Melisa Ruscsak, an American book publisherwho drove eight hours from Ohio to attend what she thought was going to be the “second biggest book fair in the world,” said the whole thing was “just weird.”

“Nothing that they had going on there made any sense,” Ruscsak told PressProgress. “It was an event without an identity,”

“It’s like all the vendors were paying to have these political people do a debate and it was two days of that.”

One of those political panels spiralled out-of-control after an anti-lockdown activist heckled Senator Kim Pate, a local People’s Party candidate hijacked a microphone to promote her anti-vaccine book and Maxime Bernier physically restrained the moderator while shouting about “freedom of speech.”