Whoever emerges as the victor in today’s federal election, don’t expect many sunny days in the aftermath.
Been there, done that. It was 2015 and it didn’t work out quite the way we anticipated, although it sure felt like a relief for a while.
Looking back over the past three years in particular, it feels as if we have gone through a very dark time in Canadian political history.
Not because of the flaws of the Liberal Government, although there were many, or the popular fatigue inevitable with any three-term Parliamentary government, and there was plenty of that too, or even with the distracted ineptitude of Justin Trudeau in the latter years of his tenure.
Rather, the darkness is the result of the strategy and rhetoric adopted by Canadian conservatives as a movement, heavily influenced by the Republican Party and the MAGA movement in the United States, particularly under Conservative Party of Canada Leader Pierre Poilievre over the past two and a half years.
We are all familiar with the derangement-syndrome trope, wherein any criticism of the commentator’s favourite politician, no matter how justified, is brushed off as a form of irrational derangement. This is hyperbolic, but it’s fairly normal political commentary in any democracy.
But during the final years and months of Mr. Trudeau’s ministry – particularly since the attempted convoy coup in the spring of 2022 and election of Mr. Poilievre as Conservative Party of Canada leader soon after – the attacks on Mr. Trudeau have taken on a tone of literal derangement, particularly in darker corners of the Internet like billionaire Elon Musk’s social media hate site.
And remember, it is an incontestable fact that, whatever his motives at the time may have been, Mr. Poilievre not only carried water for the convoy occupiers of Ottawa, he carried coffee and snacks right up to their trucks.
Of course we have witnessed exactly the same phenomenon unfold in the United States, so there should have been no surprise over the increasingly dark form the MAGAfication of Canadian Conservative politics has taken, and particularly the nearly hysterical constant vilification of Mr. Trudeau – which to a significant degree appears to have worked exactly as intended.
Still, we’re Canadians, and many of us wanted to believe we were better than that. But sometimes it’s dangerous to deny the threat that’s right before our eyes.
Face it, on a policy level there is not a lot of light between the federal Conservatives and the Liberals, regardless of who leads either party. They are both ideologically neoliberal parties of the right, increasingly committed to hardline market fundamentalist policies. I doubt the switch from Mr. Trudeau to Prime Minister Mark Carney will make much difference in that regard.
The same can be said of the Conservatives and the NDP, or any provincial New Democratic Party, or for that matter between the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois on economic policy. At base, there is a near-total neoliberal elite ideological consensus among all electable political parties in this country.
Sharp political attacks on Mr. Trudeau or Mr. Poilievre, even quite unreasonable ones, including traditional Gotcha stories by partisan journalists at election time, are a normal part of democratic political rhetoric.
But the wild-eyed, spittle-flecked, at times literally murderous hatred of Mr. Trudeau – largely unmatched among supporters of non-conservative parties – is something entirely different, a product of the MAGA revolution in the United States and the weaponization of social media by dark actors all over the world and the deployment of their techniques in Canada.
As the U.K.’s Financial Times revealed on Friday, Canada is now being bombarded with misinformation and disinformation from the United States “including from right-wing podcasters and influencers as well as bots on American social media platforms that have reduced content controls.”
The FT story, which is unfortunately behind a paywall, described a network of suspicious accounts “promoting Poilievre and attacking Carney.”
“The accounts have tell-tale signs of being bots: posting at very high volume and frequency, often only retweeting content, and consistently sharing a variety of common links — in this case promoting Poilievre and attacking Carney,” said the FT, which is not exactly run by woke cultural Marxists. “Often the accounts push misleading content, such as associating Carney with the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.”
In addition, the report said, “U.S.-based X accounts have been driving engagement and memes about Canada becoming the 51st US state.”
Well, we should have known on the night of the Brexit vote in 2016 – famously lauded by Jason Kenney not long before he resigned his federal seat to pursue provincial office in Alberta – that social media had been fully weaponized by nefarious actors to inoculate themselves against the risk of democracy.
If the sudden departure of Mr. Trudeau and his replacement by Mr. Carney demonstrates anything, no matter what the result is tonight, it is that this process can thankfully be disrupted by a good surprise, although probably not for long.
Which brings me back to where I started. Yes, we have gone through a dark time, and yes with the election result tonight, whatever it turns out to be, we will have closed a dark chapter in Canadian political history. But the next chapter is unlikely to be any more upbeat.
If Mr. Carney wins, we can expect the same corrosive techniques used to vilify Mr. Trudeau to be turned on the new Liberal leader. Already we are seeing slickly produced Internet advertisements calling for a secession movement in Western Canada. It would be interesting to know who is financing this effort.
You may ask, wouldn’t the Conservatives reconsider their strategy in light of an unexpected failure after months of positive polls? More likely, it is said here, they will double down on their strategy and either Keep the Creep, if readers will forgive me, or pick someone even worse. Former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, by all accounts a decent man, is unlikely to be asked to return from retirement.
If Mr. Poilievre wins, he can be expected to move ahead quickly with the MAGA-inspired attack on the public service in Ottawa and Canadian institutions like the CBC that have already been hinted at in his campaign.
If the election if close but he emerges with a majority – one of the dangers of our single-member plurality elections – it seems likely he would channel Donald Trump unhindered by a shallow mandate.
Remember, as we’ve witnessed here in Alberta under the United Conservative Party led by Mr. Kenney and by Danielle Smith, the present generation of Canadian Conservatives are bad losers, but they’re worse winners!