As I write this, America is in the process of deciding who will be its next president. By the time you read it, the answer may already be clear. And while voters in America will either be delighted or depressed by the outcome, the calculus is a little more complicated for Canadians. That’s because barring the sort of Reagan-esque landslide victory for Harris that sees Trump defeated in places like Texas, Florida, and Ohio (which nobody is predicting), he isn’t about to go away — much less go away quietly.
He will still be the front-runner for the 2028 Republican nomination, after all. Even if he decides not to run in it, he’ll still have the ability to effectively anoint his preferred successor. And while Americans could be forgiven for not fully appreciating the risks he posed to their democracy back in 2016, they no longer have that excuse. If he’s elected president again, or even if he comes within shouting distance of winning, Canadians need to think long and hard about what it says about America — and what it means for our country’s future.
With the exception of Ukraine, Mexico, and perhaps Taiwan, Poland, and the Baltic states, we have more at stake here than anyone else. For decades now we have had the mostly good fortune to live next to the world’s preeminent economic and cultural superpower. It bought our goods, defended our shared continent, and shielded us from any geopolitical threats we might face. In most respects, but not all, it has been an ideal neighbour.
In 2016, we all realized that this arrangement was not necessarily guaranteed, and those neighbours were getting a bit restless. Now, in 2024, we have to face the fact that 2016 wasn’t a fluke. There are tens of millions of Americans who have looked, to varying degrees, at Trump’s long track record of illegality, uncivility, and amorality and decided he’s worthy of their vote. In many cases, they’ve decided he’s worthy of their undying loyalty, and that no facts about him or his depravity can possibly change their feelings.
As such, it’s tempting to compare him to authoritarian strongmen like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and India’s Narendra Modi, if not outright fascists like Benito Mussolini. In a conversation with other conservative columnists at the New York Times, Bret Stephens offered a different political analogue: former Argentina president Juan Perón. “He draws his power not only from the adulation he inspires among supporters but also from the hatred he generates from his opponents. If he reversed all of his positions tomorrow, his followers would still love him, and his enemies would still hate him. He’s a once-in-a-century phenomenon.”
Perhaps. But in some respects, America has always been like this — and always waiting for the right political leader to capitalize on the fissile material of a right-wing media ecosystem, an underfunded public education system and long-simmering resentment against growing equality for women and minorities. There is a subset of the American public that’s been willing to vote for almost anyone, no matter how debased or depraved, so long as they’re identified as a Republican.
Back in 2005, screenwriter John Rodgers and a friend coined this as the “Crazification Factor.” They were discussing Barack Obama’s last Illinois Senate race that saw him running against an out-of-state parachute candidate named Alan Keyes. As Chicago Magazine’s Whet Moser wrote in 2011, “he wasn’t from Illinois; had spent the better part of the decade as the electoral equivalent of the Washington Generals; and regularly said things that were either ‘crazy’ or ‘surprising to hear in the realm of generalized American political discourse’ depending on how charitable you feel. And still got 27 per cent of the vote.”
In other words, in most parts of America there’s a not-insignificant chunk of the voting public that is, as Rodgers said, “either genuinely crazy; or so woefully misinformed about how the world works, the bases for their decision-making is so flawed they may as well be crazy.” After eight years of Donald Trump, I think it’s fair to say that the Trumpification Factor is now closer to 40 per cent — if not higher. That means that if 150 million people vote in this election, 60 million of them are essentially unreachable by conventional means of factual or logical persuasion.
As Canadians, there’s nothing we can do to change that. But we can start to prepare for the consequences. That means building more robust defences for our economy, our cultural institutions, and our information ecosystems. It means finding ways to depend less on our American neighbours wherever possible. And it means supporting the things that enhance our political resilience against Trump-style demagoguery at home, from public education to proper regulations on social media companies. America may one day recover, at least partially, from the toxic influence of Trumpism. But as this election has made abundantly clear, we can no longer afford to take that for granted.
A revitalized CBC can still save us from our quiet national unity crisis
From its inception in the 1930s to its glory days in the 1970s and 1980s, the CBC has been a deliberate instrument of national unity. It has connected Canadians from coast to coast to coast in our vast country, and served as the connective tissue in a place that might otherwise have fallen more fully into the cultural and political orbit of the United States.
We need that now more than ever. Whether we realize it or not, we’re in the midst of a quiet national unity crisis. With the rise of the internet and the subsequent decline of traditional journalism, we increasingly live in our own epistemic bubbles. We are strangers to each other, even as we share the same country, same city, or even the same street. And as the quality of the information we consume gets more degraded by partisanship and social media, as well as bad-faith actors who want to sow chaos in Western democracies like ours, we desperately need some common ground where we can gather to discuss the things that matter to us as a country.
The CBC can and should be that place. That will require some major changes, and it will require more funding than the CBC has been given to date. It means far more focus on local journalism, on the coverage of issues and stories the private sector can’t or won’t cover. And it means ensuring that more Canadians feel like their values and priorities are reflected in that coverage. There is clearly work to be done on that front.
Indeed, the CBC has been quietly doing some of that work already — too quietly, in my view. Some time last year it stopped publishing opinion columns (like the ones I used to write), and now only runs first-person perspectives. Getting away from opinion content, and the perception of bias it creates, is a step in the right direction. The fact that they didn’t publicize this change more loudly isn’t a great sign (more on that in a moment).
But it needs to invest far more heavily in providing the news coverage that the private sector can’t or won’t fund. That means filling the gaps in smaller communities where newspapers and local radio stations keep disappearing, and supporting the deep investigative journalism that’s often too expensive for online upstarts and new media companies to cover.
We forget, I think, that English Canada is one of the most difficult media markets in the entire developed world. I can’t think of another country that has to contend with something like the United States — a neighbour with ten times the population, 100 times the cultural influence, and the same dominant language. In an online environment where financial viability depends on the ability to scale, media entrepreneurs in English Canada face challenges that don’t exist elsewhere.
Canada needs a robust public broadcaster. Leaving it to the market, as Rupa Subramanya suggested on the recent episode of Commotion that focused on the arguments in favour of defunding the CBC, is a form of cultural and intellectual surrender — and eventual suicide. It would make Canada wholly captive to the United States and a distant colony of its entertainment and media industries. This should be an affront to anyone who cares about things like national unity, Canadian identity, and cultural independence.
The problem is that nobody from the CBC is making this argument, as far as I can tell. They’re too busy defending its status quo from the various attacks on its independence (and existence) to articulate a positive and compelling case. They need to start thinking bigger than that — much bigger. If we’re willing to spend hundreds of billions to build and operate new ships for our navy, we should be willing to fund the CBC just as generously so it can defend our political and cultural discourse from threats foreign and domestic.
I understand why Conservatives like Pierre Poilievre and his various proxies want to defund the CBC. If they can marginalize its influence or eliminate it entirely, it clears the field for media outlets like True North, Rebel Media, and other openly (and flagrantly) partisan organizations to shape our shared beliefs, ones that are increasingly being debated and discussed on social media platforms that have no regard for things like accuracy or the truth. If the CBC loses, they win.
But if Canadians lose the CBC, we’re going to lose the ability to understand and talk to each other. If we lose the CBC, we’re going to lose one of the last safe spaces we have to come together and try to understand the vast and disparate land we share. If we lose the CBC, we’re going to lose a key institution that connects us with our past and helps us understand our future. And if we lose the CBC, we risk losing the ability to separate and sort objective fact from self-interested fiction.
If we lose that? Well, then we lose our country.
Anthony Furey loses again
If at first you don’t succeed, lose, lose again. That seems to be former Toronto Sun columnist Anthony Furey’s strategy, anyway. After finishing fourth in the 2023 Toronto mayoral race with just under five per cent of the vote, he decided to run in a recent byelection for late councilor Jaye Robinson’s seat. And while he managed to win 31 per cent of the vote this time, he still finished well behind Toronto District School Board Chair Rachel Chernos Lin.
This understandably delighted Toronto progressives, who worried that a prominent right-wing columnist running in a fairly conservative ward — by Toronto standards, anyways — and with the backing of other right-wing columnists would be hard to defeat. Instead, he’s yet another data point in a growing body of evidence that suggests Canada’s populist surge may have already hit its high-water mark. From Wab Kinew’s win in Manitoba last fall to the elections in BC, New Brunswick, and Saskatchewan this year, there is no evidence of some inevitable and irrepressible blue wave sweeping the country.
It’s important not to read too much into Furey’s defeat. He was, after all, a candidate from outside the ward who ran on a threadbare platform that consisted of little other than backing the police and opposing bike lanes. His opponent, in contrast, had lived in the ward for decades and represented it on the Toronto School Board for years. Sometimes, in politics, the quality of the candidates really does matter.
It’s also a useful reminder that endorsements don’t move the needle as far as some might think. Furey, after all, had the backing of Jordan Peterson and the entire Toronto Sun opinion apparatus in the mayoral election, and he couldn’t even sniff double digits in support. This time, with endorsements from former Sun colleagues like Lilley and Joe Warmington and various federal and provincial politicians, he couldn’t get within 20 per cent of the winner. But hey, maybe the third time will be the charm.
Ethical Oil….in Saudi Arabia?
For as long as I’ve lived in Alberta — 14 years now — I’ve had to put up with people making Ezra Levant’s “ethical oil” argument. It’s a glorified fig leaf designed to delay climate action and excuse Alberta from doing the work needed to lower its emissions and address its various environmental liabilities, all because of Supreme Court decisions, federal labour laws and environmental regulations the oil and gas industry had nothing to do with. Indeed, I’d bet rather heavily a majority of said industry would have opposed things like same-sex marriage and greenhouse gas regulations at the times they were implemented.
This stolen social valour has never stopped people from making Levant’s argument. But as a new paper shows, their argument against the supposed ethical deficit of OPEC’s oil may have even less validity when it comes to environmental impacts. That’s because OPEC’s market power, and its willingness to hold back supplies to increase prices, has essentially prevented more oil from being burned. “We find that the market power has avoided releasing 67,738 M tCO2 into the atmosphere from 1970-2021,” the paper’s authors write. “This is a meaningful reduction of carbon emissions, the equivalent of three years of current oil consumption. The net present value of the total avoided damages amounts to $4,073 billion, valued at a social cost of carbon of $250/tCO2.”
This isn’t to suggest that OPEC nations are good-faith actors, or deny the social and legal cruelties that they perpetrate on their people. It’s merely to point out that an already lousy argument for Canada’s oil and gas industry just got a little worse.
They’ll keep using it, of course, if only because they don’t have anything better.
That’s all I can muster for this week folks. And who are we kidding? You’re all either waiting for American election results or digesting them. Here’s hoping they break our way.