Seeing an opportunity in hysterical claims that the country is “under attack” from its neighbor, the Liberal Party has rebranded as Team Canada, rallying the country around a patriotism it treated with disdain just a couple of years prior. Rather than lead with prudence, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has echoed the anti-Trump rhetoric. The propaganda machine is in full swing.

With an election coming in a few weeks, Canadians have been offered little more than political theater. The two parties competing for power seem to have joined forces against an invented American enemy, allowing Canadians a distraction from the very real problems that exist in their own country. How have our memories been wiped clean so quickly?

Just a few months ago, the ruling Liberal Party appeared dead in the water. Trudeau had become the most hated Prime Minister in Canadian history and calls for his resignation were deafening. By June last year, polling showed that a majority of Canadians wanted him to step down. He couldn’t even go out in public without being screamed at by angry citizens.

Even former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who had avoided criticizing Trudeau to date, said the government had “denigrated” the country. Repeating what many of us had noticed, Harper said that Trudeau managed to stay in power thanks to a “media conglomerate” that “erased his every error” and “misrepresented his opposition.”

He was right. The already tiny Canadian media landscape was unabashedly biased in favor of Trudeau’s government, and against not just Poilievre’s Conservative Party, but any Canadian who did not subscribe to Trudeau-approved narratives. As the only party to mount a serious and unapologetic challenge to issues viewed as untouchable in Canada, the PPC was almost entirely erased from the conversation. Bernier was taking on many of the sacred cows politically homeless Canadians have been desperate to see addressed — things like gender identity ideology, climate change alarmism, and mass immigration. The PPC is a small party, but one Poilievre might take a page from: if he genuinely wants to lead the country down a different path.

Canada became evermore censorial under Trudeau’s reign, as dissent against the Covid mandates, gender identity ideology, and unevidenced claims about the supposed discovery of “mass graves” at old residential school sites was framed as dangerous hate speech.

Rather than encourage Canadians toward unity, Trudeau labelled those protesting the vaccine mandates as women-haters, racists and, science-deniers. Those of us fighting for parental rights and women-only spaces, and against the transitioning of children, were violent extremists akin to terrorists. Pointing out that no remains of buried indigenous children had been discovered at old residential school sites was referred to as “denialism,” rather than the truth.

Liberal authoritarianism peaked in 2022, when Trudeau famously went so far as to invoke the Emergencies Act and freeze the bank accounts of Freedom Convoy participants and supporters, all in an attempt to shut down the protests against the ongoing draconian mandates.

The Emergencies Act had never been used before in Canadian history. Its predecessor, the War Measures Act, was invoked only once during peacetime — by Justin’s father, then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau, in the Seventies. The Acts give sweeping powers to suspend civil liberties and democratic processes in the face of a dire threat to the security of the country.

Suggested reading

Canada’s false new nationalism

By George Dunn

At the time, Bernier spoke out unapologetically against “a series of violations of our fundamental rights and freedoms that a tyrannical government wants to keep in place by crushing dissent”. He made it clear that this was “not a state of emergency”.

And we are now seeing the same tactics being used again. In January, the Prime Minister announced he intended to resign. But only he didn’t, instead proroguing Parliament in order to avoid a vote of no-confidence. This gave him the opportunity to install his pick for the new leader of the Liberal Party, Mark Carney, and drum up yet another “emergency” in the form of a trade war. While party members are meant to vote on a new leader, it was immediately clear that Carney would be picked no matter what. He was suddenly giving interviews across North America as a “Canadian Official” (odd, considering no one had elected him as an official of anything).

Indeed, Carney was installed as Trudeau’s successor in March. Canada had a new Prime Minister, and with that, all was apparently forgotten by Canadians who simply didn’t like the idea of voting Conservative and were relieved to have an excuse to fall back into their comfort zones. There was “no turning back” now, Carney explained dramatically. “The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over.” It appeared half of Canada was thrilled at the prospect of a “war” with its bigger sibling.

In truth, as Bernier explained to me, “Trump does not want to invade our country militarily”. What Trump wants is a new deal — he wants to reopen the free trade agreement. And rather than sit down at the table and make a deal, the Liberals took the opportunity to fear-monger Canadians into believing they were the innocent victims of an unfair attack. In fact, it is the Liberal Party, not Trump, that started a commercial war — “a trade war that we won’t win” as Bernier put it.

Suggested reading

Annexation has always haunted Canada

By Michael Ledger-Lomas

This is merely another distraction at a time when we need a national reckoning. I told Bernier that I saw there was no PPC candidate running in my old riding in East Vancouver, one of the most Left-wing electoral districts. I had lived in the neighborhood for 15 years, but eventually felt unsafe there. After I began speaking out against gender identity legislation and in defense of women’s spaces, the attacks on me were relentless. I’d been screamed at, threatened, and stalked while out and about — walking my dog or having drinks with friends. Many of my old friends refused to be seen in public with me anymore for fear of being canceled by association. I left East Vancouver in early 2021, during the Covid lockdowns, foreseeing a dark future. Despite addiction, homelessness, mental health crises, and crime spreading across the area, the progressives who dominated politically held firm in their approach, which offered little more than clean pipes and free drugs. Issues like women’s sex-based rights had been completely wiped off the table. Once I left, it seemed that my efforts to force a debate left with me.

At the end of our conversation, I asked Bernier if he thought I should run, unsure in that moment if I was joking or not. He responded enthusiastically.

And because I’ve never been one to sit back and let the bullies win, I’ve decided to run as a PPC candidate. In a democracy, people should have the right to vote for something they believe in. And if I don’t show up and force a conversation, it just won’t happen. Women’s sex-based rights deserve to be an election issue and a topic of debate, whether the Leftist authoritarians of Canada like it or not. Free speech is only a lost cause in Canada if we don’t fight for it. There has to still be some fight left in us.

For far too long, Canadians have accepted a status quo where expression is suppressed and democracy stifled. There’s only one way to fix that: stand up, speak out, and refuse to be erased.

Another, younger woman, is being dragged along by a man who is clearly a pimp. She sways as he shouts that she is “Only $20!” No one responds apart from a dealer who asks if he wants “Apache” (fentanyl).

Canada may have stringent alcohol restrictions and licensing in place in every province, but, on this street running 10 blocks, people turn a blind eye to addicts shooting up. And they are left to overdose on the street outside the legal “safe” injection site which has destigmatized the taking of illegal substances. The death rate here is 30 times higher than the national average. I hear tales, too, of young, mainly indigenous women who are marched into clinics by their pimps to access opiates for free; they become addicted and compliant.

There is a place here, though, which is supposed to provide respite for these women. The Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre purports to offer support, a bit of warmth and a free meal for anyone needing shelter, along with “safe washrooms”. Perhaps they aren’t quite as safe as some vulnerable women might wish, though, since female-only services for abused women and girls are illegal. And as the welcome sign reads: The Centre is inclusive of all self-identified women which includes trans women and two spirit people.

It wasn’t ever thus. One of the most inspirational and successful feminist organizations I have ever encountered was founded here in 1973. Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter was led by the indomitable Lee Lakeman who sadly died last year. And she, along with her team, fought hard to protect that safe space for women.

But the self-declared “male feminist” Justin Trudeau fought back. And not for women’s rights. Although a big fan of posturing about indigenous people’s rights, he did little to protect these women and girls from the abuse they suffer. Meanwhile, he removed their right to safe spaces and decriminalized prostitution. In any case, in Canada anyone can be a woman.

More from this author

What I learned at Terf School

By Julie Bindel

Vancouver has laws and policies in place that allow for men to self-identify as women. You may remember the case of the ball waxer supreme (then known as Jessica Yaniv, now known as Jessica Serenity Simpson). In 2019, Yaniv filed complaints against beauty salons in Vancouver run by women of immigrant background, for having refused to provide him with a “Brazilian” bikini wax (that is, the waxing of the female genital area). Yaniv lost — but only by the skin of his scrotum. The women lost too — in terms of both their livelihoods, and their peace of mind. One woman had to close down her home-based business as a result of the stress of the Yaniv case.

Aside from a small handful, all of the so-called feminist institutions and organizations go all out to support transgender ideology. The Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), established in 1985 in order to fight cases on behalf of women relating to male violence and discrimination, is now full-throttle transactivist. Indeed, the first sentence under LEAF’s Mission and Vision section of its website describes it as a charity that works for “all women, girls, trans and non-binary people”, meaning everyone. “In Canadian society, cis and trans women, trans, intersex, gender diverse, gender nonconforming, gender queer, genderfluid, agender, bigender and non-binary people all experience discrimination based on their gender.”

Gender ideology has taken hold here in a way that makes Britain’s trans activists look meek, with liberal feminists welcoming the opening of domestic violence services to everyone. And any push-back comes almost exclusively from Right-wingers and radical feminists — who are roundly castigated.

Suggested reading

What the Right gets wrong about Canada

By Michael Ledger-Lomas

As a result, I know exactly the sort of abuse I am liable to be subject to whenever I do an event in Canada. There is screaming, jeering and intimidation. Sometimes there is spitting. There is always anger and the threat of violence. So the crowd that greeted me at an event about safe spaces for women (the irony escapes them, obviously) was no surprise.

But what was a surprise this time was that along with the jeers of “Nazis, bigots, fascist cunts”, some people were actually barking. And many of them were wearing animal masks. Since their aim was to intimidate, I wanted to show them that they hadn’t. So I approached them to quiz them about their feminism, only to have a placard shoved in my face by one young man that read: “Real feminists support ALL women.” The contrast between these privileged “feminists” with those tragic women I saw on the backstreets couldn’t have been starker. So much for the great successes of women such as Lee Lakeman.

During my visit, Trudeau was replaced by Carney. I wondered whether getting rid of him would change the landscape in Canada when it comes to the rights of women. Carney, though, is certainly keeping his mouth shut on the divisive issue. A firm believer in open markets and free trade, he is doubtless more focused on the economy rather than whether he is free to get along to the Pride parade. But the women I spoke to read that as cowardice; they suspect this man has no backbone when it comes to dealing with anything trickier than Trump’s tariffs.

They’re also very clear that the last thing they want is a Canadian Trump in the shape of Poilievre, the leader of the Conservatives. “He would do exactly what the orange man is doing,” said Sara, a long-time activist who works in a women’s shelter, “which is posturing about reversing all of the trans stuff, like men in women’s sports, whilst taking all of the other rights away, from abortion, to funding for Rape Crisis centres, and everything in between.”

Perhaps those young protesters who’ve grown up in Trudeau’s Canada, refusing to listen to what we aged feminists had to say about men’s violence, might learn something if they got out of their echo chambers and took a bus down to Downton Eastside. There they would see the damage done by men empowered by Trudeau’s policies, they would see vulnerable women victimised, abused and denied shelter.

Although the spectre of tariffs rather than free trade has initiated the current flap in Canadian-American relations, the ghosts of 1911 are not far away. At first, Donald Trump suggested that Canadians could avoid his planned heavy import tariffs by tightening their border security, but he quickly proposed a better alternative: Canada should become America’s 51st state.

Canadians have now turned a joke into a crisis. In December, Chrystia Freeland resigned as Finance Minister, alleging that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was spending  on vote-winning gimmicks when he need to keep his “fiscal powder” dry for a trade war with Trump. And on the resonant date of January 6, Trudeau’s own resignation followed.

The alarm over Trump’s musings has lacked historical perspective. The journalist Andrew Coyne called him “utterly insane”, writing almost tearfully about how “the basic assumption of Canadian history, that we would always have a stable, democratic ally to our south, is over”. Yet as Laurier’s fate illustrates, this is just wrong. Canadians have always worried about the American threat to the autonomy and even sovereignty of their nation. Until recently, its politicians saw the States not as a friendly big brother but an unruly giant with a scary hunger for resources. These fears provoked debates that were always and sometimes usefully introspective: about what Canada is and how it might need to change.

Some Canadians demanded “annexation” before their nation even existed. In 1849, leading merchants in Montreal, then the capital of the province of Canada, formed an Annexation Association. They argued that Britain’s North American colonies could never put on population or become prosperous until they could crack the tariff walls protecting the huge American market. And the only viable way to do that, they said, was to request political union with the United States.

After Montreal’s Parliament buildings were burnt down by rioters, British officials soothed these discontents by negotiating a trade agreement, but annexation would return in the aftermath of the American Civil War — this time as a menace rather than a promise. American statesmen threatened to annex the North American territories in compensation for British support for the defeated South. Although this did not come to fruition, the prospect of invasion lingered for decades afterwards.

Fear of the United States was therefore a vital spur to nation-building. John A. Macdonald, the Tory and Anglophile Prime Minister of the province of Canada, championed its confederation with other colonies in 1867 to strengthen them all against the States. The new Dominion of Canada bought the vast western territories of the Hudson Bay Company, and turned them into provinces. Macdonald planned a Canadian Pacific Railway to link Vancouver and Montreal, encouraging goods and people to flow from east to west rather than north to south. And although Canada still struggled to attract immigrants and bled people to the States, Macdonald won a final electoral victory in 1891 by denouncing the Liberals’ response to these problems — a US trade agreement, no less — as tantamount to treason.

Canada might have been much more populous and prosperous in 1911 than at Confederation, but Laurier’s proposals revived neuralgia about American intentions. President Taft wrote to his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt — a sentimental annexationist — that they would turn Canada into an “adjunct to the United States”. The leaking of his letter provoked outrage. Trumpish gaffes, not least the House Speaker’s remarks about wanting to see Stars and Stripes at the North Pole, reminded Canadians of their moral objections to becoming Americans. Kipling snapped that if Canada wanted to harmonise its economy with the United States, then it would also have to dramatically up its murder rate — a quip that retains its sting in the age of mass shootings.

Laurier’s defeat in 1911 made freer trade with America toxic for decades. During the Second World War, Prime Minister Mackenzie King drew Canada into an unprecedented degree of military and industrial cooperation with the United States. Yet his youthful memories of Laurier’s rout held him back from a comprehensive free trade agreement. After all, FDR once confided in him that he wouldn’t mind owning Canada. Not until 1988 did a Canadian Prime Minister sign a comprehensive Free Trade Agreement.

The differences between 1911 and now underline Canada’s current predicament. It was already evident in Laurier’s time that Canada could not count on Britain to overawe the United States. In 1903, the British even sided with the Americans in dismissing Canada’s efforts to lay claim to vital waterways in Alaska. Yet the Conservatives could still draw an emotive contrast between two futures: American annexation or security and prosperity within the British Empire. The Second World War destroyed that contrast by transferring ultimate responsibility for protecting Canada’s territorial sovereignty from the States, where it has remained. It vanished altogether by the Sixties, along with the Empire. Trudeau loyalists jokingly invoke the year 1812 — when British forces burned down the White House — but it is they who need the history lesson. Justin’s father Pierre Elliott Trudeau tried to find a third option to Americanisation or insecure isolation by drumming up trade with Europe and Japan, but his efforts did not amount to much. When Trudeau’s successor Brian Mulroney inked his Free Trade Agreement in 1988 with Ronald Reagan, he tied Canada to a continentalist strategy, which assumed an identity of outlook with the United States.

More from this author

The allure of American mysticism

By Michael Ledger-Lomas

Because annexation has always been a partisan topic, it suits many Canadians to present Trump’s threats as a damning judgment on Trudeau, which a speedy change of personnel could fix. Freeland, who aspires to replace him, has hinted as much. Her resignation letter coincided with the launch of her biography, which presents her as a steely realist who can deal as handily with Trump as with the Kremlin. Canadians to Freeland’s Right are much freer with their contempt. David Frum, a Canadian speechwriter for George Bush who has reinvented himself as a Never Trumper centrist, argues that Trudeau’s performative angst about Canada’s colonial record was a fatal declaration of weakness: Trump shares with “ultra-progressives” the “same project of Canadian annihilation”.

Yet Pierre Poilievre, whose Conservatives are set to win the looming federal election, will find it no easier to exorcise fears of annexation. John Diefenbaker in the early Sixties was the last Conservative Prime Minister to engage in rousing displays of anti-American nationalism. The Conservatives have since become the voice of Western Canada’s fossil fuel industry, whose customer is the United States. Stephen Harper, the last Conservative to hold office before Trudeau, pressed “ethical” Canadian oil on the Americans while echoing their foreign policy. His protégé Poilievre has been stumped for ideas in this crisis, beyond reminding Americans of their consumption of Canadian fossil fuels — which Trump resents as a form of subsidy — and talking of building up the military, which all parties have agreed to run down for decades.

Perhaps though the events of 1911 should though remind Canadians not to panic: about American demagogues or themselves. Laurier’s biographer Oscar Skelton cattily observed that if Kipling could sell thousands of poetry books to Americans, then a Saskatchewan farmer ought to be able to sell them “a beef”. He celebrated “humbler and more unconscious diplomats”: the scores of Canadians and Americans already quietly doing business with each other. Then and since, political rhetoric has obscured but never changed the geographic logic for the inexorable convergence of the Canadian and American economies. Even Laurier’s opponents in 1911 did not rely on fear alone as an argument. The joy of being or remaining British was that it made for dynamic but orderly social and economic progress. They made the point by speaking on platforms decorated with maps of Canada’s impressive railway network. For all Kipling’s talk of “soul”, the moral of 1911 was the need to keep strengthening state capacity and to remove internal barriers to trade. The same may be true today.

But how could such a figure — whose ultimate mediocrity has been laid bare — have risen so far? And how is it he came to define a whole decade in the nation’s history? Justin Trudeau had always been Canada’s Dauphin, “the Prince” — indeed, it is the title of a popular biography. But another title from the ancien régime better illustrates what he really was: “the Sun King”, who ruled through spectacle, artifice and celebrity, and who by these means was able to cover up the dire mounting contradictions not just of Canada’s Liberal Party, but of liberalism itself.

The once hegemonic ideology of the West was in the elder Trudeau’s words “not a programme… but an approach to politics”, and it arguably found its fullest expression in his son’s Canada. Humbled in the US and Europe after 2016, liberalism seemed, at least for a time, not just to be alive but thriving in the north. This was for the transatlantic establishment a necessary illusion: Canada as their “Hall of Mirrors”, a consolation and reassurance that their creed still had a fighting chance in a hostile world turned against them. Yet as with the Bourbons and their gilded splendour, Trudeau fell under his own spell, and Canadians paid the price. The story of his reign is thus that of the collision between appearance and substance — and myths, no matter how lofty and intoxicating, can never subdue reality.

Trudeau’s political journey began in October 2000, when he delivered the eulogy at his father’s funeral, a moving speech that caused many to see “the first manifestation of a dynasty”. After an aimless youth spent camping and cavorting, and stints as a drama teacher and ski instructor, he entered parliament in 2008. When the Liberals imploded in the 2011 election, under the academic Michael Ignatieff, the party seemed to overcorrect by finding a replacement who wouldn’t be too bothered by such things as policy ideas or governing philosophies: so, they turned to their one MP who had a pleasing face, great hair, and above all, a storied name.

As Britain and the United States were hurtling toward Brexit and Donald Trump, Trudeau’s ascent in 2015 provided the progressive counterpoint. Such was the frenzied adoration, dubbed “Trudeaumania 2.0”, that the newly elected Prime Minister could cause a global stir just by uttering breezy, feel-good phrases like “Because it’s 2015!” The Economist claimed that “Liberty moved north” while Rolling Stone asked “Why can’t he be our president?”

Yet underneath the glitz, Trudeau did at first assemble a promising team of ministers, including the woman who would be his most loyal advisor Chrystia Freeland, a Rhodes Scholar who wrote a bestselling book on inequality. Trudeau’s government sought to tackle the erosion of middle-class economic security after decades of globalisation. It would do this through an unorthodox programme of moderate stimulus spending and industrial policy, a course that could demonstrate how a renewed liberalism might respond to populist grievances about a hollowed-out economy through domestic reinvestment. At least this was an approximation of the plan in theory.

This incarnation of Trudeau — in stark contrast with what would come up later — had also been conscious of how mass low-skill immigration was affecting Canadian workers, as evidenced by a remarkable 2014 Toronto Star op-ed in which he made the case for far-reaching controls on temporary workers (a warning that he himself would ignore).

Suggested reading

What the Right gets wrong about Canada

By Michael Ledger-Lomas

Trudeau’s first term saw modest successes, such as the Canada Child Benefit, which sent child support payments to families and lowered the child poverty rate, and Canada’s part in the renegotiation of NAFTA, in which Freeland’s trade delegation narrowly avoided the threat of economic “ruination” promised by Trump.

But the seeds of his impending collapse in popularity were already being planted at this time by the callous inattention he paid to Canada’s youth, who more than anyone elevated him to victory. Though the PM seemed to say all the right things about the need to build affordable housing, his actual policies amounted to tacit affirmations of the Nimby-ist status quo, which favoured home-owning older Canadians, reliant on the ever-appreciating value of their real estate.

In the past, the partisans of liberalism had always been able to present themselves and their ideas as the wave of the future, as heralds of growth and abundance: yet here was the liberal tribune Trudeau doing the opposite, taking the side of the elderly over the young, of virtual stagnation over material progress. Furthermore, his government proved incapable of carrying out its own ambitious industrial policy, producing an infrastructure bank and “innovation cluster programme” whose projects no one can still identify. He also hamstrung Canada’s vast energy wealth, needed to power any future industrial revival, with excessive environmental regulations.

A series of damaging ethical scandals and ugly political reprisals led to a reduced minority government in the 2019 election (the infamous “blackface campaign”), a setback from which the Trudeau Liberals would never recover. “At least he legalised pot!” as Canadians who now regret voting for him like to say — in reference to the one pledge that they can remember him keeping.

Then, in early 2020, came Covid-19, which threw into relief the tensions between individual liberty and collective security. And though the Trudeau government’s handling of the pandemic has since become a subject of heated polemic, the fact is that the first year and a half of the lockdown era proved to be largely uneventful. In fact, Ottawa’s relatively rapid acquisition and distribution of vaccines boosted the government’s popularity enough that the PM felt bold enough to call an early election in September 2021.

Suggested reading

Did Justin Trudeau cover up the Chinese spy scandal?

By Sam Dunning

After this would come a grave challenge to his rule: the anti-mandate “Freedom Convoy” was not widely popular, when all was said and done. Canadians are, after all, an anti-revolutionary people (“peace, order, and good government” is the national motto). The convoy’s strength, however, was in playing the same elaborate game of spectacle that Trudeau excelled at and then throwing the gauntlet back at his feet. Despite shaky national support for their cause at best, convoy leaders managed to present the impression of a people’s uprising by swarming the capital so dramatically with trucks and inviting supporters to join them, gaining the attention of the wider world and focusing attention on Trudeau’s faltering early response. In any event, even some of those who disagreed with the convoy’s actions and tactics also disagreed with his invocation of the Emergencies Act to disperse the convoy, seen as heavy-handed, if not outright tyrannical. This touchy-feely image, which had been a cornerstone of his initial celebrity, and his claim to leadership of the liberal world had been greatly diminished.

The convoy was defeated but its lasting impact was in toppling the Conservative Party leadership and replacing it with Pierre Poilievre, a man diametrically opposed to everything Trudeau stands for and who now intends to roll back nearly all of his policy legacy.

The rest of Trudeau’s rule from that point on was one long, drawn-out process of unravelling which can be described as “a political slow heat death”. In his final three years, Trudeau managed to annihilate the integrity of Canada’s immigration system, which had previously been a point of pride and consensus while presiding over a housing crisis without end, and to leave his party and country in tatters, as it emerges from this crisis woefully unprepared to meet the existential challenge of the Trump Administration’s tariffs. But perhaps most tragically of all, he had betrayed the trust once reposed in him by Canada’s youth, whose very ability to hope for a brighter future has been seriously damaged.

In the end, it was his own lieutenant Freeland who decided to throw the Sun King from his throne, ending the reign of liberal illusion and setting the stage for the post-Trudeau era. It was said that Louis XIV danced in radiant golden shoes as he seized power from the nobles: Canada’s monarch, too, managed to distract the world with colourful footwear. If only we, the citizens of Canada, had been courageous enough to say to him sooner and with a stronger voice, as the Australian Prime Minister once did: “Justin, we’re not here to talk about your socks.”

The saga isn’t over yet. David Johnston, a “special rapporteur” appointed by Trudeau to investigate the matter in March 2023, quit just three months later, blaming a “highly partisan atmosphere around my appointment and work”. Yet he was hardly the ideal candidate, coming across as a pal of both Trudeau and the CCP. Social media abounded with pictures of him beaming next to Chinese officials including Xi Jinping, who he’d met more than once while serving as the late Queen’s representative to Canada. Trudeau, meanwhile, described Johnston as a “family friend”.

China’s interference in Canadian politics has allegedly taken many forms. There are accusations of officials bussing in Chinese students to vote in Liberal Party nominations and whispers of covert donations, compromised staffers and the intimidation of political candidates and activists.

Before his resignation in June, Johnston issued a lengthy paper addressing the principal allegations. This included a quietly damning verdict on Han Dong: “Irregularities were observed with Mr Dong’s nomination in 2019, and there is well-grounded suspicion that the irregularities were tied to the PRC Consulate in Toronto, with whom Mr. Dong maintains relationships.” However, Johnston’s paper contained conceptual errors, downplayed certain claims and urged against a public inquiry.

For months afterwards, Trudeau appeared keen to avoid an inquiry, while his opponents pressured him to go ahead. Michael Chong, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, became a prominent voice in favour. For Chong, the issue was personal: in 2021, the CCP had launched a campaign targeting his family in Hong Kong after he had spoken out about ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang. Chong claimed that the CSIS withheld information from him about the CCP campaign, and that Trudeau also knew about it but did nothing to help. Trudeau, however, insists that he didn’t find out about it until early 2023 when it was leaked to the press. Neither version of the story is very encouraging.

More from this author

Why China is winning the weapons race

By Sam Dunning

In September 2023, Trudeau finally announced the “Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions”. Its public hearings began in January 2024, accompanied by classified in camera interviews and disclosures. The focus so far has been on what was known by whom and when, and why information was or was not passed on or otherwise acted upon. Looming over Trudeau is a damning insinuation: that concerns about CCP activity dissipated in a mist of procedure because that activity benefitted the Liberals.

The inquiry has not gone smoothly. In February, two diaspora groups withdrew from the process. One, Canadian Friends of Hong Kong, which claims to have been targeted by the CCP, pulled out to protest the role that three Canadian politicians were to play in the inquiry: Han Dong, former provincial cabinet minister Michael Chan, and a controversial senator, Yuen Pau Woo. The group stated that giving these figures a chance to cross-examine witnesses and access non-public evidence presented a security threat and gave them a platform for propaganda.

It is, indeed, remarkable that Han Dong has been given a privileged role in the inquiry. This is a man accused of benefitting from the CCP “coercing” busloads of private Chinese high-school students into voting for him in 2019. (Liberal nominations do not exclude those who are not Canadian citizens and allow people as young as 14 to vote.) Chan, too, is open about his “close relationships” with Chinese diplomats. Leaked CSIS intel accuses him of meeting with Chinese intelligence and orchestrating Dong’s problematic nomination. In neither case is any criminal behaviour alleged.

This surreal situation raises an important question: whose responsibility is it to prevent foreign interference? To answer it, Canadians need to consider what should count as criminal conduct in a democracy where nearly a quarter of the population was born abroad, and many retain ties with foreign governments.

The case of Kenny Chiu illustrates the delicacy of this question. From 2019 to 2021, Chiu served as MP for Steveston-Richmond East, a swing seat where more than half of the population claim East Asian ancestry. Many were born in China and Hong Kong. In the lead up to and during the 2021 election, Chiu put forward proposals for a foreign influence registry, which if implemented might have forced groups working with the CCP to publicly declare their ties. Chiu’s bill raised hairs in Beijing. On WeChat, a social media network controlled by the Chinese government, Chiu was painted as an “anti-Chinese” fanatic who wanted to force Chinese Canadians to register as foreign agents or else face deportation. His goal, according to CCP propaganda, was to destroy Canada’s relationship with China.

When Chiu first raised concerns about this online crusade against him — alongside the then-Conservative leader Erin O’Toole — he was fobbed off by the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) body, which withheld information supporting his case. SITE determined that the propaganda wasn’t significant enough to publicise, nor the evidence it was “state-directed” clear enough. Yet an intelligence document tabled at the inquiry this year came to a different conclusion. It claimed that the timing and language of the campaign, as well as the fact that the outlets involved had partnerships with Chinese state media, “all suggest that these efforts were orchestrated or directed by the PRC”.

If this was the case, why did SITE belittle the issue? Such revelations expose the inadequacy of Canada’s pre-leak anti-interference systems, which  operated on the basis that there is an acceptable level of interference that is determined privately in government. The existence of foreign interference campaigns below this level should not be communicated to victim candidates or the opposition, let alone to the public. The decision appears to have been that WeChat should be given the benefit of the doubt and only deemed to be involved in manipulation if very high evidentiary thresholds could be met. But who could realistically expect to receive this sort of evidence? This lies solely in the hands of the China-based CCP members running WeChat, who have vowed to “keep the Party’s secrets” and who face imprisonment should they break their oath. We are not going to get hold of it.

Meanwhile, there is strong experimental evidence that WeChat’s CCP-directed censorship and manipulation systems operate for users abroad. This was ignored or treated as insignificant in Canada, which is peculiar considering that WeChat is used by roughly one million Canadian voters.

Suggested reading

The Chinese students policing Britain's universities

By Sam Dunning

The fate of Han Dong is no less bewildering. Sam Cooper, an investigative journalist who covers foreign interference in Canada, points to a series of meetings in 2019 between Canadian spies and Trudeau’s national security advisor. Officials have since told the inquiry that these meetings resulted in reports on Han Dong being repeatedly altered and not shared as widely or as quickly within government as they should have been. CSIS’s head was recalled to the inquiry because of a lack of clarity about the matter. Having led on its reporting and as a direct recipient of CSIS leaks, Cooper is now deep in the weeds of the scandal. He believes there may be a Watergate-scale coverup at play here.

Yet the evolution of CSIS briefings might reflect incompetence more than conspiracy. It could be that Canadian spies simply aren’t up to the task and are either making mistakes or failing to grasp the precise contours of the situation. This would fit patterns seen in other Western countries, where spooks have been struggling to follow the CCP’s influence networks. Britain’s leading spies are not alone in admitting they are playing catch-up in the fight against CCP interference and espionage.

When asked last year whether he was told about the allegations surrounding Han Dong before the 2019 election, Trudeau’s answer smacked of emotional manipulation. “There are 1.7 million Canadians who proudly trace their origin back to China,” he said. “Those Canadians should always be welcomed as full Canadians and encouraged to stand for office and […] We are extraordinarily lucky to have a member of parliament like Han Dong in our midst.” Eventually, he got to his point: “It is not up to unelected security officials to dictate who can or cannot run.”

Trudeau was careful not to make the same mistake when he faced the inquiry this April. Instead, he admitted that he had been told about Dong before the 2019 election, and that he had decided to keep Dong in place, with an eye on revisiting the matter after the election. But he never did. The Initial Report released in May of this year states that, even after interviews with Trudeau and his officials, “the specifics of any follow-up are at this point unclear, and I am not certain what steps were taken”. It is another quietly damning comment.

Throughout this mess, senior Liberals have downplayed the gravity of the CCP’s interference. As well as distracting from serious issues — raised most vociferously by Chinese Canadians — with oblique references to racism, they have been obsessive in underlining that the elections were “free and fair” overall. This seems to be an attempt to conjure up fears about a wave of Trump-style election denialism. But this is to pretend that swathes of the population have decided that CCP puppetry actually swung the election. As all Canadians who have followed this story know, that is not the point.

More from this author

How the CCP infiltrated Britain

By Sam Dunning

A second wave of hearings are set to take place in the autumn, but the inquiry will not spell the end of the matter. Earlier this month, a 90-page report by the Canadian parliament’s National Security and Intelligence Committee (NSICOP) accused unnamed Canadian parliamentarians of “witting or semi-witting” participation in foreign interference, including attempts to influence parliamentary business and “wilful blindness” in the acceptance of funds. The report names China and India as the main perpetrators, saying of the former: “the PRC believes that its relationship with some members of Parliament rests on a quid pro quo that any member’s engagement with the PRC will result in the PRC mobilising its network in the member’s favour.” The Conservatives are calling for the names of these MPs to be published, while Canada’s public broadcaster has covered this latest phase of the scandal with reference to potential “treason”. Meanwhile, both NSICOP and the public inquiry’s commissioner continue to complain that Trudeau’s cabinet is withholding information from them — lending some credence to the suspicions of Cooper and others that the Liberal party is engaged in a coverup.

For anyone remotely versed in the CCP’s strategic framework, the idea that it should seek to lay down a bridgehead abroad is nothing new. One CCP handbook that I have been reading was printed 10 years ago. It states quite plainly the CCP’s intent to turn Chinese diasporic groups into a “new force for unifying the ancestor-land and rejuvenating China”. This is a reference to the CCP’s hopes for territorial expansion in Taiwan, the South China Sea and elsewhere, which will require compliance from Western powers. The CCP hopes that ethnic Chinese people in countries such as Canada will help secure that compliance.

Most of the diaspora want nothing to do with Xi’s dictatorship, but the CCP’s financial clout and its use of intimidation, censorship and aggressive espionage mean that Chinese Canadians need proper support from governments and civil society. This is where Canada’s Liberals have clearly failed. Wherever this scandal leads, the CCP’s goals are clear, and it is in this fight for the long haul. Multicultural democracies must be too.

After years rising through the ranks of the transatlantic financial elite, Carney has done little to deflect such rumours: in fact, a spate of high-profile speeches in recent weeks convey the impression that he is angling for something more than a plum retirement spent writing ponderous meditations on the future of capitalism. But if the ex-governor of the Bank of England is indeed biding his time for a shot at the top job, Carney will have to distance himself from Trudeau’s most unpalatable policies, while also positioning himself as the better alternative to Poilievre. And it appears he is doing just that, with public statements criticising Trudeau’s signature carbon tax and the recent, much-hyped federal budget, which he argued could have been delivered with more fiscal prudence.

Naturally, Carney has attacked Poilievre as well, for being a “lifelong politician” — as opposed to a Harvard-trained economist like himself — whose tax cut-heavy programme is a “Pavlovian reaction of extreme conservatism… based on a basic misunderstanding of what drives economies.” So far, his strategy for outshining both Trudeau and Poilievre involves brandishing his credentials as a technocrat who can pontificate on interest rates and business cycles in a way that his two would-be rivals never could. However, Poilievre, who has excelled with his pugilistic, anti-elitist rhetoric, will no doubt relish this contrast of images and may take notes from the likes of Jacob Rees-Moog (a Poilievre lookalike both physically and ideologically), who clashed with Carney in the lead-up to the 2016 Brexit referendum.

The battle lines for Carney in Canada would be very similar to the contest between Remain and Leave: making an explicit connection between his enemies in Britain and those in his home country, Carney reminded his audience: “Brexiters promised that they were going to create Singapore on the Thames, [they] actually delivered Argentina on the Channel… Broken Britain… sound familiar?” — a reference to Poilievre’s case that “Everything is broken” in Liberal-governed Canada.

Indeed, Carney would make for a far more intellectually compelling opponent and foil to Poilievre than the distinctly non-intellectual Trudeau, since the two represent two diametrically opposed conceptions of capitalism. On the one hand, Poilievre, like his UK counterparts Rees-Mogg and Liz Truss, believes in the primacy of unfettered markets and the individual as the surest agents of prosperity — to the near-total exclusion of the state, a view generally referred to as “neoliberalism” or what their common inspiration Margaret Thatcher dubbed “popular capitalism”, Right and Left-wing versions of which have, of course, predominated in the West since the Eighties, corresponding with a rise in inequality. On the other hand, Carney embodies a distinct form of political economy with roots in Canada’s past, in which states and corporations alike work to harness market forces toward common good outcomes, what Carney calls “mission-oriented capitalism” (something his frenemy Boris Johnson might have endorsed in his more communitarian phases). This is an approach that may in theory hew close to social democracy, but which in practice elevates a class of corporate elites to manage society’s competing interests. Neither seems particularly inspiring but Canadians may soon have to make a choice between them.

Today, the neoliberal model that Poilievre holds to has been much dissected and debated: he will try to roll back superfluous local regulations in the hope that market forces will deliver, without further need for guidance. But much less is known about the paradigm and lineage that Carney belongs to. What exactly would a Carney government look to do?

One way of answering the question is by shedding more light on Carney’s historical antecedents. For this, we may turn to Peter J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins’s theory of gentlemanly capitalism, which posited that the strategic and economic policies of the British Empire in its heyday, encompassing Canada in its founding era in the 1860s, were determined by transnational financial elites in the City of London, as opposed to the provincial manufacturers and smallholders whom the desire for colonial markets is sometimes attributed. The modern equivalent of the “gentlemanly capitalist” class would be typified by the Mark Carneys and Klaus Schwabs of the world: their outlook was shaped more by their shared material interests, straddling the empire, than by their local and national attachments.

More from this author

Canada's long restoration has begun

By Michael Cuenco

Canada’s global orientation has often been determined by the direction of capital flows. As historian Andrew Smith has shown, in his application Cain and Hopkins’s thesis to the Dominion of Canada in particular, 19th century Canadian elites were resolutely pro-British because, in the age of “Anglo-Globalization,” that’s where all the big investments came from. By the same token, 20th-century Canadian elites became pro-American because the centre of wealth and power had transferred to Wall Street and Washington. In the 21st century, then, it is no surprise to see Carney fraternising with Schwab, Christine Lagarde, Larry Fink and other such figures at places like COP26 and the World Economic Forum. Just as previous generations of Canadian rulers had to “kiss the ring”, so to speak, so must he. And it is easy in this era of populist discontent for critics to attack Carney over his golden rolodex: they may charge that the shady and corrupting influence of “globalist elites” would be inescapable under a Carney administration — whereas Poilievre has explicitly banned his future ministers from ever setting foot at the WEF.

Yet there is a reason for this lasting concord between Canada’s rulers and the lords of finance, namely that for a country so large and so sparsely populated, there is never enough capital in Canada to service its insatiable developmental needs, whether it is the construction of railroads to settle the frontier or the production of armaments to win the Second World War. Thus, the nation’s two longest-serving prime ministers, the Conservative Sir John A. Macdonald and the Liberal Mackenzie King were known (and criticised in similar terms) for their cosiness with the reigning globalist elites of their day, whether it be the mighty Barings Bank in Macdonald’s case or the Rockefellers in King’s: it is fair then to say that from imperial times to today, Canadians have never stopped “kissing the ring,” whoever may be wearing it.

If Carney truly wanted to follow in the footsteps of these great Canadian statesmen and make a difference, he would turn his golden rolodex from a political liability into a policy asset, that is, a means to solving the greatest challenge confronting Canada today: the housing crisis, ranked as among the most severe in the developed world. After all, Carney once raised an astronomical sum of $130 trillion for financing climate investments at COP26, something he could not have done were it not for his intimate connections with asset managers and institutional investors the world over: could he do something similar as PM? Solving Canada’s exorbitant housing shortage is said to cost $1 to 2 trillion, a fraction of what Carney gathered for the climate. He could then employ his technocratic expertise in blended finance and public-private partnerships to steer those investments toward a national industrial policy geared toward the mass manufacturing of housing for both the rental and ownership markets (an idea that is slowly taking shape among certain policy thinkers). This would be a titanic financial endeavour that could generate hefty returns for investors in the decades ahead, since the only thing that matches the astronomical costs of Canada’s housing crunch is the astronomical demand underlying it.

Suggested reading

Lauren Southern: how my tradlife turned toxic

By Mary Harrington

For there are millions of young middle-class Canadians, including even the children of affluent families now priced out of emulating their parents’ standard of living, who are willing to spend their hard-earned dollars on the dream of owning a home, but are practically prevented from doing so by the draconian Nimby-ism of local governments across Canada. There is, in other words, a vast underserved market potential which a coalition of large investors could profit from: Canadian household debt is estimated to be at a staggering $3 trillion. It is precisely the kind of problem that calls for the large-scale coordination that only “mission-oriented capitalism” can mobilise.

Whatever the case, there is a strong chance that future politician and Liberal leader Carney will act in ways that confirm every accusation of elitism and arrogance that his Conservative opponents have levelled since his return to Canada. (One can hardly read his book Values without getting a sense that he just knows so much more on so many topics than you and all your friends.) But all the ambition and lust for power in the world would probably be worth it if he could deliver on the one, all-consuming issue that threatens Canada’s social peace and economic prosperity.

Of course, there is also the possibility that Carney, whether he ever wins an election or not, would just end up like Trudeau, who said all the right things at the start only to fall short miserably — in which case, Carney and Canada’s Liberals should prepare themselves for a lifetime of panic and pearl-clutching. For they will have handed power to Poilievre’s Conservatives indefinitely, before being exiled into a state of perdition that another Canadian expatriate-turned-Liberal messiah, Michael Ignatieff, once aptly referred to as Fire and Ashes. If Carney isn’t careful, that could be the title of his next book as well.

Under the leadership of Justin Trudeau, Canadian policy has hewn quite close to the transactivist’s ideal: gender identity has become a protected characteristic under the Canadian Human Rights Act, and gender reassignment surgery is now often covered by the country’s universal healthcare system. Meanwhile, school boards and teachers’ unions have been quick to adopt some of the most extreme tenets of gender ideology — for instance, not telling parents when their children start to socially transition. 

Now, parents are pushing back. Last month, parents marched in almost 100 cities under the banner of #1MillionMarch4Children calling for the removal of material from school curriculums that sexualises children. Trudeau had claimed the protests were being “fuelled by the American right-wing”, but the alliance includes all political stances — from Liberty Coalition Canada, a Christian conservative advocacy group, to Blueprint for Canada, a non-partisan platform advocating “classical liberal” values. Some are issue-based, such as Our Duty Canada, a support network for families struggling with the impact of gender ideology. Plenty are grassroots, springing up in villages and towns in response to specific local events.

More from this author

Why Trudeau got tough on immigration

By Hina Husain

The protests, though they have been criticised for being anti-LGBT, are actually about protecting minors from harmful content in schools. At the protest I attended — in Durham, just outside Toronto — there were marchers of all races and religions. And their motives varied. Two young moms with children going to kindergarten soon held up placards that read “Education, not indoctrination” and “Stop sexualizing our kids”. A young girl sat next to a poster that read, “No boys in my bathroom!” A father of five children under the age of 15 was there with his wife and kids to protest against Ontario’s sex education curriculum, which he felt introduces material on sexual orientation and gender identity to children too young to understand the concepts. And three Pakistani brothers — one in high school and the other two in university — gave an interview to a local media outlet about why they felt they should not be required to partake in pride activities that went against their beliefs as Muslims.

Conservative Muslims have been overrepresented at recent protests, with a noticeable number of women in hijabs or niqabs. And as a result the movement as a whole has received accusations of being motivated by Muslim extremism. Protests against gender ideology in schools took place over the summer in Ottawa and Calgary, organised by local Muslim parents groups, with reports of young Arab boys stomping on rainbow pride flags while others cheered them on. There was a flurry of progressives questioning Muslim values and attitudes that clash with their beliefs in multicultural Canada. Several hundred people were present at the march I attended, and I’d estimate that 60-70% of them were Muslims.

It would not be fair to assume that all these Muslims were marching in opposition to same-sex relationships as well as in support of parents’ rights; but the Canadian Muslim community is known to have more negative views of LGBT rights than the general population. One transgender protestor I spoke to was in Durham because the chapter in her own town — led by conservative Muslims — was advocating not only for parental rights, which she supports, but also for the eradication of all gay and transgender people. So, the accusation that the movement has an anti-LGBT strain is not entirely unfounded.

There was also a conspiratorial minority at the protests. Anti-vaxxers complained about “shot deaths”, and told tales of what “really” happened during the pandemic. One former nurse who lost her job because she wouldn’t get vaccinated, believed that people were getting sick because of radiation poisoning from 5G towers. The trucker Freedom Convey was also present, waving “Fuck Trudeau” flags; one vehicle was covered in news stories about people who died after getting the Covid vaccines. These conspiracists were not representative; most people really were there to protest against the school boards and advocate for reform of the education system. Indeed, some parents were surprised to see people discussing vaccines and lockdowns. One mom told me: “It’s a free country, they can come here and protest too if they like.” But these fringe elements could be undermining a movement that should, in theory, have mainstream support.

The presence of more extreme groups has doubtless contributed to the Conservative Party of Canada keeping its distance from the march. The more Right-wing, less popular People’s Party of Canada did participate — which would have given the Conservatives another reason not to engage. Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party, sent a memo out to his caucus before the march warning them not to speak publicly about the issue — even though, at the recent convention in Quebec City, delegates voted in favour of a future Conservative government prohibiting “life-altering” medical and surgical interventions for gender-diverse and transgender people under the age of 18.

Poilievre is trying to strike a delicate balance here: he has indicated to his base that he’s on the same page as them about parents’ rights and gender ideology, but he doesn’t want his party to be associated with unsavoury characters. It might threaten his current lead over Trudeau in the polls. Poilievre tweeted in support of parents’ rights without explicitly mentioning the protests, which have continued across cities in Canada. Trudeau meanwhile came out firmly in opposition to the march, claiming it was promoting hate against “2SLGBTQI+ Canadians across the country”. It seems that for now, parents are going to have to fight it out with local governments, teachers’ unions and school boards, without the explicit backing of a national party.

The march, for all its issues and contradictions, has managed to unite a huge range of Canadians to come together in support of a common cause: a right to have a say in their children’s education. Most of the participants are trying to stay laser-focused on this cause, putting aside their differences to help pass legislation that will protect kids from being exposed to what they see as inappropriate content — and, in some places, from irreversible surgeries. Public opinion is on their side, but it remains to be seen whether party politics will catch up.

These two policies — the population-growth plan and the border-crossing closure — may seem antithetical, but they are very much related. Together, they illustrate Ottawa’s distinctive approach to immigration. Notwithstanding the progressive rhetoric of its leaders, Canada has actually been quite proactive at restricting most uncontrolled migration through its “bureaucratic wall”, while ensuring through a highly selective strategy (which includes the lauded “points system”) that the majority of the newcomers who do arrive through controlled channels are, relatively speaking, well-off, well-educated and hailing from middle-class backgrounds.

In this way, Canada has been able to scoop up “the best and the brightest” from all over the world, which explains why immigration has historically always been a popular policy. In fact, this arrangement has been so politically stable that a viable anti-immigration party has yet to emerge at the national level, bucking the trend in other Western democracies.

Yet there are reasons to believe that a reckoning is in store — though not because Canadians’ cultural attitudes to immigrants have soured, as has happened in most European nations. Indeed, they are more likely to think of surgeons rather than Salafists when they look at who’s coming through their migration streams. If a countermovement against the status quo is to come, it will stem from a single factor: there will be nowhere for newcomers to live.

This may sound like a strange thing to say for the world’s second largest country by landmass, but most Canadians live in a handful of cities and, amid a global housing crisis, Canada ranks as among the absolute worst nations in the developed world for affordability. It has the highest household debt and, astonishingly, the lowest number of housing units per 1,000 people in the G7. Needless to say, the housing bubble has greatly reduced Canadians’ quality of life and made already pricey metropolises such as Toronto and Vancouver impossible to live in for those who are not already solidly affluent. And it shows: homelessness has exploded and sprawling tent cities are now a distressingly common sight. With circumstances as dire as this, how did policymakers in Ottawa figure it would be a good idea to welcome 1.5 million new residents by 2025?

A big part of the answer is that it’s all going according to plan. For the main overriding (if unsayable) goal of Canadian policymaking across all levels of government is to do everything possible to boost real estate values and rental prices rapidly and radically for the benefit of established homeowners and investors — and to the detriment of everyone else.

This cleavage, a primarily economic rather than a cultural or identitarian one, pits older home-owning Canadians from the Boomer and Gen X cohorts against struggling Millennials and Gen Zs; landlords against renters; long-settled immigrants against those fresh-off-the-boat: in other words, the insiders against the outsiders.

More from this author

Tucker Carlson's fake populism

By Michael Cuenco

And it is clear where the loyalties of Canada’s political classes lay. The Nimby orthodoxy favoured by the insiders is evident in everything from steep development charges baked into municipal regulations — which make the cost of building houses prohibitive — to lazy, sticking-plaster solutions such as rent relief schemes, which simply funnel money into landlords’ pockets while doing nothing to address the underlying problems of housing undersupply. Once viewed in relation to this out-in-the-open conspiracy — the Great Canadian Racket — the government’s immigration targets, as well as its student visa policy, start to make sense.

For this purpose, Canada specifically wants prospective immigrants who are financially endowed, not penniless refugees; and it is able to draw in those candidates through its selective policy controls, whether they’re coming in as immigrants or as international students with enough funds to cover exorbitant rents and tuition fees.

The plight of international students is particularly tragic. Bright-eyed applicants to Canadian institutions from India and elsewhere are lured in with promises of a first-world education, only to be suckered into overpriced degrees while being cooped into horrendous housing conditions and forced to compete for menial gig work. Though Canada is not alone in experiencing this kind of steady glut of foreign entrants to its universities, it’s been conspicuous in its refusal to consider the extent of the exploitation involved — unlike in Britain, for instance, where authorities seem at least to have acknowledged the issue. While Canada has set about poaching high-skilled foreign workers from the US, a Toronto international student was found living under a bridge. Ottawa’s response to this and other horror stories seems to be: come on in!

This careless approach of importing boatloads of wealth-bearing immigrants to juice up the economic growth numbers, driving up rents for everyone and lowering the cost of labour, has been referred to by one housing policy commentator as “human quantitative easing”, an appropriately Orwellian-sounding name. Canada’s embrace of it has led to a perverse contradiction whereby its official monetary policy — namely, successive rate hikes to tame inflation (meaning increasingly costly mortgage payments for new homeowners) — is being offset by its unofficial “Human QE” policy, which, of course, exerts an inflationary effect.

If there is one ray of hope, it is that the immigrants and students themselves are beginning to rise up. Because of the genteel, middle-class character of many of these newcomers, they often have amour-propre — a keen sense of one’s own worth. The words of a Punjabi architect who decided to move back home are emblematic: “I respect myself too much to stay [in Canada].”

The ruling Liberals have all but abdicated moral responsibility on the issue, with Trudeau going from lofty rhetoric about “housing is a human right” to declaring that “housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility”. And though carrying a kernel of truth at an abstract, technical level, his words nonetheless struck many as offensively tone-deaf. After all, Trudeau’s willingness to confront the provinces on issues such as carbon pricing merely highlights his studied indifference on housing.

This negligent stance is reinforced by members of the government caucus, such as ex-housing minister, Ahmed Hussen, who recently insisted that housing “is not a political issue” after purchasing his second rental unit; and Vancouver MP Taleeb Noormohamed, who made millions buying and flipping houses. In any event, the Trudeau Liberals are cruising towards a well-earned defeat at the polls.

Suggested reading

Why Trudeau got tough on immigration

By Hina Husain

The bad news for Canadians is that the alternative, the Conservative Party of Pierre Poilievre, is no better. Much like Hussen and Noormohamed, Poilievre is a card-carrying member of the investor-rentier oligarchy (private investment is, of course, key to funding more construction but this class has gone about it in all the wrong ways, presiding over the hyper-financialisation of new and existing supply). The Conservative “plan” is apparently based on pushing cities to build more homes with carrots and sticks; and though phrased in colourful populist language (“Fire the gatekeepers!”), it is essentially a weak mirror image of Trudeau’s feckless initiatives. Poilievre’s bluster about fining cities that fail to comply — which Ottawa may not even have the power to do — would almost certainly just result in municipalities retaliating by jacking up fees and charges even more to pay the new fines.

Furthermore, Poilievre shows no sign of breaking with the status quo on immigration, refusing to contradict Trudeau’s immigration targets. There are two possible reasons for this, both of which could be true. The first is that Poilievre fears being tarred as “Trump North” and doesn’t want to risk losing the Conservatives’ long-cultivated relationship with multicultural communities (the subject of an admiring 2014 essay by Rishi Sunak) — even though the young people in those same communities are suffering just as much from housing scarcity and would greatly benefit from a slowdown in the rate of new arrivals. The second is that Poilievre is an anti-statist libertarian who worships at the altar of Milton Friedman, the US monetarist who helped make the case for immigration maximalism, when he argued it would supercharge growth and kill the welfare state. It could just be that Poilievre genuinely believes, on ideological grounds, that such heedless immigration targets are a good idea.

Canada faces a perfect storm: a population bomb and a housing crunch, both the consciously engineered products of national policy. Staving off disaster will require heroic leadership to chart needed course corrections on housing, immigration and student visas, while acknowledging the hard political trade-offs that need to happen: the insiders must incorporate the interests and demands of the outsiders, or trigger a complete social breakdown. In the past, Canada’s storied Laurentian elite excelled at this kind of astute brokerage politics and built a nation with it, but their courage and vision have now given way to the reign of cowardice and mediocrity.

If it were true that people were escaping to Canada from the US because they feared being deported under Trump’s harsh immigration policies, then the flow of immigrants heading north would have slowed when President Biden took office. According to government data, in the period between the tweet going out and the pandemic, which slowed crossings to a trickle, almost 60,000 people made “irregular border crossings” into Canada. But afterwards, the influx returned, reaching over 20,000 in 2022, Biden’s first year in office. By February of this year, more than 10,000 people had already crossed over into Canada.

Nor were refugees put off America by President Trump. Since 2020, the number of migrants going the other way — crossing into the US from Canada — has also shot up. Last year, Homeland Security apprehended more than 100,000 migrants crossing from Canada. (For context, in 2018 US authorities arrested only 558 people on the northern border.) There is no end in sight to these “irregular crossings”, and the public has been expressing its dissatisfaction with lax immigration controls on both sides of the border.

According to the two nations’ Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), which has been in effect since 2004, refugees have to apply for status in the first “safe country” they reach. So, they cannot apply for asylum in Canada at official border crossings with the US. However, a loophole in the agreement enables migrants crossing at unofficial border points to claim asylum after they cross. And along the 9,000km-long border, there are many places to do so, the most infamous being Roxham Road, where New York state meets Quebec.

That is, until March 25, when Roxham Road was shut down by the Canadian government. Trudeau made the announcement on the afternoon of March 24, and the policy took effect at 12:01am the next day: “To address irregular migration, we are expanding the Safe Third Country Agreement to apply not only at designated ports of entry, but across the entire land border, including internal waterways, ensuring fairness and more orderly migration between our two countries.” Biden was in Canada at the time, on his first official visit since winning the presidency. It later transpired that the neighbouring countries had signed an amendment to the STCA a year earlier, but hadn’t made the news public because officials feared untold numbers of migrants might rush to cross the border before the changes could be enacted. Now, both countries can turn away asylum seekers, no matter where they cross.

More from this author

Joyland is not a trans love story

By Hina Husain

This was a shock to Canada’s reputation as an immigrant-friendly country. Here, eligible refugees receiving generous welfare benefits including government-assisted housing, healthcare, work permits, and financial support. A path to citizenship is available to anyone who can secure permanent residency in the country. But there is a feeling, among some Canadians, that migrants have started exploiting vulnerabilities in the system. Almost 70% of Quebec residents — the province that Roxham Road leads into — said they wanted this irregular entry point closed. With social services in the province overwhelmed by asylum-seekers, the federal government started transferring migrants to Niagara Falls in Ontario, which saw welfare services pushed to the brink as well. Since 2021, the Immigration Department has paid $94 million to book out entire hotels for months, in order to accommodate asylum-seekers.

The ease with which people could illegally enter through Roxham Road, according to analysts, was “almost an invitation for undocumented migrants to try their chances at obtaining asylum in Canada”. Specifically, migrants from Nigeria, who make up a big chunk of all those who cross over from Roxham Road. The majority actually possess a valid US tourist visa, flying into New York before making their way to Canada. “I went to search Google and I figured out this is what everybody is doing,” one Nigerian migrant said while crossing the border. A “disproportionate” number of Nigerians claiming asylum are doing so on the grounds of LGBT persecution, which is met with more sympathy in Canada than in the US. But concerns have been raised about the similarities in such applications, and one investigation by a Nigeria-based publication revealed how some Nigerians make up stories in an attempt to secure asylum. This has left some aid organisations worrying that legitimate claims are now more likely to be doubted.

Some migrants still have their hearts set on America, however. Those from Mexico and India make up the bulk of illegal crossings from Canada to the States, with many flying into Canada for the sole purpose of getting across the world’s longest international border without detection. Mexicans, who since 2016 can fly visa-free to Canada, often spend thousands of dollars flying into Toronto and paying smugglers to get to the US — hence Biden’s motivation to renegotiate the STCA.

And this phenomenon burst into the public consciousness when, in January 2022, the bodies of four Indian nationals (two of them minors) were found frozen to death in Manitoba, near the American border. The Patel family had come to Canada on a tourist visa, but hoped to reach family in Chicago. A documentary last year suggested that, in Gujarat, the Patels had been a comfortable, upper-middle class family with no financial troubles or experiences of racial or religious persecution. Why, then, would they risk crossing illegally into the US in the middle of winter with two young children?

Migrant rights groups almost always lay the blame for tragedies at the feet of unscrupulous smugglers and harsh government policy. Few acknowledge that the people who decide to illegally cross an international border almost always have agency. And for middle-class migrants, it’s usually not about security; it’s about status. In developing countries, attaining the “American Dream” — or another Western nation’s equivalent — is still highly aspirational. And while everyone has the right to build a good life for themselves, migrants who can pay their way into one North American nation in order to cross over into the other, depending on their preference, undermine faith in the immigration system.

Which is a problem for Trudeau. His Liberal government plans to welcome half a million new immigrants into Canada every year till 2025. (Like most developed nations, Canada has an aging population, a low birth rate, and is facing a labour shortage.) Almost 50% of Canadians already think this target is too high. If Trudeau doesn’t want public opinion turning against his plans, he needs to reassure the electorate that his government has a strong handle on who is being welcomed across our borders.

Suggested reading

The end of Germany's open borders

By Maurice Frank

Amending the STCA is meant to signal that the government is aware of the growing unpopularity of irregular border crossers, who are seen as jumping the queue, leaving those without financial means further down the list — not to mention those waiting in refugee camps around the world. John Manley, one of the architects of the original STCA, supports the new changes, claiming that most migrants around the world are in much greater danger than those who have already found their way to the US. But there has been backlash from refugee rights advocates, with the Canadian Council for Refugees, among others, arguing that the STCA is unconstitutional. But last month, the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously ruled otherwise.

The closure of Roxham Road sent a message to all those who want to migrate to Canada that the way to do so is through official channels. Two days later, the Government of Canada launched a survey to poll Canadians’ opinions. Trudeau was, apparently, ready to listen to how Canadians feel about this issue. While some advocates have been arguing that closing the loophole will have pushed people into the hands of smugglers, it’s still too early to tell what the effects of the new changes will be, though data on the past three months’ of irregular border crossings should be imminent. But whatever the outcome: the Prime Minister won’t be promoting Canada’s immigration policies on Twitter any time soon.

That was then. By now, however, he’s proven to be provocative in all the wrong ways, even before the scandalous Fox News-Dominion case. Out went any thoughtful explanations for the social and economic ills of American life, and in came the repetitive culture war agitprop, the febrile conspiracism, and the bizarre advertisements for esoteric “bronze age” lifestyles. Tucker’s segment on the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, in which he blamed it on wokeness, was typically vapid and asinine. His recent outlandish attempt to legitimise the sordid events of January 6, denounced even by Republicans, is yet another case in point. And though he apparently hates Donald Trump “passionately”, he still knowingly amplifies his lies nearly every week. My disappointment with Tucker is even greater when I remember the admiration I felt on the first day I met him.

“Tucker! I’m your biggest fan!” I yelled across the crowded hotel ballroom. That was not quite true: I don’t think I had ever sat through a single episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight, but I had watched enough clips and read enough articles about the Fox News host to know that he was a cut above Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and all the other talking heads on that channel. Like Hegel seeing Napoleon at a distance, Tucker appeared to me on that hot and humid Washington summer day in 2019 as the very Weltgeist of the populist age — even more than Trump — and I had pushed and shoved my way through a crowd of conservative activists to be close to the star himself. A nice man nearby took my iPhone and took shots of us as Tucker put his arm around me.

“WHERE ARE YOU FROM?!” Tucker asked in a tone of ebullient surprise, perhaps in reference to my ethnicity, as I was one of a sparse number of non-white attendees at the first National Conservatism Conference. I found it endearing rather than offensive, as some others might have taken it. I told him that I was a citizen of Canada and a student at the University of Toronto who was interning for the magazine American Affairs. “CANADA?!”, he boomed, “I think Canadians often know America better than Americans!” I nodded my head, shook his hand, and walked away ecstatic. Not only did I meet the Weltgeist, but the picture I got of the moment was priceless. I had an impish grin that perfectly captured my excitement while Tucker had a mirthful, red-faced expression: we looked like two old pals.

More from this author

Did Trudeau ignore China's meddling?

By Michael Cuenco

When I showed it to friends back in Toronto, they froze in horror. The lot of them were good liberals, after all, but the strange thing was that so was I — even more incongruously, I was also a big-L Liberal, as in a supporter of the Trudeau Liberals. Unable to put two and two together, one friend said: “You might be the only human being who’s a Justin Trudeau Liberal in Canada and a Trump-Tucker Republican in America… Are you some kind of ideological schizophrenic?” While that was not quite the case, the observation nonetheless hit on the peculiarity of my worldview.

I told my friend that in this time of revolutionary change, old political labels were fading into obsolescence. Yes, on the surface, there could be no greater contrast between the two poles of the culture war. However, this was an illusory distinction. In fact, the elections of Trudeau and Trump represented a common response to late-stage neoliberalism. As evidence, I showed my friend another picture, perhaps no less shocking and incriminating than the one of me and Tucker: it was of Steven Bannon and Gerald Butts — the High Dark Lord of Trumpworld and the Grand Vizier of the Trudeau Court — merrily chumming around in the White House in 2017. An article in the New Yorker explained the context for this unlikely friendship:

“They met in New York during the transition and now talk regularly. Bannon sees Butts as a sort of Left-wing version of himself. Last year, as the Prime Minister’s popularity was in decline, Trudeau pushed through a tax hike on the rich, and it helped him rebound… Bannon wants to sell the idea politically by arguing that it would actually hit Left-wing millionaires in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and in Hollywood… ‘There’s nothing better for a populist than a rich guy raising taxes on rich guys,’ Butts told Bannon.”

More from this author

The empty words of Ron DeSantis

By Michael Cuenco

Indeed, the first several months of the Trump administration were still very much alive with the possibility of a genuine populist revolution: not only did Bannon, on Butts’ advice, recommend hiking taxes on the rich, Trump’s close friend, Christopher Ruddy, CEO of Newsmax, was pushing a proposal to build on Obamacare and expand public healthcare for the benefit of the multiethnic working class. But instead of following through on such radical instincts, Trump sold out to the Paul Ryan wing of the party: he passed a massive tax cut, tried to abolish Obamacare, failed on immigration reform, and further deregulated the economy, essentially retaining the Bush-Ryan playbook on nearly every major issue outside of trade — and even that fell short of its goals.

As Trump revealed himself to be nothing more than a neoliberal shill, it seemed as if the only one left to hold the populist line was Tucker Carlson. Here was a conservative who was not afraid to punch up: calling out the Koch Brothers for their malign influence on the GOP, and criticising the Trump-Ryan tax cut as a cave-in to corporate interests. This was the Tucker Carlson I came to see in July 2019 and he didn’t disappoint; the speech he gave at that conference was a clarion call for a new conservatism, one that had more in common with the pro-worker economic populism of Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders than with Milton Friedman’s pro-shareholder laissez-faire fetishism.

Around this time, I wrote an admiring profile of Tucker in my school newspaper, part of a series on promising post-neoliberal figures: it also included Austria’s Sebastian Kurz and New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, two young leaders who both ran on regulating immigration. I realised that it mattered less if one was a conservative like Tucker or Kurz or a progressive like Trudeau or Ardern, as long as their actions reflected the populist drive toward containing the excesses of neoliberal globalisation by regaining control over borderless flows of capital, goods, and labour. In my mind, the culture war paled in comparison to this problem, and, though I didn’t care for either the woke sanctimony of Trudeau or the gross reactionary undertones of Tucker, I was willing to put up with their disagreeable soundbites so long as their policies contributed to this larger goal.

More from this author

Biden can win on immigration

By Michael Cuenco

Based on this logic, I resolved to use my position as a culture-war-neutralist Canadian writing in American outlets to inform the US policy debate in ways that were uniquely critical and dispassionate. As Tucker himself suggested, Canadians think about the US more than we’d care to admit — if for no other reason than our survival depended on it. Or as Marshall McLuhan put it, Canada was the perfect “counter-environment” through which to examine the hegemonic American “world environment”.

There was no more pressing issue where the Canadian perspective could be of help to Americans than immigration. Even under Trudeau, Canada is a lot tougher and smarter on migration than the US was under Trump: for instance, Canada has its own longstanding equivalent to mandatory E-Verify — a proposal long advocated by hard-Right American immigration hawks — that neither Trump nor DeSantis could get passed. Trump himself has said: “I think we should have merit-based immigration like they have in Canada.”

If American populists cared to see beyond the woke packaging, they would realise that Canada already had many of the policies they dream about: on family policy, eligible Canadian families enjoy a tax-free monthly payment to help with the cost of raising children (an idea not very different from Trump’s recently floated “baby bonus”). On reviving the heartland, Canada has “equalisation” that transfers money from rich regions to poorer ones like Atlantic Canada, which like much of the Trump-voting American Midwest, is heavily deindustrialised and predominantly white. On bank regulation, 563 banks failed in the US from 2001 to 2023 — Silicon Valley Bank being the latest — and there have been 12 systemic banking crises since 1840. Canada, on the other hand, has had zero bank collapses in the past 25 years and zero systemic crises since its foundation, due to its tightly-regulated Hamiltonian financial system — the opposite of America’s fragmented Jacksonian one. Taking up any one of these ideas could have helped to redeem the populist promise of 2016.

But rather than converging around a programme of economic reconstruction for the benefit of ordinary citizens, whatever their race or identity, the populist movement was subsumed into the sinkhole of the culture war. And Tucker played a leading part in this process.

Suggested reading

The American experiment has just begun

By Anton Jäger

The last time I found myself in full agreement with Tucker was in the summer of 2020, when he called out the Leftist rioters who wrought havoc on the streets of American cities. However, six months later, when pro-Trump rioters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, Tucker rushed to depict that riot as a frame-up — or, depending on the day, to valorise the perpetrators as peaceful patriots. The kind of moral relativism that says “Yes — but the other side does it too!” is the culture war in a nutshell. In the years that followed, Tucker’s coverage devolved into a reductive culture war kabuki play, in which he appeared to care more about “owning the libs” than revolutionising the economy.

Around this time, the populist instinct in the US, across Left and Right, had transformed, from an imperative to represent the people’s best interests into a desire to transgress all rules and give expression to the spirit of mob rule. This marked a shift in my worldview. When I first read about the French Riots of May 1968, I sympathised with the glamorous radicals, whereas now I see the merit in maintaining public order above all. Where I once imagined myself singing the Internationale with the students in the Latin Quarter, I now think I would have joined the counter-demonstration in the Champs-Elysées, calling for General de Gaulle to re-establish order. I have never felt more fortunate to be a Canadian than in that period when the US descended into chaos.

But then, as I feared, the Jacobin fever soon crossed the border in the form of the 2022 trucker convoy, which desecrated our national capital and engaged in economic sabotage by blocking Canada’s border crossings and costing the economy billions in lost trade. Just as I didn’t discriminate in expressing my opposition to either “Defund the Police” or “Stop the Steal”, I couldn’t care less about the specific nature of their grievances, for no civilised cause could justify such reckless and vulgar emotional hedonism as was on display. I never thought the convoy were fascists: I took them at their word when they described themselves as “the Woodstock of our time”. And this was precisely why they had to be opposed, for it was the same anarchistic spirit of the late Sixties.

Suggested reading

Why I'm voting Republican

By Andrew Sullivan

It also became clear that these “populists” were not speaking on behalf of the people, but were often privileged members of the political class, who egged on the mob and used the name of the people to indulge their own ambitions. It was perhaps as a rebuke to the pretensions of would-be demagogues that Alexander Hamilton exclaimed: “Your people, sir, is a great beast!” The task of restoring economic sovereignty in a post-globalised world still had to be accomplished, but from now on by means other than populism.

I’ve never been reluctant to criticise Trudeau, but I was never more in agreement with his actions than when he finally shut down the convoy: order had to be restored. Predictably, Tucker and his followers on both sides of the border regarded it as nothing less than tyranny and in January, he casually called for a Bay of Pigs-style invasion to avenge the convoy and “liberate” Canada. All of a sudden, Tucker was a regime-change-loving neocon! It was just a bad joke, of course, at least, I think.

However, the invasion of Canada has already begun, mentally if not militarily. Instead of America becoming more like Canada through the adoption of reforms, Canada is becoming more like America through the culture war. Every day, our liberals sound more like American liberals, regurgitating all the latest progressive academic jargon, while our conservatives sound more like MAGA Republicans, parroting Q-like conspiracy theories and waving the Stars and Stripes.

Canada stands for freedom and order, argued Tory nationalist philosopher John Farthing: “That, if you will, is our national romance and on that basis alone we should be ready to pit [a single] Mountie against all the Jesse Jameses of Wyoming.” It is a terrible yet glorious thought: for the day that last Mountie dies is the day Canada dies, and the day Tucker Carlson wins.

This week, Trudeau announced that he would appoint an “eminent Canadian” to the position of “special rapporteur” to investigate the reports of foreign interference that have been eating away at his credibility. Though this is still short of the full public inquiry that the opposition has been demanding, it is better than his previous tactic of trying to minimise or dismiss the claims. Yet already the political establishment is asking: will this scandal be enough to take down Justin Trudeau?

In many ways, Trudeau had already fallen from grace — although the only way was down from that ridiculously high pedestal he was placed on. When Trudeau came to power in 2015, he was hailed by the international media as liberalism’s golden boy. He looked like a Disney prince and sounded all the right notes on feminism and climate change. When Americans elected Trump, Trudeau’s reputation with the transatlantic establishment shot up even farther, if only in comparison with the orange ogre. But back home, his government proved no less vulnerable to the vice that afflicts nearly all Canadian prime ministers who stay in power long enough: the ethics scandal.

Suggested reading

How we appeased China's Zero-Covid regime

By N.S. Lyons

Trudeau’s came early and often. First were the charges, in 2017, that Trudeau had accepted luxury gifts from the Shia Imam Aga Khan in exchange for $50 million in government funding for the Aga Khan Foundation. Next came reports of political interference with an investigation into Quebec engineering giant SNC-Lavalin, for which the parliamentary ethics commissioner found that Trudeau had unduly pressured his Attorney General, Jody Wilson-Raybould, into offering the firm a deferred prosecution agreement. Then came scrutiny over the government’s decision to award a lucrative youth summer jobs contract to the WE Charity, a well-connected outfit run by the Kielburger brothers, who had previously paid $425,000 to the Trudeaus to cover expenses for their participation in the group’s promotional events.

In each of these scandals, Trudeau offered excuses. He and the Aga Khan were old friends; in shielding SNC-Lavalin from prosecution, he was saving Canadian jobs; the WE Charity was the “only possible option”. These explanations failed to clear the air and Trudeau’s polling numbers took a hit; in particular, rifts in the Liberal caucus, such as the ousting of Wilson-Raybould (Canada’s first indigenous Attorney General) and two more high-profile female MPs, tarnished Trudeau’s feminist brand. Yet these scandals took place in his first mandate, and he went on to win re-election in 2019 and in 2021, eking out minority governments. (Notwithstanding the alleged presence of compromised candidates, the overall outcome of these elections is not being contested, either by Canada’s intelligence chief or by the Conservatives’ campaign manager.) With his seeming imperviousness to political damage, the prime minister has been dubbed “Teflon Trudeau”. Trudeau’s position appeared stable enough in the middle of 2022 for him to declare: “I’ll be around for the next election.”

Is there any reason to believe that this time will be different? While the earlier ethics breaches stem from a culture of prime ministerial cronyism that is as typically Canadian as moose and maple syrup, the involvement of a foreign power and the prospect of a direct threat to the integrity of Canada’s democracy marks this scandal in a more insidious category of corruption. Incidentally, this would not be the first time the Liberal Party relied on foreign interference: in the 1963 election, Liberal leader Lester Pearson colluded with advisers sent by John F. Kennedy to displace conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker. That, and 2019’s mid-campaign endorsement from Barack Obama that helped to salvage Trudeau’s credibility after the release of his infamous blackface photos. However, it is one thing to call in help from the Americans and another matter entirely to accept the aid of a hostile authoritarian state like China. Indeed, a few years before he became prime minister, Trudeau expressed admiration for China’s “basic dictatorship”, a comment brushed off by some at the time as a bizarre gaffe, but which takes on an ominous significance now.

Suggested reading

How we appeased China's Zero-Covid regime

By Malcom Kyeyune

Another sign of the scandal’s graveness is that Canada’s institutions and opinion leaders seem to be converging on the idea that Trudeau’s time may be up. See the editorials from Canada’s broadsheets: “Even Liberals sense the China scandal could spell the end of Trudeau” (the conservative National Post); “We don’t need a public inquiry into foreign interference… What we need a public inquiry to look into is domestic complicity in foreign interference” (the centrist Globe and Mail); “The longer Justin Trudeau stalls, the more he looks like he has something to hide” (the liberal Toronto Star). Among the opposition parties, it is no surprise to see the Conservatives, under hard-edged new leader Pierre Poilievre, howling for blood. But the more decisive factor may be the response of the Left-wing New Democrats and their leader Jagmeet Singh, who are the ones propping up Trudeau’s minority government. Should Singh decide that a public inquiry is a condition for continued support, and should Trudeau refuse, the government could fall, triggering a new election — though this still seems a distant possibility at the moment.

But even more than the press and rival parties, the Canadian institution that can do the most harm to Trudeau now and in the long run is the one that initiated this political maelstrom in the first place: CSIS, which has launched an investigation to determine the identity of the whistleblowers. It is always a troubling sign when a breach emerges between the security services and the political authorities, though even this is not uncharted territory in recent Canadian history. In 2006, another branch of the security services, the RCMP, may have helped to topple the last Liberal government by unveiling its findings about another ethics scandal in the middle of an election campaign, not unlike FBI Director James Comey’s “October Surprise” in the US election of 2016.

Suggested reading

'Why did Canada help my brother die?'

By Flo Read

It is perhaps with such precedents in mind that Trudeau responded forcefully to the claim that he ignored a CSIS request to terminate the candidacy of Han Dong. He appealed to the principle that: “in a free democracy… It is not up to unelected security officials to dictate to political parties who can or cannot run.” This is true enough, but what if the candidate in question really was compromised?

Another line taken up by Trudeau is that to question the matter too closely, or to play “political games” with the issue of foreign infiltration, was to cast doubt on the electoral process as a whole, thereby eroding Canadians’ trust in their democracy — the implication being that this was an unwholesome, Trump-like thing to do. The irony, however, is that Trudeau is now roughly in the same position as Trump when he was president: having to deal with allegations of collusion with a foreign power emanating from disgruntled agents of the “deep state”. Trudeau’s most laughable strategy so far has been to suggest that those looking into Han Dong’s affiliations are trafficking in “anti-Asian racism” (though a number of Chinese-Canadian community groups have already pointed out that it isn’t at all racist to be concerned about national security). These are the throes of a politician in desperation.

If the worst were to happen, Trudeau’s consolation would be that his party has a few strong candidates to succeed him who stand a decent chance of defeating rival Pierre Poilievre, some of whom happen to be talented and capable women. For instance, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland is a Rhodes Scholar who recently dressed down the Russians in their own language. Maybe she can do the same to the Chinese? What better way for Trudeau to restore his feminist bona fides than to step down in the very near future and make way for a female prime minister? He can either make the decision now, on his own terms, or wait and let Canadian voters make it for him.

Still, it doesn’t look like Trudeau will go down quietly. The pressure on him is only likely to ramp up as more information comes to the surface, whether through further leaks or a future inquiry, about what he did or did not do. It’s also a curious portent that the first person to predict a political career for Justin Trudeau was none other than Richard Nixon, who toasted the four-month-old infant as Canada’s future prime minister in 1972. Of course, Tricky Dick read the writing on the wall and knew when to go. But will Teflon Trudeau have the same sense?

Last year, assisted suicide accounted for 3.3% of all deaths in Canada, a third more than the previous year. At the same time, deaths officially recorded as suicides fell to the lowest rate in two decades. The Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAiD, Act was passed in 2016, requiring that a patient’s condition has to be “grievous and irremediable”, and death “reasonably foreseeable”, for them to qualify for euthanasia. But the law appears to allow loose interpretations of these conditions.

As a child, Alan Nichols had suffered complications from surgery which affected his mobility on one side and left him with hearing loss. Still, he was living independently before his death. Physically, Gary says, his brother had been doing much better: “He was being treated for absolutely nothing, no illness.” But Alan’s mental health was volatile. “He would go through stages where life was good and then he’d hit a stage for a while, for a month or two, where he didn’t feel like living.” He was prone to paranoia and reacted badly to change: if Gary was getting ready to leave, Alan might say: “Are you going to leave me home with all these knives?” And Gary would have to say: “Alan, I trust you. If that’s what you want to do, I can’t guard you 24/7.”

He did guard Alan, as well as he could. After their parents died, Gary and his other brother Wayne took turns in helping Alan to do tasks that overwhelmed him, such as banking. But they both had their own lives, and Alan struggled to accept help from friends. In the months before his death, he had begun to feel increasingly isolated. His local network was coming apart: Wayne had decided to take a trip across Canada; a trusted neighbour was planning to relocate; his favourite shop had closed. His story isn’t unusual: of the 31,664 assisted deaths in Canada, 17% of the patients cited “isolation or loneliness” as a reason for wanting to end their lives.

Suggested reading

How France lost her dignity

By Michel Houellebecq

The week before Wayne was due to leave, Alan was found by paramedics on the floor of his apartment. The neighbour he trusted had raised the alarm after not seeing him for days. He was malnourished and clearly suffering a major depressive episode. He was taken to Chilliwack General Hospital.

Alan did try to resist being sectioned. Gary was told that his brother “was fighting not to go into the ambulance”. Gary rushed to the hospital to see his brother, who said to him: “If you’re not here to bust me out, you might as well leave.” Gary didn’t bust him out, a decision he now says he regrets. He trusted the hospital to look after Alan. When he called to get updates on Alan’s condition, the staff were optimistic: “The hospital would say, ‘Oh, he’s doing fine. He’s okay. Yeah, he’s eating.’” It made Gary think Alan was “getting back on track.” What the hospital didn’t tell Gary was that his brother had actually signed his own death warrant.

For some Canadians, assisted suicide is a peaceful alternative to an unpleasant death. Patients with terminal illnesses often point out that end-of-life care can be highly undignified, and appreciate the power to choose something else. Don Kent was assisted to die in Ottawa after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. In a blog post written before his death, he declared: “We euthanise our pets humanely, but it is only recently that we have started applying humane dying to our own species. I want medical assistance to ease my way out of this life — nay, I demand it!” His family describe the process as cathartic: “As he requested, Deep Purple’s ‘Child in Time’ was cranked up in the background. His death was completely on his own terms, just as he wished.”

But what happens when there is no terminal diagnosis? What if your family don’t support your wish to die? In the days and weeks following his hospitalisation, Alan refused to take visits from his brothers. Gary tells me that patient confidentiality meant that the doctors didn’t have to inform them about Alan’s application for assisted dying. The people who loved him didn’t find out about it until a couple of days before the procedure was scheduled. Gary sees the hospital as partly responsible for keeping Alan from his family. “The last two weeks, they were treating him for nothing. They were giving him room and board.” He could have gone home. When, later, Gary asked the hospital, “Why did you keep him there?”, they said: “Alan didn’t think he should go home because you guys would try to convince him otherwise.”

Suggested reading

What I've learned about suicide

By Julie Burchill

Gary did, indeed, spend the last day of his brother’s life trying to change Alan’s mind. He winces at the memory: “I think we came really, really close to convincing him not to do this.” Aware that his brother felt isolated, Gary told him: “Alan, I’m contemplating retiring this year, and possibly coming back to Chilliwack. To give you a little more support and a little more family close by”: “He just looks at me and says, ‘Geez, I wish I’d known that.’” In Alan’s view, it was already too late to alter his decision.

Now, Gary wonders if his brother would have regretted his attempt to end his life, had it not succeeded. It’s common knowledge in psychiatry that most previously suicidal people do. One Harvard study shows that “nine out of ten people who attempt suicide and survive will not go on to die by suicide at a later date”. Gary says he feels utterly betrayed by the hospital, the Canadian government, the whole system that undid all his family’s hard work to keep Alan alive.

Other countries are taking tentative steps towards a debate on legalised euthanasia. Last year, Spain passed legislation stating that a person can qualify for euthanasia if both incurable illness and “unbearable suffering” are proven. In the UK, both euthanasia and assisted suicide are currently illegal. But in 2021 an Assisted Dying Bill was proposed to the House of Lords and in the same year YouGov polls showed 73% of citizens supported legalising euthanasia for terminal patients. Only 35% of MPs agreed at the time, but since then the violent suicide of a grandfather with debilitating prostate cancer revived the debate, which remains preliminary and cautious.

Suggested reading

Mental illness doesn't make you special

By Freddie de Boer

Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, is barreling at breakneck speed towards near total liberalisation. The Canadian system is set to become similar to Belgium’s or Switzerland’s. In March 2021, adults with “incurable diseases” but no foreseeable death were made eligible. Now, the “Special Joint Committee on MAiD” is considering whether to expand the law to “mature minors” (no further clarification given) and offering assisted dying to those with solely mental health conditions. Both tweaks to the law could come into effect in Canada as early as 2023.

Evidence suggests that there is demand for these services. Rupa Subramanya recently reported, for Bari Weiss’s Common Sense, on an epileptic woman called Victoria, who was only 21 when she considered applying for MAiD to alleviate her family’s dire financial situation. Subramanya also told the story of 23-year-old Kiano Vafaeian, who is seeking MAiD for depression, and his distraught family. Alan’s MAiD form, which I have seen, only listed “Hearing Loss” as his reason for requesting to die.

The conflicts of interest here are troubling. A 2020 preparatory analysis of MAiD predicted that it could save $66 million in healthcare costs. And facilities that carry out assisted suicides are given government support. In Alan Nichols’s case, the nurse who approved his application was also the “practitioner” giving him the fatal injection. “It’s like you’re writing your own paycheck,” Gary says.

Gary suspects Trudeau will allow the laws to go even further. “Why don’t you just set up a walk-in clinic for it? Because that’s what’s going to happen: once the government opens the door, these physicians and medical teams are just going to open it wider.”

As we say our goodbyes, Gary remembers something:

“In 2008, my mum called me and said: ‘Alan didn’t show up for dinner last night.’ So I said: ‘Okay, I’ll go check on him.’

So, I went over to see him, and his door was locked and wasn’t opening. I called a locksmith who came and opened up the door, and we went in there and he was laying in his bed.

And he says: ‘I knew eventually somebody would come to see me.’”

You can call Samaritans for free on 116 123, email them at jo@samaritans.org, or visit www.samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.

There is one Commonwealth realm, however, where republicanism is anathema — at least among the establishment. Canada’s dominant political culture descends in large part from loyalist exiles who fled the American Revolution in the late 18th century, and so it is no surprise to see their contemporary heirs, the present political establishment, expressing support for the monarchy. (It is a different story for the general population who usually lie somewhere between lukewarm and “unaffected”.)

This runs contrary to the widespread image of Canada’s elites as post-modern cosmopolitans who despise their own history and traditions. But the recent outpouring of personal homages paired with pro-monarchy sentiment led by the likes of Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet, former Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney, and the editorial board at the national newspaper of record, is indicative of where the Canadian ruling class stands.

Unlike in other parts of the Commonwealth (and discounting the special case of Québécois separatism), there has never been a properly pan-Canadian republican movement of any significance, much less a prime minister who avowed republicanism (the closest was a high-ranking cabinet minister in the 2000s, but his was an isolated case). More than a convenient way to distinguish Canadians from Americans, the monarchy has become an unlikely object of affection for those who govern Canada.

Trudeau himself is, of course, a hereditary monarch who would have never risen to the top were it not for his surname. In fact, Trudeau first met the Queen as a child in 1977 when his father was prime minister. Their personal history became the subject of a humorous exchange in 2015, when the Queen remarked: “Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister … for making me feel so old.”

Historically, the Trudeau Liberals have often been regarded as either indifferent or outright hostile to Canada’s imperial heritage. It was this party, after all, that retired the Union Jack and Red Ensign in favour of the Maple Leaf Flag in 1965, while one of the most iconic images of Trudeau Sr. is of him doing a pirouette behind the Queen, noted as a gesture of irreverence. More recently, a Liberal government dropped the adjective “Royal” in the name of Canada’s navy and air force, only for it to be restored by the succeeding Conservative government.

Suggested reading

What does Liz Truss see in Canada?

By Marshall Auerback

Yet such stylistic changes belie the fidelity maintained by Canada’s liberal establishment towards the Crown. Trudeau Sr. and the Queen, by all accounts, actually had a warm and fruitful relationship, which is exhibited in two more iconic photos: one in which the prime minister is peeking under the monarch’s umbrella, and another featuring the two presiding over the “patriation” of the constitution, in which Canada severed the last colonial links with London and became a fully sovereign state. For the final act in this constitutional saga, in 1982, the Queen came to Ottawa to personally grant royal assent to what had been the elder Trudeau’s life’s work: the pillars of today’s progressive Canada — the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, official bilingualism, multiculturalism — were codified.

Against charges that Pierre Trudeau discarded the history and values of the Old Canada, the Queen’s presence at this pivotal moment in the country’s evolution highlights not the disjuncture but rather the continuity between the Old Canada and the New. For the nation-building project begun in 1867 with declarations of fealty to Queen Victoria reached its maturation under the gaze of her great-great-granddaughter. The motto of the province of Ontario is thus an apt descriptor for Canada as a whole, no less under its current liberal and multicultural Trudeauvian regime: Ut Incepit Fidelis Sic Permanet. (“Loyal she began, so she remains.”)

So perhaps it is understandable that Canada is not as eager as its Commonwealth cousins to leave the royal embrace. When a newly-elected Justin Trudeau was asked by the BBC if he was sympathetic to republicanism, he replied: “We’re perfectly happy with our Queen of Canada.” No doubt he will be just as happy with the new King of Canada. As Jacobin correctly pointed out in its denunciation of this modern-day liberal monarchism inherited from the nation’s counterrevolutionary forebears: “Canada’s elites and its governing class admire the royals and evidently want their legacies to endure … [they] see in the monarchy a reliable ‘last resort’ to maintain ‘stability’ and prevent potential major upsets resulting from popular will.”

What is notable these days is not so much how Canada’s centre-left elites have lent their support to monarchy, but how the Right-wing opposition to those elites has increasingly drifted into anti-monarchist territory, almost seeming to converge at times with voices on the Left. The opposition Conservative Party is officially devoted to the monarchy; indeed, the mood at the election of their new leader last Saturday, the pro-trucker populist Pierre Poilievre, was subdued in the wake of the Queen’s death. Poilievre opened his speech with a tribute to the late sovereign and expressed allegiance to her successor with the words “God Save the King”. However, the highly online Right-wing base that bolstered Poilievre has begun to see things differently.

Suggested reading

How the truckers split indigenous Canada

By Ashley Frawley

Scrolling through the Twitter replies to coverage of the King’s first speech by the conservative site True North Centre reveals how its Right-wing audiences view the new monarch: “An irresponsible globalist”; “Please don’t put his face on our money”; “All hail King Klaus”. As these responses suggest, Charles III’s record of speaking up on climate issues or taking the stage with Klaus Schwab at the World Economic Forum has not endeared him to the Freedom Convoy.

It is also notable that one of the most active media supporters of the convoy had previously come out in support of abolishing the monarchy in the conservative National Post, while revolutionary republican imagery of the 1776 variety was a very prominent feature in those demonstrations. Aside from the Stars and Stripes and the Gadsden flag, the truckers and their sympathisers waved the Patriote flag of the 1837 Lower Canada rebellion against the Crown, and the Eureka flag beloved of Australian republicans (and lately used by anti-lockdown protesters in that country).

Meanwhile, across Canada’s Western provinces, particularly in oil-rich Alberta, a new kind of separatism has reared its head in response to the perceived abuses of the same Central Canadian liberal elites. The intellectual currents fuelling this movement have long-harboured the fantasy of seceding from “the bureaucratic despotism of Ottawa” and carving out a libertarian republic in the prairies. Even with the potential elevation of a premier running on a platform of de facto secessionism, this is admittedly a distant possibility but one that nonetheless highlights the synergy between Right-wing populism and the republican ideal.

As the Trudeaus and the Carneys can attest, the monarchy has stood as a symbol of order, stability and continuity in Canada, as it has in Britain and throughout the Commonwealth. But it remains to be seen if this ancient inheritance can continue to resist the hyper-politicisation of institutions that has become so ubiquitous in this era of culture war and populist ferment.

The young anthropologist who conducted the GPR search later added a note of caution: only a forensic investigation could confirm that these were indeed burials. But a moral panic had already been unleashed. Politicians and the media immediately seized on the first announcement, and “burials of missing children” was the storyline that ricocheted around Canada and much of the world. Meanwhile, several other First Nations that had at one time hosted residential schools hired their own anthropologists armed with GPR and announced similar discoveries. Weeks later, almost exactly a year ago, in June 2021, the Cowessess First Nation announced the discovery of 751 unmarked graves at the site of another former residential school in Saskatchewan.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau set the tone of the public response on 30 May by ordering Canadian flags to be flown at half-mast on all federal building to honour the “215 children whose lives were taken at the Kamloops residential school”, thus elevating the possible burials to the status of murder victims and making Canada sound like a charnel house of murdered children. Unprecedented in Canadian history, flags remained at half-mast until Remembrance Day, 11 November, and were returned to normal height only after the Assembly of First Nations gave its OK.

In spite of this ostentatious virtue-signalling, Trudeau got into trouble when he skipped an event in Kamloops on 30 September to commemorate the missing children. Apparently, our surfer dude prime minister preferred to ride the waves at Tofino on the Pacific coast rather than attend a commemorative ceremony. To make up for his faux pas, he had to go to Kamloops on 18 October for another memorial ceremony, at which he was harangued for several hours.

But not all the events in the wake of the Kamloops announcement were so amusing. Sixty-eight Christian churches, mostly Roman Catholic, were vandalised or even burned to the ground. Many of these were historical church buildings still used and revered by native people. The pretext for arson and vandalism was that the Kamloops Indian Residential School had been run by a Catholic religious order, as had 43% of all residential schools. Imagine the outrage if 68 synagogues or mosques had been vandalised and burned. Yet the attacks on 68 Catholic churches passed with only mild criticism.

An article in the New York Times was typical of media commentary about the unmarked graves. It was first published under the headline “Horrible History: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada” on 28 May and updated on 5 October under the same title. It asserted that: “For decades, most Indigenous children in Canada were taken from their families and forced into boarding schools. A large number never returned home, their families given only vague explanations, or none at all.”

Suggested reading

Why the Canadian Left is burning down churches

By Meghan Murphy

Because the corporate press take their cue from the New York Times, its perspective echoed widely. The discovery of the so-called unmarked graves was chosen by Canadian newspaper editors as the “news story of the year”. And the World Press Photo of the Year award went to “a haunting image of red dresses hung on crosses along a roadside, with a rainbow in the background, commemorating children who died at a residential school created to assimilate Indigenous children in Canada”.

But the award this news report should have won is for fake news of the year. All the major elements of the story are either false or highly exaggerated.

First, no unmarked graves have been discovered at Kamloops or elsewhere. GPR has located hundreds of soil disturbances, but none of these has been excavated, so it is not known whether they are burial sites, let alone children’s graves. At her original press conference, the Chief of the Kamloops Indian Band called these findings unmarked graves, and the media, politicians, and even Pope Francis ran with the story without waiting for proof.

Similar claims from the chiefs of other Indian reserves ran into grave difficulty (no pun intended) because the GPR research was conducted in whole or in part on community cemeteries located near the sites of residential schools. It would hardly be surprising to find burial sites in a cemetery! But again, since no excavations have been conducted, it is not known whether these unmarked graves contain the bodies of children.

Suggested reading

Why Canada's truckers will lose

By Michael Cuenco

North American Indians did not conduct burials; they usually exposed the bodies of the dead to be worn away by predators and the elements. Christian missionaries introduced the practice of burial. But Indian graves were usually marked by simple wooden crosses that could not long withstand the rigours of Canadian weather. Thus Indian reserves today contain probably tens of thousands of forgotten unmarked graves of both adults and children. To “discover” these with ground-penetrating radar proves nothing without excavation.

Second, there are no “missing children”. This concept was invented by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), whose members spoke at various times of 2,800 or 4,200 Indian children who were sent to residential schools but never returned to their parents. Indeed, some children died at residential schools of diseases such as tuberculosis, just as they did in their home communities. But the legend of missing students arose from a failure of TRC researchers to cross-reference the vast number of historical documents about residential schools and the children who attended them.

In the fake news stories, the “unmarked graves” are presumed to be populated by the “missing children”, who died at residential school. Lurid tales of torture and murder, of babies thrown into the furnace and hanging from meat hooks, make the stories more colourful. However, the notion of missing children cannot stand up to critical scrutiny. Indian parents, like other parents, loved their children and certainly would have noticed if they went away to school and never came back. But no inquiries about missing Indian children were ever filed with the police. Moreover, children were carefully tracked in the residential school system. Similar to boarding schools all over the world, each child received a number upon admission for keeping track of clothing and other possessions.

Suggested reading

How the truckers split indigenous Canada

By Ashley Frawley

The federal Department of Indian Affairs also recorded students because it paid a per capita subsidy to the schools. It reviewed admission records meticulously because it didn’t want to pay for the white and Métis students who sometimes got into the residential schools, even though they were supposed to be only for Indians. On the other side, the residential schools were equally motivated to keep track of students because their income depended on the per capita subsidies. If students disappeared, their subsidy would have decreased.

Third, stories about Indian residential schools are almost always accompanied by the frightening claim that 150,000 students were “forced to attend” these schools, but the claim is misleading at best. Scholars generally agree that more students attended day schools on Indian reserves than went away to residential schools. Moreover, a large number didn’t go to any school at all. It wasn’t until 1920 that school attendance was made compulsory for Indian children, and enforcement was often lax. It was estimated in 1944 that upwards of 40% of Indian children were not in any kind of school.

For students who did attend residential school, there had to be an application form signed by a parent or other guardian. Many of these forms still exist and can be seen in online government archives. The simple truth is that, despite allegations of physical and sexual abuse, many Indian parents saw the residential schools as the best option available for their children. Cree artist Kent Monkman’s famous painting The Scream, showing missionaries and mounted policemen snatching infants from the arms of their Indian mothers, is a fever dream of the imagination. It is not even close to an accurate depiction of historical reality, not even if taken metaphorically.

*

How could the fake news story of unmarked graves, with its attendant legends of missing children ripped from the arms of their mothers, have gained such wide currency among political and media elites? The short answer is that it fits perfectly into the progressive narrative of white supremacy, of the white majority in Canada oppressing racial minorities. But there is also a specific etiology of the unmarked grave story.

Prior to 1990, residential schools enjoyed largely favourable coverage in the media, with many positive testimonials from students who had attended them. Indeed, alumni of the residential schools made up most of the emerging First Nations elite. Then Manitoba regional chief Phil Fontaine spoke on a popular Canadian Broadcasting Company radio show about how he had suffered sexual abuse at a residential school. After that things went south quickly. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples wrote critically about the schools; two historians wrote influential books; and lawyers launched multiple class actions on behalf of residential school “survivors”, claiming damages for physical and sexual abuse, as well as loss of language and culture at the schools.

Suggested reading

Are women more Left-wing?

By Mary Harrington

Rather than contest these lawsuits in court, the Liberal government of Paul Martin negotiated a settlement in 2005, which was accepted shortly afterwards by the newly elected Conservative government of Stephen Harper. Ultimately about $5 billion in compensation was paid to about 80,000 claimants, and Prime Minister Harper gave a public apology for the existence of residential schools in 2008.

Harper might have thought that the compensation payments and his apology would be the end of the story, but it was only the beginning. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he appointed took off in its own direction after the initial set of commissioners resigned and had to be replaced on fairly short notice. The TRC held emotional public hearings around the country at which “survivors” were invited to tell their stories without fact-checking or cross-examination. Most had already made claims for financial compensation in which the amount paid was proportional to the degree of sexual and physical abuse suffered, again without fact-checking or cross-examination. The TRC concluded that the residential schools amounted to “cultural genocide”.

Suggested reading

Biden's cowardly war on conversion therapy

By Kat Rosenfield

While this was going on, lawyers were bringing more class actions for other forms of Indian education, such as day schools on reserves, or boarding in town to attend public schools. Harper’s government offered some resistance in court, but the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, elected in 2015, preferred to settle out of court. Billions of dollars more are being paid out as a result.

Against this background, the claims of unmarked graves are a new money-maker. In August 2021, the federal government announced $321 million in special grants to First Nations for research about unmarked graves, and Canada’s 2022 budget pledged $275 million for “addressing the shameful legacy of residential schools”. Meanwhile indigenous leaders are pursuing claims for financial compensation from the Catholic Church.

Fake news does not arise and thrive in a political vacuum. While progressive ideology makes academia and the Liberal government a receptive audience, the indigenous industry has an obvious financial stake in driving the story. As long as the dollars flow, expect more stories about unmarked graves, yet no excavations to test the truth of the stories.

Take the debates surrounding the trucker protests in Ottawa. The mainstream press, by and large, has attempted to assimilate the protests into categories familiar from the Trump years.

According to Politico, “far-Right” truckers, some of them sporting “Confederate and Nazi flags”, have “wreaked havoc on Canadian cities”. In the Guardian, one writer warned that the “siege of Ottawa” was an “astroturfed movement funded by a global network of highly organised far-Right groups and amplified by Facebook’s misinformation machine.” Slate, after dropping the trigger words “militia”, “hate”, “extremist”, and “Nazi”, called the protests an “armed occupation of a G-7 capital”. All linked the truckers with the domestic threat posed by Fox News, the Republican Party, and the American far-Right.

Critics of the establishment have responded with their own counter-narrative, aimed at portraying the truckers in a sympathetic light while focusing attention on the tyrannical response of the Canadian government. After Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergency Powers Act, Tucker Carlson labelled Canada a “dictatorship” and warned that similar measures would soon be coming to the United States. Over the weekend, as Ottawa police attempted to clear the city centre, Twitter was filled with viral videos of police violence against the protestors, juxtaposed with old quotes from progressive leaders praising the BLM protests of summer 2020, intended to highlight their hypocrisy.

These narratives have a recognisable logic, which holds whether the underlying event is the truckers or the Capitol riot. They are tribal, pitting a virtuous “us” against a malevolent “them”. They are curated to provoke fear of, and rage against, the out-group, often through “empathic triggers” that highlight aggression against the in-group. They are also, in a loose sense, conspiratorial, running together phenomena that have no logical connection except within the pattern of the narrative.

More from this author

Is the New Right a grift?

By Park Macdougald

This is easy to recognise in Right-wing conspiracies about the 2020 election, but establishment media indulges in something similar. When CNN leads a story about Joe Rogan’s use of the n-word with a line about a man carrying “a Confederate flag inside the US Capitol rotunda”, the purpose is to train readers to create an emotional connection between the podcast host and white supremacist domestic terrorism, when none exists in reality.

The war between these tribal narratives, according to media theorist John Robb, is the defining feature of US politics today. He argues that a combination of establishment failures — the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Global Financial Crisis — and the information explosion ushered in by the internet have annihilated the legitimacy of the old narratives that used to hold Western states and societies together, nationalism being the most prominent one.

But humans are tribal and narrative creatures — take one story away and we will invent another one. Today, our most compelling narratives — the ones that provide us with the sense of “fictive kinship” formerly provided by membership in a nation, religion, or ethnic group — are political narratives defined by enmity.

This development, claims Robb, is largely the product of social media, where we are presented with more information than we can possibly pay attention to, let alone understand. We make sense of it by picking patterns out of the noise. These patterns, however, are social phenomena. And as the pioneers of clickbait discovered a decade ago, we are especially drawn to content that provokes a strong empathic response — generally something shocking or outrageous, though our specific triggers will depend on which pattern we are curating. Over time, we come to identify with those who respond to the same triggers and assimilate them to the same pattern. Our tribe is the collective of people outraged by the same things that outrage us.

More from this author

The importance of repression

By Park Macdougald

The clearest example of how this works in the real world is the response to the video of Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd. The video was shocking and vivid. In a previous media environment, however, it would have had its emotional impact blunted by layers of context, expert commentary, and he-said-she-said quotes from local police and the Floyd family. Instead, the video was immediately assimilated to patterns such as “systemic racism”, provoking mass rage and mobilisation against not only Chauvin or the Minneapolis police department but the United States as a whole. Video of the ensuing protests set in motion a similar dynamic on the Right, as users curating patterns about “BLM rioters” and “antifa terrorists” circulated vivid footage of lootings, arsons, and assaults, often framed to induce outrage at the Left-wing politicians and journalists who were vocally supporting the protests.

Robb developed his framework as a way of understanding how digital politics and social media were bleeding over into the real world during the Trump administration. Trump himself, of course, had ridden a wave of social media enthusiasm into the White House, and his election prompted many of his more elite, media-savvy opponents to self-organise into the #resistance, which identified and amplified every real and imagined outrage of his presidency (including conspiracy theories about Russiagate).

Robb dubbed the open-source network supporting Trump ‘the #insurgency’. Unlike ‘the resistance’, which operated in the open and tried to compel government and corporate action through moral coercion and appeals to expert consensus, the #insurgency was largely anonymous. It sought to confuse and disorient its opponents, often through jokes and targeted harassment, and to prevent the emergence of consensus around resistance narratives.

For Robb, however, 2020 kicked the tribalisation of American politics into overdrive. First came the pandemic, which damaged an already fraying social fabric and forced Americans to spend more time online than ever before. The death of George Floyd then served as a huge empathic trigger for the Left, not only sparking mass popular mobilisation but also inducing a moribund Democratic Party establishment and many mainstream institutions to officially endorse Left-wing patterns such as “white supremacy”. The Right, in turn, began to tribalise in earnest after November 2020, uniting around patterns of conspiracy — surrounding the 2020 election, vaccines, the Covid-19 pandemic, Big Tech censorship — promoted by Trump and his allies.

The final accelerant, in Robb’s telling, was the Capitol riot. The assault on the Capitol proved for the Left that Trump and his supporters — including the Republican Party and virtually all of its voters — were not merely racists but existential threats to the republic, whose suppression was crucial to ensure the survival of democracy. Perhaps more importantly, the Capitol riot prompted the major tech companies to openly align with the Left, disconnecting Trump — then the sitting president — from their networks under the guise of preventing further violence. Given the control of these companies over not only political discourse but also much of the infrastructure of modern life, this alignment, for Robb, amounted to a declaration of corporate sovereignty over the U.S. political system.

Suggested reading

The myth of Chinese supremacy

By Edward Luttwak

Today Robb sees, on the one hand, a corporate and political establishment aligned around enforcing curated, Left-wing patterns as the de facto consensus view of reality — one that combines a technocratic emphasis on “facts” and “science” with a tribal moral narrative about the existential threat posed by racists and white supremacists, constantly reinforced by curated, emotionally charged stories that fit the pattern. On the other hand is an emerging tribal Right — though this tribe can more easily accommodate cranks and dissidents of all political persuasions — organised around a curated pattern of elite conspiracy, drawing its strength from any and all establishment failures and from attempts to censor or suppress its narrative. The victory of the former would represent what Robb calls “networked fascism”, or the alignment of government and corporate power behind a single approved narrative. The victory of the latter would lead to dissensus, disunion, and nihilism.

Robb’s framework provides a useful, if alarming, way of looking at contemporary debates over “misinformation” and online “hate”. Whether or not one buys his ominous warnings about “networked fascism”, his diagnosis of the tribal dynamics of social media — our tendency to assimilate information into politicised patterns, and to respond to empathy triggers that fit our pattern with rage and loathing directed at our tribal out-group — is an important reminder about the ways in which we are constantly emotionally manipulated by social media, often in ways we don’t recognise. And it should make us sceptical of both top-down attempts to enforce a consensus interpretation of reality — which is usually messy and offers few clear moral lessons — and of any bottom-up patterns that posit, as an explanation for all the phenomena that trigger us, some unified conspiracy or plan.

For individuals, too, Robb’s work is a warning about how easily the architecture of social media can be weaponised to make us hate our fellow citizens. Indeed, it is precisely when we don’t experience the emotion as “hate”, but rather as justified outrage against the enemies of everything righteous and holy, that we should be most suspicious.

In many ways, these divisions are unique: they are not draped in the usual identitarian focus on race, gender and sexuality that has come to define the West. Rather, they are between those minority groups which embrace a sense of victimhood and those which reject it; between the strong, self-determining subject capable of rational judgement and between the vulnerable subject who demands protection. Nowhere is this clearer than in the contentious case of indigenous participation in the Freedom Convoy.

Even in my own family, the truckers’ protest sparked an unprecedented sense of discord and division, both on and off reserve. In recent weeks, I have spoken with several relatives and their contacts who participated in and organised portions of the Convoy. What emerged was a sense of division that is a microcosm for a more fundamental rupture in mainstream Canada and beyond.

This is to be expected: no matter how hard policymakers and even indigenous leaders try to convince us otherwise, the issues faced by indigenous people are not so different from those faced by people around the world. Like so many groups, they are torn between the demand for freedom and the demand for safety. It is a conflict faced by governments and populations that predates Covid-19 — but which has become manifest with lockdown measures and the resistance to them.

While Trudeau dismissed the protests as sexist, racist outpourings of white supremacy, the indigenous participants I spoke to were keen to emphasise their diversity. Some indigenous people arrived in full regalia; a mother marched with a papoose on her back and two small children in traditional dress. “We met so many people from every background,” said an Ojibwa woman from a Northern Ontario reserve who helped organise protestors in her area. “Because we’re just like everyone else. We want the mandates to end. We want freedom of choice and autonomy over our own bodies. We want a good life and we want our children to have a good life. We want the same things.”

Suggested reading

Justin Trudeau's phoney dictatorship

By Malcom Kyeyune

She pointed to problems on reserves but linked these to broader issues in Canadian society. “Like the rest of the population, we have suffered from so many drug-related deaths and suicides. Covid just made that worse. We don’t want that anymore. We’re so sad seeing this and we’re just hoping for change. Just like everyone else.”

Yet many in the indigenous community disagreed. Leaders issued statements condemning the protests, and in particular the use of traditional ceremonies and objects by both indigenous and non-indigenous people without “permission from us in order to proceed”, dismissing them as “ignorant acts of cultural appropriation”. While there was some controversy about a kitsch “pipe ceremony” that was posted online, the broader message underscored that ceremonies and ceremonial objects only have a place in certain approved protests and in relation to certain approved issues. Indigeneity, it appears, is the sole province of those who toe a certain line. And that line is not about freedom, but safety and protection.

Indeed, all these pronouncements highlighted was the insularity of Canada’s indigenous movements. Grand Council Chief Reginald Niganobe said: “Once again, we ask that you please remain vigilant within your communities where you are continued to be needed.” In a statement shared on social media, he argued: “It is counter-intuitive to the progression of our communities to be caught up in anti-government sentiment which fails to address the complexities of Anishinabe realities.”

Others framed the protests as a clear indication of racist inequality in Canada, pointing out that an indigenous-led convoy would have been met with swift suppression. The author of one such piece reflected that while some indigenous people might be attracted to the movement’s anti-establishment rebelliousness, “this is not the cause that we need to get behind because they’re not here to help our issues”.

But as Kenan Malik recently observed, racial specialness has often been used as a means of dismantling cross-race “fusion” movements that threatened the existing order. Take the struggle that brought together poor black workers and poor white farmers in the American south during the early 20th century. Rather than organising together, white workers were persuaded that their interests lay not in their class position but rather in their racial uniqueness. Of course, certain groups undoubtedly suffer individualised issues. Historically, however, the distinctiveness of one’s struggle was preached precisely to destroy the power of solidarity movements to achieve change.

Suggested reading

How the Left betrayed the Truckers

By Malcom Kyeyune

And this is a danger that still runs deep today. Indigenous people are constantly invited to believe that their problems are distinct and rooted squarely in the past. When news broke last summer about the alleged existence of unmarked children’s graves at a Kamloops residential school, the media was awash with tales of suffering and horror. While many indigenous people did suffer greatly in these schools, it is important to note that not all children attended them. Nonetheless, a predictable narrative began to emerge: that, however indirectly, all indigenous people are essentially traumatised by this past. As one academic put it at the time, indigenous people have “ongoing issues in our communities that are a direct result of these schools”, and the failure to recognise this ensures “that new generations are continuing to suffer”.

Such claims about the colonial trauma experienced by all indigenous people have not been dampened by more recent evidence that the evidence of mass graves is shaky. It fits too well with the dominant ideal of the indigenous victim. As one young woman put it: “We’re still experiencing the effects of the residential school from our parents and grandparents. We’re all damaged, and we’ll pass it on to our children, so it will never end.”

With victimhood now all but regarded as an innate indigenous characteristic, it is hardly surprising that indigenous frauds have started to fabricate entire identities grounded in this trauma: Saskatchewan professor and public health expert Carrie Bourassa was revealed last year to have fabricated claims to indigenous heritage, appearing publicly in elaborate dress as ‘Morning Star Bear’ with attendant melodramatic theatrics. While organisers of the Freedom Convoy have similarly been outed for making shaky assertions about their mixed roots, it is interesting how long Bourassa’s claims went undetected.

Bourassa climbed the career ladder for years, steadily growing bolder with expanded claims to indigenous heritage and cultural roots. Why? Because Bourassa told a story that people wanted to hear. She talked of suffering, addiction and “endemic” sexual abuse — experiences that were likely a far cry from her comfortable middle class upbringing in Regina. “Everybody around me was either an alcoholic, drug addict or suffered from some sort of addiction,” she embellished. “There was a lot of violence in my family.”

True or not, here we had a story of a virtuous indigenous victim — the sort of victim that inspires a carefully positioned Justin Trudeau to be photographed with a single tear running down his cheek; the sort of victim that legitimises his decision to exclude indigenous citizens from obeying his draconian emergency laws without needing to explain why.

Suggested reading

Why Canada's truckers will lose

By Michael Cuenco

And for the people I spoke to, this can have an unintended effect: it makes them feel like frauds because that narrative of trauma is not their experience. Even if it were, I am not convinced it would be capable of fulfilling their desires for more control and freedom to decide how to live their lives.

Quite the opposite. As indigenous scholar Dian Million has warned, this narrative of virtuous victimhood runs expressly against claims to self-determination, a long established goal of indigenous communities. This is because when we assume victimhood, we often relinquish power. Constantly invited to confess endless tales of suffering and damage, the call for “self-determination” fades into “self-management” and the therapeutic “empowerment” of outside agencies.

And this is echoed throughout Canada at large. In recent years, indigenous communities have started to groan under the weight of expanding bodies of surveillance. It’s striking, then, that during the recent protest, truckers spoke of the encroachment of endless managers into their work, subjecting them to increasing surveillance, such as fitting their trucks with cameras in their cabs. And like indigenous leaders’ disavowal of indigenous participants’ demands for freedom in favour of safety, so too did the truckers’ unions retreat into threats, seeing their main role as providing not self-determination but safety.

Indigenous experiences, then, are a microcosm of Canada. We are not so different. Like so many others, some of us reject the vision of virtuous victimhood. And it is testament to the power of this unity that our community leaders should respond with such horror. They’ve finally sussed out that we too are the “Average Joe” — and as one indigenous participant told me: “The average Joe has had enough.”

I suspect that Putin is all of these things. But none of that matters to the Ukrainians who find themselves living on Europe’s new Eastern Front because, more than anything, the Russian President is simply… “lucky”.

He’s lucky: lucky that the current leaders of the Western world are plagued by ineptitude, lucky that they can’t formulate a coherent response to his menacing of Ukraine, and lucky that none of this will change anytime soon. If ever there were a good time to carry out aggressive mischief like invading — or just destabilising — Ukraine, it is surely now.

Ultimately, this is a tale of division, one that starts with voters at home and concludes with the collapse of Nato. The Trump administration had already raised the alarm about the way key European countries — in particular Germany — do not contribute enough to their own defence. And in the years since, Western attempts to foster military unity have been marked by chaos. “Stab in the back!”, was the verdict of one national newspaper after Australia decided to renege on a submarine deal signed in 2016 with France, in favour of buying nuclear-power subs from the US.

An embittered EU responded with talk of creating a European army, hailing the “strategic autonomy” it would provide. But this is fantasy. Brussels is hardly the geopolitical powerhouse it thinks it is: the EU can scarcely maintain its own border force — let alone deploy a fully equipped fighting force. And looking at America and Britain’s shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan, it’s hard not to conclude the same about every Western country. Their people were left behind; their leaders left fumbling to explain the almighty mess.

Suggested reading

Why the West fell for Putin's bluff

By David Patrikarakos

Yet for Putin, perhaps the obvious division within the West — the one that really allows him to act with impunity — relates to energy and the environment. No doubt climate change is a real and pressing problem. The rational approach to coping with it is through long-term investments designed to improve existing technologies such as nuclear fission and to develop new ones such as nuclear fusion. In the meantime, there are encouraging ways to make our use of fossil fuels more efficient and less polluting.

However, this is not the approach favoured by today’s leaders in the West, who have all but embraced Greta Thunberg’s worldview. Fracking is pretty much impossible in Europe. Nuclear power has been shut down in Germany. And the European Commission has set out a variety of measures to raise the cost of carbon. What happened next was entirely predictable: a manufactured energy crisis, a cost-of-living emergency, and the threat of social unrest. And for Putin, there was a bonus: the increased reliance on Russian natural gas through projects such as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Yet there is another, less obvious source of division within the West that has fuelled the Ukrainian crisis: Covid-19. No Western democracy has managed to minimise excess mortality without significant restrictions on individual liberty. At least in some cases — such as Australia and New Zealand — the restrictions kept mortality down. But in Britain and North America, people have had to endure the worst of both worlds: high mortality and heavy restrictions.

Suggested reading

The liberal order is already dead

By Paul Kingsnorth

Only now, just as these countries should be putting on a united front, are the longer-term repercussions coming into view. In the UK, voters remain incensed to learn that lockdown rules against parties were repeatedly broken. In Canada, a protest against a rule that requires cross-border truckers to be vaccinated against Covid has thrown the supposedly liberal government into a spasm of illiberalism.

Given the unrest springing up across the West, perhaps it’s unsurprising that the approval ratings of its political leaders have been sliding over the past year. Consider the leaders of the “Five Eyes” group of Anglophone countries that not only share classified intelligence but are also widely regarded as its core. Their most recent approval numbers are remarkable — not least because the hapless Joe Biden comes top: Joe Biden, 41%; Justin Trudeau, 40%; Scott Morrison, 39%; Jacinda Ardern, 35%; Boris Johnson, 25%.

Of course, today’s Western leaders are unpopular for a host of reasons. Plagued by weakness, they have alienated large sections of their electorate — both by yielding to progressive policies and flirting with increasingly draconian policies. And as we are now seeing, this weakness has been magnified onto the global stage.

Suggested article

Will California ever be safe?

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Yes, the Anglosphere and eurozone may give the impression of a united front — not a day goes past without some politician warning that Putin will face the harshest sanctions ever seen if he invades Ukraine. But all these threats ring hollow. Nothing our leaders say will dispel the sense that we are being led by a group of King Lears: “I will have such revenges that all the world shall… I will do such things… What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be the terrors of the earth.” Their words are empty — and that is precisely why they seem destined to fail as a deterrent.

So we can still hope that Putin will relent and spare the people of Ukraine the scourge of war. We can also hope that the Chinese and Iranian governments will not follow Putin’s example in the coming months and years. But we should also hope, just as fervently, that the next time we get the opportunity, we elect more capable leaders than these weaklings.

Yet Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergency Act is also a bizarre moment. Consider that the law stipulates that the government can fine people violating the act between 500 and 5,000 dollars. On the face of it, these are not numbers that seem commensurate to punish violators of the most powerful emergency law in the Canadian state’s armoury. But the reason these numbers seem so strange is simple: the law hasn’t been updated to keep up with the times, or inflation.

The oddness doesn’t end there. A law that in a real sense was forgotten — and designed to handle the most extreme situations a nation state can find itself in — is now dredged up to deal with a fairly routine political protest. Trudeau, and his finance minister Chrystia Freeland, have also called on financial institutions to freeze or suspend any bank accounts without a court order if they are being used to fund the protests. They believe, as David Frum writes in The Atlantic, that the truckers represent a “form of performative intimidation”.

Compared to the mass burning and vandalism of Catholic Churches in Canada last summer — which Trudeau both denounced and sympathised with, calling the arsons “understandable” at one point — the truckers hardly represent a nadir of public order. Across the border in the United States, the rioting that occurred there in the summer of 2020 involved loss of life, and massive damage to property. Back then Kamala Harris’s response was markedly similar to that of Trudeau — hand-wringing, sure, but also sympathy with the motivations of those who rioted.

Perhaps buildings being burned down, sometimes with their occupants still inside them, is just part and parcel of living in a vibrant democracy. Meanwhile, a protest that has led to zero loss of life and no torched buildings is cast as a grave threat to democracy. Put up bouncy castles for kids to play in and have public barbecues, as the truckers have done? Then, in the words of the New York Times’ editorial board, you are “far-Right”, and represent a “test of democracy” itself.

Or you will be accused of “sedition” by the usually phlegmatic Mark Carney. The former Bank of England governor may support Trudeau’s use of emergency powers, but by all indications it is a spectacularly ill-conceived move. Many provincial leaders are already openly rejecting the necessity of such extreme measures.

More from this author

How the Left betrayed the Truckers

By Malcom Kyeyune

But the presence of open division among Canada’s political class — though fatal enough on its own — pales in comparison to the much deeper issue here. Throughout the protests, it’s been clear that the authorities — from Trudeau’s government down to the city of Ottawa itself — have lost control of the situation on the ground.

Tow truck companies openly refuse to tow trucks, and even the police force has proven itself to be unreliable. After an order came down to cut off the demonstrator’s supply of fuel for their trucks, the OPS did some perfunctory confiscations of jerry cans, but the only real result was that demonstrators started carrying around jerry cans en masse as a form of resistance. Not that they had to resist too hard; few police officers seemed interested in doing any policing in Ottawa — they were too busy being filmed hugging and greeting the protestors.

The same can be said of the Canadian Armed Forces, who do not seem bothered enough to play a role in resolving these demonstrations. In fact, the military is now investigating at least six of its members for actively supporting the trucker protest. Two of those under investigation belong to the elite Joint Task Force 2. Compared to the total manpower of the CAF, this might seem like a trifling matter, but as an indication of overall political reliability, it cannot be dismissed. The US military has seen similar indications of political unreliability with its own Covid mandates, so this is hardly some issue unique to Canada, either.

Where does all this leave the Trudeau government? Critics talk about creeping totalitarianism in Canada — though with the invocation of an outright legal state of exception it’s hard to say whether totalitarianism is actually “creeping” anymore. Others, mainly Americans, mutter darkly about “a certain F-word”. One can sympathise with the alarm informing these remarks, without fully buying into them. It only takes a couple of minutes thinking about the situation in Canada to realise how incredibly weird it is — and that weirdness requires some serious explanation.

More from this author

Why the experts are losing

By Malcom Kyeyune

When was the last time we saw totalitarianism associated with a government that has unreliable control of its police? That can’t control the roads of its own capital? A government calling for something akin to martial law but emphatically rejecting using the military — because they probably wouldn’t follow any orders to enforce it that they were given?

Tucker Carlson is calling Trudeau “the dictator of Canada“, but this seems like a very odd dictatorship indeed. One of the reasons given for calling this state of exception was that it allowed Trudeau to draft tow truck companies into performing paid but involuntary work.

This may well prove to be a crisis that undermines yet another plank of the post-Cold War liberal era, but V for Vendetta it is not. In that dystopian society, the state of exception is simply a normal way of life. Here, the police will not hesitate to shoot you the moment you cause trouble, and the fall of the totalitarian government comes after it is no longer able to keep the population in check through violence and intimidation. In Canada right now, however, the truth is much stranger than fiction. The state of exception has belatedly arrived only after clear signs from the police and the military that they are absolutely not going to be shooting anybody to begin with.

In regards to Trudeau’s actions being a form of “fascism”, that is perhaps an even harder case to make. It’s a point understandably overlooked today, but fascism, seen in its own day, was most definitely a forward-looking political force. The official hymn of the Italian fascist party under Mussolini, Giovinezza, literally means ”youth”. In the context of the early Twenties, fascists saw themselves — and were seen by many Western contemporaries, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt and David Lloyd George — as a rejuvenating, revolutionary force, whether for good or ill.

So let’s be honest with ourselves: it is impossible to look at this weak Canadian government — barely capable of enforcing its will on its own security forces — as a Mussolini-style fascist New Dawn. This sputtering display is about as far from a youthful springtime of the nation as it is possible to get. Trudeau seems mostly tired, under siege, and bereft of ideas, and politicians like him — who self-style as “defenders of democracy” — are now clearly becoming a sort of spent ideological force, barely able to muster a lick of respect from their unruly subjects.

Suggested article

Why Canada's truckers will lose

By Michael Cuenco

But perhaps that is the new day that is dawning. Perhaps we are all headed in the same direction as Canada, where political polarisation between the rural population and the urban managerial classes, between the people who give orders and the people who are supposed to follow them, eventually produces a situation so untenable that the system simply snaps.

Not every part of the system, though. It is notable that Trudeau is calling on the banks and tech firms to help restore public order, while excluding any meaningful role for the military. The banks, as well as various parts of the tech sector, are increasingly looking like the only powerful institution that the managerial classes can expect to count on in a true crisis. Especially once the cops, truckers, firemen, pilots, rubbish collectors, special forces operators, sailors, and meter maids bid their politicians farewell and thanks for all the fish.

Unfortunately (or maybe not), those who derive an almost pornographic pleasure from fantasising about imminent totalitarian dystopia are likely to be sorely disappointed in the days and years ahead. Acts like the one just undertaken by the Canadian government amply illustrate that there’s no ten-thousand year Reich of Technocracy coming anytime soon.

The gulf in our societies between the people who work in the real world — those who keep the planes flying and the power on — and the restive and radicalised “email workers” of the urban class keeps growing more and more ominous and intractable. Trudeau can freeze as many bank accounts as he wants. If he thinks it’s a workable solution to this crisis, then the chaos is just getting started.

The story blew up for no other reason than Canadian politics is not usually known for producing unruly sights like this one. While broader Western politics have been marked by rising populist fervour against elites over the last half-decade, Canada has, true to stereotype, remained quiet, contented, bland and unexciting. The patron saint of liberal elites was, after all, re-elected last year and continues to rule over a country that prides itself on its inoffensiveness.

There is every reason to believe that this is how things will remain: the global populist revolution that gave us Trump, Brexit and the gilet jaunes has had a hard time getting a foothold in Canada for structural reasons. It is unlikely that the protesting truckers will have changed many minds, much less public health regulations, or accomplished anything other than increasing traffic congestion in Downtown Ottawa. The industry association representing truckers has disowned them, pointing out that 90% of Canadian truckers are vaccinated, while a recent poll put nationwide popular support for the convoy at a paltry 28%.

Canada’s general incompatibility with populist politics goes back to its roots. Ask an American why the United States was founded and he might say something like: “We had a revolution to secure freedom and government of, by and for the people…” The foundation of Canada was an explicit rebuttal to this notion.

As a country, it was designed to serve as a bulwark against the spectre of revolution and the idiom of popular sovereignty. Its two main political cultures descend from peoples who were defined by their conspicuous non-participation in the great revolutions of the eighteenth century, the American and the French, from which much of the modern rhetoric about liberty, rights, and the will of the people is derived.

Subsequently, the evolution of Canada’s political identity can be thought of less as having a liberal or conservative orientation, but as, quite simply, anti-revolutionary. This means that when change does happen, it is actively managed and mediated by elites at the top rather than brought about by uprisings from below. Though the country has had its own bouts of populism of the Right and Left varieties (and a few failed revolts), it has never been the dominant tradition.

This is because historically, Canada’s elites have proven to be expert not merely at resisting the pressures of revolutionary change but at pre-empting the causes of it.

English Canada was shaped in large part by Loyalist refugees who fled north because they did not want to be a part of the revolutionary experiment of 1776. Disavowing Yankee radical individualism and republicanism, the colonies that would become Canada were suspicious of mass democracy, more deferential to authority, and more mindful of communal obligations: they were said to be “more Tory than the King” and their progeny retained the so-called “Tory touch”.

Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, looked south of the border with horror (as many Canadians do now) at the chaos of the American Civil War and vowed to establish a strong central government that would have unquestioned supremacy over its constituent provinces. Thus, modern Canada was born in 1867 with the motto “peace, order and good government” — a somewhat authoritarian-sounding reply to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

Suggested article

Why the Canadian Left is burning down churches

By Meghan Murphy

French Canada is different but the same. Its people are the descendants of pious habitant colonists who were insulated from the influence of the Jacobin revolution across the Atlantic by the British conquest of Quebec in the Seven Years War.

Macdonald’s chief French Canadian ally, Sir George-Étienne Cartier, claimed that despite the trauma of defeat, the conquest was actually a blessing in disguise sent by Providence to save French Canada “from the misery and shame of the French Revolution”. The Ancien Régime, with its spirit of conformity and obedience to Catholic orthodoxy, lived on in Quebec until the Sixties, when secular nationalism replaced Catholicism as the de facto state religion.

In that decade, Canada would prove yet again that it was the anti-revolutionary country par excellence. While American cities burned in riots over race and the Vietnam war, Canadians smugly congratulated themselves for living in “the peaceable kingdom”. When, in 1968, the streets of Paris, Chicago and Prague were racked with revolutionary violence, Canada witnessed a peaceful transition of power to the new generation as embodied by a charismatic action-intellectual named Pierre Trudeau, who unlike LBJ, Nixon or De Gaulle, was definitely with it.

The first Trudeau’s rise to power, much like the second, was greeted by fawning crowds and adoring fangirls: it took on the feel of a Beatles tour and was dubbed “Trudeaumania”. What might have looked like a spontaneous democratic outpouring was actually the result of backroom dealing by ruling party elites, who recruited Trudeau and practically fast-tracked him to the premiership: Canada’s own Ancien Régime had found a way to adapt itself to the Age of Aquarius.

Suggested article

Conservatives need multiculturalism

By Blake Smith

Trudeau’s chief task was to keep Canada together in the face of Quebec separatism. With the exception of the brief terrorist October Crisis of 1970, which Trudeau met with heavy-handed repression, his 16 years in power were marked by vigorous but non-violent political debate culminating in the 1980 Quebec independence referendum. Unlike other interethnic hotspots, say Northern Ireland or the Balkans, Canada resolved its divisions through the ballot box — and through occasionally heated but mostly boring conferences where elites could hash things out.

Fast forward to the second Trudeau. The world is once again living through revolutionary times. But Canada seems to be immune. US or UK conservatives might look at the insufferably progressive rhetoric of Justin Trudeau and wonder why ordinary Canadians haven’t tossed him out in favour a more populist alternative. Have they all been brainwashed up there?

Yet once again, like Macdonald and Trudeau Sr. before him, Justin Trudeau is the face of a Machiavellian elite that can maintain itself in power by diffusing and pre-empting the pressures of revolutionary change. Looking past the often-deceptive rhetoric and surface-level imagery, one will see that Canada is not nearly as liberal, progressive or cosmopolitan as it is perceived.

Trudeau Jr, like his father, is a promoter of official multiculturalism and is fond of uttering slogans like “diversity is our strength”. But as Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath has pointed out, unlike the United States, the Canadian government “does not engage in race-based classification of citizens [just as] the census does not impose racial categories”.

Suggested article

The squalid world of Justin Trudeau

By Yuan Yi Zhu

And though Canadian universities are prone to indulging in critical theory jargon — as a certain University of Toronto psychology professor will be able to tell you — Canada has nothing like the American policy of “affirmative action” or race-based admission quotas, which is the source of interminable racial and ethnic animus in the US.

When it comes to immigration, Trudeau has been depicted by both liberal fans and conservative critics abroad as a bleeding-heart advocate of open borders. But look at Canada’s actual immigration system; in many ways, it is far more stringent than the US immigration system was under Trump. Canada may not have a border wall but it has a ruthlessly efficient “bureaucratic wall,” in addition to having invented the famous “points system”, emulated by Australia, and now the UK.

What shocks, particularly from the American vantage point, is that Canada has its own version of “mandatory E-Verify”, an employment verification policy for the purposes of immigration enforcement. In the United States the measure is usually only advocated for by hard immigration restrictionists. Not even Trump (for understandable reasons) and the Republican establishment are willing to support it. 

The drivers of Right-wing populism — divisive racial preferentialism, permissive immigration policy, a widespread sense of the loss of control — are thus not present in Canada. In other countries, pandemic restrictions may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, the latest in a long line of elite excesses that long predated Covid-19.

Suggested article

Why the experts are losing

By Malcom Kyeyune

But in Canada, whatever the policy on restrictions or vaccine mandates, absent those other factors, the camel’s back is not nearly so overburdened. Save for in the perpetually dissatisfied energy-producing region out west, populism will remain a hard sell. It is simply not favoured by Canada’s political culture.

This is not to say that the truckers are “un-Canadian” as their liberal opponents will paint them, though the decision by some of them to carry Confederate and “Don’t Tread on Me” flags does not help — nor does desecrating the National War Memorial. Shameful hooliganism aside, there is a place for dissenters in what is still (contrary to their cries of “tyranny”) a free country. 

They will just have to accept that they are up against one of the most entrenched and hegemonic ruling classes anywhere in the Western world: the “Laurentian elites” and their instrument for wielding power, the Liberal Party. As veteran journalist Peter C. Newman once observed, they have “reigned longer over Canada than … Communists ruled Russia”. If the Freedom Convoy is looking to overthrow this regime, they will have a very long drive ahead.

Of course, just as no one outside of Britain actually thinks that the NHS is “the envy of the world”, the truth is that most people don’t care much about Canada at all. It’s big, it’s there, but what happens in Canada tends to stay in Canada, unless it’s some self-parodic video about Canadian niceness. In fact, when it comes to Canadian politics, even Canadians tend to find Canada boring, which is why at one point only 8% of them could correctly name our head of state, which suggests a population not gripped by the country’s affairs (the answer, of course, is a familiar one).

Thus, Justin Trudeau’s accession to the premiership in 2015, and the short but fawning bout of international media coverage that it generated, was taken by many Canadians as welcome evidence that we still mattered to foreigners. As a then-recent expat, I have painful memories of earnest Canadian students explaining to their half-interested British friends how Trudeau would restore Canada’s international reputation which had been tarnished by his predecessor, then having to explain who this wicked predecessor was (go on, reader, can you name him?)

The day after his victory, Mr Trudeau, never one for using an under-statement where a hubristic over-statement would do, told the world that “On behalf of 35 million Canadians, we’re back.” And when Donald Trump was elected to the American presidency the following year, our prime minister was even floated briefly as the “new leader of the free world”, something not even his father managed, no matter how many times he hugged Fidel Castro.

Now, as Canada enters the final days of its third federal election in six years, there is no more of that. It’s hard to say when Mr Trudeau went from international golden boy to punch-line to an unfunny joke: was it the novelty socks? Was it his fancy dress-wearing and terrorist-hosting trip to India? Was it the blackface? Was it his groping of a woman? Was it him dressing down a woman who had said “mankind” instead of “peoplekind”?

And those are only the scandals the rest of the world cared about. For every instance of over-enthusiasm in the makeup and wardrobe department, there was a corresponding ethics scandal, or possible attempt to pervert the course of justice, or political prosecution of a senior military leader, or cover–up of sexual assault, or… you get the idea. Mr Trudeau might come across as a naïf on the international stage, but he is the heir to a Liberal Party whose ruthlessness and ability to distribute the right amount of patronage and pork barrel to the right provinces has made it into one of the Western world’s most successful political organisations.

Suggested reading

Gavin Newsom's hollow victory

By Marshall Auerback

Still, there were moments during the campaign when one wondered if he had lost his political skills, honed since he was a little boy on his father’s knee. For one thing, he never managed to explain to voters why, after promising again and again that he would not call a snap election in the middle of a pandemic, he did exactly that. Confronted with the question, the best he could do was to say that this was Canada’s most important election since 1945, whatever that meant (students of history will remember that the 1945 election was in fact one of the less important in Canadian history, but there are very few of those people in Canada).

As it became apparent that voters remained unconvinced by this argument (or perhaps could not grasp the significance of 1945 as a date), he changed tack. Canadians had to return a Liberal majority to stop Erin O’Toole, the affable but unexciting leader of the Conservative Party, from banning abortion and enacting other unspecified nefarious plans. Given that the Conservatives did no such thing during their preceding nine years in government despite weekly Liberal predictions to the contrary, one could be forgiven for being somewhat sceptical.

In any case, given that the only thing which could make Mr O’Toole prime minister was wining an election, calling a snap one seemed like a very poor strategy to save Canada from those terrible Tories, who have nothing to recommend to them except the support of millions of Canadians: in the last election, they actually won more votes than the Liberals, who were saved only by the entrenched regional malapportionment which Trudeau Sr had written into the Constitution (Liberal-voting Prince Edward Island returns four MPs when it has fewer people than a single constituency in conservative Edmonton).

The lack of any justification for calling this vote does not mean, however, that it is an uninteresting one. For one thing, it must be one of the very few democratic elections conducted by a country which, by the admission of its own government (that would be Mr Trudeau’s), is committing a genocide at the same time.

Suggested reading

Conservatives need multiculturalism

By Blake Smith

One might think that the logical thing to do for such a genocide-committing government is to surrender collectively to face trial at The Hague, or at the very least to resign in disgrace and shame. Not so with Mr Trudeau, who obviously doesn’t think that a mere genocide should stop him from winning a third term in office. In fact, even though almost all of Canada’s media and cultural elites have nominally endorsed the idea of an ongoing, state-led genocide in Canada, the subject has been almost entirely absent from this election campaign.

Ongoing genocide or not, it is true that Canada’s treatment of its Indigenous peoples has often been appalling. When he came to power, in a high-profile gesture of reconciliation, Trudeau appointed the newly elected MP Jody Wilson-Raybould as Minister of Justice, the most senior Cabinet post ever held by an Indigenous person. Three years later she was out, after refusing to bow to pressure from the Prime Minister’s office to drop a criminal case against SNC-Lavalin, a Quebec engineering firm which bankrolled the Gaddafi family and which is so corrupt it single-handedly put Canada at the top of the World Bank’s corruption blacklist ranking. The scandal bruised Trudeau, though he wiggled out of it by sacrificing his right-hand aide, an angry little man and semi-professional Twitter troll by the name of Gerald Butts.

Suggested reading

Why the Canadian Left is burning down churches

By Meghan Murphy

Now Wilson-Raybould has written an unostentatious memoir about her time with Trudeau. Having once thought that he was an “honest and good person”, the scales fell from her eyes when she discovered that “he would so casually lie to the public and then think he could get away with it” — and what’s more, try to force her to take part in his lies, too, and to make a mockery of Canadian justice to boot. At one of her last meetings with Trudeau, she told him out loud “I wish that I had never met you”.

No doubt Trudeau, whose propensity to proclaim his feminist credentials as loudly as he can shout them is matched only by his disdain for women who dare to disobey him, feels the same way about her. But thanks to a craven political culture, a favourable electoral map and vote splitting among Right-wing parties, he still might well snatch a victory when the votes are counted, though Liberal hopes of a majority are mostly gone. Mr Trudeau has so far won the endorsements of Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton. Lined up against them is nothing except basic decency.

Even if, as it now looks likely, Newsom is not recalled, or Trudeau wins re-election, that we’re even discussing their downfalls indicates that both the “Golden State” and Canada, a country long known as the Scandinavia of the Western Hemisphere, are no longer political exemplars for the rest of the world. Instead, their governments now represent more of the same kind of political disappointments that have characterised Western liberal democracies for the past 40 years.

In Canada, polls suggest the Conservatives and Liberals are locked in a tight race, as many voters turn to the opposition Conservative Party, whose “blue-collar” policies under leader Erin O’Toole closely resemble those of Boris Johnson’s British Tories. Meanwhile, California, long considered one of America’s most progressive Democratic states, was almost confronted with the spectacle of a Republican governor, in the form of black Right-wing libertarian radio host, Larry Elder. The very fact that the recall vote got this far indicates that the “Golden State” no longer glitters with opportunity for all.

This month’s elections in Canada and California — preceded by 18 months of rolling lockdowns, job losses and Covid-related chaos — can roughly be described as a collective “Howard Beale” moment. Echoing Network, Paddy Chayefsky’s classic satirical black comedy-drama film, voters in both places are “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore”.

More from this author

The West can learn from China

By Marshall Auerback

Even though vaccine mandates have been broadly accepted by the majority of Canadians and Californians, this compliance is increasingly transcended by contempt for their respective governments, which have failed to address a range of non-pandemic-related issues: from rising economic precarity (concurrent with the growth of the so-called “gig economy” and all of the attendant insecurities that come with it) to the fact that both places are being ruled by hypocritical, out-of-touch technocratic elites who are clueless about the everyday life for ordinary Californians and Canadians.

As far as Covid itself goes, despite some missteps, Canada and California have done relatively well in introducing measures to restrict the speed of the pandemic. Both have also secured relatively high rates of vaccinations; Canada now has a greater proportion of its population fully vaccinated than either the US or UK, while California ranks among the highest vaccinated among American states.

Despite their relative success stories, this month’s elections have unleashed longstanding grievances, spurred on by disgust with the perceived hypocrisy of the two administrations. In the case of California, Governor Newsom’s ill-timed visit to a Michelin-starred restaurant amid a Covid-19 surge last year sparked outrage, as did his admission that he was sending his own children to classes at a private school while most public schools remained closed.

But Newsom, despite his recall victory, has failed on a host of other issues — a number of which he shares with Trudeau. For instance, California is often heralded as a model US state in terms of decarbonising its economy. But the truth is that the governor’s push for renewables has degraded the reliability of the state’s electrical grid, resulting in multiple blackouts this year. These have occurred against a backdrop in which some of California’s Latino leaders have filed lawsuits to halt several climate-focused regulations due to their negative effect on low and middle-income Californians. Yet for many families it is too late: the ostensibly progressive state has the highest poverty rate in America and a level of income inequality that exceeds of all but five states.

Similar charges of sanctimony have had increasing resonance in Canada, home to a Liberal government that has consistently trumpeted its desire to move to net zero carbon emissions. Yet recently, this same administration has also taken the extraordinary step of promoting oil sands exports to global markets after it nationalised the Trans Mountain pipeline for CAD$4.5-billion — even though its former owner had cancelled the pipeline expansion because of fierce opposition from environmentalists, indigenous groups and the provincial British Columbian government.

More from this author

Why the Canadian Left is burning down churches

By Meghan Murphy

By the same token, Justin Trudeau, a leader who has long trumpeted his progressive credentials, has steadily seen that image erode, notably in the wake of the SNC-Lavalin scandal which provoked the resignation of two female cabinet ministers. Both ministers accused the Prime Minister of inappropriately interfering in a prosecution effort against the engineering company, which had been charged with fraud in connection with a series of Libyan business dealings. That one of the resigning ministers, Jody Wilson-Raybould, served as Canada’s first indigenous justice minister was a particular blow to the Prime Minister’s diversity agenda.

Yet Trudeau may have had plausible grounds for his actions: in the case of the controversial pipeline, Canada is still a heavily resource-based economy, and the fossil fuel industry continues to be a source of high-paying skilled jobs for the working and middle classes, especially in western Canada. And as far as SNC-Lavalin goes, it is a large, Quebec-based company employing thousands of Canadians in a province that is a key stronghold for the Liberals.

But while Trudeau at least has plausible grounds to explain his perceived hypocrisy, the same cannot be said for Newsom. The California governor may have survived his recall vote — but now there is no hiding from the very serious structural problems that have long afflicted his state. Indeed, as author Michael Shellenberger has persuasively argued, Newsom’s policies have actually made them worse: “Rather than put forest management on war-time footing, Newsom in 2019 actually cut the budget for forest fire prevention, which resulted in a full halving of the forest area treated for fire in 2020, all while accusing his political opponents of climate denial, and suggesting that the deployment of weather-dependent renewable energy will somehow address the state’s high-intensity forest fires.” Extensive fires have also played a significant role in the state’s rolling blackouts.

Likewise, California’s housing affordability ranks last among the 50 states with the result — as Shellenberger notes — that the number of homeless people in the Golden State “rose 31% over the last 10 years even as the number of homeless in the rest of the U.S. declined 18 percent. Where New York City shelters 95% of its homeless, California cities shelter one-third.” Meanwhile, Newsom acts like a helpless bystander, even though he has a Democratic super-majority in the State Assembly. Remarkably, new housing construction actually fell 10% last year, with just 100,550 new building permits issued, one-fifth of what Newsom promised when he was elected back in 2018.

More from this author

Conservatives need multiculturalism

By Blake Smith

That might explain why a solidly blue state started to contemplate a radical alternative to the incumbent governor. Larry Elder, a Black radio talk-show host in the state, a is pro-life cultural conservative who has explicitly opposed any minimum wage (let alone increase it). He has also come out against vaccine mandates, and has railed against critical race theory and transgender politics.

In Canada, however, conservative politics north of the border are somewhat more prosaic. The Conservative Party’s capable new leader, Erin O’Toole, has run a smart campaign and given voters a positive reason to vote Tory (in contrast to his hapless predecessor, Andrew Scheer). Evoking Boris Johnson’s successful 2019 election strategy, its manifesto features a new kind of pro-worker conservatism, at a time when most centre-left parties have increasingly abandoned working class interests in favour of launching progressive campaigns. Among its notable features are benefits for gig workers (who are largely exempt from adequate social coverage in the US), German-style worker representation on corporate boards and protections for pensions from corporate bankruptcy.

These are policies far more likely to engender support among middle and working-class Canadians than, say, proposals to support an LGBTQ agenda or linguistic “reforms” to abolish gendered pronouns. All of which has helped O’Toole’s Tories make headway in the election. While the most recent polls show an incremental movement back to the Liberals, they still point to a hung Parliament.

And so both Newsom and Trudeau have, in recent weeks, cast their political futures in increasingly melodramatic “life and death” terms. But such rhetoric — even if they win, as Newsom has — fails to address the central issue: namely, the shredding of a once sacrosanct social contract between the elites and the rest of us. No matter who wins these elections, the corresponding anger and social fallout that has resulted is unlikely to dissipate. From Canada to California, the people are “mad as hell” — and neither Trudeau nor Newsom seem capable of remedying that.

When the Gilets Jaunes protests threatened to unseat Macron from behind his gilded desk in the Elysée, the extremely heavy-handed crowd control methods employed by the French police were brushed off, if they were remarked upon at all, as the necessary response of the liberal state to urban disorder. Despite the inchoate and ideologically-fluid demands of the protestors firmly coalescing on the side of the radical left before the protest wave finally fizzled out, the Gilets Jaunes were framed as a right-wing populist revolt as if by necessity.

Macron was no longer the last-ditch defence of French liberalism from the radical right: he was the anti-Trump, a liberal strongman willing and capable of keeping the world safe for Washington Post commentators by rolling back the then-seemingly unstoppable wave of populist anger, at the helm of a country more or less interchangeable with Europe as a whole in the American imagination.

It is a marker of how far US commentators have self-radicalised since then that Macron is now the target of the New York Times and Washington Post, after daring to criticise their new race-centric ideological passions, and the complex algebraic equations of moral worth and political validity which derive from them. 

Following a wave of brutal jihadist murders targeting innocent French civilians, it is Macron who is the villain in their eyes, for launching a counterattack against the Islamist insurgency within France. There is only one permissible response to jihadist terrorism for European leaders, it seems, which is to light some candles and resolutely ignore the situation until the next attack: to take any meaningful action to prevent future violence is to find yourself accused of Nazism by the American press which idealised you just a few short years ago. 

Once lauded as the liberal bulwark against Europe’s nativist far-right, Macron is now morally suspect for tackling the continent’s Islamist far-right; Europe’s “anti-Trump” is now only comprehensible as a Trumpian figure in the eyes of the New York and Washington press, but there is increasingly little value in paying attention to the hysterical wailing of American commentators.

Instead, we can more profitably assess how far Macron’s worldview has evolved in the nearly four years since he came to power by reading his latest long interview with the Groupe d’Études de Géopolitiques thinktank, published earlier this month. Macron is fond — perhaps too fond — of sharing his important thoughts with the world in long, expansive interviews, and his latest interview is perhaps the purest distillation of the genre. 

Yet by cutting through the lofty generalities to examine the specifics of how Macron now views the world, we see him as he sees himself, a liberal of the right, and a defender of the French and European Enlightenment against Chinese totalitarianism, the seductive lures of Europe’s radical right, and the counter-Enlightenment obscurantism of both jihadists and Americans.

Macron begins by asserting that the multilateral framework of what is still nostalgically termed the liberal international order no longer functions. “The UN Security Council no longer produces useful solutions today,” he declares, and “some, such as the WHO, find themselves hostages of the crises of multilateralism,” the latter diagnosis surely being derived from the COVID experience. Indeed, he notes, “we have a crisis with the multilateral framework of 1945: a crisis in terms of its effectiveness, but, and it is even more serious in my opinion, a crisis in terms of the universality of the values upheld by its structures.”

More from this author

Covid has exposed America as a failed state

By Aris Roussinos

That crisis, for Macron, is the growing rejection of the very ideological underpinnings of liberalism by the rising civilisation-states of Eurasia, and by the resurgence of political Islam as a force in international politics.

On the tenth anniversary of the Arab Spring, Macron observes that what was birthed by the crisis of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa was not the expansion of liberalism on which his predecessor Sarkozy gambled so much, but instead “the return of the mindset of certain peoples and of religion in politics,” and “an extraordinary acceleration of a return of religion on the political scene in a number of these countries.”

The liberal triumphalism of the post-Cold War moment, “based to a great extent, both academically and politically, on a fiction that was the ‘end of history’ and an implicit idea that was the ongoing spread of democracies, individual liberties, etc” was misguided, Macron declares; instead, the clearly observable result is that, contrary to the aspirations of both the Arab Spring protestors and their external supporters, “authoritarian regional powers are re-emerging, theocracies are re-emerging”.

Liberalism is no longer in expansive mode, then, but is instead fighting a defence for its own survival, even in its core European territories: “the fight against terrorism and radical Islamism is a European struggle, a struggle about values,” he declares, where our “struggle today is against barbarity and obscurantism.” The forces of jihadism and autocracy that defeated the Arab Spring abroad now threaten Europe itself even in our own heartlands. Indeed, he continues, “the combat of our generation in Europe will be a combat for our freedoms. Because they are being overturned. And so it will not be the reinvention of the Enlightenment, but we will have to defend the Enlightenment against obscurantism.”

The obscurantism Macron speaks of is not purely external: he also warns of a political current within Europe, “a crisis of the post-1968 and 1989 Western societies,” a form of what he confusingly terms “neoconservatism” but which we could perhaps better term “reaction” or neoreaction, “which is challenging 1968,” and which, he declares — no doubt with an eye on the ever-present electoral threat of the radical right — is a rational and understandable response to the failures of neoliberalism.

The Washington consensus which underwrote post-Cold War neoliberalism, Macron muses, “turned into a dogma whereby the truths were: less state intervention, privatisations, structural reforms, opening up of economies through trade, financialisation of our economies, with a rather monolithic rationale based on the accumulation of profits.”

Whatever the benefits for the workers of China and the CEOs of the United States, the result for the middle class across the Western world was disaster: “it has reduced part of our population to a feeling of uselessness, with deep economic and social, but also mental tragedies: our middle classes in particular, and part of our working classes have been the adjustment variable of this globalisation; and that is intolerable.”

More from this author

What Boris Johnson could learn from Emmanuel Macron

By Aris Roussinos

Identifying himself with the “struggle against this mechanism of capitalism,” the former investment banker now portrays himself as a sceptic of Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism: but it is perhaps more accurate to say that he sees himself saving liberalism by cutting away its excesses, saving liberalism from itself in the economic sphere in a way analogous to his rejection of the American excesses of liberalism in the cultural and political spheres.

The Washington consensus is dead, he declares, and the time for a “Paris consensus,” no doubt under his tutelage, has begun. What this means in practice is not elaborated on with any degree of specificity — he comes out for a vague form of a Green New Deal — but it is hard to avoid the impression Macron’s economic strategy is subordinate to his already expressed  geopolitical musings.

Indeed, and with a degree of triumphalism, Macron now declares that his vision of European strategic autonomy, so controversial when he first advanced it, has been borne out by events. “Three years ago, when I spoke about European sovereignty and strategic autonomy, I was taken for a lunatic,” he muses, “and these ideas were dismissed as French whims,” but no-one’s laughing now. The German defence establishment, represented by the craven Atlanticist submissiveness of the defence minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, may still complain, but “fortunately, the Chancellor [Angela Merkel] does not share this point of view.” 

Assuaging the outrage of think-tankers by stressing Europe’s close bonds of alliance and friendship with America, he nevertheless emphasises the continental bloc’s need to “prevent the Chinese-American duopoly”; indeed, he repeatedly links the two rival superpowers when he argues Europe’s need to assert technological and political independence from both.

Suggested reading

Everything you know about Europe is wrong

By Ed West

A geostrategic Europe, with a sphere of influence in Africa which he terms a partnership, is at the heart of his vision: chiding Africa once again for its excessive birth rates (and for the first time linking it to Europe’s demographic decline, a dynamic where “for one European country demographically disappearing, in the same period, one African country appears”) and for the abuse of Europe’s asylum system by African economic migrants, Macron posits a Euro-African relationship where France’s post-colonial interests and those of Europe as a whole are perhaps uncomfortably elided.

Yet it is surely in his vision of Europe as a commonwealth, a continent where we share a sense of belonging and ineffable political values despite our division into discrete nation-states, that we see Macron’s evolution most clearly: the defender of the French Revolution’s values has become an unexpected Burkean. It is not just that his horror at the tyranny and fanaticism of what became of the Arab Spring shapes his worldview, as the French Revolution did Burke’s, with his drift to the right deriving from a similar claimed desire to save liberalism from its own worst excesses.

Macron also echoes Burke’s conception of Europe as a political unit, an orderly and pacific civilisation of its own, and a commonwealth of shared values to be defended against internal and external challengers. Whatever divides us Europeans, he asserts, in a quote which could be lifted directly from Burke’s 1796 Letters on a Regicide Peace, “something unites us. We know that we are European when we are outside of Europe. We feel our differences when we are among Europeans, but we feel nostalgia when we leave Europe.” 

But above all, Macron observes, citing our moderate economic ideals, our belief in the value of culture, and our neighbourly relations with the Middle East and with Russia, “we are not the United States of America”. He is surely fortunate then, in the reaction he has now solicited from the other side of the Atlantic: if the basis of Macron’s creation of a geopolitical Europe in his own image is that of our deep and essential difference from the United States, then he has no greater ally than the American press, which draws the dividing lines between Us and Them more clearly with every passing day.

He’s a little bit right. And so he proposed to invite Russia, India, South Korea and Australia too — as “guests”. This, he contends, would counter the might of China and might re-energise the group.

The first to complain was Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau. He did not actually say he would boycott the summit if Russia attended, but he said there would have to be “many discussions” first. The UK was next. A spokesman for Boris Johnson conceded that it was customary for the host country to invite others to participate as guests and that the UK would “look at the detail of what the US is proposing”.

But our statement went on to say that the UK would not support Russia’s readmission to the G7, because there was “no evidence of changed behaviour”. In so saying, though, it went further than Donald Trump had done, because while he has in the past mooted the return of Russia to the G7, his latest proposal, to invite Russia as a guest, can be seen as an attempt to avoid the issue of whether Russia should be reinstated after its indefinite suspension over the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

And then the EU’s high representative, Josep Borrell, picked up the baton, saying that the format of the G7 was not for the summit chair to change. “The G7 cannot become G8… until Russia changes its course.”

More from this author

Don't scorn Boris's ambition

By Mary Dejevsky

In fact, the G7 host does have the discretion to invite additional guests. But somewhere along the way, the distinction between Russia being invited as a guest and being reinstated as a full member has been lost. Not that Russia would necessarily even want to be reinstated at what used to be seen as — but is no longer — the world’s top table.

So why is Trump extending the guest list? To make the G7 meaningful again?

In fact, I think the go-it-alone, America-First, Donald Trump is on the look-out for, if not multilateral then glad-handing bilateral relationships with countries that could side with the US in trying to rein in China. Tired of the European olde worlde timidity and, like his immediate predecessors at the White House, entertaining the idea of that still incomplete ‘pivot’ to Asia, Trump is exploring ways to cope with an increasingly assertive Beijing. He knows that Australia, India and South Korea all have beef with China and that they are also casting around for some way of configuring the world in a way that better corresponds both to their own national needs and what they see as the needs of the wider Pacific region today.

Underlying at least some of this is a widespread dissatisfaction with the way existing multinational organisations have been working in recent years, highlighted by the perception that they have not exactly covered themselves in glory during the Covid pandemic. All sorts of international and internal power balances have been upset, exposing differences in the way individual countries responded and the varying success of the measures taken. Only a few, very different, countries — some of the Asian nations, starting with South Korea and Japan, and Germany in Europe — have distinguished themselves. No international grouping has proved in any way adequate to the emergency, let alone excelled.

Suggested reading

The WHO has failed us again

By Ian Birrell

The WHO, for one, was hardly a commanding presence. So much so that even Trump noticed — and announced an end to US support. Similarly, the United Nations. It is true that in April António Guterres set up what he called the Secretary-General’s Covid-19 Response and Recovery Fund, but the target budget, at US$2bn seems pitifully inadequate. Mr Guterres himself was hardly out and about promoting his project, at the very time when almost any attempt at a coordinated response would have been welcomed by many.

Nato helped with airlifting medical supplies, mostly within Europe — though the alliance hardly sang of its achievements from the rooftops either. Help was also delivered by countries on a bilateral basis, including US medical supplies for Russia and EU medical aid for Iran (a breach of sanctions to which the US turned a blind eye).

Given the scale of what had become a global health emergency, however, the fact is that there was a conspicuous gap where institutional leadership might have been. Every government’s priority was to protect its own; borders were closed from Australasia through much of Asia to Europe and on to the United States. This national turning inwards, however, in no way precluded a role for international initiatives and cooperation; there was just no one taking any credible lead.

Once, the world might have looked to the US for leadership. We certainly did during the Ebola and Aids epidemics. The United States was (eventually) at the forefront of the campaign, both medically and morally, to wipe out Aids; it was perfectly placed to lead. Ebola, moreover, was a largely regional epidemic in a part of the world where the US and the West in general had longstanding expertise they could apply.

Suggested reading

Can India keep China at bay?

By Tim Marshall

Coronavirus, however, reached the United States only after ravaging parts of Asia and Europe. When deaths were at their height in Spain and Italy, the US still barely acknowledged it might also have a problem. And when the virus started to make itself felt, the US — for all its wealth and advanced medical facilities — proved no better at handling it than most Europeans.

It was not just the late arrival of coronavirus on US shores, and prior US scepticism, however, that militated against US leadership. It was also that Trump has eschewed global leadership even more than his predecessor, Barack Obama — leaving an even more conspicuous vacuum.

The European Union, which had in the past presented itself a potential alternative pole of leadership, wasn’t up to the job. It regards health as a national issue, so pan-EU channels were undeveloped, and when desperate members begged for central help, the EU was barely able to organise itself.

Enter Gordon Brown, then, who wants to save the world again, as he claimed to during the 2008 financial crisis. Along with various other former leaders, he has tried to resurrect the joint effort they mounted through the G20 in 2008-9, calling for the G20 summit to be brought forward from November to consider a global approach to coronavirus.

But the main reason why the G20’s response to the financial crisis is seen as a success is that the group was not only able to agree a particular set of goals, but it incorporated governments with the power and the political will to do what was required. The extent to which even central governments, let alone an international body, could accomplish a similar feat in relation to very disparate health services is doubtful.

Suggested reading

Covid has exposed America as a failed state

By Aris Roussinos

There has also been a move by the UK, as it embarks upon life outside the EU, to form a grouping of major democracies — a D10, comprising the G7, plus India, South Korea and Australia — designed to cooperate in the first instance on technology so as to reduce dependence on China, but which could in the longer term grow into something more substantial.

The close resemblance between the proposed D10 and Donald Trump’s expanded G7 is not coincidental, but there is one key difference. The D10 is not only directed against China, but expressly excludes Russia. Pushing Russia into China’s arms — which could be a consequence — might not in the end work in democracy’s best interests.

The United Nations, for its part, is certainly too unwieldy to address a specific global emergency. The Commonwealth? When was the last time we heard of that? The WHO’s big success was the eradication of smallpox which was a long time ago and a long-term effort. It has not covered itself with glory during Covid.

If not the US, the EU, the UN or the WHO (for pandemics) or an expanded G7 or the G20 or a D10, then where is leadership in global emergencies to come from?

Maybe better to start from what has worked. Identifying and agreeing a set of goals is essential. The members of any group must have the power and the will to honour what is agreed. Inclusivity is another key. A grouping whose real purpose is to oppose China is not going to solve a China problem; similarly Russia or Iran.

The Helsinki Accords, signed in 1975 with the purpose of reducing Cold War tensions, illustrate how this strategy can bring change. The signatories included distinguished statesmen, but you will search in vain for a single leader. And maybe that is how it has to be. With the US bowing out and other actors with different agendas taking the stage, perhaps it is time to allow ad hoc groupings to take a more collegiate approach to a particular task in hand.

Perhaps that is what Trump is driving at with his proposal for an extended G7 this year? Could that help our post-Covid recovery? If only, the next generation might say, we had got our act together sooner.

There is indeed a fine line between support for a cause or respect for a particular culture on the one hand, and fetishisation of a disadvantaged group on the other. And you don’t need to dress up or put on make-up to be guilty of the latter, although the just re-elected Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has certainly taken it to a new level.

Reflecting on the recent “blackfacing” controversy, the Arab-Canadian academic Moustafa Bayoumi speculated that “Trudeau seems to want to play out some deep-level desire to leave his whiteness behind” but nonetheless doubted that “Trudeau wants to be an Arab man or a black man or an Indian man, though he has dressed up as all three”.

Unlike Bayoumi, I’m not so sure. I suspect that a part of Trudeau would like to be a member of another ethnic group, and he certainly believes that certain groups — such as people of colour, women, and LGBT people — are especially and inherently “cool” and worthy of praise; he would dearly like to be one of them, or at least to have some of their cache rub off on him. Hence he has, in the words of one Asian Canadian, so much fun “playing dress-up”. 

Suggested reading

Soon we’ll all be cancelled

By Meghan Murphy

Trudeau has never missed the opportunity to be photographed at gurdwara in a turban, or eating iftar in shalwar kameez. This is despite the criticism it has drawn from the communities he was supposedly paying tribute to; on a visit to India, he wore “traditional” dress while many of the Indians he met wore suits, prompting a wave of eyerolls on Indian social media. When it comes to gender politics, he famously hectored a woman about feminism, correcting her for using the word “mankind” instead of “humankind”. 

While there is nothing wrong with paying tribute to peoples and cultures one admires and respects, still less helping to combat discrimination and prejudice, this can easily fall into essentialising, stereotyping and fetishising people. Alongside this “neo-Orientalism”, many on the Left exhibit an element of self-loathing, believing that white men — or, to give them their full title, middle-class, cis-gender, straight white men — are inherently morally compromised.

This tendency is at its most offensive and absurd in the cases of Rachel Dolezal and Anthony Lennon, who despite their white parents both claim to be black, due to their politics and their love of and respect for black people and culture. Yet you do not have to go to the extreme lengths of Dolezal; for plenty of white leftists, constantly criticising your own demographic group and actively seeking to distance yourself from it is a way of escaping the prison of whiteness, almost itself a form of blackfacing.

In a recent episode of the hit Netflix television programme Queer Eye, one of the stars, Antoni Porowski, responded to being told by a Mexican-American abuela that her secret chilli recipe was “not for white people” by protesting that this shouldn’t apply to him, as he was “Polish-Canadian”.

Suggested reading

Is woke culture totalitarian?

By Erik Kaufmann

This was more than a throwaway joke: Porowski and Trudeau do not literally think they are not white, but they think that they are politically not white: their cultural values and political views preclude them from whiteness. For them, whiteness is inextricably bound up with reactionary values, and even Left-wing whites are still compromised. Hence the claim by journalist Laurie Penny following Trump’s election that she was “truly horrified and ashamed to be white”,  or the actress Rosanna Arquette tweeting her “disgust” at the fact she was “born white”.

This performative wokeness is not merely ridiculous — it does precisely nothing to help victims of systemic and every-day racism. And this behaviour is not restricted to ethnicity: there is a growing trend on the Left that sees structural disadvantage and discrimination — due to, say, ethnicity, class, or gender-identity – as almost a desirable status to be envied.

Laurie Penny has also boasted that she is “about as close as you can get to the trans rights movement without being trans yourself. I’ve been associated with trans activism for years, and while I don’t know what it’s like to be harassed, threatened or abandoned for being transsexual, most of my close friends do”. Substitute “black” or “working-class” for “trans”, and that sentence becomes even more toe-curling and absurd; it indicates less of a concern for ally-ship and solidarity than a desire to emulate and associate oneself with a disadvantaged-but-fashionable group.

Suggested reading

Woke GQ reeks of fear

By Douglas Murray

Nor is this trend confined to white people. The journalist Afua Hirsch is of mixed Jewish-Ghanaian heritage, and grew up in a pleasant middle-class neighbourhood in Wimbledon. Her husband’s parents, in contrast, were both Ghanaian, and lived on a rough estate in Tottenham. A theme of her book is how while “he thinks in terms of generating wealth and opportunity, I think in terms of identity and belonging”.

Hirsch’s response to the material deprivation her husband experienced growing up was one of envy: “when it comes to identity, I tell him, he was born with the equivalent of a silver spoon”. Her parents “often joked that I would rather have grown up on a council estate, and this contained a grain of truth”.

Reni Eddo-Lodge, in her best-selling book Why I’m no Longer Talking to White People about Race, explicitly criticises this “wallowing in guilt”. For Eddo-Lodge, support for disadvantaged groups,

looks like financial or administrative assistance to the groups doing vital work. Or intervening when you are needed in bystander situations… Don’t be anti-racist for the sake of an audience. Being white and anti-racist in your private or professional life, where there’s very little praise to be found, is much more difficult.

This is advice Justin Trudeau, Laurie Penny and others should take on board: try to help, not appropriate.

David Swift’s A Left For Itself: Left-wing Hobbyists and Performative Radicalism is published by Zero Books

Two weeks ago, a Des Moines Register journalist called Aaron Calvin wrote a piece about a local man, Carson King, who had become famous by raising over $3m in charity, winning the support of a big brewery among others. In researching the profile, Calvin uncovered some racist tweets made by King when he was a teenager, for which he expressed deep regret. “In re-reading it today — eight years later — I see it was an attempt at humor that was offensive and hurtful,” King reflected. “I am embarrassed and stunned to reflect on what I thought was funny when I was 16 years old. I want to sincerely apologize.”

Calvin told Buzzfeed that, while he “recognized that these were not representative artifacts of Carson,” he felt obligated to share the information, so included a “brief mention of these tweets and his apology at the bottom of this profile, after the glowing synopsis of his charity”. Calvin felt he did so in a “thoughtful” way that showed the tweets no longer showed King’s worldview.

King was dropped by the brewery anyway.

King wasn’t mad at Calvin. In fact, he said he appreciated that the journalist had pointed out the tweets and with it the opportunity to apologise. Nonetheless, those who felt the journalist had tried to tarnish the image of a “local hero” targeted him with harassment and then – inevitably – some old tweets of Calvin’s turned up and he, too, was cancelled. Fired from his job and forced to leave his apartment – another victim of “cancel culture”.

“Cancel culture” is a sort of addiction: the addict — outraged members of the public demanding someone’s humiliation and “cancellation” — gets a high, but only temporarily, and the desire creeps back once again and must be fed.

Yet this type of public ostracism is not exactly like other addictions — food, drugs, pornography, shopping or gambling – which involve private behaviours, albeit connected to social problems. Most addictions are about an individual escaping from some kind of pain or trying to fill an endless hole inside of them. Cancel culture is very much about public behaviour — a display of anger, power and virtue — as well as the self-loathing and emptiness in all addictions.

No healthy, secure person invests that much time and energy into destroying other people’s lives. No happy, fulfilled human enjoys seeing others – strangers – ruined, ostracised and vilified. Unless we are purely targeting violent, evil or dangerous individuals… but, of course, this is almost never the case. We target comedians, politicians, writers, friends, fellow activists, co-workers and former comrades. In a terrified frenzy, we look for any excuse — a verbal blunder, a politically incorrect opinion, a tacky 20-year-old Aladdin costume…

While Justin Trudeau — the wokest of leaders — may well be many things, I don’t believe he is a racist. No one does. While black or brownface is indeed racist, Trudeau’s poor costume choices two decades ago do not reflect who he is today: a boring, phony, political coward.

Plenty of things that seemed acceptable or funny 20 years ago are not today. And people change. I mean, 20 years ago, I was wearing a white pleather mini skirt and a mesh animal print tank top, reciting every lyric to “I’m a player”. And I just cannot wait for someone to dredge up all of our old Halloween costumes. (I must have co-opted dominatrix culture at least three years in a row. All you Pocahontases better have your CVs ready.

Suggested reading

Whatever happened to 'publish and be damned'?

By Douglas Murray

The worst thing about cancel culture is not even its attacks on others – it’s that the whole thing is a lie. I don’t believe that anyone thought, deep down, that they were better than Justine Sacco who infamously lost her job for a tweet. They just didn’t make the mistake of trying to be funny on Twitter, in a culture that would prefer not to take a joke.

I don’t believe that anyone thinks Kevin Hart is a homophobe, or that Al Franken is a dangerous predator. And I definitely don’t believe they think Sarah Silverman is a racist.

Cancel culture doesn’t actually want accountability. It doesn’t want an apology. It doesn’t want a conversation. It doesn’t even want the world to be safe from truly dangerous people or ideas. What it wants is to feel that boot on someone else’s neck – perhaps in order to avoid the boot itself.

What is the purpose, after all, of demanding an apology, only to say the apology isn’t good enough? (And the apology is never good enough.) What is the point of saying you want accountability, when no redemption is available? Do we want change or do we want flagellation?

The truth is that many people get off on sadistic, herd-like practices that thrive on platforms like Twitter. Who can be the angriest, the most righteous, and the most devout in their hatred of the Wrong? Who would Never Do Such A Thing, never mind think it?

I don’t think racist or homophobic comments are harmless, but I do think that we prefer punishment over change. And if we truly wanted people to understand other’s hurt and to change their behaviour, we wouldn’t write them off for life.

Suggested reading

Why I've reported Douglas Murray to the police

By Titania McGrath

Recently, when past comments by comedian Shane Gillis about Chinese-Americans came out of the woodwork, the new Saturday Night Live cast member admitted that he “sometimes misses” and that in his “10 years of comedy… you’re going to find a lot of bad misses.”

NBC, having recently hired Gillis for their flagship comedy, promptly unhired him. Yet not everyone wanted him cancelled — Democratic candidate Andrew Yang, who himself has suffered numerous racial slurs, suggested the two men “sit down and talk” and added, “I do not think he should lose his job. We would benefit from being more forgiving rather than punitive. We are all human. He does not strike me as malignant or evil. He strikes me as a still-forming comedian from central Pennsylvania who made some terrible and insensitive jokes and comments.”

And this is precisely the point. Good people can say bad things; most people can and do learn from their mistakes. And sometimes, on the internet, things are misunderstood, misrepresented, and blown out of proportion. (Most of the time, to be fair.)

Indeed, we seem to thrive on doing just that: taking a headline, an out of context comment or joke, and running with it, never reading the article, asking questions about context, never wondering what else might have been happening beyond the frame. We love to hate, so much more than we love the truth or love to understand.

This has led to a real culture of fear. Young people feel so afraid of ostracism that they won’t be honest, even with their closest friends. “I probably hold back 90 percent of the things that I want to say due to fear of being called out,” one student told The Atlantic 2017. “People won’t call you out because your opinion is wrong. People will call you out for literally anything.” This isn’t uncommon; we all know that those deemed to have made “wrong” comments do not get conversations, they get cancelled. Online and in real life.

And you don’t even need to express a cancellable opinion.

I’ve had several friends simply disappear on me, almost out of thin air – no explanation, no debate, no angry showdown. These are not people who suddenly discovered my opinions, either, since my political views have never exactly been a secret. Rather, they were experiencing pressure from friends — getting “called out” themselves, due to their continued association with me, and didn’t want to risk cancellation by association.

For personal (but obvious, without having to think too hard about it) reasons, I’ve got into attachment theory lately, and it strikes me that we’re living in a culture of avoidants. We are so afraid of making ourselves vulnerable that we reject those around us at the first sign of difficulty. We ghost with ease, and avoid face-to-face, honest conversations at all costs. Rather than drawing people in, we disconnect. We react in a knee-jerk manner so that we don’t need to think too hard. Our boundaries are solid — so rigid we need not question them, as we are confident in our one-sided answers: there is right and wrong, good and bad, black and white. No inbetween.

Suggested reading

Is woke culture totalitarian?

By Eric Kaufmann

It is inhuman as well as isolating. We deny our own truths, authenticity, and humanity because we deny it of others. Yet we can’t be close to one another without vulnerability, honesty and face-to-face connections. And, in fact, I don’t believe we can be close without disagreement — without knowing that we can have hard conversations with those around us and still come out unscathed, and with respect for one another. We create a false ego based almost entirely on low self-esteem and fear, projecting hostile and cynical attitudes at those around us. Who needs that prick, anyway?

I say all this, having dabbled in this behaviour myself. Having knee-jerked, chosen oversimplified hot takes, and written off those I believed to be on the “wrong” side of the political spectrum. I have labelled people in unfair ways. I have judged them as bad and irredeemable, based on one act or opinion. I called people who didn’t share my politics various things that enabled me to write them off, including “Right-wing”, “neoliberal”, “misogynist”, “libertarian”, “woman-hater”, “liberal” or “MRA”.

I didn’t bother engaging with these people in good faith or try to understand their perspectives. This did not make me more right, and it did not make my ideas or arguments any stronger. It certainly did not make me a better or more compassionate person, or help me understand what people really thought; the opposite, in fact.

I regret mistakes I’ve made in the past, and I’m grateful to have learned from them, grown and changed. (Some things I’m undoubtedly still working on.) It is something everyone should have the opportunity to do, but I don’t see us granting people this space.

I don’t know what kind of world the cancellers want to create. Some say they support “social justice,” but their behaviour is incredibly anti-social and, while there is power in being a canceller, there is no joy. So go ahead and cancel everyone, bathed in the depressing blue glow of your iPhone, grasping at a high, safe within your own world. Righteous, but alone, and imprisoned by your own sanctimony.