The statements that Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi made on The West Block (on May 9) are sickening. Anti-maskers don’t deserve to eat? Are you joking? Isn’t he the man who has been the poster child for minority groups? Yet he calls out a group that, in all honesty, is just sick of the half-assed attempts of the government.
Instead he says and I quote, “Those people at those anti-mask protests, let's not kid ourselves, they're not people who need to eat. They are people who are marching in thinly veiled white nationalist supremacist anti-government protests and they don’t deserve that kind of sympathy.”
The definition of bigotry is the “obstinate or unreasonable attachment to a belief, opinion, or faction; in particular, prejudice against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.”
He is shaming people into not voicing their opinions based on fear and backlash.
Yet he decided to make generalized broad sweeping statements about something he truly knows nothing about.
I have never felt so angered by what that man said. As far as I’m concerned everyone deserves to live no matter their views. And as far as I knew Nenshi thought the same but he has made it very clear with his statements today that he is a contradiction of himself.
He essentially implied that anyone who goes against him and his beliefs doesn’t deserve to eat. That makes me sick. Shame on the West Block and shame on Mayor Nenshi for not being a solution but instead being a part of the problem.
Alberta is not full of white supremacists but more like people sick of being vilified in the news and on social media based on the presumption that we are all uneducated rednecks without a moral compass. Disgusting.
Erin Ross-Campbell,
Olds
