Who draws the line in the sand between crazy and credible and who decides who is allowed to cross it?

People with power and people with power.

On Monday, Toronto Star journalists learned along with our online readers that People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier was, like other leaders, invited for a chat with the editorial board, and it was to take place the next day.

Bernier was the man who was once the Foreign Affairs Minister who had to quit over a national security compromise after he left a secret document at the home of a girlfriend.

Then he was the chief contender to the leadership of the Conservative Party which he lost by a razor-thin margin.

Now he’s the man who heads a party linked through its supporters to far-right bigots, white supremacists, and even a neo-Nazi as a founding member (since removed).

Bernier is open about his views on multiculturalism — it should be banned as a policy. He demands that immigrants “integrate” — with whom? The “west” (read: white). He seeks a Canadian values test for new immigrants (add ominous music and “sharia law” here). Refugees — we can’t save the world, so let’s do very little. Climate change — not an emergency. (All quotations here are mine.)

Bernier will also be platformed by the CBC next week.

Of course many journalists of colour — there are not that many of us in the newsroom — felt let down by our employers’ decision. It stopped us in our tracks, forcing us to change gears from the regular demands of the job. We didn’t have the luxury of shrugging or rolling our eyes. Many of us had deadlines, yet we had to take on the emotionally exhausting task of organizing and speaking up to explain to our management why this impacted us so viscerally.

Columnists have wide latitude to express their opinions. This is my privilege. It means I don’t feel professionally compromised when I voice an opinion. Indeed, it is my job to do so. But my colleagues who spoke up are not in the same position. Would voicing their protest risk their reputations? Be seen not as a demand for justice but a lack of that much-vaunted objectivity? Their positions are made more precarious by many of them being at entry-level ranks.

“Would we do this with a flat-earther?” one of my colleagues asked our editor-in-chief in an email the evening before the chat.

At the Star, the newsroom is separate from the editorial board (which means the decision to invite or disinvite Bernier wasn’t the editor’s to make). From a reader perspective that’s a distinction without a difference. Stories from both the board and the newsroom appear on the same platforms and editors of both ultimately report to the same publisher.

Platforming does not defeat ideas. If there is anything U.S. President Donald Trump is a shining example of, it is the danger of free-speech arguments that validate hate speech, and the failure of the concept of “sunlight as a great disinfectant” of bad ideas.

All platforming does is legitimize the speaker. And when that speaker is polished or perceived by the audience as authentic, the platform elevates their stature.

In his conversation with the Star’s editorial board, Bernier denied his ideology was anti-Muslim. He said things like, “I’m not against diversity, I’m against more and more and more diversity.” He fended off in the softest terms his churlish attack on 16-year-old climate change activist Greta Thunberg in which he called her “mentally unstable,” saying on Tuesday: “First of all two days after that I tweeted and said she is a courageous girl … Other people were bringing in the discussion her health and I did that and that was a mistake.”

The event was open to anyone in the newsroom. We know how these discussions unfold. This is why many of us journalists of colour decided not to participate in any capacity — neither to question Bernier nor to work behind the scenes to produce the live video.

We know that racism is instituted with or without Bernier. We work despite it. Racism exists among “mainstream” politicians — it exists in the structures and policies and institutions around us. But we didn’t want to be part of a discussion that Bernier could, and did, frame in “agree to disagree” terms. Bernier’s ideologies are not abstract level ideas for us, not mere disagreements that can be debated in a civilized fashion. “Let’s debate, then have a drink, old chap.” They have real-world consequences.

This is us, our children, our fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers being threatened by people who feel emboldened by Bernier’s rhetoric, whether or not he intends it. The non-Muslims among us may not be the primary targets — but there is no scope for complacence; the laser pointer swings fast.

We’ve seen time and again individual white supremacists attacking Sikhs and Hindus, mistaking them for being Muslim. We have seen hate crimes against Black people. We know what Bernier followers — the Soldiers of Odin and PEGIDA, for instance — say about our skin colours, our cultures. We know that while he says he isn’t racist (and touts the meaningless idea of having people of colour in his party as proof), his words continue to be a clarion call to those seeking to bridge the far-right and the “mainstream.” (And if he truly believes they don’t represent his views, he might find it worth reflecting upon why they’re so attracted to his party.)

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Even among those of us who want to “integrate” (in other words, adhere to standards of whiteness, not Indigeneity), we can change our clothes, we can change our lifestyles, we can change our accents.

We cannot peel off our skins.

By platforming Bernier, all the Star and other media do is further bridge the gap between the far-right and the mainstream. Are these the Canadian values we are proud of?

Shree Paradkar , a columnist covering issues around race and gender, is the 2018-2019 recipient of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy. She is based in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @ShreeParadkar

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