TORONTO — Police made several arrests on Friday as chanting protesters delayed the start of a Toronto debate featuring Steve Bannon, the former strategist who helped Donald Trump win the White House, and conservative commentator David Frum.
Video posted on social media showed officers outside the downtown venue using batons to hold back the crowd, and a photo from the scene showed an officer using pepper spray. Police tweeted there had been “a number of arrests” but no reported injuries.
In his opening statement, interrupted by a shouting protester, Bannon gave a nod to the protesters exercising their free speech rights before laying out his views. Society is on the verge of a “revolution,” Bannon said.
“It’s not a question of whether populism is on the rise and whether populism is going to be the political future,” Bannon said, prompting derisive laughter at times. “The only question before us is it going to be populist nationalism or populist socialism.”
In his own opening statement, Frum said the new populism promoted by Bannon is a “scam” and a lie, saying so many populist leaders around the world — including Bannon’s former boss — are “crooks.”
“Does the kind of politics that Steve Bannon is speaking for and President Trump articulates, does that politics offer me anything?” Frum said to audience applause. “It offers you nothing. It does not care about you. It does not respect you.”
Bannon accused critics of populism — and its recent successes in several countries — of resorting to smear tactics.
Critics, who accuse Bannon of being a white supremacist, wanted the debate scrapped. While the 90-minute event at a downtown auditorium was sold out, the theatre was barely half full at the scheduled start time.
Organizers explained the roughly half-hour delay by saying they had anticipated protests and wanted to ensure everyone is safe. To ensure the debate went ahead, albeit late, members of the public were seated even after it began.
“We are going to work diligently as a group to make sure this is a safe evening,” said Rudyard Griffiths, the chairman and moderator of the debate. “That is going to require us to wait a little bit.”
The debate played out just ahead of the fiercely contested midterm congressional elections in the United States on Nov. 6. Organizers said about 2,700 people paid to attend, while several thousand more watched via livestream.
The proposition the two men debated, with Bannon in favour and Frum opposed, was: “The future of Western politics is populist, not liberal.”
Bannon, 64, former executive chairman of right-wing Breitbart News, helped Trump win the 2016 presidential election and was White House chief strategist for eight months until August 2017. The relationship soured after the president suggested Bannon had “lost his mind” for reportedly branding Trump’s son “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.” Bannon later walked back his comments but left his post at Breitbart in January.
Some critics have branded him as a racist and anti-Semite, epithets he has rejected.
Friday’s event — part of the decade-old Munk Debates — was announced just days after Bannon was dropped from the speakers list at this month’s New Yorker Festival after an intense backlash and threats of a boycott by other guests. Critics in Canada also opposed allowing him to air his views on the grounds that he fuels hatred against disadvantaged groups.
Despite the blow-back, Griffiths stressed what he called the importance of allowing vigorous discussion of hot topics to allow the public to make up its own mind.
“Civil and substantive public debate of the big issues of our time helps all of us better understand the challenges we face as a society and what, if anything, can be done to resolve them,” Griffiths said.
Frum, 58, a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine, is a former speechwriter for ex-U.S. president George W. Bush. The Canadian-American is also the author of the recent book “Trumpocracy,” which sharply criticizes the current American president as a threat to democracy itself.
“We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered,” Frum wrote.
Organizers said audience members each paid up to $100 to attend the debate although some resellers were asking several times the value on Friday. Aurea, the charitable foundation behind the event, says it supports public-policy organizations that, among other concepts, advance free markets and the protection of democratic values.