first we aimed to raise $25,000. Some of our friends were sceptical and wondered if the small Indo-Canadian community could raise that amount. But as someone who had reported on such efforts in the past, I knew Squamish would come together united to help.

The community proved me right. We raised $25,000 in matter of days. We then reset our goal at $50,000. Money kept trickling in along with best wishes and prayers and messages of healing. And a large majority of those sending these messages with their money were yes, white. In the end, we raised over $60,000, about three times more than what we had originally intended. Then, a Squamish lawyer decided to waive off his fees to set up a trust fund, and a local nurse volunteered to take the mother of one of the victims to Vancouver General Hospital every day.

The injured young dad called me one day and said several people had stopped by his home with flowers and cards. All these people mentioned above were white. The victims and several Indo-Canadian community members were so moved, rather overwhelmed by the response they repeatedly urged me to write a story about how thankful they were and I did.

We will never build racial harmony and mutual understanding if we paid any serious heed to this grand narrative in which women and people of colour are forever victims and white men are almost always the oppressors.

Does all this mean we live in a post-racial society now? No, racism is still a lived reality for many Canadians and we should all fight it when we witness or experience it. But it was simply wrong to turn Canadian’s generosity over a heart-rending tragedy in Humboldt to a opportunistic commentary about implied white male privilege.

I don’t condone the misogynistic hatred and death threats directed towards Nora, but her tweet and the mindset behind it lifts the curtain ever so slightly on the dangerous identity politics game being played by the alt left in Canada.

Couched in the high ideals of equality and social justice, the radical left’s sinister shibboleths find their way every day into the minds of unsuspecting Canadians through news, commentary and sophisticated academic jargon.

We will never build racial harmony and mutual understanding if we paid any serious heed to this grand narrative in which women and people of colour are forever victims and white men are almost always the oppressors.

Interpreting events through a narrow lens of race and gender perhaps benefits the radical left’s ecosystem with speaking, writing, and teaching opportunities. But this toxic talk can have sinister consequences as it dehumanises us and drives communities apart.

We should all protest racism but let’s just steer clear of the identity politics trap some alt-left activists so badly want us to fall into.

Gagandeep Ghuman is the editor of The Global Canadian