Pandemics, authoritarianism and the coming storm

Posted on January 19, 2025 by bhaggart

When the Covid pandemic began in early 2020, like many people I bought a copy of Albert Camus’ The Plague. It was for the pandemic what Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism was for the first months of Trump 1 in 2016: something to grasp onto as we tried to make sense of a tragedy unexpectedly thrust upon us.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I found Camus’ novel an enormous comfort as we dealt with our own plague. Plagues happen. They eventually end. Even the way that the people, experts and authorities dealt with Camus’ plague mirrored what was happening in our own societies: the reluctance to believe until the evidence becomes undeniable, the panic, the lockdowns, the people trying to get past the lockdowns, the heroic doctors trying to figure it out while comforting the dying. Also, the price gouging and the desperation of the people to pretend like everything’s normal, going to restaurants, enjoying the expensive wine, having a great time at the theatre. Until, of course, someone dies during the production, which casts a temporary pall on things.

For me, Camus helped to make the unknowable knowable. For me, this was enormously reassuring. It’s the not knowing that gets you. This is one reason I recommended the book to my parents, who I think found it similarly helpful.

But even more than the way it made the nightmare somewhat effable, I took from The Plague a way to live during a pandemic. There are many lessons one can take from this deeply philosophical and moral book. But for me none was more important than Camus’ assertion, through his point of view character, Dr. Rieux, that our job is not to spread the plague. Our job, in short, is not to do harm to others.

In acting so as not to do harm to others, we’re not only ensuring that we do not become a tool that hurt others. As Camus points out, we are also acting in a way that acknowledges reality. Because our other job is not to shy away from the reality of our situation. That other people don’t acknowledge reality doesn’t change our own individual, moral obligation to the truth, to our fellow humans. This is why my partner and I continue to mask, five years into a seemingly unending pandemic, even as everyone around us, including our workplaces and our governments, carry on as if doing so isn’t spreading the plague, maiming and killing literally countless people. Our governments, our societies, have also given up on counting, because to count is to acknowledge reality.

While others’ decisions have left us trapped in an unending plague, they have not changed the underlying moral calculus: to be true to reality, and not to spread disease. There is strength in a moral code.

Since last summer I’d been thinking of writing a longer piece along these lines to mark the upcoming fifth anniversary of the declaration of the global covid pandemic. Life intervened, but I may still flesh this out (with maybe actual direct quotes?). But I’m writing these notes today, Sunday, January 19, 2025, because of course Camus wrote The Plague as a political allegory for the rise of, and fight against, fascism in Europe. And tomorrow is the inauguration of Donald Trump.

Of Trump all we need say is what one of my Brock University colleagues noted at a public panel a couple of weeks ago: every reputable political scientist agrees that Trump is an authoritarian. The only question is whether he’s also a fascist.

Already, through unprecedented levels of donations to his inaugural ball or fishy legal settlements, media, tech and industry have signalled their fealty to Trump, with several tech oligarchs invited to ascend to his dais for the inauguration. US media has bent the knee. The Republican-controlled US Supreme Court has made him a king, placing him above the law. The Republican party has demonstrated no desire to stand up to him. Many Americans are holding out hope that possible losses in the upcoming 2026 midterms will curtail Trump, but the Democrats have been singularly unimpressive in rising to meet the magnitude of Trump’s challenge. And don’t forget that Trump is not just a cause, but a symptom of US authoritarianism, the culmination of a scorched-earth, anti-government and anti-Democratic politics that dates at least back to Newt Gingrich’s 1995 government shutdown.

While one wishes US citizens the best in their upcoming struggle to restore their Republic, the rest of us cannot count on their success. We must prepare for the US authoritarian, fascist plague to batter our shores for years to come.

Canadian failure and the coming fascist storm

In Canada, we can already see Camus’ allegory in play. Our leaders, without exception, wasted the last eight years under the assumption that Trump 1 was an aberration. No matter that the US under President Biden continued many of Trump’s openly protectionist policies, or that a never-to-be President Harris would have used the USMCA’s renegotiation clause to get Canada and Mexico to enact potentially long-reaching policy reforms in the two countries. To his lasting credit, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded forcefully to the first major outbreak of Trumpism in Canada – the February 2022 Ottawa Occupation – when Ottawa’s Mayor and Ontario’s Premier effectively deserted the city. But his government did precious little to otherwise protect the country. Bill C-18, the Online News Act, which attempts to provide sorely needed funding to Canadian news media, both recognizes the problem caused by a poorly informed public while also being utterly insufficient to deal with the magnitude of the problem.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Party’s current leader owes his leadership to the Occupation, the previous leader having been forced out for not being supportive enough of the occupiers. The current leader, in turn, has borrowed the grievances and language of the occupiers, seeing in them his path to power.

And even as Trump completed his vile political resurrection on November 5, Canadian leaders and pundits have been tortuously slow to recognize Trump II for the existential threat that political scientists, for our part, immediately recognized him for, years ago. Trudeau’s surprise trip to Mar a Lago, by displaying subservience rather than acting as the equal head of a sovereign state, humiliated both himself and Canada.

The government’s initial attempts at appeasement were no better: rented Black Hawk helicopters and proposed joint strike force have all the earmarks of an improvised response to an imaginary problem, designed to distract Trump with trinkets but not to actually improve Canadians’ security. They’re a bribe.

The problem here is that Trump doesn’t care about policy. He doesn’t care about the Canada-US border, where fentanyl and large scale illegal immigration aren’t big problems. He cares about domination. Most importantly, his (likely illegal) tariff threats signal, combined with his 51st state rhetoric, that he’s interested in undermining Canadian sovereignty. Canadian independence and Canadian democracy are on the menu.

In a few recent pieces and presentations, I’ve outlined what I think Canadian leaders need to do in order to respond to the US threat. Our current and prospective leaders have, to date, failed to rise to meet the day. Former Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has come closest in her resignation letter and recent Toronto Star oped, although I’ve yet to see a vision for Canada that reflects the strength of her view of Canada-US relations. Of our provincial and territorial premiers, their very position limits their ability to fill the federal leadership vacuum. In any case, the days of Bill Davis are long gone.

The politician who’s come closest to proposing a vision that fits the enormity of the challenge is former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. That a 91-year-old two decades out of power has best read the situation tells you all you need to know about how lacking Canada is in effective leadership.

Fascism and the truth

Which brings us back to Camus.

For all the death and devastation, The Plague is, ultimately, a hopeful story, both in terms of the plague and as an allegory for fascism. Despite initial resistance, the government comes through and works to fight the plague. The plague recedes.

The Covid pandemic has not followed the same playbook. Governments and their publics have decided to ignore the reality of the plague, condemning individuals to death and societies to continued disruptions and destabilization, from things such as long-term disabilities due to the still-mysterious Long Covid. We failed to meet the challenge.

A society can only alter the course of a pandemic (rather than letting it master us, burning through a population and reach its own, possibly devastating, equilibrium) by recognizing reality and choosing the moral path. Do our job: don’t spread the plague. That’s the lesson from The Plague.

The lesson from the Covid pandemic is: your efforts might not work. The plague may continue indefinitely. Enough people may decide to take leave of reality and live in denial.

The same is true of our current fascist moment, in the United States as in Canada. The United States may not recover its democracy. Or it may be transformed in ways that we can’t even currently imagine. Canada may end up as a 51st state in all but name, subservient to the US power.

But whether or not our leaders are able to rise to the occasion doesn’t change our own, individual obligation: not to spread the disease, of covid, of authoritarianism, of fascism. In the novel, Dr. Rieux and his compatriots did not make their efforts conditional upon ultimate victory. They did what they did because it was their moral obligation to fight disease and to stop it from spreading.

I’m writing this mostly for myself, on the brink of what feels like an irreversible, epochal change that will touch the lives of every Canadian. For the first time in my lifetime – over 50 years – the institutions in which we’ve lived our lives, and which have given our lives structure and even meaning, are in flux. As someone who studied Canada-US relations at the doctoral level, I don’t know what’s coming. Only that when the underlying rules change, almost anything’s possible. And chances are the changes will end up ruining a lot of lives, a lot of communities.

But we understand this disease, fascism. It seeks to destroy knowledge and compassion. It scoffs at the rule of law. It disdains democracy. It will seek to turn us against one another, to divide and conquer. It believes that raw economic and military power should decide all. It sees us as little people, as means to others’ ends.

I don’t know what forms this disease will take. I don’t know what Trump will try to do, in the United States or to Canada. I only know that he, and the United States so long as the Republicans are in power, will seek only to dominate. But while these actions and reactions will cause much unneeded devastation and harm, our own obligation – our task – remains the same. As individuals, as citizens, as democrats, our job is to resist any efforts to dominate us, and to ensure that we in turn do not dominate others. We must honour the truth and be compassionate to our neighbours. These values must be reflected in our everyday lives, in our work and in our politics. Time to mask up.

Taking a cue from Paul Krugman, here’s Donny Benét, with a song that captures perfectly our awful moment. It goes hard.

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My presentation for the panel, Donald Trump and US Authoritarian Turn: Implications for the United States, Canada, and the World

Posted on January 14, 2025 by bhaggart

Last night I was part of an in-person panel co-hosted by the St. Catharines Public Library on, as the title says, what Canada and the world can expect from a Trumpified US. There was, unsurprisingly, a lot of interest in the event — it was fully registered, with a waiting list. Judging from the turnout and the questions we fielded, people are understandably very worried about what’s going to happen after next Monday’s inauguration.

Local TV was also there to do a segment, coincidentally the same camera guy who videoed a 2016 panel on Trump (post-election, per-inauguration) that I’d also organized at the Library. He told me that that first panel had stuck with him, including how his initial belief that we were being somewhat alarmist faded quickly as the madness of Trump I took hold.

Regarding the event itself, as a former colleague who attended put it, “People found the session enlightening, if a bit disturbing.”

Which sounds about right. You’d be hard-pressed to find a legitimate political scientist who can see any silver lining in what’s about to happen. Yet, if anything, there continues to be a relative lightness to most of the public pronouncements about the coming Trump 2.0 administration, and deeds are not matching words. Pundits are gaming out Trump’s 51st state nonsense, as if the same (democratic) political rules will apply after next week. The Liberals are taking their sweet time choosing a new leader. Just today the federal government accused Elon Musk of political interference in Canada, but with no plan to, you know, actually do anything about it. The federal Conservative leader is passing the time talking to a disgraced, far-right psychologist and has yet to emerge from his three-word-sloganeering pupa stage.

What I’m saying is, there’s an appetite for honest, sober analysis that lays out exactly what we’re dealing with. A good start for people would be Kim Richard Nossal’s 2023 book, Canada Alone: Navigating the Post-American World. Though it’s exactly about our moment, written by one of Canada’s leading scholars of Canada-US relations, it’s been conspicuously absent from the Canada-Trump discussion.

Below are my opening comments, lightly edited. They’re adapted mainly from two articles I’ve written for The Conversation (which, it should be noted, has been publishing excellent and accessible academic analysis on what Canada can expect from Trump). It even gave me the opportunity to revisit my 2005 MA Major Research Paper on the negotiation of the Canada-US Smart Border Accord.

Thank you all so much for coming out and thank you to the St. Catharines Public Library for hosting this panel. Just the sheer number of people here shows that there’s a lot of interest and real concern about what’s going to happen to Canada when Trump assumes power in just under a week.

From 2005 to 2011, my PhD and before that my Masters’ work, focused on Canada-US and North American politics, and on the question of the conditions under which Canada can exert significant policy autonomy in the shadow of its neighbour, which is also the world’s most powerful country. And all of a sudden, this is the big question of the day, and probably for the next four years at least.

There’s a lot to say about what Trump and the authoritarian turn in US politics means for Canada and the world, but I’m going to keep my comments brief, because I’m interested to hear your questions and concerns. In my time I want to highlight two things. First, what makes this moment so dangerous for Canada, and second, how the country should respond.

It’s worth keeping in mind that we are in uncharted waters. The Canada-US relationship has been so stable for so long that it feels almost natural, like a fact of life. And over that time Canada has enjoyed peace, prosperity and a healthy degree of independence, built in large part on the Canada-US relationship.

But it was a product of its times and context. And in a way, as I’ll show in a moment, it was already fading. But Trump’s re-election means that this old-style relationship is likely gone for good. As a result, Canada is now more exposed to raw US power than any time in its history.

I’ll give a few of examples of what I mean, but basically it comes down to trade agreements that aren’t really trade agreements, and, more fundamentally a lack of shared norms related to the rule of law and sovereignty.

A lot has been made about Trump’s continued and wholly offensive and utterly inappropriate threats to Canadian, Mexican and Greenland’s sovereignty. And last week he said that he’s going to use economic coercion to bring Canada in line.

I wrote most of the following remarks [ed. note: everything on why Canada’s vulnerable to the US] back in mid-November, just to give you an idea of how predictable all this has been.

Anyway, the bad news is, we are currently very susceptible to this kind of open and direct coercion. And for all the patriotic talk online about how the US can get bent, I think politicians and pundits are underselling the degree of the challenge an authoritarian US poses to Canada.

Most importantly, we have a trade agreement with the United States that doesn’t provide us with any actual protection. The United States for decades has used the carrot of access to its market, or the stick of removing this access, to get other countries to amend their laws so that they favour US interests and goals.

But trade agreements, like the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, take that card off the table. And for Canada and Mexico that reduces the United States to the status of an important party, but not one that can tell Canada what to do. Which preserves policy autonomy even as our two economies became ever-more deeply integrated.

But! Back during Trump 1, the United States forced the renegotiation of NAFTA, to include, among other things, a renegotiation clause, that would automatically reopen it every six years. Which means in 2026. This renegotiation clause guts the autonomy protection that normal trade agreements provide. It means that every six years, the United States, whether it’s run by Democrats or Republicans, will be able effectively to go through our regulations, decide what it doesn’t like, and put that on the table. At stake: our access to their market.

And this is what’s allowed under our treaty, let alone Trump’s almost certainly illegal tariff threats.

Here’s the catch. Because trade agreements now cover so much more than tariffs, there’s nothing that this power won’t be able to touch. Do you think that Teslas should have to face regulations that make them not trap passengers inside a burning car, as happened in Toronto a few months ago? Me too, but those regs could easily find their way onto the chopping block, all in the name of market access.

Second, trade politics. Whenever the United States get protectionist, the federal government likes to trot out the fact that we’re the number one trading partner of 19 US states and I’m sure number two in a whole bunch others. The reason they lobby US officials using this number is because they want to show them that if you hurt Canada economically, you’re just hurting yourself. And it’s true.

The problem, though, is that that only works if politicians care what happens to voters. And in an authoritarian system, the links between voters and power are muted at best. The Republicans will care if Elon Musk’s interest are hurt. They won’t care if Democratic Detroit slides into the sea. So that’s gone. This is where we’re headed. (And you’ll notice that I’m referring to the Republicans, and not just Trump. This is because the Republicans are now an authoritarian, far-right party, with or without Trump. That’s our reality.)

Third, our regulatory state, the rules that keep our water clean, our medicines safe and our cars from being deathtraps, could very well come under attack. Trump, backed by an enthusiastic Republican Party and the Republican Supreme Court, has signalled his intention to dismantle the regulations that have kept Americans safe and the economy functioning for a century. Think things like pesticides on strawberries and lead in toys. Given the tight relationship between our two countries, are we going to recognize their (non-rules)? And given our integration, how long will it be before US companies, to say nothing of own companies, start lobbying Canada to lower our own regulatory thresholds in the name of competitive disadvantage?

You want to go really dark? We can do that: We already have Elon Musk interfering in our politics in a way that is completely inappropriate for a member of a foreign government. Now, consider what a lawless Trump, one with his personal generals on his side, with the might of Silicon Valley at his disposal, might do to Canadian political opponents who displease him. For all the talk of the United States as a beacon of democracy, they have a long, and recent history, of abetting coups and assassinations in countries that step out of line. We’d be foolish to think that something similar couldn’t happen in Canada.

Democracies are comfortable with dissent; we know how to process it. For authoritarians, dissent is treason. Why would an authoritarian United States feel comfortable with a healthy democracy on its border?

That’s some of why the current moment is so dangerous for Canada. So, how should our leaders respond?

The whole 51st state thing points us to the big challenge facing Canada over at least the next four years. Which is: Because they’re next door, we have to respond to US demands, no matter how crazy or destructive they may be. So, how do we respond in a way that promotes and protects Canadian sovereignty and Canadian interests, without giving away the store?

If we just try to appease them and give them whatever they want, then we’ll be end up being a de facto 51st state. And that’s kind of what the federal, Ontario and Alberta governments have been doing to date, with their haphazard border deals and natural resource proposals. Not great.

The good news, such as it is, is that although Trump’s authoritarianism has us in uncharted waters, this isn’t the first time that the United States has directly posed an existential threat to Canada. So, we actually can look to both recent and ancient history to tell the difference between mere appeasement and working in the national interest.

The first lesson is from the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. It’s hard to believe now, but in the 1990s, the United States didn’t really pay a lot of attention to its northern border with Canada. At the time, they were all about making North America a borderless economic space. Then 9/11 happens, and all of a sudden, security went from being a minor issue for the US to the only thing they cared about. Then, as now, this securitization of the border threatened Canadian exports to the US.

But also, then, as now, while the United States wanted action on the border, they didn’t really know what they wanted beyond, security. You know who did? Canada. Because the federal government had been bugging the US for years to modernize the border to make things run more smoothly. And so, when the United States said, we have to do something, Canada had what became the Smart Border Accord ready to go. And it had some security parts to it, but because of Ottawa’s forethought, it was designed mainly to protect the economic relationship, which is what we cared most about.

The lesson here is: Always have a plan ready for what we as a country want out of the relationship. That way you’re not left just reacting.

That’s lesson one. Our second lesson comes from the birth of Canada itself. One of the reasons Confederation happened at all was because the United States abrogated the free trade agreement that had been in place between it and the Canadian provinces. In response, instead of just looking south for salvation, the founding provinces looked east and west. And we got Canada as a result. Not a bad result.

The lesson here is: To respond to US uncertainty, look east, west and north. We need to build up the country. This should include internal free trade, reorienting our energy infrastructure to flow east-west rather than the now-unstable North South, revitalizing our internal communication infrastructure, including platform regulation and support for the CBC.

Now, none of these is a panacea. And they will also require substantial effort and investment on a scale we haven’t seen in Canada since the 1960s. But the reality is, Trump is going to cost Canada one way or another. And while we can’t avoid this challenge, we can choose how we react to it. And we can choose to react in a way that builds up and improves the country and doesn’t just give in to whatever Trump wants today.

US election night at the Sens-Sabres game. In retrospect, the perfect alternative to a passive night in front of the TV awaiting the self-immolation of the world’s most powerful country.

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Goodbye to Twitter

Posted on November 9, 2024 by bhaggart

Just 30 minutes ago, I deactivated by Twitter account. This is the second time I’ve done this, but I’m pretty sure this time the breakup will be permanent. Everyone’s got their breaking point, as Gord Downie once noted. So what was mine?

Like a lot of people, my reasons for finally ditching Musk’s cesspool are political and personal. Politically and morally, I can’t justify supporting what has become an overt white-supremacist, pro-authoritarian site.

Of course, Musk’s spent the past two years burnishing his fascist, white supremacist credentials. And to my discredit, I’ve tolerated it over that time. My reasoning, or rather my rationalization, was basically careerist: as an academic, Twitter remained (and even now remains) the primary means of communication among scholars, politicians and media. When it comes to political social media, Twitter remains the dominant player.

The re-election of the nakedly authoritarian Donald Trump to the US presidency has made it impossible to maintain this hypocritical stance. Trump’s presidency will lead to needless death and suffering. It will make the world a cruder, meaner place, not least in Canada, a country of which I’m quite fond. The next several years are going to force all of us to explicitly choose to support democracy and human rights, or rank authoritarianism. This is not a time for equivocation that accords undue respect to the people, companies and forces that would destroy our democracies. I left Facebook when it was implicated in a genocide. I could hardly do less here.

My decision isn’t just high-minded. To be frank, I don’t like what Twitter, more than any other social media platform, brings out in me. One of the last things I quote-tweeted, negatively, was an editorial written by someone I knew way back when in university. Friendly, part of the same group back in the day, but we hadn’t kept in touch: that kind of relationship. I like the guy. He’s a talented writer, who just happened to have written an article in an area — Canada-US relations — in which I earned a doctorate, and whose argument I thought was completely wrong.

My response, on reflection, was pithy (thank you, Twitter character limit) but in-bounds. He sent me a DM justifying his editorial, I responded with my point of view, and that was that. We’re both adults. We both put words out there for others to consider, debate and even disagree with.

But my initial tweet still bugged me. Not that I was wrong, or even that unfair, but what am I even doing here?

Why did I care that some editorial is wrong enough to retweet it along with my own comment? Writers and reporters and editors make ridiculous pronouncements all the time. More importantly, why did I think it necessary to call out this editorial in the first place? In a medium built to generate ephemera, privileging pithiness over dialogue and deep engagement? As Emo Philips says, “I like Twitter because it combines my two favorite forms of communication: texting, and throwing a note in a bottle out into the sea.” This is not writing that’s meant to last. Short-form social media may very well be the lowest form of expression.

My reflection on my response to that editorial forced me to confront that, for me at least, my engagement with social media has been driven significantly by insecurity, a desperation to be part of the larger conversation, whatever that may be.

In my experience at least, it can be incredibly frustrating to have a deep understanding of important issues and yet not be involved in the public debate to the extent that you’d like. If you let it fester, it can eat you alive, leaving you angry and bitter. I’ve seen colleagues grapple with this dynamic.

Of course, there’s always been a well-policed academic pecking order, but social media’s promise of democratic engagement combined with its publicness makes it even worse. It turns a lot of academics into clout-chasers, begging for new followers. We become our own PR agents, promoting our latest book or article or job, always self-promoting, and trying to shove our way to the front of whatever the current debate’s about. And, of course, every time you open Twitter, or Mastodon, or Bluesky, or LinkedIn, you’re reminded that someone else is doing better than you, which feeds into a negative-reinforcing inadequacy spiral.

The reality isn’t just that people on social media tend to paint rose-coloured pictures of their lives. It’s that, no matter what we achieve, there’s always someone out there who’s doing better, or more. Constant comparison is a recipe for misery, at least in my case. I think it hits particularly hard in your fifties. I’ve heard it described that this is the decade in which you start to realize that, chances are, you won’t be able to fulfill all of your goals or realize all of your ambitions.

On reflection, what I didn’t like about Twitter, and what I don’t care for about social media in general, is how this clout-chasing, this constant comparison, this always striving to be part of other people’s conversations, had me chasing these things that, previously, I’d never really cared about.

My writing has always been almost entirely self-driven. I’ve never written out of ambition, to get a job or to win an award. I write to figure out what I think and because I love writing, in and of itself. I share my writing because it’s what you do as a writer and because I think I have something worth saying. At heart, though, it’s my art, my preferred form of self-expression.

And as for loftier ambitions, I have a healthy self-regard for the quality of my research, writing and opinions. As Max Weber noted over a century ago in Politics as a Vocation (yes, I am showing off a bit to prove my point), these are simply table stakes for all academics everywhere. Academics need to believe that their research is important, no matter what anyone else thinks. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to do their job.

But I have also tried to work on the principle that the best place to make a difference is wherever you happen to be. And I’m doing my best to make a difference. I’m not advising the prime minister on Canada-US relations (though I truly hope that they’re reading Kim Richard Nossal), but I do have a couple of opeds lined up and am doing regular radio interviews to highlight my concerns about Canada’s future. Most importantly, I’m organizing panels to trying to help my fellow Niagara residents and Brock colleagues understand what’s going on. And I’m talking through these issues with my students in class. Along the same lines, my book, The New Knowledge, may not revolutionize International Political Economy, but it’s a solid book that’s garnered positive responses from pretty much everyone who’s read it. That it has resonated with graduate and doctoral students has been particularly rewarding.

Those are the things I want to focus on: writing for writing’s sake, and helping out where I can. So, while I will still on Mastodon and Bluesky, and also LinkedIn, I don’t plan on engaging on them as deeply as I had on Twitter. Some people thrive in the clout-chasing environment. I’m not one of them. And while it has its advantages, using Twitter has been a surefire way to eventually make myself miserable and to distract myself from the joys of doing the work.

I have to say, it feels pretty great to be finally rid of it.

(I spent Election Night in Buffalo watching the Sabres dismantle the Senators. In retrospect, it was definitely the smart move. Sabres: Exciting team, and the tickets cost a quarter of what you’d pay in Toronto.)

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Canada and Trump 2.0: Dealing with the reality in front of us

Posted on November 6, 2024 by bhaggart

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.
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Brian Mulroney, the conventional wisdom, and how yesterday’s solutions become today’s problems

Posted on August 26, 2024 by bhaggart

An absolutely remarkable oped on the virtual front page of the Globe and Mail this morning. In response to the CN and CP lockouts (since ended by the government via binding arbitration) of their workers, themselves concerned about health and safety issues, independent journalist and public historian Taylor C. Noakes argues in favour of nationalizing Canada’s railways. His reasoning is straightforward: Railways are essential economic infrastructure. We can’t afford to be held hostage to the caprices of private companies.

Less interesting for me is his argument (he’s 100% correct) than that the Globe and Mail, Canada’s remaining serious business paper of record, ran an article calling for the nationalization of an industry on their front page.

“It’s time to consider nationalizing Canada’s railways” is not a headline that any Very Serious Person would have entertained 20 years ago. The ground is shifting under our feet and with it, slowly and unremarked-upon, the conventional wisdom.

The distance between the 1980s and now can be measured by this headline.

But even as the conventional wisdom — Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s term for the range of acceptable opinions at any given time — shifts, the unconscious, unacknowledged nature of this shift is causing a lot of problems for Canada and Canadians.

Nowhere was this more on display than in the Canadian media’s hagiographic veneration of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney upon his death on February 28, 2024. The link above is to the Globe’s search results on Mulroney’s name: check it out and see what I mean.

The death of a consequential prime minister like Mulroney offered Canadians a chance to reflect on how his past policies shaped the Canada of today, for good or ill. Unfortunately, in the rush to celebrate the man, Canadian media, for the most part, robbed Canadians of a chance to reckon with the reality that almost all of Mulroney’s enduring policies — deregulation, privatization and US free trade — are no longer fit for purpose. Mulroney helped to create the world we live in, but it’s a world in which two foreign railroad companies can tank the entire Canadian economy over a labour dispute.

Deregulation and privatization — his government’s watchwords, proudly claimed — have left us at the mercy of anti-competitive monopolies.

Under Mulroney, privatization meant that we lost the ability to respond collectively to problems when necessary. The embrace of privatization involved/involves the denigration of public options, even when (as with railway nationalization) they made sense. What’s more, Mulroney began the trend of treating the public service as the bad guys, gutting its capacity to adapt to new challenges.

As for free trade, agreements like the USMCA that contain renegotiation clauses don’t really protect the smaller country because the smaller country remains vulnerable to retaliation. This will become ever-more obvious as the USMCA renegotiations draw closer. That it wasn’t immediately obvious was due, in my opinion, not only to the relief of getting any certainty under from the unstable and authoritarian Donald Trump, but also because the concept of free trade has a talismanic aura borne of another era. As it was, in 2018, few analysts even raised this vulnerability as an issue. In contrast, my dissertation research on North American governance made it immediately obvious to me that this was going to cause problems. It’s always a mixed blessing when one’s research demonstrates such direct, depressing relevance.

When solutions become problems

To be clear, Mulroney’s actions for the most part simply reflected the conventional wisdom of his time. Privatization, deregulation, and free trade are straight out of the 1980s mainstream policy manual drafted by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and accepted as the conventional wisdom by right- and left-wing parties for decades afterwards.

More importantly, that privatization, deregulation and free trade agreements are now backfiring on us isn’t unusual. It’s common that one generation’s solutions become the next’s problems. The real trouble arises when you don’t understand fully that this has happened, that the world has changed, and fail to adapt.

And, as our nationalization headline suggests, the world has changed. Monopolies run rampant, the multilateral trade system is dying, and civilizational challenges like the climate crisis can only be solved with strong government intervention, with Big Government. The policy world birthed by Mulroney, and nurtured by Chrétien, and Martin (both Liberals, not conservatives), and Harper, no longer fits the world in which we live. We are in the anti-1980s.

The problem is this: The policies of the previous generation helped to create the policy monsters facing this generation. They changed the world. But they are now the problem getting in the way of making life better for Canadians.

From this perspective, Canada’s past decade starts to make a lot of sense. The last 10 years are what you get when you fail to understand and adapt fully to the era you’re living in. After his election in 2015, Justin Trudeau seemed to be governing like it was 1999: Sunny ways, gender and social equality, but stay the course. To their credit, as they were hit by crisis after crisis — Trump, Covid, the Ottawa Occupation, rampant monopoly power, out-of-control foreign online media companies — his government changed course as reality intruded.

But old habits die hard. Policy-wise, the past several years have been so frustrating because while this government is, for the most part, pointed in the right direction, they don’t seem to have the courage of their convictions. The best way I can put it is, they’re doing their best to respond to the moment, but they are not of the moment. So we get half-measures.

Even worse, though, are the Conservatives. Under Pierre Poilievre, they’ve descended into cargo-cult conservatism. They have failed utterly to adapt to the changing world or to the fact that yesterday’s solutions are causing today’s problems. As befitting a leader who treats federal politics like a exceptionally sophomoric high school debating tournament, there is no meaning behind anything Poilievre says. Every utterance is chosen only to win the next point. It is literally bullshit, in the academic sense of the term. Their shibboleths are backward-looking, policies (such as they are) from another era that, when applied to the world of today, just won’t work. At a time when we desperately need thoughtful policy for a new world, they have nothing to offer but slogans.

It’s incredibly demoralizing.

We need generational change. We need politicians and policymakers of this moment, who understand the world as it is, not as they imagine or wish it would be. Unfortunately, it’s unclear from where this change will come.

The current government is tired. I worry that replacing Trudeau would likely just amount to rearranging deckchairs. The Conservatives are cosplaying.

Yes, the conventional wisdom is shifting to where it needs to be, but only slowly and in an unacknowledged way that leads to incremental reforms and the retention of destructive old ideas, at a time when wholesale changes are needed. (As it happens, I have two go-to policies that, to me, would indicate that a government is serious about taking on the world as it is: They would create and fund sufficiently a high-powered consumer-protection agency, and make explicit efforts to rebuild public-sector capacity, such as through the re-creation of an Economic Council of Canada, which Mulroney shuttered in 1993.)

After all, the challenges we face are only going to get worse.

As a reward for reading this far, here’s a photo of Tiramisu.

Posted in economics, evidence-based policymaking, Free Trade, monopoly | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Brian Mulroney, the conventional wisdom, and how yesterday’s solutions become today’s problems