When political people or issues start trending on Twitter, it’s normally because of a few thousand tweets — or a couple of tweets being shared quite a bit — not more than 500,000 tweets or interactions. That’s what the #TrudeaMustGo hashtag was sitting at when Twitter stopped displaying the figures over the weekend.
For the past week, thousands of people, including Justin Trudeau’s own brother, have been tweeting out a photo of themselves, a short bio and stating that Trudeau must go.
At first, Liberals on Twitter were dismissive of the grassroots campaign, then they got nervous and started claiming it was all run by bots — robotic accounts not backed up by real people. Martin Belanger, a Calgary-based engineer, says it’s not bots pushing this message, and it’s not anyone who is being paid. He said he started the campaign out of frustration.
Belanger was translating a TV appearance that Trudeau made during the last election where, in French, he agreed that people who won’t get vaccinated are extremists.
“They don’t believe in science, they are misogynistic, often racist,” Trudeau said at the time before adding that he wonders whether we should tolerate this small group.
As he added subtitles to the video to share with someone, he became outraged.
“I have a prime minister who is trying to dehumanize me, and I needed to say something,” Belanger said during a phone interview Monday. “He’s pitting Canadians against each other.”
Frustration and a hashtag launched a campaign
So he took a photo of himself and posted it with a quick comment along with the hashtag, #TrudeauMustGo.
“I’m a 55 year-old Canadian. I’m married, father to 4, university educated & perfectly bilingual. I’m an engineer, solving problems for 35 yrs. I’m a volunteer hockey coach & an avid outdoorsman. According to Trudeau, I’m an extremist who needs to be dealt with,” Belanger tweeted.
His original post has been retweeted more than 6,000 times and has been liked almost 24,000 times. It also saw people begin posting their own versions and variations of his post.
“I think that’s why my comment resonated is that it was so simple,” Belanger said.
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Gerald Butts, the former principal secretary to Trudeau, took to Twitter to claim that it was a paid-for account run by bots, something Belanger disputes. While initially, it was mostly people he knew, it grew to the point where it Trudeau’s brother, Kyle Kemper, posted.
“I’m a 37 year old father of 4.5, entrepreneur, crypto OG & proud Canadian. For 2 decades I’ve been calling BS on the corporatocracy and my brother @JustinTrudeau has become a captive in their scheme. It’s time #TrudeauMustGo and for Canada to become a sovereign nation again,” Kemper tweeted.
Kemper, the son of Margaret Trudeau and her second husband, Fried Kemper, said in a later post that he loves his brother Justin but that his “words and actions over the past two years have been deplorable.”
Maybe instead of dismissing the campaign, Liberals should wonder why it is resonating.
The campaign isn’t just attracting people who aren’t vaccinated, but also people who are fed up with the prime minister’s divisive tone and rhetoric, something one of his own MPs has called him out over. There is a lot of anger directed at the Trudeau government and Trudeau himself – just look at the outrage over him singing in a hotel bar in London two nights before Queen Elizabeth’s funeral.
All of this is reflected in the latest Abacus poll which shows Trudeau with just 33% saying they have a positive impression of him while 48% have a negative impression.
This Twitter campaign saying #TrudeauMustGo is an outgrowth of that sentiment, and it’s gaining ground because so many people are simply fed up. Whether it will resonate with the general public, or average voters — most of whom aren’t on Twitter — remains to be seen.
What this does show is that the shine has definitely worn off of Mr. Sunny Ways.
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