In 2008, I made my first foray into writing for a mass audience during a dark period in Canada’s recent past, known as the “Prorogation crisis” in a guest column for Rabble.ca. I did so because the events that unfolded did not just lead to a disappointing political outcome; they revealed both a deep institutional susceptibility to authoritarianism in Canada’s constitutional order and a deep, largely unseen, cultural authoritarian substratum in Canada that was more Russian than English. A central theme of my published work ever since, and of my blog since I started it in 2011, has been trying to warn my fellow Canadians about the creeping authoritarianism of our institutions and culture.
The First Threat: The Canadian Online Harms Act
With a bill before parliament to suppress speech and jail opposition figures that would make Recep Erdogan blush we have to stop living in the past and lying to ourselves about the situation in which we find ourselves. The hour is later than you think. And pro-tip to Justin Trudeau: proper dictators never make repression like this so explicit. Only the weakest dictators pass nor do they need to pass laws that so explicitly suppress opposition speech and jail their opponents. Proper authoritarians do this through extra-legal means and trumped-up charges. Normal authoritarians do not need to lean on the apparatus of the state in this way, nor are most so shameless as to lay before the public what they are doing.
To be clear: if I return to Canada after Bill C-63 is passed, I am effectively returning home with a price on my head. That is because any person who finds an essay like this “hateful” can anonymously report me to a tribunal empaneled by the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the Liberal government. This tribunal would not need to tell me who had accused me or what hateful act I was accused of, lest describing the act itself reveal the identity of my anonymous accuser. The bill sets the evidentiary standard for this tribunal lower than that of an ordinary court and explicitly states that (a) I would have no right to offer testimony or face my accuser and (b) simple accusation would be sufficient evidence for conviction.
If convicted, I would be fined $70,000 and $20,000 of that would be kicked back to my accuser. In other words, being offended by the online remarks of opposition activists and politicians could be a lucrative full-time job someone could do anonymously from the privacy of their own home. Of course, in my case, they wouldn’t get their $20,000 and I would end up in jail for non-payment of a fine.
Or maybe that would not even need to happen. Because the law also specifies that if the tribunal is convinced that a person is likely to make a “hateful” comment in the future, something like “no one is born in the wrong body. You are beautiful just the way you are,” they can be pre-emptively placed under house arrest, banned from using the Internet and subject to random drug-testing until the tribunal is satisfied that this person no longer presents a risk of uttering future hate-speech. Welcome to the Pre-Crime Division of the Canadian government.
Now, I am just a washed-up fringe left politician and failed child star nobody listens to. My life has mostly been Gary Coleman’s run against Arnold Schwarzenegger for governor of California.
But let’s think about Pierre Poilievre and all his candidates. Let’s think about Maxime Overdrive and all of his. How many times have the Prime Minister and his surrogates accused them of peddling hate speech, conspiracy theories and “unacceptable views”? And, worse yet, fervently believed themselves when they said it, as did many of their judicial and quasi-judicial appointees.
Has the Prime Minister not already asked “How long must we tolerate these people?”
While it is not the most likely outcome of passing C-63, which will more likely produce a slower diminution of free speech rights, it is not outside the realm of possibility that the bill will be used to incarcerate the leaders of the right-wing opposition parties and most of their candidates, enabling a default Liberal victory.
The Second Threat: Indefinite Prorogation
But this is not the only route by which we may be moving towards some kind of institutionally-anointed post-democratic authoritarian regime. And that is why we need to remember the Prorogation Crisis of 2008.
In 2006, when he received 36% of the vote and formed a minority government, Stephen Harper decided to govern as though he had a majority, using brinksmanship to stay in power. Trusting that at least one opposition party would be unwilling to face the voters at any given moment, Harper played chicken with Stephane Dion, Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe for two and a half years. And time and again, an opposition leader, usually the Liberals’ Martin, Graham or Dion, would buckle and refrain from voting against legislation they purported to oppose in order to avoid an election.
Unable to goad the Liberals into toppling the government and giving him another crack at winning a majority, Harper eventually called an election himself in September 2008. The campaign nearly produced the majority he sought but came twelve seats short.
Following the election, in which the Liberals suffered major losses, the opposition leaders decided this could not go on. Assembling a coalition of parties who had won 54% of the vote and 52% of the seats in the election, Stephane Dion hammered-out a left-green coalition agreement with Gilles Duceppe and Jack Layton, a deal the business wing of the Liberal Party and the Central Canadian establishment found very troubling, with its massive funding for changing Canada’s energy system to a post-petroleum one.
Harper’s response was to demand that parliament be prorogued i.e. the Governor-General suspend the constitutional requirement that it meet shortly after the election and instead continue the pre-election government. Everyone knew what the subtext of this was. Harper wanted to give the business faction of the Liberal Party time to pull off a palace coup and replace Dion with someone who would continue giving Harper carte blanche to govern.
Initially the Canadian left thronged into the streets to support “The Coalition,” which seemed to be the collective expression of our shared dreams. I remember the rally at Nathan Philips Square in Toronto where I witnessed an example of the paradoxes of charisma whose like I had not witnessed since the 1996 Vancouver Film Festival when the stunningly beautiful, charismatic and talented Adrienne Shelley was unable to get a block of seats for herself and her three friends who watch her own movie, Sudden Manhattan at the Vancouver Film Festival. The cinematic opposite of Julia Roberts, Shelley seemed to small and unauthoritative in person that her own fans who had heard up to listen to her post-screening talk wouldn’t give her a seat at her own movie.
Watching Stephane Dion struggle through the crowd to get to the stage at Nathan Philips Square that cold day in December, while Mary Walsh vamped on stage, cracking jokes about his poor film-making abilities, I could see this thing was a house of cards.
That got clearer after the crisis did not conclude immediately. As Harper crafted his formal prorogation strategy and the Governor-General Michäelle Jean hit the law books, the stock market took a bad turn and, within a week, a found myself in an awkward conversation with my Communist Party member and trust fund heiress friend about how, while she had initially supported the Coalition, her finances were deteriorating and the country did need order, something Dion was not going to bring. She hated Harper and everything he stood for but…
This was reflected in the polls that came out in the ensuing days. A majority of supporters of every Coalition party except, profoundly ironically, the separatist Bloc Quebecois, now supported Harper continuing over their own party joining the government. It was these polls about which I wrote in Rabble, in which I suggested that this was not due so much to the kind of self-interest Canada’s Liberal elite were exhibiting but because their theory of political justice had changed.
“For Canadians, entitlement to rule comes not from the capacity to build a coalition representing the majority but instead from the capacity to discipline one’s core constituency. This is why, much as they find these attributes of Harper personally distasteful at a human level, Canadians appear politically undaunted by the image of a Prime Minister who rules his party by fear and centralizes power in his own hands. What offended Canadians about the likes of Randy White and other undisciplined, bigoted members of the Class of ’93 Reformers was not their bigotry, per se. It was the way their public statements demonstrated Manning’s inability to offer the discipline and control Chretien could.”
Resolve began to weaken, especially in the Liberal caucus, following Jean granting Harper’s request for prorogation. Harper, himself, was surprised by this turn of events. He was expecting the Liberal appointee to turn him down and to have to plead his case directly to the Queen. Jean was, after all, from the opposing, what we would now call “Globalist” faction of the elite.
But Harper was helped by a phenomenon over which my friend Kenneth lost his political life trying to warn us of back in 1999. In the fall of 1999, Jean Chretien broke with more than a century of tradition and appointed Adrienne Clarkson as Governor-General, Canada’s head of state. While the media were very excited that she was a non-white TV personality, Kenneth, speaking for the Monarchist League of Canada, publicly worried that we would, for the first time, have a Governor-General who was not a former privy councilor, had no legal training or experience and was completely unfamiliar with the operations of the complex interface between the government and the state in a Westminster constitutional monarchy. He actively worried about whether an untrained person could safely guard the most important valve in our entirely political system.
The New York Times decided to label his questions, “thinly-veiled racist thunderbolts” and suggested that he was the leader of an unseen network of Canadian white supremacists who did not believe a brown woman could be Governor-General. The story was carried on the wire services, and he spent the next two years contacting newspapers from Melbourne to Rio de Janeiro trying to get them to print the retraction his lawyer had wrung out of the Times.
Because Jean, like her predecessor, was utterly untrained and lacking both confidence and education in the core legal matters around which her job centred, she simply channeled the zeitgeist of her class when it came time to adjudicate the request that the new parliament be prevented from meeting until the establishment had re-established its control over the main opposition party.
While Mary Simon, the current occupant of Rideau Hall, at least has experience in government and the upper echelons of the civil service, she has never been a privy counselor, received a law degree or served as an MLA or MP. More importantly, cultural conditions, political polarization and class consciousness in Canada are in vastly worse shape than they were in 2008.
This is the Canada that used the Emergencies Act to stop a protest that more closely resembled an extended tailgate party than the insurgency the Prime Minister claimed it was. This is the Canada in which a drawing in sharpie based on a right-wing podcast joke on the side of a camper van Pierre Poilievre accidentally appeared near is being used as evidence of the white supremacist coup he is planning. The Convoy, the least violent, the least deadly, the most peaceful mass mobilization in Anglo America in the twenty-first century (compare to: Occupy, Free Palestine, Black Lives Matter, January 6th, Charlottesville) is routinely depicted by Trudeau and his ilk as a narrowly averted violent coup that required the suspension of Canadians’ civil rights.
I would argue that, although not the most likely outcome of his Liberals losing the election, there is a non-zero chance that, a completely sincere Trudeau might go to Mary Simon and request the indefinite prorogation of parliament and the continuation of his government until some future condition, like the replacement of Poilievre, is met, or new elections can be held uncontaminated by “hate” and “disinformation,” i.e. until additional censorship legislation can be enacted. And the residents of the progressiverse would applaud this as “saving democracy,” the way Rob Reiner keeps telling his twitter following that the US can only “save democracy” if every candidate except Joe Biden is removed from the ballot this November.
It is my most fervent wish that this article will be labeled in years to come as evidence that this was the moment that I lost it, when I was overtaken by paranoia and became consumed with fear of threats that were never present. But on the off chance that the hour is as late as I think, we need to start floating these scenarios in the public square if, for no other reason, than to get Canada’s progressive parties to convincingly assure Canadians that the things I fear they might do, they absolutely will not.
