Weekend reads: On Canadian complacency

A Q&A with Toronto-based political theorist David Polansky

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With the Liberal leadership race underway, and Parliament prorogued until March 24, Canadians are forced to sit and wait — as Trump’s tariff threats escalate. It’s an astonishing moment in Canada, and it has caused many to reflect on how we got here.

David Polansky is a Toronto-based political theorist, and a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy. His writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Washington Post, and Foreign Policy.

Here, in this edited and condensed Q&A (taped on January 22), we discuss Canadian complacency and David’s latest essay for The Hub, “You need to be angrier, Canada.”

TH: Good to speak with you today. I had reached out to you about your piece in The Hub. I thought it was powerful. For readers: You are not advocating for the kind of anger that “encourages us to see our fellow citizens as enemies rather than just rivals or opponents in the political sphere.” But you do make the point that we in Canada have become too complacent. You write: “The leniency with which Canadians have treated their governing class still receives insufficient attention. It is no longer possible, with the exception of a few loyalist hold-outs, to deny the failures of the current government. Why, then, did the Canadian people put up with it for so long, at increasing material cost to themselves?” What a question. Why have we been so complacent?

DP: I’ve thought about this a lot. To some degree, I do think this is a general function of democracy. Auberon Waugh, who was a British political critic and very funny, used to say that democracy isn’t really rule of the people, it’s rule of the busybodies. The average person has a million things to do in any given week, and just wants to be left alone and wants everything to work. You’ve got to pick up the kids; you don’t have time to focus on whatever ideological project you are passionate about. So, that cedes the field to people who are a little unhinged, or people who are passionate about niche things and able to push things in a certain direction. It’s very easy, I think, in any democracy for this dynamic to take place — in which increasingly institutions, and particularly elite institutions, just aren’t actually representative. They are only notionally representative of what the normal person thinks and feels.

In Canada, I think this is exacerbated by the basic complacency of its population. I mean, Canadians are nice. Canadians like to go along and get along. I think they have a sense of themselves, in contrast to their more turbulent southern neighbors, that “we don’t do that stuff.” Outside of Quebec maybe, where things are different. I think that’s contributed, over time, to a passiveness when it comes to observing the failures of these institutions — combined with the fact that, looking back, the degree of democratic engagement was probably always overstated.

It worked because you have a pretty high-performing population. You have strong human capital in Canada, for the most part, and the institutions functioned well for a long time. The mediocrity of the elites, the mediocrity of so many of the leaders, didn’t really impact the day-to-day functioning of the country. That’s changed over time, and I think that there has been a delay in recognition of what that change has meant. Now people are starting to get fed up. But they still haven’t quite connected that sense to what needs to be done, what action should be taken.

TH: How do you reconcile the idea that we’re not angry enough with the anger we are seeing in our politics, in our streets? We are seeing politicians being heckled. We are seeing increased threats to politicians.

DP: That’s impotent anger. That doesn’t do anything. It’s like me yelling at my TV screen, yelling at the football game. It accomplishes nothing. It changes nothing. But I sort of assume that people reading that Hub piece aren’t the kind of people who are going out and throwing beer cans at people. I’m thinking more of my neighbours — and myself, frankly. People who sit around like, “Wait a minute, home invasions are bad, increased crime is bad. Letting an immigration policy get completely off the rails — nobody supports this.” This is something that cuts across left and right.

It’s very rare anymore that I find someone, particularly outside of academia, who will defend the present system. And yet there’s a sense of, “Oh well.” It’s almost like it’s a natural occurrence. You can’t get mad at forest fires, you can’t get mad at earthquakes. But you can get mad at your government. And you can begin to think through why they are not representing us, and why they are expressing what are really niche preferences that have nothing to do with the average Canadian, regardless of what party you are nominally a member of.

So, I think that’s the kind of anger we need to see more of — anger that translates into a return to political engagement. Because heckling people on the street is not political. You can do that at a football game. It means nothing.

TH: You write in the piece that “as they are denied a trip to the ballot box, Canada’s citizens are in need of a preference cascade in which they can commonly and openly recognize how much they agree with one another and disagree with their government on a range of important issues, from energy to immigration to cultural politics.” Can you unpack that for us?

DP: A “preference cascade” — that’s one of these social scientific-sounding terms. But it’s actually a pretty good one. It does describe a real phenomenon, in which people actually agree with each other on things but don’t know it. Because there’s a sense that we don’t talk about this stuff. So, you have a sense of, “I’m the only one who thinks this way.” This phenomenon is obviously exacerbated in authoritarian societies. A place like East Germany for example, during the Cold War. But even in democratic societies, people say, “My colleagues can’t think the way I do.” Actually, your colleagues do think the way you do. You don’t realize this because of how much of the media dissemination reflects an alternative reality.

Just to take an example — and I can say this, because I’m not even Canadian, I’m American — I’m struck by how much anti-Canadian sentiment exists in schools, in the media, even just from politicians. There’s a sense that we have so much to atone for. The average Canadian doesn’t really feel that way. The average Canadian doesn’t mind being proud of their country. They don’t think it makes them a fascist to be proud of their country, or to express ordinary pride, or to think that it’s okay to advocate for their interests. And yet, if you didn’t talk to your neighbours — if you didn’t have this kind of communal, political deliberation — you wouldn’t realize what you had in common. You wouldn’t realize what the actual bases of agreement and disagreement were. Because so many of the ideas now being received are from institutions that have been captured by, again, fairly niche political persuasions.

TH: I noticed this dynamic when I left the mainstream media publicly, because I started getting a lot of mail from the public. Those issues that had been very much off limits in the mainstream media, people — as you say, across the political spectrum — were writing me about them … On the topic of nationalism, Trudeau has said we are a post-national state. But now that we have the threat of tariffs and Trump’s remarks about us becoming a 51st state, Trudeau went on CNN and evoked nationalism. It wasn’t very clearly articulated, but he did fall back on it. What did you make of that?

DP: It doesn’t really surprise me. But it doesn’t mean that he suddenly gets converted to nationalism, or that he’s thought about this at all. Or that he’s really thought about anything very deeply. I don’t think, for example, when he said we were a post-national state, that he had really reflected upon what that meant. I think that was simply an expression of what he took to be a kind of general elite preference. The thing about nationalism is that it is the ordering principle of our world — and it still is, even if we pretend that it’s not. So, you will routinely find people falling back on it when the chips are down.

There is this, “Wait a minute, we actually do need something to hold on to.” That something invariably ends up being nationalism, in the absence of a real alternative. And there is no real alternative, at least right now. It’s weak because Trudeau hasn’t reflected on it. And because they have spent so many years basically undercutting the foundations of something like a sturdy and decent form of Canadian nationalism. Being told, “Why don’t you just become an annex to a more powerful neighbour?” offends on some level — and it should offend. But having spent so many years basically disregarding what that means, it comes off very watery now. But I think the average person would simply say, “No, I’m Canadian. Of course I’m Canadian.” But that needs to be built into political practice. It can’t just be something that you reach for when things go bad.

TH: I was thinking about this with Mark Carney’s bid for the leadership of the Liberal Party, and the way objections to that are being framed. I was reminded of the David Goodhart book, The Road to Somewhere. In that book, Goodhart characterizes the battle [of modern politics] as being between the Anywheres — urban, liberal, secular, educated, wealthy elites who travel extensively, and are not tethered in any meaningful way to the nations they come from — and the Somewheres, who are grounded in a specific locale, and care very deeply not just about its material wellbeing, but about its identity. We saw this framing surface as people reacted to the news that Mark Carney, a man who has often lived and worked abroad, is, according to the media, the front-runner. How do we think through that?

DP: It’s a good question. I’m actually a bad person to think through this, probably, because I’m living in my third foreign country. I’m one of those rootless cosmopolitans that you hear about. But in the end, any form of cosmopolitanism is inherently parasitic, at least in the modern world, because we don’t really have a global framework for cosmopolitanism that isn’t undergirded by the nation state. Everyone holding those passports is very careful to make sure they hold certain passports. There are passports you don’t want to hold. There are places you want to be able to fall back on when the chips are down. If you are really, really rich, if you can achieve something like escape velocity, you can say, “No, I’m giving this up.” One of the Facebook guys did right before the IPO came out; he went over to Singapore. But we’re talking of very, very few people.

Most of the cosmopolite necessarily do have recourse back to one or more nation states. And Canada is appealing for them. Because it’s stable, it’s relatively wealthy, it’s a home. They are protected. There is rule of law. These things matter in the end. So, I think there is a falseness to a lot of what we think of as global cosmopolitanism. It isn’t true cosmopolitanism — they are not really citizens of everywhere. They are citizens of a certain place that, because of the highly favourable conditions of the past so many decades, allows them to think that they can be anywhere. But when the chips are down, where do you go?

I do think that makes them poor representatives of most people. Because most people don’t have that many passports. Most people, if they travel, they travel for vacation, then they go home. That’s it. And their business, their capital, is tied up in particular places. So, citizenship has much more value to them. Citizenship has value to everybody, but the value is more apparent to certain people when their lives and their capital are more grounded, more tied to a certain place.

I think that part of restoring democratic representation in Canada means making that link between ordinary Canadians and their representatives more sturdy, more clear. Reminding politicians: “You represent us. You are not the spokespeople of some Davos class. I don’t care who you had lunch with in Switzerland last week.”

I think that part of restoring democratic representation in Canada means making that link between ordinary Canadians and their representatives more sturdy, more clear. Reminding them: “You represent us. You are not the spokespeople of some Davos class. I don’t care who you had lunch with in Switzerland last week.” And, “If you can’t [represent us], then you can just go be rich — but without being a politician.” I suspect Mark Carney is running into this problem now, and will continue to run into this problem.

TH: There’s one question that I’ve been puzzling over. In this era of politics in Canada, the leftists that I know see Trudeau as a centrist who is enthrall to elites and their interests. But those on the right see him as far left. I thought of this again recently, with Jordan Peterson and Pierre Poilievre’s discussion. Poilievre said Trudeau had governed with a radical ideology that is “basically authoritarian socialism.” I don’t know how to think through that. On the one hand, I do think Trudeau has taken radical positions on social issues. But Trudeau-era Canada has not been unkind to Corporate Canada, from SNC-Lavalin, to big banks and telecommunications, and the universities and businesses that took advantage of international students and temporary foreign workers. How do we unpack this? Is there a coherent political ethos that’s at play here?

DP: No. Look, I’m not a partisan fellow. I spent most of my life — and even most of my time in Canada — not having strong opinions about Canadian politics. When I was studying and I would occasionally see people who were studying Canadian politics, I would see what they were writing on, and I would fall into a coma. But it has gotten more interesting.

What’s really striking to me, and I think I can say this, is that Trudeau is an intellectual lightweight. So, I think it would be a mistake to see him as an ideologue of one flavour or another. He reflects the general views of the class of which he is a part. Those views are not entirely coherent, though. I think you are quite right: Nothing about Trudeau’s policies has really threatened the Canadian oligarchy. I use the term advisedly, because Canada is a strange country, a country in which certain families do actually retain a lot of power. On top of which, the major industries are heavily consolidated. None of their positions were ever threatened by Trudeau. So, I think that falling back on this language of socialism doesn’t really get it right.

The cultural issues, Trudeau is probably more left wing on. But then, that’s just a function, again, of the entire elite establishment. Those are just their views. At no point, I think, has anyone in that class ever said, “I’m willing to sacrifice my material standing in order to achieve this future that I want to see.” They have not been threatened. In fact, their insulation from the costs of many of their policies is a big part of why we see what we see. The average person making these decisions, their job is not threatened by immigration. They haven’t been subject to a home invasion, things like that. The material decline of Canada has not actually hit them, and I don’t think they really see it that way.

I think it’s a mistake to see them as some kind of real socialist. What you really have is an incoherent mishmash of policies that, I think, really stem from a sense that Canada was at the end of history, that hard decisions didn’t have to be made anymore. Canada was a fortunate country. You read all of these standings that Canada is the best country on earth, all the most livable cities are in Canada. I think it was, “Our work is done. All we have to do now is whatever we feel like. There will be no cost.”

Now there is this very belated realization that you are still in the real world. History, as such, isn’t over. You still have to make tough decisions and there are trade-offs to the decisions that you have already made. I think that this is finally dawning on people. But I don’t think that the general policies they have pursued have been a function of some kind of coherent, hard-left ideology. I think it was a sense that somehow the money will always flow, and some amount of that money can be redirected to whatever interest we favour in a given moment. I think it much more can be explained by expediency than ideology.