Skip to content

Canadian Politics

Notes on Alberta Separatism from the Quiet Revolution: Is Danielle Smith Today’s Robert Bourassa?

A Lesson in Québec History
In 1960, a new political force swept into power in Québec. Jean Lesage led a renewed Liberal Party into office after a period of sixteen years of the authoritarian rule of Maurice Duplessis’ Union Nationale. While the Liberals had been the natural governing party of Québec from 1897-1944, prior to the rise of Duplessis, the party that Lesage led back into office was a radically different organization than the one Duplessis had defeated in 1944.

While still technically the same corporate organization with the same name, the small government federalist Québec Liberal Party of Louis-Alexandre Taschereau and his predecessors bore scant resemblance to Lesage’s renewed Liberals. These Liberals were the party of Jean Marchand’s Catholic Workers’ Confederation of Canada (the precursor to the Confederation of National Trade Unions, one of Quebec’s two labour federations) and socialists like Eric Kierans.

Stuart Parker’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Subscribed

Most importantly, it drew significant support from a new generation of nationalists who rejected the Irish Fianna Fáil-style Catholic authoritarian nationalism of the Duplessis regime. These new nationalists, epitomized in Lesage’s energy minister René Levesque, offered a new state-centred nationalism. Lévesque persuaded Lesage to call a second election, two years into his first term, to seek a new mandate to nationalize Québec’s hydroelectric grid under the aegis of a massive, state-run company Hydro Quéebec. The slogan, which Lévesque, not Lesage had crafted was “Masters in Our Own House,” a boldly nationalist slogan.

Even before Lesage’s unexpected defeat in the 1966 “wrong winner” election (i.e. an election in which the first-past-the-post electoral system awards a majority of seats to a party placing second or third in popular vote–Lesage’s Liberals had won the popular vote by 7%), obvious tensions began to emerge within the party. Lesage’s caucus could all agree that the creation of Hydro Québec was good and that the province should set a distinctive course on welfare state entitlement programs like Medicare and pensions, the party began to polarize between those like Marchand, who saw an unprecedented opportunity for Québec to take a greater leadership role in Canada as a whole and those like Lévesque, who had grown increasingly disillusioned about collaborating with English Canada and open not just to autonomy but to independence.

Because nearly all of Lesage’s front bench had pretty specific beefs about Québec-Canada relations many in English Canada assumed a level of consensus within the Québec Liberals that was simply not there. Furthermore, they radically underestimated support for independence because pro-independence parties appeared to be a nothingburger at the polls.

In 1966, the two pro-independence parties, Ralliement Nationale and Rasemblement pour L’Independence Nationale won no seats and scored, between them, just 9% of the popular vote. Just how big a threat could the separatists be? English Canada wondered.

But now we know. Just ten years later, the separatists would form a majority government, led by Lévesque.

I want to suggest that, as we march towards an Alberta independence referendum, that Canadians must examine much more closely the decade between the Lesage government and the election of the Parti Québecois.

First elected to the Liberal caucus in 1966 was Robert Bourassa, who immediately threw himself into a task whose urgency was vastly underestimated by his colleagues: keeping people like Lévesque in the party and in the country. When Lévesque submitted a pro-sovereignty resolution to the 1967 party convention, Bourassa led the effort to mediate a compromise between Lévesque and his supporters and the party brass, led by Kierans, the party’s new president.

In an effort to win Lévesque’s trust. Bourassa even helped him draft the convention resolution and only pulled-out of co-sponsoring it when he realized that his chances to broker a future compromise could be killed if he were part of the convention floor majority that Kierans’ forces crushed.

This scheme ultimately worked and won Bourassa the party leadership in 1970 and the premiership later that year. During his six years in government, Bourassa was in near-constant conflict with Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government in Ottawa by championing Québec autonomy in constitutional negotiations, enacting discriminatory language laws reducing the rights of English speakers and opposing official Multiculturalism.

What many did not understand until it was too late was that all these efforts were designed to prevent what took place in 1976: the election of actual separatists and the divisive referendum of 1980 that took Canada to the brink of collapse.

Today’s Alberta and Yesterday’s Québec
I do not know Danielle Smith as a person and, honestly, my opinion about her fluctuates as much as my opinion of any Canadian politician I can think of. But the many parallels between contemporary Alberta and her place in it and that of Bourassa in 1960s and 70s Québec seem striking and worthy of observation.

Like Bourassa and Lesage, Smith and her predecessor, Jason Kenney, have led a different kind of Conservative Party than the one Rachel Notley’s NDP had defeated in 2015, one incorporating an autonomist tendency, a party more like Ernest Manning’s Social Credit than the Tory dynasty of Peter Lougheed and Jim Prentice.

This party has a far more complex and fractured caucus than national media care to acknowledge or investigate. As in 1966 Québec, the future leaders of Alberta separatism are likely submerged in the caucus of the United Conservative Party and not on the front lines of the province’s picayune separatist parties. Canadian federalists should take no more comfort from the separatists winning 1%, 3% and 18%, respectively, in the recent byelections in Edmonton and the rural area east of Red Deer than federalists should have from the anemic RIN and RA results in 1966. The future leader of Alberta separatism is almost certainly, like Lévesque in 1966, a member not of a fringe party but a prominent member of the province’s natural governing party.

These byelection numbers are not the numbers of which we should be taking the most notice when it comes to Alberta’s future in the Canadian federation. Since the re-election of the Liberal Party of Canada this spring, various pollsters have entered the field and found hard-to-measure chaos when it comes to Alberta public opinion about sovereignty. Of the respected, respectable pollsters who have asked Albertans, outcomes range from Angus Reid showing 38% for separatism to Leger measuring 49%, this without any Lévesque-like figure uncloaked and on the scene. Furthermore, the somewhat less reputable ThinkHQ has polled on an interesting, related question and found that 60% of the supporters of Smith’s party support separation.

The other numbers that should concern us are that 26% of Canadians now believe Smith is herself a separatist, and an additional 47% see her as fanning the flames of separatism to negotiate more effectively with Ottawa. What few seem to consider is the possibility that she is actually a Bourassa-like figure, a federalist doing everything possible to keep potential separatists in a broad autonomist coalition within Canada.

Because most Canadians outside the Prairies seem oblivious to the effects of the relentless anti-Alberta discourse emanating from our national media, opinion leaders and leadership of Canada’s progressive parties in constantly pushing Albertans away from Canada, it does not occur to them that Smith’s efforts to permit a referendum before pro-independence forces are organized enough to win one is an effort on behalf of federalism. They do not recognize that by co-opting the discourse and policy positions of separatists and presenting them on behalf of a federalist party, as Bourassa did, she is actually working to hold separatists inside her party and hold Alberta inside Canada.

Whether this is a plan or whether it is a series of reactions to events is unknowable to me and knowable, possibly, to her closest confidantes and Smith, herself. But whether she is conscious or not of playing a historical role analogous to Bourassa’s, we all know what happened when Bourassa failed: a national unity crisis of mammoth proportions that fundamentally reordered not just Québec but all of Canada.

Canadian Politics | fusangite |

The Groundhog: Life After the Tories

My Two Years as a Tory
As some of you know, I was deeply involved in the BC Conservative Party the past two years, an experience that I do not regret, despite it ending in easily anticipated disappointment. The reasons for my involvement I made clear: I am from a jurisdiction, British Columbia, whose governments, at both the provincial and federal level are among the most extreme in the Global North when it comes to

  1. shutting down democratic processes, violating democratic norms and draining the power out of legislatures into the hands of the head of government and his unelected courtiers (i.e. the current premier was appointed by the chief lobbyist for Royal Dutch Shell after she, as “returning officer” for his election, disqualified all other candidates),
  2. the Woke capture of institutions and the enforcement of the movement’s bizarre American space religion as the de facto state religion, including the administration of loyalty oaths to the religion’s tenets to obtain or keep most white-collar jobs,
  3. the continued escalation and expansion of programs to facilitate and encourage self-harm, suicide and sex crimes, such as the promotion and distribution of free chemical castration drugs and addictive opiates and stimulants to children as young as twelve, as well the promotion and expansion of state-facilitated suicide facilities and the genital mutilation of troubled children; BC even has a serial child rapist housed in our local prison mother-baby unit!

Like many other anti-authoritarian populists from across the political spectrum, I worked hard to elect BC Conservative MLAs in 2024. And I am glad I did so for a few reasons:

  1. there was a chance we could not pass up that the anti-authoritarian populists would set the course of the party and that of the caucus, containing, as it does, so many newcomers to the legislature who might resist the efforts of the establishment to capture the party and make it part of the One Party, Three Factions system that has run BC for the past generation;
  2. I had the opportunity to meet, work with and befriend an incredibly wide diversity of grassroots activists working hard to oppose our society’s ghoulish and authoritarian turn;
  3. I had the opportunity to work in the BC Legislature, a building the province’s establishment has worked hard to keep me out of the past forty years; and
  4. I had the chance to immerse myself in the present-day culture of the Convoyist, Christian Right and other social movements about which the mainstream media offers only distorted and outdated images.

But the sad reality is that the young courtiers with whom John Rustad, the party leader, insists on surrounding himself, came of age, politically, within the conservative movement under Stephen Harper and his successors, who have actually led the country, until recently, in the destruction of democratic institutions, processes and culture. And this has helped to create a fundamental structural problem in all Canadian political parties: because the leader and his courtiers, not party members or voters, primarily determine whether candidates are nominated and re-nominated, in practical terms, elected officials see themselves as serving at the pleasure of the courtiers, not the reverse.

As a result, it has been fairly easy for the establishment to capture the party and reintegrate it into the One Party, Three Factions system that governs BC. The party has since  proceeded quickly to shut down any level of internal member-driven democracy through mass disenfranchisements and mass expulsions. And party caucus members overwhelmingly see themselves as serving not party members or BC voters but rather the leader and his unelected enforcers.

While this was always the most likely outcome of the BC Conservatives returning to the legislature under the leadership of John Rustad, it was not a certain outcome and, even in the context of a larger failure, my work did help to result in an expansion of the Overton Window in BC politics. Some Tory MLAs, especially those who have since defected to the splinter party, One BC, have stood in the legislature to speak up for biological and historical truth and against the speech suppression efforts in which the establishment and captured institutions in our society have been engaging. And I was pleased to see today’s Mainstreet Research polls showing the Independent Conservatives and/or One BC receiving the support of 10% of voters right out of the gate.

Old Growth and New Growth
This spring, even as my relationship with Rustad and his Young Turks entered its terminal stage, I found myself noticing, almost every week, positive signs in the larger grassroots social movement world. My institute’s gender critical group had become large and committed enough for some members to exit and start a new feminist organization that better expressed their views and approaches and incorporated some of the new energy that has been coming into my group. While schisms are often sad, I was very pleased to see that we had regained the grassroots capacity to have another organization split off without killing us and that people were not in such a defensive mode that they were sticking together out of despair or fear.

I was also contacted by a former elected official about him running an anti-Woke campaign for the leadership of the BC Green Party. While those efforts were ultimately stymied by the party bureaucracy itself, fearing his potential success, it was exciting not just to see this individual attempting a return to electoral politics but to see the number of Old Growth Leftists who were eager to hop on board and start organizing with him.

Then there was the decision of the federal NDP to select its least-Woke caucus member as its interim leader, who began his leadership by issuing a statement repenting of the party’s turn away from class politics and affirming its purpose as politics by and for workers. I also saw my friends in Deep Green Resistance conduct a successful European tour and site their annual conference in Philadelphia, far outside their core territory in Northern California where I have been attending their conventions.

Not only have I seen various members of the Old Growth Left emboldened and reactivated, one of the most exciting things I have been discovering over the past couple of years is just how many Freedom Movement (e.g. Convoyist) and Christian Right activists share a lot more of my concerns than just genderwang, authoritarianism and censorship. If one is looking for peace activists who question NATO, they are to be found on the so-called alt-right; ditto opponents of free trade and investor rights, who favour import substitution industrialization and/or smaller, more locally self-reliant economies.

Furthermore, because the Woke environmental movement has basically lost interest in almost every environmental issue except climate change, there is more environmental concern and activism on the part of conservatives than I have seen in decades. This is true especially in areas of environmental activism the left will not touch for one reason or another.

Cobalt and lithium mining, along with other forms of environmental degradation associated with electric vehicle manufacture are one area of focus. Endocrine disruptor pollution is, again, primarily the concern of conservatives because, on the Woke left, believing that healthy, natural endocrine systems are good is viewed as “transphobic.” Similarly, forest practices that render forests more likely to burn, like the elimination of succession growth trees such as aspen, face greater opposition on the right because climate activists like to depict the increasing number and intensity of wildfires as caused solely by atmospheric carbon buildup. And, practices that cause adverse local, as opposed to global, climate change are, again, primarily within the optic of conservatives and not the Woke left.

But, aside from these culture war “gotchas,” there is just more of a sense on the part of conservatives today that the forests are too quiet, our windshields too clean and our oceans too empty than there has been since I was a teenager.

After three years of living as a pariah in a shrinking world on the left, followed by two years living as a kind of refugee on the right, I feel like I am in a social location where I can organize and speak about what I believe in again. The combination of changes on the political right and the sheer number of refugees from Wokeness, like me, that it has had to take in, has created opportunities to get on with the work of building parallel, replacement institutions on the conservative/alt-right side of our cultural partition.

Groundhog Day
As I suggested in my recent article, the Death of Parable, our lack of access to agrarian and natural landscapes and their creatures has impaired our capacity to engage in metaphor, comparison and literary reference. Such is the case with Groundhog Day. The term now refers not to Groundhog Day but to a thirty-year-old film about a TV reporter covering the festival. When people say “Groundhog Day” today, they usually mean that they are being forced to live in a time loop, to endlessly re-experience the same sequence of events. Many have forgotten that this day was originally about the arrival of spring and oracular beliefs about a particular animal.

As legend has it, when a groundhog emerges from his burrow after hibernating through the winter, if he is able to see his shadow, he retreats into his burrow and hibernates for another six weeks. If he does not, spring is arriving.

I guess what I am really trying to say in this article is that, for the first time in half a decade, I cannot see my shadow. I feel in my bones that spring is finally coming for the Old Growth Left after a long, long, cold winter.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |

Forget “ignorance is strength;” in today’s Canada, weakness is strength

On June 28th, 1988 Brian Smith, the Attorney-General of British Columbia dramatically resigned his position during a speech to the provincial legislature. Smith had been at odds with Premier Bill Vander Zalm over major policy differences with his boss. After the resignation and speech, he spoke to reporters and then attended the caucus meeting that debated the fallout of his move. He remained a leading member of that caucus for the next year and a half, at which time he resigned to accept a job in the private sector. A week later, Grace McCarthy, the deputy premier resigned, also citing concerns about policy and leadership. Both remained members of the Social Credit caucus throughout Vander Zalm’s premiership.

Upon Smith’s resignation from the Legislature in November 1989, Vander Zalm called a byelection for his seat of Oak Bay-Gordon Head. Oak Bay’s popular mayor, Susan Brice, who agreed with the criticisms of McCarthy and Smith resigned her position to seek the Social Credit nomination. She was opposed at the packed and hotly contested meeting by Kathleen Toth, an anti-abortion activist, Vander Zalm loyalist and future friend and comrade of mine.

Toth lost the nomination to Brice who would go on to campaign on the slogan, “Send a message to Bill Vander Zalm—and make me the messenger.” Vander Zalm dutifully signed Brice’s nomination papers after she won a large, democratic mandate from party members and encouraged voters to support her. She was narrowly defeated by NDP candidate Elizabeth Cull, whose ignominious future in BC politics will be covered in a future essay.

That is not to say that the Social Credit Party’s caucus survived Vander Zalm’s leadership intact. MLAs Graham Bruce, Dave Mercier, Doug Mowat and Duane Crandall all temporarily left the caucus, caucusing as “Independent Social Credit” from October 1989 to February 1990.

Vander Zalm had no love for Brice when he signed her nomination papers or for McCarthy and Smith as they grumbled from his back bench. But he suffered their membership in caucus and suffered Brice’s candidacy for one simple reason—to do anything else would have made him look weaker than he already did.

Only a generation ago, you see, democratic norms in Canada were such that not permitting a candidate to run because they openly opposed your leadership, expelling members from caucus because they did not like how you were running things would have made a leader look weak, fragile, unable to face opposition in a caucus meeting, willing to void the democratic decision of party members simply to silence dissent. The thinking was, back then, that a leader who couldn’t win a vote fair and square, couldn’t face down his internal opposition in a meeting was so weak, so incapable of the thrust and parry of politics that they were axiomatically unqualified for high office.

A true leader, a powerful person, was someone who could keep a caucus in line, a party in line, a government in line through old fashioned loyalty and charisma. If a leader were in danger of losing a vote, he would be shaking hands, slapping backs and cutting deals right in the open at a nomination meeting, party convention or caucus retreat.

If a leader were concerned about whom the members would choose to represent them in a tough seat or a seat he wanted for one of his buddies, that leader would drive or fly to the local nominating meeting, just as NDP leader Mike Harcourt did in 1990, when his preferred candidate in Nelson-Creston, Corky Evans, was facing an unexpectedly strong challenge from environmentalist Wayne Peppard, who had signed up more new members than Evans and appeared on track to win at the meeting.

Back then, candidate nominations in Canada worked like nuclear missile silos. Two keys had to be turned to launch a candidacy, one by the local members at their nominating meeting and one by the party’s leader. Typically, if the party leader didn’t like the local choice, they would suck it up and sign the nomination papers anyway, the way Vander Zalm did with Susan Brice. If the leader really couldn’t abide the local candidate, they could refuse to sign, the result being that no candidate was fielded under the party banner, not that the leader would simply handpick a local candidate.

So, Harcourt and his guys headed up to Nelson and shook the hand of every person who attended. In plain view of the assembled media, many who had followed them up from the coast, they intimidated; they negotiated; they slapped backs; they made promises; they used charisma and star power. And they won the meeting, proving that Harcourt was a strong leader, a man with the charisma and authority to change the minds and votes of local party members at a consequential meeting.

Indeed, that was how Andrea Horvath and Peter Kormos swung enough votes from the ranks of my supporters to leader-preferred Julian Heller in the NDP nomination meeting for the Saint Paul’s byelection in 2009. But that era was practically over by then. The following year, it would not be a charm offensive or Kormos trying to dislocate my shoulder from behind that would end by NDP candidacy in the federal riding of the same name. My candidacy was simply vetoed by the NDP’s newly-installed “vetting committee.”

Those changes had been underway for some time, first in the Liberal Party of Canada, where the party changed its constitution in 1996 to permit the leader to unilaterally nominate candidates without local nomination meetings. Stephen Harper’s Tories were quick to adopt the same practice in 2003, followed by the NDP in 2010, just in the nick of time to stop me!

By the time the NDP adopted these changes, the legacy media was demanding them because the theory of what made a leader strong or legitimate had wholly inverted in less than a generation.

Today, a strong leader, is understood by the Canadian establishment as someone who can and should silence all criticism within their party and expel from its caucus and its membership anyone publicly critical of them. Giving one’s critics a hearing, debating areas of disagreement, seeking to bring one’s opponents around to one’s side, tolerating different camps in one’s party and dealing fairly with all of them, resolving disputes by voting not barking orders: these things are portrayed by our legacy media as signs of weakness, incompetence and disorganization. Personalities that, in any other time, would be understood as those of petty tyrants are understood to be the epitome of democratic statesmanship, and vice versa.

This sea change in our theory of leadership may have started in party back rooms but is now everywhere. Legacy media attacked Pierre Poilievre for meeting with Freedom Convoy representatives. While he did not take up most of their demands, he has nevertheless been pilloried in the national press for three straight years for merely speaking with people whose political views are controversial. That was once the duty of every politician in a democracy. Now it is seen not merely as a political failure but a moral one.

Furthermore, he took months of abuse from the media for allowing some of his MPs to meet with visiting members of the Bundestag representing the Alliance for Germany, the government-in-waiting, as the chamber’s second-largest party. Sure AfD has some controversial policies but not long ago, (a) it was not a party leader’s business to regulate every single meeting members of his caucus took and (b) it would have been viewed as a serious lapse of political and diplomatic etiquette for a visiting delegation of foreign parliamentarians to be denied a meeting with every single member of our parliament.

What would have looked like cowardice, smallness, a lack of curiosity, a failure of basic politeness, decency and hospitality in 1995 is lauded as statesmanship in 2025. The behaviours our culture has, for centuries, belittled as weak and tyrannical are now somehow supposed to be understood as courageous, as showing leadership. People who cannot or will not face, will not confront people who have strong opinions of their own, who are comfortable only in rooms of toadies, sycophants and stooges are, by definition, incapable of leading us anywhere good because they are not true leaders.

These may be stupid, ugly, petty times but true leadership is what it has always been, no matter how hard the media works to make cowardice seem courageous and courage seem cowardly.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

From South Chicago to Lower Post, BC: The Contemporary Relevance of Richard Wright’s Native Son

Orthodoxy and Un-Saying
People often mistakenly call Wokeness and its component parts “ideology.” While there are certainly ideological aspects of this godless religion, they are often not the most salient characteristics. Certainly, there are religious doctrines associated with this cluster of social movements, but the mechanisms by which they are defended or justified are not ideological in character. Indeed, when a movement propounding a religious orthodoxy takes an authoritarian turn, as Wokeness certainly has, ideologically driven argument is rarely its preferred tool for imposing its beliefs on the skeptical.

For instance, when Galileo Galilei was persecuted for propounding his scientific discoveries, the argument of the Roman Catholic Church was not that his views were incorrect. No argument was mounted against his ideas. Rather, the church argued that stating his views was impermissible and because his views should not have been stated, they were effectively un-said. No argument needed to be mounted against them at all; the faithful were not asked to disbelieve them but rather to act as though they had never heard them.

To state that Central Asian Muslim migrant communities in England are perpetrating violence against girls at a significantly greater rate than their neighbours is not a position UK Labour politicians argue against. They simply state that making this observation is Islamophobic. Because it is impermissible to make the observation, its veracity need not be evaluated. To observe that transgender-identified males are three to four times more likely to commit acts of sexual violence than other males is not a position anyone argues against. Such an observation is un-said because to make it is transphobic. To observe that the main reason that black Americans are more likely to be victims of violent crimes is because young black males are more likely to commit such crimes than other Americans is racist. The veracity of the observation is irrelevant. The problem is not vulnerable black Americans being assaulted; it is people talking about who is assaulting them.

These practices of orthodoxy enforcement, of un-saying, do not impact all of us equally. As you can see from the paragraph above, this kind of retroactive censorship hits the most vulnerable people in our society the hardest, working class teenage girls, incarcerated women and black seniors are just some of the constituencies whose victimization it is impermissible to talk about. Furthermore, if we expand our optic, we might also consider how ill-served young black men or men compelled by an untreated mental illness to mutilate themselves also are by this state of affairs.

Author Wesley Yang cogently observed on Twitter last week that, thanks to this phenomenon, “the best way to obtain immunity from consequence in today’s media environment is to make one’s wrongdoing aligned with dark stereotypes adhering to one’s group—so that a neutral description of what you actually did violates a taboo against exclusionary tropes.”

This “shoot the messenger” policy is today so vigorously defended by those claiming to be “anti-racism” activists that many imagine these practices of silencing observations that risk reinforcing negative stereotypes have always been a practice of anti-racist movements. But this is just another example of Woke reimaginings of the past to serve the present.

Richard Wright, Native Son and the Black Communists
Richard Wright, whose grandparents had been born into slavery, whose parents were sharecroppers, who grew up in violent, impoverished homes and the occasional orphanage lifted himself out of poverty to become one of the greatest black American novelists of the twentieth century. An autodidact with little formal education, Wright did not merely teach himself the craft of writing but dialectical materialism. His credentials as a Marxist and literary giant, not to mention his membership in the Communist Party, ultimately led to his selection as editor of the Daily Worker in 1937.

Shortly thereafter, he began work on his next novel, Native Son. Its main character was provocatively named Bigger Thomas. Bigger—whose name Wright said he chose deliberately to rhyme with “nigger”—was a young, violent black criminal who epitomized the stereotypes of young American black men that are little-changed in the eighty-five years since the novel was first published. “Thomas” referred to the obsequious and weak aspects of his nature by way of reference to Uncle Tom of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Native Son was published in 1940 to great accolades from across the American left. The first novel by a black author featured by Book of the Month Club, it was praised by communists, socialists and civil rights activists; Hollywood made three movies of it, the first in 1951, starring Wright himself. Partly inspired by Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Bigger, an uneducated violent petty criminal, murders a young, naïve, white communist woman and, in prison, discovers not Jesus but Karl Marx. Orson Welles directed its 1941 Broadway debut.

Much of the final part of the book is a structural analysis of the economic forces that have manufactured Thomas and his ilk that caused so many young men to become uneducated violent criminals. The fact was that too many black men were poor; too many were uneducated; too many were violent; too many were Uncle Toms.

One would think that in our Woke moment, when ideas of “structural violence,” “institutional racism,” “colonialism,” etc. seem hegemonic that Native Son with its highly didactic Marxist concluding chapters would be a much beloved text among progressives. But we all know the reality. Were Native Son published today, it would be assailed as a racist, white supremacist text that reinforced racial stereotypes. Wokes would burn copies and call for Wright’s assault or murder for suggesting, as an eye-witness, that America’s black community has problems with men’s violence that are common to all communities and has problems that are exceptional and non-universal.

You Cannot Cure What You Cannot Diagnose
If one cannot name a problem, the chances of solving it become vanishingly small. If one cannot take notice of the specific features of violence and other social problems in a place like South Side Chicago, where Wright grew up, what chance do we have of addressing these problems? We cannot protect people from today’s Bigger Thomases on their block if we cannot admit that Thomas exists in the first place.

Whether it is violence in America’s inner cities or addiction on Canada’s remote Indian Reserves, an establishment that will not let you notify it of problems because it un-says every report cannot and will note help you. It cannot and will not design rational public policy responses when its discourse insists that there is no such problem because you haven’t reported it because it would be bigoted and reinforce negative stereotypes to do so. Not reinforcing the “drunken Indian” stereotype is more important than helping indigenous communities struggling with addiction.

That is why, today, it is the local Indian Bands in places like Lower Post and Skidegate are taking extraordinary and extralegal measures to protect their communities from the blizzard of drug dealing unleashed by BC’s “safe supply” policies. They realize there is no help coming from the white progressives running the government and the cops because these coddled souls imagine that the worst thing that can happen to you is that someone says negative things about a group you are part of. Not, say, death from fentanyl or a collision with an impaired driver. The establishment is so focused on protecting vulnerable communities from having their problems named that it is doing all it can to ensure that their problems cannot be solved because they cannot be discussed.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity Race Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

Canada 2025: the Election that Time Forgot

Geopolitics Is Not a Schoolyard
For an election that is supposedly about how Canada will respond to Donald Trump’s trade, investment and foreign policy, nobody seems to be actually putting forward a policy framework that makes any sense. Instead, our state-subsidized news media has decided that this is not a policy contest at all but about how will “stand up” and “talk tough,” who can “make Donald Trump behave,” or “put Donald Trump in his place.” “You always must stand up to bullies, no matter what,” apparently serious opinion leaders opine.

These are folks who used to remind us that saying “we need to run the government like a business” was an infantile and immature simplification of the task of governing because the state is bigger, more complex and has a different purpose than a car dealership are now eager to tell us that geopolitics is just like a playground. Just stand your ground and punch the bully because bullies always back down in the face of courage. Because countries are just like elementary school students, even the ones with gigantic nuclear arsenals capable of annihilating all life on earth forever with the press of a button.

While Canada is on an extra-stupid tear as a country right now and we are currently living through the Gaslightenment, it is nevertheless remarkable how little this election contains any actual policy responses to the tariffs. Instead, like spoiled children, Canadians seem mainly focused on making the case that Americans owe us unobstructed access to their steel and aluminum markets, that the president of the US owes Canadians continued prosperity, even if it contributes to America’s massive trade deficit with the rest of the world.

In essence, rather than putting forward a plan to adapt to America’s new trade, industrial, migration and foreign policies our opinion leaders and most of our politicians are instead simply demanding that America change those policies back to the way they were under the Biden Administration. While the Conservative Party has, just in the past couple of days, at least begun to go beyond that, the policies on offer are not impressive.

To understand this failure in both our national discourse and in our public policy imagination, we need to remember how issues like this played out a century ago.

The End of the Progressive Era and the Rise of ISI
A common theme in my writing the past few years has been the shocking parallels between the present and the world of a century ago, reminding me of Karl Marx’s take on the history of the West, that events in our history repeat, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” So, to review, the Progressive Era (1890-1930) was a period when the economy grew rapidly, as did the gap between rich and poor.

Labour costs were depressed and housing prices rose rapidly thanks to uncontrolled mass migration policies and rapidly consolidating private capital in the form of monopolies and oligopolies. Economic growth was maintained through this period through population growth, mass migration and major increases in consumer credit and consumer debt. Curiously, when our societies are run by a small number of tycoons and corporations who control the media and the major industries and reap massive profits leavened by consumer debt, cross dressing and eugenics seem to get awfully popular.

This was not an indefinitely sustainable state of affairs. And so, in the mid-1920s, countries like Canada, the US, Brazil and the new British colonial regime in Palestine enacted sudden and dramatic reductions in immigration. These dramatic reductions were likely essential in forestalling and ultimately preventing the rise of successful fascist parties in the New World, with the exception of the Vargas regime in Brazil, destination of the second-largest number of immigrants after the US.

Following the start of the Great Depression half a decade later, the other cornerstones of Progressive Era economic policy also gradually came to lose their credibility. Growth leavened by private borrowing, free trade, unimpeded investment and what Lenin called “financialization” of developed economies stopped delivering the growth and profits they had in decades previous. Trade declined and trade-dependent economies were required to pivot dramatically in order to avoid entering into a tailspin of debt and underdevelopment.

The countries that handled this era the best and experienced not just less economic decline but, in some cases, increased economic growth and stability were those that switched first and most aggressively from liberal trade and investment policies to what are called “import substitution industrialization” (ISI) policies. Whereas liberal/free trade policies seek to enrich an economy by attracting foreigners to purchase its exports and invest in its businesses, ISI policies seek to concentrate local consumer spending power on local production by diversifying the economy and producing more finished products for local consumers.

Naturally, if one is running a liberal free trade economy, when one’s trading partners switch from free trade to ISI, this deepens the tailspin in a free trading economy by redirecting foreign investment and purchasing power into a neighbour’s domestic economy. In other words, when the world, and, in particular, one’s close trading partner, turns away from free trade and towards ISI, it is important to adopt one’s own ISI policies expeditiously before too much foreign investment and purchasing dries up.

Argentia and Brazil were especially successful in the 1930s because they switched from free trade to ISI faster than other states, acting with an immediacy and a focus that spared their societies the depths of the Great Depression other countries went through. The United States’ pivot was slower, with the Roosevelt government only beginning ISI policies in 1933 and, despite the country’s greater size, it experienced a tougher Great Depression than societies that pivoted more rapidly on trade and investment policy.

Today, we face a similar situation to that of the Interwar Years (i.e. the 1920s and 30s). An era a free trade, open borders, unrestricted investment and economic financialization is ending. Free trade is giving way to protectionism and tariff walls, genuine walls are rising along borders and checkpoints and border enforcement are hardening, pro-foreign investment policies are being replaced by incentives for domestic reinvestment and economies that were financializing and offshoring industry are now reindustrializing.

But Canada is turning out to be a far worse policy laggard than we were in the 1930s.

Canada’s Generation of Living in the Past
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Canada has become an increasingly backward jurisdiction relative to global trends. Just as neoconservatism was running out of gas everywhere else, we elected the Stephen Harper government in 2006. By the time we finally gave him a majority in 2011, his was the last neocon regime on earth.

Similarly, just as the rest of the civilized world has been undertaking course corrections on policies like Genderwang and DEI, with these policies being rolled by in Norway, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, the UK, Italy, the US, Argentina and a host of other developed countries, Canada is only intensifying these policies.

Canada’s commitment to functioning as a nostalgic intellectual and political backwater has real costs at this moment. Instead of reading the geopolitical room and moving quickly and decisively to enact ISI policies, diversifying our economy and redirecting local investors towards our economy, as is taking place in the US, we are mainly focused on explaining why we should not have to adapt and why it is dumb and wrong to bring an end to the era of neoliberal trade, investment and migration policies. Dumb or not, wrong or not, that is what is happening. And Canada has neither the credibility nor the power to arrest, never mind reverse, current global economic trends. We must adapt.

But the problem is that every single one of our national political parties has the same cutting edge 1990s neoliberal trade and investment policies. With the accession of Jean Chretien to the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1990, the party abandoned its longstanding support for ISI and wholly committed to neoliberalism. The NDP followed suit in 2006, following heavy criticism from the media for not being part of Canada’s policy consensus on trade and investment.

When the turn away from neoliberalism began throughout the Global North post-2012, the US saw the popular Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump presidential candidacies explicitly opposing NAFTA and open borders, assailing many aspects of neoliberalism and touting ISI. In 2016, we did not just see Trump take the presidency but the UK withdraw from the neoliberal Maastricht Treaty governing the European Union. And major conflicts over neoliberalism erupted in both Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party and Boris Johnson’s Tories, as Nigel Farage’s Reform UK rose in the polls, entering Westminster finally in 2024. These conflicts are playing out in Italy, France and Germany too as the different political systems grapple with the collapse of the neoliberal consensus.

While this era has seen the rise of new parties opposing the neoliberal consensus, like Germany’s AfD and BSW and the UK’s Reform and the resurgence of early 90s anti-neoliberal parties like Australia’s One Nation, Canada’s offering has been especially lame and anemic. Former Conservative cabinet minister Maxime Bernier resigned from the Tory party after losing a close leadership race and, since 2019, has been leader of the People’s Party of Canada, a party that, at first glance, appears to be Canada’s equivalent.

While it is true that Bernier’s party shares the migration, climate and Covid policy skepticism of these other parties, where it differs is that it is actually more fundamentalist in its commitment to neoliberal trade and investment policies, that its main message is that Canada needs to double down on neoliberal orthodoxy and anchor its policies more closely to the economic orthodoxies of the 1990s.

In other words, the reasons we are hearing such an utterly facile and empty debate about which leader will be the toughest and pluckiest when it comes to impotently wagging their finger at Trump or making hyperbolic threats and unhelpful personal denunciations of Trump and his cronies is that Canada has an all-party consensus in favour of continuing to beat the drum of neoliberalism, even as the number of free trading economies in the world continues to shrink precipitously.

Only this weekend did we see the first tentative efforts at a domestic self-reliance reinvestment policy with an announcement from Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre to that effect. The rest of our political class has no answer to the present state of affairs other than to demand that a time machine be built so we can go back to competing in the global economy that existed between 1989 and 2015 and, frankly, it’s not like Poilievre has an answer that is remotely good or comprehensive enough.

Of course, Canada’s failed journalistic establishment is not helping, by insisting that geopolitics is a schoolyard and that personal pluckiness, seriousness and firmness are perfectly reasonable replacements for sophisticated economic and foreign policy on the world stage. But they are not. And, thanks to an ossified and out of date policy consensus, a media composed mostly of stooges and stenographers for the establishment, Canadians are in danger continuing down an economic path from which the rest of the industrialized world is turning back. And if there is one kind of policy on which you cannot go it alone, it is neoliberal free trade and investment.

Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |

Fragility, Sensitivity and Canada’s Authoritarian Turn

Stupidly, I was in an argument about my support for the Freedom Convoy with an old acquaintance on Facebook the other day. I generally prefer to do my arguing on the Twitter because it’s easier to have arguments in which professional censors do not intervene. But, because it is probably the least socially partitioned platform these days, one can have experiences there that just don’t happen so much on Twitter anymore.

I suggested that, while the proponents of the dangerous ideology of Truckism might staged the longest, largest, loudest tailgate party to date, the Convoy was far less physically dangerous, far more law abiding  and, most importantly, far less lethal than comparable mass protests like the George Floyd protests, the Occupy movement or the Indian farmers’ march. It lacked the open air drug market scene of Occupy and consequently did not produce the masses of overdose deaths and close calls Occupy camps did. It lacked the vigilantism, vandalism and mob violence of the Floyd protests and so, did not get anyone shot, unlike the protests sponsored by Black Lives Matter.

So, why was it so much worse than these rallies? And why was it necessary to use emergency powers against it?

My interlocutor replied that it was because of all the horn honking at all days and hours. That would be annoying, I responded. No. It’s actual torture. It’s an atrocity. It’s banned in the Geneva Convention. (Of course, so is putting men in women’s prisons but no matter!)

One of the biggest problems I have speaking across the social partition with my friends who continue to reside in the progressiverse is that I often do not credit that they sincerely hold some of the beliefs they espouse, that saying obvious falsehoods is such an important boundary maintenance practice these days that I tend to go that route more frequently and more ungenerously than I should.

But I felt a real note of urgency, of sincerity. This person could not imagine suffering more profound than a couple of weeks of frequent and annoyingly loud car and truck horn blasts through the night in a major city. This was such extreme violence, such extreme suffering, such trauma that Nuremberg-style trials should possibly be empaneled to punish the Truckists for this heinous crime!

Having just spend a year living in Dar Es Salaam with my neighbourhood’s late night bars and pubs and my apartment complex’s chickens, I was tempted to suggest that your average Canadian could not handle the noise culture of any major world city, even when a massive protest was not going on.

On the same day—yes, I managed my time very poorly that day—I found myself in an equally useful but similarly illuminating debate about British Columbia’s Bill 7, an actual enabling act, one of many tributes to the original 1933 version, very much in the style of Nicolas Maduro and other authoritarian strong men who periodically ram a bill through parliament declaring a continuing state of emergency, necessitating that the head of government rule by decree. In this case, BC’s government wants two years to rule by decree, collect personal information unhindered, restrict speech and mobility rights and enact or amend any provincial law without resort to the legislature.

Why? Well, because these aluminum tariffs really hurt BC. In fact, they are causing such unprecedented disruption, such extreme hurt that of course the government needs unfettered powers. Canada, the story goes, has never faced so great a threat as the Trump Administration’s punitive and arbitrary tariffs. Donald Trump is the biggest threat to Canadian rights and liberty because he is depriving us of our fundamental right to sell Rio Tinto’s aluminum ingots to foreigners, unobstructed.

But again, I sensed the genuine fear, desperation, need for order.

But if we didn’t need this kind of legislation when the far more impactful softwood lumber tariffs went into effect four separate times through the 1980s, 90s and 00s, why do we need an enabling act now? Because this is worse. Because the real threat is what Trump says he wants to do, to annex Canada, to punish Canada—he’s revealing his mind to us, the fact that the tanks will be rolling across the border any day now.

But we didn’t need such sweeping authoritarian legislation even when we were fighting Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo eighty years ago. Why now? Because this is literally the scariest thing that has ever happened to Canada. Scarier than Ronald “Nuclear Warning Shot” Reagan was elected, scarier than when we headed to Vimy Ridge or the Battle of the Bulge, scarier than our actual war with the US back in the 1810s.

I think people are sincerely feeling these emotions because fear is contagious but also because exhibiting fear and panic strengthens authoritarian social impulses and that is what our leaders want right now. Rule by decree is saleable only to bullies and cowards, to the extent that the two categories are separable.

In other words, I believe that core to the rise of cultural authoritarianism among Anglo Canadians has been a new politics of personal fragility, one inextricable from the rise of Justin Trudeau and the new nationalism he hawked. I wrote about this disturbing trend and where it might send us in the early days of the 2015 election campaign following a striking and bizarre moment at the first federal leaders’ debate:

I was initially so surprised by Justin Trudeau’s sudden pivot, echoed in pre-rehearsed, stage-ready tweets and Facebook posts from campaign surrogates, to immediately assert that his continued feelings of bereavement surrounding his father’s death a decade and a half ago required some kind of disability accommodation by everyone else in Canada. Gerald Butts and other Liberal surrogates instantaneously reacted to Tom Mulcair’s assertion that the NDP’s multi-generation track record of standing up for Canadians’ liberty was demonstrated in their opposition to the War Measures Act in 1971. Apparently, this implied criticism of Trudeau’s dad was dirty pool and had hurt the prospective Prime Minister’s feelings. The recent emergence of medically invalid but nevertheless popular “trigger warnings” on US college campuses had, somehow, leapt across the border and now, fifteen of the past fifty years of Canadian politics were off-limits for fear of causing one rich white man to experience hurt feelings.

But I am no longer surprised. This bullshit is totally working. All kinds of random people, veterans struggling with amputations and PTSD, precariously employed minimum wage workers, racialized populations being stripped of their citizenship rights—these people, ordinary Canadians, are getting really concerned about how Mulcair was insufficiently considerate of Trudeau’s hurt feelings. How is it that the feelings of one attractive, privileged, successful, white adult male could become the object of so much sympathy that the entire narrative of the campaign changed in one day? How could Butts and the other Liberal strategists have calculated that so many Canadians whose easiest day is tougher than Trudeau’s hardest would have become so concerned about another national leader being inconsiderate of his feelings?

In hindsight, this scene was a harbinger of what would go wrong with this country over the past decade. The man who would later unconstitutionally use emergency powers against his citizens couldn’t be grilled on the subject because to elicit his opinion about the use of the War Measures Act during the FLQ Crisis because it might hurt his feelings.

But I want to go further: Justin Trudeau’s use of performative grief, of his own tears as the linchpin of his rhetorical strategy helped Canadians slide faster towards cultural authoritarianism. You see: Trudeau’s tears functioned as both sword and shield. They could be used to indict the behaviour of others not by demonstrating its wrongness but rather by how it impacted the Prime Minister’s emotions. The tears were, more importantly, a shield. They allowed Trudeau to dodge questions, not just those he was took choked to answer but, more importantly, all the questions his tears stifled in the throats or on the lips of his interlocutors, the passive-aggressive intimidation of a very powerful man crying.

As I observed in my original commentary, there is nothing new about linking social and political rank and power to a politics of sensitivity, fragility, even. The Princess and the Pea is, in some ways, the ultimate Enlightenment description of political legitimacy, that only a true princess would be so sensitive as to feel a single dried pea through seventeen goose down mattresses.

Last week, in Nanaimo, a criminal trial took place of a man who assaulted a woman on her way home from a parents’ rights protest. More than a foot taller than the fifty-two-year-old, the man who had more than a decade and a foot on his victim explained to the court that he had to punch her in the face because she made him feel “unsafe.”

Those present to support the victim were baffled that this appeared to amount to the sum total of the assailant’s defense. But he clearly believed (and the courts might agree with him), that feeling uncomfortable or whatever “unsafe” means to an individual like this was a nothing short of a threat to his very existence.

More importantly, as with Justin Trudeau in that fateful debate, it is clear that preventing certain people from experiencing unpleasant feelings, even if those feelings might only last moments is more important than Canada’s national leaders being able to debate emergency powers legislation and its abuse. After all, stopping certain people from feeling bad is enough reason to use those very emergency powers; it is even sufficient reason to breach our society’s state monopoly on violence to permit the dozens of unprosecuted assaults against women rallying and speaking in support of their rights and those of their children.

But, of course, the problem with the success of efforts to punish, chill and silence speech high-status individuals find hard to tolerate is that the more people are protected from speech that makes them feel bad, the less able they are to handle such speech when it somehow gets around the barricades. Consequently, offense-based speech restriction produces an ever-receding horizon of offense. And that means an ever-increasing demand for new legal, social and technological tools to manage the increasingly fragile personalities.

In essence, we are becoming addicts of censorship, state censorship, community censorship, self-censorship and even compelled speech and like addicts of all things, more censorship creates more tolerance (i.e. speech sensitivity) which then requires more censorship.

Those we coddle by acceding to their authoritarian demands inevitably grow ever more despotic and fragile. People who are so used to other people preventing them from having experiences that elicit negative or challenging emotions lose their ability to manage their own emotions and become increasingly convinced that it is the job of everyone around them to manage their emotions for them. Those who refuse to be conscripted into changing their speech and that of those around them to accommodate the acquired fragility of special persons are understood to be hate criminals, bigots who deserve whatever is coming to them, firing, beating, incarceration, whatever!

As this vicious cycle of offense-taking and new forms of punishment and overreaction, we are generating a society that genuinely believes that it is the president of the United States’ duty to make sure foreigners like us are prosperous, that believes our prosperity must be guaranteed by the US government and that it is not merely a nice thing but a fundamental right. We expect coddling in a widening set of contexts.

Canadians have experienced far greater hardships than these tariffs but, when one asks why the BC government did not require the ability to rule by decree during the Softwood Wars, the Salmon War or the two actual World Wars, the answer is “but Donald Trump keeps talking about the ‘51st state.’ Can’t you see the tanks are going to roll across the border and begin killing us!” Unlike our reaction to Reagan’s far more serious threats of a nuclear first strike, our interpretation a 10% duty on aluminum ingots, because these very fragile, sensitive folks all believe they can read Trump’s mind, is that it is identical to soldiers marching into town and shooting our family members and neighbours.

What an increasingly number of Canadians cannot handle and require unprecedented measures to handle is being taunted and trolled by Trump. Of course, we really need sweeping emergency powers because those powers must be used to prevent Trump from making us feel angry, scared, powerless, humiliated, insecure because we have lost the ability to manage those normal emotions and how need not just a media bubble lying to us about our ability to vanquish the US in a one-on-one trade war or even conventional war; we need the full coercive power of the state to shut people up, shut people down—anything to solve the emergency called “our feelings.”

Of course, not all Canadians are understood to deserve or can conscript the state and those around us into managing our emotions. Obviously, women and girls wishing to protect their sports, spaces, privacy, etc. must manage their own emotions, even “reframe their trauma,” to make sure that the Hearers of this Manichean system are the exclusive beneficiaries of this external emotion-management.

Our society is growing more authoritarian by the day and that authoritarianism is powered by inculcating novel and escalating forms of fragility, concurrent with the expectation that this fragility is everyone’s problem except one’s own. And when people see no difference between special, designated individuals hearing words they would rather not and such things as murder and assault, we know where that goes: exactly where Canada is going now, concurrently descending into both increasing vigilante violence and increasingly authoritarian government.  

Sensitivity is important; empathy is important; but so is taking responsibility for one’s own emotions, even if they are a reaction to the actions of others. This country needs a corollary to Pink Shirt Day, maybe Blue Shirt Day, the day where we celebrate those who are continent and responsible, who manage their own emotions and learn the most important thing about bullying: how to stand up to a bully. Because if you don’t learn to stand up to bullies, you are fated to become one, like the petty authoritarians with whom the Canadian establishment is replete and who constantly seek new means of lawfare, intimidation, threats and violence to prevent themselves experiencing feelings they have made themselves too fragile to handle.

Cue Flight of the Conchords!

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

The Class Contradictions of the Conservative Courtier

My old friend George Gibault, the director of Social Credit Caucus Research from the 1970s until the party’s ultimate collapse in 1994 was exceptional. He played a significant role in an internal coup against Premier Bill Vander Zalm in 1988, working with Finance Minister Mel Couvelier and Attorney-General Bud Smith to radically circumscribe the powers of the premier and place much de facto authority in the hands of Couvelier and Smith.

George’s involvement in that high-level decision was exceptional because he was a career courtier who had risen through the ranks of the party’s unelected activists and through the party bureaucracy in the Victoria legislature while it sat in government.

While courtiers have always been an important part of politics in any system of government, different social orders strongly condition who becomes a powerful courtier and how. When George was coming up politically, during the last decades of the Cold War, the most senior courtiers, especially in conservative parties, were not people who had risen through the ranks of junior courtiers. Premiers and Prime Ministers hired men—and it was overwhelmingly men—out of other careers, “successful” businessmen, academics, prominent lawyers, who would typically place their assets in some kind of trust to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest and self-dealing. They would also take a significant pay cut. The discourse was that they were “giving something back,” engaging in “public service.”

We all know that the trusts were not very blind and that the friends and relatives of the courtiers would soon find the government making decisions that improved their bottom line. Nevertheless, the public performance of virtue did condition our horizon of expectations. When these men were revealed to be self-dealers, hypocrites, we would be outraged, genuinely, because their authority supposedly came from their altruistic virtue. Men like Jimmy Pattison, the future billionaire, were given prominent jobs for a nominal or token salary; such jobs were an effective tactic for self-fashioning and virtue signaling for those wishing to graduate from a mere rich and successful businessman and enter the financial elite.

Conservative parties also had a healthy verging on unhealthy suspicion of civil servants. Indeed, provincial civil servants did not gain the right to vote in BC elections until 1972. The sense was that the civil service was a separate and hostile locus of power in a legislature. Both of BC’s major parties continued conducting gratuitous reorganizations and civil service purges until the end of the twentieth century. Political power, understood as a zero sum game, meant that every bit of power an unelected government employee gained came either at the expense of the liberty of the citizens or at the expense of the power of elected representatives.

Perhaps because of the outsized influence of Warsaw Pact refugees within Social Credit, the party, George especially, feared the political world in which we now live, in which the managerial class has become fully self-conscious and self-interested and has, as a cartel, seized state power from elected officials primarily through the courtier subset of the managerial class or, as they used to say out East, the commissars.

As the twenty-first century has worn on, our baseline has shifted and we have normalized the way that the courtier class has usurped the power of elected officials and how it has come to control its own promotion structures, making career courtiers the norm, for the first time, on the political right.

Ironically, this has also led to a decline in our expectations that our politicians, elected and unelected, will or should not engage in brazen self-dealing and looting of the public purse. If being a courtier is just a profession, like any other, expected to act in its own interests and make no pretense of a special virtue, altruism or sacrifice, how are we to object to them pursuing “their own interests.” And this has bled to our expectations of elected officials, especially as their wealth has increased so rapidly relative to the rest of the population.

But, especially since the advent of Trumpism and the other Bannonite movements around the world, parties of the right have developed a class politics utterly inimical to the courtier class. At a moment when their parties and governments, like all others, are in the vise grip of the commissars, conservative parties find themselves crucibles of class conflict. Courtiers inside conservative parties might strike the odd anti-Woke pose and try to sound like Andrew Tate but they are fundamentally motivated by the same class interests that motivate progressive courtiers and the permanent civil service.

In other words, to be a decent conservative courtier, one must be a supremely self-conscious, self-examining class traitor. At my job, I try to follow George’s example and be exactly that. But that’s the problem with neoliberalism: you cannot solve systemic problems solely through personal virtue. And so, the only other option is that conservatives must break the power of the labour system, smash its promotion structures, purge the ranks, slash the pay and install good old fashioned senior courtiers.

And this is why the managerial class hates Elon Musk more even than Donald Trump. Because the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency and Musk’s control of is something out of the Cold War, before the managerial class became self-conscious and seized huge chunks of state, social and institutional power. Not only does it place a wealthy, eccentric businessman with no government experience at its head; its primary purpose is to conduct a massive civil service purge and concurrent reorganization, seeking to break the hold of the commissars on the state.

And Musk is not the only “inexperienced” and “unqualified” Trump appointee. Nearly every cabinet nominee was assailed during confirmation for the fact that they had not come up through the supposedly meritocratic civil service. Again and again, Democratic senators implied or directly stated that a person who was not already a member of the courtier class, who had done work like this before inside the state, was simply incapable of being a cabinet minister.

Instead of concealing their belief that the state should be a meritocratic technocracy and not a popularly elected democracy, they bared their fangs, with Chuck Schumer suggesting that if the Trump Administration were not careful, they might be personally destroyed or even killed by an intelligence agency. Indeed, throughout mainstream media, we see that the term “democracy” has become its own opposite, now meaning Mandarinate. Those, like Rob Reiner, wishing to “save democracy” mainly mean by this that they wish to preserve the governing power of the commissars and protect the commissars’ authority from the democratic rabble full of unqualified people exercising common sense.

The problem for these putative saviours of democracy is that if Elon Musk or Robert F Kennedy or some other prominent wealthy outsider is actually competent to do their job and carrying it out competently, it is a standing refutation of the commissars’ claims of running an expertise-based, meritocratic outfit that produces uniquely and solely qualified experts for leadership positions.

And this is why we see such an odd political configuration: industrial workers, youth and the old school bourgeoisie in an alliance to restore some modicum of twentieth century representative democracy as the commissar class rushes to finish dismantling it. But this coalition has been able to get further in the United States precisely because, while the culture of political parties and of the judiciary has been captured, to a large extent, by the commissars, America’s robust and democratic political institutions have proven harder to tame.

A country like Canada has made substantial and devastating changes to its democratic institutions to ensure that its parties, across the spectrum, are controlled by the courtier class. As I have stated in previous essays, Jean Chrétien’s 2003 Election Act gave the office of the leader of every party direct appointment powers over candidates. And between 2004 and 2010, not only has an increasing proportion of candidates been directly appointed; all parties have established “candidate vetting” committees composed entirely of courtiers, with secret memberships that meet in secret and produce no minutes. These committees can veto any candidacy at will and without cause.

In a country like Canada, legislators do literally serve at the pleasure of the courtiers who can, with no institutional primary system, veto a legislator’s re-election bid with the stroke of a pen. And without a primary system, I do not know how Canada’s political system will confront the contradiction of interests between the interests of the conservative courtier class and the class alignment of the parties they serve. But that confrontation is coming, nevertheless. It is inevitable. I wish George were here to puzzle it through with me.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |

2024: The Year Canadians Said “Merry Christmas”

When I was a child, “Season’s Greetings” and “Happy Holidays” were common greetings in the world around me, in informal spoken language during the second half of December. They were not heard quite as frequently as “Merry Christmas,” but they were things people organically said. And they said these words with enthusiasm quite often. Their meaning was clearly not the same as “Merry Christmas” but the phrases were not understood by Canadians outside of conservative Christianity to be adversarial to “Merry Christmas” either.

In large measure, that was because they were about something positive. They did not, and have never, merely signified the mere avoidance of the term “Christmas.” Rather, they signified belief in something: the Cold War secularist civic nationalism we associate with the Great Society and the welfare state. Especially in Canada, where our welfare state arose the secularization of the Social Gospel movement and its leaders like Tommy Douglas, “Season’s Greetings,” was not simply a neutral expression. It signified belief in a project, the project of creating a liberal, universalist secular social contract that wove a thread through the churched and unchurched and through Christians and people of other religious faiths.

It was like our flag, our national anthem, our official multiculturalism, our welfare state. Sure, these things lacked deep cultural roots and were elite-driven projects handed down from on high but they appeared grounded in the ethos of reasonableness on which the great secular Anglo democracies of the twentieth century were culturally centred. One could comfortably say “Merry Christmas” and “Season’s Greetings” because they were complementary and compatible benedictions.

Of course, like so many aspects of white settler state liberalism, it actually concealed its own prejudices and cultural imperialism; fortunately, like many such prejudices of the age, they were relatively benign. Part of what held up “Season’s Greetings” and its friend “Happy Holidays,” was a major falsehood, a myth relentlessly propounded by the teaching profession, politicians and liberal religious leaders: that every major religious faith is like Christianity and that every religious tradition has two major annual festivals, one in the month following the vernal equinox and one in the two weeks surrounding the winter solstice.

Liberal secularists and neopagans like this myth for opposing reasons: liberal secularists like the idea that we are really just celebrating the climate, the seasons, the weather, that religion is simply an inefficient or nostalgic way of celebrating scientific laws and natural phenomena. Neopagans, one of the movements involved in the pernicious redefinition of “cultural appropriation” from the commodification and monopolization of cultural knowledge (as depicted in the Coen Brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou? and dramatized by Monsanto’s patenting of basmati rice) to normal processes of cultural change and transmission, like this idea because it creates the false idea that Christians somehow stole the pagan festival Yule from Germanic pagans. Neopagans, being a white consciousness movement, if ever there were one, also share with atheists the dubious distinction of being the only people I have ever seen offended by “Merry Christmas.”

But the reality is, of course, that there is nothing universal about the there being two main religious festivals linked to the winter solstice and vernal equinox. Even North American liberal Judaism, the sole religion used to make this bold assertion, underwent significant modification to fit into this framework, elevating local observance the fairly obscure festival of Channukah above the far more significant festival of Yom Kippur.

Ironically, as we replaced our immigration with one that selected entrants based on class rather than colour, the obvious falsity of the universalist myth that every religion is excited about the vernal equinox became increasingly evident to us. And much of our enthusiasm for saying our secularist benedictions declined with it. We realized that we were not saying anything to our Muslim, Hindu or Sikh neighbours about their faith or seasonal experiences; we were just talking about the strange trip we were on.

Reactions to this came in a variety of forms: first, a growing negativity, a spirit of nullification, which had begun in the US, spread rapidly north. Lacking an ACLU  and First Amendment of our own, we nevertheless imbibed a new kind of bitter American secularism, complaining about the violation of our non-existent separation of church and state (the first article of our liberal constitution is “the Supremacy of God” and our king is the head of a major Christian church). And so we began complaining about Christmas displays, songs and greetings receiving too much state sponsorship, being too permissible in public workplaces and other public settings.

And so we also borrowed the moronic idea that Christians saying “Merry Christmas” to non-Christians was some sort of injustice, injury or offense. Needless to say, people from venerable world religions were not offended, and often took the lead in saying it to us. No. The only people who seemed to be offended were neopagans and white atheists i.e. apostates from Christianity who constructed their religious identity in opposition to Christianity.  

Another reaction was to attempt to astroturf new religio-cultural traditions that affirmed rather than contradicting the false premise of “Happy Holidays” universalism. Liberal churches, progressive school boards and other institutions dominated by liberal intellectuals invested heavily in the constructed festival of Kwanzaa, the black liberal secularist answer to Channukah.

The most pernicious reaction was proxy-offense culture, where identitarian whites take offense at people saying “Merry Christmas” to people of non-Christian faiths on their behalf. As I explained in my original series of essays on identity politics four years ago, proxy offense-taking is an important part of hierarchical honour cultures. Taking offense on behalf of a perceived sleight of one’s inferiors is central to maintaining and burnishing one’s identity as a powerful person in an honour culture like late eighteenth century Mexico, mid-nineteenth century Dixie or contemporary Coastal British Columbia.

The idea is that oppressed people lack both the knowledge and sophistication to be offended and the social capital to enact offense, even if they are. And so a crucial part of liberal white consciousness is taking offense on behalf of one’s inferiors, just as a lord might take offense on behalf of one of his servants if they were insulted on a public street in eighteenth century England.

In recent years, as the Pearsonian nationalist project was first betrayed, then hollowed-out, then inverted, all that remains is the offense-taking. And so, “Season’s Greetings” and “Happy Holidays,” have come to be perceived as combative slogans, as the precursor to a metaphorical duel in which today’s gentry, the commissar class, throw down a gauntlet, challenging their interlocutors to repeat back a meaningless and empty slogan or face the consequences.

Because I have been pushed out of Woke culture, I no longer even experience this. For the past two years, nobody has said “Happy Holidays” or “Seasons Greetings” to me at this time of year. Instead, “Merry Christmas” has made a remarkable resurgence as a greeting, one relished by both Christians and non-Christians alike. Because it turns out that moments of understanding and appreciating difference, of mutual recognition, of vicarious joy in others’ joy, of mutual agency are what bind a society together.

So I choose to remember 2024 as the year Canadians outside the Progressiverse, united in one small way: saying “Merry Christmas.” Arabs in keffiyehs said it; Zionists in yamakas said it; feminists supporting sex-based rights said it; Christians said it. And I say it: Merry Christmas.

Canadian Politics Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

The Age of Bizarro Churchill, the Outsourcing of Wife Beating and the Creation of the Super-Id

Beginning in the 1890s during the Boer Wars, Winston Churchill had a consistent response to whatever ailed the British people: “Attack! Attack now! Throw everything we’ve got at them!” That plan did not work out so well at Gallipoli and caused him to lose standing among the Coalition Liberals and British people but nevertheless, when the future kingdom of what would become Saudi Arabia began his insurgency against the British puppet ruling the British mandate of Hejaz, Churchill was back on form. It was time to conscript the young men and send them into the desert to prevent the rise of the Saudis.

But the world changed around Churchill. And because the world changed, and kept changing for the worse, one day in the 1930s it came to pass that Churchill was finally right. The correct answer to what the British were facing had become, “Attack! Attack now! Throw everything we’ve got at them!”

So they made him Prime Minister and, the rest, as they say, is history.

Today, we live in the age of Bizarro Churchill. The old man who is finally right is the person we are most certain is wrong.

It has been more than fifty years since Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, more than thirty since Preston Manning tried to sell Canadians on dramatic cuts to our immigration rates and nominated racist MP candidates like Herb Grubel, Randy White, Bob Ringma and Philip Mayfield. Back in those days we were right to see panic over immigration as mainly driven by racial animus and bad “slippery slope” reasoning. We called Powell and Manning racists; we held rallies against Powell’s racism and Manning’s promiscuous flirtations with racists; and we were not wrong.

Back in the twentieth century, we were still relatively prosperous; we had strong institutions; most people could still afford their rent; and we had a robust civic nationalism structuring our multicultural pluralism, with flags and outfits and festivals that included all of us. Back then, activists opposing increased immigration were overwhelmingly old and white and the movements were rife with discredited race science and belief in eugenics.

Today, a clear majority of both white and non-white Canadians want immigration levels to be reduced to where they were when Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party was in office, approximately 20% of current levels. Those most supportive of current immigration levels tend to be white seniors, those who remember the odious politics of people like Powell, Manning and Ringma most vividly. Those least supportive are young people can have been pushed out of entry level jobs by temporary foreign workers and kids from the Global South on student visas and young families unable to find housing they can afford.

But the response from the courtiers and commissars who run our societies is not the way the British people responded to Churchill in the 1930s and 40s. Instead, they argue that supporting any kind of reduction to any kind of immigration is axiomatically wrong, that no matter what the migration situation is in a country, it is, by definition morally and politically wrong to restrict it in any way for any reason.

Instead of engaging logically with people recommending temporary or permanent reductions in migrant flow, they simply label anyone with an objection a hateful bigot and their ideas “hate speech,” what they call “stochastic terrorism,” the idea that if you say or even repeat a statement deemed “hateful,” you are in effect murdering members of a minority groups to whom the statement might refer.

Similarly, many conservatives acquitted themselves atrociously during the gay liberation movement and AIDS crisis. Lifesaving medication was denied to innocent people; their same sex partners were spitefully barred from visiting them in hospital; their partners’ pension spousal benefits were confiscated; and marriage was placed out of reach. In the 1980s, Andrew Dice Clay’s and Eddie Murphy’s stand-up performances ended far too frequently with the men who had laughed at the homophobic jokes performed going out and beating up innocent gay men.

Just as I attended anti-Reform Party rallies, I fought for gay rights and organized with Svend Robinson, Canada’s first openly gay MP.

But, as I warned at the time, we were taking shortcuts for which we would pay later. Instead of arguing that people have a right to marry whomever they want, we should have argued that, extending marriage rights to gay couples was a pro-social move of intrinsic that would make our societies better, not the creation of a new kind of right. Similarly, when we argued that we should never judge people for the weird sex they like, I thought: “this is heading for trouble.”

But, the Bizarro Churchill effect is, of course, present on questions of human sexuality now. If men need to wear diapers and shit themselves in the street in front of us, dance provocatively in sexualized getups in front of grade schoolers and wave their junk teenage girls in locker rooms, who are we to judge them? After all, if objecting to one form of male sexuality showing up in public was wrong in the 80s, objecting to any form of male sexuality asserting itself in any context is inherently wrong at all times and places.

And so those of us who object to Genderwang and are trying to protect gay kids from being sterilized and mutilated are bigots, hatemongers and, most ironically, “homophobes.” Last fall, when the Million March for Kids took place, once credible journalists ran stories stating that those of us in the march were planning to hunt down homosexuals and beat them up, just like those Clay and Murphy fans in the 80s. The BC government even sent warning to daycare centres that we were coming to assault the gender-confused children there.

In the 1990s and 00s, we fought against Ronald Reagan’s Drug War, worked for safe injection sites, decriminalization of hard drugs, supportive housing for addicts and freeing those convicted of drug offenses from prison. Like my work on welcoming immigrants and civil equality for gays and lesbians, I remain proud of this work and glad I did it.

But now we face a situation where, as reported by Adam Zivo in the National Post, we have a government program in BC that allows teenagers to receive hard recreational drugs from the province and have the state act to keep that secret from parents, literally slipping children fentanyl and telling them not to tell mom, thanks to the terrible precedent set by administering Lupron to teenagers secretly.

But again, object to there being too many drugs out there, as the government increases the drug supply, as no credible academic study has ever recommended, or object to how young the people are that we’re giving addictive drugs to or even simply suggest that being a full-time unhoused drug addict is a less worthwhile life than having a job and a family and once again, one is accused of hate speech, bigotry and stochastic terrorism. The next overdose will be blamed on us—as though you can’t OD on “safe supply” fentanyl.

Again, because conservatives were wrong about something in the past, they cannot possibly be right about it now. And anyone who agrees with them now has become a “far right” “hatemonger.”

Violence Against Women and the Rise of the Super-Id
I used to think this was just some sort of cognitive error that was producing these three highly similar social phenomena where all problems caused by out-of-control immigration can only be solved by fewer immigration controls, all problems caused by drug use can only be solved by more drugs and all problems caused by Genderwang can only be solved by de-stigmatizing “minor attracted persons” and conferring on people the right to have their bodies made into surreal Japanese hentai monsters at government expense.

But a recent chat with a very important gender critical thinker convinced me that this is something darker:

The other thing that changed in our society in the 1980s was our fairly successful crackdown on domestic violence and marital rape. Wife-beating, of course, continued. But it had to be closeted in new ways. Even celebrities who publicly advocated it were smacked down hard or the media edited their backwards views out of their interviews. Male violence against women was attacked both by law enforcement with a new zeal and, at the same time, Hollywood and the news media came together to stigmatize this vile behaviour.

But we didn’t fix the men or address the underlying causes and so violent misogyny has been building up as behind a dam since the 1980s. And the inhibitions and prohibitions around white men and respectable men hitting and sexually assaulting women have never been greater, especially in progressive communities.

And so this violent misogyny has found a vent. Pakistani grooming gangs in England do have permission to rape, beat and traffic women; so do men in dresses; so do homeless men on meth. And that is why our governments are now admitting young, male rootless immigrants at a higher rate than other immigrants, proposing, as BC’s chief medical health officer recently did a chain of meth stores like our stores that market cannabis products in a friendly atmosphere, but for crystal meth.

White progressive men have outsourced their misogynistic violence to three groups of men. It is an exchange: these men enact the misogynistic violence and rage of the commissar class towards women and, in exchange, the commissar class describes them as victims and grants them total immunity from the consequences of their actions, not just legally but socially.

The Woke ideologies that enable this are a kind of Super-Id our society has built itself. A psychological force that uses ideology to push our collective behaviour beyond even where your average unrestrained male id would go.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |

Canada’s Emerging Two-Tier Society

Until it was gradually overtaken by “the Tories will ban abortion” beginning in the 2000 Canadian federal election, the favourite, and not wholly inaccurate or illegitimate scare tactic used by Canada’s Liberals and New Democrats was to claim that conservatives, if elected, would institute “two-tier health care.”

For decades, this claim was repeated. It was understood to mean that provincial conservative governments would violate the Canada Health Act or that the federal Tories would amend the Act and permit private medical businesses to opt-out of the state’s single-payer health insurance system, thereby creating a second tier of health care that permitted other forms of payment such as cash or private insurance.

Before I go any further, I should take a moment to explain how Canadian public healthcare came about and how it is structured because there are many romantic myths about it, often less popular in Canada than in countries, especially the US, where our system is inappropriately and excessively romanticized.

The History of Canadian Public Healthcare
In 1948, Clement Atlee’s Labour Party government in the United Kingdom nationalized private hospitals and medical practices, severing prior employer-employee relationships, expropriating hospitals and other medical facilities from charities, churches and private corporations and turning Britain’s health care system into a unified, publicly owned system in which doctors were now government employees. They also intervened in medical licensing so as to prevent doctors using their syndical power to ration their labour or otherwise subvert the government’s agenda of expanding the scope, reach and accessibility of the system.

But what they did not do was attempt to enforce a monopoly, nor did they coercively expropriate for the most part. Instead, they lured doctors away and institutions away from the private system by making the public system a more lucrative and stable place to work. Similarly, their interventions in medical licensing entailed purchasing a majority on the board of the medical association through what was tantamount to bribery. The health minister in charge of the nationalization, was quoted as saying, of the doctors, “ultimately I had to stuff their mouths with gold.”

Such an arrangement was untenable as consumer use of the NHS grew rapidly. Soon, doctors began leaving the public system but the UK was able to use the decolonization of its collapsing empire to flood the labour market with doctors and nurses who were Wind Rush migrants.

The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation government of Saskatchewan, the only social democratic government in early Cold War Anglo America, studied all this carefully and figured that, to create a truly public, truly universal system, they were going to have a fight on their hands. So they spent sixteen years paying off the province’s debt making it the most prosperous jurisdiction in the country before attempting to socialize health care.

The province’s doctors balked at becoming government employees and having their hospitals and general practices made state property under any circumstances or level of compensation. And a strike ensued, resulting in the government’s defeat and the deaths of some innocent people.

Perhaps having anticipated this turn of events, Tommy Douglas, the premier who had conceived of this had resigned the premiership, leaving his successor, Woodrow Lloyd to wear the defeat while he became leader of the federal NDP and entering the House of Commons where, following the 1963 election, he held the balance of power.

Lester Pearson, the Liberal Prime Minister was what one might call a Great Society Cold War hawk. Like John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson whose election interference and public contempt for his Tory predecessor, John Diefenbaker, had helped win him the Prime Minister’s office, Pearson believed that the West could only win the Cold War if it matched or exceeded the state’s material guarantees of health care, housing and employment that the USSR promised. But the point of expanding the New Deal order and creating the Great Society was understood as a means of saving capitalism not dismantling it.

So, in collaboration with Douglas, Pearson worked to create a made-in-Canada solution to the problem of universal healthcare. Canadian Medicare did not seek to expropriate medical facilities nor to turn doctors into government employees and it left their syndical associations, the College of Physicians and Surgeons and Medical Association unmolested. Instead, Medicare created one territorial and ten provincial health insurance companies and prohibited the private sector from selling health insurance.

While provincial governments created new hospitals, the old hospitals remained, for decades, in the hands of churches and private interests. Clinics and individual practices remained private businesses, as they do to the present day. Doctors continued being compensated on a fee-for-service basis by the new state insurance companies just as they had been by the old private ones.

While NHS-like aspects have gradually crept into the system with a small minority of salaried doctors and nurse-practitioners at government-created clinic-like health centres and with an increasing portion of large health facilities becoming state-owned, the fundamental structure of Canadian Medicare has remained intact: a private health care system paid through a state-owned health insurance monopoly. What makes Canadian healthcare universal and public is its insurance companies not its health facilities or their employees.

The Collapse of Canadian Public Healthcare
Since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s, with its widening gap between rich and poor, increased labour mobility and increased costs of graduate degrees, public healthcare systems throughout the Global North have struggled to meet rising demand, expanding mandates, increased labour costs and increasing struggles with high-wage labour retention. In most places, this has resulted in more of the wealthy using privately insured or fee-for-service medical services to, as Canadians would think of it, “jump the queue” and obtain higher quality and faster service through their greater wealth.

Because Canada borders the United States and most of our population lives near the border or can cross it via air or land with relative ease, as our system degraded, Canadians became world leaders in medical tourism, nipping across the border for whole procedures or just for tests whose results would move them up the queue in Canada for expensive and urgent treatment, for instance, of cancer.

And as more Canadians of middle and high income made a habit of holidaying in Mexico and as ties between Canada and India deepened, India and Mexico began to compete with the United States in attracting Canadian medical tourists, offering cheaper procedures and, in Mexico’s case, medical and dental treatment mixed with resort living.

But for those of us for whom this was out of reach, things have grown steadily more dire as has the situation for all Canadians requiring emergency or urgent care near them quickly. Fewer and fewer Canadians have family doctors. “Walk-in clinics,” once the pressure release valve on the system now rarely accept walk-ins and require appointments to “walk in” weeks or months in advance. Furthermore, many of those clinics now refuse to grant in-person appointments at all and book fifteen-minute telephone consultations that are still usually weeks in the future and which allow the patient to discuss only one individual health problem often making it impossible for doctors to evaluate their condition, having neither physical contact nor a full description of the patient’s symptoms. And if, unable to tolerate this gatekeeping, Canadians present themselves to a local hospital emergency ward, they can face a wait of up to twelve hours before they can be seen by anyone and might still be turned away for having an insufficiently urgent condition.

Having personally spent three and a half years on a waiting list to see a specialist I ultimately never did get to see, I cannot over-emphasize the degree to which things often become more dire if your condition requires a referral in Canada. Months and even years are spent on the waiting list to see medical specialists, even oncologists and other specialists treating conditions that have an inherent urgency to them.

Except that this is not your experience of the Canadian medical system if you come from the correct social class.

The Rise of Class-Based Health Care
From 2013-15, I was in a live-in relationship with a highly educated woman with a PhD. Although not a MD, per se, she held a senior position as the manager of a government-run healthcare facility, presented at medical conferences and had even been published in The Lancet. The first New Year’s party we attended together was in the palatial home of a friend of her who also held a senior position in the healthcare system. There were doctors aplenty at the event, specialists, general practitioners, bureaucrats and officials in syndical organizations like the BC Medical Association, College of Physicians and Surgeons, running things like the International Medical Graduate program (which allows doctors to control which immigrants are permitted to join their profession immediately and which have to jump through hoops).

Within two weeks of moving in with her, I had a family doctor for the first time in years. And when she or I received referrals from our GP and we did not promptly see a specialist, a few calls could be made and that specialist appointment was soon available.

You see, whereas the two-tier medical systems of the other Global North countries make access to prompt and quality care increasingly contingent upon wealth, Canada’s system makes these things contingent upon class. Whom one knows, with whom one socializes and who is inside one’s larger social world determines access to health care in Canada.

Like old school class systems, the Canadian system looks down on those who might be termed nouveau riche and shunts them into poor person healthcare or out of the country. Healthcare access in Canada is about class and culture in the traditional sense, measuring one’s social refinement, family history, educational background, literally what parties you attend and how much sophistication and decorum one can show there. One’s socio-cultural proximity to the commissars and bourgeoisie, of which wealth is merely one very important facet, determines your access to Canadian healthcare.

For the members of Canada’s commissar class and liberal bourgeoisie, there is no healthcare shortage, no access problem. The system functions for them as it once did for all of us.

Two-Tier Rental Housing
While best dramatized through the story of healthcare, the increasing importance of class, as opposed to mere wealth, in accessing the basics for a healthy and successful life in Canada, applies across the board.

When I returned to Vancouver in 2022, following my fatwa, I had some extraordinarily good fortune. A friend was part of an upwardly mobile family that had acquired a small real estate empire of two or three properties and was renting out subdivided houses and a laneway home. While my friend was, like me, a college professor, his father was an autodidact whose prodigious hard work and canny business sense had helped to create small complex of rental housing over which the family presided. While riding high financially, after some bad experiences with tenants, he asked his son to find a higher class sort of tenant for their recently vacated laneway house.

The presence of a more educated, more respectable, more credentialed tenant was something of value to him. And so, with his son carefully concealing my recent expulsion from progressive society and emphasizing my teaching and publishing record, I received a lease at a discount of somewhere between 30% and 50% relative to market rates.

As what some clever person called “artisanal landlording” becomes more popular for Canada’s commissars and bourgeoisie, with constantly rising rents and property values, the only true “sure thing” in the Canadian investment scene, such arrangements are growing more common.

As with medical care, one’s access to affordable housing is conditioned not merely by wealth but by class. If you know a landlord, just as in health care, costs fall, waiting lists vanish and insecurity, fear and precarity recede.

The Rising Stakes of Cancelation
Naturally, when faced with such egregious unfairness, things like healthcare user fees appear egalitarian and leveling by comparison. Private healthcare becomes saleable to the working poor in new ways because it grants levels of access currently beyond their means. Instead of the wealthiest among us beating the drum for the eviscerating of the Canada Health Act, it is increasingly the proletariat and lower middle class.

To be clear, much as I am downwardly mobile and a higher and higher velocity, I don’t want user fees. But they are popping up anyway despite half-hearted and haphazard efforts by government to suppress them. The largest chains of clinics in BC, those run by Telus (a company whose other operations receive massive government subsidies) and Loblaws, do now charge user fees for seeing doctors in person. Only telephone consultations are free now. Smaller clinics and chains are introducing subscription fees and charges to stay on the patient list and have permanent files and repeat visits to the same doctor.

And those paying those fees are now being pushed into defending them, knowing that if the fees vanish, so do the “services” for which they pay.

This is not, furthermore, merely about access to the basics of life, including housing and healthcare. It also fits into the larger matrix of rising authoritarianism. Not only might you be fired for saying something unorthodox and facing cancelation; your expulsion from polite society could cost you your housing (a small landlord just needs to say a family member needs your suite to legally evict you) and your access to medical care.

By linking housing and healthcare to class, rather than mere wealth, Canada has made cancelation scarier yet as the range of acceptable political opinions in polite society continues to contract.

Canadian Politics | fusangite |