The Election Was a Warning. Canada Needs Dramatic Change

The federal election was, at best, a reprieve for Canadian sovereignty, democracy and citizen well-being.

It is also a warning: a new approach that addresses the forces of division and demolition is desperately needed.

In a remarkable demonstration of civic solidarity and political pragmatism, many Canadians, including urban New Democrats and nationalist Bloc Québécois supporters, voted strategically to prevent a Conservative win and send a message to Donald Trump.

At the same time, however, the Conservatives increased their share of the total vote and elected more than 20 additional members of Parliament, including radical candidates Aaron Gunn, Andrew Lawton and Matt Strauss. Pierre Poilievre plans to stay on as Conservative leader. Liberals under Mark Carney were unable to secure a majority government and fared virtually no better in Alberta and Saskatchewan than Justin Trudeau, despite more conservative policy offerings. The NDP and Green parties both lost seats with the former losing official party status for the first time in more than 30 years.

For the “most important election of our lifetime” voter turnout was actually disappointing, still well below historical averages since 1926.

In the end, this was not the decisive victory over divisive and destructive forces that Canada so desperately needed.

A new approach is required, one that finally, comprehensively, addresses the interrelated crises driving these forces — disinformation, economic inequality and climate change.

Consider how disinformation distracts us from relationships and distances us from truths, how economic inequality denies us possibilities and delivers us resentments, or how climate change exacerbates our fears and extinguishes our freedoms.

Extensive research shows that citizens who are lonely and confused, or hopeless and angry, or afraid and constrained, are prime targets for far right movements and authoritarian populists.

Meanwhile, our country’s antagonists and obstructionists — the Trump administration, borderless tech bros, dark money-supported think tanks and the oil lobby, among others — continue to exacerbate and exploit these crises for their own benefit, intensifying the threats to our sovereignty, democracy and collective well-being.

For Canada’s political leaders, there is not a moment to waste.

While the new Liberal government is speaking dramatically, if vaguely, about getting things built, it is so far ignoring the civic and social infrastructure that desperately needs urgent restoration. Certainly, Canada must build and renew its physical infrastructure, but no degree of military investment can protect us from food insecurity, no new pipeline can prevent our cities and forests from burning, and no amount of future home construction can shelter us from the present-day torrent of online lies and abuse.

To deliver on their central campaign promise to protect Canada from threats from both outside and inside the country, the Liberals must prioritize countering disinformation, combating economic inequality and meaningfully confronting climate change.

Countering disinformation

A remarkable study last month out of the United Kingdom underscored the gravity of this moment of reckoning with our relationship to technology: almost half of young people surveyed would prefer a world without the internet.

Some Canadian parents are already responding, pledging a smartphone-free childhood for their children. A worthy initiative, but individual responsibility alone is insufficient to counter the myriad of rising hazards associated with the online world that begin, but do not end, with disinformation, including abuse, exploitation and the spread of hate.

Canada’s ability to foster an informed, empathetic and free citizenry will increasingly be threatened unless it curtails the power of foreign technology companies on our soil and resists our own country’s influential “tech bro” leaders.

Social media in particular is having a corrosive impact on our democracy including the influencing of our politics. In this past election, more than 25 per cent of Canadians say they may have been exposed to fake political content on social media platforms.

Increasingly adding to this problem is the impact of artificial intelligence, notably its ability to generate fake news. This development makes the Carney government’s decision to appoint a cabinet minister to “artificial intelligence and digital innovation,” assigned to rookie Evan Solomon, and not to, say, disabilities, a curious choice. All the more concerning is the prime minister’s cabinet-wide mandate letter in which there is near-effusive praise of AI’s benefits yet no mention of regulation or preventing digital harms.

It is also worth noting that deploying AI to reduce middle-class civil service jobs, as the mandate letter suggests, will do nothing to stem the tide of economic inequality and resentment.

Canadians are increasingly alert to the multitude of harms disinformation and related online threats are creating for our society and democracy and looking for ways to fight back — and for their government to lead.

Where previous Liberal governments stalled in their efforts to hold Big Tech accountable, the Carney Liberals can deliver by regulating the industry to the degree the European Union and Australia do, and by attacking the disinformation networks that are disrupting and dividing our country.

The Liberal government must be proactive, too, by moving quickly to reinvest in the CBC, as it promised to do during the election campaign, and boosting institutions that defend liberal democracy.

Combating economic inequality

Economic inequality — in both income and wealth — is continuing to rise in Canada. Incredibly, just one per cent of Canadians account for nearly a quarter of this country’s wealth. Our country’s wealth disparity is more complex than that, though. Consider that the richest 20 per cent of Canadian households hold 64.7 per cent of the country's total wealth, while the bottom 40 per cent account for just 3.3 per cent.

Behind these statistics are real people experiencing hurt: the fear of being unable to provide for yourself or your family, the sadness that your children may not have access to the same opportunities you had, the frustration of watching others accumulate so much more than you for the equivalent effort.

This deepening inequality is increasing polarization. Such a political landscape is catnip to populist leaders like Pierre Poilievre who, while offering nothing to ease voters’ pain, excel at exploiting their anger. Indeed, among Poilievre’s strongest supporters are younger, working-class voters who have “deep economic pessimism and sense of declining intergenerational mobility.”

What’s more, experts who study the issue suggest economic inequality has ominous implications for population health, social cohesion and trust, and even the risk of violence.

Fortunately, as Alex Hemingway, senior economist with the BC Society for Policy Solutions, has noted, “there is no shortage of policy levers available to address growing inequalities.”

Unfortunately, political will appears to be in short supply.

After scrapping the capital gains tax increase and the carbon tax and accompanying rebate, the Carney Liberal government is planning to implement a “middle-class tax cut” that will also extend to more wealthy Canadians. These measures will not reduce economic inequality; there are better options.

Whereas the new Carney tax cut promises qualifying two-income families a maximum return of $70 per month, the maximum Canada Child Benefit payment that was instituted under the previous Liberal government delivers up to $650 per month per child under six and almost $550 per child between six and 17. The child benefit is widely credited with dramatically reducing child poverty. In addition, while the tax cut will be paid for by reducing government spending on public services, the child benefit is supported by an income tax increase on the wealthiest Canadians that was announced in 2015.

Canada needs more sharing, not less. Encouragingly, some very wealthy Canadians are proposing the federal government facilitate this by raising their taxes.

Imagine a government with the courage — or just the common sense — to implement a wealth tax to raise an estimated $39 billion in annual revenue that could be redistributed to, for example, help end food insecurity for the 25 per cent of Canadian families affected by it, or provide a housing affordability subsidy to young workers, or strengthen medicare for everyone.

The Carney Liberals have an opportunity to be that government.

Confronting climate change

Canada’s new energy minister, Tim Hodgson, gave a speech to the oil and gas industry recently that was widely perceived as friendly to that industry. It was delivered as wildfires were burning throughout Western Canada.

Making Canada a “conventional energy” superpower was a promise made by the Carney Liberals as a way to lessen the impact of a trade war with the United States. Environmentalists and sustainability experts, however, view this strategy as an economically perilous plan that undermines the country’s climate targets and threatens our security and well-being.

Climate change is becoming central to our politics not because it is a humanity-threatening crisis — though it is that — but because, as historian Timothy Snyder puts it in his book On Freedom, those who profit from burning fossil fuels “spread lies that lead us all toward death.”

Consider that even as MEG Energy — a member of the Pathways Alliance that has been accused of greenwashing — was evacuating non-essential workers from one of its facilities due to wildfires, it had “not curtailed its oil production.”

Canada’s majority foreign-owned oil and gas industry succeeded in reshaping the political narrative around carbon pricing based on fear and falsehoods. The industry is now coming for all federal climate policies, leveraging a manufactured national unity crisis via separatist movements in Alberta and Saskatchewan to do so. Unsurprisingly, fossil fuel-cheering, dark money-supported think tanks are now running interference for separation efforts.

Troublingly, this strategy, too, may be working. Carney has suggested he would be open to changes to the sector’s demands on the federal emissions cap and the Impact Assessment Act to get new oil and gas projects built.

As the decades-long experience with Quebec separatists’ strategy reminds, the demands will not end. This is especially so when the antagonist is not a movement ostensibly fighting for the protection of a language but an industry fighting for the protection of its profits.

Protecting those profits worsens economic inequality. The Canadian Climate Institute has calculated that all households will lose income from the effects of climate change starting this year, with lower-income households impacted most. Better for the industry to redirect public resentment toward environmental policies or, for western Canadians, to the federal government.

Climate change also contributes to rising food prices, forced migration and the risk of conflict. Disinformation about each of these issues is used to divide citizens and distract from the climate crisis, its causes and its solutions.

Fighting climate change equates with fighting for truth and equality. As Timothy Snyder further notes, “if we can break the oligarchical lying now, a better future awaits.”

Carney has long indicated an understanding of the threat of climate change and the imperative to address it. Now is his opportunity to act.

The recent election result was only a reprieve. Canada’s sovereignty, democracy and well-being are still at risk, and disinformation, economic inequality and climate change are the interrelated crises fuelling these risks.

The Carney government must prepare and prioritize bold and comprehensive policy responses to these crises.

Some may posit that such an approach would be outside the mandate the Liberals received from voters.

On the contrary, as pollster Kyla Ronellenfitsch discovered, the election may indeed have turned on the values question, or “who we are as Canadians.”

In that case, championing Canadian ideals like honesty, collective well-being and environmental responsibility could be the formula for turning a reprieve into resolution, for both the government and the country.