Andrew Lawton: At Least We Still Have ‘Bigot’

Andrew Lawton is an interesting piece of work. Sometimes politician. Sometimes a far-right radio host. Now an author.

Lawton emerged from the fog of the right-wing Internet some fifteen years ago. He ran for Doug Ford’s Tories until he was fired in 2018. After bouncing around a bit, he was hired as managing editor of True North, a right-wing news and media outlet. It’s run by a charity that was set up, according to Canada Revenue Agency filings, for “public policy research on issues related to immigration, integration and national security.” Originally, the charity’s mandate was to settle British immigrants in British Columbia.

True North’s four-member board of directors includes Kaz Nejatian, a former staffer for Jason Kenney in Alberta, now COO of Shopify. He’s married to Candice Malcolm, author of compelling books like Losing True North: Justin Trudeau’s Assault on Canadian Citizenship and the bizarre Generation Screwed, both published by Magna Carta, which limits its list to works by strange people.

Barbara Kay, a right-wing columnist, is also on True North’s board, along with William McBeath, the director of training and marketing for the Manning Centre for Building Democracy. As of 2023, lawyer Jessica Kuredjian rounded out the team.

Over the years, Lawton has said and done some pretty bizarre things.

In a Twitter argument with a poster named Kayla Black, Lawton called her “Kayla African-American”. In another post from 2014, he said, “I was called a misogynist twice today. I’m sure my girlfriend would be the first to say that isn’t the case, when I let her speak.” Another Twitter user wrote, “You let her speak?” Lawton answered: “It’s Christmas time.” In an earlier Twitter post, Lawton told the world, “Proms are for straight people.” He also told his online followers her left the Anglican church when it allowed gay marriage.

He made anti-Muslim comments including this gem, posted when he was in the hospital with heart problems: “Covered in wires from a portable heart monitor. The Muslim gents nearby think I’m one of them.” Still on theology, he posted, “Not when you assume that anyone who isn’t a Christian is wrong. It works for me!” And he recycled an old joke about Barack Obama. “An immigrant, a Muslim and a communist walk into a bar. The bartender says, ‘Hello, Mr. President!’”

After being challenged by the mayor of London, Ontario for hyping an extremist protest in 2017, Lawton doubled down by defending the anti-immigration group Pegida: “What’s the white supremacist group? Pegida’s anti-Islam but not white supremacist. Seen several media reports of WS group supporting [London] protest”. Pegida weighed in with, “It’s Islamization we fight. Just so you know.”

On a Rebel Media podcast, Lawton argued for the protection of “free speech” rights for Holocaust deniers, as though there’s some good reason to protect the expression rights of liars who would create doubt about the worst crimes of Hitler’s Nazis. “To say the Holocaust never happened is offensive? Absolutely I’d say that. But I would darn well hope that no group in that situation would ever say they don’t have the right to make that appeal.”

On the same podcast, Lawton yammered about “the pussification of the West”. He said climate change science is “a lot of nonsense”.

Lawton organized an event at the University of Western Ontario with best-selling nutter Ann Coulter, where Coulter’s wit shone brightly: “We lost ‘retarded’ last week but we got ‘negro’ back,” adding, a moment later, made the quip again: “It’s sad to see retard go but at least we have negro.” Lawton chimed in: “Yeah, exactly.”

In 2018, as his bid for a provincial seat hit the wall, Lawton blamed temporary mental illness for the worst of his political expression:

“Throughout my career, I’ve been very open about my struggles with mental illness,” he tweeted. “While that discussion has centered on my 2010 suicide attempt, in actuality it was a battle that spanned from 2005 to 2013.”

He continued: “I was reckless in almost all areas of my life: financially, socially, sexually and vocationally … I was active on social media throughout much of this time, posting things that are so far removed from who I am and what I stand for that I can’t even fathom my frame of mind in writing them.”

Which is a good start, and good luck to anyone who starts down the road toward better mental health.

But Lawton barely toned things down, and his own chronology of mental health problems leaves a lot of awful things unexplained, including a lot of the ugly tweets that I’ve already talked about.

He made common cause with the “truckers” who took over downtown Ottawa in the winter of 2022, then wrote a fawning book about them.

Now, he’s written a book about Pierre Poilievre. It’s the first full-sized biography of the would-be Prime Minister, though it’s hardly complete. The book is a national best-seller.

The brilliance of the Lawton book is that it is written in clear but lifeless journalese, in the style of Time Magazine or Maclean’s when it was a news magazine. The flatline prose helps normalize the author and Poilievre himself. By describing Poilievre in a literary monotone, Lawton did not shock or challenge those in the Canadian pundit clique. It’s mostly populated by older men and women who do not like emotion and put as little as possible into their writing.

The flat, “magisterial” writing allowed publications like the Globe and Mail and the National Post to reprint parts of the book. People who didn’t know much about Poilievre were told they could buy Lawton’s book and take it seriously. The pundits made the writer and the subject part of the mainstream. They’re normal. Nothing to see here.

And anyone who writes a book that was sharply critical of Poilievre, who questioned his flirting with leaders of the extreme right, who analyzed his reckless ambition, who listed his lies and compared him to those of Donald Trump, would, by comparison, come across as hysterical and even crazy.

The acceptance of the book and its author by establishment MSM columnists and their pilotfish colleagues – presumably after proper benediction from their media outlets’ proprietors – signals to the Conservative elite that Poilievre can be sold to the Canadian public as an ambitious, dynamic, but normal conservative. At the same time, leading journalists let the author and True North into the real media tent. In 2015, outfits like True North did “low road” political work. Now, they can be remade as simply enthusiastic opinionists.

Andrew Philips, former editor of the Montreal Gazette and editorial page editor of the Toronto Star, treated the book as though it was an accurate look at Poilievre, and ignored its sycophancy.

John Ibbitson, writing in The Globe and Mail, at least let his readers know the book was written by a Poilievre fan before treating it like a complete biography. “There are mistakes in the book – Tom Flanagan, for example, was not in charge of the 2006 Conservative election campaign – but none that impair its integrity.

“The author does not attempt to poke far beneath the surface of his subject’s philosophy or tactics, accepting the former as gospel and the latter as necessary. This will render the book out of bounds for many progressives and for those who champion the institutions and conventions of Laurentian Canada.” This seems like rather strange praise that, as an author, I’d avoid.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey, on the website Politico, said he expects “a few serious books in the coming years” but “Andrew Lawton got there first”.

Paul Wells, who has the same publisher as Lawton (Sutherland House, owned by former National Post and Maclean’s editor Ken Whyte), put out a Substack post on Lawton’s book:

“I’m not surprised the idea for Andrew Lawton’s book about Pierre Poilievre came from his publisher, Ken Whyte. After all, the idea for my book about Justin Trudeau came from my publisher, Ken Whyte.

“Ken’s long been bugged about Canadian journalism’s increasing inability to take the long perspective…”

Wells got to work, though at least he mentioned that Lawton has an, um, interesting past. Still, he did his best to rehabilitate Lawton. Wells blamed mental illness, not dumbassery, for Lawton’s long career of right-wing turd polishing:

“I should note that Lawton has his own row to hoe. He ran for the Ontario Progressive Conservatives in 2018 and ran into real trouble over some gross stuff he wrote on Twitter in the early 2010s. He lost, in a riding the Conservatives haven’t won since 1999. He apologized profusely at the time, and I’ve never had an unpleasant conversation with him.”

Former Globe and Mail political columnist Jeffrey Simpson praised Lawton’s book in The Literary Review of Canada while managing to spell the author’s name wrong. “Andrew Lawson’s (sic) timing could not be better. Pierre Poilievre: A Political Life is highly sympathetic to its subject, yet it provides a good understanding of the experiences and intellectual underpinnings of the country’s putative next head of government. Poilievre will be a polarizing prime minister unless he decides, by experiencing the discipline and compromises of power, to become a more accommodating leader in a country whose overall center of gravity has usually settled around the middle of the political spectrum. Or maybe, just maybe, Canada has changed so much that his brand of right-wing politics and economics has become the new norm, so that he will shape the country more than the country will shape him.”

And Lawton got business class treatment on the Canadian cable news programs like Power and Politics, where shut-ins across the country could watch as the national media embraced Lawton and get a pass for his normalization of the often-bizarre politics of Pierre Poilievre.

Why do it? Why would respected media be part of a campaign to make Poilievre’s Trumpist politics seem like mainstream discourse on national policy? Maybe they drank the Kool-Aid, but I doubt it. Rather, I think the media establishment is getting ready for a Poilievre regime and is already trying to make peace with it. Insiders need to be inside, no matter who’s running things. Just like they’ve done any other time democracy was threatened.

As for Lawton, he’s jumped again. Now he’s trying to get the federal Tory nomination in a riding near London the same part of the country where the wheels came off his provincial campaign.

Kate McKenna, senior CBC parliamentary reporter, told her audience: “On his radio show Wednesday, he said he will be taking a leave of absence from his on-air work as well as his role as editor.” There was no mention of Pegida, the Holocaust, African-Americans and the rest.

Mark Bourrie is a journalist, lawyer, and author of 18 books, including “Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson”, winner of the 2020 RBC Taylor Prize. His book “Kill the Messenger: Stephen Harper’s Assault on Your Right to Know” was a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year for 2015. Bourrie has been a feature writer for the Globe and Mail, served as a member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, taught media history at Concordia University, history at Carleton University, and Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa. He has been a lecturer and consultant on propaganda and censorship at the Canadian Forces Public Affairs School. He contributes regular columns on current affairs and media criticism at Fairpress.ca.