Weekend reads: Is Canada broken?

My appearance on The Hub's weekly roundtable podcast, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths and Sean Speer

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I’m on the road this weekend, but I wanted to take a moment to share a podcast appearance with you all. The Hub’s Rudyard Griffiths and Sean Speer recently invited me on their weekly roundtable podcast to discuss my essay “What happened to Canada?” (The follow-up to my 2022 article “On collapse.”)

You can stream that Hub podcast here. In the back half of the episode, I offer my analysis of what’s gone wrong in our country — and why I remain optimistic about our future. I know a lot of you prefer reading to listening, so I have provided a lightly edited transcript below.

While we’re on the topic of The Hub, I also wanted to flag former Lean Out producer Harrison Lowman’s groundbreaking new essay for the outlet, on Canadian journalism, which made big waves this week. Our journalism schools “are not raising left-wing partisans, or telling them to support left-wing political parties,” Lowman writes. But they are “developing and encouraging almost exclusively left-wing storytellers, who are most comfortable with progressive storylines, and who often question the value of objectivity.” He asks: “At the end of the day, isn’t that almost as bad for Canadian democracy?”

See you next week!

— TH

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RG: Tara, great to have you on the program.

TH: Great to be with you.

RG: For those of you who have not discovered Tara’s amazing Substack and podcasts, this is someone who swims in some of the same intellectual waters as The Hub, really cares about issues of free speech — and the state, the tenor, the quality of our public discourse today. Tara, I want to start with an article that you wrote for us on the theme of “Is Canada Broken?” It really resonated with our audience. You had some interesting analysis and insights in that commentary. We’ll include a link to this article in today’s show notes. But why don’t you give us a breakdown of your key argument? Where is this momentum — this kind of malaise, unfortunately, that seems to be affecting Canadians — coming from? The brokenness that many of us feel in our lives, in the country, and the institutions that we’re interacting with.

TH: It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Because my podcast has guests from around the world, I get a chance to talk to a lot of people. And often when I’m recording the podcast, before or after the guest will say, “What happened to Canada?” I think that our political class and our media may not be aware of this perception out there in the world. And so, I started to think, “Okay, how would I explain this to people living elsewhere? What has happened that we’re experiencing this decline across so many parts of our society?”

Now, I just want to say upfront that I am optimistic, but I am also realistic. What we have are these cascading crises all across society: the housing crisis, the opioid crisis. We’re seeing government debacles like the ArriveCan app — I know you’ve been speaking about that on the show — and ethics scandals. We have out of control public policy on the immigration front, on our MAID program. And we just had the ruling on the Emergencies Act, which said that the government broke the law during the trucker crisis. Then we have per capita GDP being down, and our birth rate plummeting, and our education system in crisis post-October 7th. There are a lot of things going on.

And then, you have these embarrassing moments on the world stage for Canada. Like the standing ovation in Parliament for a Nazi. Or, going back further, Theresa Tam saying that single people in the pandemic, if they were going to have intercourse, should be wearing masks. I mean, that was a widely mocked comment. So, you have these strange, embarrassing moments in the midst of all of this. I was trying to figure out what has happened. Why are we experiencing this strange decline across so many fronts?

The conclusion that I’ve come to is that this is really about economic inequality. But not just economic inequality, economic precarity. My sense is that the housing crisis in particular has destabilized our society. When you have whole generations of people who not only cannot afford to buy a house, but also can’t afford to rent … Rental housing is not stable housing; you can’t necessarily start a stable life in that. And so, we have a generation who are not putting down roots, who are often precariously employed, who are delaying the life cycle, who are not starting families, who are working really long hours just trying to get by — food costs are high, inflation, all of those things — and who are extremely angry and frustrated.

Then, along comes the pandemic, and our public policy heightened these tensions. It reinforced these big economic divides, and we did not listen to the people who were most affected. So, you have a polarization spiral that was kicked off, I believe, during the trucker crisis, and is intensifying. Each side of this divide is getting louder and more extreme, and our public debate is being dominated by this.

SS: A ton of insight there, Tara. Your observations about the extent to which housing issues are at the bottom of a lot of these issues resonates a great deal with me. We’ve been socialized to see owning a home, or renting a home, as a crucial step along the path of the so-called success sequence. And when that sequence breaks, I think it is destabilizing for a lot of people. It brings into question a whole host of assumptions that we have really undergirded our society for a long time. I want to try to connect some dots, though, for a minute. We’ve just come off, Rudyard and I, a conversation about the news media. Of course, you are part of the news media. And you’ve written in the past the extent to which certain intellectual and ideological trends within the mainstream media are contributing to that sense of destabilization that you just outlined. Why don’t you talk about that — what’s the role of the news media in contributing to this sense of attenuation and polarization in Canadian society?

TH: I think part of what’s happening is we have a failing media and intellectual class right now. It pains me to say that, because I know there are so many smart and talented journalists and intellectuals in this country who work really hard to resist these trends.

But overall, back to the economic issues — which I know you have been covering extensively on The Future of News series [at The Hub] — we have a collapsing media industry. And we have a government that has intervened with very aggressive public policy that I don’t think has helped at all. So, you have that same sort of economic precarity and economic instability in the media, and I think it breeds conformity.

At the same time as the housing crisis came along, a new ideology came along. A lot of people refer to this as “woke,” but I talk about it as identitarian moralism. It’s a cluster of very radical and quite extreme beliefs on things like gender and race. And it is very illiberal. It shuts down debate instead of encouraging debate.

The problem with this ideology, I think, is that it has taken the very good instincts of very many well-meaning Canadians — “We see this inequality. It’s not good for society. We want to do something about that” — and diverted those great intentions to symbolic gestures instead of working on material conditions and making actual change.

This thinking has dominated the media. It’s a very difficult thing to unpack, because it is presented as a moral imperative. “If you are a decent person, this is how you should think about the world.” It is not presented as an ideology. Many of the arguments that I had in the newsroom, for example, were about pointing out that this is a political ideology and we are politicizing content. And beyond just it being a political ideology, it’s an extremely unpopular one with the general public. It’s very divisive. Many of its ideas go against the liberal, pluralistic ethos that many of us have been raised with.

So, the media has been caught in this cycle of polarization and hyper-politicized content, and it has effectively lost the trust of the Canadian public. This is a key moment when we need the media, when we need diversity of opinion. If we’re going to get out of this cycle of crises and decline, we need all the ideas on the table right now. And we’re just not getting that.

RG: Tara, your diagnostic here — specifically the effects of housing, and the extent to which they go well beyond economic outcomes or needs, that this affects people at a psychological level … It’s certainly having an effect on generations of younger Canadians. We know this. It is like a known-known, and yet what we’ve seen in the last year in Canada has been this massive surge in population, primarily through temporary worker visas, but also temporary student visas. I mean, if you wanted to kind of open mouth-and-insert foot, and your problem was housing, the policy reaction over the last 12 to 18 months has been to do exactly that. To exacerbate these problems, to make them worse. I’m wondering if you have a diagnostic for that. Why do we seemingly do the very things that are intensifying this polycrisis, in a sense, that you’re identifying — that a lot of it has to do with housing and the deep kind of emotional and other needs and issues that are associated with shelter?

TH: I think it’s about conflicting interests, and weighing those conflicting interests. In terms of the huge increase of students, there are academic institutions and pseudo-academic institutions for whom that is extremely helpful. Bringing in temporary foreign workers is extremely helpful for some businesses.

With the housing crisis in Vancouver, where I grew up, you would often see the dialogue split between the half of the people in the city who own property and the half that rent. The decision-makers are overwhelmingly people who own property. These are houses that were, 20, 30 years ago, $300,000 — that are now $3 million. That is not small amounts of money. That is going to impact how people view the housing crisis. For some people, it’s a disaster. For others, it’s a windfall. So, how do we negotiate this clash of interests? I think that’s the question.

Coming back to the media, we must be able to talk about these clashes of interests, and to have wide-ranging conversations on what have been, until now, extremely taboo topics. Coming back to immigration, we are seeing in recent weeks a more fulsome conversation about immigration. But up until now, it has been very taboo to talk about it. I think it has come as news to much of the public that these numbers are what they are. And that’s a very unhealthy dynamic.

SS: You set out earlier that, notwithstanding these various signs of decline, that you’re still ultimately optimistic. Please do Rudyard and me a favour, including our listeners. What gives you reason for optimism, in light of the rather dire picture that you paint?

TH: I’m very optimistic, and let me tell you why. First of all, people are amazing. As someone who interviews people for a living … I talk to a lot of Canadians on a regular basis, I get a lot of mail from readers. People are good. They love the country, they want the country to get on track. The vast majority of people are not hyper-polarized. They want to have reasonable conversations, and are open to hearing a wide range of ideas on all of this. So, I believe in the public, that’s the first thing. And I also believe that there’s a lot of people in this country, including yourselves, who are working really hard to have reasonable conversations about these issues.

There’s three other signs that I just saw this past week that gave me a lot of hope. Steve Paikin was on your podcast. He’s a very respected journalist, across the country, even though he’s in Ontario. He was talking about journalism and really pushing back on this idea that the aspiration of objectivity is antiquated. This is something the public talks to me about all the time. They just want us, as journalists, to present the facts and to trust the public to make their own mind up on it. But that is not how a lot of practicing journalists in this country view that issue now. So, hearing Steve speak about that in such a straightforward way was incredibly heartening for me.

Stephen Marche, also, in The Globe and Mail, wrote a piece about the ideological extremism on the left in light of the Gaza conflict. You could not have published that essay in 2020 in a mainstream outlet. I found his analysis incredibly clear-eyed, very courageous, very straightforward, and it is really resonating.

And then lastly, the Federal Court’s Emergencies Act ruling is, to me, a sign that our institutions are not hopelessly broken. That they are still questioning the government and still effectively working. All three of those signs are hopeful to me.