“People are so rigid that you say the wrong thing, and the amount of fury and rage that it elicits in others is really something else.”
–Gwen O’Mahony
The tenor of online posts has been getting more aggressive and “dehumanizing” since Donald Trump took over the Oval Office, but former BC Conservative candidate, Gwen O’Mahony, had never felt physically threatened until this week.
On Feb. 11, as O’Mahony was settling in for the evening and thinking about pouring herself a glass of wine, unbeknownst to her, someone was outside her building crouched by the curb, stacking wood under the back end of her Fiat.
Then, between 9:30 and 9:40 pm, that person lit the wood on fire.
Shortly after, a resident of O’Mahony’s building noticed the flames and called 911.
By the time the fire truck arrived, the inside of her vehicle was ablaze.
Fire fighters smashed the windows and extinguished the flames before they reached the tank she’d filled with gas just hours earlier.
If their response hadn’t been so swift, the car might’ve exploded and someone could’ve been hurt or worse. The area has a moderate level of foot and car traffic, and there’s a neighbourhood park with a footpath nearby and a grocery store up the street.
O’Mahony’s first thought after the RCMP informed her the car had been torched was that it was an accident. Maybe one of the unhoused people who sometimes transit the area had lit a fire to keep warm or perhaps there’d been some kind of weird electrical shortage in her car.
But no, there were pieces of wood, firewood or logs, set underneath her car.
“This was deliberate. There’s no way it was an accident.”
“As soon as I walked down there, the RCMP officer looked at me, and she says, ‘So do you have any enemies?’
“I said, ‘Well, I’m a BC Conservative, so I imagine I have quite a few.’”
Anti-Christian hate’
O’Mahony has been speaking out on controversial issues for a while now.
A former BC NDP MLA who left the New Democrats when the party veered too far left for her liking, O’Mahony has been a prominent critic on gender identity issues, women’s rights, and the government’s harm reduction and safe supply drug policies ever since.
A day before the arson, she did an interview with Drea Humphrey from Rebel News condemning the 33 church burnings that have occurred in Canada in the last several years, most without any charges laid.
In the interview, O’Mahony called out the federal and provincial governments for failing to properly acknowledge or take action on the arsons, characterizing them as “anti-Christian hate crime.”
There’s a certain kind of rhetoric that goes on within select social justice circles that’s “incredibly negative,” referencing “anti-Christian” type stuff, she explained in a subsequent interview. “Things they would never post if, let’s say, for example, they were talking about… Islam or Sikhism.”
Maybe the burning of her Fiat is a coincidence and the arsonist randomly chose her car. Or maybe the person was angry at some other stance she’s taken on another topic. But it says something quite concerning about the polarization in our province (country, world) that it may be equally likely she was purposefully, vengefully targeted.
“I do have a lot of people on the left who are quite irritated with me, and some of those people are extreme activists,” she said.
US trade rhetoric worsens animosities
U.S. President Trump’s bellicose trade rhetoric seems to have worsened tensions and escalated the “de-humanizing of conservatives” by critics, she said. “A lot of the left activists have been quite angry with Trump and the trade war, the tariffs.”
The need to be a social justice warrior doesn’t mean what it used to – a sort of hippie movement about peace, love and building a better world.
“It’s really aggressive. It’s in your face. It’s calling you a murderer. It’s calling you a genocider. And when you start thinking of people as genociders, and people that are causing the death of people – you’re causing people to commit suicide – then, you can do anything to those people.”
There’s a lot of animosity on social media, even among people she’s known a long time.
“Saying things like, ‘Hey, Gwen, I know the real reason why you left – you’re a transphobe, that’s why you left the party.’ It’s pretty nasty.”
O’Mahony supports biological women and men competing in separate sports categories and has spoke against biological men sharing public change rooms with girls and women.
“To call someone a transphobe a year or two years ago, was career-ending. They throw around these terms, and the impact of it is actually really devastating to the person, and they don’t give a shit. That really makes me mad. Where’s the kindness in that?”
She said the current elevated agitation in public discourse also may relate to changes at Facebook which recently lifted certain speech restrictions, allowing freer debate between people who disagreed.
Some people aren’t used to being challenged, or having people express differing opinions, she said.
‘Unfriends’ on the internet
Even before Trump’s resurgence on the global political scene, things were getting personal.
When BC Conservative Leader John Rustad referenced O’Mahony in the legislature as a Conservative candidate last spring, Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon lectured the chamber about those who were “falling into that trap of… supporting Freedom Convoy, thinking about conspiracies, all of a sudden becoming super anti-trans and anti-homophobic [sic].
“What’s clear is that [O’Mahony’s] now found a home with people who believe the same thing,” Kahlon said. “That’s what she sees in the leader of the Conservative Party — that same extreme view.”
For some people on the political left, their ideology is a religion, O’Mahony said. “You are a heretic when you leave.”
During the election that followed, instead of looking like a tinfoil hatter as Kahlon suggested, O’Mahony landed a few hefty political blows. She called public attention to embarrassing public policy failures, including rampant drug use and out-of-control conditions in a long term care home and drug dealing by staff in a safe consumption site.
She also filmed a video showing how easy it was to obtain drug paraphernalia like crack pipes from an Island Health vending machine outside Nanaimo General Hospital. The clip was viewed almost a million times on X.
As she gained prominence, so too did the intensity of push-back.
On election night, minutes after her NDP opponent was declared the winner in her riding, O’Mahony received an out-of-the-blue text from a long-time organizer and NDP staffer with deep ties to party.
“Bye, bitch,” read the message.
“Nope,” O’Mahony replied 30 minutes later. “Not gone.”
“Go fuck yourself,” came the reply.
The staffer worked on O’Mahony’s successful BC NDP MLA campaign in the 2012 by-election. O’Mahony lost her seat 13 months later in the 2013 election and although the two had remained Facebook ‘friends,’ they hadn’t spoken in 10 years.
“There’s an optimistic side of me that remembers these people as colleagues, trying to reason with them [on social media] and realizing that they’re using these really deliberate tactics [like gaslighting] against me, and they’re not being genuine,” she said.
“That’s sort of been a bit of a tough slog for me to see that we can’t even have a reasonable discussion when I knew them in a different context.”
And anyone pushing against the “dogma” is an enemy. Former believers are in their own category, said O’Mahony, adding “I’m an apostate.”
‘You can’t be silent’
One thing she says she’’s noticed in online conversations generally is an absence of flexibility.
“The views are … just so staunch, they’re so unbending. There’s no room to have even a slightest diversion of opinion.
“People are so rigid that you say the wrong thing, and the amount of fury and rage that it elicits in others is really something else,” she said.
That’s where we’re at right now, and the only way to deal with it is to keep fighting, O’Mahony said.
“You can’t be silent.”
O’Mahony went public with the arson, hoping too, it might flush out someone who saw something.
Meanwhile, her car is impounded, a police investigation is ongoing, she’ll have to go through the hassle of getting another vehicle and might have to move.
Still, she remains defiant.
“Burn my car up – I never liked it anyway,” she says with a dark laugh.
Then she pauses, serious again.
“A minority of extremists are pushing a weird agenda, and a lot of us are just getting sick of it. This woman is sick of it. This woman is not shutting up.”
Correction: Gwen O’Mahony served as BC NDP following a by-election in 2012 until a general election 13 months later in 2013.