Regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum, no one should be OK with the treatment Canada's deputy prime minister experienced in Alberta last week.
A video from last week quickly went viral of Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland being verbally attacked just before entering an elevator at the Grande Prairie city hall. In the video, a man hurls profanity at Freeland, calls her a "traitorous b****" and demands to know what she's doing in Alberta. He then tells her to "get the (expletive) out of the province."
First of all, Freeland was technically born and raised in Alberta, so there's an ignorance and irony in telling her she doesn't belong in the province. Secondly, the language the man used was disgusting and offensive.
These incidents of female politicians being verbally harassed are not new, and they seem to be becoming less and less isolated – a point made by Calgary's mayor Jyoti Gondek in response to the Freeland incident.
Everyone knows there's a lot of mistrust of the federal government and resentment shown toward Ottawa in this province, but there's a line that shouldn't be crossed, and the man in Grande Prairie clearly crossed it last week.
If you're upset with government – provincial, federal, or even municipal – by all means, you should make your voice heard. But verbally harassing and intimidating individual politicians is not the way to do it. It's telling that politicians of both liberal and conservative affiliations were denouncing the man's behaviour afterwards on social media.
Not only were the Grande Prairie man's words disgraceful, but for us as Albertans, they were also also embarrassing. It's' an incident that will add further fuel to an argument across Canada that Alberta is not the most welcoming of provinces – no less at a time when the provincial government is pitching a multi-million dollar campaign to entice residents of Toronto and Vancouver to relocate to Alberta. Good luck with that.
