Tim Horton’s found itself at the center of what is possibly the dumbest controversy I have ever seen over the past week. It started with a bit of cross-promotion, as the company aired advertisements from oil company Enbridge. That raised the ire of people who would rather not hear about oil while they order coffee – enough to start an online petition that garnered 28,000 signatures. In a rare example of an online petition actually changing something, that prompted the coffee chain to pull the ads.
That was not the end, because for some reason the right wing side of Canadian society decided that this was a cause worth fighting for, something that could get them back in the forefront of the country’s mind after what has been a pretty bad year for the country’s conservative population. Ezra Levant, still reeling from Sun News getting shut down due in a thunderstorm of indifference, decided to organize a rally in Calgary to protest. The rally was ostensibly in support of the oil field, but it was largely in support of making people pay attention to Levant again, who has been trying to get a right-wing news source established in the wasteland of the internet. The leader of Alberta’s Wildrose Alliance Brian Jean decided to take a stand against the coffee purveyor, loudly declaring that it was a way to support the Alberta oil patch, a way to shore up support in a province that mostly went for the opposite of his party in the most recent election.
The move to boycott Tim’s was less about taking a stand for the little guy – Enbridge is hardly a plucky underdog in any scenario – but about getting people to pay attention to conservatives again. After all, they lost their big news network and the entire province of Alberta, things have been going poorly for them all year and we are in the run up to the federal election. Clearly, the momentum has to be shifted if they want it in their favor, and to do that they have chosen to pick a high profile target, create a narrative that expresses support for the working class, and attempt to spin that into positive press. It’s not going to work because the target they’ve chosen is a very stupid one, they are essentially getting all in a huff because one large corporation isn’t advertising for another large corporation anymore.
Tim Horton’s probably should not have agreed to run the ads in the first place, the oil industry is going to be controversial. The television screens of a coffee shop are perhaps not the ideal place to spark a debate about the value of fossil fuels versus the environmental impact. But by pulling the ads they’re not attacking the oil patch, no more so than the countless number of coffee shops that have never aired a single Enbridge ad. The entire controversy is only tangentially about oil, it’s a way for Canada’s right-wing to get people’s attention after the tide turned against them. That they thought supporting a large oil company in a mild disagreement with some coffee shop customers would be the way to get Canadians back on board shows how out of touch they actually are. People are paying attention to Levant and Jean, sure, but how many people are merely reflecting on how the Canadian conservative movement has disappeared so far up their own rear end that they think boycotting a popular coffee stop for spurious reasons will get support?
