Liberal MP is once again making headlines for making deplorable comments. This time, he accused Michael Geist of being racist… for pointing out racism.
Yesterday, we reported on the Liberal scandal where the government was funding an organization with a member making antisemitic comments. Several Liberal MPs began pointing fingers at each other trying to abdicate responsibility for the scandal – this despite the scandal enveloping their whole department. Luckily, Anthony Housefather actually took some responsibility and began asking for an investigation as to how these events came to be. The contract between the organization and the government has since been terminated.
While there was movement to try to resolve this issue, it seems that some MPs just don’t know when to shut the blank up. Liberal MP, Chris Bittle made headlines back in June when he triviliazed sexual assault. Essentially, he suggested that sexual assault was no big deal and that investigating such allegations was just “Conservative philibuster”. I personally called the MP out for making such reprehensible comments – that resulted in my account being blocked by Bittle. Clearly, he knew accountability was coming and wanted to try and cowardly hide away from his critics.
Now, we are learning that the deplorable MP is making even more reprehensible comments. After launching yet another personal attack against Michael Geist, he apparently decided to accuse Michael Geist of being the real racist for having the audacity to point out the racism that was going on and asking officials to say something and/or take action.
In a tweet that was screen captured, he suggested that Geist doesn’t like anyone who looks black.
At this point, you’re now deliberately misleading your followers. So strange. I’m told you’re a respected academic. Why would a respected academic do that?
Blinded by hate for Pablo?
Is it because the Minister responsible looks like this
The comments, of course, were shocking. Unfortunately, making such deplorable comments is nothing new for him given that he has a long history of routinely posting harassing comments in response to Geist’s highly respectable reporting of events. What is new is that Geist did respond to these particularly deplorable comments. Geist responded with the following:
I’m the grandson of holocaust survivors who thinks it shouldn’t be too much to ask the Heritage Minister to say something – anything – about officials in his department funding an anti-semite despite multiple warnings. Instead, the Parliamentary Secretary suggests I’m racist. pic.twitter.com/l4ypj9QgWP
— Michael Geist (@mgeist) August 25, 2022
I’m the grandson of holocaust survivors who thinks it shouldn’t be too much to ask the Heritage Minister to say something – anything – about officials in his department funding an anti-semite despite multiple warnings. Instead, the Parliamentary Secretary suggests I’m racist.
Bittle apparently decided he didn’t have enough and continued his campaign of harassment:
https://twitter.com/Chris_Bittle/status/1562843866759172098
Par for the course that you leave out the multiple tweets where I ask why you are misleading your followers about the Minister responsible.
I’m certain you haven’t a racist bone in your body, but the question remains…why keep misleading people? I can’t answer that.
Unsurprisingly, the asinine response garnered even more backlash:
https://twitter.com/ChrisQuines/status/1562844108695412738
I’m not sure how this tweet is supposed to make your other tweet look any better, Chris.
— Sage Nematollahi (he/him) (@snematollahi) August 25, 2022
I’m not sure how this tweet is supposed to make your other tweet look any better, Chris.
Dude, maybe show a little bit of class and take the L.
— Matt Sullivan (sporkless.bsky.social) (@sporkless) August 25, 2022
Dude, maybe show a little bit of class and take the L.
https://twitter.com/asmaloney/status/1562852463753195521
You just accused him of being racist, but now you’re certain he isn’t?
Your continued transparent attempts to deflect using ad hominem attacks isn’t the kind of transparency we are looking for from this government.
You owe him a public apology.
https://twitter.com/gollywog1963/status/1562859633454514176
You are a disgrace Chris Bittle.
And you wonder why people think you guys are divisive.
Deal with argument factually, not back hand a racisism accusation. Maybe just accept that you blew this issue BIG TIME.
Free advice, stop digging a deeper hole.
— Jack (@StephenJack4) August 25, 2022
And you wonder why people think you guys are divisive.
Deal with argument factually, not back hand a racisism accusation. Maybe just accept that you blew this issue BIG TIME.
Free advice, stop digging a deeper hole.
https://twitter.com/DanDelmar/status/1562847213034020867
You’re an MP?!
As another grandson of Holocaust survivors, I’ll also repeat calls for a timeline of what the Minister knew of the “antiracism” program he was “proud” to fund and when, and insist you to stop smearing prominent Jews as racists for asking these basic questions.
You should be embarrassed. I expect you're not, but you should be.
— David T.S. Fraser (@privacylawyer) August 25, 2022
You should be embarrassed. I expect you’re not, but you should be.
The widespread backlash is, of course, not that surprising. Bittle made highly inappropriate remarks and people are responding to those disgraceful remarks.
An overarching question in all of this is at what point does Bittle become a liability for the Trudeau government. After all, there is a well established pattern of terrible behaviour to begin with. What’s more, the backlash Bittle has, once again, received shows that Canadians don’t agree with his handling of any of this. Clearly, Bittle didn’t learn from the last time he made ridiculously stupid remarks, so there isn’t really reason to believe that he will change after this latest PR disaster. Already, you have a government who is walking into the next session of government with a racism scandal on their hands. The last thing they needed was this completely unacceptable reaction in the first place.
As we mentioned yesterday, the question is inevitably going to come up about judgment. There will be difficult questions to answer, but throw in Bittle’s completely insane response and you have a series of terrible judgment calls going on within the Heritage Ministry. This isn’t even getting into how we got here with the social media censorship bill (Bill C-11), the link tax bill (Bill C-18) and the online harms proposal (forthcoming). As some have already suggested on Twitter, the only thing the Liberal party can do is stop digging.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
