Photo by Andrew Francis Wallace / Toronto Star
by Sasha / Earth First! Newswire
The former Environmental Minister of Ontario, Chris Stockwell, went toe-to-toe with anti-Line 9 activists in an epic Twitter war and lost big, deleting his entire account in the end.
Co-editor and moderator of protestbarrick.net, Sakura Blue, led the debate against the expansion of the Line 9 pipeline.
“It started as a simple response to a stupid comment,” Sakura writes in the Toronto Media Co-op, “But over the next 72 hours, a twitter war had developed and the victor had been clearly determined. By Monday morning, Former Ontario Environment and Energy Minister Chris Stockwell’s Twitter account was deleted, erasing the record of his shameful performance in a debate about Line 9, the controversial pipeline project that seeks to run toxic dilbit and explosive Bakken oil through Southern Ontario in a 39 year old pipe.”
Stockwell did, indeed, make a fool out of himself. Of course, if someone states a factually inaccurate claim, it doesn’t reflect badly on them, but when they repeat that claim a day after it has been shown false, they are clearly just lying. This was the pattern established by Stockwell, whose debate style bordered on creepy, if not just plain drunk.
It wouldn’t be surprising if he was, in fact, drunk while debating the different folks who popped in to comment, such as Rising Tide North America and LIFT Toronto. Stockwell, who works at a consulting firm today, was forced to resign from his position as Environment Minister after getting caught using state funds to pay for his family vacation to France, as well as bar fees in excess of $4,000.
Always prescient and lively, Sakura took screenshots of much of the debate before Stockwell hung it up and abandoned Twitter entirely. According to Sakura, “The takeaway message from all of this is to never ever use Ezra Levant as a primary source of information when engaging in a public debate.”
It all starts out quite normally:
OK, so Sakura is putting on a clinic right now, but there is still nothing severely disgraceful from Stockwell’s side… yet…
“Don’t talk in isolation” is about to get weird…
At this point, it appears Chris might have had a few. Sakura’s annihilating factual evidence has apparently rendered his mind immobile. What happens next is utter humiliation.
Shutting down debate is hilarious, but the 99.999% thing? Sheer genius. Stockwell’s motto: “We are the 99.999%, yay democracy!”
Clearly moving the goal posts. Incoming…
All good points. Stockwell’s response is a case of “If I repeat a lie enough times, maybe it becomes true”:
Stockwell has already given up on making sense, but watch how he brings his 99.999% stat back into play. Truly a master of the absurd.
Chris is evidently completely lost at this juncture.
So lost that he favorites a comment meant for him about how behind he is.
And then he starts weirdly talking about Sakura Saunders’s ass, and everybody starts feeling awkward.
Pretty soon, Chris just started garbling random tweets that made no sense at all. A few people asked whether or not he was drunk, and then he pulled the plug on his Twitter account.
“The whole experience was extremely strange. As I followed along, I felt anxious as to what Stockwell would say, but every time he tweeted something, it just seemed less comprehensible than the last one,” stated one observer, ”I mean, this isn’t like a real time debate. He had time to compose his answers—sometimes hours—but he just couldn’t come around to an actual point.”
