Canada, Trump and what we can do

Posted on January 30, 2017 by bhaggart

If you’re Canadian and appalled by what’s happening in the US, there are at least two concrete things you can do:

1. Phone or email your local MP and demand that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau back up his Twitter claims of support for refugees with legislative changes to make it easier for refugees to come to Canada, and to revisit the Safe Third Country agreement with the US. This agreement states that if a refugee first applies for asylum in the US but is turned down, Canada won’t consider their claim. 

2. Our political parties set the tone of our national conversation. If you want to keep Trumpism out of Canada, it starts with making sure we have responsible leaders. The Conservative leadership election is the single most important Canadian political event of the next year. If you’re a Canadian who doesn’t hold membership in another party, please consider joining the party and voting for a candidate who will stand up for basic human decency. If you’re reluctant to join because you don’t feel that you’re part of the tribe, remember that a party is the sum of its members, which can include you.

We have the power. We have the vote. But we have to use it.

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Jonathan Kirshner: On the rise of Trump, and the irreversible damage done

Posted on January 17, 2017 by bhaggart

Great article by Jonathan Kirshner in the LA Review of Books, as we begin the countdown to the end of the post-World War II world. On the question of, How Trump? Kirshner argues that economic inequality and a rigged system weren’t enough on their own to account for Trump’s victory. Not to put too fine a point on it, the United States has never, ever been through anything as bleak as faced by Germany in the 1920s and the 1930s, when they elected Hitler with a measly 33% of the vote: millions dead, starvation, a collapsed economy, a country stripped of its military and means of economic support by vengeful victors:

As a nation we’ve never faced a test of our national character as daunting as that, but we have faced plenty worse than what we’ve got today, and until now had never thrown in our lot with the first demagogue that came along.

Instead, you also have to look to racism (he ignores the rampant misogyny faced by Clinton, a huge oversight in an otherwise insightful article) and a changed media climate — the rise of the Internet:

The internet is exponentially more pernicious: entry is free, accountability is absent, and — here we are more stupid — the ability of people to distinguish between fact and fiction has virtually vanished.

That said,  I think people are exactly as smart (and dumb) as we’ve ever been. People have always been prone to believe anything that’s put in front of them; it’s just before news (and misinformation) came from a few sources. We didn’t have to distinguish between fact and fiction because there were only a few news sources. Now “news” comes from all over.

On the damage done: It’s irreversible, and won’t end well:

from now on, and for a very long time, countries around the world will have to calculate their interests, expectations, and behavior with the understanding that this is America, or, at the very least, that this is what the American political system can plausibly produce. And so the election of Trump will come to mark the end of the international order that was built to avoid repeating the catastrophes of the first half the twentieth century, and which did so successfully — horrors that we like to imagine we have outgrown. It will not serve us well.

With the battle, and the war, and the civilization lost, Kirshner is already looking forward to the next great (final?) American crisis:

But we will face a great moment of crisis, after the next major terrorist attack in the U.S. (something no American President could prevent), which will present something like a perfect storm: a thin-skinned, impulsive leader with authoritarian instincts, a frightened public, an environment of permissive racism, and a post-fact information environment. In such a moment basic civil liberties will be at risk: due process will be assailed as “protecting terrorists”; free speech will be challenged as “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” And that will be the moment when each of us must stand up and be counted, and never forget Tolstoy’s admonition: “There are no conditions to which a man may not become accustomed, particularly if he sees that they are accepted by those about him.” Our portion is to make sure that never comes to pass.

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Canadians! Fear Trumpism? Then join the Conservative party to keep it off the ballot

Posted on November 11, 2016 by bhaggart

[Edited to correct the deadline for joining and being able to vote in the leadership campaign. It’s actually March 28. Apologies; I have no idea how I got the date wrong.]

Yesterday, I paid my $15 and joined the Conservative Party of Canada. At this very moment, they’re deciding whether Trump-style hate will be on the ballot in the next election in the form of Kellie Leitch and Steven Blaney. If one of them, or a similar candidate, wins – and Leitch is the current favourite – then there’s a 50/50 chance that our next Prime Minister will be a Trump acolyte (the NDP, in its wisdom, having decided to get out of the business of actually contesting elections). That’s the lesson from the US election.

Canadians are fortunate that we have a say in who the next potential prime minister will be. We have a vote in the future of our country. The Conservative leadership election is open to all Canadians who have been members of the party for at least six months [EDIT: the deadline is actually March 28]. The vote is on May 27, so if you sign up in the next two weeks by then, you can have a say in who becomes the next Conservative leader, and the next potential prime minister. And there are candidates, such as Michael Chong and Chris Alexander who have directly repudiated Leitch’s particular brand of hatemongering. (Full disclosure: I also gave $25 to Chong’s campaign.)

If you’re shocked by the low voter turnout in the US election, here’s your chance to put your money ($15) where your mouth is. If you support the Conservatives, there’s no reason for you not to become a paid member and stand up for Canadian values. If you haven’t previously supported the Conservatives, when you join and check out the profiles of the candidates, you might find that some of their policies aren’t quite as evil as our tribal approach to politics would lead you to think. And you can always influence these policies, because we’re all Canadians here and we have a say in what happens next.

One of the only silver linings in this entire election season was seeing some Republicans repudiate their party — a fundamental part of their identity — to focus on what united them with others Americans, rather than on the seemingly intractable partisan divide. Over the past few decades — in Canada as in the United States — we’ve lost touch with the fact that there are some fundamental Canadian ideals that transcend party affiliation. Respect and support for the weak and the marginalized is one of them. Punching down is never cool. We have to make sure that everyone is able to do the best they can in this country.

Now, how we make that happen is fair game for political disagreement. But before we get to that fun debate, we have to decide what type of Canada we want. That’s what’s on the ballot in May. If you fear what happened in the United States on Tuesday, here’s your chance to finally make a difference.

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Canada: The functional country (and not just by default)

Posted on July 1, 2016 by bhaggart

At a time in which it seems the world has gone completely mad, the Canada Day holiday stands as a chance to take the day off and catch our breath amid the insanity.

Our two main international cultural reference points (apologies to France) seem completely unmoored. To the south, an orange-skinned, short-fingered grifter is the Republican candidate for president, a spectre who doesn’t so much fan the embers of hate, fear and resentment of non-whites, Muslims and women, as douse them with kerosene and break out the flamethrower.

Across the ocean, David Cameron has single-handedly brought the United Kingdom and the European Union to the brink of destruction. Future barroom fights won’t start over who the greatest British Prime Minister was (experts are divided between Lord Palmerston and Pitt the Elder), but over whether Cameron is the worst British PM or the worst democratic leader in world history.

Given this chaos, it’s weird to realize that Canada – the country without an identity, home of the perpetual constitutional crisis – is currently one of the most functional, well-run and cohesive countries in the world. And it’s not just because everyone else is busy scoring own goals. We have much to be thankful for.

It feels unCanadian to say, but our leaders have, from time to time, shown a bit of wisdom. It’s hard to overstate how lucky Canadians, Mexicans and Americans are that back in the heady, post-Cold War days of the 1990s, our governments explicitly rejected EU-style institutions in favour of the more limited North American Free Trade Agreement. They intuitively understood that nationalism and a desire for democratic politics would make such an arrangement untenable in North America. Now, tragically, it looks like Europe is facing this same reality.

Our democracy is also in pretty good shape. Prudent banking regulation helped us avoid the worst of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, and thanks in part to opposition pressure on a minority Conservative government to open the fiscal taps, we avoided the crippling austerity that has plagued Europe.

As xenophobia engulfs Europe and much of the United States, we’re also fortunate that we set up our political system to skew pro-immigration. It’s not by chance that the Conservative party had to reject the Reform wing’s more xenophobic elements to gain power; that voters smacked down the Conservatives’ blatantly racist anti-Muslim “barbaric cultural practices” snitch line in the last election; and that this anti-Muslim attitude was attacked so passionately at the Conservatives’ own recent convention. Though our relative isolation makes it very hard for Canada to be swamped by huge numbers of refugees, this shouldn’t detract from multiculturalism’s policy success.

Confederation itself, with its equalization and transfer payments, ensures that Canadians roughly share the fruits and burdens of our labours. Even Quebec separatism is off the front burner, thanks partly to successive governments’ conscious attention Quebecers’ demands.

Not to get too rose-colored, but all this is democracy in action. These things don’t just happen; we built this system. And it’s working.

Finally, there’s the much-maligned Canadian identity. For all of the talk that we’re merely hockey-mad non-Americans, Canadian identity is both deep and durable. Waking up to the Brexit results brought me back to the failed 1995 Quebec referendum. Like the Remain campaign, the Canadian No forces emphasized the scary economic consequences of Quebec separation. As with the Remain campaign, this campaign of fear wasn’t enough.

However, unlike the Remain campaign, the No forces were able – at the very end – to shift into another gear and appeal to Quebecers’ sense of Canadian nationalism. In Britain, there is relatively little European nationalism to which Remain could appeal.

Experts disagree on why No triumphed in 1995, but the fact that the No side could appeal to Canadian nationalism revealed a base level of Canadianness in all provinces and territories that glues us together. Debates about what it means to be Canadian are healthy and normal, but we shouldn’t doubt for an instant that Canadianness is real and mighty.

Of course, Canada is far from being a paradise. Our treatment of Canada’s indigenous population is a disgrace and ongoing humanitarian disaster. We’re not doing enough on climate change. Economic prosperity isn’t shared as widely as it should be. There remains much to do to build a better, more just Canada. But we’ve been doing it for 149 years, and we’ll continue to do so. As they used to say south of the border, the state of the union is strong.

Happy Canada Day.

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Stephen Clarkson, 1937-2016

Posted on March 1, 2016 by bhaggart

Terribly sad news. Stephen Clarkson was the external reviewer on my dissertation and a real inspiration. His signing off on my dissertation was a career and life highlight; his work the starting point for everything I’ve written and taught about North American regionalism. The brilliance of his work in this and other areas doesn’t come across at all in the Globe and Mail’s perfunctory obituary; much, much better is Louis Pauly’s on the University of Toronto’s website.

It was Prof. Clarkson (it still doesn’t feel right to call him Stephen) who suggested to me, an MA student who approached him out of the blue at a conference in Ottawa in the early 2000s, that if I was going to study Canada-US politics, I should include Mexico in my research. Only my friend Keith Serry’s suggestion that I also study copyright has been more important for my academic career.

One quick story. In 2007, I was at an Association for Canadian Studies in the United States conference in Toronto(!) as a third-year PhD student. I had not had a good conference. My (undercooked) paper elicited exactly zero interest, and I didn’t do well in the networking department. Last panel of the conference, late Saturday afternoon (aka, the dead zone), I was listening to a presentation promoting a North American student model parliament whose underlying assumption was that if you just got rid of all the power politics that come from the United States being the world’s biggest superpower, and Canada and Mexico’s reluctance to surrender their sovereignty (i.e., if you just pretended the world was other than what it was), then everything would be fine. Stephen Clarkson was in attendance (not on the panel).

During the Q&A, I asked the panelists: if a model parliament’s underlying assumptions are fantastical, then isn’t the whole exercise pretty much useless? That went over about as well as you’d expect. Great way to end a dismal conference.

Except Prof. Clarkson — who I’m pretty sure had no idea who I was — came up to me after the panel was over and said, “Now, that’s the question, isn’t it?” This brief remark not only redeemed what had been a miserable conference, but confirmed to me that I might have something worth saying.

You don’t have to get everyone’s approval, just the right people. Prof. Clarkson was definitely the right people. RIP.

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