What is Ezra Levant? Is it antibiotic-resistant? Can it be cured, and if not, will topical steroids take the swelling down? Should I be asking my doctor for anti-inflammatory medication or will that irritate my stomach lining? I’m asking for a friend because I don’t myself have EL. It spreads virally via Sun News Network so I blocked it on TV and then it sprang up on my computer, then on Twitter and now people are writing columns about it.

I know it’s wrong to make these EL videos, but it is legal to watch, I am definitely with the child pornographers on that one. Are my eyelids bleeding? Check again please.

See, my “friend” contracted EL by watching a Sept. 16 Sun video contained in news stories later headlined “Local man yells at photo for 5 minutes.” The video consisted of Ezra Levant saying extraordinarily vulgar and vicious things about Liberal leader Justin Trudeau and his family, regarding a recent encounter in which Trudeau had kissed a local bride on the cheek as she and her bridesmaids smiled for the camera.

EL said Trudeau was symbolically “deflowering” the bride as in medieval times, sexually insulted Trudeau’s mother, said his father “banged anyone” and “was a slut,” said a female CBC journalist was losing bodily control in Trudeau’s presence and then there was something about “panties.”

I apologize for the trauma. Please keep reading.

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The bride and her family were outraged by the video. Trudeau called for a “response” from Quebecor, which owns TV and newspapers across the country and said he would no longer speak to Sun’s English media, which seems sensible. I once worked for the Toronto Sun and I was so ashamed that I didn’t even speak to myself for years. Oh, I used to copy edit David Frum columns and eat hot pockets out of tinfoil for lunch, it was my own little gulag, but it paid the mortgage until I got a better job.

Perhaps if I were Trudeau, I would have wanted to hit someone, but since my own parents were not in any way sexual and never had sex, I was not stirred by the “marriage oaths” violation stuff. However seeing “Ezra Levant” and “panties” in the same sentence is making the rash come up in blisters, so again, how long for the test results? Maybe Monday?

Ottawa journalists went all “esprit de press corps” and fell for the gag that Levant was a journalist to begin with. Of course he is not, he is simply Sun News Network’s performing flea. No one watches that channel (I wish it would stop asking me to appear). As the Globe and Mail wrote in 2013 about a CRTC hearing, “Sun believes most Canadians don’t know it exists, and it has the market research and ratings to prove it.”

Most Canadians don’t live in Ottawa, don’t watch House of Commons debates and aren’t members of a press club (the “Media Party,” in EL-speak) starved of information by a government that hates good journalism. They would agree with the Liberal Party that the video “breached any reasonable measure of editorial integrity.” Still, running what appears to have been a 1970s “upskirt photo” of Margaret Trudeau — whose 23-year-old son Michel died in an avalanche in 1998, whose candour about her bipolar disorder has helped so many — did get attention.

I cannot say whether Ezra Levant, who, believe it or not, is a lawyer, is unwell or a horrible person or just an idiot with an underpants fetish, but he certainly represents his viewership, which is all of these things. I have the emails to prove it.

I watched the screen, appalled. This creature had no screen presence. Its face was stationary, while its wide, oblong mouth flapped strangely. Mute the sound and anything could be coming out of it. It could issue parking tickets, or serve as a ham dispenser.

Instead it was all sexual jealousy, like fluid oozing, which is just what my EL blisters are doing right now. I couldn’t equal this level of cruelty, even if I wished to.

The Conservative Party resents Trudeau deeply. It is not clear why, but it is certainly more than leftover resentment of his late intellectual father and his beautiful mother. It isn’t youth. Trudeau is 42, which my children consider frankly elderly. It isn’t beauty, he just looks better than most politicians. He seems confident and comfortable with himself, happy to meet-and-greet and not snobbish. He is unrehearsed and speaks candidly. Canadians like that.

I do remember Justin Trudeau’s birth being announced. I was in the car with my parents. It was a cold winter afternoon in northwestern Ontario and we were taking a family drive to the town dump. As one does.

We were listening to CBC radio and someone said it was the birth of the “Justin Society, hah hah” which was a play on PET’s “just society” and I thought “Wow, my first pun,” and then the quarry reared up in front of us. Then I did not think of the man again for decades. Although I have wrung a lot of therapy out of those Sunday drives and I still do not like puns.

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We have gone off-topic, as has the Conservative Party in its unhinged fear of Trudeau. What scares them of course is that he could win. He could re-stock the country with scientists and restore the CBC, introduce national daycare and invest billions in green energy. He could put a stop to this Iraq venture, and worst of all, he could run a minority government with NDP leader Thomas Mulcair.

But in the meantime, I have a bad case of EL, an unsightly rash that’s crusting, and I can’t just lie in a cold tub all weekend chewing on the bath mat. Is this a personal allergic reaction to a chance one-and-only EL video encounter, or is it a threat to public health?

If the latter, it could easily be resolved with a civilized decision by Quebecor in favour of Canadian decency. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

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