Controversies have been taken too far, for some Quesnel residents. Political debate is not always comfortable, but in a civil society, differences of party affiliation or religious choice have not typically been grounds for fear. Today, in Quesnel, there is fear being felt over the issues of the day.
When mayor Ron Paull and his wife Pat Morton became central figures in the past month regarding the promotion of a book that downplays the atrocity of residential schools that so damaged Indigenous cultures and individuals all across Canada, it set off emotional explosions as much as intellectual discussion.
When Morton first communicated after the issue was raised, it was in a letter addressed to Lhtako Dene Nation chief Clifford Lebrun, and copied to a number of others, including The Observer. She started the letter with a stark introduction.
“I am withholding my personal address due to fear of my safety,” she said.
When she came to the microphone at a special hearing of city council to discuss the matter further, and was joined by one of the book’s contributors, Frances Widdowson, both of them were rudely treated by the majority in the room. The power of rebuttal was substantial, among the vast majority who packed council chambers that day, but neither were given a respectful hearing followed by retort. They were shouted down and dismissed.
Derision spills in all directions, in this matter. The councillor who brought the book’s distribution to light, Tony Goulet, told council that Morton gave his mother and father the book - his father being a residential school survivor. That triggered council unanimously denouncing the book (not banning it), reaffirming the municipality’s memorandum of understanding with the Lhtako Dene Nation, and affirming the Truth And Reconciliation Commission’s 94 recommendations following the testimony of residential school survivors and the impacted generations that followed.
Goulet has also experienced a version of the shouting, only it has come at him by email and letter. Worse, he said, his elder parents have also received harassment from strangers, many of whom do not live in Quesnel or even British Columbia.
“It’s borderline hate, and borderline cyberbullying,” said Goulet. “And they are still coming in. I have opened a file with the RCMP.”
As a longtime elected official - a school trustee and a councillor simultaneously - he has never seen the usual political ping-pong turn this personal or irrational.
Another husband-wife combination has been shadowed by the cyber darkness. City manager Byron Johnson and his wife Laurie have been getting more than just objectionable letters from residential school downplayers. For them, it has been years in the crosshairs of the COVID anti-vaccine crowd. Laurie has a binder of screenshots showing the threads of discussion disparaging and mocking them.
“And to what end? The defamatory and inflammatory anger they are creating is based on zero, and that is scary,” said Laurie. “I have an open RCMP file. We don’t know where these things end. These have gone too far. I worry about having to defend myself, if someone goes psycho.”
When he, as top administrative employee, had to carry out the wishes of council during the COVID crisis that City Hall staff all be vaccinated - a similar directive to innumerable government offices across Canada and beyond - he became a target.
“It has always been there, on the hard right and the hard left, but it was just a couple of people yapping in the background, but it’s just so widespread, now,” said Byron. Social media, if not the cause, is certainly a leading landscape of unaccountable opining and unchecked invective.
“It’s just a segue for them (the social media critics) getting back at Byron,” said Laurie. “They are trying to refight the fight. The more this goes on, the the ante goes up.”
What makes Byron and Laurie saddest, they said, is the division that has grown between people in the last few years. There are many topics that demonstrate this, but what they see is ideological brainwashing happening, on both far ends of the political spectrum - people who refuse to adjust their opinions when presented with new information. Rather, they attack the new information and its sources, no matter how sound. People will even use euphemistic veils to appear to be on the side of a universally accepted value (freedom of speech, equality, intellectual rigour, etc.) but only as a disguise for their rigid views that are usually rooted in some fear of a certain group of people.
It has caused rifts in friendships, even the betrayal of Laurie being groomed by a friend to provide uncontextualized or outdated snippets of conversation to be used against them in online threads.
It has caused public confrontation and awkwardness. And it has caused people to worry that their personal safety is threatened, even if no overt threat has been uttered.