In March 2021 after a controversial outburst and due to what she says was harassment against her, regional councillor Laura Ip (pronounced ‘Yip’) set her Twitter account to private. She has continued to engage with her approximately 1500 followers, but only they can see her for-private-eyes-only Tweets.
In May 2022, Ip launched a reelection campaign on a new Twitter account, and updated her website to reflect her new campaign. The slogan at the top reads, “Candid. Clear. Capable”
A sharp reaction to ‘harassment’
On March 14, 2021 Laura Ip received a message on her Facebook that she said upset her and made her feel threatened. In the message she received, Niagara region resident Douglass Caddick-Bisson took issue with an old Tweet by Ip (dated 2017, prior to her term in office) that had recently been shared by local podcaster Jim Fannon (whom had made controversial remarks about her the year prior).
The old Tweet at issue was Ip’s 2017 response to a Jordan Peterson tweet. “Oooohhh…Maybe we can go back to the days when it was legal for a husband to rape his wife. #Moron”, Ip tweeted.
“You have a mouth on you”, Caddick-Bisson’s message said on March 14, 2021. He took issue with “the example this sets for our kids”; he sent a link to a photo of protesting children who held a sign that said “We are watching”, and echoed these comments in a message: “We are watching π”
Ip exposed these message on her Twitter and made a series of her interpretations.
“There is a violence in ‘You have a mouth on you’ that I can’t stop thinking about today”, she said.
Caddick-Bisson took issue with her interpretations (Full disclosure: as did this author.) Caddick-Bisson later filed an Integrity Commissioner complaint, but it was dismissed.
See attached thread for full documentation.
On March 20, 2021, Ip put out a statement on her website.
[..] If you do not like something I said before I was an elected official, so be it. If you do not like something about who I am, so be it. We are all permitted to be whole people. I am permitted to have thoughts and feelings outside of the time and/or scope of my role as a Regional Councillor, and you are welcome to not like them. It is also possible β in fact, it is far less work β to completely ignore the aspects of my life that you do not like or, frankly, to ignore me altogether.
As a politician, of course I want media attention. I will tell you, though, that I would much rather garner media attention because I worked hard to tighten up the Regionβs Expense Policy or because I worked to ensure that the election of the Regional Chair was a transparent process or because I brought a motion to try to address a number of governance issues or because I am currently working on getting my colleagues to consider developing a Lobbyist Registry.
I can assure you that I do not want attention for being the target of hateful, misogynistic behaviour, and I would like nothing more than to stop having to talk about it. Until it stops, though, we do have to continue to talk about it, because β as I noted above β there is too long a history of this kind of behaviour escalating to physical violence.
Laura Ip, March 20, 2021
She also advised her supporters not to harass anyone for her, “In the meantime, just as I do not enjoy receiving all of the hateful messages I receive, I also do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, condone the sending of those kinds of messages to anyone else.”
Later that night or the next day, Ip pulled her Twitter account and went into private mode.
In December, in a blog post on her website after vandalism of her local ally, Karrie Porter, Ip explained why she was in private mode:
Because of the βππππ ππππ π ππππππππππ βπ’π ππ πππ€-πππ£ππ ππππ‘πππππ π£πππππππβ of on-line abuse and harassment to which Iβve been subjected on a near daily basis for the last few years, I was trying to take one of my extended breaks from social media to give myself some relief and peace. Because even locking down my social media accounts has not seen an end to the posts about me; the posts in which Iβm tagged; the e-mails I receive; or lies and abuse to which Iβm subjected about my personal life and my very existence.
Laura Ip, Dec 22, 2021
The phrase “ceaseless flickering hum of low-level emotional violence” links to an excerpt from a book in a section “Cyber-misogyny: Intrusion online” from “Women and Gendered Violence in Canada: An Intersectional Approach“.
Ip claims the reason for her negative experiences online is her sex as a woman.
Brief reappearance in April to comment on mass arrest of protesters
On April 30, 2021, Ip’s Twitter account made a brief public reappearance with the following statements. When the statements were screencaptured and shared to another platform, Ip put her account back into private and it was not seen again until her brief statements in December.
The statements in April were made the day prior to an anti-lockdown protest in St. Catharines and during the Provincial Stay-At-Home orders. Protesters (full disclosure: this author included) planned to protest peacefully but there were calls for police to intervene. “Many people are also very upset that the police are not arresting people on the spot,” she said.
She claims that protesters are “already angry” and “Many of them would — quite quickly and without provocation, I presume — resort to violence”, saying she has been “on the receiving end of their vitriol.”
“The police storming into these events and trying to arrest anyone/everyone would, without a single doubt in my mind, result in a riot”, she claimed.
Ip went on to suggest that protesters are using their children as human shields from the prospect of police mass arrests. “They know that the police are far less likely to do anything that might result in violence from the attendees if children are present”.
As she later indicated, anyone who might go online to express a disagreement with these comments is cyber-misogynist.
In full disclosure, this author was the organizer of the peaceful protest that took place in St. Catharines the following day, and was subsequently arrested and charged.
A past of Twitter political activism: #MyUnthinkableAbortion
Laura Ip’s Twitter account was prior an outlet for her political activism. In May 2019, she responded to comments attributed to Ontario Progressive-Conservative MPP Sam Oosterhoff (“Make abortion unthinkable”), with a series of very personal statements centered around her “unthinkable” decision to abort her third child.
CKTB platformed the hashtag campaign and copied a full transcript of the thread, which is now otherwise unavailable to the public because Ip’s Twitter account is currently set to private.
Author’s comment
The purpose of this story is to expose that which is currently hidden. Members of government must be transparent in order to be held accountable. In this case, Laura Ip has made controversial statements (for example, her assessment of the nature of the protests) and yet and these past statements are today entirely non-transparent. It is because of the author’s diligence that a screen capture of those statements is available.
Ip claims to be the victim of harassment, which is likely true to some degree, but she has also obscured the original context of everything she claims. In this author’s view, she has taken very little responsibility how her approach has brought about her reputation, and instead has externalized the problem onto others as a venue for maximizing a feminist political ideology. “It’s not me, it’s misogyny”.
Even if that is not so, the above story nevertheless provides context that is currently omitted from any discussion elsewhere. Under the cloak of her private Twitter status only her followers know what she has written. Perhaps it is nothing, or perhaps she has taken her opinions to a further edge. What might she be organizing on that platform with 1500 other people? Whatever it is, it’s for-private-eyes-only. You’d have to be an approved follower of hers to know, and that is a curious position for a public figure to be in.
Her new online persona may avoid some of the pitfalls of her last one, but the public can not assess, for better or worse, her contribution to the political discourse if she keeps her Twitter account private.
