Some quick thoughts on what Trump’s re-election could mean for Canada, from someone whose dissertation examined the conditions underpinning Canadian policy autonomy in the shadow of the United States. These points touch on both current and past research interests as they relate to Canada. I will probably turn several of these into longer opeds at some point, but I wanted to get my initial reactions down.

The tl;dr on what went down last night. Trump’s re-election poses a five-alarm threat to the Canadian economy and to Canada’s liberal-democratic society. It would be a disservice to say otherwise. I have no idea how we’re going to deal with this. And anyone who tells you they do is just guessing.

Trump’s election, with a majority mandate, running as a straight-up authoritarian (call him a fascist; you’re not wrong), with a politicized Supreme Court that’s granted Republican presidents (let’s not pretend otherwise) immunity for any crimes committed while in office, a ready-to-go plan, and a supine media (the hundreds of thousands of Washington Post subscribers who cancelled understood exactly what they were doing), signals the transformation, potentially for generations, of the United States from a flawed liberal democracy to an authoritarian superpower, little different in size from China or in temperament from Russia.

And we’re right next door.

We’ve never had an authoritarian neighbour before. I guarantee we’re not ready for what’s coming.

So:

• Canada-US trade relations were already headed in a more coercive direction thanks to the USMCA’s renegotiation clause, which I’d previously written about for The Conversation in 2018, but which most analysts only picked up on earlier this year. Trump’s election signals the definitive end of the rules-based North American trade relationship. The whole thing about authoritarian governments is their disdain for the rule of law. They maintain for themselves the right to change or ignore the rules as they choose.
• Canada’s traditional trade lobbying tactics will become less effective. Canadian officials always like to point out how much trade individual states do with Canada. The implication is that if you put a tariff on Canadian goods, that will hurt your communities. But this tactic only works in a country with a functioning democracy. If your authoritarian leader is isolated from public opinion, they will feel more empowered to dish out the hurt should, say, Justin Trudeau shake Trump’s hand in the wrong way.
• These structural changes mean that Canada’s policy autonomy space (again, the subject of my dissertation) is now supremely curtailed.
• Managing our economic relations with an authoritarian regime will be difficult, but the real problem, and the threat that should keep you up at night (if I can’t sleep, I don’t see why any of you should be able to!), is to Canada’s liberal democracy. I very, very strongly doubt that an authoritarian US will tolerate a liberal democracy on its border. And freed by the Supreme Court and his own sociopathic nature from any restrictions on his dealings with anyone, Trump and his US government will feel no reluctance to meddle, Russia-style, in our politics and our elections.
• I’m not sure that Canadian policy autonomy and a healthy liberal democracy can survive a Trumpist America.
• I worry about the Canadian military. It’s tightly integrated with the United States’. One of the lessons I recall from either my Masters or my PhD was how the US used their integration into Latin American and South American militaries to support authoritarian leaders. This hasn’t really been a problem for the Canadian military, largely because of shared values around the rules-based international order and a liberal attachment to human rights. Both of those are now gone. Also, will, or should, Canadians be comfortable when our soldiers are asked/required to support US military missions that are nakedly about preserving US power, not promoting any deeper ideals?
• On climate change, we’re going to have to come to terms with the uncomfortable reality that our best chance at avoiding the worst of global heating runs through China. As Peter Drahos argues in his criminally under-read book Survival Governance, only China has the market size, external linkages, functioning bureaucracy and cleantech technological know-how to push the global economy off the carbon track in time to actually make a difference. The EU’s heart is in the right place but their internal energy market is too fractured, India has its own problems, and the United States, always beholden to is carbon industries, has now explicitly left the game. Which leaves China. (On the plus side, now that the US is going authoritarian, the biggest argument against Chinese leadership — that it’s an authoritarian, freedom-hating country — is now off the table. All that’s left is garden-variety racism.)
• On social media and digital regulation, Musk’s tanking of Twitter/X for Trump and Bezos’ Washington Post non-endorsement highlight something I’ve been arguing for years: That Canada has to get serious about digital regulation. As I wrote almost three years ago, the US tech giants are uniquely vulnerable to pressure from the US government. Their free-speech positioning, beloved of a certain brand of unreconstructed internet-freedom true believer, has always been a reflection of dominant US values and interests, nothing more. Faced with an authoritarian climate and authoritarian back home, they will happily export this authoritarianism abroad.
• Musk and Bezos’ actions (as well as Zuckerberg going all-in on the rapey, authoritarian Trump) highlight another uncomfortable reality for Canadian regulators: Our digital-regulation agenda, the Online Streaming, News and Harms Acts on which officials expended so much energy, are nowhere near equal to the task of disciplining these corporations. Faced with the tsunami of shit that’s heading our way on social media and a degraded search, our legitimate news sources need much more money, yesterday. And if it won’t come from advertising, it’s gotta come from somewhere else. Time to face hard facts. Same for culture.
• The worst of the lot is Bill C-63. I’ve previously written of my profound indifference to the proposed Online Harms Act, even shorn of its out-of-scope and over-reaching non-social-media elements. Bill C-63 is, at the end of the day, an overly cautious piece of legislation that continues — after all this time, against all evidence to the contrary — to treat social media companies (that it leaves other digital giants out of scope is another thing entirely) as trusted co-regulators. Show us a plan! Give us some data! You can design and run your own enforcement systems! And for all of that, mostly you can ignore your effects on anyone over the age of 18. Bezos’ and Musk’s direct interference in their media properties shows that the root problem with these companies is the companies themselves, and that we’ve signed over our information ecosystem to a bunch of unaccountable (except to Trump) foreign billionaires. Meanwhile, these bills’ ideologically obstinate opponents are critical of even the idea of regulation, because freedom. That so few of us are calling for more effective regulation that actually addresses root causes remains an enormous problem.
• Everyone in official Ottawa — every Canadian — should read Kim Richard Nossal’s indispensable book, Canada Alone: Navigating the Post-American World. Released a year ago, it explores the challenge Canada would face should Trump be re-elected and his brand of National Conservatism (see what he did there?) triumph. Nossal is one of the leading scholars of Canada-US relations. He doesn’t jump at shadows. That he doesn’t have any great ideas for how Canada should navigate this disaster — his most concrete idea is to hold a Royal Commission, which, definitely — should tell you everything you need to know about how unprecedented and dangerous our current moment is for the country. On Monday, when we read it in my graduate seminar, Canada Alone was speculative. Today, Wednesday, November 6, 2024, it’s the clearest road map we have to the coming darkness.
• It’s also a good time to re-read Albert Camus’ The Plague. Navigating a deadly pandemic against the indifference of others and a metaphor for dealing with the rise of fascism? Truly, it’s the story for our times. Heaven help us.