We were able to invite legendary NDP MP Charlie Angus, who represented Timmins/James Bay in parliament for over 20 years, to come to Picton next week because we had a connection of sorts. Turned out Charlie was a friend of a friend.

Chris has a friend named Tim Hadley from the olden days, when they worked in a Toronto bookstore together. Tim now lives in Belleville and plays bass in a band called Grievous Angels. He also writes music reviews for the Gazette.

Meanwhile, life went on. Trump started talking tariffs and how great it would be to make Canada the 51st State. We heard Charlie’s Elbows Up! call and started to read his Resistance posts on his Substack. At the Gazette, we promoted shopping local, supporting Canadian, and boycotting the U.S.

It then dawned on me that Tim Hadley’s band was also Charlie Angus’s band. How many aggrieved angels could there be? I started to badger Chris. “Do you think we could get Charlie Angus to come to Picton? Ask Tim!” Chris did ask Tim. Tim wrote Charlie. And Charlie wrote back! Sure, he could make a stop in Picton.

And there you go. He’s coming.

Charlie Angus is a bit of a contradiction. He’s a long-serving, superstar politician with a national profile — but his heart is in the small scale, local and grassroots. In kitchen table organizing. Meetings in churches and community halls. How we met Charlie is how everybody meets him. Through a friend of a friend. Through his band.

His call to resist asks ordinary people, those like you and me, with practically nothing in the way of political power, to come together to oppose bad government and abuses of power. To resist is to dissent. It’s the only way to oppose fascism, which imposes absolute, terrifying control. The Trump regime’s kidnapping people off the street is just a warning of more to come.

Charlie Angus wants us to know that the small scale and insignificant, the provincial and the marginal, little rural communities, and individual, ordinary people, are powerful and effective if they work together.

Canada is used to being considered small, a marginal player on the world stage — part of the G7, yes, but not one of the members with real heft. And yet. It is now a leader in a global resistance movement.

Mr. Angus stresses this: the whole world is watching our boycott, just as it watched our election. Canada has reminded the world of the power of resistance. Our unified rejection of the chaos and cruelty descending on America offers a stark contrast to the posturing and uncertainty on display in the UK and Europe.

Resistance offers hope, and reminds that basic decency has its own power.

Other leaders are meeting this moment, too. Both the new PM, Mark Carney, and the former MP are speaking out, for example, against the digital attack on democracy, the “algorithms of hate,” as Mr. Angus calls them, perhaps the most important weapon in the destabilization of peaceful democratic countries around the world.

Before the election, Mr. Angus wrote a letter to the Chief Electoral Officer noting that Elon Musk was interfering in elections around the world, both by donating millions of dollars to populist and alt-right candidates and by using his massive social media platform, X, to spread hatred, lies, and racism.

Mr. Carney has also targeted disinformation as a form of violence his government will work to combat. Fake news is not new — but clear statements from our political leaders saying it must no longer be tolerated are. Why is that?

Mr. Angus thinks that the political and economic establishment, in both the U.S. and here at home, is denying the seriousness of this moment just as it has denied the catastrophe of climate change for decades. Even as wildfires burn all around us.

In our energy policy, both in this province and federally, climate change is not an issue. It is stuck on oil and natural gas and now, in Ontario, on nuclear, and woefully behind in developing the cheaper and cleaner electric technologies now becoming the standard around the world.

“I see myself as challenging the legal and economic and political consensus that minimizes the damage that is being done,” he says.

Mr. Carney and Mr. Angus, I hope, will continue to support and echo each other in the fight ahead. Mr. Carney, too, is deeply invested — literally — in meeting the challenge of climate change. He is also refreshingly direct and straightforward about the moment we are in. The Prime Minister, however, is a statesman, an outsize figure whose place is on the national and the world stage. He will not be coming to visit Picton anytime soon. His first stop, of course, was Washington.

But Mr. Angus is. That fact alone is important. In a recent interview with Steve Paiken on TVO, he explained some of the reasons he decided to retire as an MP.

“The boundaries of my riding were changed, making it bigger than the UK. I have to travel it by bushplane, canoe, helicopter, and navigate rivers during breakup. I can’t, physically, take all that on. Politics is not long distance, it’s not a long-distance thing. I have to be in these communities, for weddings, funerals, celebrations. They expect me to be there.”

Likewise, that on-the-ground engagement is central to his activism. “I had a vision for the Party that I felt was important, grassroots, built on our riding association and local chapters and volunteers.”

Now, he says, politics is large scale, and it is, unfortunately, no longer just the Liberal and Conservative parties that are “leader driven.” The NDP let Jagmeet Singh become the center of the party — and it is now in pieces. Leader-driven politics leave behind the grassroots, the base.

But the resistance, and its impact, are showing us a different path. Resistance restores the local. It invites everybody to the table, to find the language and the frame to understand the moment we are in, to speak clearly about it, and to map the way ahead.

Join the conversation. Charlie Angus will be at The Regent Monday 12 May at 7pm. He will be introduced by the NDP candidate for the Bay of Quinte, Kate Crothers. Chris Fanning will convene a discussion and a Q and A from the audience. Tickets are $15 and available at the Gazette or at the door. All welcome.