The Elbows Up Secular Priest

A Catholic Worker founder, punk bassist, and twenty-one-year parliamentarian has reinvented himself as Canada’s most successful merchant of political rage.

A sermon in Mexico City

In certain quarters, it has been a year of wrath. On the first day of August 2025, a retired member of Parliament from Northern Ontario appeared in Mexico City before an assembly of the hemispheric Left and called for a global boycott of the United States. The occasion was the Second Pan-American Congress, a gathering of some sixty legislators from twelve countries, welcomed by Presidenta Claudia Sheinbaum. The agenda carried resolutions against American migration enforcement and against Israel. The hyperbolic Canadian guest told the delegates that his country’s consumer boycott against the US had drawn blood, and that the world should follow its example.

Charlie Angus Calls for Global Boycott of USA,” Meidas Canada, YouTube.

The speaker was Charlie Angus, and the scene distills a remarkable second act. For twenty-one years he represented Timmins-James Bay in the House of Commons. Today he answers to no voters, no caucus whip, no Speaker, and no disclosure regime. He commands instead a Substack called The Resistance, a YouTube operation run ironically under the banner of an American partisan network, and a touring revival show that has crisscrossed the country under the slogan, wait for it,…Elbows Up. One cannot make this up!

What does a man do with a pulpit like that? Following his virtual trail, compiling the record of the past eighteen months, supplies an answer, and the answer deserves closer inspection than Canadian media have given it.

The formation

The first half of the biography commands respect. Born in Timmins in 1962 and raised in Toronto, Angus co-founded the punk band l’Étranger, named for the Camus novel, at seventeen, with Andrew Cash, writing songs shaped in equal parts by the Clash and by Catholic social teaching.

In the 1980s Angus and his wife, Brit Griffin, opened a Catholic Worker house of hospitality in Toronto, sheltering homeless men, refugees, and former prisoners in the tradition of Dorothy Day. He wrote a long-running column for the Catholic New Times. He moved north to Cobalt in 1990, published a magazine devoted to Northern Ontario life, fronted the folk band Grievous Angels, and wrote books on mining history and the betrayal of Treaty 9. When he won his seat in 2004, the House gained one of its more textured members: a man formed by a tradition that saw the face of Christ in the unwanted.

That tradition was radical about hospitality. It kept no enemies lists. Holding the two halves of this biography together is the task of everything that follows.

The rupture

In 2005, the two authorities in Angus’s life collided. His party lined up behind Bill C-38, the same-sex marriage legislation. His parish priest at St. Patrick’s in Cobalt, Father John Lemire, warned him, with the public backing of Bishop Paul Marchand of Timmins, that a vote for the bill would place him outside the communion of the Church. Angus voted with his party on June 28, 2005, and was refused the Eucharist. He called the refusal a “shocking and improper action on the part of a lone priest” and objected that no priest had any business instructing his vote in the House. Not exactly an accurate depiction of what took place.

The priest was no freelancer. Canon 915 of the Church’s universal law directs that communion be refused to those who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin, and in 2004 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then the Church’s chief doctrinal officer, had set out for the bishops how that rule reaches Catholic politicians who campaign on the basis of the faith while legislating against its teachings. A politician who draws votes as a Catholic and then defies the Church on a defining question puts his pastor in an impossible position, and the pastor’s duty in that position is written down.

The Church in Mexico has managed this species of politician for a century and knows the manual by heart. In Canada, the rule may not be applied consistently, but so few politicians draw on their Catholicism. Justin Trudeau is Roman Catholic, and while he does not hide it, he does not campaign on it and does not pretend to live a public sacramental life. Father Lemire applied the rule to Angus, with his bishop behind him, to a longtime columnist of the Catholic press who knew the manual perfectly well himself.

Whatever one makes of the merits, the episode marked a transfer of allegiance. The parish had asked him to choose, and he chose. The moral community that ordered his conscience would henceforth be political.

The party of Tommy Douglas and Ed Broadbent or the Church of Saint Francis of Assissi and Saint John Paul of Krakow? That was his personal choice.

The exit

The parliamentary career ran another two decades without a second act. In 2017, Angus ran for the federal NDP leadership and traumatically lost to Jagmeet Singh, taking under a fifth of the vote. By 2024, the party he had served was collapsing nationally, and the writing on the wall in Timmins-James Bay was legible to anyone who could read the statistical tea leaves. He saw what was coming and chose an exit on his own terms, announcing his retirement and resolving, by his own account, to stop asking questions about bills nobody read and to spend his remaining time in the chamber on speeches about fascism as a warm up prelude to his new vocation.

The verdict of his riding arrived in April 2025 without him on the ballot: the Conservative candidate took roughly half the vote in the successor riding, and the NDP fell to a distant third, below four thousand votes, in a seat Angus had held since 2004. Not much of a political legacy to bequeath to his party.

Unless you’re Jagmeet, retirement, for most parliamentarians, means memoirs and a board seat or two. Angus built something more interesting. He built a new congregation.

The toolkit

Consider the campaigns in sequence; the sequence reveals the method.

In February 2024, while still an MP, Angus tabled Bill C-372, the Fossil Fuel Advertising Act, announcing that “the Big Tobacco moment has finally arrived for Big Oil.” The bill went far beyond billboards. Section 8 prohibited promoting a fossil fuel in any manner suggesting it “would lead to positive outcomes in relation to the environment, the health of Canadians, reconciliation with Indigenous peoples or the Canadian or global economy.”

Producers faced fines up to one million dollars and imprisonment up to two years; other persons faced fines up to half a million. Defenders pointed to a clause exempting opinion and commentary, and the bill died at first reading when Parliament dissolved. The precedent it sought to plant remains on the record: criminal penalty, including prison, for asserting the economic benefit of the commodity that funds Confederation. What kind of democrat drafts that?

One year later came the citizenship campaign. Elon Musk had lived rent-free in Angus’s head for some time. In January 2025 the MP wrote to Elections Canada demanding an investigation of the “American oligarch,” accusing him of rigging his platform’s algorithm and of endorsing what Angus called fascist leaders around the world, and telling an interviewer that Canada could not allow “men like Elon Musk, the broligarchy of the United States” to interfere in the country.

Days earlier he had posted that Musk had given “a fascist salute,” appending a two-word obscenity to the world’s richest man by way of analysis. Then a British Columbia author launched a parliamentary e-petition demanding the government revoke Musk’s Canadian citizenship and passport, and Angus, still sitting as an MP, gave it his formal sponsorship. More than three hundred thousand people signed.

Legal experts noted throughout that no government can lawfully strip on a whim a citizenship acquired by descent, and Musk holds his by descent, through his mother, born in Regina. The impossibility troubled the sponsor not at all.

The point, Angus explained, was to let Canadians “express their disgust” at what Musk had become. Citizenship, in Angus’ conception of Canada, is a licence revocable for holding the wrong views and advising the wrong men, and a member of Parliament lent the machinery of the House of Commons to the proposition.

In the traditions of this country, Parliament is the guarantor of the rights of its citizens.

CBC News clip: “Petition to revoke Musk’s citizenship allowing Canadians to ‘express their anger.’”

Then came the ambassador. Pete Hoekstra may have given Canadians legitimate grievances, and a serious critic would document them soberly and press for proportionate answers. Angus instead declared on his Substack that the ambassador is “a foul-mouthed wrecking ball with no sense of diplomacy,” a man sent to sabotage trade and inflame the Canadian far right, and he directed his readers to write to the foreign minister demanding Hoekstra’s immediate expulsion from Canada.

A parliamentary petition to declare the ambassador persona non grata, initiated by a Calgary resident and sponsored by Elizabeth May, gathers signatures under his continuous promotion. He is not its author. Angus is its evangelist.

Beneath the campaigns runs the rhetoric, and the rhetoric deserves quotation rather than summary. At a Sudbury rally in April 2025, Angus described the American president as a “grifter, narcissist psychopath who’s also a convicted criminal and a sexual predator.” In March, he vowed that “Canada will never kiss that gangster’s ring” and urged Canadians against travel to the United States altogether, warning that they risked being kidnapped by American agents and shipped to a Salvadoran concentration camp; those were his nouns.

By June, at an Ottawa press conference, the United States had become a “full-on police state tyranny.” The word gangster now does service in nearly every one of his sermons: gangster president, gangster regime, and the phrase he has made his network’s mission statement, gangster fascism.

“Charlie Angus: Travel Warning Against United States,” YouTube.

Notice the word that surfaces every time the ledger is read. Musk gives a fascist salute and endorses fascist leaders. Washington practises gangster fascism. Travellers face a rising fascist threat. His farewell speeches in the Commons were devoted to fascism; the congress in Mexico City assembled against fascism; the tour exists to fight fascism.

Orwell warned in 1946 that the word had already decayed into meaning little beyond “something not desirable.” In Angus’s mouth the decay is complete. Fascism names whatever he opposes this week, which spares him the labour of thought, argument, flatters every audience into an army of Resistance fighters, and quietly issues the permissions that follow from the label. A man who finds fascists everywhere has licensed himself to do nearly anything, because nearly anything is justified against fascists. The usage is facile, and the facility is the point. A war requires an enemy worthy of one.

Pause on the war sentence itself for a moment. It has not received much attention. At that same Sudbury rally, Angus told the crowd: “This is a war, and we know in a war that people get hurt.” A former parliamentarian, addressing crowds night after night, tells them they are in a war and that in wars people get hurt. Wars have enemies. Wars suspend the ordinary rules. An audience told it is at war has been told, by implication, what the moment licenses. War is a violent endeavour. No responsible public figure lets that sentence leave his mouth by accident, and Angus composes his sermons too carefully for accident to explain it. A man who brands his opponents fascist has adopted the mobilizing grammar of the movements he claims to resist: the enemy within, the traitor class, the existential emergency that makes ordinary politics contemptible and extraordinary measures thinkable.

That is the language of a provocateur.

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The collection plate

Who pays for all this radical rhetoric? By Angus’ own solicitation page, the congregation does. Readers upgrade to paid subscriptions. Supporters send e-transfers to an address in his own name, or mail cheques made out to Charlie Angus, with The Resistance noted on the memo line, to a post office box in Ottawa. PayPal is available. Ball caps sell for thirty dollars by e-transfer.

The team, he writes, consists of himself and two others. On Labour Day 2025, the operation merged with MeidasTouch, the American anti-Trump media network of the Meiselas brothers, to launch Meidas Canada; by his own December accounting, the channel drew nine million views in under three months and reached two hundred thousand subscribers, which he advertises as the top independent news analysis operation in Canada. The tour stops that feed it charge five dollars at the door, are hosted by labour councils and riding associations, and sell out. The door is an on-ramp. The destination is the subscription page.

A note of precision is owed here: none of this is illegal, and none of it is hidden. Angus discloses the mechanics himself, cheerfully. The point is structural. Canada built elaborate regimes to keep political money accountable. Elections Canada caps and audits candidates’ money. The charities directorate disciplines the money of charities. Parliament discloses the money of members. A retired MP with a post office box and a PayPal account answers to none of them, and the product he sells is the gaseous emotional temperature he generates.

In this business model, anger is inventory, and the man who spent an election year warning Canadians about unaccountable foreign-linked political money now runs a Canadian political operation under the brand of an American media network, financed through channels no Canadian regime examines. Elbows up!

His alarm about foreign hands in Canadian politics has a selective history besides. Through 2022 and 2024 his party propped up, under a formal supply-and-confidence agreement, a Liberal government whose elections the Hogue Commission found Beijing had targeted with sustained interference, and whose own intelligence review committee reported that some parliamentarians had wittingly assisted foreign states. No petitions issued. No expulsions were demanded. Foreign meddling stirred Angus to fury only when the supposed meddler had a South African accent.

One must also point out that Charlie's taxpayer-backed parliamentary pension is worth more than $100,000 a year, and estimates put his lifetime payments at roughly $3.9 million. Socialism for the 21st century.

What expulsion would cost

Return, then, to the demand he presses hardest: that Canada declare the American ambassador persona non grata and remove him. Under Article 9 of the Vienna Convention, a receiving state may do this at any time, without explanation. Between close allies it is the gravest formal step short of rupturing relations, and Canada has never taken it against an American chief of mission.

Look at the calendar. On August 19, less than a week from today (this is posted Aug 15), an American tariff of fifty percent under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 lands on roughly twenty billion dollars a year of Canadian trade, with no expiry date. The CUSMA review has collapsed into annual renewals; Mexico is four rounds deep in bilateral talks while Ottawa has barely begun formal negotiations.

Every channel between Ottawa and Washington now carries real weight. Expelling the ambassador guarantees the reciprocal expulsion of Canada’s own, likely the expulsion of all provincial legations and freezing of those channels too, and a fresh grievance handed to a White House that has shown every willingness to convert grievance into tariff.

The cost would land on lumber towns, auto workers, and canola farmers. The cost would never land on a Substack in Ottawa, where confrontation is the product and escalation is the growth strategy. The cost would land on the ordinary people Angus once served, much harder than on the elbows-up boomers who support him now.

Would a man who expected to bear the consequences of his own counsel give this counsel? The question answers itself, and it separates the patriot from the pensionable entrepreneur.

The verdict

The tragedy of the case is that the younger man would have recognized the older one. The Catholic Worker movement he joined in the 1980s refused to divide the world into the saved and the damned; its whole discipline was to see a person where the world saw an enemy. The movement he leads today runs on the opposite spiritual nourrishment. It names enemies weekly: the oligarch whose citizenship must be revoked, the ambassador who must be expelled, the industry whose defenders belong in prison, the neighbour recast as a war adversary. It collects its offerings by e-transfer through profit-hungry banking institutions he once condemned. It calls this resistance, and it calls the other side fascist.

A caring democratic position defends even the citizenship of individuals it despises, tolerates the speech it detests, and keeps the peace with the neighbour it must live beside. Angus once understood all three. The younger Angus fed strangers at his door. The older one sells tickets to sdvance a war of wrath. The Resistance pays better.