Grigori Khaskin owns and operates Euro Food Tri-City in Coquitlam, B.C., where he sells foodstuffs from eastern Europe, including countries like Ukraine, Romania, and Czech Republic. It’s what he hopes will be the final chapter in a storied working career, which has included helping clean up the Chernobyl nuclear site after the catastrophe in 1986, followed by two decades teaching at Simon Fraser University.
However, with a Russian-sounding name and a store selling Russian products, something Khaskin never would have anticipated happened—he became the victim of a series of vicious online attacks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“I was born in Ukraine, and I lived in Ukraine my entire life before I came to Canada,” he told The Epoch Times. “And now I’m a Russian terrorist, a fascist. It’s a little bit ironic.”
Kashkin’s store and staff, more than half of whom are from Ukraine, have received vile threats, including death threats, primarily on the store’s Facebook page, followed by a campaign to target the business’s favourable ratings.
In nearby Vancouver, the Russian Community Centre was damaged around the same time when vandals threw blue and yellow paint on the doors and walls of its theatre entrance. Local police have been investigating all three situations. So far, no arrests have been made.
In fact, Canada has seen few arrests and fewer charges related to the escalation in activism in recent months, and that includes the attack on a Coastal GasLink worksite near Houston, B.C., in mid-February that caused millions of dollars in damage, and the arson and vandalism of 68 churches across the country last summer.
Some academics argue that actions such as the attacks on Russian businesses or the assault on Canadian churches are part of a growing trend in activism today, where people align themselves with a cause they passionately believe they must support, regardless of the consequences—and politicians and media have inflamed the divide.
Philip Salzman, professor emeritus of anthropology at McGill University, says derogatory labelling has played a role in raising the activism temperature.
“All you have to do is label [a particular group or cause] as something horrible, and politicians have jumped in and have been doing that enthusiastically. Most political entities have used the pandemic in order to bolster their power and take power away from other people. You’ve seen an egregious example in Canada with the declaration of emergency powers,” he told The Epoch Times.
“The truckers weren’t calling for cancelling anybody. They weren’t calling anybody evil. They certainly were not engaged in any kind of violence whatsoever. But their bouncy castle, apparently, was a great threat to the government of Canada.”
Before the Freedom Convoy arrived in Ottawa at the end of January, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the truckers and supporters of the convoy a “small fringe minority” who hold “unacceptable views.”
Numerous other elected officials disparaged the Freedom Convoy protesters, including Ottawa City Councillor Diane Deans, who called them “a threat to our democracy.”
In response to the church burnings last year, Trudeau condemned them but then followed up by saying he sympathized with the motivation for the vandalism given the history of the residential schools.
‘Pitting Canadians Against Canadians’
In recent months, Vancouver has developed into one of the country’s hot spots for activism, including regular protests outside media networks in a campaign titled The Media Is The Virus. One of the organizers behind this movement, Marcella Desjarlais, points an accusatory finger at today’s journalism.“Some of the things that the media puts out there is propagating fear and causing division,” Desjarlais said in an interview.
“They’re making identifiable groups visible, like the unvaxxed and the unmasked, and they become the enemy of the country. We’ve become terrorists. And so it’s pitting Canadian citizens against Canadian citizens when all we want is our freedom and our rights respected.”
While bias in media reporting has been alleged for years, the past two years of COVID coverage, coupled with the Freedom Convoy’s pursuit to remove government-imposed restrictions, have left some claiming that Canada’s press has been choosing sides.
Anita Krishna, a former television director with a well-established Canadian media outlet, says that although she and her co-workers weren’t obligated to adhere to a company policy on how to cover a story, in retrospect she could see the prejudice creep into the newsroom.
Krishna said her network framed social justice causes favourably, even when vandalism, arson, and looting had taken place. But when covering somebody’s vaccination status or the people who protested being forced to reveal it, the station had a different stance.
“Nobody’s judging anybody or criticizing anybody in the Black Lives Matter protests because we are presenting that in a way where you’re justified to do those things. But boy, are we ever judging the unvaccinated,” she told The Epoch Times.
Joseph Quesnel, a senior research associate with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy who worked in journalism for 15 years, says when it comes to the coverage of the convoy protests, media outlets “were very afraid of reporting on anything that questioned the dominant narratives.”
“A lot of the hostile coverage by the media about the Freedom Convoy was really about attacking the messenger because they personally didn’t like the message,” Quesnel said in an interview.
“They persisted in calling the convoy an anti-vaccination protest when it was about mandates and restrictions. And that was unfortunate because it caused people to have a black and white mentality that if you question anything to do with the mandates, it was OK to disrespect those people or call them selfish without even looking at the reasons why they were adopting those positions.”
Salzman says there’s a “spiritual gap” growing in society, which, combined with constant social and media messaging about politically correct discourse, has caused more polarization on issues people with opposing views once used to be able to talk about.
“Now, you’re not just disagreeing over factual matters, you’ve expressed evil,” he said. “And the desire is not to correct you by making better arguments, but to cancel you—to get you fired, to punish you, to isolate you from other people and to say you’re out of civilized society.”
