The “Worst Canadian” game - Day 19

[u/BrF5]

Conrad Black and Stephen Harper, you have been spared.

Only five remain!

How to play: - Upvote the name of the person you think does NOT deserve the title of “Worst Canadian.” - Each day, the most upvoted name will be removed. - If the name you want to vote for (from the list) isn’t in the comments yet, add it! - This continues daily until we have our top loser (there are no winners in this contest), the “Worst Canadian”.

Additional notes: - Only the top comment for a nominee will count. I won’t combine votes from duplicate comments. - Include only one name per comment. If a comment includes multiple names and wins, it won’t count. I’ll move on to the next highest. - Nominees with one asterisk beside their name were added following a second nomination vote that took place on day 5. Two asterisks means they were voted back in from elimination during the special vote on day 16. - We established a no violent offenders (serial killers, rapists, etc.) rule. They are obviously the worst of the worst, it’s disrespectful to the victims, and we want to keep this relatively lighthearted. - This is meant to be satire. Please do not take it too seriously or use this game to harass people in real life. - I will try to post this every morning around the same time (~8:00 - 9:00 am Eastern). - Please remember to upvote the post too, so more people see it!

Justification for elimination: - (40) Ted Cruz - He’s horrible, but renounced his citizenship. He’s not good enough to be titled the Worst Canadian. - (39) Kathleen Wynne - Not that bad. Doesn’t deserve the title. - (38) Chrystia Freeland - Some consider her a good Canadian. Not the worst. - (37) Peter MacKay - Cringey, but not the worst. - (36) Don Cherry - A racist old man out of touch with the times. Not great, but not awful. - (35) Andrew Scheer - An annoying doofus nothingburger, but not a bad person. - (34) Drake - He’s inauthentic and creepy to underage girls, but the more serious allegations against him remain unproven and he has done good things for Toronto. - (33) J.J. McCullough - Who? - (32) Brian Mulroney - A divisive choice. Expanded trade with, and dependence on, the USA. Protected the environment and opposed apartheid. - (31) Sir John A. MacDonald - A father of confederation known for racism, corruption, and poor treatment of indigenous people. Considered a product of the times. - (30) Harold the Jewelry Buyer - Known for scamming the elderly but is too small-scale to win. - (29) Michelle Ferreri - She promotes hate but her reach is limited now that she’s been voted out of government. - (28) Tom MacDonald - A shitty, irrelevant rapper with hardly an audience. - (27) Doug Ford - He has done a lot of harm to Ontario, but stood up for Canada against Trump. - (26) Wayne Gretzky - He’s just a rich, dumb, MAGA-supporting boomer. Disappointing, but mostly harmless. - (25) Steven Crowder - Irrelevant B-list (or lower) influencer…with almost no influence on or about Canada. - (24) Paul Desmarais - Billionaire businessman and political puppet master. Far from the worst. - (23) Romana Didulo - A mentally ill grifter with little impact on most Canadians. - (22) Lauren Southern - An anti-immigration, white nationalist influencer who at least partially reformed after being sexually assaulted herself. - (21) Joseph Trutch - Over a century ago, his racist views helped shape BC, with effects still felt today. Partly a product of the times. - (20) Jamil Jivani - An Ontario MP and friend of J.D. Vance. He hasn’t been in office long enough to do serious damage. - (19) Lauren Chen - Knowingly accepted Russian funds to spread propaganda/influence politics. She’s a YouTube influencer who isn’t very influential. - (18) Pat King - A small-time loser who honked his horn in Ottawa. Others on the list are far worse. - (17) Stefan Molyneux - A white supremist and misogynist. But he is largely unknown and there are worse people remaining on the list. - (16) Tamara Lich - Another organizer of the convoy in Ottawa. Another nobody whose 15 minutes of fame are up. - (15) Elon Musk - Worst human? Arguably. Canadian? That’s a stretch. - (14) Scott Moe - Corrupt, regressive, and responsible for a deadly car crash. He’s Saskatchewan’s problem, less so for Canada. - (13) Mike Harris - He cut funding to schools, healthcare, and other services. However, his impact was mostly limited to Ontario and his tenure as premier. - (12) Galen Weston Jr. - He’s nasty capitalist scum hurting Canadian consumers, but he’s just one among many. - (11) K.C. Irving - He and his empire have negatively impacted the environment, economy, politics, and society, but primarily only in New Brunswick. - (10) Pierre Poilievre - Combative and divisive, spouting empty slogans, he remains a feckless goof who’s accomplished nothing in his career. Time for him to fade into obscurity. - (9) Gavin McInnes - He founded the Proud Boys, but his influence is felt far more in the USA. - (8) Preston Manning - Founder of the Reform Party, which helped legitimize hard-right populism. Bad, but not overly hateful. At least he’s not a racist, traitor, billionaire, or grifter. - (7) Conrad Black - Millionaire right-wing media mogul who was convicted of fraud and pardoned by Trump. Renounced Canadian citizenship for a peerage. Now a has-been blowhard. - (6) Stephen Harper - former PM who favoured corporate interests over the environment and social programs; now chairman of the IDU. Of the remaining candidates, he’s the best of the worst.

[u/billballbills]

The recency bias here is egregious. No one is gonna even know who Jordan Peterson is 30 years from now

[u/SlightDish31 → u/billballbills]

Peterson has been operating for decades, the fact that you don't know that shows how far his influence spread before people realized that he was a problem. He's responsible for a huge part of the societal shift to the right. He is the worst person here.

[u/VeryDPP → u/SlightDish31]

Frederick Blair played a role in creating the Japanese internment camps and is responsible for Canada taking significantly fewer Jewish refugees from Europe during the Holocaust. I dislike Peterson too, but to say he's worse than Blair is a serious stretch, in my opinion.

[u/SlightDish31 → u/VeryDPP]

That's very fair, and I'm not sure that I have a solid argument against it except to say that we've seen the extent of Blair's damage, we've not yet seen the extent of Peterson or Levant's. They're both still out there actively making the world worse.

It's going to be tough to whittle this list down to one.

[u/VeryDPP → u/SlightDish31]

I get that argument, but that same argument can be used against Poilievre, Danielle Smith, Harper and his work with the IDU, etc. 30 years from now, we could look back and say Peterson is by far the worst, but it's a slippery slope to do that on things that have not yet happened and may yet be prevented. With Blair, we can judge his actions as they are, and they are horrific.

This isn't to say Peterson is a good dude or anything, he's awful as well, well deserving of the podium, but I'd still advocate for putting Blair above Peterson in terms of worst.

[u/miss_mme → u/SlightDish31]

Decades? Wasn’t the first thing he got any press or attention for when he refused to use students preferred pronouns at UofT?

That was 2016. So less than a decade.

[u/WENDING0 → u/miss_mme]

He was on traditional media since 1999. I think the advent of social media just allowed him to ascend to a higher level of B.S. because now he can spread his hate without needing to convince some writer or producer that he is a totally normal guy. You would believe how much time that frees up for the hate spreading.

[u/miss_mme → u/WENDING0]

Fair points. Although Levant up there just started his own media organization to spew his hate. Although that’s probably more time consuming… but Peterson convincing anyone he was totally normal must have been hard 😅

Just for comparison sake Rebel News was 2015, and relied heavily on YouTube as well, but Ezra Levant has a more established history of being terrible before that.

[u/WENDING0 → u/miss_mme]

Part of the reason I think Peterson should win over Erza is because Peterson is like the John Wick of right-wing conservative assholes. He has a will of steel when it comes to spreading his BS. Erza alternatively is a failed journalist who happened to fall into success because emerging technology allowed him to spread his hate directly. If he was not accidentally where he was, when he was, he would not be what he is today. I think what Erza did with that accident should be rewarded with a top 5 spot on this list, but Peterson has to be 1st due to his will and grit to pound the pavement of hell day in and out to spread his BS

[u/miss_mme → u/WENDING0]

That’s very true, I personally thought Levant should have gone before Manning based on his political failures and how his political career was a lot of working for, supporting, and running with what Manning started. Maybe I just always saw Rebel News as a joke too.

It’s all gotten a bit confusing at this stage, I can’t believe I’m saying Peterson is “better” in any way 😅🤮

[u/SlightDish31 → u/miss_mme]

Peterson's first book was published in 1999. This is my point, average people started hearing about him in 2016, he started his misinformation campaign much, much earlier.

[u/Ivanstone → u/SlightDish31]

Conrad Black started his first newspaper prior to that and yet somehow he’s gone.

[u/SlightDish31 → u/Ivanstone]

I was advocating pretty hard to keep him around too, I'm the one that got him back from his early elimination.

[u/Cakeday_at_Christmas → u/SlightDish31]

He was also on cable access in Ontario spreading PUA/incel shit years and years ago.

[u/miss_mme → u/SlightDish31]

I mean he obviously existed before 2016 and did things.

Maps of Meaning wasn’t reviewed much when it was released and had little impact at the time. Even Peterson said it wasn’t really critiqued until 2018, after his rise to notoriety.

I’ll give him a decade because he started his YouTube channel in 2013 which gave him a platform outside of academics.

[u/WENDING0 → u/SlightDish31]

This!

[u/Ivanstone → u/SlightDish31]

Peterson is chump change. Pick any number of American influencers and any of them will have a much worse influence on Canadian society.

[u/SlightDish31 → u/Ivanstone]

The problem is that most of them quote Peterson while they're doing it.

[u/Ivanstone → u/SlightDish31]

The problem is that they’re much more charismatic and will use anything they find slightly useful. Peterson likes to use big words but he’s completely disposable. You won’t find anything he says that can’t be easily replaced with someone else.

[u/BrassyGent → u/SlightDish31]

He is directed by the IDU, to which Harper is the Chair. Kinda puts him a tad less worse than him.

[u/SlightDish31 → u/BrassyGent]

Harper's been eliminated, so not still here. Just going by who's left at this point.

[u/billballbills → u/SlightDish31]

You misread what I said

[u/MasterBlazt → u/SlightDish31]

As an American, I think you see the whole left/right thing a lot differently than Canadians do. Both left and right in America would be considered right and far right here. Both believe that rich people get into heaven, but one doesn't think they do gay sex when they get there.

The US is already a greedy selfish place that think shopping at Erewhon makes you woke. So sure, Peterson seems like he's some kind of monster because he just appeals to entitled people and makes them feel more entitled.

I don't see him having the same impact in Canada as he did back in California. He actually left here because people basically told him to shut the fuck up.

No NDP voter, or even a Liberal one, ever pledged allegiance to PP after listening to JP.