Nearly all of the Canadian media reaction to Cooper’s intervention was visceral, emotive and immature. “He came to the meeting prepared to read from the attacker’s manifesto – ugh!” Or, “He spoke the name which is not to be spoken – eek!” Finding a calm, mature, rational reaction has been difficult. And that which in self-congratulatory fashion purports to be rational, isn’t. I present as “Exhibit A” the June 5th column of Andrew Coyne. It is in the guise of a friend of conservatism that he offers a model for how Cooper should have made his point in a more urbane and civilized way, one that might have gained universal assent.

Coyne begins in his typical manner, with irony: “…there is a well-known rule of argument known as the principle of charity, which obliges us to put the best construction on our opponents’ words and not the worst.” At least I charitably assume that citing this rule is intended ironically, given that nobody responded to Cooper’s intervention with the slightest degree of charity. In Coyne’s understanding, the rule of charity apparently has a caveat: be charitable, unless your opponent occupies a position on the political spectrum anywhere to the right of Karl Marx, in which case be as vicious as you please.

Coyne employs the principle of charity to misinterpret what the witness, Suri, actually said. “I’m going to assume,” continues Coyne in his script for Cooper, “that when you [Suri] included ‘conservative commentators’ in your list of terrorist influencers you did not mean to attribute responsibility for terrorist atrocities to mainstream conservatives, or to conservatism, which is an honourable creed professed by millions of Canadians.” But why assume a known falsehood? All manner of social justice warriors assert that mainstream conservative commentators, from Jordan Peterson to Mark Steyn and Tucker Carlson, influence terrorism. And heavens! – even lifelong liberal Richard Dawkins has been de-platformed for his allegedly anti-Muslim stance. Some have even gone on record calling Justin Trudeau a white supremacist.

Assumptions are for deadline-imperilled news commentators, not serious thinkers on Justice Committees. We have seen the leftist syllogism many times before: Andrew Scheer is Doug Ford, Doug Ford is Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is Hitler; therefore, Andrew Scheer is Hitler. In fact, by declaring Cooper to be persona non grata, Scheer more closely resembles Stalin, and Cooper disappears down the memory hole. (Isn’t tracing political lineages fun?) Why is it wrong for a mainstream conservative, a democratically elected MP at that, to forcefully rebel against this calumny? This ridiculous charge as an extremist? Seems more like a duty to me.

At this point, Coyne ceases to pretend to be making any point resembling Cooper’s views. He instead goes off on a frolic of his own: “These fears and resentments have proven fertile soil for opportunistic politicians, so-called ‘populists’ promising to defend ‘the people’ from whatever it is that is not ‘the people’ if only they are given power — only power that, due to the gravity of the alleged threat, must not be impaired by the usual restrictions of a democratic opposition, a free press, or an independent judiciary.”

For a moment, I thought Coyne was about to call out Justin Trudeau by name. The Liberal Party of Canada is the epitome of stoking fears and resentments among the people: finding systemic discrimination and genocide everywhere, climate catastrophe just a decade off, neo-Nazis in every mother’s basement, anti-abortionists marching en masse – the list goes on.

As for grasping at power and circumventing democratic norms, Trudeau is in a class of his own. He is the only Canadian politician I’m aware of who has expressed his admiration for China’s basic dictatorship (although admittedly, we also have elected Chavistas and Castrophiles, who seem to fly under the radar of the mainstream media). He wanted to gerrymander the electoral system to favour the Natural Governing Party. And when that project didn’t yield the result he wanted, he galloped away from the promise to make 2015 “the last election under first past the post” (the age-old system, inherited from Great Britain, by which the candidate with the largest number of votes is elected, whether or not that number is a majority of all the votes cast).

Trudeau is also the one whom, a strong case can be made, has obstructed justice in the SNC-Lavalin affair, whether due to naked political calculus or to favour friends of the party (or both), while professing concern about jobs. It is Trudeau who is sneakily trying to fetter and limit freedom of public expression, including in the media, through the re-introduction of s. 13 of the Human Rights Act, which would once again ban publishing anything that might offend anyone. And it is Trudeau who is now trying to purchase the media wholesale by raising fears that “uncertified” sources in social media could steal the coming election. Talk about exploiting the people’s fears.

Every day, I’m reminded of yet another way Trudeau behaves like those authoritarian creeps Coyne says he detests, and which he somehow believes are uniquely associated with “populism” or the “right.” But there is plenty of evidence of authoritarian “creepage” in our governing Liberals. If it’s not legislating police-state powers of search and seizure, it’s adding more and more to the mandates of the “human rights” tribunals (Bill C-16; reintroducing “hate speech” laws), or denying government funding to individuals and groups that oppose abortion in some measure. The list goes on. The time is past when fascism could be easily associated with the political right. For some time now, it’s the social justice warriors on the left who have been eroding individual liberties and, in many cases, dressing, sounding and acting just like fascists.

“Conservativism is about freedom,” says Coyne, “populism is about fear. Indeed, populism is not just different from conservatism. It is its opposite. Where conservatives see people as individuals, it divides society into Us and Them.” Here Coyne is arguing, and attempting to get you to believe, the logical equivalent of, “Whales are wet, whereas cacti are dry. Therefore, whales are the opposite of cacti.” Conservatism is a political and governing philosophy; populism above all is a method or style.

More accurately, conservatism is about conserving and protecting what has worked in the past, including a strong dose of liberty, free markets and broad individual rights. But the political philosophy that puts freedom first and foremost is classical liberalism, or libertarianism, and in Canada the party that most closely instantiates this philosophy is Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party. For all of Coyne’s professed championing of freedom, he has very little positive to say about Bernier’s movement.

If, as Coyne asserts, populism is about fear, then I suppose the populism one prefers will depend on which hobgoblins one is most frightened by. Some people (“conservatives”) appear frightened by such phantoms as airplanes being flown into tall buildings, trucks being driven through Christmas markets, murderous attacks on satirical magazines and cartoonists, followers of the Prophet trying to establish a caliphate in the Middle East while chopping off heads and throwing gays off buildings or drowning them in cages while the video cameras roll, bombs exploding at pop-diva concerts, sex-slave grooming – and a host of similar trivialities.

Others (“progressives”) are exercised by increasing levels of plant food in the atmosphere that might make the weather slightly more pleasant in 100 years. They are terrified of plastic in the oceans. They are also frightened nearly to the point of apoplexy by the prospect of abortion becoming illegal the minute they lose their grip on power. “Progressives” turn ghostly white with fear that an unregulated internet will cause a swarm of embryonic neo-Nazis to escape their mothers’ basements and take over the country.

And now we come to the pièce de résistance, which returns us to the Cooper affair. Coyne writes, “At the worst edge of [populism] are avowed racists and neo-Nazis, liberated from the margins of public discourse by social media and emboldened by the discovery therein of others of like mind.” Except that not all mosque shooters are white supremacists and neo-Nazis; all haters do not imbibe the same poison. Nor do they get their hate from “conservative commentators” or even the alt-right websites we are instructed to charitably assume Suri was referring to. But to know this you have to know something about what motivated the Christchurch attacker; and to know that, you have to know what’s in his manifesto. And for that, we require freedom of speech.