Transcript: Justin Ling
An interview with the Canadian journalist and author
Earlier this year at Lean Out, we covered Canada’s federal election — a contest not just between candidates and parties but between dominant narratives about the challenges facing this country. Was our biggest problem the decline in material conditions, or was it Donald Trump? My guest on this week’s podcast was there, on the campaign trail. He’s just written a new book about why this election was one of the most consequential in recent memory.
Justin Ling is a Canadian journalist and author. His Substack newsletter is Bug-eyed and Shameless, and his new book is The 51st State Votes: Canada Versus Donald Trump.
This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview, which was taped earlier this month, here.
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TH: This past election was a fascinating one. I covered it as well, but you were on the ground, following the candidates. So, I'm pleased that I can get, and that our listeners can get, a closer view of what went on. The book is pretty tightly focused on the election. But set this up for us, what events led up to this election?
JL: The book is this teeing up of our current moment. There are books that get written about elections that are meant to be these wonky, insider, realpolitik recaps of the various insular goings-on of the political system. This isn't that. This is not designed to be that. This is very much a primer for where we are right now, and it's a very temporal book in that sense. How we got to where we are is a really useful thing to understand if — and I don't mean this to be dramatic — we're going to hope to continue to be a country.
The dominoes start falling last year with the revolt that happens against Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government. There's a phrase that became quite popular over the last couple of years, popularized by the opposition leader Pierre Poilievre, which is, “Canada is broken.” It's an idea that became well-entrenched in our political system. It's a sentiment that exists in the UK, in France and Germany. You can see the reverberations of this feeling that the state is falling apart, all around the Western world. But in Canada, it felt acute in a whole bunch of different ways: Housing is way too expensive. Prices were going up everywhere. Productivity is going down. Services are worsening in just about every respect. There's a feeling like everyone is working harder and not getting ahead, and that the state is placating them with platitudes about the problem and not doing very much to fix it. It was that sentiment that ultimately led to tanking poll numbers for Justin Trudeau, and revolt in his own caucus, and eventually his resignation in January.
At the exact same moment, Donald Trump is telling the world that he wants to annex Canada, and maybe Greenland at Panama while he’s at it, and instigating a trade war with us. It is that context that propels us into the last election, which set up Pierre Poilievre, who’d been the odds-on favourite, against Mark Carney, a total political neophyte who’d been the Governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England. He manages, despite all odds, to capture the imagination, to address those anxieties, to convince people of his preeminent competence, and to come from behind to win a pretty impressive election victory. So, that's what happened. This book is trying to zoom in on the inflection point, to give us a handle on what we do now.
TH: I want to spend a moment on Justin Trudeau. In March of last year, you got an interview with our former Prime Minister, which our colleague Paul Wells aired clips of on his podcast. I thought you did a great job of holding Trudeau's feet to the fire, especially on his divisive rhetoric during the pandemic and the trucker crisis — but also, you pushed him on the housing crisis. This was for a profile for The Walrus. Your proposed headline was “Justin Trudeau's Reality Distortion Field.” You talked to a lot of people for that piece. Ultimately, what's the crux of it? Where do you think he went wrong? How did he lose his party, and more importantly, the Canadian public?
JL: I've been thinking about this a lot recently, not just in the Canadian context but in the global context as well. Because, like I say, a lot of the problems that plague Canada are plaguing the entire world right now. There are widespread protests happening in Nepal, Georgia, Eastern Europe, Serbia, for various reasons. But a lot of the anxieties that are stretching from Australia to Europe to South America to Canada are all interlinked. The world is getting more expensive for regular people. Our productivity as a society seems to be declining. Technology is threatening our way of life, for working-class people anyway, perhaps to the benefit of some very rich folks. There's a feeling like the pandemic made us all quite loopy and that we never really had a chance to fully disentangle all of the things that went terribly wrong during that. Call it trauma, just call it frustration, it doesn't really matter. There's a feeling around the planet that something has gone quite lopsided and that our political leaders have been unwilling, unable, incapable or just sort of blithe, to address the actual realities of it. That is the baseline. It's very hard to point to a country in the world right now where any politician is doing very well. People are not happy with their leaders, by and large.
In Canada, it felt even more acute because Trudeau was this Captain Canada, this Captain Liberal, this totem for enlightened liberalism — what detractors might call neoliberalism. Because he was such the poster child of this political ideology, and because he continued to want to be that, and because he continued to defend and deflect and double down through all of this frustration, I think it made people go squirrely in a really intense way.
Sitting and talking to him, that is really what I wanted to start illustrating for people. We did the interview in Langevin Block, his office. I went into that room thinking to myself … Actually, I assumed I was not going to get the interview. It took so long. I had to convince so many staffers that this was not some elaborate trap, that I was not some plant out to destroy his government. There was a lot of paranoia happening in that office at that time. They were probably wrong to agree to do it, all things considered. [Laughs] But I walked into that room not quite sure what the final story was going to be. I had a lot of the story written, it had taken so long for me to get this interview. The story that I had written was: Justin Trudeau continues to pitch this sunny liberalism, even as the limits of it and the failures of it have become abundantly clear, and it seems like he's not willing to do the difficult things necessary to get the system running again. I went into that room thinking to myself: This is the test of whether or not I think he can convince people — me, the general public, maybe even himself — that that repair is still within his capability. And I walked out of that room shocked at how certain I was that he was not ready, willing, capable, or interested in doing the difficult things necessary to make that system work again.
Housing is a great example. I mean, he was patting himself on the back. There's a really illustrative moment — I use it in this book and in the feature — where I said, “You came in promising to build hundreds of thousands of homes for a country that needs millions of homes, and you didn't even do that. How do you explain to people why you failed?” And he goes, “Well, I don't think we did fail.” I said, “You promised to build hundreds of thousands, and you built exactly 67,000. That's a failure. Those numbers didn't come to fruition.” And he goes, “Those numbers, in a sense, did come to fruition.” It just made me feel crazy. It made me feel insane. I got hot under the collar. I was like, “I don't understand how you can continue gaslighting people this way.” So, it became very clear that he just was not willing to confront reality. The phrase “reality distortion field” comes from one of his own MPs. It became clear that he wasn't willing to do that. After that interview, I was just watching him to see when he fails. It ultimately took until January of 2025 for it to happen. But it happened.
TH: That same feeling that you're describing, I had that feeling when Parliament was prorogued, when the leadership race for Mark Carney — you had teenagers voting. These things felt fairly anti-democratic. Then, there's an entire campaign based on the fact that we have this threat from Donald Trump, who is anti-democratic. I'm not going to argue that Donald Trump has anti-democratic impulses, but that framing of Trump as an existential threat? It was very convenient for the Liberal Party. And it was very effective, it worked. Do you think they were manipulative?
JL: No, I don't. Actually, if anything, I think they probably needed to lean into it harder. Which I know sounds extraordinary, but let me try to explain. If there's a thematic device in the book I use a lot, it's this question of binaries. Elections are generally stark choices anyway, but this one, in particular, was. More than any other Canadian election, which is normally competitive amongst three to five parties. This was the most two-party race we've seen in a very long time. So, in a very literal sense, this was a binary election. But it also became an election of binaries in terms of what the ballot box question was. Was this a question about the existential threat, and the economic threat, and the social threat and democratic threat posed by Donald Trump? Or was it an election about pocketbook issues — about the failure of our state, about economic concerns and anxieties, about a lack of services and housing and healthcare and so on? To some degree, it's a really sensible binary. I argue in the book that, given the choice between those two issues, it is more important we focus on the threat post by Donald Trump. Because I think it is existential, right? The other things need fixing, no doubt, but the degree of the threat cannot be understated. I think recent months and weeks have illustrated the degree to which that's true.
Before the [American] election — I was just looking at this today — there was an article that ran in The Hill, the DC paper, that basically ran a fact-check of Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris had said, “Donald Trump is going to put soldiers on the streets,” and The Hill wrote, “That's absurd. That's insane. Donald Trump is not going to put soldiers on the streets in America.” It didn't even take a year for him to do that. Donald Trump has occupied two cities, and is probably going to go do a third, with the National Guard and federal agents. So, I really think we have to get in that mindset of anticipating the unpredictable. We cannot continue operating on this sunny optimism that has defined Canadian existence for the past century or so. We have to anticipate that things can get very bad very quickly. I don't think we can let short-term concerns, as important as they are, cloud our judgment there. So, that is the binary that is important. And I think the Liberal Party accurately and adequately adopted that first threat to the centre of their campaign. But here's the big caveat: It's not really a binary choice, because you need to do both.
This is something that Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party tried, and never quite threaded the needle on. But the reality is, if you want to win a trade war, if you want to go toe to toe with your closest neighbour, your one-time ally, the most powerful nation on the planet, you need to be strong at home. You need flexibility on exporting critical minerals and natural gas and oil. You need to have a bureaucracy that works. You need to have a hard-nosed, sharp-elbowed foreign policy that can get wins even as you're facing that existential threat, that 300-pound gorilla. There's a lot of things you have to do to make yourself strong abroad by making yourself strong at home. Improving productivity has to be core to that. I think both parties had a degree of the answer. I don't think either party had the whole answer. If there's a tiny note of optimism, of kumbaya cooperation, that you can pick up from the book, it’s that we need both parties, and all the parties in our system, to, sure, compete and criticize and joust, but also to collaborate and cooperate. Because existential threats require a degree of a common front. Without that common front, I think we're going to fall to petty in-fighting.
TH: When you have something deemed an existential threat, then you are able to declare a state of exception, and under that state of exception, the normal rules of a functioning liberal democracy are suspended. I worry about that trend. How do we grapple with the threat that Donald Trump may or may not pose in a realistic, rational, unemotional way — without suspending our own functioning?
