In his speech to the European Parliament last month, Carney kept planting (metaphorical) trees. He described how First World War Canadian lieutenant Leslie Miller had gathered acorns from a scorched French battlefield, smuggled them back home to Ontario, and planted them. In time, they grew into a fine oak forest. A century later, grafts from those oaks were replanted in France. “A profound circle of renewal was completed,” Carney told MEPs. 

Now, Carney wants to graft a Canadian maple onto the European family tree. Today, he is hosting European Union leaders in Montreal, in the hope of establishing how Canada can become the union’s first ever “associate member”. But the bloc may just drop the offered title entirely, after major pushback from EU members who don’t want Canada formally in their club.

Carney is attempting to pull off a monumental act of historical reverse engineering — one that would see the New World returning to the shores of the Old. Finding itself in President Trump’s crosshairs, Canada is trying to pivot from being America’s dependent northern brother to Europe’s long-lost child returning home. “It is my strong personal view that the international order will be rebuilt, but it will be rebuilt out of Europe,” Carney has predicted.

The problem is that this reunion will not work out. While their roots intertwine, Canada’s relationship with Europe faces hard geographic, economic and cultural ceilings that cannot be overcome by mere treaties and titles. Canada is a non-native species on European soil.

Carney takes every opportunity to remind Canadians of their British and French “founding peoples”, even persuading King Charles to travel to Ottawa to open Parliament last year (Carney’s brother is the chief operating officer at Kensington Palace). Yet despite the current feud with President Trump, Canadians have far more in common with Americans. Our European ancestors, who threw caution to the wind and boarded ships bound for Canada, chose to leave the Old World behind for a reason: to seize individual and economic opportunity. To escape wars, class divides, and poverty. To build a new and different society.

What, then, is Carney hoping to get out of the EU? He has vowed to double non-US exports in the next decade and wants Europe to be a bigger trading partner, claiming the continent is even more economically enticing than China. He is particularly interested in European defense technology: Canada has inked a Canada-EU Security and Defense Partnership, and chosen German-Norwegian shipbuilder TKMS to build it a fleet of 12 new submarines. There’s also been talk of Canada joining an EU-Canada Digital Trade Agreement, Erasmus+ (the EU’s education program that allows students to study abroad), and Horizon Europe (the bloc’s funding program for research and innovation). There are rumors that Canada is aligning with Europe on AI regulations, pension investment, competition watchdogs, forest fire water bombers, and undersea telecommunications cables; it is also said to be taking part in the EU space program. But, most importantly, Canada has joined the European Broadcasting Union, clinching a spot in Eurovision and the chance to introduce the rest of the world to Inuit throat singing.

The Europeans, in turn, are interested in Canada’s critical minerals (lithium, graphite, and nickel), energy (liquefied natural gas, hydrogen), and the Canadian Arctic. A deepened Canadian partnership would make Europe less reliant on China’s rare earth deposits, America’s technology, and Russia’s oil. “Canada is truly the most European of the non-European countries,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, asserted during her State of the Union address in June. In September, she extended the associate member invite to Carney, whom she calls “dear Mark”. As she landed in Montreal today, the German politician signaled she hasn’t given up on granting Canada the new title, standing in defiance of many of her European colleagues.

The Canadian government views EU associate membership as its best chance of diversifying away from the US. (This is after Carney walked out of American trade deal negotiations in the eleventh hour because, as he put it, Canada’s sovereignty was being stolen.) Europhile Canadians see Europeans as kindred spirits equally devoted to democratic institutions, large social safety nets, and the defense of Ukraine. They dream about the possibility of greater freedom to live, study and work across Europe.

Those opposed to EU membership, however, are wary of Europe’s anemic economic growth, lack of technological innovation, and aging population, as well as its strict data rules, agri-food standards, and energy regulations. They fear that joining the EU could result in more migrants at our borders, as well as Canada having to send roughly 1% of its economic output to Brussels. They say that rather than surrendering our sovereignty to the Americans, we’d just be surrendering it to the Europeans. “We will never be the 51st US state. And we will never be the 28th EU state,” Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre told his supporters.

According to recent polling, around 81% of Canadians want closer integration with the EU, while remaining outside of the union. But Canadian support for closer integration falls to 49% when the prospect of EU membership is raised. The consensus is clear: Canadians want to have a closer relationship with Europe, but they do not want to become Europeans. 

This tension is evident in the difficulty the Canadian government has had describing the new “associate member” relationship — are we just dating, or getting married? The relationship is now up in the air, as members appear prepared to vote against the associate member designation. “We’ve definitely put the cart before the horse,” admitted one European diplomat. “Nobody really knows what it means,” said another. “The good news is it doesn’t matter about specific names or nomenclature,” said a visibly perturbed Carney responding earlier this week. “What matters is the difference that it will make to lives of Canadians.”

Talks around Canada’s new membership status have seen Germany, France, Italy and Greece push back. They don’t feel consulted. They are frustrated that Canada is receiving “association without accession”, reaping European rewards without meeting the standard requirements to gain membership.

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The obstacles to Canada’s European romance are numerous. On the economic front, 72.5% of Canada’s exports are sent to the US; the entire EU currently takes a measly 5.5%. In addition, 85% of Canada’s energy is sent to America. In a single month, Canada exports more to Oklahoma than Germany, more to Kentucky than France, and more to New Jersey than Italy.

Then there are the societal barriers. It is admittedly difficult to pinpoint a distinct Canadian culture: in many ways, Canada is already its own often dysfunctional union. A vast country of 10 provinces, three territories and two official languages is home to far North Inuit, Quebecker maple-syrup makers, Newfoundland fishermen, Albertan cowboys and everyone in between. Add to that the vexing interprovincial trade barriers that cost our country $200 billion a year, and it becomes clear we have our own issues getting along among ourselves.

Yet a shared Canadian culture does exist, and it is plainly different from Europe’s. Our ancestors left behind most of the Old World’s traditions, bloody revolutionary battles, and class hierarchies. We are a young country of just 159 years old. We are more individualistic. Our work often defines our lives. Living in the second-largest nation in the world, we spread out across our vast landscape. We live in larger homes and drive bigger cars: for 16 years straight, the Ford F-150 truck has been the best-selling vehicle in Canada. Then there’s the fact that within Canada, hundreds of Indigenous nations increasingly practice self-governance. Our nation is undeniably “un-European”.

While we hate to admit it, we share much with and depend on Americans more than anyone else. Two-thirds of Canadians live within 100 kilometers of the American border. The US covers 60% of the budget for our Arctic defense radar stations. English Canadians consume almost exclusively American arts and entertainment: in 2023, only 3.3% of our total box office revenue came from Canadian films. 

Currently, 56% of Canadians say they have more in common with European nations than the US. But the hostile American president has completely muddied the polls. Remove Trump from the equation and far more Canadians would agree they have more in common with Americans than Europeans. In the end, Carney’s best intentions, buttressed by globalization, technology and emotion, simply cannot trump geography, history and culture. As much as Canadians might want it to, Europe cannot fill Canada’s America-sized hole.

Prime Minister Carney keeps a map of his grandparents’ Irish hometown of Aughagower on his desk in Ottawa. He says it acts as a friendly reminder of where he came from. But that’s just it. The reality is Europe is where Canada came from, not where it is going.

That day has now arrived. Alberta’s long-awaited independence referendum is happening on Monday, and if the polls are right, roughly 650,000 of Russell’s fellow Albertans intend to vote the same way as him. The province’s independence movement is not about language or culture, as separatism in Quebec has been for 60 years. Instead, as talking with the protesters on the Edmonton bridge reveals, it’s almost exclusively about populist outrage; a quixotic belief in cultural homogeneity; and naive-if-understandable economic hope.

For Russell, the inflection point came in early 2020, the first days of the Covid pandemic. That was when he lost his job as an industrial plumber in Edmonton, Alberta’s sub-Arctic, truck-clogged capital city of 1.2 million people. “We heard they canceled St Patrick’s Day in Ireland,” he recalls, “and then obviously the layoffs happened”. Having started his job just five weeks before, he says he was “first on the chopping block”. From that moment, Russell tells me his confidence in being able to make ends meet was shaken — as was his hope. Over the past six years, he has moved his family several times to find work; a business he launched ground to a halt; and his son was forced to be vaccinated against his wishes. As for Russell himself, he was called a Nazi for his anti-vaccination beliefs.

Yet if Russell’s is a personal tragedy, he feels his province has been wronged too — by the Canadian state. “The rug,” as he puts it, “has been pulled out from under us.” He’s far from alone. Freed from federal laws, indigenous land treaties, environmental reviews, and other barriers they feel Canada’s liberal-minded power brokers back East put up to thwart them, separatists believe their land of prairies and mountains might soon resemble petro-states like Qatar or the UAE.

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If they get their way, Canada could be broken in two. The referendum is not binding, just like the 2016 Brexit referendum, but it’s still the first direct vote on Canadian unity in 30 years. And, just like Brexit, the aftermath of Alberta’s vote is likely to be protracted and damaging. If they don’t succeed, and polls suggest they won’t, separatists will feel hope has been snatched away from them — and that could somehow be worse than the chaos of secession. It’s the same challenge faced by countries right across the Western world: how do pluralist, liberal societies create hope that’s louder than the grudge, before the grudge breaks everything?

Alberta is Canada’s original grudgeland. There’s history you must know to make sense of that fact — though it doesn’t perfectly explain what’s happening now. Anthony Sayers, a political scientist at the University of Calgary who traces the history of party politics in Canada, explains Alberta was cut out of the country’s North-West Territories in 1905 to create a province “in the Roman sense” of the term. In other words: it existed to be extracted, while the local government wasn’t given control over its natural resources or tax base. For the politicians in Ottawa, Alberta was first there to be a cash-cow — its bounties exported to eager consumers in Europe.

The first resource Canada extracted was grain. But even before Alberta was formed, federal surveyors and prospectors believed it held vast reserves of oil. This was quickly proven, though industrialization in practice took decades (and it was actually Americans, not other Canadians, who first brought money and technology to help — another source of grudge). Today, Alberta has more than 160 billion barrels of proven reserves still left. That translates to the fourth largest stockpile in the world, and encompasses practically all of Canada’s share.

This created the grudgeland. For though Canada handed control of Alberta’s natural resources to the province in the Thirties, separatist discussions have rumbled for more than a century. Especially after 1979, the Iran revolution and resulting oil crisis, a Canadian policy to sell Alberta oil domestically at below-market prices spurred white-hot anger. Western Canada Concept, the province’s first separatist party, was born. “Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze In The Dark!” as one popular Albertan bumper sticker from the period put it.

Separatism’s newest wave doesn’t fit neatly into this history. The standard grudges remain, but they’re joined by more conspiratorial beliefs. Russell tells me he’s a separatist because Alberta’s wealth goes to Canada in the form of taxes, and Canada then sends these dollars to other less-wealthy provinces — the much-hated “equalization” policy. That’s mostly accurate, albeit with huge caveats. But what certainly isn’t accurate is Russell’s next claim. “For this fiscal year, we have budgeted, as Canadians, C$86 billion to send to King Charles for the administration of our country,” he tells me, with that figure coming out to about £45.5 billion. “Look that up. Don’t take my word for it.”

Mitch Sylvestre shares that fixation with the British Crown, and even told one reporter he believes King Charles wants him murdered. When I meet Sylvestre, leader of the pro-independence Stay Free Alberta organization, he describes the utopia that could unfold if his province became a country. Sylvestre is tall, athletically built, and has a blazing intensity that belies his 71 years. “Let’s get real here,” he tells me. “If we have a C$27 billion-to-C$50 billion fiscal surplus every year, multiply that by 20, that’s a trillion dollars,” or about £530 billion. Just the interest on that windfall, Sylvestre continues, will pay every cost in Alberta. “No income tax, no property tax, no federal tax, no debt. Does that appeal to anybody?”

Clearly it does. Given Alberta’s royalties from oil extraction, valued at C$19.3 billion in 2025 alone, you might see a glittering windfall to be split among the province’s 5.1 million residents. Still, economists at the University of Alberta have questioned Sylvestre’s sums. The academics warned that creating an entirely new government structure, from courts to the army, as well as paying a portion of Canada’s national debt, would prove costly — especially at first. Their most optimistic scenario suggests a 2% hit to Alberta’s overall GDP, while their pessimistic scenario suggests GDP could drop by 10% over five years, and by more than 15% over 20. While some counter that an independent Alberta would be able to sell more oil to compensate, it would still be landlocked, and dependent on its current main customer, the United States, for moving or buying its black gold. And the US, to put it mildly, has lately been indifferent to economic fairness.

For Jared Wesley, a political scientist who works on finding shared ground among Alberta’s polarized citizens, these economic dreams point to real pain for the working class. The fact is jobs in the much-feted oil and gas sector aren’t growing, peaking with 170,000 jobs in 2014 before falling through a mixture of automation and frozen investment. Another source of anxiety has been immigration, which the province cannot control. Nearly 150,000 non-permanent residents have moved to Alberta over the past decade, and this has been seized upon by separatists, including the currently provincial Premier Danielle Smith. When voters come to vote next week, after all, Smith has included nine other questions in their ballot papers, five of which are about the access to public services immigrants should have.

Culture matters here too. To be sure, Alberta doesn’t have a particularly unique identity within Canada — aside from perhaps a love of cosplaying as cowboys while actually living in the suburbs. The oft-cited culture of Albertans being “hard-working people”, who just want big government to leave them alone, is also present in rural parts of Ontario, where I’m originally from. Still, compared to other parts of the country, Alberta did see a strikingly large inflow of settlers from the American Midwest in its early days. These settlers brought with them a deep current of libertarianism, populism, and Christian conservatism. As far back as the Thirties, Albertans elected William Aberhart, a radio preacher, as their premier, with “Bible Bill” famous for taking on the Ottawa establishment. In the century since, business ties with the US have only deepened.

This blend of history, economics and frontier culture explains the referendum’s immediate political context. Former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney created the United Conservative Party (UCP) in 2017, patching up the province’s fragmented Right wing. Kenney won the 2019 election handily, heading a party he’d engineered with populist conservative ideals: including giving rank-and-file party members the ability to hold binding leadership reviews. As premier, Kenney then passed the Citizens Initiatives Act, allowing Albertans to gather enough signatures to push through policy changes and even constitutional referendums.

Both were key to what happened next. Kenney railed against the Canadian state, trading in outrage and even mild conspiratorialism. A 2019 public inquiry, which hoped to find evidence of foreign money being used to strangle Albertan oil and gas, spent millions and found little. Still, it was all part of Kenney’s broader theory of “ventilation”: of keeping separatists under control by throwing them hints that he shared their outrage.

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But back in 2021, as Justin Trudeau, the antichrist for most Albertan conservatives because of his performative wokeness and policies that many Albertans believe shut in their resources, looked ready to win yet another federal election, separatist sympathizers pushed Kenney to consider a split. He refused. This is when Sylvestre evolved into one of Alberta’s most unelected people. He helped force Kenney out as leader (Sylvestre is also a constituency president in the party); helped replace him with Smith; and then, in 2026, organized the petition that, under Kenney’s law, gathered 220,000 signatures, passing the threshold for a province-wide vote.

Smith is far more comfortable with the idea of secession. As for Sylvestre, he has visited the US to chat with officials about what might happen if Alberta left Canada. Among other things, that might potentially include a half-billion dollar loan, with the funds provided by Washington.

Sylvestre has also vowed that separatism won’t go away, whatever happens with the vote. If they lose, some secessionists have already threatened to oust Smith from within, one path to continued unrest. There are many others. For instance, over half of Alberta’s doctors say they’ll leave if the province separates. Rank-and-file separatists, people like Scott Russell, will be at risk of seeing the hope they’ve clung to evaporate. Where would they turn then? Based on the progress of other populist movements, from Britain to the Netherlands to Germany, the answer is likely to be messy.

Another parallel with populists elsewhere is that people like Russell arguably have the wrong target. Many of the problems he and others rightly flag are ultimately the responsibility of their own provincial administration — from healthcare to the royalties owed by oil giants. The federal Canadian government, under new Prime Minister Mark Carney, has actually declared a new pipeline to the Pacific Ocean in the national interest, thereby avoiding the many loopholes that stymied similar proposals in the past. But in Alberta’s political culture, the historical frame of reference is to blame outside forces, not those from within.

Little wonder Wesley is worried for the future. In the US, he notes, some on the populist Right have already turned to violence. “I just hope that that’s not going to be the overwhelming response here.” Separatists and their leaders are peaceful. But in 2022, far-Right activists mounted a border blockade in southern Alberta to oppose federal vaccine mandates. One man openly talked of preparing for what he saw as a war against tyranny, calling for federal leaders to be hanged. He had weapons, including a pipe bomb, and is now in prison.

Russell is hardly in that mold, but his words could make you think otherwise. “Canada — like the country, the land, the people — I love it.” he says. “But like the federal government and the system? You are darn right that I hate the guys who hate me and who literally want me dead, and have said so.”

In Musil’s writings, I see parallels with today’s Europe. Our time, too, might one day be known as a pre-war era. After all, if Germany was the up-and-coming power in 1914, China is today. The UK was then the biggest global power, like the US today. The equivalent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 2026 is Russia: a once-great power in terminal decline.  In hindsight, one of the omens of the First World War was the emergence of political and military alliances that were intended to protect but which ended up becoming conduits of war — such as Germany’s alliance with Austria, Russia’s with Serbia, and France’s with Russia.  

The alliance between the EU and Canada — which was strengthened last week, when the EU proposed that Canada somehow become its first “associate member” — is militarily not as consequential as those that led Europe to the killing fields. Yet it has something of their essence. It has a certain Musil-like quality too — just another parallel campaign in a world soon to be extinguished.

Mark Carney likes giving spine-stiffening speeches in defense of the passing multilateral order, while Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, poses for as many photos with Volodymyr Zelensky as possible. But surely, like Musil’s dreamers, both Carney and von der Leyen have more important things to do? For the EU is not a global power, but something much more down to earth: a customs union and a single market, plus a monetary union among most of its members. These three functions are the only ones that ever mattered. Yet instead of focusing on the EU’s core economic problems, where she has the power to bring about change, von der Leyen is engaged in a performative dance with Carney. 

The Canadian prime minister, too, has unresolved problems at home. Canada’s biggest trade barrier is not the one with the US, but its own internal system. Canadian provinces are like medieval European fiefdoms, imposing trade barriers against each other. It is a vast country, but it is not a single market. Why not solve that problem first?  

So the issue with the EU-Canada pact is not so much that it is wrong, but that it is vacuous, or, as, Musil would put it, without qualities. In 2014, the EU and Canada signed a trade deal, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, or Ceta, which took provisional effect in 2016. Ten years later, this treaty is still not formally approved, because 10 EU countries, including France and Italy, have refused to ratify it. If you are really interested in solidifying the EU-Canada relationship, would you not start there? My theory is that von der Leyen and other politicians are simply bored with the single market, and find a G7 or G20-type set up far more glamorous.  

The UK-based European Council on Foreign Relations, together with the Netherlands-based European Cultural Foundation, recently published a poll that found 70% of Europeans were euroskeptic. I was not in the least surprised by this result, but it came as a shock to the authors, who subsequently recommended that the EU engage in even more performative stunts. They wrote that to foster pro-European attitudes, Brussels should harness “the power of future nostalgia, or a longing for a time when a better future seemed within reach”. In other words: keep your eyes off the ball for a little while longer, while appealing to our glorious past.  

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The stunt with Canada is about exactly that — nostalgia for the age of globalization that has now vanished. Canada and the EU entered the new era of globalization as second-rate powers, led by third-rate politicians, but they ended up being the big winners. I still recall the uncritical British deference to Carney when he arrived as governor of the Bank of England. He was the highest-paid central banker in the world at the time: apparently he needed the money to send his children to a private school. This all happened in 2012, an age when non-doms, now an extinct species, roamed the streets of Mayfair. This is the world Carney wants to return to — the world he knows. 

The obvious problem with Canada’s aspiration to become an “associate member” of the EU is that no such membership exists. Veterans of the Brexit debates may recall that the EU only offers a fixed number of external relationships — and Canada currently has the same deal as the UK (except with more maple syrup).

Nor is full Canadian EU membership possible, since membership is limited to European countries only. The 10 member states that refused to ratify the Ceta trade deal will almost certainly not ratify that EU-Canada association agreement. So what are Carney and von der Leyen even discussing? 

There are ironies here too. I found it deeply comic when I recently heard Carney speaking about sending a special envoy to the EU to discuss co-operation on areas including AI and defense. There is practically no AI work going on in Europe — except for lots of people hyperventilating about US tech companies. Besides, Nato, the defense alliance that ties Canada and most EU countries together, already exists. In other words, there is absolutely nothing in this hot-air balloon of a “pact” that could not be had down here on Earth. (And no, you don’t need an alliance to relax restrictions on freedom of movement.)

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If the EU and Canada were really serious about safeguarding their waning global influence, perhaps they should start by addressing their joint dependencies on the US in a more strategic way. Canada and Europe both run large and sustained current-account surpluses against the US. The two nations have built industrial structures on the assumption that the Americans would forever tolerate the trade deficit and global imbalances that sustain them. Even in the highly unlikely scenario that Canada were to gain full EU membership, this would not reduce its dependence on the US for imported goods. 

On my list of the 10 most important initiatives the EU needs to take right now, in other words, a closer relationship with Canada doesn’t even feature. Instead, my top suggestions would be for the EU to reopen the closed diplomatic channels with Moscow to ensure that it plays a role in the governance of post-war Ukraine; to recognize the dangers of a financial crisis that over-indebted European countries like France have exposed themselves to; to ditch the anti-tech regulation and many other bureaucratic hurdles the EU has imposed on business in the last decade; and to create a fledgling capital-market union, so that Europe’s large pool of savings are channeled into domestic investments. I can think of many more ambitious things, but that would be a good start.  

Besides Canada’s “associate membership”, fast-tracking Ukrainian EU membership is the other delusion of European politics. The EU does not have the money for it. And Ukraine is moving further away from meeting the formal criteria for joining, sinking deeper and deeper into corruption. Neither von der Leyen nor Zelensky are doing the work to change things. Instead, they are content merely to act upon the world stage. And that’s what this is really about: acting. If only Musil were alive today: he would have a lot of fun with these characters without qualities, and their mystifying parallel universes.

Why, then, is the Trump administration appeasing China on trade, while picking fights with countries like Canada that are friends and allies of the United States? Why is America shaking down allies for cash and risking inflationary pressure at a time when the US economy can hardly afford more of it? The sheer irrationality and refusal to ease up lend President Trump’s trade war with Canada the aspects of a mad compulsion. 

Trade negotiations between Washington and Ottawa have dramatically collapsed in the last week. The industries involved include autos, lumber, plywood, clothing, dairy, and alcohol. There is no reason for the two countries not to be able to reach an accommodation on any of these questions, provided America doesn’t continue to treat friends like enemies.

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The automobile industry is a strategic industry, to be sure, but the issue in the US-Canadian trade diplomacy involves merely the location of supply chains in what is already an integrated North American market. As for the rest, nobody would describe dairy, alcohol, and plywood as sectors essential to American industrial, commercial, and military power.

Meanwhile, by 2023, China’s share of global manufacturing output surged to 28%, up from just 9% in 2004 — making it larger than the combined output of the United States, Japan, and Germany.  

Chinese manufacturing dominance, by the way, isn’t about “plastic trinkets,” free-traders’ shorthand of a generation ago for why we shouldn’t worry about giving up some industry to the Middle Kingdom. Thanks to a relentless and effective state-sponsored industrial- and trade-policy combination, China, once an exporter of low-value-added products like textiles, now leads the world in electronics exports. It enjoys a global market share of 32%, followed by 14% in the case of Taiwan. The American share of global electronic exports? A measly 5%.

China is also now the world’s largest car maker, responsible for a third of global output. And the country’s share of global shipbuilding, another high-tech, strategic-manufacturing industry, is even higher, at a staggering 56%. And while the Chinese lag behind the United States in commercial aviation, they control an estimated 80% to 90% share of global drone manufacturing — an industry with obvious military implications. 

OK, when it comes to the most strategic industries of the 21st century, America should be picking its trade fights with China, not with … Canada. But hey, at least when it comes to plywood, Canada is a bigger player in global markets than China. Oh, wait — China is responsible for more than 54% of global plywood exports and makes up to an estimated 70% of the world’s plywood.

Alcohol? Canada lags behind the leaders in alcohol revenue: the United States, China, and Japan.  Is Canada threatening to engross the world lumber market? Well, at least Canada exports more milk and dairy products (180,000 tons) than China (70,380 tons). And according to 2026 data, Canada exports more lumber than the United States.

America is threatened by a lumber gap!

In all seriousness, there is something perverse afoot here. While cracking down on Canada in trade disputes over non-strategic industries, the second Trump administration has appeased Communist China. The People’s Republic controls 90% of refining in rare earths, essential for advanced technology and manufacturing in many industries, and the Beijing regime hasn’t hesitated to use the leverage it gains from control of this strategic chokepoint. In April 2025, following Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcements, China imposed export controls on a number of rare-earth minerals on which American and allied civilian and defense industries depend. 

Living up to the motto “TACO” — Trump Always Chickens Out — the president in May flew to Beijing to a summit with Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping. According to the White House news release, “China will address US concerns regarding supply-chain shortages related to rare earths and other critical minerals, including yttrium, scandium, neodymium, and indium.” 

In return for this vague promise, the Trump administration won commitments from the Chinese regime to buy 200 Boeing aircraft — which will undoubtedly help China obtain technology to build its own rival aircraft industry — and promises to buy more US beef and poultry. America may have lost consumer electronics and drone manufacturing to the Chinese, but take solace: America’s chicken feedlots rule!

Those of us who have followed bad US trade deals for decades recognize the trick used by East Asian mercantilist nations, including Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, as well as China. Knowing the power of America’s farm lobby in Congress, and the political weakness of US manufacturers, the East Asian mercantilists will graciously promise to import more American soybeans, beef, pork, or other agricultural commodities, if Americans agree to stop protesting their state-sponsored, trade-induced deindustrialization of the US economy.

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Team Trump, in short, is doing the exact opposite of what American strategy in the 21st century demands.

Strategy is the art of picking priorities. A rational American trade strategy would focus on a hard decoupling of the United States from market-Leninist China. In addition, to take advantage of economies of scale in manufacturing and increase global market shares, a rational American trade strategy would seek to pool the American manufacturing base with those of allies in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere that share America’s interest in reducing economic and military dependence on China. Even legitimate trade disputes with US trading partners, including Canada, should be kept off the front pages of the news media and subordinated to these two goals of Sino-American decoupling and allied solidarity.

Moreover, in order to work over many years and through changes of party control in Washington, a rational strategic trade policy should be backed by technocratic expertise and should seek to win bipartisan legitimacy. But Trump’s trade policy is personal and whimsical and finally incoherent. 

The worst part: instead of rehabilitating the use of tariffs as a legitimate instrument of American economic statecraft going back to the Founding Fathers, Trump is discrediting them in the eyes of the American people. No wonder the share of the US public that favors global free trade rose to 55% last year, up from 35% percent in 2024, when Trump was re-elected. Even among Republicans, free trade’s popularity rose to 34%, up from 20%, in the same period.

If the Chinese regime had possessed the power to plant a Manchurian Candidate in the White House in 2025, whose goal was to discredit economic nationalism in American public opinion, it could not have chosen a better agent than Donald “Tariff Man” Trump.

Dr Fleischman rather eccentrically operates on the fowl, trying to remove the buckshot. But the bird dies. And Joel is despondent. At the local bar, he is consoled by the waitress, Shelly. “When things get gnarly, Dr Fleischman,” she says, “it’s best to do the sad thing. Don’t be afraid to salt your oatmeal with your tears.” The fact is, Joel loved hunting: the primal experience of tracking his prey, of being outdoors, of sleeping under the stars. “And the killing,” he tells Shelly, “The killing was the best part. It was the dying I couldn’t take.”

I think of that line each time I hear about Canada’s MAiD policy which is vigorously putting an end to dying. There is a clear distinction between killing and dying, and between dying and death. In that episode of Northern Exposure, the bloodlust of killing is turned to compassion when Joel encounters the dying bird. Dying elicits his compassion in a way that death does not. Death causes grief, but bearing witness to dying moves him deeply. The Greeks had a few words for compassion. What Dr Fleischman seems to experience is splagchnizomai, which means literally to be moved in your bowels. This gut-wrenching compassion can spur one into unexpected action — such as operating on a wounded duck.

Perhaps this old episode has stayed with me because it is interwoven with my memory of my grandmother’s dying. It was slow. She had many strokes, but she had a strong heart. She lingered, and she suffered, and the family suffered, too, as we watched. I was 13, and then 14. My mother would insist that I visit her. It was frightening and depressing. Grandma would usually be unconscious. Her mouth would hang slack. She was skinny, and her breathing was always raspy. Occasionally she would be awake. But she couldn’t speak. I am not sure if my being there had any measurable effect on her at all. It may even have disquieted her.

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But being there had an effect on me. There are not many places a teenage girl would less rather be than in a hospital by the bedside of a dying old lady. It smelled. I would hear other patients moaning. I felt awkward. Painfully so. Do I hold her hand? Talk casually? Remind her who I am? During these visits I acutely felt the desire to flee. If splagchnizomai is about being moved to action as a gut-response, I was being moved to avoid the suffering. But I could only sit there. It was a long wait to the end.

Those awkward, painful moments deepened me. I didn’t grow comfortable with suffering, but I grew comfortable with being uncomfortable. I was obliged to witness suffering, which is distinct from the pain of grief, and so her dying laid a demand upon me. It forced me to be connected to her, to suffer with her. It compelled me to learn about duty. I’ve realized, only in hindsight, that this burden was a gift. I learned, in part, how to suffer, and that suffering should not be done alone. There are more important things than ease.

A friend of mine who works as a chaplain at a Canadian hospital spends his life doing such sitting. He is witness to about one death a day. Most dying, he tells me, is like my grandmother’s: slow. Very often it is even gentle. Still, we don’t all die well, he’ll tell you. We die as we have lived. If you are bitter and resentful in life, you will be more so during your dying. If timid, more timid. If loving, more loving. Dying is frightening, and when we are afraid, we retreat into what is familiar.

When patients speak to the chaplain, they do not typically speak of the pain of dying but that of living. He hears about the sting of betrayal, the hurt of being wounded by someone you love. He hears of the pain of being misunderstood, overlooked, and left bereft. He hears about ordinary, heartbreaking loneliness. And he hears about the torment of guilt, of the wrongs we have inflicted on others. We feel the burn of shame, the ache of remorse. We often endure our own failings only through the dull consolation offered by self-delusion. “Life is pain,” as the classic line goes, “anyone who says differently is selling something.”

We need to be comforted for our living as much as for our dying. And we don’t want to endure the living or the dying alone. When it comes to that, all living is a movement towards the grave, and dying is a kind of intensified living. It only appears that some of us aren’t dying, as my chaplain friend says. Really, he says, we are one body, falling toward death together.

He is not the first to say this. John Donne wrote vividly of dying as a kind of urgent, heightened form of being alive. He was no stranger to death, burying five of his children, as well as his beloved wife Ann, only 33 years old. And in 1623, he grew dangerously sick himself, suffering for 23 days. As he lay near death, he would read the countenance of his physicians for signs of relief or worry (he finds mostly worry) as he submits to their increasingly desperate treatment, such as affixing spatchcocked pigeons to his feet to draw the humors away from his head. He grew in his love for his physicians as they cared for him.

The pigeon-slippers seem to have worked. Donne did not die of this illness; he lived another 10 years. Later, when he was truly dying, he wrote and preached his final sermon: “Death’s Duel.” It is his own funeral sermon, and its focus is on death. It is very different from the reflections he wrote on dying,  Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, which he rushed to print in 1624 as he felt that his dying reflections would be a gift to others. In Devotions, Donne writes of the compassion he grows to have for himself during his illness, which is not at all the same as self-pity. Compassion allows him to see himself as though from the outside, lucidly, and to love himself without self-deception. Dying also draws him closer to others. On the 17th day of his illness, Donne writes these astonishing words:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

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Donne understands that we are all of us falling toward our death. The bell is tolling for you and for me. To hasten death by bringing an end to dying involves me and you. I know that suffering increases, and that dignity, defined as choice and control, recedes during dying. We in Canada are involved in our shared, messy humanity. We seem to cohere around our support for the program, somewhere around 84% of Canadians approve of it. But there is a depth of compassion that can only come from sitting with one whose living is the experience of dying. It is the dutiful, the uncomfortable, the painful, and even, at times, the undignified burden of sharing dis-ease. Dying deepens us in a way that grief does not.

Does it trouble me that almost all MAiD cases, 95.6% of them, are white and middle class, my own cohort? It does. We are either very progressive, believing that burdening loved ones is unethical and limits their agency, or we are keen to defer to experts, limiting our own. But no doctor, no health policy expert, no politician, has more moral authority over death than you or me. Dying has no expert class, no progressive elites. They are not more involved in mankind than you or me.

Other cultures do dying differently. When I would visit an Eritrean friend in palliative care, I was almost never the only one at her bedside. There was a constant vigil kept by other members of her community. This lasted months. Her suffering was great, but it was shared. Only on one occasion was I the only visitor by her bedside. She asked me to read her favorite psalm, a lament by David. She took comfort in David’s suffering: “There is no health in my body,” the Psalm says, “I groan in anguish of heart.” She felt joined with the ancient Hebrew poet, and her suffering was less because of it. She took comfort in humanity’s shared suffering. On that occasion, I left the hospital feeling nourished and cared for. It reminds me still of that Northern Exposure episode, at the end of which Dr Fleischman is literally nourished by the bird that died under his care. “Huh. Not bad,” he says while chewing it.

We are entangled creatures; we are involved with each other. To burden our loved ones by forcing them to act dutifully, against ease, sitting at the side of a dying loved one, is to precisely act with compassion and treat the dying with dignity. It is also to treat the living with a kind of dignity, one that has faith in our capacity to endure the suffering of others, to not flinch from painfully awkward tedium, to be able to endure the burden placed on us by sitting beside someone dying. It is a gift that the dying can bequeath to the living.

Wanzhou, known as the “Princess of Huawei”, also happened to be the favorite daughter of Ren Zhengfei, the telecom giant’s founder. So Canada had detained, and the US intended to prosecute, the heir apparent to China’s most successful technology firm. As her lawyer argued, the then president Donald Trump’s attitude to Wanzhou was “the very definition of ransom”; her freedom would only come as part of an economic deal.

But then, in 2021, Washington dropped the case. Bail restrictions were lifted and a saga which began under the Trump administration ended under Joe Biden. The arrest and detention of a senior Chinese executive had gone hand-in-hand with escalating sanctions on several Chinese technology firms and export controls on advanced microprocessors. The political implications couldn’t be clearer: one part of America’s political class made it personal, another had walked things back.

Five years on, Canada’s relationship with Washington and Beijing has flipped. Last week, Mark Carney paid the first visit to China by a Canadian prime minister in a decade and tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, a symbol of the country’s technological rise, were reduced from 100% to just 6%. In return, China reduced tariffs on canola oil — a $4 billion market — as well as on a host of other Canadian agricultural products. Travel between the two countries will also become visa-free. Most important of all, Carney views the deal as a boon to domestic manufacturing, driving “considerable” Chinese joint-venture investment in Canada. Unlike its neighbor to the south, Canada has no domestic car industry. Its new partnership with Beijing could change that — besides bringing cheap EVs to the masses.

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“We’re recalibrating Canada’s relationship with China, strategically, pragmatically, and decisively,” Carney wrote on X last week. Despite his understated delivery, it is now clear that those words marked a significant change: Canada was positioning itself as the first G7 economy to seize the opportunities and mitigate the risks of a post‑Trump world. Those hazards became starker in the intervening days, as Trump ramped up his rhetoric on the seizure of Greenland. But the Canadian PM’s intent only clarified as Europe panicked. “Middle powers must act together,” Carney said in his barnstorming speech at Davos on Tuesday, “because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” Unlike the empty grandstanding of Barack Obama, or the rambling theatrics of Trump, his speech was deeply significant — acknowledging the falsehoods that underpinned a now-dissolving world order, while emphasizing the need to build a new era of co-operation.

This shift has never been more urgent. The American President sees the globe in tripartite terms, with Russia and China as fellow apex players to the US — albeit of lesser standing — each deserving their own spheres of influence. Hence his argument for acquiring Greenland, reiterated yesterday, was made in hemispheric terms — this is our continent. He insisted that Canada, and Europe, wouldn’t even exist had it not been for America’s war effort eight decades ago. For middle powers such as Canada, as well as South Korea, the UK, France, and Germany, this poses a challenge: their economic models and diverse security frameworks have long relied on a globalized order that the White House seems intent on discarding.

Carney’s speech was a muscular response to that challenge. “Great powers can afford for now to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not.” In other words, the West’s future — beyond Washington, and particularly for Canada and the nations of Europe — depends on collaboration. Alone, neither Canada, nor any European country rivals Russia, China or the United States. Together, however, they wield remarkable economic — and to a lesser extent, military — clout. Carney was calling forth a formidable fourth force on the world stage.

“When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon,” Carney declared, “we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating.” “This is not sovereignty,” he continued, “it’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.” Unfortunately, this aptly describes No. 10’s strategy since Trump’s return to the Oval Office. Starmer’s plan to protect British interests was to send the President signed letters from the King, and elevate a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein to the role of Washington ambassador. At no point has the British Government considered anything beyond meek genuflection.

Lofty rhetoric is usually just that — pieties untethered from reality. But in Carney’s case, words are matched with action. Between finalizing the China agreement and speaking at Davos, he also secured a strategic partnership with Qatar. Next: free-trade deals with India, the South-East Asian trade bloc ASEAN, and the South American equivalent, Mercosur.

Who could have imagined that the world’s most polite, apologetic people (yes, even more so than the English) would be the ones fomenting geopolitical upheaval? But if this strategy is bold, it is also pragmatic. After all, China and Russia, faced with measures designed to damage their economies, still generated growth and found new markets. Beijing, despite US import tariffs exceeding 50%, not to mention sanctions and export blocks intended to cripple its leading tech firms, managed to shift its export focus and achieve a record trade surplus of $1.2 trillion, even as exports to America fell by 20%. Russia, having lost access to most of Europe’s energy market after its invasion of Ukraine, pivoted East — and saw growth of 8% in two years.

To those two civilizational powers who turned on a geopolitical sixpence, we can now add the home of ice hockey and maple syrup. Crucially, though, Carney is offering a blueprint that extends beyond Canada’s borders, and its success depends on his country not acting alone. Others appear to be with him already. Emmanuel Macron followed the Canadian’s lead, openly inviting Chinese investment “in some key sectors” to drive growth and facilitate technology transfer. More than vacuous aviator-clad posturing, his speech reflected a long-standing French proclivity for technological autonomy that reaches back to Charles De Gaulle, not to mention that China is a leading market for the country’s luxury brands. In a striking reversal of the early 21st-century status quo, Europeans are now seeking partnerships with Chinese firms — on European soil — to tap their capital and expertise.

So where on earth is Britain in all of this? On paper, we are a leading contender to help catapult the middle powers to a new world order. London is a tier-one global city; we have a permanent seat on the UN security council; we are one of only two European nuclear powers, albeit with missiles leased from the US; and, in finance, AI and the creative industries, the country remains a global force. But Britain isn’t even at Carney’s table, as Keir Starmer scrambles for crumbs at Trump’s feet. Perhaps he lacks the political experience of Carney, or the braggadocio of Macron. But while both accusations contain an element of truth, the key reason is structural. Britain’s political class is more firmly committed to Atlanticism than anyone else, propped up as we are by the crutch of American imperium.

Remember, Britain does not have an independent nuclear deterrent without the consent of Washington. The country’s model of being a center for globalized professional services is more exposed to the peccadillos of this White House than anyone else’s. Ours is the least sovereign of the middle powers. While Zack Polanski recently called for a British departure from Nato, and the expulsion of the 12,000 US troops stationed in the country, a US reckoning might be delivered in response: America is hardwired through Britain, literally, from payment systems to servers, production and work platforms. The global economy, as Carney reminded us in his speech, has been weaponized to suit the interests of Washington. Now imagine the hardships for British business without Visa, Stripe, Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft or Apple. Even minor friction with any one of these would come at immense cost to the economy. And what of Britain’s great power characteristics, if not status, without Trident or Five Eyes? A hard break with the US-led order would hurt Britain more than anyone.

It might be painful, but there is no alternative. Trump’s argument to annex Greenland is that Denmark cannot defend such a large territory from Russia or China. Isn’t the same true of the Falklands? Or the British Antarctic Territory? Or Bermuda? What if Trump, or a like-minded successor, unilaterally decides to suspend collaboration on Trident? A French politician once declared it unwise for Europeans to base their security on swing voters in Wisconsin every four years. Why is it any different for us?

Britain, just like Canada, has no choice but to pursue sovereignty through cooperation with other middle powers, becoming that fourth force in global politics — by following the Carney Doctrine. But we can only do this if we can deepen our technological autonomy and improve our infrastructure.

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Could we come to an arrangement with China, like Carney? While Starmer is unlikely to ask Huawei to return to the UK and repair the damage inflicted after we banned the company in 2020, an element of cooperation with Beijing could be useful. Why not also harness some of their expertise in high-speed rail or nuclear power? How else can we hope to wean ourselves off America? Of course a measure of autonomy is lost in any transaction with a major power — whether China, Russia or the US. But the former, for now, seems like the most pragmatic option if Britain hopes to reindustrialize.

Alas, Britain’s political elite are terrified of conducting diplomacy like Carney. Economic integration with Europe, and military dependence on Nato and the United States, has atrophied the basic skills of government, which is in large part why the prospect of Brexit terrified them so. Just as the country of Boulton & Watt now manufactures vanishingly little, the nation of Lord Palmerston is unable to secure itself a place in an emerging global order. This is less an issue of competence than a reflection of the fact that nobody in mainstream politics has thought about it for more than a generation. After all, they entered politics during the End of History. Carney’s admission that the “rules-based international order” was a convenient lie will horrify many of his British peers who all own DVD box sets of the West Wing, listen religiously to the Rest Is Politics and worship at the Atlanticist altar.

And yet, despite our precarious situation and inadequate elite, Britain remains a prominent middle power. If any country should be attempting to restore the sovereignty of the wider West, it is us. We shouldn’t think twice about joining France and Canada as a midwife to a world order beyond MAGA, Moscow and Beijing.

“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies,” declared Palmerston in 1848, addressing the Commons about Britain’s response to events on the continent. “Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” The same is true today regarding a “special relationship” which has left Britain beleaguered. If Canada’s Prime Minister recognizes that, why can’t our own?

When Monroe outlined his plans to Congress in 1823, the US already controlled a sizable portion of North America, but there was still room to grow. Although the country was more built-up in the East, it was sparsely populated in the West. The US bordered Spanish-held land that covered what we now know as California and other states. Both the US and the Spanish territories were themselves incursions onto the lands that were once held, or were still contested by, America’s native inhabitants.

But these settler Americans were not inclined to stop expanding their territory. In 1845, the journalist John L. O’Sullivan coined the term “Manifest destiny”: the belief in a preordained, inevitable and divinely-inspired expansion of the United States across the North American continent to the Pacific Ocean and beyond. Expansionism was not a concept unique to the nascent US, but this was a heady time. Some American men of letters even imagined that their country might one day engulf British North America, now known as Canada. Some of their northern neighbors were equally keen: the repealing of the Corn Laws had severely affected the Canadian economy, and so many Canadians looked south for help. In 1849, a group of Montreal businessmen even demanded political union with the US. William Seward, an American senator, wrote in 1853 that Canada “will ultimately become a member of this confederacy, if we will consent”.

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In the years that followed, Manifest Destiny took the US west rather than north. The US engaged in a variety of deals and wars that added hundreds of thousands of square miles to the young nation, but left blood on American hands. Native tribes were brutalized. Even when territory was acquired by purchase, those purchases were often between settlers. The Louisiana Purchase, by which the US had bought a vast tract of land from the French in 1803, is one example; the Alaska Purchase, transferring ownership of Alaska from Russia to the US in 1867, is another. In neither case were the natives consulted.

Such abuses were not acknowledged, of course. Instead, America’s expansion was romanticized in popular culture and with propagandistic art. The painter Emanuel Leutze commemorated the Alaska Purchase with a portrayal of American and Russian officials discussing the deal over an enormous globe. And a painting by John Gast depicted Columbia, a figure representing republican values, marching west, laying a telegraph line as she went. (That painting was posted on X by a newly nationalistic Homeland Security only last year.)

One of the men depicted in the Alaska Purchase painting was William Seward, who had forecast that Canada might eventually join the US. He had now risen to the role of secretary of state, where he was able to put into practice his early enthusiasm for Manifest Destiny. As early as 1848, shortly after the phrase was coined, Seward had written that “our population is destined to roll its resistless wave to the icy barriers of the north and to encounter oriental civilization on the shores of the Pacific”.

Seward, an ardent abolitionist, sought to achieve expansion peacefully, criticizing his colleagues who sought to redraw America’s northern and southern borders by means of war. He believed that America had only to be patient, and that Mexico, as well as Canada, would one day join the Union of its own accord.

But his work on the Alaska Purchase helped intensify American territorial ambition. In the summer of 1867, Seward’s ally in the Alaska deal, Robert J. Walker, suggested the purchase of Greenland and Iceland from Denmark. Hoping to persuade his colleagues in government, Walker commissioned a report on the two territories’ assets. In addition to praising the vast and valuable resources of both areas, including fisheries, coal, cryolite, and other minerals — the rare earths of their day — the report specifically noted that the acquisition of Greenland might hasten the absorption of British North America. Such an acquisition, the report argued, would “greatly increase her (British North America’s) inducements, peacefully and cheerfully, to become a part of the American Union”.

The American Civil War had ended only in 1865, but Canada was already back on the agenda. In 1866, Congressman Nathaniel Banks introduced a bill calling for the annexation of British North America. The bill failed, but British officials were alarmed. For decades, they had resisted the idea of the states of British North America becoming a single confederation. A unified Canada might, after all, form a strong bond with its closer, republican neighbor, or fall prey to American expansion without the oversight and protection of the British military.

But things had changed. Now, in the late 1860s, America was making a quick recovery from the Civil War. It was getting its way with Alaska and it was casting hungry glances at Canada. And those glances, as Allen Francis, the US consul in Victoria, British Columbia, noted in April 1867, were reciprocated. Many locals, he wrote, “are now urging with great unanimity annexation to the United States as their only salvation — as the only means of retrieving the Colonies from their present embarrassment and decline.”

To the British, confederation now seemed the best way of buttressing Canada against American expansionism. On the day before the Alaska treaty was signed, Queen Victoria approved the British North America Act and the Dominion of Canada was formed on 1 July 1867, containing four provinces: Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Over the next decade, Canada would grow to include four more provinces. To some extent, then, Canada’s existence can be viewed as a defensive play against American expansionism.

And so far, the play has worked. In 1931, the Statute of Westminster made Canada legally independent from Britain, but there were no rumblings of conquest from the south. The same was true in 1982, when Canada’s constitution became fully separated from British control. (The shared monarch is now the only remnant of the legal bond.) By the second half of the 20th century, America was the global hegemon, and its foreign adventures went far beyond its home continent: not only in Latin America, to which President Roosevelt had extended the Monroe Doctrine, but to Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Canada was a friendly neighbor that subscribed to America’s liberal values and was an important trading partner.

Yet today those jingoistic rumblings have resumed. Trump represents less a continuation of 20th-century liberalism than the expansionism of old. He invoked “Manifest Destiny” in his second inauguration speech, is pressuring Denmark to cede Greenland, and has sometimes appeared to have similar designs on Canada. Indeed, he has called the Canadian-American border “artificial” and envisioned Canada as the 51st state.

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Canadians, of course, have bristled. In early 2025, the then-prime minister, Justin Trudeau, wrote on X that “there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell” that Canada would become part of the United States. When Mark Carney became prime minister a few months later, Trump seemed to quiet down, perhaps feeling less overshadowed or threatened now that the handsome and charismatic Trudeau was out of the picture. But now, in the wake of the attack on Venezuela and the threats against Greenland, Canadian politicians are once again eyeing the United States with suspicion. Both Bob Rae, Canada’s former ambassador to the United Nations, and Jean Charest, the former premier of Quebec, have warned that Trump’s imperial ambitions may include putting Canada “back in his crosshairs”. Canadian Arctic sovereignty and control of the Northwest Passage, after all, have been challenged by the US and are directly linked to Trump’s claims about national security concerns in that region. Meanwhile, conservative Albertans have mirrored the Montreal businessmen of yore, campaigning for a separatist referendum in the hope of joining the US.

How this all plays out remains to be seen. History cannot predict the future, nor can it offer specific advice for political players. As Adam Gopnik, an American essayist raised in Canada, wrote: “What history generally ‘teaches’ is how hard it is for anyone to control it, including the people who think they’re making it.” And despite the historical legacy of American expansion and the notion of Manifest Destiny, the circumstances today are far different from those of the 19th century. Greenland and Canada are not vast expanses of uncharted land, waiting to be “discovered” and “civilized”. Furthermore, the United States, Denmark and Canada are all Nato members. Threats of American aggression have created an unprecedented crisis within the alliance, destabilizing an organization that is still wrestling with how to respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The arrogance with which the imperial countries of the 19th century invaded other lands in search of resources, disregarding the existence and rights of the local inhabitants, should be a thing of the past. Yet Trump, just like Vladimir Putin, seems to wish for a bygone day, when larger nations dominated smaller ones without fear or compunction.

Both men may discover that they have less control over the future than they think. The war in Ukraine has dragged on far longer than anyone thought possible, and Putin has discovered that President Zelensky is a more dogged adversary than he anticipated. Might Canada surprise Trump in a similar way? Though American military superiority is unquestioned, Canada has begun to expand its military reserves and may take the approach of Finland vis-à-vis Russia, the goal being to make conquest too costly and troublesome to be worth the effort. Or will the Democratic Party find its footing and retake the White House in the next presidential election, reversing the tide of American foreign policy? Elections in the fall of 2025 seemed to indicate a shift in that direction, but 2028 is far off and Trump can do a lot of damage before then.

But “religion” is a surprisingly tricky term: and not just for Your Party who offended their Muslim members by signing off their recently chaotic Liverpool Conference with John Lennon’s “Imagine” (“and no religion too”). In our Western post-secular world, we tend to think of it as the kind of thing that goes on in specific spaces — churches, mosques — where it is appropriate to speak of God. Religion thus understood is a kind of specialist pursuit that religious people are into, like a hobby you do on the weekend. Sport is an obvious comparison here. Max Weber coined the term “specialization” when talking about the changes brought about by modernity. Different social activities — whether football or faith — did their own thing, established their own rules and institutions, and existed in a semi-detached way to other activities in life. And just as it is possible to live without knowing how Chelsea got on, so one can live, for the most part, without knowing or caring that we are now in the season of advent.

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Before, let’s say, 1500, this wasn’t really the case. And it isn’t really the case for faith traditions that developed outside of the West and specifically outside the orbit of the Protestant revolution that came to govern how we think about that term “religion”. What confuses so many beyond the modern West, and non-Christian minorities within it, is that they cannot conceive of religion as simply being the theological equivalent of buying a ticket at Stamford Bridge. A roll call of places that vex us politically — Russia, Israel, much of the Islamic world — all boast a very different religious “DNA”, one where the boundaries of God’s presence in the world are set in totally different ways.

Take Judaism. It sounds like a pretty straightforward term, one used to describe a religion, like Christianity or Buddhism. But that’s a very modern understanding, one many Jews would not accept, and one that historically would scarcely have been recognized. Even the word “Jew” is a misleading translation of a word like the Hebrew term “Yehudi”. Before the second century, that would have been understood as more like “Judean” — a person from a particular place called Judah. “Jew”, then, is originally an ethnic-geographical term, not a religious one.

Of course, the people from that corner of the Levant had various practices linked to their understanding of God. But to call these practices “Judaism”, and to gather them together as “religion”, misplaces the role that God played in the life of a Jewish person. The great Talmudic scholar Rabbi Daniel Boyarin argues that “Judaism” is a Christian term designed to fit Jewishness into a very Christian template. Tom Holland agrees. After the French Revolution, Jews were told that they had freedom of religion, and were to be French citizens who were able to practice something called Judaism. But as Holland rightly notes, “Jews didn’t have religion”. After all, “religion” as a discreet activity, to be done occasionally and in private, was a totally alien idea to a people for whom identity and faith were indivisible.

To put it differently, then, the very idea of “religion” is arguably a secular one, even as it stems from the deep history of Christianity itself. Certainly, Christianity was the very first to detach its relationship with God from any ethnic or geographical rootedness. You could be a Greek a Jew or a Roman — and still be a Christian. What mattered was what you believed. And through Christianity, belief became the central defining feature of being religious.

This association of religion and belief is further intensified after 1500: thanks to the Protestant Reformation. The Canadian philosopher and sociologist Charles Taylor is particularly illuminating here. The Protestant attack on maypoles and relics, on Christianity as a way of life marked by a panoply of everyday popular practices, reduced religion to something that went on in your heart or your head. This, for the reformers, was where the battle for salvation took place. Yet again, then, religion was about what you believed. And when you gathered in church, it was with other like-minded people.

Back to the Canada secularization bill. If you think of religion as I have just outlined it, then it makes perfect sense to deal with the sort of conflict that can come about by having different world views rubbing up against one another by defining the public sphere as one safely free of religion. After all, religion understood as private belief can be practiced freely in specialist religious spaces. This liberal answer to the religious clash of worldviews is a tidy way of both respecting people’s right to their own faith — and maintaining good public order. Yet this liberal answer to the challenge of a multicultural society only works if Jews, Christians and Muslims all accept that they indeed are a religion in the Western sense of the word.

This is by no means certain. For Muslims, after all, the term “religion” is a kind of trap. Like the trap sprung for Jews by the French Revolution, it is a know-your-place kind of word, one that seeks to fillet what it is to be Muslim. And very few Muslim could accept that. But by that same token, this idea of religion is also a trap somewhere like Israel. The idea of Israel as a majority Jewish state, where Jews are free to behave as Jews, is premised on the idea that there is no such thing as “Judaism” as a religion in the narrowly Protestant sense: but rather that being Jewish is an entire way of life. Indeed, it is perfectly possible to be a Jew in Israel without believing in God or going to synagogue — because being a Jew is a combination of ethnic identity and involvement in various public and family practices that don’t necessarily require that Protestant emphasis on belief. A Jewish atheist isn’t an oxymoron in a way that a Christian atheist is.

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By Samuel Rubinstein

A word in Arabic that appeals many times in the Quran and is often translated as “religion” is the word “deen”. But a better translation is something like “way of life”, or “way of life that should be followed”. A word with the same root appears in Hebrew, and occurs, for instance, in the “Beth Din”, the “House of Judgment” or religious courts. Deen, then, is far more all-encompassing than the Western term “religion”, one relegated in Quebec and elsewhere to mere private belief. It includes public life, government, food, clothing, law, art, everything. This is why Muslims and Jews who are promised freedom of religion by secular Western states are bound to feel confused.

Of course, none of this is to say that the secular answer to maintaining fairness in the public realm is necessarily wrong. Even so, the very different idea of religion as deen, doesn’t, if I can put it this way, travel very well. You could almost say that Christianity was, right from the start, designed to be portable. All those maps of St Paul’s journeys around the Mediterranean, which they used to have in Bibles, was an indication of an understanding of religion that could uproot and replant itself in different cultures. We should not expect that other religious traditions will find it so easy.

As Canadians greeted the announcement of Mark Carney’s cabinet, the expectation was that of far-reaching change. But a day after being sworn in, Canada’s new housing minister, Gregor Robertson, put an end to those hopes. Robertson, the ex-mayor of Vancouver — which saw one of the most severe localized housing crises — said home prices should not go down. Has his boss’s campaign pledge already been turned to dust?

This is a terrible start to a supposedly new era. What Canada needs is not just a total rupture with the Trudeau years but a break with decades of virtual NIMBY dictatorship under all parties, at all levels of government. At this rate, the divide between the generally affluent home-owning Boomers and Gen Xers and the downwardly mobile Millennials and Gen Zs is only likely to persist into the Carney era. This generational divide, of course, exists as well in the US, the UK, and elsewhere, but the Canadian context is distinct: owing to the lesser relative salience of culture war and immigration issues compared with other Western nations, it is now the central cleavage of Canada’s politics, in a way that it isn’t elsewhere.

So how great is the gulf between them? Statistics Canada shows a 65-67% gap between average Millennial household wealth ($493,423) and the equivalent figures for Boomers ($1,397,609) and Gen X ($1,485,654). On top of this, there is said to be $1 trillion in Boomer wealth set to be passed down soon, but even this is in doubt given longer lifespans and this cohort’s tenacity in holding on to what they have.

The reason for this disparity is real estate, which props up the economy. Young Canadians have either been excluded from homeownership by high prices and interest rates, with big cities like Robertson’s Vancouver and Toronto among the two most unaffordable cities in North America; or they are new homeowners who managed to buy properties but are now squeezed by rising mortgage payments.  Older Canadians meanwhile have seen the value of their properties soar over a much longer period.

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But this snapshot is part of a 60-year-old pattern whereby Boomers exert their influence as the largest generation. Because “Canada’s was the loudest boom in the industrialized world”, as the demographer David K. Foot has recounted, “Canadian boomers are a… more important factor in Canadian life than American boomers are in American life”. The subsequent history of Canada has been one of governments responding with reflexive deference to their demands. The growth of the public sector in the Sixties catered to their educational needs, while the Nineties-era turn towards fiscal austerity (and federal disengagement from housing) coupled with the rise of prohibitive zoning at local levels reflected this now middle-aged cohort’s intention to keep and grow their personal net worths.

They have maintained this goal — through ceaseless real estate appreciation — with fanatical discipline ever since. As Foot wrote, “It was just as inevitable that once the boomers were housed, the [housing] boom would end.”

But it’s not just their numbers that let the Boomers get away with so much: it’s also their enormous capacity for political cohesion. People who voted for the first time in 1965 kept voting at high rates — around 60-70% — throughout their whole adult lives. In contrast, later generations, especially Millennials and Gen Zs, mostly voted at the lower rates of 30-40% range, with few exceptions.

In fact, Foot failed to foresee how the Boomers would prolong their stranglehold well past their working-age primes. He predicted they would relinquish their urban properties and cash in early, mass migrate to smaller retirement towns, and gracefully free up space in the cities for younger cohorts, believing that not long after 2000, “houses will be what they were before the boomers entered the housing market, places to live rather than investments… the days of rapid and huge increases in house prices are gone.” Of course, this never happened — quite the opposite.

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Gen X is in a special position; though they were not able to benefit as quickly from the system set up by the Boomers, enough of them were nonetheless able to break into the housing market and build up household wealth as the price upswing was in its initial stages in the mid-Nineties and 2000s, an entry point that was closed off to many Millennials who came after. As a result, they even have a marginally higher average net worth than Boomers and are not in a position to break ranks politically with the status quo.

Naturally, the flip side of Boomer hyper-engagement is consistent Millennial and Gen Z non-engagement: countless youths who have abdicated their civic rights altogether, citing apathy or ignorance.

What we are dealing with here are gross sociological distinctions, which cannot be put down to partisan differences. Canadian and global outlets who covered the race put special emphasis on a supposed bond between the disenfranchised youth and the populist Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre, just as the over 55s flocked to Carney: in this telling, the former voted on cost of living while the latter voted on anti-Trump nationalism, depicted with scorn in Right-wing media as a luxury issue for Boomers intent on drowning out the affordability debate with nostalgic invocations of their own postwar golden age.

Yet the polling data does not confirm this: yes, the Boomers have gone majorly for the Liberals, but surveys carried out in the lead-up to the election and in its immediate aftermath indicate a very close, competitive race for the youth vote, with apparent Liberal leads for the 18-35 cohorts. It was actually middle-aged Gen X males (along with the oldest Millennials) who went overwhelmingly for the Tories.

But it is enormously comforting for the Right to say that they have a strong lock on the youth vote, and they will continue to do so. To hear Poilievre speak, it is as if the housing crisis sprung up overnight in 2015 right as Trudeau was elected — instead of being the result of decades of joint Liberal and Conservative misrule, including the last Tory government of which he was a part. Other than deregulation, which really needs to happen at the municipal rather than the federal level, it is also hard to see Poilievre’s neo-Thatcherite agenda as anything other than a return to vintage Nineties Boomer conservatism; or as JD Vance said of him, “Mitt Romney with a French accent” (Poilievre doesn’t have an accent, but point taken).

In any event, Canada’s youth is still up for grabs, even as young and old jostle for the favor of the governing Liberals who have historically been the big-tent brokerage party par excellence. In the 20th century, Liberal leaders brokered ingenious compromises to reconcile the divergent interests of competing groups in Canadian society: English and French, East and West, capital and labor. Today, they must do the same with the Boomers and their children; they must first admit, however, that a zero-sum standoff currently exists between them, instead of ignoring the problem in the first place as Robertson did as mayor in Vancouver, and as Trudeau did as prime minister.

Enough first-time voters responded to Carney’s pledge of a Second World War-style, nationally directed industrial policy to get “government… back in the business of building affordable homes”, that is, to mass manufacture homes at scale: the very idea that his housing minister can’t seem to contemplate. But what will it take for such an ambitious plan to actually succeed?

Carney will need to compensate the Boomers and Gen Xers whose home values will start tumbling once new units enter the market en masse. A creative way to do it would be to find ways to deploy the older cohorts’ own wealth toward funding the construction boom, perhaps through the issuance of special Canada Construction Bonds that pension funds and retirees can purchase, the returns on which would be drawn from the profits to be generated by the resulting newly manufactured affordable unit sales. This is exactly the kind of financial alchemy that Carney should be able to perform. The “counteroffer” to the Boomers could then be supplemented by seniors’ discounts, subsidized nursing care, and the construction of retirement villages as part of the new industrial policy.

Whatever the case, young Canadians must realize (as well as young Americans, Britons and anyone else with this challenge) that the conflict will be settled not on the terrain of patriotism or political ideologies but of raw self-interest. Beating the Boomers at their own game will be the only way to humble them.

Long ago, it was reasonable to hope that voters thinking of voting for a scary ultra-Rightist in order to annoy the centrists whose policies kept them down might come to their senses the moment that scary ultra-Rightist looked likely to win government. Something like that happened in France in 2002. Back then, middle-class socialists, young ecologists and working-class communists lined up at the polling stations alongside conservatives to give 82% of the national vote to Rightist Jacques Chirac so as to keep ultra-Rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen — the father of the French ultra-Right’s current leader — out of the Elysée. But this is not what happened in France 25 years later, or in Canada or Australia last week.

In 2002, six years before Western capitalism’s near-death experience, Chirac defeated Le Pen because the socialist and the communist parties directed their voters to him. Under the slogan: “We vote for you today, we oppose you tomorrow morning!”, voters who were at odds with the establishment voted for an establishment figure in order to keep a neofascist out. All the while, they retained their allegiance to parties of the Left. In contrast, Emmanuel Macron won by annihilating the parties of the Left.

Working-class voters, who were suffering the consequences of the centrists’ austerity policies, were incensed with Macron, a former banker determined to impose “green” taxes on them while giving tax breaks to his haute bourgeois mates. With nowhere else to go, these voters drifted en masse to Le Pen. Then something startling happened: Macron and Le Pen grew co-dependent, their mutual antipathy notwithstanding. The more austerity he imposed on the many, the deeper their discontent and the higher her support. And the higher her support, the better able he was to appeal to anti-fascists to hold their noses and vote for him in order to keep her out.

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As this dynamic co-dependency grew, the ultra-Right won a staggering 40% of the national vote in the June 2024 parliamentary elections. There is nothing on the horizon to suggest that this trend is unravelling. In this light, history may well remember Macron more as the liberal center’s gravedigger than its redeemer.

Cut to last week and the decisive defeat of the Rightist Canadian and Australian parties that tried, and failed, to ride the Trumpian wave. Mark Carney and Anthony Albanese won because President Trump made it impossible for them to lose. By threatening to annex Canada, and by slapping tariffs on an Australia that not only has never missed an opportunity to bend over backwards to accommodate Washington’s every whim but also runs a trade deficit with the United States, it is as if Trump was determined that his Canadian and Australian copycats lose last week’s elections. Nevertheless, under the surface of Carney’s and Albanese’s victories, it is not difficult to discern social trends similar to those that rendered Macron’s victory decidedly Pyrrhic.

In Canada, after 11 years of ruling, the Liberals failed to appeal to the large sections of the working-class who either abstained or voted for the conservatives. When the Liberals nevertheless secured a razor-thin majority, they did so by cannibalizing, Macron-style, the Left-of-center (the NDP and the Parti Québécois). In Australia, Labor’s landslide victory obscured the fact that it won with a historically low percentage of the primary vote. Although it won most seats in the working-class suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, Labor did so on second preferences, while continuing to bleed first preferences — especially amongst the immigrant communities which used to be the party’s most reliable vote reservoir. As in Canada, Australia’s centrists won by feeding off the only Left-of-center force, the Greens, but had no luck in unseating a significant number of Right-leaning independents (the so-called Teals).

So far, so very similar to the political dynamics in France. What makes these similarities so fascinating is that they have taken place in such different countries. France’s economy is joined at the hip to that of Germany and the rest of the European Union. Australia and Canada, on the other hand, are resource-based economies integrated into the energy-industrial-military complex of the United States.

Because of its location, Canada sells 75% of its exports to America, while also directly investing more of its capital in the US than the US invests in Canada. As for geographically isolated Australia, its economy is also deeply intertwined with US conglomerates, albeit indirectly. While Australian mining companies have long been in the business of extracting fossil fuels and digging up gargantuan volumes of the country’s red earth before shipping it all to Japan and China, this roaring trade with Asia’s two superpowers is predicated on the US sourcing two crucial resources from China and Japan: manufactured goods and savings.

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This is why the political trends in Canada and Australia are similar to those in France. Despite their vast differences, the three economies are hooked into the same US-centric global surplus-recycling mechanism, whose deep crisis is steering their politics in a direction inimical to the centrists’ medium-term prospects. Politicians like Macron, Carney and Albanese may score impressive victories, but they have no plan for stemming the secular decline of their influence over their increasingly restive electorates. For years now, these electorates have been pummeled by the undercurrents of the global recycling mechanism — a mechanism that once drove their countries’ growth and stability.

The essence of this global mechanism (which I once labelled the Global Minotaur) is simple. Since the Seventies, America’s deficits have provided East Asia (first Japan, then China) and Europe (primarily Germany) the demand for their factories’ manufactures. In return, the European Union, Japan and later China sent their accumulated profits to Wall Street to be recycled into US private and public debt, some equities, and real estate. A Chinese official once described this mechanism to me as a “dark deal”. “Our Dark Deal with the Americans,” the official explained, “turns on the US trade deficit, which keeps demand for our manufactures high. In return, our capitalists invest the bulk of their dollar superprofits into America’s FIRE”. (The acronym stands for “Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate.”) “Once this process got underway, America shifted much of its industrial production to our shores.”

The problem with this global recycling mechanism was that, to function smoothly, it had to generate larger and larger imbalances: greater trade deficits for the US and more accumulated savings for Northern Europe and East Asia. But there are limits to how large imbalances can grow. Ruptures are inevitable. The longer they are delayed, the greater the pain they inflict — a truth that centrists never acknowledged, not even when it was tearing down their houses.

Trump’s greatest strength comes from asking the pressing question that the centrists refuse to countenance: what comes after the Dark Deal? What comes after the imbalances built on the US trade deficit have proven unsustainably massive? Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, put it succinctly in a recent speech at the IMF: “Everywhere we look across the international economic system today, we see imbalance… This status quo of large and persistent imbalances is not sustainable… The persistent over-reliance on the United States for demand is resulting in an evermore unbalanced global economy.”

Their proposed solutions may be wrongheaded, half-baked, even crazy, but at least Trump’s team has identified the problem. Voters may not understand that these unsustainable imbalances are at the root of their plight, but enough of them have the sixth sense to intuit that Trump’s people are on to something, unlike the centrists who act like King Canute ordering the tides of discontent to reverse course.

Inexcusably, centrists treat Bessent and the rest of Trump’s economic team as Neanderthals. They forget that the people they celebrate as the architects of the globalized capitalist order, an order which they now mourn, had warned them in good time. On 10 April 2005, when no one was interested in bad news stories, Paul Volcker, the man who had helped design the devastating Nixon Shock and later headed the Federal Reserve during the formative years of the Dark Deal, foreshadowed everything Bessent is now saying:

“What holds [the US economic success story] all together is a massive and growing flow of capital from abroad, running to more than $2 billion every working day, and growing… As a nation we don’t consciously borrow or beg. We aren’t even offering attractive interest rates, nor do we have to offer our creditors protection against the risk of a declining dollar… We fill our shops and our garages with goods from abroad, and the competition has been a powerful restraint on our internal prices. It’s surely helped keep interest rates exceptionally low despite our vanishing savings and rapid growth. And it’s comfortable for our trading partners and for those supplying the capital. Some, such as China, depend heavily on our expanding domestic markets. And for the most part, the central banks of the emerging world have been willing to hold more and more dollars, which are, after all, the closest thing the world has to a truly international currency… The difficulty is that this seemingly comfortable pattern can’t go on indefinitely.”

Three years later, Wall Street crashed. Two decades of centrist denial followed, bought at the price of gigantic money printing for the few and harsh austerity for the many. With Volcker and his ilk sidelined by the governing centrists, the political center began to fragment across the West — with deficit countries like France, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom (not to mention my country, Greece) closer to the eye of the storm. It was only a matter of time before someone like Trump would rise up, the inevitable outcome of the centrists’ refusal to acknowledge that the global surplus recycling mechanism, the Dark Deal, was dead in the water — just as its predecessor, the Bretton Woods system, was before President Nixon killed it in 1971.

Sure enough, Trump’s policies are unlikely to rebalance the world economy. While some manufacturing will return to America, automation will render this a jobless growth surge. Big Tech’s burgeoning cloud rents will further undermine any actual rebalancing. China will probably move on, gradually transforming the Brics into a Bretton Woods-style system anchored by the yuan. The European Union will fail to rebalance its internal macroeconomy, sinking deeper into stagnation. The planet’s climate will go haywire.

But, though Trump’s policies may not work in the US, France, Australia, Canada or anywhere else, his willingness to upend a broken global system is enough to garner political support for, at home, unprecedented authoritarianism; and abroad, a confrontation with China that casts doubt on our species’ long-term prospects. Meanwhile, centrists stuck in their delusion that the Dark Deal can be sustained are condemned to keep losing even when they win.

He had to do something. So he went to the courts. The legal claim he filed on that frigid winter day would put Wade on a quest no father should have to face: saving his daughter’s life from a Canadian health system that at times appears more committed to delivering death than protecting health. By taking legal action, he managed to delay Marge’s death for a while. But he is set to lose the battle.

Wade and Marge aren’t the real names of this story’s subjects. The case is under a Canadian publication ban issued by a provincial court in Alberta, leaving Marge’s family reluctant to speak on the record. Yet with the pro-euthanasia Liberals re-elected to power in Canada and assisted-suicide legislation swiftly clearing obstacles in Britain and New York state, among other jurisdictions, their story must be told: for it highlights the slippery-slope expansion of the categories of patients deemed eligible for suicide-by-doctor, once the practice is legalized.

After the January notice came the details. The last physician to assess her for assisted suicide, a family doctor practicing with the Alberta Health Services (AHS), took fewer than 24 hours to review and approve her application. And although the neurologist treating her for fatigue and pain assessed her as “normal”, another family doctor, unknown to her parents, declared her to be terminally ill. The clinic at which this family doctor practices referred UnHerd’s request for comment to AHS, which told UnHerd that “as this is before the courts, we are unable to provide comment”.

“She tells us that she’s getting [Medically Assistance in Dying], and of course we freak out”, Wade tells me. “I was new to MAiD. I didn’t know anything about it.” He describes his daughter, Marge, as an intelligent young woman. He loves her, and he was saving money for her to be independent, to move her from the family home to her own apartment. She was healthy, but convinced she was sick.

Her only diagnosed conditions were autism and ADHD, which made it difficult for her to keep in touch with her friends during Covid lockdowns or to hold down a job. Her life was nocturnal and online, and that worried him, as did the sort of online peer pressure that bears down especially on younger women. Wade says: “For the last eight years, she has spent a lot of time online researching medicine and adverse medical conditions”. She slept through the day and stayed up most nights until 4 a.m. or later as she accessed “online support groups and chat rooms with other people who share her sickness”.

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Canada has become a warning light for the limits of enforcing safeguards for euthanasia. Even though hundreds of reported violations of Canada’s criminal law on euthanasia were never fully investigated by authorities, Marge’s story is different. She has thus far refused to make public the diagnosis on which she based her application for suicide. Her father, however, insists that it’s her autism that has caused to her become fixated with being sick — terminally so.

In Canada, intellectual disabilities or mental illness alone are no reason for people to receive MAiD. That’s unlike the Netherlands, where at least five people with intellectual disorders younger than 30 cited autism as their primary motivation for euthanasia. Canada is supposed to be different — at least, until 2027, when the country will expand the law to approve assisted-suicide requests for cases of mental illness alone.

As it is, to qualify for euthanasia in Canada, you need any two physicians or nurse practitioners to say you meet the eligibility requirements. You must be over 18 years of age, mentally competent, eligible for health care, and have a “grievous and irremediable” physical illness or disability. Marge’s autism, her parents have argued in court, means that his daughter “is vulnerable and is not competent to make the decision to take her own life”.

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It was 2021 when Marge first filled out the form — without telling her parents — asking to die. AHS, the public health-care system, connected her with two physicians. Although one physician deemed her eligible without any diagnosed physical symptoms, according to Wade, the second denied her application, presumably because she had no terminal illness. She seems to have only met some of the requirements, although it is impossible to know for sure without access to her MAiD assessment. Alberta’s policy was that in the case of a tie, the suicide would not proceed.

But Marge was determined.

In 2022, she went doctor-shopping. She found another physician, an Alberta family practitioner, who intervened and supported her (their clinic didn’t reply to UnHerd’s request for comment). Unknown to the family, this doctor signed a change in her “Goals of Care Designation”, which is the medical standard used in Alberta to indicate how severely ill someone is. The doctor switched it to the most extreme category, which in some Canadian provinces indicates the likelihood of imminent death; that was almost three years ago.

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The following year, in 2023, she applied for assisted dying a second time. Once again, the two physicians consulted disagreed. (The clinics at which these two practice didn’t reply to UnHerd’s request for comment; AHS declined to comment, citing the court case.) This time, however, the so-called MAiD navigator, who sherpas patients through the process, connected Marge with a third doctor as a “tiebreaker”. The chosen physician was the same one who had approved Marge’s MAiD application the first time, and did so again, within 24 hours.

It was only then that her parents found out from Marge that she had been approved for assisted suicide. Her parents pushed back. Tempers flared. And the MAiD navigator claimed that Wade was a “safety risk given his threats” fewer than two weeks before she was set to die.

Her father couldn’t understand how any doctor could think Marge was qualified to die. “I thought MAiD was for, like, you’re dying anyway. So, we’ll just speed it up because you’re suffering. That’s what I thought it was for”, he tells me. “And I’m thinking, well, how could this be for Marge?” So, the day before her “MAiD provider” was meant to pay a final house visit, when a physician and a nurse would bring the lethal but now routine injection of a sedative, a coma-inducting agent, and a neuromuscular tranquilizer, Wade filed a last-minute court challenge. He claimed that Marge did not have a “grievous and irremediable medical condition”, that her only diagnosed illnesses were mental, not physical, and that her second tie-breaking assessor was not independent.

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That day, an initial judge granted the temporary injunction to block physicians from ending the life of Wade’s daughter. But then the case went to trial.

This was the first time anywhere in North America that a legal assisted suicide for a non-terminally ill patient, approved by any two physicians, was stopped by a court, at least in its preliminary stage. The judge, Justice Colin Feasby, of the Court of King’s Bench, Alberta, ruled that Marge’s father had a reasonable cause of action that the correct protocols around assisted dying weren’t followed. Marge had no terminal illness. Neither of the MAiD assessors appeared to be experts on Marge’s autism. And the independent assessor appointed as tiebreaker wasn’t, either.

Once it came to ruling on the substance of the dispute, however, the judge wouldn’t consider whether Marge qualified for assisted suicide; no evidence was accepted on even naming the condition for which she was approved. Any criminal prosecution, the judge ruled, could only happen after Marge is dead: “Parliament has put its trust in doctors and nurse practitioners, and it is not for this Court to second guess that choice.”

In Britain, Kim Leadbeater — a member of Parliament whose proposal to legalize the practice is set for a critical vote in the House of Commons this May — recently claimed that “there would be an injunction” by the parents of a person with a learning disorder if their child was choosing to die for the wrong reasons. In response to this, Wade says, “I know it won’t work”. When his injunction was thrown out, the judge ruled that his doubt didn’t matter. “As a court”, Judge Feasby held, “I can’t go second-guessing these MAiD assessors … but I’m stuck with this: the only comprehensive assessment of this person done says she’s normal”.

The ruling was no surprise. Since the Supreme Court of Canada decriminalized euthanasia, scarcely any judges in Canada have found problems with euthanasia safeguards. Rather, past rulings reinforced that MAiD wasn’t expansive enough. The 2019 Truchon v. Canada case expanded the practice to include nonterminal illnesses. Failing those who weren’t dying, the ruling said, would be tantamount to discrimination against people without a terminal illness.

One of the two plaintiffs, Jean Truchon, a 51-year-old euthanasia advocate with spastic cerebral palsy, requested to die because he was suffering from a severe disability that prevented the use of his arms. Yet Truchon also told a friend that he would have chosen to live if he received adequate support at home.

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The Trudeau government chose not to appeal the decision, despite opposition from virtually every prominent disability-rights organization in Canada.

In Marge’s case, too, Canadian disability groups mobilized against the ruling; they agreed with Wade that disabilities shouldn’t be compared to a terminal illness. At stake is a future where disability supports are neglected for immediate and cheaper death-on-demand, only for those whose disabilities are too profound or serious for the state to support.

In September, some of the largest Canadian disability groups launched a constitutional challenge against euthanasia based on nonterminal disabilities. The suit claimed it is an “appalling injustice” to offer suicide just on the grounds of disability. “It is not just wrong”, says Krista Carr, the executive vice president of Inclusion Canada, in an email to me. “It is discriminatory and violates our most fundamental rights.”

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Yet even if that constitutional challenge triumphs, it will be too late for Wade. He says he has spent more than $150,000 in legal fees, half of it through credit-card debt; a further legal appeal would have to come from money he doesn’t have. But the expense did not bother him: “This is just money. We can make it. We can’t go to the store and buy another Marge. I don’t regret it at all.”

His legal challenge failed, but it restarted Marge’s assisted-dying process from the beginning. He tells me she had applied again. Meanwhile, in April 2024, Wade appealed the court’s decision, which delayed any further assisted-suicide approval until October that year, when his appeal case was to be heard. But Marge began starving herself that June, so he dropped the appeal a week later.

More recently, I received another message from Wade. Marge’s third application to die had been approved. Wade waits, angry and terrified, to receive the scheduled appointment of his daughter’s death. It could happen anytime.

Instead, they have delivered a muddled, mixed result that neither fully confirms nor denies either of these projections. With the long, dramatic count not yet completed, it looks like the parliament will be divided between a returned but humbled Liberal government under Prime Minister Mark Carney, holding on to minority status, and a rising but still not triumphant opposition Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre. Both these parties made sizable gains, the more consequential performance likely coming from Poilievre, who stole a number of working-class seats from progressive parties. But both will nonetheless also have to deal with the sting of dashed expectations. Neither side was handed a decisive victory: Carney and Poilievre each fumbled the historic leads they held at different turns of the campaign, failing to provide a compelling or unifying vision of leadership before the electorate.

This is a sharp turnaround in fortune for the Tories. Not long ago, they enjoyed a 25-point lead, with an expected 200-seat landslide; but the resignation of Justin Trudeau powered-up by Donald Trump’s tariff war scrambled their strategy. As a result, the ruling Liberals were sufficiently emboldened to expect their own mega majority at the outset of the race.

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At the time of writing, the Liberals had 167 seats, just five short of the 172 needed for a majority in the House of Commons; the Conservatives had 145 seats, the separatist Bloc Quebecois had 23, the left-wing New Democrats seven, and the Greens one. One leader, Jagmeet Singh of the NDP, has lost his seat, and remarkably, despite his party’s upward movement, Poilievre is in danger of losing his own — which is located next to the constituency that elected Carney to parliament for the first time.

All those hoping for a return to stability after a half-decade of minority rule face only further volatility. There was neither a Blue nor a Red Wave — only more uncertainty, as Canadians face an aggressive threat to their independence in Washington, and a dangerously divided parliament in Ottawa. This would be a trying enough in ordinary times, but these are not normal days.

Roughly two and a half years ago, Poilievre’s Conservatives began their steady ascent to frontrunner status, where they would stay until just a few months ago. The headwinds were with him, as he looked set to become the Canadian incarnation of a global wave of revolt against liberal elites. Poilievre found a formula for translating the populist energies that roiled America and Europe into a distinct local context: he downplayed culture war concerns, which never really took off in Canada, and instead played up the cost of living, tying creeping inflation and spiraling housing costs to Trudeau.

A singular focus on Trudeau’s unpopular carbon tax, distilled by the slogan “Axe the Tax”, seemed to resonate with working-class voters; indeed, it was so effective that it caused the Liberals to cave in the middle of 2023, catalyzing a chain of events that would end with the ousting of Trudeau in January of this year. But success came too early, as the party proved too slow to react to the change at the top, sticking to their anti-Trudeau playbook even as Carney succeeded him; then Trump began issuing threats of annexation, followed by a barrage of tariffs, declaring economic war.

Poilievre had ample opportunity to shift his narrative to one of existential national defense but only did so belatedly or half-heartedly. Instead, the Tory leader banked on affordability, which he intended to hang like a millstone around Carney’s neck: after all, Trump may be the issue of the moment, but how could Canadians forget the “lost Liberal decade” during which Trudeau’s policies, as Poilievre tells it, exploded the cost of living?

Carney, though, canceled Trudeau’s carbon tax on day one, distancing himself from the former PM and rendering useless Poilievre’s Trumpian schoolyard taunt (“Carbon Tax Carney”). Outflanked on patriotism and weakened on affordability, the Conservatives were backed into a political corner.

Meanwhile, Poilievre’s provincial counterpart in Ontario, Doug Ford — with whom a blood feud has now broken out — proved how Canada’s Tories could win in the age of Trump: weeks before, he called and decisively won a snap election centered on tariffs, precisely what Poilievre didn’t do. The federal party had also managed to antagonize provincial sister parties in Nova Scotia and British Columbia, which could have boosted Poilievre’s chances. Repairing the fissures of the conservative movement will be vital for the Canadian Right if they are to continue their quest for national power.

An earlier Poilievre pivot away from his Trudeau-era slogans and towards recognition of the Trump threat could have prevented the bleeding of support. Poilievre was shown to be right, however, in refusing to choose between affordability and Trump, as the spate of working-class votes he stole from the New Democrats in industrial and suburban Ontario can attest. These seats, some held by the union-backed NDP, were expected to defect to Carney rather than Poilievre, who ended up benefiting handsomely.

But the Tory leader could still have been more creative in blending the two issues, that is, showing how the US trade war would compound an already weakened economy. But he was much too cautious in scaling back his counterpunches against the Yankees, as if fearing to cross a line with parts of his base who might still admire the president. In any event, while Poilievre may have secured the best conservative result since 1988, he fell short. If he loses his own Ottawa-area seat, it will be a desperate (but not fatal) embarrassment.

Not that Mark Carney has covered himself with glory. He also had a reasonable hope of marching to power with a thumping majority. When the campaign started, the Liberals were heavily favored to pull off the impossible: a majority after a decade in government. But though they have secured a fourth mandate, it is a vulnerable one. It can survive only by scrapping together ad hoc supply-and-confidence deals with New Democratic and Bloc Quebecois MPs — precisely the dynamic that exhausted the energies of the late Trudeau government, while at the same time facing an aggressive and empowered Conservative opposition.

In the end, Carney’s professions of a new direction for the Liberal government failed to move the needle. The baggage of the Trudeau era proved too much: too many families and young people felt as if they aren’t getting ahead; working-class Canadians in industrial cities such as Hamilton and Windsor identified with Polievre’s “boots-not-suits” message, rather than the expert reassurances of Carney and the old Trudeau ministers; and crucially, the multicultural “905” Greater Toronto Area suburbs, where Canadian elections are won and lost, broke the Liberal “red wall” there to elect just enough Conservatives to deny Liberals the advantage in Ontario, effectively blocking the Liberal Party’s path to a majority.

The government’s disastrous mismanagement of the housing, immigration, and law-and-order files has hit hard in these suburbs, where immigrant communities themselves felt the brunt of overpopulation and a surplus of non-integrable newcomers. Indeed, the surge in crime rates and the appearance of tent cities in these otherwise respectable middle- and working-class neighborhoods are what may have lost the Liberals their formerly reliable and vital bedrock of support.

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Only in Quebec did Carney’s Liberals make significant gains, mostly at the expense of the separatist Bloc Quebecois, whose social democratic base feared the prospect of a Poilievre government so much that they voted against their nationalist inclinations to hand Carney enough to claim the win. With 24 seats, however, the same Bloc, which rejects the very idea of Canada, as it exists, may play the part of kingmaker in the hung parliament, further testing national unity in this already fractious federation.

With these results, governing will be far from easy for Carney, and after a short, raucous 45th parliament, Canadians may well have to return to the polls later this year or next to dispel the indecision that has descended over Ottawa. While there were no decisive winners, the loser of this race may just be the national interest, which desperately needs a stable majority government as Canada fights for its sovereign existence and standard of living against a vicious and implacable foe.

At the start of his ministry, Mark Carney made a bizarre gesture: he winked at the camera as if to cross the fourth wall and communicate something to those watching; on social media, Carney was then compared with the protagonists of House of Cards: a shrewd Machiavellian figure who comes in from the shadows to seize and hold power against great odds. Instead, what we Canadians got was a House of Cards in the more literal sense, a fundamentally unstable structure that can be blown away at any time by a strong gust of wind. And a storm is brewing across the border.

These words came back to me the following week when the Hudson Bay Corporation, the oldest in North America, announced that it was going out of business. Incorporated by royal decree in 1670, the HBC was responsible for westward expansion into British North America. Canada became what it is because of this company. For over 200 years, the HBC was the governing authority in Western Canada. In the 20th century, it became the anchor for urban development, emerging as the country’s most iconic retailer. Every major city in Canada had its downtown centered around an HBC department store that spanned an entire city block. Even in recent years, the Christmas windows of its flagship Toronto store attracted the kind of attention that a major tourist destination receives. The floors inside were civic retail Utopia, where teen girls and new moms and corporate bankers and grandpas shopped happily under the same roof. If there was a unifying symbol of Canadian culture in the last century, it may have been an HBC wool blanket. Traded for fur pelts from the late 1700s, the blankets at one point accounted for well over half of all traded goods. There are few fashion staples dating from over 200 years ago that are still popular today, but the HBC Stripes are one of them. Every household has one somewhere in the house.

The end of the HBC, hastened by its owner, an American private equity firm that bought the company in 2012, has happened during a time of a strange resurgence of Canadian patriotism. A few months ago, one experienced a kind of fremdscham — vicarious embarrassment — if one saw a household flying a Canadian flag. We have been told, and told often, that we’re a genocidal nation; it was gauche to be proud of Canada. But now even in the most bourgeois neighborhoods you see the maple leaf flying proudly. Canadian products in grocery stores are now labeled with a maple leaf. Californian wine has been taken off our shelves. There are Canadian flags inside businesses and on clothing, and on hats. (We have our own version of the red and white ballcap: “Canada is Already Great”, it says.) This weekend in my home province there is a Rally for Canada happening at the provincial legislature. I think there will be music, some speeches by local radio hosts, face-painting for the kids, and some fried mini doughnuts and hot dogs. You know, all the things that make us uniquely Canadian, I guess.

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It is difficult to put one’s finger on the pulse of Canadian culture. We seem to define ourselves by one thing: not American. (That’s why it’s still perfectly acceptable for a Canadian backpacker to affix a maple leaf to her bag. At home our patriotism has been a cause for embarrassment, but abroad a worse embarrassment would be to be mistaken for a vulgar American.) Americans, on the other hand, typically don’t think of us at all. Years before the talk of becoming the 51st state, my husband took a trip from his home in Virginia to Canada to give a lecture. He was delayed overnight in the Chicago airport because he left his passport at home and had to have it emergency couriered. “I honestly forgot Canada was a separate country,” he joked, making fun of his own forgetfulness by deflecting it onto Canada’s deepest insecurity. “I just assumed it was like America-North.”

But Canadians forget that we’re a separate country, too, strangely. Consider this: at a party around Christmas, after the US election but before Trump’s inauguration, a fellow Canadian and I were talking about, unsurprisingly, US politics. “Trump is going to be bad for Canada,” he said. “I expect so,” I said, “but he is allowed to do things that he thinks are in the best interest of his country.” “But are you prepared to accept everything he says he’ll do?” he asked. “It doesn’t really matter since I’m Canadian. I didn’t vote for him, and I don’t pay taxes to him.” My friend stood there, as though not quite understanding what I meant, so I clarified: “he is not the president of Canada.”

Canada is a country that has long defined itself by our sense of moral superiority to our uncouth neighbor to the south. To be Canadian is to be more virtuous and more intelligent than our American cousins. But of course we learn our virtue from America, influenced by them in ways we can’t fully apprehend because our culture is so saturated by theirs. The only thing we don’t do better than them is patriotism — until recently, that is. Now that Trump has adopted a stance of hostility toward Canada, we’ve got good at that, too. Our newfound love of Canada is another import from our southern neighbors. Our response to Trump’s tariffs is to buy local, support Canada. In other words, we are now doing by way of patriotic reaction precisely what Trump is doing by way of policy: spending our money in our own country.

I know that this sounds as if I’m unpatriotic myself, eye-rolling at Canada’s reactive nationalism. This isn’t true. First of all, few things are as Canadian as being self-deprecating and self-apologizing. Sorry, eh. But truly I love Canada, deeply. Not only our cold, unforgiving winters, which do forge a different kind of person, but our social and political systems, which in fact are very un-American, and make for a very pleasant society. I was a participant recently at an American conference in New York. There I was surprised by how opposed the Americans were to things like universal healthcare, public daycare and public schools, and even to taxes. One participant there was a third-generation non-social security number holder. She is off the grid so that she doesn’t have to pay a cent in taxes. To a Canadian this is unthinkable. Nobody likes paying taxes, but we certainly do enjoy the benefits of them. And we are certainly aware that we have a responsibility to our fellow citizens.

There is a tangible difference between Canada and the US that made me realize how incompatible our cultures are. Canada is collectivist, if not even a teensy bit socialist. We have government corporations, such as energy utilities and insurance companies. They work well, in general. We pay high taxes, but we get services in return — no, don’t snicker. It’s true. For many years I was a single mother. I had to work. Daycare in my home province is heavily subsidized by the government. The cost to all is $10 a day. Affordable and necessary, so off my kids went. To the average American, I have learned, state-run daycare sounds menacing, as though it’s the kind of institution where toddlers are given sippy cups of Soylent Green as images of blue-haired angry teens are beamed into their innocent eyes, like Clockwork Orange for three-year-olds. But in practice provincial daycares are each run separately by a board made up of parent volunteers. The province provides the funding, but the community determines the policies. And the daycares are truly diverse communities. Professional moms and dads mingle with recent immigrants at pre-school parties. The lawyer and the grocery store custodian become friends as they plan weekend playdates together. The Eritrean refugee family and the Russian Jewish family laugh together as their kids hang from the monkey bars at pick-up time. It is a kind of classless polis. It is beautiful, and it works.

And the same goes with our healthcare system. Although certainly strained and now with a very questionable policy regarding medically assisted dying, it is still highly functional. That is why we hear about cases when the system fails. They are newsworthy because they are not commonplace. A few years ago, my daughter fell on glass and sliced her knee; it was cut open to the bone. My American husband and I took her to the downtown Children’s Hospital. Within three hours, her knee was stitched (10 big sutures and two subcutaneous ones) and we were sent home with Advil and extra bandages. As we drove home, I asked Matthew how much he paid for parking in the hospital parking garage. “Seven dollars,” he said. “Seven dollars!” I replied, shaking my head. “Tsk, tsk. They get you coming and going around here.” He slowly turned his head to glare at me. “In the US that bandage alone would have cost $25.” He is right. Our system is not perfect, but it has in large part been saved from outright corruption because it is a public good.

“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” is, as we all know, America’s saying. Canada’s lesser-known one is “Peace, Order, and Good Government”. At the heart of Canada is a spirit that embraces governance as long as it is for the common good. We have an election here at the end of this month. It will be, as usual, a battle between the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party. The latter would have won the election handily had it been called in the autumn (as it should have been) while the deeply disliked Trudeau was in power and Trump had not yet started a trade war with America’s longest-running trade partner. But now to be Conservative in Canada is aligned, incorrectly, with American Trumpism. To be Liberal is to be, more or less correctly, a lib globalist. The American political landscape has so overshadowed our politics and culture that their terms have become ours; their division of political policy our own — you’re either Right or Left — just as our “Canadian culture” is in so many ways the same as theirs: doughnuts and hot dogs.

But Canada has a unique history of political values that have neither formed themselves as a negation of American values or a colonization by them. To be a Red Tory is to be both fiscally conservative and collectivist; it is to hold socialist policies that look to the community’s good, while often holding onto conservative social values. Unlike America’s focus on individual liberty, Canadian Red Toryism focuses on the collective. The Canadian Wheat Board was such an institution: a single government-run trade platform where farmers marketed their grain. It effectively dissolved in 2012 in favor of open market globalization, which has been devastating to family farms but good for corporate ones. (The majority of Canadian farmers opposed its dissolution; my father, a Ukrainian immigrant farmer, was one of them. Corporate farms, however, lobbied strongly for “market freedom” as opposed to collective capitalism. They won.) I wonder if now, in the face of high tariffs in our American market, it might be time to bring Canadian collectivism back to our grain market. Few things would make me prouder to be Canadian. Western farmers, like our truckers, are remarkably unified. Ottawa might want to remember this.

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But probably I’m being naïve. It feels increasingly like a remnant of the past to imagine a government that is both collectivist and conservative, like a trace of old wiring in a house that no longer serves any purpose. But it could still happen. I am no economist, but I love this country of mine and, as the wife of an American, have more insight than I might otherwise have had to the differences between our two nations. Of course we will never, ever become annexed to the USA — for one thing, the Americans couldn’t handle Quebecers for a day, let alone conciliate them for well over a century.

But the history of Canada is to keep traces of the past intact. That is why we still have a king — God save him. We have always been loyalists. This might now mean being loyal to our unique Canadian collectivism. Socialist, but not wokeist. Fiscally conservative, but not anti-taxation or anti-government. Neither on the Right nor the Left, but maybe somewhere beneath these divisions, closer to the land. The old Canada of the mid-20th century might feel no longer relevant to the functioning of the modern globalist markets, but then again, the modern globalist market seems to be crashing down before our eyes. Canadian Red Toryism need not be an artifact of the past. Just as old houses can be restored, Canadian Red Toryism may become again a vital force in a functioning modern state, for the current of collectivism still flows through our country. In a time of diminishing exports, a uniquely Canadian socialism might still be a viable commodity to the people of Canada.

Seeing an opportunity in hysterical claims that the country is “under attack” from its neighbor, the Liberal Party has rebranded as Team Canada, rallying the country around a patriotism it treated with disdain just a couple of years prior. Rather than lead with prudence, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has echoed the anti-Trump rhetoric. The propaganda machine is in full swing.

With an election coming in a few weeks, Canadians have been offered little more than political theater. The two parties competing for power seem to have joined forces against an invented American enemy, allowing Canadians a distraction from the very real problems that exist in their own country. How have our memories been wiped clean so quickly?

Just a few months ago, the ruling Liberal Party appeared dead in the water. Trudeau had become the most hated Prime Minister in Canadian history and calls for his resignation were deafening. By June last year, polling showed that a majority of Canadians wanted him to step down. He couldn’t even go out in public without being screamed at by angry citizens.

Even former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who had avoided criticizing Trudeau to date, said the government had “denigrated” the country. Repeating what many of us had noticed, Harper said that Trudeau managed to stay in power thanks to a “media conglomerate” that “erased his every error” and “misrepresented his opposition.”

He was right. The already tiny Canadian media landscape was unabashedly biased in favor of Trudeau’s government, and against not just Poilievre’s Conservative Party, but any Canadian who did not subscribe to Trudeau-approved narratives. As the only party to mount a serious and unapologetic challenge to issues viewed as untouchable in Canada, the PPC was almost entirely erased from the conversation. Bernier was taking on many of the sacred cows politically homeless Canadians have been desperate to see addressed — things like gender identity ideology, climate change alarmism, and mass immigration. The PPC is a small party, but one Poilievre might take a page from: if he genuinely wants to lead the country down a different path.

Canada became evermore censorial under Trudeau’s reign, as dissent against the Covid mandates, gender identity ideology, and unevidenced claims about the supposed discovery of “mass graves” at old residential school sites was framed as dangerous hate speech.

Rather than encourage Canadians toward unity, Trudeau labelled those protesting the vaccine mandates as women-haters, racists and, science-deniers. Those of us fighting for parental rights and women-only spaces, and against the transitioning of children, were violent extremists akin to terrorists. Pointing out that no remains of buried indigenous children had been discovered at old residential school sites was referred to as “denialism,” rather than the truth.

Liberal authoritarianism peaked in 2022, when Trudeau famously went so far as to invoke the Emergencies Act and freeze the bank accounts of Freedom Convoy participants and supporters, all in an attempt to shut down the protests against the ongoing draconian mandates.

The Emergencies Act had never been used before in Canadian history. Its predecessor, the War Measures Act, was invoked only once during peacetime — by Justin’s father, then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau, in the Seventies. The Acts give sweeping powers to suspend civil liberties and democratic processes in the face of a dire threat to the security of the country.

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At the time, Bernier spoke out unapologetically against “a series of violations of our fundamental rights and freedoms that a tyrannical government wants to keep in place by crushing dissent”. He made it clear that this was “not a state of emergency”.

And we are now seeing the same tactics being used again. In January, the Prime Minister announced he intended to resign. But only he didn’t, instead proroguing Parliament in order to avoid a vote of no-confidence. This gave him the opportunity to install his pick for the new leader of the Liberal Party, Mark Carney, and drum up yet another “emergency” in the form of a trade war. While party members are meant to vote on a new leader, it was immediately clear that Carney would be picked no matter what. He was suddenly giving interviews across North America as a “Canadian Official” (odd, considering no one had elected him as an official of anything).

Indeed, Carney was installed as Trudeau’s successor in March. Canada had a new Prime Minister, and with that, all was apparently forgotten by Canadians who simply didn’t like the idea of voting Conservative and were relieved to have an excuse to fall back into their comfort zones. There was “no turning back” now, Carney explained dramatically. “The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over.” It appeared half of Canada was thrilled at the prospect of a “war” with its bigger sibling.

In truth, as Bernier explained to me, “Trump does not want to invade our country militarily”. What Trump wants is a new deal — he wants to reopen the free trade agreement. And rather than sit down at the table and make a deal, the Liberals took the opportunity to fear-monger Canadians into believing they were the innocent victims of an unfair attack. In fact, it is the Liberal Party, not Trump, that started a commercial war — “a trade war that we won’t win” as Bernier put it.

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This is merely another distraction at a time when we need a national reckoning. I told Bernier that I saw there was no PPC candidate running in my old riding in East Vancouver, one of the most Left-wing electoral districts. I had lived in the neighborhood for 15 years, but eventually felt unsafe there. After I began speaking out against gender identity legislation and in defense of women’s spaces, the attacks on me were relentless. I’d been screamed at, threatened, and stalked while out and about — walking my dog or having drinks with friends. Many of my old friends refused to be seen in public with me anymore for fear of being canceled by association. I left East Vancouver in early 2021, during the Covid lockdowns, foreseeing a dark future. Despite addiction, homelessness, mental health crises, and crime spreading across the area, the progressives who dominated politically held firm in their approach, which offered little more than clean pipes and free drugs. Issues like women’s sex-based rights had been completely wiped off the table. Once I left, it seemed that my efforts to force a debate left with me.

At the end of our conversation, I asked Bernier if he thought I should run, unsure in that moment if I was joking or not. He responded enthusiastically.

And because I’ve never been one to sit back and let the bullies win, I’ve decided to run as a PPC candidate. In a democracy, people should have the right to vote for something they believe in. And if I don’t show up and force a conversation, it just won’t happen. Women’s sex-based rights deserve to be an election issue and a topic of debate, whether the Leftist authoritarians of Canada like it or not. Free speech is only a lost cause in Canada if we don’t fight for it. There has to still be some fight left in us.

For far too long, Canadians have accepted a status quo where expression is suppressed and democracy stifled. There’s only one way to fix that: stand up, speak out, and refuse to be erased.

One obsequious biographer called it the “crunch that was heard around the world”. Elon Musk and Ben Shapiro praised his vim. Poilievre suggested that the Right could make headway in cultures that appeared stacked against them by aggressively rebutting mainstream media. Few Canadians read Urquhart’s Times Chronicle, but hundreds of thousands saw Poilievre’s alpha demolition of him on YouTube and shared it on what was then Twitter. By 2024, he had already put out 3,000 social media videos and amassed 500,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel and a million Twitter followers. He repeatedly promised to “Axe the Tax”, “Build the Homes” and “Stop the Crime”.

This visceral style thrilled the Anglophone Right. Mainstream conservative parties in Britain and Australia wanted to learn how he had won a hearing in a centrist country that usually leans mildly Left. As recently as January, James Heale wrote in The Spectator that “there are few party leaders who excite British Conservatives more. Both Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick have visited Canada to try to learn from his playbook.” No wonder: Poilievre was then 20 points ahead in the polls and preparing for a federal election in which he was an “existential threat” to Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government. Australian conservatives were no less admiring: one explained that Poilievre had forged a “pragmatic working-class conservatism” that had enticed voters from the woke Liberals and socialist NDP. It was a good omen for his Australian counterpart Peter Dutton, a battler championing cost-of-living issues against a Labor government that represented only the affluent.

These discussions of Poilievre’s success now read oddly. Donald Trump’s re-election should have confirmed his passage to power this year as all but inevitable, especially once the President’s posturing on tariffs hastened Trudeau’s resignation as prime minister. Instead, it has been a meteor strike on the platform Poilievre has spent years putting together. Although pollsters in Canada are a fractious bunch, they currently converge in finding that Poilievre’s lead has dwindled to a tie with the Liberals. At the federal election on 29 April, Mark Carney, the newly appointed Liberal leader and Trudeau’s successor as Prime Minister, is set to win enough seats to form a minority or even a majority government.

What explains Poilievre’s sudden implosion? In a scathing but comprehensive recent biography, Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, the historian Mark Bourrie points out that his thinking on most subjects has not advanced much since adolescence. Poilievre’s energy in content creation, which has naturally impressed the Anglophone Right, may turn out not to compensate for his intellectual rigidity.

As a young activist and student in late Nineties Calgary, Poilievre absorbed from Milton Friedman’s writings the lesson that the state was the enemy of liberty and prosperity. The job of politicians was simply to shrink its demands, then to get out of the way of the market. There was a partisan edge to this faith: Poilievre shared the conviction of many Albertans that the eagerness of Liberal governments to siphon off its wealth for their voter base in eastern Canada explained the wild fluctuations of their prairie province’s economy, which depended heavily on the extraction of oil and gas.

After helping the insurgent Reform Party to absorb the moribund Progressive Conservatives and form a new Conservative Party of Canada, Poilievre entered Parliament in 2005. He served as a minister in Stephen Harper’s government and in 2022 finally became leader of his party in opposition. Throughout that time, he consistently condemned efforts to grow the state. He opposed subsidized daycare (better to cut taxes so one parent could afford to stay at home), benefits for indigenous people (too dependent on handouts in his view), and payouts to furloughed workers during the pandemic.

His libertarianism finally caught on during the cost-of-living crisis that set in after the Covid pandemic, when his calls to “axe the tax” on carbon consumption suggested a sensitivity to the plight of ordinary Canadians. And though he had once written them off as incorrigible progressives, his slogans now resonated particularly with younger people, who polls reveal are disenchanted with and even embarrassed by Canada. As Harper’s minister for electoral reform, Poilievre had stopped the Elections Canada agency from trying to boost voting by the young. Yet the spike in Canada’s already high house prices and the inflation during the pandemic led to a new assessment: the young would now hear the argument that the state was preventing them from enjoying the lifestyles of their parents. Poilievre explained that Trudeau’s tax on carbon consumption generated the “Justinflation” that put independence and homeownership beyond their reach.

In particular, Poilievre tailored his message to men in their twenties, around 35% of whom now still live with their parents. Though in his forties when he became leader of the opposition, he began to resemble the denizens of the transnational manosphere. He ditched his nerdish spectacles, dyed his hair and wore tight t-shirts to emphasize his gym-honed physique. Meme-makers digitally inflated his muscles to turn him into a grinning, tax-cutting chad. He praised and had periodic chats with the psychiatrist Jordan Peterson: their last interview has more than five million views.

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Yet while Poilievre fraternized with culture warriors, he managed to come across as merely “based” rather than extreme: a sardonic opponent of woke follies. In 2022, his defiant backing for protestors who blockaded Ottawa in an attempt to overturn restrictions on travel for unvaccinated people won him the conservative leadership. Poilievre had taken his shots, but argued that “inflammatory” contempt for the truckers was emptying grocery stores and pharmacies. He also attacked “whacko” experiments with the decriminalization of street drugs, which had supposedly turned the downtowns of cities such as Vancouver into open-air drug dens. The Liberals were ideologues who had “broken” Canada, leaving many of its people “just hanging on by a thread”.

His commonsense pitch has attracted conservatives in Britain and Australia because its unapologetic materialism is free of MAGA’s theocratic flourishes. Poilievre’s adoptive mother was a conservative Catholic who took him to demonstrations outside abortion clinics; as a young activist, he mixed with Creationist Protestants. Yet as leader of the opposition, he reversed his earlier opposition to gay marriage and has deflected rote Liberal accusations that his party would restrict abortion rights. His social vision is a trad yet highly generic ideal of suburban contentment: so much so that the stock footage chosen to illustrate one of his speeches on “our home” mainly came from the American Midwest.

Poilievre ensured his indictments of the Liberals were never fact checked. He has systematically avoided interviews with journalists from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation or newspapers, shrewdly recognizing that the audience for such legacy media in Canada as in other Western societies is greying and dwindling. Instead of “Justin’s journos”, he favored an archipelago of alternative news organizations. Although Canada’s print media leans center-right and is largely owned by Americans, Conservatives these days like to imagine themselves bucking elite censorship. Websites such as Ezra Levant’s Rebel News, the Post Millennial, and Candice Malcolm’s True North offer their readers the samizdat truths the elite do not want you to read. Although often dismissed as Maple MAGA, a northern outpost of Trumpy misinformation, they are characteristically Canadian. Levant resembles Poilievre in being a rock-ribbed Albertan conservative who has devoted his career to defending the West’s fossil fuel industries against effete greens from eastern Canada. Poilievre promised to reward these truth-tellers by giving them government subsidies and defunding the English-language operations of the CBC.

These sites amplified Poilievre’s view of Canada as a “broken” country and broadcast it to the rest of the world. Musk said that “Canadian truckers rule”; more considered commentators represented them as blue-collar rebels against the “laptop classes” who had clamored for the lockdowns that did not affect them personally. Trump’s belief that Canada is a fentanyl dealer’s paradise owes much to productions such as the film Vancouver is Dying, a safari of drug taking and homelessness on the city’s Downtown East Side, which now has 4.5 million views on YouTube. Its maker Aaron Gunn is now running for election with Poilievre’s Conservatives.

This convergence in rhetoric became a grave problem once Trump started his pantomime campaign to annex Canada, to which Poilievre has not yet found a convincing response. Much of his base in the West admires the President’s politics and is not much fussed by his talk of annexation, given that for years it has flirted with the idea of Alberta’s secession from Canada. That might explain why his comments on Trump have been too muted to please many Canadians outside Alberta, while nonetheless being “negative” enough to annoy him. Doug Ford, the conservative but undogmatic premier of the province of Ontario, has meanwhile stolen his limelight with his theatrical promises to retaliate against American tariffs. Poilievre needs to win many federal seats in Ontario to form a majority government, but Ford has pointedly held back from his forthcoming election campaign.

The other problem was that Poilievre could not stop harping on about Trudeau’s carbon tax — even though Mark Carney reduced the carbon tax to zero in one of his first acts as Prime Minister. Rather than finding a new issue to campaign on, he has salvaged the podium stands and campaign merchandise that promise to “axe the tax” by warning of Carney’s plans to resurrect the tax if elected. His calls for a beefed up military aside, he is still recommending a shrunken state to a public that seeks protection against a foreign menace.

During the years in which he targeted Trudeau for personally breaking Canada, Poilievre apparently devoted little thought to the fact that he might have to fight someone else in an election. The Conservatives have been left to test attack lines on Carney in real time. Perhaps he is a well-heeled “globalist” not truly committed to the fight for Canada’s economic independence. Or maybe he is “Marx Carney”, who helped to craft Trudeau’s socialist policies. The website Juno News reported that one of his children is a “hard-Left” trans activist who had sought treatment at the “discredited” Tavistock Clinic in London. The implication was that Carney — like Kamala Harris — would be more interested in fussing about pronouns than in ordinary folk.

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Poilievre did not authorize these attacks on his rival’s family — although the founder of Juno News is a favorite journalist of his. But they seem likely to hurt the Conservative leader all the same. The tactics of his outriders encourage a perception he desperately needs to dispel: that the Conservatives share the feral methods of MAGA Republicanism. The sneering vigor with which Poilievre pitched into Trudeau online was the making of him, but is easily cast as divisive now that Trump has put the very existence of the nation under threat — rhetorically at least. Although the party has tried to respond by upping the patriotic content of its sloganeering — it is now marching under the resonant but ambiguous banner of “Canada First for a Change” — it has not changed its fundamentally negative approach.

Poilievre’s aggressive style still plays well with angry young men, but is promoting a drift towards a two-party system that promises to benefit the Liberals. That is because Liberals are recovering in the polls not by poaching Conservative voters, who largely remain loyal to Poilievre, but by hoovering up the Leftist supporters of the New Democratic Party, who may reluctantly vote for the banker Carney to keep him out of power. The recent announcement that reporters will not be allowed to travel with Poilievre during the forthcoming election campaign shows he has no intention of changing his preferred style of communication.

Poilievre’s problems should remind his international admirers that a mastery of the medium cannot compensate for a rigid message. It is easy enough to borrow his online playbook. Nothing could be more Canadian than the taut videos in which Robert Jenrick puts on casual but body-conscious clothing to speak fearlessly about his broken country. Yet in modernizing their rhetoric, conservatives need to ensure that it remains true to the distinctive traditions of their own country. Poilievre could not have guessed that a majority of Canadians would come to hear Trump’s voice in the libertarian rallying calls of Alberta. But the furious persistence with which he repeated them probably means it is too late to correct that impression.

The phrase “sleeping with an elephant” has come to define US-Canadian relations in the minds of many Canadians. But since President Trump launched his second term in Oval Office, the elephant has been neither friendly nor even-tempered. In fact, its twitches and grunts have recently become more like angry kicks and menacing roars, especially with Trump’s imposition of a 25% tariff on most goods from Canada.

Rather than meek acceptance, however, the response in Canada has been a surge of nationalist sentiment. Only, at the helm of this patriotic revival is a new prime minister, Mark Carney, for whom the substance of Canadian identity amounts to little more than . . . globalism, multiculturalism, and liberal proceduralism.

Trump has offered varied justifications for his punishing tariffs. He alleges an uncontrolled stream of illegal immigrants and fentanyl pouring across the border, notwithstanding the Canadian government’s serious efforts at interdicting such flows. He is on much firmer ground when he points to the trade imbalance between the two countries, with Canada running a significant trade surplus with the United States; about 20% of what Canada produces is consumed by Americans.

At a meeting in Mar-a-Lago, Justin Trudeau, the recently ousted prime minister, protested that such tariffs would “kill the Canadian economy”, eliciting from Trump a suggestion that Canada would be better off as the 51^st state. This line was initially heard by most people as a jest, but Trump has become fixated on the idea. Remarks about the US-Canadian border as an “artificially drawn line” have fueled fears that his real endgame is annexation.

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Perhaps Trump is just trolling, something that certainly wouldn’t be out of character for him. But a recent post on his Truth Social website signals that he may mean business. “The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State”, he wrote. “This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear”. Trudeau, for one, takes Trump at his word, stating that he believes the real aim of the tariffs is nothing less than “a total collapse of the Canadian economy because that will make it easier to annex us”.

Trump’s tariffs and his annexation rhetoric have had consequences that he surely did not intend. Canadians have never been big flag-wavers, but sales of Canadian flags have skyrocketed, American liquors are being pulled from store shelves, grocery stores are slapping labels on domestically produced items, and many people are scrapping travel plans to the United States. A movement to boycott US goods is underway.

The tariffs have also been a godsend to the governing Liberal Party. Trudeau’s plummeting approval ratings threatened to deliver his party a crashing defeat in the election to be held later this year. But when Trudeau’s unpopularity prompted his resignation, the Liberals were forced to replace him as party leader and prime minister. Mark Carney, an economist and banker with no previous experience in elected office, won in a landslide in the party vote. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the Liberals are now inching their way back up in the polls, though they still face a steep uphill climb.

Carney’s victory speech on 9 March tapped into the rising nationalist sentiment. Switching back and forth from English to French, Canada’s two official languages, he called out Trump for “trying to weaken our economy”. But more than the Canadian economy is at stake, he warned: “The Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country. If they succeed, they will destroy our way of life.”

What exactly did Carney mean by the phrase “our way of life”? Hockey, maple syrup, Tim Hortons, and politeness come to mind. But the features of Canadian identity that Carney highlighted were all political or institutional, such as universal health care and the country’s strong tradition of social programs and wealth redistribution. He also lauded Canada’s much-vaunted policy of multiculturalism: “America is a melting pot. Canada is a mosaic.”

“America is not Canada. And Canada never, ever, will be part of America in any way, shape, or form”, he declared to an enthusiastic audience. He made it clear that the future of Canada now depends on pivoting away from economic integration with the United States to seek more “reliable” trading partners.

Carney also sought to attach the odor of Trump to the opposition party, insinuating that the Conservative standard-bearer Pierre Poilievre “worships at the altar of Donald Trump”. To accuse Poilievre of kneeling before the US president may be an overstatement, but he has voiced support for many of Trump’s policies and has a reputation of being cozy with MAGA types. He recently accepted the endorsement of Elon Musk, an action that may come back to bite him.

Still, Carney is an unlikely champion of Canadian nationalism. Born in the Northwest Territories, he spent most of his adult life outside Canada, studying at Harvard and Oxford, then working for Goldman Sachs in London, New York, and Tokyo. After a stint as the governor of the Bank of Canada, he in the same role at the Bank of England. He holds both British and Irish citizenship, making him an EU citizen.

From the perspective of nationalism, it is noteworthy that he stoked controversy at the helm of the Bank of England when, prior to the Brexit vote, he decried leaving the European Union as the “biggest domestic risk to financial stability”. Many interpreted his remark as a political intervention that overstepped his job description.

Carney also has strong ties to globalist elites, with memberships in the G30, the World Economic Forum, and the Bilderberg Group. In short, he is the quintessential Davos Man, a cosmopolitan technocrat and financial bureaucrat with a newfound fondness for nationalist rhetoric.

Arguably, what Carney defends as “our way of life” is a vision of Canadians as good global citizens pulling their weight within the rules-based international order that Trump seeks to dismantle. As Canadian political scientist Tyler Chamberlain has observed, “Canadian identity is bound up very closely with multilateralism, international organizations, and free trade. That’s the kind of nationalism that is playing well today”. Meanwhile, Canadians watch American television, cheer American sports teams, and “think like Americans in many ways that really matter — but we have health care.”

Carney is a specimen of what Canadian political philosopher Ron Dart calls liberal nationalism, which is of relatively recent vintage, the chief precedent for the present moment being Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s trade disputes with Richard Nixon. “Liberal nationalism usually emerges from a position taken by the United States at a given moment that threatens certain elements of the Canadian economy”, says Dart. It tends to be reactive and narrowly focused on economics.

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It differs from what Dart calls High Tory nationalism, “which comes from a much deeper grounding in the Canadian soul”. Its most prominent exponent in the 20^th century was the philosopher George Parkin Grant, but it harks back to the founding of Canada as a nation that sought to preserve British and French traditions that were foreign to the society taking shape in the United States. Instead of placing a premium on liberty and individualism, like the Americans, the Canadian High Tory tradition aspired to a more orderly society oriented toward the common good of the whole.

Over time, however, Canada was transformed into what Grant called a “branch plant satellite” of the United States, a supplier of raw materials to the superpower that had emerged postwar as the “spearhead” of the dynamic liberal capitalist order. As early as 1965, Grant lamented that Canada was ceasing to exist as a sovereign nation. Dependent on the United States for both markets and defense, Canada was being absorbed, culturally and economically, into the behemoth to its south. Canada’s formal political independence might still persist for some time, Grant thought, but only due to a kind of inertia.

Grant believed that Canada was being swallowed up into an emerging global order helmed by the American hegemon. In a surprising twist, the American republic that now threatens Canadian sovereignty is a nation in open revolt against that liberal hegemonic order. Living within the gravitational field of the United States, Canada has always retained ties to its older roots in Europe. Ironically, Trump is now forcing Canada to become more internationalist in the name of Canadian nationalism.

But Dart believes this current upsurge of liberal nationalism is shallow. Though intensely felt at the moment, it is also likely to be ephemeral, lasting only as long as MAGA’s reign, since it is motivated by an external threat rather than a living memory of older Canadian traditions. “If you have no memory of anything”, he says, “then what holds you together? What holds Canadians together at this point is anti-Trumpism.”

Another, younger woman, is being dragged along by a man who is clearly a pimp. She sways as he shouts that she is “Only $20!” No one responds apart from a dealer who asks if he wants “Apache” (fentanyl).

Canada may have stringent alcohol restrictions and licensing in place in every province, but, on this street running 10 blocks, people turn a blind eye to addicts shooting up. And they are left to overdose on the street outside the legal “safe” injection site which has destigmatized the taking of illegal substances. The death rate here is 30 times higher than the national average. I hear tales, too, of young, mainly indigenous women who are marched into clinics by their pimps to access opiates for free; they become addicted and compliant.

There is a place here, though, which is supposed to provide respite for these women. The Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre purports to offer support, a bit of warmth and a free meal for anyone needing shelter, along with “safe washrooms”. Perhaps they aren’t quite as safe as some vulnerable women might wish, though, since female-only services for abused women and girls are illegal. And as the welcome sign reads: The Centre is inclusive of all self-identified women which includes trans women and two spirit people.

It wasn’t ever thus. One of the most inspirational and successful feminist organizations I have ever encountered was founded here in 1973. Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter was led by the indomitable Lee Lakeman who sadly died last year. And she, along with her team, fought hard to protect that safe space for women.

But the self-declared “male feminist” Justin Trudeau fought back. And not for women’s rights. Although a big fan of posturing about indigenous people’s rights, he did little to protect these women and girls from the abuse they suffer. Meanwhile, he removed their right to safe spaces and decriminalized prostitution. In any case, in Canada anyone can be a woman.

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Vancouver has laws and policies in place that allow for men to self-identify as women. You may remember the case of the ball waxer supreme (then known as Jessica Yaniv, now known as Jessica Serenity Simpson). In 2019, Yaniv filed complaints against beauty salons in Vancouver run by women of immigrant background, for having refused to provide him with a “Brazilian” bikini wax (that is, the waxing of the female genital area). Yaniv lost — but only by the skin of his scrotum. The women lost too — in terms of both their livelihoods, and their peace of mind. One woman had to close down her home-based business as a result of the stress of the Yaniv case.

Aside from a small handful, all of the so-called feminist institutions and organizations go all out to support transgender ideology. The Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), established in 1985 in order to fight cases on behalf of women relating to male violence and discrimination, is now full-throttle transactivist. Indeed, the first sentence under LEAF’s Mission and Vision section of its website describes it as a charity that works for “all women, girls, trans and non-binary people”, meaning everyone. “In Canadian society, cis and trans women, trans, intersex, gender diverse, gender nonconforming, gender queer, genderfluid, agender, bigender and non-binary people all experience discrimination based on their gender.”

Gender ideology has taken hold here in a way that makes Britain’s trans activists look meek, with liberal feminists welcoming the opening of domestic violence services to everyone. And any push-back comes almost exclusively from Right-wingers and radical feminists — who are roundly castigated.

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As a result, I know exactly the sort of abuse I am liable to be subject to whenever I do an event in Canada. There is screaming, jeering and intimidation. Sometimes there is spitting. There is always anger and the threat of violence. So the crowd that greeted me at an event about safe spaces for women (the irony escapes them, obviously) was no surprise.

But what was a surprise this time was that along with the jeers of “Nazis, bigots, fascist cunts”, some people were actually barking. And many of them were wearing animal masks. Since their aim was to intimidate, I wanted to show them that they hadn’t. So I approached them to quiz them about their feminism, only to have a placard shoved in my face by one young man that read: “Real feminists support ALL women.” The contrast between these privileged “feminists” with those tragic women I saw on the backstreets couldn’t have been starker. So much for the great successes of women such as Lee Lakeman.

During my visit, Trudeau was replaced by Carney. I wondered whether getting rid of him would change the landscape in Canada when it comes to the rights of women. Carney, though, is certainly keeping his mouth shut on the divisive issue. A firm believer in open markets and free trade, he is doubtless more focused on the economy rather than whether he is free to get along to the Pride parade. But the women I spoke to read that as cowardice; they suspect this man has no backbone when it comes to dealing with anything trickier than Trump’s tariffs.

They’re also very clear that the last thing they want is a Canadian Trump in the shape of Poilievre, the leader of the Conservatives. “He would do exactly what the orange man is doing,” said Sara, a long-time activist who works in a women’s shelter, “which is posturing about reversing all of the trans stuff, like men in women’s sports, whilst taking all of the other rights away, from abortion, to funding for Rape Crisis centres, and everything in between.”

Perhaps those young protesters who’ve grown up in Trudeau’s Canada, refusing to listen to what we aged feminists had to say about men’s violence, might learn something if they got out of their echo chambers and took a bus down to Downton Eastside. There they would see the damage done by men empowered by Trudeau’s policies, they would see vulnerable women victimised, abused and denied shelter.

But there are some economists who see things differently. A few of them have found their way into Trump’s orbit. Economists of this kind argue that tariffs can be effectively employed in a strategy to build a country’s industrial base. The classic examples of this are postwar Japan and then South Korea, each of which rebuilt their war-ravaged economies using a combination of state nurturing and protectionism. As a result, they became global manufacturing champions. (South Korea started practically from scratch.)

The origins of this approach might be unexpected. When Japanese bureaucrats first looked around for examples of such “infant industry models”, they found inspiration in 19th-century America’s industrialization. Contrary to its more recent policies, the US has some history of using protectionism to make itself great.

Neoliberal economists therefore stand accused of neglecting the examples of history. Another blind spot might be political. Neoliberal mathematical models anticipate the effects of tariffs, but they lack a theory of the state and of political economy. In their focus on the aggregate impacts of free trade, the neoliberals have too often neglected the differential impacts of opening western manufacturing to imports.

Yes, output and efficiency rose in America when it opened up to China in the Nineties. But the gains were largely captured by large owners of capital, whereas small businesses and workers didn’t do so well. There resulted what the economist Branko Milanović dubbed the “elephant curve” of income distribution, in which a global middle class of owners and professionals grew rich while workers in Western countries fell behind. In America, where Democratic elites once represented working-class interests, the neoliberal turn initiated by Bill Clinton left them largely abandoned, and they ended up turning to Donald Trump.

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Thus there is both an economic and political rationale for Trump to use tariffs to rebuild American manufacturing and restore the working class to its former glory. As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, “Wall Street’s done great… but this administration is about Main Street.”

The problem is that it’s hard to detect much evidence of strategy in the way Trump is going about it. First, he’s going after countries like Canada that aren’t the source of the US’s problem. The US runs a much bigger trade deficit with China than with Canada but has imposed the heavier tariffs on its neighbor. Worse, hefty tariffs on Canadian cars won’t actually benefit American carmakers. They’re highly integrated with Canadian firms, moving parts back and forth in cross-border supply chains. So American carmakers will pay the tariffs, making their products more expensive than imported models from elsewhere.

Trump’s tariffs also lack precision. The Koreans and the Japanese ensured that their tariffs supported the development of strategic industries while enabling imports in industries in which their countries were not competitive. Trump, in contrast, is slapping on tariffs indiscriminately. It’s hard to see what advantage the US would gain from raising prices on Colombian coffee, for instance, because the US has no capacity to build its own coffee industry.

Note the apparent incoherence of the tariffs on Canada. Trump has variously said that his tariffs are intended to protect American jobs, stop fentanyl trafficking, improve border security and make Canada the 51st state. Which of these, if any, is his actual goal is anybody’s guess. When asked how he’d describe the “psychodrama” of Trump’s on-again-off-again tariff announcements, the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, sighed and said wearily: “Thursday”.

Worst of all, Trump fiddles with the tariffs constantly, imposing then suspending them, or announcing carve-outs. His recent pivot to reciprocal tariffs goes even further, essentially outsourcing the US’s trade policy to other countries. Rather than set an economic plan and stick to it, he’s entrenched a reactive policy in which the US will play tariff whack-a-mole with trading partners.

If Trump’s idea of generalship is to tell his troops to advance, retreat, turn right then left all in a matter of hours, sooner or later they’ll give up from exhaustion. That’s already begun. Rather than respond to his tariffs by altering their production plans, businesses are starting to stand back, waiting for the fog of war to lift so they can plan better for the future. They’re postponing investment and holding off on new purchases, with the recent survey from the Institute for Supply Management revealing orders to be dropping so sharply the sector will soon be contracting. One recent business survey estimated that the manufacturing sector in the first quarter may therefore contract by as much as 3%.

This reveals another apparent flaw in Trump’s approach to this war. Like many declining empires, America is both overestimating its strength and underestimating that of its opponents. The American exceptionalism of recent years, in which its economy has grown strongly while other developed countries have stagnated, was always something of a debt-fueled illusion. American borrowing has grown at twice the pace of GDP over the last few years. If the US had lived within its means, its economy would be as moribund as its G7 peers.

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The evident limits to a debt-fueled model started becoming apparent last year, when bond investors started driving up interest rates and thereby crimping demand. Trump took office at a time when the US economy was soaring high above its peers and its stock market was sucking capital in from all over the world, but the tide had already begun to turn. The economy was weakening, and money had begun quietly leaving the US. As America turned inward, foreign investors began to return home to Europe and Asia. Since the start of the year, the US stock market has gone negative, whereas those in Europe and Asia have been rising. Not surprisingly, Friday’s jobs report revealed an employment market that is losing steam.

And where America has been profligate, its trading partners have often been prudent. This has left many of them with ample fiscal firepower to respond to Trump’s provocations. Germany, China and the EU have all announced major increases in spending to stimulate their economies. This will help soften the impact of tariffs and further encourage investors to return home and chase the higher returns on offer. Three years ago, Liz Truss’s attempt at fiscal largesse provoked major ructions in bond markets, but no such turmoil has occurred in this new era of tariffs. It seems that investors are happy to continue lending to what have been comparatively tight-fisted money-managers.

Europe’s sudden largesse also poses a potential threat to one of the key pillars of the US’s postwar global dominance: the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency. Contrary to what conventional economic theory would predict, US tariffs have been accompanied by a weakening of the dollar in favor of other currencies and gold.

The dollar has on its side the depth, liquidity and openness of America’s capital markets, as well as the dependability of its regime. No currency has ever come close to rivaling the dollar as a reserve currency. But Europe’s bond market is likely to expand substantially, just as the US has started to look less safe for foreign investors. (Trump has even hinted that the government could default on some debt.) As a result, the impossible is becoming at least conceivable.

One storyline currently doing the rounds in Trumpland is that this is all part of a plan — that Trump is deliberately engineering a downturn to squeeze excesses out of the economy before teeing up a strong rebound once his tax cuts and deregulation kick off. It would be a pugnacious approach to economic revitalization, especially since he didn’t ask for a mandate from voters to do this. But it is at least plausible, since that’s essentially what Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan once did. Still, it’s hard to square this fine-tuned strategy with the volatility of Trumpian policy-making. Besides, the tax cuts being proposed are largely baked in, being not new but an extension of the 2017 tax cuts. It’s not clear how much added stimulus they’d bring.

One can make a case that a trade war would be a just one. But Donald Trump isn’t fighting that war. In fact, other than the approval of his followers, it’s hard to tell what he’s fighting for.

Although the spectre of tariffs rather than free trade has initiated the current flap in Canadian-American relations, the ghosts of 1911 are not far away. At first, Donald Trump suggested that Canadians could avoid his planned heavy import tariffs by tightening their border security, but he quickly proposed a better alternative: Canada should become America’s 51st state.

Canadians have now turned a joke into a crisis. In December, Chrystia Freeland resigned as Finance Minister, alleging that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was spending  on vote-winning gimmicks when he need to keep his “fiscal powder” dry for a trade war with Trump. And on the resonant date of January 6, Trudeau’s own resignation followed.

The alarm over Trump’s musings has lacked historical perspective. The journalist Andrew Coyne called him “utterly insane”, writing almost tearfully about how “the basic assumption of Canadian history, that we would always have a stable, democratic ally to our south, is over”. Yet as Laurier’s fate illustrates, this is just wrong. Canadians have always worried about the American threat to the autonomy and even sovereignty of their nation. Until recently, its politicians saw the States not as a friendly big brother but an unruly giant with a scary hunger for resources. These fears provoked debates that were always and sometimes usefully introspective: about what Canada is and how it might need to change.

Some Canadians demanded “annexation” before their nation even existed. In 1849, leading merchants in Montreal, then the capital of the province of Canada, formed an Annexation Association. They argued that Britain’s North American colonies could never put on population or become prosperous until they could crack the tariff walls protecting the huge American market. And the only viable way to do that, they said, was to request political union with the United States.

After Montreal’s Parliament buildings were burnt down by rioters, British officials soothed these discontents by negotiating a trade agreement, but annexation would return in the aftermath of the American Civil War — this time as a menace rather than a promise. American statesmen threatened to annex the North American territories in compensation for British support for the defeated South. Although this did not come to fruition, the prospect of invasion lingered for decades afterwards.

Fear of the United States was therefore a vital spur to nation-building. John A. Macdonald, the Tory and Anglophile Prime Minister of the province of Canada, championed its confederation with other colonies in 1867 to strengthen them all against the States. The new Dominion of Canada bought the vast western territories of the Hudson Bay Company, and turned them into provinces. Macdonald planned a Canadian Pacific Railway to link Vancouver and Montreal, encouraging goods and people to flow from east to west rather than north to south. And although Canada still struggled to attract immigrants and bled people to the States, Macdonald won a final electoral victory in 1891 by denouncing the Liberals’ response to these problems — a US trade agreement, no less — as tantamount to treason.

Canada might have been much more populous and prosperous in 1911 than at Confederation, but Laurier’s proposals revived neuralgia about American intentions. President Taft wrote to his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt — a sentimental annexationist — that they would turn Canada into an “adjunct to the United States”. The leaking of his letter provoked outrage. Trumpish gaffes, not least the House Speaker’s remarks about wanting to see Stars and Stripes at the North Pole, reminded Canadians of their moral objections to becoming Americans. Kipling snapped that if Canada wanted to harmonise its economy with the United States, then it would also have to dramatically up its murder rate — a quip that retains its sting in the age of mass shootings.

Laurier’s defeat in 1911 made freer trade with America toxic for decades. During the Second World War, Prime Minister Mackenzie King drew Canada into an unprecedented degree of military and industrial cooperation with the United States. Yet his youthful memories of Laurier’s rout held him back from a comprehensive free trade agreement. After all, FDR once confided in him that he wouldn’t mind owning Canada. Not until 1988 did a Canadian Prime Minister sign a comprehensive Free Trade Agreement.

The differences between 1911 and now underline Canada’s current predicament. It was already evident in Laurier’s time that Canada could not count on Britain to overawe the United States. In 1903, the British even sided with the Americans in dismissing Canada’s efforts to lay claim to vital waterways in Alaska. Yet the Conservatives could still draw an emotive contrast between two futures: American annexation or security and prosperity within the British Empire. The Second World War destroyed that contrast by transferring ultimate responsibility for protecting Canada’s territorial sovereignty from the States, where it has remained. It vanished altogether by the Sixties, along with the Empire. Trudeau loyalists jokingly invoke the year 1812 — when British forces burned down the White House — but it is they who need the history lesson. Justin’s father Pierre Elliott Trudeau tried to find a third option to Americanisation or insecure isolation by drumming up trade with Europe and Japan, but his efforts did not amount to much. When Trudeau’s successor Brian Mulroney inked his Free Trade Agreement in 1988 with Ronald Reagan, he tied Canada to a continentalist strategy, which assumed an identity of outlook with the United States.

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Because annexation has always been a partisan topic, it suits many Canadians to present Trump’s threats as a damning judgment on Trudeau, which a speedy change of personnel could fix. Freeland, who aspires to replace him, has hinted as much. Her resignation letter coincided with the launch of her biography, which presents her as a steely realist who can deal as handily with Trump as with the Kremlin. Canadians to Freeland’s Right are much freer with their contempt. David Frum, a Canadian speechwriter for George Bush who has reinvented himself as a Never Trumper centrist, argues that Trudeau’s performative angst about Canada’s colonial record was a fatal declaration of weakness: Trump shares with “ultra-progressives” the “same project of Canadian annihilation”.

Yet Pierre Poilievre, whose Conservatives are set to win the looming federal election, will find it no easier to exorcise fears of annexation. John Diefenbaker in the early Sixties was the last Conservative Prime Minister to engage in rousing displays of anti-American nationalism. The Conservatives have since become the voice of Western Canada’s fossil fuel industry, whose customer is the United States. Stephen Harper, the last Conservative to hold office before Trudeau, pressed “ethical” Canadian oil on the Americans while echoing their foreign policy. His protégé Poilievre has been stumped for ideas in this crisis, beyond reminding Americans of their consumption of Canadian fossil fuels — which Trump resents as a form of subsidy — and talking of building up the military, which all parties have agreed to run down for decades.

Perhaps though the events of 1911 should though remind Canadians not to panic: about American demagogues or themselves. Laurier’s biographer Oscar Skelton cattily observed that if Kipling could sell thousands of poetry books to Americans, then a Saskatchewan farmer ought to be able to sell them “a beef”. He celebrated “humbler and more unconscious diplomats”: the scores of Canadians and Americans already quietly doing business with each other. Then and since, political rhetoric has obscured but never changed the geographic logic for the inexorable convergence of the Canadian and American economies. Even Laurier’s opponents in 1911 did not rely on fear alone as an argument. The joy of being or remaining British was that it made for dynamic but orderly social and economic progress. They made the point by speaking on platforms decorated with maps of Canada’s impressive railway network. For all Kipling’s talk of “soul”, the moral of 1911 was the need to keep strengthening state capacity and to remove internal barriers to trade. The same may be true today.

But how could such a figure — whose ultimate mediocrity has been laid bare — have risen so far? And how is it he came to define a whole decade in the nation’s history? Justin Trudeau had always been Canada’s Dauphin, “the Prince” — indeed, it is the title of a popular biography. But another title from the ancien régime better illustrates what he really was: “the Sun King”, who ruled through spectacle, artifice and celebrity, and who by these means was able to cover up the dire mounting contradictions not just of Canada’s Liberal Party, but of liberalism itself.

The once hegemonic ideology of the West was in the elder Trudeau’s words “not a programme… but an approach to politics”, and it arguably found its fullest expression in his son’s Canada. Humbled in the US and Europe after 2016, liberalism seemed, at least for a time, not just to be alive but thriving in the north. This was for the transatlantic establishment a necessary illusion: Canada as their “Hall of Mirrors”, a consolation and reassurance that their creed still had a fighting chance in a hostile world turned against them. Yet as with the Bourbons and their gilded splendour, Trudeau fell under his own spell, and Canadians paid the price. The story of his reign is thus that of the collision between appearance and substance — and myths, no matter how lofty and intoxicating, can never subdue reality.

Trudeau’s political journey began in October 2000, when he delivered the eulogy at his father’s funeral, a moving speech that caused many to see “the first manifestation of a dynasty”. After an aimless youth spent camping and cavorting, and stints as a drama teacher and ski instructor, he entered parliament in 2008. When the Liberals imploded in the 2011 election, under the academic Michael Ignatieff, the party seemed to overcorrect by finding a replacement who wouldn’t be too bothered by such things as policy ideas or governing philosophies: so, they turned to their one MP who had a pleasing face, great hair, and above all, a storied name.

As Britain and the United States were hurtling toward Brexit and Donald Trump, Trudeau’s ascent in 2015 provided the progressive counterpoint. Such was the frenzied adoration, dubbed “Trudeaumania 2.0”, that the newly elected Prime Minister could cause a global stir just by uttering breezy, feel-good phrases like “Because it’s 2015!” The Economist claimed that “Liberty moved north” while Rolling Stone asked “Why can’t he be our president?”

Yet underneath the glitz, Trudeau did at first assemble a promising team of ministers, including the woman who would be his most loyal advisor Chrystia Freeland, a Rhodes Scholar who wrote a bestselling book on inequality. Trudeau’s government sought to tackle the erosion of middle-class economic security after decades of globalisation. It would do this through an unorthodox programme of moderate stimulus spending and industrial policy, a course that could demonstrate how a renewed liberalism might respond to populist grievances about a hollowed-out economy through domestic reinvestment. At least this was an approximation of the plan in theory.

This incarnation of Trudeau — in stark contrast with what would come up later — had also been conscious of how mass low-skill immigration was affecting Canadian workers, as evidenced by a remarkable 2014 Toronto Star op-ed in which he made the case for far-reaching controls on temporary workers (a warning that he himself would ignore).

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Trudeau’s first term saw modest successes, such as the Canada Child Benefit, which sent child support payments to families and lowered the child poverty rate, and Canada’s part in the renegotiation of NAFTA, in which Freeland’s trade delegation narrowly avoided the threat of economic “ruination” promised by Trump.

But the seeds of his impending collapse in popularity were already being planted at this time by the callous inattention he paid to Canada’s youth, who more than anyone elevated him to victory. Though the PM seemed to say all the right things about the need to build affordable housing, his actual policies amounted to tacit affirmations of the Nimby-ist status quo, which favoured home-owning older Canadians, reliant on the ever-appreciating value of their real estate.

In the past, the partisans of liberalism had always been able to present themselves and their ideas as the wave of the future, as heralds of growth and abundance: yet here was the liberal tribune Trudeau doing the opposite, taking the side of the elderly over the young, of virtual stagnation over material progress. Furthermore, his government proved incapable of carrying out its own ambitious industrial policy, producing an infrastructure bank and “innovation cluster programme” whose projects no one can still identify. He also hamstrung Canada’s vast energy wealth, needed to power any future industrial revival, with excessive environmental regulations.

A series of damaging ethical scandals and ugly political reprisals led to a reduced minority government in the 2019 election (the infamous “blackface campaign”), a setback from which the Trudeau Liberals would never recover. “At least he legalised pot!” as Canadians who now regret voting for him like to say — in reference to the one pledge that they can remember him keeping.

Then, in early 2020, came Covid-19, which threw into relief the tensions between individual liberty and collective security. And though the Trudeau government’s handling of the pandemic has since become a subject of heated polemic, the fact is that the first year and a half of the lockdown era proved to be largely uneventful. In fact, Ottawa’s relatively rapid acquisition and distribution of vaccines boosted the government’s popularity enough that the PM felt bold enough to call an early election in September 2021.

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After this would come a grave challenge to his rule: the anti-mandate “Freedom Convoy” was not widely popular, when all was said and done. Canadians are, after all, an anti-revolutionary people (“peace, order, and good government” is the national motto). The convoy’s strength, however, was in playing the same elaborate game of spectacle that Trudeau excelled at and then throwing the gauntlet back at his feet. Despite shaky national support for their cause at best, convoy leaders managed to present the impression of a people’s uprising by swarming the capital so dramatically with trucks and inviting supporters to join them, gaining the attention of the wider world and focusing attention on Trudeau’s faltering early response. In any event, even some of those who disagreed with the convoy’s actions and tactics also disagreed with his invocation of the Emergencies Act to disperse the convoy, seen as heavy-handed, if not outright tyrannical. This touchy-feely image, which had been a cornerstone of his initial celebrity, and his claim to leadership of the liberal world had been greatly diminished.

The convoy was defeated but its lasting impact was in toppling the Conservative Party leadership and replacing it with Pierre Poilievre, a man diametrically opposed to everything Trudeau stands for and who now intends to roll back nearly all of his policy legacy.

The rest of Trudeau’s rule from that point on was one long, drawn-out process of unravelling which can be described as “a political slow heat death”. In his final three years, Trudeau managed to annihilate the integrity of Canada’s immigration system, which had previously been a point of pride and consensus while presiding over a housing crisis without end, and to leave his party and country in tatters, as it emerges from this crisis woefully unprepared to meet the existential challenge of the Trump Administration’s tariffs. But perhaps most tragically of all, he had betrayed the trust once reposed in him by Canada’s youth, whose very ability to hope for a brighter future has been seriously damaged.

In the end, it was his own lieutenant Freeland who decided to throw the Sun King from his throne, ending the reign of liberal illusion and setting the stage for the post-Trudeau era. It was said that Louis XIV danced in radiant golden shoes as he seized power from the nobles: Canada’s monarch, too, managed to distract the world with colourful footwear. If only we, the citizens of Canada, had been courageous enough to say to him sooner and with a stronger voice, as the Australian Prime Minister once did: “Justin, we’re not here to talk about your socks.”

My accounts of questioning this individualistic ideology, and embracing marriage and motherhood have resonated with social conservatives. Most of these, it goes without saying, feel (as I do) that family life and women’s distinctive sexed realities should be better understood and valued in the public conversation. Some, though, take more hardline positions: that women should never work, for example, that we should always be submissive — or even that women’s right to vote should be repealed.

But surely any stance which risks lending momentum to such extreme arguments cannot be in women’s interests? I explored this question recently with the Canadian Right-wing firebrand Lauren Southern, whose early video content regularly challenged liberal feminist orthodoxy, and promoted domesticity. Our stories are symmetrical in some respects: both of us embraced radical politics in our early twenties, me on the Left and Southern on the Right. Both of us embraced ideologies that felt inspiring in the free-floating world of the internet. And both of us, albeit in different ways, have course-corrected back toward reality in part via the fiercely practical experience of caring for a child.

Southern’s story might easily serve as a cautionary tale for how socially conservative talking-points can lead women into danger. For where I lost my twenties to commune life and niche sexualities, she left media at 22 to embrace a socially conservative template for women: the lifestyle often idealised by social media influencers as “tradwife”. Except it wasn’t all Fifties pinafores and cute cupcakes; it was a living hell. Nor, as she has learned, was she the only conservative woman in this position.

Comparing our experiences, though, two things emerge. Firstly, that this is not simply a matter of the Right being uniquely toxic for women — though, as Southern’s story reveals, there’s plenty of scope for toxicity. It’s rather that purist ideologies as such map at best uneasily onto the practical realities of life as a woman – and especially as a mother. And secondly, that the simplifying, polarising incentives baked into the contemporary internet are increasingly warping the ideologies of both Left and Right into such extreme forms, that any sincere effort to apply these in real life will almost inevitably be the stuff of nightmares.

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Southern was perhaps the most telegenic figure in the brash, young, and very online “alt-Right” movement which emerged in the 2010s, quickly gaining international notoriety for her views on mass immigration, Islam, racially-motivated farm murders in South Africa, and the supposed harms of liberal feminism — content that saw her accused by the radical Left-wing Southern Poverty Law Centre of racist dog-whistling, and even hovering “at the precipice of outright white nationalism”. Southern herself has always denied this but that hasn’t stopped her critics on the Left accusing her of “far-Right” agitation.

Then, abruptly, she disappeared in 2019, to embrace marriage and motherhood in her husband’s home country of Australia. She was, it seemed, all set to embrace the nurturing, feminine, domestic role promoted by Right-wing traditionalists, idealised by “tradwife” influencers, and criticised by progressives as “dangerous and stupid”. Four years later, though, Southern caused a new round of shockwaves — this time with a video recounting what happened next: the breakdown of her abusive marriage, her return to Canada as a single mother, and a stint living hand-to-mouth in a cabin in the woods.

Southern has attracted vitriolic criticism from the Right, for speaking openly about how “tradlife” went wrong for her. She, however, sees speaking out not as betrayal of her own “side”, but as continuous with her earlier willingness to challenge progressive consensus on topics such as immigration. “I’m not worried about saying the things I’m saying right now, that are getting me so attacked online. Because I’ve dealt with this, with South Africa. I’ve dealt with this with mass immigration, I’ve dealt with this with my critiques of feminism. And every single one turned out: oh, maybe she was onto something.”

For, she tells me, she’s not alone. She tells me she knows many other women still suffering in unhappy “tradlife” marriages. One of her WhatsApp groups, she says, “is like the Underground Railroad for women in the conservative movement”. Some of these are prominent media figures: “There are a lot of influencers who are not in good relationships, who are still portraying happy marriage publicly, and bashing people for not being married while being in horrendous relationships.” She hopes that in speaking out she can reassure “all of these women who are thinking in their heads: I’m uniquely terrible, and I’m uniquely making a mistake” that no: something is more generally amiss.

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What, then, is amiss? In her view, it’s not that conservatism as such is fundamentally mistaken, or that complementary sex roles are unworkable. But the online “tradlife” ideology has distilled a version of these roles that’s both rigid and wildly over-simplified, and thus woefully ill-equipped for real life — in ways that pose significant risks for women in such marriages.

How, then, did Southern get from posting videos titled “Why I Am Not A Feminist” to defending women’s sex-specific interests within family life? This is, after all, not a million miles from what used to be called “feminism”. It’s a long and bitter story, in which Southern did her best to live a purist internet ideology to the letter — only to receive a grim object lesson in its shortcomings.

Born in 1995, Southern grew up in British Columbia in a middle-class, conservative, Christian home. Southern was, she recounts, part of the first generation to grow up predominantly online. She and her sister (now a DJ and Twitch streamer) spent their adolescence in the kind of internet hinterlands where wild ideas flourish, free of grounding in material reality or practical experience.

Here, once-complex theories are swiftly distilled to their bare essentials, for maximum viral reach. As Southern puts it: “Follow the listicle, and you’ll be fine.” By the time she met her husband, she’d been condensing conservative values into “listicle” form as a media influencer for some years — to the point where it seemed possible to realise this framework in real life, too. So, when marriage beckoned, at 22, she tells me wryly: “I thought I’d won the lottery”. They were married within four months: arguably the equivalent, for the Right, of my Left-wing embrace of communes, anti-capitalist demos and niche sexual subcultures. She was quickly pregnant.

There were warning signs from early on. “If I ever disagreed with him in any capacity he’d just disappear, for days at a time. I remember there were nights where he’d call me worthless and pathetic, then get in this car and leave.” But she didn’t see them, thanks to the simplified anti-feminist ideology she’d absorbed and promoted: “I had this delusional view of relationships: that only women could be the ones that make or break them, and men can do no wrong.” So she didn’t spot the red flags, even as they grew more extreme. “He’d lock me out of the house. I remember having to knock on the neighbour’s door on rainy nights, because he’d get upset and drive off without unlocking the house. It was very strange, to go from being this public figure on stage with people clapping, to the girl crying, knocking on someone’s door with no home to get into, being abandoned with a baby.”

But as she tells it, the nightmare began in earnest when he was offered a work opportunity in his home country of Australia, a few weeks after the birth of their baby. She did not want to leave her support networks behind. But he used the political and religious importance she placed on lifelong marriage as a lever to force her to agree: “Whenever I wouldn’t do something, he would say: I’m going to divorce you.” So, feeling she had no other option, she assented.

He also insisted she should publicly quit work. His work required a high level of government security clearance; she was a Right-wing provocateur who had faced deplatforming, state investigations, and was even banned from entering the UK. In their early, giddy romance this had felt manageable. But “when we moved back to Australia, he really wanted to get back into his old work”. And Southern was a “hardcore liability”, so the pressure was on: “It was like: Lauren, you gotta hire lawyers. You’ve got to disavow everything. You’ve got to never talk publicly again.”

So, in 2019, she announced that she was leaving media and activism altogether. As Southern tells it, she was trying sincerely to put into practice the ideology she’d promoted in her videos. “I believed I had a certain role in my relationship,” she told me. “And it was to be the more submissive one that supports my husband’s dreams.”

Then, thousands of miles from friends and family, she reports becoming “the closest thing to a modern day, Western slave”. With no income of her own, she had to do everything: “The lawns, the house, the cooking, the baby care, his university homework. And I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t have any support. There was no help changing diapers, there was no help waking up in the night with the baby. I’d still have to get up, to make breakfast before work. I’d be shaking and nervous, for fear I’m gonna get yelled at.” Then he’d berate her for spending all her time on tasks other than earning money: “I was told daily that I was worthless, pathetic. Deadweight. All you do is sit around and take care of the baby and do chores.” When Covid shut down all real-world public life, her situation became “hell on earth”. It was, she said, “the only time in my life where I idealised dying.”

Instead, between the lockdown claustrophobia and her husband’s behaviour, she began to revise her initial willingness to leave public life. In part, she told me, she hoped it would win back his love. “He was so much kinder, sweeter and more pursuant of me when I was this ‘boss babe’ travelling the world working. It seemed like becoming a mother made him lose respect for me. It was shocking to me, again, because the traditional view preached the opposite — that men love you more when you stop working and become a wife and mother.” In her experience, though, this was “very much not the case”. So, a year after retiring to embrace traditionalist domestic life on the Right-wing model, she posted her comeback video, and began making sporadic media appearances.

Never mind the pop-antifeminist ideal of a breadwinning husband and homemaking wife that Southern had once promoted — the freedoms (won by early feminists) for women to work and have interests outside the home turned out to be a lifeline. Those already inclined to dislike Southern’s politics might feel a certain vindictive satisfaction at this collision of ideology with reality. But arguably, in having taken so long to see the potential downsides of her own antifeminism, Southern simply shared the same blind spots as much of the mainstream Left and Right.

It is surely true that conservative advocacy for complementary sex roles sometimes ignores questions about women’s physical vulnerability, and the scope this affords for domestic abuse. Conversely, today many self-identified liberal feminists have also forgotten that the earliest women’s movement was grounded in the sex-specific material vulnerabilities Southern experienced first-hand. The magazine pop-feminism that I internalised in Nineties Britain seemed less concerned with such gritty realities than more nebulous goods such as “empowerment”, representation, and smashing stereotypes. By the time Southern made her first viral video denouncing feminism, this was still more pronounced — and joined by the even more disembodied ideology of gender identity. When the physical vulnerability inherent in becoming a mother gets downplayed across the political spectrum, for different reasons, perhaps it’s no wonder Southern only gradually came to grasp the practical value of some first-wave feminist victories.

But even though she was no longer a “deadweight” financially, her job failed to appease her husband. “He kept demanding I contribute more financially, but then would chew me out whenever I would work.” It didn’t seem to matter what she did: “He would just give me impossible tasks all day. Tasks that I simply could not finish. It felt like he would almost send me on errands with the intent of having me fail.”

All of this was, Southern tells me, difficult to square with her religious beliefs. She would pray by his bed when he was angry with her, hoping that if she gave him grace one more time he’d realise the depth of her love and be kinder. And if this didn’t work, she was encouraged to persist by the way online life had conditioned these beliefs into “listicle” form. But as she discovered, distilling religious traditionalism into viral bullet points does not provide an adequate framework for navigating the complexities of a real-world marriage. She thought, she told me, that “as long as I put on the high heels and the lipstick when my husband comes home, as long as I cook the best meal, as long as I’m always submissive, and say yes, sir, whatever you want, things will go fantastic.” And if it’s not fantastic? The listicle version of traditionalism would just say she should make more effort.

It was, she says, “an embarrassing wake up call, finding myself consistently applying these rules and instructions I found on Twitter, and then never getting the results they were supposed to get, in the real realm of relationships”.

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It seems to me, I tell her, that condensing millennia of religious belief and real-world domestic praxis into viral memes has produced a Right-wing gender ideology every bit as over-simplified, dematerialised, and radically disconnected from the complexities of life as the disembodied Left-wing version. In turn, both Southern and other women I spoke to within her wider “underground railroad” of ex-trad women think that, perhaps like its Left-wing analogue, the extremely online nature of this gender ideology attracts a higher than usual proportion of individuals with existing psychological issues.

Ellen (not her real name), 35, is another previously married erstwhile “trad” who is now in Southern’s network. She describes how the men who self-select into these communities are often “wayward, antisocial, disagreeable and very, very misogynistic”, frequently themselves from broken homes and with limited real-world social support. And when their relationships go wrong, as they often do, the very online “trad” gender ideology has no remedy. “If there’s a problem due to the fact that he’s crazy, violent, or hateful,” Ellen says, “that’s just how it’s supposed to be. So there’s nothing really done to fix it.”

Southern is careful to emphasise that she knows many traditionalists in happy, loving, complementary marriages. But, she says, it’s a fallen world, and her community includes many women whose husbands seem to have been drawn to listicle-style gender ideology precisely because of the power it offers over women. “Those guys want someone they feel they can definitely control, who’s never going to leave them, who they can do anything to.”

In the end, it wasn’t Southern who broke the spell, but her husband. Around the time her son was toddling, two family deaths prompted her to arrange a visit home to Canada. Her husband threatened to divorce her if she went, and Southern tells me she had to sign an affidavit promising to return. Finally he relented — only to text after she landed in Canada, declaring that because she’d chosen to travel, the marriage was over.

She moved in with her parents, then into the kind of affordable accommodation available to those on the breadline, in Canada’s brutally expensive housing market: a cheap cabin surrounded by woodland and trailers. Even then she still hoped her marriage could be saved: “I still wanted to make it work. I was texting my husband and calling him, begging to get back together. But he just said ‘No. I don’t even want shared custody.’” The cabin, she said, had an ant infestation; everyone used her washing machine because it was the only one. But, she says, it was unexpectedly healing, and filled with a genuine sense of community.

Still, it was a confusing time for her. “My brain was breaking between two worlds,” she says, “because I couldn’t let go of the ideology.” I was at a similar age when I fell away from the radical Left, and the sense of disorientation she describes is familiar. But where I was free to grapple in private with my cognitive dissonance, Southern had built an international profile promoting this worldview. “I had been banned from countries over this ideology,” she says. “I had destroyed my reputation internationally for this. How am I going let go of this?”

And yet, every manosphere talking point had turned out not to match her experience. It wasn’t true that only women mess up relationships. Being submissive didn’t fix everything. Yes, women mostly initiate divorce — but as she discovered, this can happen because a man wishes to avoid incurring child support liabilities. When she described her redpill-conditioned expectations of divorce to her lawyer, the woman laughed at how mistaken she was.

More than anything, though, what shattered the listicle mindset was simply realising how much nicer life could be, when you live the life that’s in front of you rather than trying to follow rigid precepts. Despite not being “the Right-wing ideal of aristocracy and everyone going to Mass”, she realised she was infinitely happier there in that woodland, among her working-class neighbours, than she ever had been in her marriage. “Every single thing I was experiencing in my real realm, not online realm, was the complete opposite of what I was being told.”

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When she first announced her marriage, she says, she’d been lauded by friends and fans; then, when she announced the separation she was inundated with messages lamenting how her life was ruined. But in both cases the exact opposite was true: “Post-divorce, after becoming a single mother, my mental health started to improve. I started to repair all these really important friendships. And I’m living a much happier, much healthier life than I was before….Some of the most miserable people I’ve met – in fact, absolutely the most miserable people I’ve met – have been stuck in this weird, larpy trad dynamic.” The happiest people she knows, on the other hand, “are just living in reality”.

In Southern’s view, the increasingly visible gulf between Right-wing gender ideology and “living in reality” has an analogue in the memes and talking-points of the broader e-Right — a phenomenon that, once again, is mirrored on the other side of the aisle. Here, viral and overly simplistic ideas replicate with seemingly very little reference to reality, human nature, or the world as it actually is. For example, she describes the “Repeal the 19th” meme, which calls for ending women’s right to vote, as “the Right-wing version of Defund the Police”.

Southern thinks the internet’s baked-in incentives encourage this drift toward ever more caricatured viral politics. For example, she tells me that where earlier generations of “red-pill” content merely focused on exploiting women sexually, it “has become just teaching men to hate women” – simply because this is a simpler, cheaper, and more viral message and therefore easier to sell.

Someone less online than Southern might reply: yes, but surely the error was disappearing into online ideological rabbit holes in the first place, and confusing memes for life principles. This is true; but so much of social life now happens online, including for children, that Southern is far from the only individual to have reached adulthood with a set of templates for life gleaned more from memes than real-world adult guidance. Nor is this a problem for just one side of the political aisle.

Against an online world with entropic, culture-dissolving effects at this scale, then, what hope is there for any of us? A pessimist might say the future looks bleak for interpersonal relationships, indeed for our public life tout court. But I think Southern’s story offers cause for optimism. It suggests that maybe, just maybe, our current crop of internet-generated political derangements will turn out to be a temporary symptom, driven by generations who grew up without the internet and hence without much psychological defence against its many pathologies. By contrast, the first generation to grow up online is now approaching middle age. A great many besides Lauren Southern have road-tested ideologies they developed in virtual space and are finding them inadequate to the real world’s complexities.

I doubt online “gender” arguments will abate any time soon. The tussle between men and women is a culture war as old as humanity itself: men and women always need to find a way to live together, which means negotiating those ways our material interests and physical capacities align or exist in tension. With the wider world in flux, it’s hardly surprising to find ourselves here again; the challenge is finding solutions that are grounded in reality rather than abstract, purist ideologies.

But the internet’s first generation of natives may be the ones who bring us back down to earth. Even the erstwhile queen bee of the extremely online radical Right is now a convert to “living in reality”. So perhaps there’s hope that the rest of us — and our politics — will also find our way back there, in the end.

***

This article was first published on 6 May, 2024

What has happened to the peaceable and rather dull kingdom that was the “daughter nation” of Great Britain? Before its lurch into dystopia, Canada’s bland open spaces attracted a certain kind of English person, for whom bigger houses and the excellent snowboarding made up for the long winters and bad television. It made a perfect refuge for Prince Harry, who holed up in British Columbia shortly before renouncing his royal status and has chosen Vancouver to host the next Invictus Games.

The doom-laden reportage will probably not last. Most of it recycles the talking points of the Conservative Party of Canada, which has insistently argued that a tired Liberal government has “broken” the country. Once its leader Pierre Poilievre has trounced Trudeau in next year’s federal election, we will hear less about Canada’s insuperable challenges. The re-election of Donald Trump, who has already daydreamed about turning Canada into his 51st state, might even rekindle Tory patriotism. After all, their Victorian ancestors created the dominion of Canada in 1867 to keep British North America from the clutches of the United States.

A longer view shows that Canada has allured but also vexed British observers ever since its creation. The Edwardian era produced an especially rich crop of writings on Canada. In 1887, the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, the first train from Montreal pulled into Vancouver. This completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) had persuaded the Crown colony of British Columbia to join in the new federation. In expanding Canada, the CPR also made it easier for British people to see the country. Having crossed from Liverpool to Montreal on a fast liner, they could visit most of its major cities, which were found on or near the railway.

Literary celebrities did so in enviable conditions. The CPR’s bosses loaned the poet Rudyard Kipling his own carriage in 1907, so he could travel in comfort and at his own speed. His impressions, which appeared in newspapers and then as Letters to the Family (1908), make for particularly resonant reading today. Although a man of strong prejudices, he had seen the country up close, rather than merely retweeting allegations about it, and was prepared to be surprised as well as disappointed by it.

Kipling’s contemporaries travelled with heavier and very different ideological baggage than we carry today. It was not wokery that worried them, but irreligion and greed, two poisons that had crept north from America. When the clergyman Hensley Henson steamed into Vancouver, in July 1909, he was horrified to see its beaches plastered with “vulgar advertisements”. The further West he travelled, the worse things became. The Anglican clergy were “weaklings” who made no dent on a materialistic society. Winnipeg was given over to “graft”. Young people in Ontario spoke like gum-chewing Yankees. Quebeckers were despoiling their province by setting up hydroelectric dams on its waterfalls.

Kipling did not share Henson’s churchy desire to scold his Canadian hosts. He was a cheerful freethinker who considered materialism a necessary part of nation-building. Canada had “big skies, and the big chances”: he admired its railway workers and lumberjacks for their insouciant and sometimes drunken swagger. Boom towns like Winnipeg excited him: he loved to see office blocks rise and streets flare with natural gas lamps; he lost considerable sums speculating on Vancouver real estate.

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What worried him was rather Canada’s fading strategic commitment to the Empire. The modern Right understands Canada as a battleground for the values of “the West”. Kipling, who had married an American and lived for some years in Vermont, naturally believed in and did much to formulate the fervent if vague sense that English-speaking peoples share a civilisation. Yet this did not weaken his overriding concern for the political cohesion of the British Empire. Canada’s failure to join as enthusiastically in Britain’s recent war against the rebellious Dutch Boers of South Africa as he would have liked weighed on him — so much so that he kept calling the prairie the “veldt”. Kipling regarded the scepticism of Liberals and Socialists at home about whether the Empire offered value for money as a “blight”: now this “rot” seemed to be spreading like Bubonic plague, “with every steamer” to Canada.

The way to draw the dominion back to the motherland was to fill it with English settlers who shared his distaste for domestic Socialism. The dilution of English Canada worried Kipling. He allowed the Francophone Catholics of Quebec their differences — he found their basilicas romantic — but the policy of settling the prairies with hardy Slavs from the Habsburg and Russian Empires appalled him. These “beady-eyed, muddy-skinned, aproned women, with handkerchiefs on their heads and Oriental bundles in their hands” could never assimilate to English Canada. Nor did he care that many were fleeing oppression: people who renounce their country have “broken the rules of the game”.

There is something sadly contemporary about these fulminations: in Canada, as in Britain, it is once again becoming common to worry about the replacement of national cultures by an influx of unassimilable outsiders. Yet Kipling’s imperial preoccupations could limit as well as inflame his xenophobia. As he wanted British Columbia, which he regarded as a Pacific paradise, to become the Empire’s link to Asia, he condemned popular efforts to stop the immigration of the Japanese workers. Without them its fruit farms would never take off as exporters to the East. He despised a recent riot against Vancouver’s Japanese community as the work of American racists from Seattle.

The British have always projected their hopes and fears onto Canada. Edwardian Britain’s views from the train car nonetheless suggest that we should always allow Canada to be a more complex place than the thesis of the moment requires. Kipling, who doted on British Columbia as the garden of a new England, was startled but delighted to encounter hundreds of Sikh immigrants there. To hear the name Amritsar was as pleasant as a drink of “cold water in a thirsty land” to this old India hand. Sikhs were fellow subjects of King Edward. He urged (in vain) that Canadians must spare them from the violent extremes of colonial racism, or tales of their treatment would get back to their villages and weaken the Raj. We now rightly look askance at Kipling’s chauvinism, but our thinking about Canada could use some of his willingness to feel surprised as well as vindicated.

Lately, however, another set of immigration policy trendlines have begun to alter the town’s pacific character. Demonstrations consisting of more recent arrivals, also from South Asia, can now be seen in Brampton, protesting the prospect of their deportation. Though they came to Canada either with temporary worker or student visas, they believe themselves entitled to permanent residency; some of these students are even protesting their own failing grades! That their presence in the country — amounting to a mind-boggling 2.8 million temporary residents in a population of 40-odd million — continues to exert distortionary effects on wages and housing seems not to bother the rally-goers.

Meanwhile, authorities have registered a 30% rise in hate crimes, a 187% increase in auto theft, and a staggering 350% rise in home invasions in the Peel region of which Brampton is part; this has come on the heels of last year’s interethnic tensions, following the slaying of a Sikh activist. These statistics are not to suggest that all crime stems from immigrants but rather that an environment of material scarcity and institutional breakdown conduces to higher rates of crime, whether committed by immigrants or native-born individuals.

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In other words, Brampton, a microcosm for Canadian society, has begun to move away from the “bland” Bill Davis country of yesteryear, looking everyday a bit more like those politically fraught immigrant ghettoes found elsewhere; and its condition brings to mind another kind of Tory politician: Enoch Powell. Though Powell, of course, lived in another time and another country, his legacy had been to mark the passage of immigration from a point of quiet consensus into a source of intractable polarisation and social fragmentation. With more Canadians now expressing opposition to immigration, Canada faces its own “Enoch Powell moment”. And as the rest of the West reckons with the consequences of permissive migration, we must ask: how did Canada, so long a liberal multicultural oasis, begin to lose its exceptional status? To answer this, we must first understand the standards of the pre-existing immigration system, from which the current policies have so radically deviated.

Since the Sixties, Canadian immigration has operated on a principle of prudent control, both in terms of quality and quantity. In 1967, Ottawa came up with perhaps the greatest policy innovation that Canada ever produced: the points system, which could be used to measure candidates’ suitability for contributing economically and integrating socially in Canada.

At the same time, the nations of Western Europe, including Britain, were importing migrants from post-colonial peripheries to act as a “lumpenproletariat” or reserve army of labour, leading to a general erosion of social trust. Unlike in Canada where multiculturalism worked as a rhetorical gloss, European societies could not adjust so easily to their new situation, and it is in this context that Enoch Powell gave his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968, a divisive act that nonetheless served as an expression of the sense of alarm felt by many ordinary people.

Canada avoided this path — and not just because of its isolated geography. Its leaders consciously opted for a different approach, choosing to prioritise Canadians’ cohesion and security. As the demographics of post-Sixties immigration show, the points system does not discriminate on the basis of race. But it does discriminate in favour of a certain type of immigrant: English or French-speaking, skilled, educated, financially secure, upwardly mobile, entrepreneurial, and so forth, drawn from the middle classes of many nations. This is borne out by positive immigrant performance in such metrics as social mobility, savings accumulation, skills and educational achievement, and overall economic independence.

Thus, Canada is formally multicultural but functionally unicultural. The prevailing leitkultur is not ethnic or racial but rather sociological and class-based.

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It was Max Weber who made the connection between the austere theology of Calvinism and the ascendancy of the middle classes of industrialising Europe. At comparable stages of development, it is no surprise that something like Calvinism infuses the outlook of the middle classes of the developing world today, whatever their actual religion. It is an acquisitive (yet ascetic) classically bourgeois disposition that strives for success and respectability while retaining a commitment to family, community, and social order. This is what the points system draws from: it works to pre-empt Powell-esque backlashes by ensuring the quantity of immigration can be adjusted to economic conditions, while the quality is such that new arrivals reinforce the stabilising egalitarian character of society.

Until recently, parties cooperated to maintain this consensus, before a sea change unfolded around the time of Canada’s emergence from Covid-19, which had brought immigration to a standstill. The post-pandemic economy witnessed upward pressure on wages from tight labour markets and downward pressures on rental prices as well as the cratering of international student tuitions: businesses, landlords, and the higher education sector all stood to profit less. And as governments are more likely to respond to the concerns of these groups, policymakers rushed to restore a profitable climate for them. This meant one thing: jacking up the immigration intake.

Alongside immigration targets of more than 2 million new permanent residents until 2025/26 came a still more senseless move: the lifting of restraints on both the hiring of foreign workers and enrolment of international students; notably, these latter temporary streams did not have to pass through the points system to come to Canada, being let in with ever more liberality. The fact that federal Liberals under Trudeau and Ontario Tories under Doug Ford seemed to be of one mind on this only underscored how this arrangement — a betrayal of the previous, pro-middle-class system — had become the new consensus.

Even more damaging than the economic stress are the long-term social implications of having imported a new “lumpenproletariat”. Unlike the “Calvinist” middle-class immigrants of previous cohorts, these ones have often been taken en masse in from the villages and rural regions of their home countries, where lifestyles are markedly “pre-Calvinist”.

Canadian media, for predictable reasons, have been reluctant to report on just how problematic and maladaptive many in these cohorts have been, so journalistic accounts are scarce. But I have it on good authority from sources in the government, educational, and NGO sectors that many of these migrants are failing at most cultural markers of integration: from rampant cheating to disregard of basic norms to glaring lack of linguistic ability to a brazen willingness to bend public policies at every turn. If these trends continue, it won’t be long before places like Brampton acquire toxic reputations akin to the cultural powder kegs of Europe: the banlieus of Paris or the no-go zones of Malmö.

Beyond cuts to future intake across all streams, there can be only one sure way to restore balance to the system, so that it becomes bland again; and that is a sustained and far-reaching campaign of deportation of visa overstays.

But how can this be done?

It’s important first to note that the status quo in Canada is not open borders, even though the effect is similar. It is still a highly regulated and bureaucratised process that’s heavily reliant on visas, permits, and hiring forms; unlike in the US, where millions can live indefinitely as undocumented immigrants, Canada still has elements of a formidable “bureaucratic wall” and functional equivalents to “E-Verify” that could theoretically keep tab on overstayers. The Canadian government could use the vast array of data at its disposal from this system—bank accounts, employment records, bits of personal information and paper trails—to construct a comprehensive live database of temporary residents and prospective deportees, whose exit from the country can then be confirmed by exit controls.

The only thing missing, of course, is the political will to execute such a programme, for no major party seems to be really interested. Even if Canadians do go to an early election after this week’s political shake-up, it is unlikely that it will be fought over this issue. After decades of stability, Canada’s ruling class has chosen to squander its inheritance of the world’s most envied immigration policy. And as for what happens next, whether Canada ultimately goes the way of Bill Davis or Enoch Powell, we need only look to Brampton.

The saga isn’t over yet. David Johnston, a “special rapporteur” appointed by Trudeau to investigate the matter in March 2023, quit just three months later, blaming a “highly partisan atmosphere around my appointment and work”. Yet he was hardly the ideal candidate, coming across as a pal of both Trudeau and the CCP. Social media abounded with pictures of him beaming next to Chinese officials including Xi Jinping, who he’d met more than once while serving as the late Queen’s representative to Canada. Trudeau, meanwhile, described Johnston as a “family friend”.

China’s interference in Canadian politics has allegedly taken many forms. There are accusations of officials bussing in Chinese students to vote in Liberal Party nominations and whispers of covert donations, compromised staffers and the intimidation of political candidates and activists.

Before his resignation in June, Johnston issued a lengthy paper addressing the principal allegations. This included a quietly damning verdict on Han Dong: “Irregularities were observed with Mr Dong’s nomination in 2019, and there is well-grounded suspicion that the irregularities were tied to the PRC Consulate in Toronto, with whom Mr. Dong maintains relationships.” However, Johnston’s paper contained conceptual errors, downplayed certain claims and urged against a public inquiry.

For months afterwards, Trudeau appeared keen to avoid an inquiry, while his opponents pressured him to go ahead. Michael Chong, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, became a prominent voice in favour. For Chong, the issue was personal: in 2021, the CCP had launched a campaign targeting his family in Hong Kong after he had spoken out about ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang. Chong claimed that the CSIS withheld information from him about the CCP campaign, and that Trudeau also knew about it but did nothing to help. Trudeau, however, insists that he didn’t find out about it until early 2023 when it was leaked to the press. Neither version of the story is very encouraging.

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In September 2023, Trudeau finally announced the “Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions”. Its public hearings began in January 2024, accompanied by classified in camera interviews and disclosures. The focus so far has been on what was known by whom and when, and why information was or was not passed on or otherwise acted upon. Looming over Trudeau is a damning insinuation: that concerns about CCP activity dissipated in a mist of procedure because that activity benefitted the Liberals.

The inquiry has not gone smoothly. In February, two diaspora groups withdrew from the process. One, Canadian Friends of Hong Kong, which claims to have been targeted by the CCP, pulled out to protest the role that three Canadian politicians were to play in the inquiry: Han Dong, former provincial cabinet minister Michael Chan, and a controversial senator, Yuen Pau Woo. The group stated that giving these figures a chance to cross-examine witnesses and access non-public evidence presented a security threat and gave them a platform for propaganda.

It is, indeed, remarkable that Han Dong has been given a privileged role in the inquiry. This is a man accused of benefitting from the CCP “coercing” busloads of private Chinese high-school students into voting for him in 2019. (Liberal nominations do not exclude those who are not Canadian citizens and allow people as young as 14 to vote.) Chan, too, is open about his “close relationships” with Chinese diplomats. Leaked CSIS intel accuses him of meeting with Chinese intelligence and orchestrating Dong’s problematic nomination. In neither case is any criminal behaviour alleged.

This surreal situation raises an important question: whose responsibility is it to prevent foreign interference? To answer it, Canadians need to consider what should count as criminal conduct in a democracy where nearly a quarter of the population was born abroad, and many retain ties with foreign governments.

The case of Kenny Chiu illustrates the delicacy of this question. From 2019 to 2021, Chiu served as MP for Steveston-Richmond East, a swing seat where more than half of the population claim East Asian ancestry. Many were born in China and Hong Kong. In the lead up to and during the 2021 election, Chiu put forward proposals for a foreign influence registry, which if implemented might have forced groups working with the CCP to publicly declare their ties. Chiu’s bill raised hairs in Beijing. On WeChat, a social media network controlled by the Chinese government, Chiu was painted as an “anti-Chinese” fanatic who wanted to force Chinese Canadians to register as foreign agents or else face deportation. His goal, according to CCP propaganda, was to destroy Canada’s relationship with China.

When Chiu first raised concerns about this online crusade against him — alongside the then-Conservative leader Erin O’Toole — he was fobbed off by the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) body, which withheld information supporting his case. SITE determined that the propaganda wasn’t significant enough to publicise, nor the evidence it was “state-directed” clear enough. Yet an intelligence document tabled at the inquiry this year came to a different conclusion. It claimed that the timing and language of the campaign, as well as the fact that the outlets involved had partnerships with Chinese state media, “all suggest that these efforts were orchestrated or directed by the PRC”.

If this was the case, why did SITE belittle the issue? Such revelations expose the inadequacy of Canada’s pre-leak anti-interference systems, which  operated on the basis that there is an acceptable level of interference that is determined privately in government. The existence of foreign interference campaigns below this level should not be communicated to victim candidates or the opposition, let alone to the public. The decision appears to have been that WeChat should be given the benefit of the doubt and only deemed to be involved in manipulation if very high evidentiary thresholds could be met. But who could realistically expect to receive this sort of evidence? This lies solely in the hands of the China-based CCP members running WeChat, who have vowed to “keep the Party’s secrets” and who face imprisonment should they break their oath. We are not going to get hold of it.

Meanwhile, there is strong experimental evidence that WeChat’s CCP-directed censorship and manipulation systems operate for users abroad. This was ignored or treated as insignificant in Canada, which is peculiar considering that WeChat is used by roughly one million Canadian voters.

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The fate of Han Dong is no less bewildering. Sam Cooper, an investigative journalist who covers foreign interference in Canada, points to a series of meetings in 2019 between Canadian spies and Trudeau’s national security advisor. Officials have since told the inquiry that these meetings resulted in reports on Han Dong being repeatedly altered and not shared as widely or as quickly within government as they should have been. CSIS’s head was recalled to the inquiry because of a lack of clarity about the matter. Having led on its reporting and as a direct recipient of CSIS leaks, Cooper is now deep in the weeds of the scandal. He believes there may be a Watergate-scale coverup at play here.

Yet the evolution of CSIS briefings might reflect incompetence more than conspiracy. It could be that Canadian spies simply aren’t up to the task and are either making mistakes or failing to grasp the precise contours of the situation. This would fit patterns seen in other Western countries, where spooks have been struggling to follow the CCP’s influence networks. Britain’s leading spies are not alone in admitting they are playing catch-up in the fight against CCP interference and espionage.

When asked last year whether he was told about the allegations surrounding Han Dong before the 2019 election, Trudeau’s answer smacked of emotional manipulation. “There are 1.7 million Canadians who proudly trace their origin back to China,” he said. “Those Canadians should always be welcomed as full Canadians and encouraged to stand for office and […] We are extraordinarily lucky to have a member of parliament like Han Dong in our midst.” Eventually, he got to his point: “It is not up to unelected security officials to dictate who can or cannot run.”

Trudeau was careful not to make the same mistake when he faced the inquiry this April. Instead, he admitted that he had been told about Dong before the 2019 election, and that he had decided to keep Dong in place, with an eye on revisiting the matter after the election. But he never did. The Initial Report released in May of this year states that, even after interviews with Trudeau and his officials, “the specifics of any follow-up are at this point unclear, and I am not certain what steps were taken”. It is another quietly damning comment.

Throughout this mess, senior Liberals have downplayed the gravity of the CCP’s interference. As well as distracting from serious issues — raised most vociferously by Chinese Canadians — with oblique references to racism, they have been obsessive in underlining that the elections were “free and fair” overall. This seems to be an attempt to conjure up fears about a wave of Trump-style election denialism. But this is to pretend that swathes of the population have decided that CCP puppetry actually swung the election. As all Canadians who have followed this story know, that is not the point.

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A second wave of hearings are set to take place in the autumn, but the inquiry will not spell the end of the matter. Earlier this month, a 90-page report by the Canadian parliament’s National Security and Intelligence Committee (NSICOP) accused unnamed Canadian parliamentarians of “witting or semi-witting” participation in foreign interference, including attempts to influence parliamentary business and “wilful blindness” in the acceptance of funds. The report names China and India as the main perpetrators, saying of the former: “the PRC believes that its relationship with some members of Parliament rests on a quid pro quo that any member’s engagement with the PRC will result in the PRC mobilising its network in the member’s favour.” The Conservatives are calling for the names of these MPs to be published, while Canada’s public broadcaster has covered this latest phase of the scandal with reference to potential “treason”. Meanwhile, both NSICOP and the public inquiry’s commissioner continue to complain that Trudeau’s cabinet is withholding information from them — lending some credence to the suspicions of Cooper and others that the Liberal party is engaged in a coverup.

For anyone remotely versed in the CCP’s strategic framework, the idea that it should seek to lay down a bridgehead abroad is nothing new. One CCP handbook that I have been reading was printed 10 years ago. It states quite plainly the CCP’s intent to turn Chinese diasporic groups into a “new force for unifying the ancestor-land and rejuvenating China”. This is a reference to the CCP’s hopes for territorial expansion in Taiwan, the South China Sea and elsewhere, which will require compliance from Western powers. The CCP hopes that ethnic Chinese people in countries such as Canada will help secure that compliance.

Most of the diaspora want nothing to do with Xi’s dictatorship, but the CCP’s financial clout and its use of intimidation, censorship and aggressive espionage mean that Chinese Canadians need proper support from governments and civil society. This is where Canada’s Liberals have clearly failed. Wherever this scandal leads, the CCP’s goals are clear, and it is in this fight for the long haul. Multicultural democracies must be too.

Come 4 July, the Scottish Nationalists are in danger of losing badly, having become bound up with a militant current of minoritarian social liberalism which undermines the collective and civic basis of classical nationalism, as it has historically existed on the Left. Meanwhile, the national project of the Brexiteers, which lives on the Right, fell short of its own lofty expectations: its architects in the Conservative Party (set to fare even worse than the SNP) proved unable to deliver on their promise of a Britain secure from the ravages of economic and cultural globalisation. 

In short, Britons seem unable to do nationalism with any success or conviction, that is, to put it into practice beyond its merely performative aspects. So, as the election day approaches, where can the British political establishment look to form a coherent nation-based system?

There is, one place that anyone aspiring to a functional nationalism, in Britain or elsewhere, can take notes from: a forgotten corner of its former empire, where the people happen to do a decent job of maintaining themselves both as a nation and a state, even if it isn’t actually a state in the Westphalian sense. I’m talking about Quebec, a Canadian province that is also a nation unto itself, and one with its own fraught history of holding referendums. Today is Quebec’s own Fête nationale: Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day. And what better occasion to survey the trajectory of nationalism there?

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The animating fact of Quebec politics and history is that of survivance, the desire of its people to survive as a distinct society of Francophones in the midst of an overwhelmingly Anglophone continent. Though Quebec’s identity is rooted in the French language and descends from a heritage that stretches back to New France, modern Quebec nationalism was forged in the Fifties and Sixties, in a time of immense social change known as la Révolution Tranquille (The Quiet Revolution). It saw the conservative and pro-clerical regime of Maurice Duplessis replaced by the reforming government of Jean Lesage, which nationalised utilities and took over education and welfare services from the Catholic Church; these measures established the modern contemporary incarnation of l’etat québécois or the Quebec state, looked to by its people as the supreme institutional expression of the Quebecois nation.

In the Seventies, desires arose among both the political-intellectual elite and the broad populace to make that Quebec state sovereign: their leader was journalist-turned-Lesage cabinet minister René Lévesque, who executed the utilities nationalisation scheme. His Parti Québécois (PQ) would lead the push for independence from Canada with the referendum of 1980; though it was rejected by a 60-40 margin, Lévesque’s government nonetheless largely shaped the character of Quebec nationalism for decades to come: Left-wing, pro-union, secularist, feminist, environmentalist, and aligned with global anti-colonial currents. It was under Lévesque as well that Quebec passed legislation to enshrine French as its official language, cementing the Quebec state’s role as defender of the national character. 

La Révolution Tranquille, however, also spawned a divergent and opposing tradition: federalism, which may be understood formally to mean an acceptance of continued membership in the Canadian federation. But in Quebec, it also has deeper philosophical underpinnings: a kind of radical emancipatory individualist liberalism developed in the pages of the Duplessis-era dissident journal Cité Libre. Its great champion was Pierre Trudeau, who as prime minister of Canada prevailed in the 1980 referendum, but whose subsequent actions sowed the seeds of the knife-edge second referendum of 1995, when Quebec nearly seceded, had it not been for a 54,288-vote margin (1.16%) in favour of “Non”. 

For 40 years, Quebec politics was a struggle between the two poles, nationalist-sovereigntist and federalist, with “soft” or semi-nationalist compromises sometimes gaining ground. By the 2010s, however, something different was happening, a depolarisation of the old sovereignty debate and the emergence of a new alternative: firmly nationalist but agnostic or neutral on independence. Such a stance meant that the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) could attract both soft nationalists and sovereigntists, amounting to a majority of the Francophone electorate. Indeed, this was the formula that its founder and leader François Legault used to win power in the elections of 2018 and 2022.

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The CAQ has pledged to leave behind the quest for independence, treating it as a settled affair (Legault was a former PQ minister). But it has never hesitated to brandish its nationalist credentials in other ways, namely its aggressive agendas on language, culture, and migration: these can be discerned in a bevy of new regulations expanding French-language requirements for businesses, immigrants and English universities, in addition to raising the latter’s tuition costs. Legault has also routinely squared off with Justin Trudeau’s federal government, pressuring it to act more decisively in halting the flow of refugees through Quebec’s borders, as well as proposing a referendum — not on independence — but on strengthening immigration powers. 

Though what is significant from a historical point of view is what the CAQ represents: the re-emergence of Right-wing nationalism as a dominant force. Indeed, the intellectual implications of this tendency are only now being fleshed out by a new generation of thinkers, led by the likes of Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard, Legault’s 23-year-old speechwriter, who published a treatise Le Retour des Bleus (“Return of the Blues”) attempting to revive the conservative or bleu strain of Quebec nationalism; this would entail a rehabilitation of figures such as Duplessis, whose legacy remains anathema to the largely progressive sovereigntist movement.

Just as interesting is the recent resurgence of the PQ as the chief opposition to Legault’s CAQ. After having been written off as a dying Boomer-era artefact, the sovereigntist party has risen in the polls under an energetic young leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, who has threatened to hold a third referendum on independence. However, tough support for the PQ has not actually translated into support for the idea of sovereignty, suggesting that this boost in the PQ’s fortunes has more to do with voicing dissatisfaction with Legault than with Quebecers wanting to revisit the issue. 

All of which means that Quebec politics now appears to be a contest between two vigorous but antagonistic nationalisms; a fact highlighted by the decline of the federalist Quebec Liberals. Though the tension is genuine, these two variants of nationalism are nonetheless united both in their recognition of the Quebec nation as a civic-collective entity, as illustrated by their common resistance to the minoritarian social liberalism that’s taken hold in the rest of Canada; and in their shared readiness to deploy the powers of the Quebec state as a means of safeguarding that nation (leaving aside whether that state should be sovereign), as shown by the activist policies of the nationalist parties, Left and Right. As a result, for instance, Quebec’s language regime may seem absurd or even vindictive to outsiders and non-Francophones, but it starts to make a bit more sense when viewed as part of a larger historical project, that of ensuring national survivance. 

These linguistic and cultural differences aside, we can glean the operative principle for those — in Britain, America or Anglo-Canada or elsewhere — who find themselves drawn to the nationalist persuasion after years of hyper-globalisation: the nation-state only makes sense if both its constituent terms are taken seriously. 

For those on the Left, reclaiming the nation requires promoting unifying bonds and symbols of nationhood over and above the subaltern identity politics that’s become fashionable across the West, for the nation is ultimately what legitimates the state. For the Right, meanwhile, a constructive nationalism in the post-Brexit era will have to rest on restoring the state and its capacity to act in defence of the nation, most of all with respect to borders and rebuilding industry. It will involve a rejection of that odious and long descredited combination of free market-ism and flag waving that’s been the standard of the Anglo-Saxon Right for decades.

For as many a Québécois can attest, without a powerful state to act on your behalf in a hostile world, any nation, no matter how historically great, is liable to be reduced to, in David Starkey’s phrase, a “feeble little country.”

This may sound like the current general election campaign in the United Kingdom but it is, in fact, an account of another campaign in another country and in another decade: Canada’s historic 1993 federal election. The Tory government in question was that of prime minister Kim Campbell and her Progressive Conservative Party (or PCs); the centre-left opposition was the Canadian Liberal Party; and the Reform insurgency belonged to Preston Manning, who went on to achieve his ambition of displacing the PCs as Canada’s Right-wing alternative.

The government was reduced from 156 seats to two (a “mating pair”), having been devoured on all sides. It is this aspect of the 1993 campaign, the spectacle of near-total annihilation for the Tory establishment, that so entices Farage and his supporters. 

Though the analogy is not exact by any means, Farage has repeatedly invoked the Canadian model of populist transformation in his campaign’s opening phase. As he told the Sunday Times: “Why do you think I called it Reform? Because of what happened in Canada — the 1992-93 precedent in Canada, where Reform comes from the outside, because the Canadian Conservatives had become social democrats like our mob here.”

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But what exactly does following this model entail? The answer would depend on which standard of success Farage holds: if he wishes to influence political discourse by moving the Overton Window in the direction of certain ideas, such as dramatically curbing migration, then he could reprise the role he played as the leader of Ukip: as an ideological trendsetter rather than a wielder of power.

At the launch of yesterday’s Reform manifesto — or glibly labelled “contract with the people” — we saw glimpses of this. Pledging to “stop the boats” in 100 days is clearly not a political possibility, but suggesting you can will inevitably draw in voters’ attention. Similarly, Farage claimed his party would massively cut taxes for people on all incomes — a proposal which, when faced with the reality of public finances, is a fantasy. But for Farage and Reform who will never actually have their hands on the treasury pursestrings, it is an easy way to shift the conversation to the Right on taxes.

If he truly wishes to take the path to political hegemony laid out by Canadian Reform, then it will require considerably more work and perseverance on the part of Farage; and it will be far from certain whether he will be the one to reap the spoils of such a strategy, or whether he will end up like Manning, who paved the way for the populist Right only to be displaced by the younger and more astute Stephen Harper. In other words, the Canadian model has its pluses and pitfalls. 

Canada in the early Nineties was a country — not unlike Britain in the 2020s — reeling from a bout of political post-traumatic stress disorder, having just gone through a highly divisive and exhausting period of existential debate over the nature of Canadian federalism and sovereignty, and in particular, the question of Quebec’s status. Just as with the post-Brexit years in the UK, Canada’s leaders promised grand schemes of constitutional renewal only to fall short each time while practical economic issues, like spiralling debt and declining business confidence, seemed to go unaddressed. In addition, the Western Canadian provinces felt as if metropolitan elites in places like Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal held a vision of national unity that came at their expense. The fact that the country had been ruled by Brian Mulroney’s Tories since 1984 seemed to make little difference, for they had appeared to be just as out-of-touch as Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals had been: this was the Canadian equivalent of what is today called the “Uniparty”.

The perceived lack of attention to the concerns of ordinary voters, especially those in hinterland regions, opened up space for a new option in Canadian politics, one which could reset the terms of debate in favour of those who felt left behind. This was the gap that Preston Manning aimed to fill when he founded Reform in 1987, his goal being a “New Canada” grounded in the “the common sense of the common people”. Even as he worked to build grassroots networks out of scratch, he was for all intents and purposes the lone face of the party; the son of an evangelical former premier of Alberta, he brought a preacher’s zeal to his quest to rein in the size of government, decentralise the federation and, as he saw it, end the privileges of the Ontario and Quebec-centric metropolitan elite. Manning and Reform also raised stringent criticisms of bilingualism, multiculturalism and what it regarded as lax immigration policy. Though Manning aspired to a universalist populism, Reform was largely seen as the vehicle of Western Canadian alienation. 

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And on election day, the West came out heavily for Manning’s message of revolt, trading in Tory seats for Reform en masse, just as Quebec voters lodged their protest vote with the new separatist Bloc Québecois, hollowing out the precarious Tory coalition and and handing power to the Liberals. From the opposition benches, Reform would galvanise Canadian politics Rightward, outshining the Tory rump and eventually mounting a reverse takeover of the Progressive Conservatives by merging with it a decade later in 2003.

This was the foundation of the reunified Conservative Party of Stephen Harper, a Manning lieutenant, who governed as prime minister from 2006 to 2015. Under Harper’s insistence, the new party dropped the “Progressive” moniker — and with good reason, for the post-2003 Tories are ideologically and temperamentally a different party: much more hard-edged, libertarian and rooted in prairie populism. (Its current leader and likely next Canadian prime minister, Pierre Poilievre, got his start as a young Reform activist in Calgary.)

In hindsight, it is easy to recount what happened with Canadian Reform, as Farage so often does, and imagine that its victory was preordained, with the implication being that Reform UK faces a comparably straightforward path to realigning the British Right. But Farage should take note: the opposition years were no cakewalk for either Reform or the old-line Tories.

As Canada’s Liberals governed for over a decade, it proved to be a gruelling stretch for the Canadian Right, wracked as it was by dissension, demoralisation and uncertainty. The tribal differences between the two parties were real enough that it prevented meaningful cooperation for years. Furthermore, as the Liberals won one majority after another, thanks in large part to conservative infighting, they appropriated parts of Manning’s agenda on fiscal retrenchment, debt reduction, and balanced budgets — and even dramatically tightened immigration requirements — taking the wind out of Reform’s sails and blunting its immediate appeal. It was not at all clear if Canadian conservatism would make it out of the Liberal epoch alive. Now faced with his own long odds, can Farage navigate his party through a similarly treacherous time in the wilderness? 

Much will depend on how the two camps of the British Right will regroup once the present general election campaign yields its expected result on 4 July: a Labour-majority government. Owing to the very different electoral and geographic dynamics in the UK, it is unlikely for Farage’s party to come close to anything like the clean sweep that Canadian Reform obtained when it stole the bulk of Tory seats west of Ontario. Yet it is also probable that defeat under Rishi Sunak will empower and elevate a new breed of hard-Right Tory leadership candidates who can potentially match Farage in their commitment to populist concerns around migration and law-and-order issues: the likes of Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch come to mind. In such a scenario, there is no guarantee that Farage will have a monopoly on populist energies and loyalties in the years of opposition that lie ahead.

And just as Manning’s Reform opened the political space for Canada’s Liberals to move Right on fiscal policy, so too could a highly vocal Reform presence in Westminster do the same with respect to the next Labour government’s approach to migration. For all the talk of Labour’s metropolitan base as being intractably liberal and maximalist on immigration, a restrictionist strain has arguably flowed in the party’s veins for much of the last decade, going back to Ed Miliband’s 2015 promise to restore “controls on immigration” (famously plastered on a red mug) to Keir Starmer’s current pledge to outflank Sunak and cut “sky-high” net migration. Indeed, this is generally how populist revolts work, by exerting pressure rather than exercising power directly. This was, after all, how a previous incarnation of Faragist populism got the Cameron government to hold the 2016 Brexit referendum. 

So, where could it all end for Farage? By the 2000s, Manning was seen as tired and lost a leadership race, giving way to a generation of his protégés, including Harper, who went on to take the Conservatives to electoral victory. Manning was relegated to a respected but sidelined role as elder statesman. Perhaps Farage’s fate will play out in similar terms. The British Right is said to be undergoing a profound generational shift in ideas and outlook, which he helped to make happen: Farage’s contribution to history may well be in charting a course of political realignment that will ultimately be completed by someone younger, cleverer, and more disciplined than he could ever be. 

Allison, then 56, later learned that she had stage 4 peritoneal carcinomatosis, an aggressive condition. By the time she saw a specialist early last year, he warned that she might only live a few months longer: chemotherapy tended to be ineffective for her cancer, buying a bit more time at best, and she was inoperable. Instead, she was told to go home, sort out her papers, and decide if she wanted medical assistance in dying.

Unsurprisingly, Allison was devastated. “I could barely breathe — I went in there hoping to come out with a treatment plan but was just told to get my will in order.” That night was the worst of her life as she broke the shattering news to her son and daughter at her home in Victoria. “I told them I might only live for another two months,” she recalled. “If I’d not had my children, I might have accepted MAID [medical assistance in dying] — but when I saw the effect on them, having just been through the deaths of my own parents, it made me dig really deep.”

So, determined to find help, she researched her condition, spoke to doctors as far away as Taiwan, flew to California for scans and eventually travelled to Baltimore for treatment. She had discovered that patients could be given debulking surgery to reduce their cancer, followed by targeted use of heated chemotherapy — yet back in Canada, she could not get even an initial telephone chat with a surgeon who performed such operations for two months. Aided by her tight circle of friends and relatives, she raised almost half the $200,000 cost for the operation by crowdfunding. By the time she managed to see an oncologist in her home province of British Columbia, she was already on the road to recovery.

Today, Allison is in remission. She lifts weights daily, and goes running and cycling. She recently married her partner on a beach in Hawaii in front of her children. But she remains infuriated that Canadian doctors offered to kill rather than treat her. “The way it was presented was shocking,” she told me. “I was disgusted to be offered MAID twice. Once I was even on the phone, when I was on my own having just come back from Baltimore. It left me sobbing.”

As the debate over assisted dying heats up in Britain, with Keir Starmer promising a free vote on the matter if he wins the general election, and with politicians in Jersey approving plans for its use only last week, we should take notice of Allison’s case. For she does not share the ethical or religious concerns held by many opponents of euthanasia. Nor does she oppose Canada’s 2016 MAID reform; she agreed with her father five years later that it was an “appropriate” option for his intensifying pain after many years of prostate cancer.

But she has deep worries about assisted dying being offered by doctors in a health system that is floundering — especially with inadequate and overwhelmed oncology services when cancer patients comprise almost two-thirds of the soaring numbers of citizens opting for MAID. “We do not have a good standard of care here, especially for cancer — and that is why it is so dangerous to have MAID, especially when it can be used to take a bit of pressure off physicians and the government.” She knows of three other cancer patients whose families fear they died needlessly — including the person whose home she bought after downsizing to pay her medical bills in the US.

Allison’s very existence challenges those who argue that Britain — with its flailing health and social care systems, shamefully long waiting lists and historically poor cancer survival rates — should rush headlong into legalisation of assisted death. So, what would she tell those advocating for the reform? “I would tell Britain to only accept assisted dying when the health service is fixed — otherwise it is a very dangerous step to take. We deserve decent and timely care rather than offers of faster death.”

Like her, I have no qualms over the ethics of assisted dying as an atheist — but huge concerns over its realities. This is based on my reporting on the issue from the pioneering nations of Belgium and the Netherlands, with evidence of the implications for vulnerable groups, especially those already suffering medical discrimination and societal marginalisation. One study last year, for instance, revealed eight Dutch people were subjected to euthanasia simply because they felt unable to live with their learning disability or autism, along with 16 other closely related cases. Disturbingly, many included being lonely as a central cause of their unbearable suffering.

Yet until talking to Alisson, I had not considered the implications of injecting this irreversible reform into a struggling healthcare system. In British Columbia, faced with growing waiting lists and corrosive healthcare bureaucracy, there have been reports of a number of cancer patients forced to resort to MAID. Samia Saikali, for instance, a 67-year-old grandmother in Victoria, chose to end her life that way after waiting more than 10 weeks to see a specialist. “The word cruel comes to mind,” said her daughter Danielle, pointing out that, with aggressive cancer, this delay can be the difference between having a shot at life or certain death. “Cruel to be given such a terrible diagnosis and then told to just wait and sit and wait.”

Yet studies indicate that Canada’s cancer care and survival rates are better than the UK, where waiting lists rose every year over the past decade. The NHS target for starting treatment after diagnosis is 62 days, showing how complacency is built into the British health system. But even this dismal target is missed for more than one-third of patients, despite there being evidence that each month of delay reduces the survival chances by about 10%. One study earlier this year into why British survival rates have fallen behind countries such as Canada found the average wait in Scotland for chemotherapy was 65 days — and 81 days for radiotherapy in Wales.

Concerns have been highlighted by Canadian bioethics professor Jaro Kotalik, co-editor of the first full analysis of his country’s reform, who warned British MPs last year that MAID seems to be more and more “a way to compensate for lack of resources and reduce healthcare costs”. He added that palliative care “appears to be a casualty of MAID” with reduced access, leaving some patients to feel that assisted dying was their only option since “their suffering has been inadequately addressed or because they perceive that their families or social supports would carry an excessive burden”.

Kotalik maintains that there had been far too little investigation or oversight of MAID since its introduction. “There is no real governance of this national programme, which relies for the purpose of collecting information about applicants and deaths entirely on self-reporting by providers,” he said. “I’m concerned about the possibility of people choosing MAID without the full or correct diagnosis, especially in cancer when oncologists are not involved. Options for a cancer patient should not be assessed just by a general practitioner or nurse practitioner so I worry patients are not fully informed about alternative options with different treatments and more comfortable outcomes.”

Such warnings become even more pertinent in light of the surging MAID toll on Vancouver Island, a haven for wealthy retirees with its beautiful beaches, forests and mountains. Euthanasia campaigners often reject claims that reform leads to a “slippery slope”, although numbers keep rising and icriteria have been expanded in nations that led the way. In the Netherlands — which in 2002 pioneered assisted dying for patients — it accounts now for one in 20 fatalities, with 58 couples dying together last year and the rules extended to include terminally ill children.

Canada has also seen MAID cases soar each year — and once again, protections have been eroded. In 2021, the central rule that natural death had to be “reasonably foreseeable” was removed. Latest figures disclosed that 13,102 people ended their lives under the scheme in 2022, a rise of 30% over the previous year despite postponement until 2027 of the controversial expansion to people with chronic mental illness. The country is catching up fast on Holland’s rate with 4.1% of deaths aided by doctors. Its annual MAID report also revealed that more than one-third of those choosing to die felt themselves a burden on family, friends or caregivers. Inevitably, there have been significant controversies with reports of pressurised fatalities involving disabled, elderly and impoverished citizens.

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Meanwhile, the rate of MAID cases under Vancouver Island’s health authority is more than twice as high as the rest of Canada; indeed, it may well be the world’s highest since it accounts for almost one in 10 deaths. I heard various explanations for this, ranging from the struggling state of the region’s cancer services through to a history of legal, social and medical activism in support of euthanasia.

Prominent practitioners include Stefanie Green, founding president of the Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers, who has assisted more than 400 deaths. She spent two decades as a family doctor focusing on maternity and new-born care before turning to assisted dying. “I’d always been interested in the intersection between medicine and ethics,” she told me. “The more I looked into it, the more I was drawn to it. The skill set was almost identical. It required a knowledgeable person to take people through a natural event. I would be with them during a very intimate event. It would take time to build up the trust. It is intense, it is intimate, there are the family dynamics.”

When I asked if medically induced death was really “a natural event”, she insisted that “the death is imminent” before adding that she found the work deeply moving. “Patients are grateful, families are grateful, and I am facilitating their final wishes. I am certain in all the cases they are 100% eligible, both legally and medically. The work is done properly. It is not for me to decide on their situation. It is their personal autonomy.”

Green is both passionate and proud of her work: intriguingly, she faces far more protests over the single day a week she spends performing infant circumcisions from campaigners who argue it is an infringement of the child’s rights. She agrees, however, that patients such as Allison have every right to feel disappointed. “She should feel aggrieved that the Canadian health system is not working efficiently and failed her. I will also demand better resources with more doctors and nurses. The government has failed — but that is not reason to cancel the MAID programme. It needs to be delivered carefully and cautiously.” Likewise, she agrees society often fails people with disabilities. “We must act to remedy this — but this shouldn’t mean we cancel desired, needed, legal medical services.”

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Green stresses that MAID requires people to make their own request to terminate their lives. “It cannot be triggered by anyone else. It cannot be coerced — subtly or explicitly. It must be consistent with their own values; they must demonstrate capacity. It is far, far more common to see people coerced out of their request for MAID than to have someone show up who has been coerced into making this choice — which we then note and find them ineligible.”

This debate is a moral minefield, with emotive and valid arguments on both sides. There is, however, a global drift towards legalisation of assisted dying, from Ecuador to Germany. In Britain, as lawmakers across the Channel prepare to debate assisted dying, YouGov polling suggests similar legislation would be backed by 44% of voters, although 31% remain unsure — and surveys have suggested twice as many people with disabilities would be concerned by a change in the law as support it, despite claims from campaigners to the contrary.

Christopher Lyon, a social scientist at the University of York, believes Britain should be very cautious in following Canada’s lead after witnessing his father’s assisted death in a drab Victoria hospital room in the summer of 2021. He was left highly disturbed by the experience, believing his father failed to meet the correct criteria for being moved rapidly to the category of “reasonably foreseeable” death, as well as being depressed and possibly drunk when giving consent. “It was absolutely horrific,” he said. “Britain would be wrong to go down this path. You see some people making the same arguments as in Canada about personal autonomy, control and the right to make decisions to end your life. It is perhaps a choice for people in very rare cases with extreme and unmanageable suffering at the very end of life, which is not what we see in Canada. But there is no doubt the evidence points towards a slippery slope with widening access — although it is really more of a cliff face. Ultimately, I doubt any assisted death system can be made safe.”

Lyon told me he was neutral on this issue before seeing his 77-year-old father die. “It is horribly hard to see your father in distress being killed by a doctor with no attempt to help. It is almost indescribable. It came across as so cruel — but also so avoidable.”

After years rising through the ranks of the transatlantic financial elite, Carney has done little to deflect such rumours: in fact, a spate of high-profile speeches in recent weeks convey the impression that he is angling for something more than a plum retirement spent writing ponderous meditations on the future of capitalism. But if the ex-governor of the Bank of England is indeed biding his time for a shot at the top job, Carney will have to distance himself from Trudeau’s most unpalatable policies, while also positioning himself as the better alternative to Poilievre. And it appears he is doing just that, with public statements criticising Trudeau’s signature carbon tax and the recent, much-hyped federal budget, which he argued could have been delivered with more fiscal prudence.

Naturally, Carney has attacked Poilievre as well, for being a “lifelong politician” — as opposed to a Harvard-trained economist like himself — whose tax cut-heavy programme is a “Pavlovian reaction of extreme conservatism… based on a basic misunderstanding of what drives economies.” So far, his strategy for outshining both Trudeau and Poilievre involves brandishing his credentials as a technocrat who can pontificate on interest rates and business cycles in a way that his two would-be rivals never could. However, Poilievre, who has excelled with his pugilistic, anti-elitist rhetoric, will no doubt relish this contrast of images and may take notes from the likes of Jacob Rees-Moog (a Poilievre lookalike both physically and ideologically), who clashed with Carney in the lead-up to the 2016 Brexit referendum.

The battle lines for Carney in Canada would be very similar to the contest between Remain and Leave: making an explicit connection between his enemies in Britain and those in his home country, Carney reminded his audience: “Brexiters promised that they were going to create Singapore on the Thames, [they] actually delivered Argentina on the Channel… Broken Britain… sound familiar?” — a reference to Poilievre’s case that “Everything is broken” in Liberal-governed Canada.

Indeed, Carney would make for a far more intellectually compelling opponent and foil to Poilievre than the distinctly non-intellectual Trudeau, since the two represent two diametrically opposed conceptions of capitalism. On the one hand, Poilievre, like his UK counterparts Rees-Mogg and Liz Truss, believes in the primacy of unfettered markets and the individual as the surest agents of prosperity — to the near-total exclusion of the state, a view generally referred to as “neoliberalism” or what their common inspiration Margaret Thatcher dubbed “popular capitalism”, Right and Left-wing versions of which have, of course, predominated in the West since the Eighties, corresponding with a rise in inequality. On the other hand, Carney embodies a distinct form of political economy with roots in Canada’s past, in which states and corporations alike work to harness market forces toward common good outcomes, what Carney calls “mission-oriented capitalism” (something his frenemy Boris Johnson might have endorsed in his more communitarian phases). This is an approach that may in theory hew close to social democracy, but which in practice elevates a class of corporate elites to manage society’s competing interests. Neither seems particularly inspiring but Canadians may soon have to make a choice between them.

Today, the neoliberal model that Poilievre holds to has been much dissected and debated: he will try to roll back superfluous local regulations in the hope that market forces will deliver, without further need for guidance. But much less is known about the paradigm and lineage that Carney belongs to. What exactly would a Carney government look to do?

One way of answering the question is by shedding more light on Carney’s historical antecedents. For this, we may turn to Peter J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins’s theory of gentlemanly capitalism, which posited that the strategic and economic policies of the British Empire in its heyday, encompassing Canada in its founding era in the 1860s, were determined by transnational financial elites in the City of London, as opposed to the provincial manufacturers and smallholders whom the desire for colonial markets is sometimes attributed. The modern equivalent of the “gentlemanly capitalist” class would be typified by the Mark Carneys and Klaus Schwabs of the world: their outlook was shaped more by their shared material interests, straddling the empire, than by their local and national attachments.

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Canada's long restoration has begun

By Michael Cuenco

Canada’s global orientation has often been determined by the direction of capital flows. As historian Andrew Smith has shown, in his application Cain and Hopkins’s thesis to the Dominion of Canada in particular, 19th century Canadian elites were resolutely pro-British because, in the age of “Anglo-Globalization,” that’s where all the big investments came from. By the same token, 20th-century Canadian elites became pro-American because the centre of wealth and power had transferred to Wall Street and Washington. In the 21st century, then, it is no surprise to see Carney fraternising with Schwab, Christine Lagarde, Larry Fink and other such figures at places like COP26 and the World Economic Forum. Just as previous generations of Canadian rulers had to “kiss the ring”, so to speak, so must he. And it is easy in this era of populist discontent for critics to attack Carney over his golden rolodex: they may charge that the shady and corrupting influence of “globalist elites” would be inescapable under a Carney administration — whereas Poilievre has explicitly banned his future ministers from ever setting foot at the WEF.

Yet there is a reason for this lasting concord between Canada’s rulers and the lords of finance, namely that for a country so large and so sparsely populated, there is never enough capital in Canada to service its insatiable developmental needs, whether it is the construction of railroads to settle the frontier or the production of armaments to win the Second World War. Thus, the nation’s two longest-serving prime ministers, the Conservative Sir John A. Macdonald and the Liberal Mackenzie King were known (and criticised in similar terms) for their cosiness with the reigning globalist elites of their day, whether it be the mighty Barings Bank in Macdonald’s case or the Rockefellers in King’s: it is fair then to say that from imperial times to today, Canadians have never stopped “kissing the ring,” whoever may be wearing it.

If Carney truly wanted to follow in the footsteps of these great Canadian statesmen and make a difference, he would turn his golden rolodex from a political liability into a policy asset, that is, a means to solving the greatest challenge confronting Canada today: the housing crisis, ranked as among the most severe in the developed world. After all, Carney once raised an astronomical sum of $130 trillion for financing climate investments at COP26, something he could not have done were it not for his intimate connections with asset managers and institutional investors the world over: could he do something similar as PM? Solving Canada’s exorbitant housing shortage is said to cost $1 to 2 trillion, a fraction of what Carney gathered for the climate. He could then employ his technocratic expertise in blended finance and public-private partnerships to steer those investments toward a national industrial policy geared toward the mass manufacturing of housing for both the rental and ownership markets (an idea that is slowly taking shape among certain policy thinkers). This would be a titanic financial endeavour that could generate hefty returns for investors in the decades ahead, since the only thing that matches the astronomical costs of Canada’s housing crunch is the astronomical demand underlying it.

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Lauren Southern: how my tradlife turned toxic

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For there are millions of young middle-class Canadians, including even the children of affluent families now priced out of emulating their parents’ standard of living, who are willing to spend their hard-earned dollars on the dream of owning a home, but are practically prevented from doing so by the draconian Nimby-ism of local governments across Canada. There is, in other words, a vast underserved market potential which a coalition of large investors could profit from: Canadian household debt is estimated to be at a staggering $3 trillion. It is precisely the kind of problem that calls for the large-scale coordination that only “mission-oriented capitalism” can mobilise.

Whatever the case, there is a strong chance that future politician and Liberal leader Carney will act in ways that confirm every accusation of elitism and arrogance that his Conservative opponents have levelled since his return to Canada. (One can hardly read his book Values without getting a sense that he just knows so much more on so many topics than you and all your friends.) But all the ambition and lust for power in the world would probably be worth it if he could deliver on the one, all-consuming issue that threatens Canada’s social peace and economic prosperity.

Of course, there is also the possibility that Carney, whether he ever wins an election or not, would just end up like Trudeau, who said all the right things at the start only to fall short miserably — in which case, Carney and Canada’s Liberals should prepare themselves for a lifetime of panic and pearl-clutching. For they will have handed power to Poilievre’s Conservatives indefinitely, before being exiled into a state of perdition that another Canadian expatriate-turned-Liberal messiah, Michael Ignatieff, once aptly referred to as Fire and Ashes. If Carney isn’t careful, that could be the title of his next book as well.

My accounts of questioning this individualistic ideology, and embracing marriage and motherhood have resonated with social conservatives. Most of these, it goes without saying, feel (as I do) that family life and women’s distinctive sexed realities should be better understood and valued in the public conversation. Some, though, take more hardline positions: that women should never work, for example, that we should always be submissive – or even that women’s right to vote should be repealed.

But surely any stance which risks lending momentum to such extreme arguments cannot be in women’s interests? I explored this question recently with the Canadian Right-wing firebrand Lauren Southern, whose early video content regularly challenged liberal feminist orthodoxy, and promoted domesticity. Our stories are symmetrical in some respects: both of us embraced radical politics in our early twenties, me on the Left and Southern on the Right. Both of us embraced ideologies that felt inspiring in the free-floating world of the internet. And both of us, albeit in different ways, have course-corrected back toward reality in part via the fiercely practical experience of caring for a child.

Southern’s story might easily serve as a cautionary tale for how socially conservative talking-points can lead women into danger. For where I lost my twenties to commune life and niche sexualities, she left media at 22 to embrace a socially conservative template for women: the lifestyle often idealised by social media influencers as “tradwife”. Except it wasn’t all Fifties pinafores and cute cupcakes; it was a living hell. Nor, as she has learned, was she the only conservative woman in this position.

Comparing our experiences, though, two things emerge. Firstly, that this is not simply a matter of the Right being uniquely toxic for women — though, as Southern’s story reveals, there’s plenty of scope for toxicity. It’s rather that purist ideologies as such map at best uneasily onto the practical realities of life as a woman – and especially as a mother. And secondly, that the simplifying, polarising incentives baked into the contemporary internet are increasingly warping the ideologies of both Left and Right into such extreme forms, that any sincere effort to apply these in real life will almost inevitably be the stuff of nightmares.

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Why tradwives aren't trad enough

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Southern was perhaps the most telegenic figure in the brash, young, and very online “alt-Right” movement which emerged in the 2010s, quickly gaining international notoriety for her views on mass immigration, Islam, racially-motivated farm murders in South Africa, and the supposed harms of liberal feminism — content that saw her accused by the radical Left-wing Southern Poverty Law Centre of racist dog-whistling, and even hovering “at the precipice of outright white nationalism”. Southern herself has always denied this but that hasn’t stopped her critics on the Left accusing her of “far Right” agitation.

Then, abruptly, she disappeared in 2019, to embrace marriage and motherhood in her husband’s home country of Australia. She was, it seemed, all set to embrace the nurturing, feminine, domestic role promoted by Right-wing traditionalists, idealised by “tradwife” influencers, and criticised by progressives as “dangerous and stupid”. Four years later, though, Southern caused a new round of shockwaves — this time with a video recounting what happened next: the breakdown of her abusive marriage, her return to Canada as a single mother, and a stint living hand-to-mouth in a cabin in the woods.

Southern has attracted vitriolic criticism from the Right, for speaking openly about how “tradlife” went wrong for her. She, however, sees speaking out not as betrayal of her own “side”, but as continuous with her earlier willingness to challenge progressive consensus on topics such as immigration. “I’m not worried about saying the things I’m saying right now, that are getting me so attacked online. Because I’ve dealt with this, with South Africa. I’ve dealt with this with mass immigration, I’ve dealt with this with my critiques of feminism. And every single one turned out: oh, maybe she was onto something.”

For, she tells me, she’s not alone. She tells me she knows many other women still suffering in unhappy “tradlife” marriages. One of her WhatsApp groups, she says, “is like the Underground Railroad for women in the conservative movement”. Some of these are prominent media figures: “There are a lot of influencers who are not in good relationships, who are still portraying happy marriage publicly, and bashing people for not being married while being in horrendous relationships.” She hopes that in speaking out she can reassure “all of these women who are thinking in their heads: I’m uniquely terrible, and I’m uniquely making a mistake” that no: something is more generally amiss.

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What, then, is amiss? In her view, it’s not that conservatism as such is fundamentally mistaken, or that complementary sex roles are unworkable. But the online “tradlife” ideology has distilled a version of these roles that’s both rigid and wildly over-simplified, and thus woefully ill-equipped for real life – in ways that pose significant risks for women in such marriages.

How, then, did Southern get from posting videos titled “Why I Am Not A Feminist” to defending women’s sex-specific interests within family life? This is, after all, not a million miles from what used to be called “feminism”. It’s a long and bitter story, in which Southern did her best to live a purist internet ideology to the letter – only to receive a grim object lesson in its shortcomings.

Born in 1995, Southern grew up in British Columbia in a middle-class, conservative, Christian home. Southern was, she recounts, part of the first generation to grow up predominantly online. She and her sister (now a DJ and Twitch streamer) spent their adolescence in the kind of internet hinterlands where wild ideas flourish, free of grounding in material reality or practical experience.

Here, once-complex theories are swiftly distilled to their bare essentials, for maximum viral reach. As Southern puts it: “Follow the listicle, and you’ll be fine.” By the time she met her husband, she’d been condensing conservative values into “listicle” form as a media influencer for some years – to the point where it seemed possible to realise this framework in real life, too. So, when marriage beckoned, at 22, she tells me wryly: “I thought I’d won the lottery”. They were married within four months: arguably the equivalent, for the Right, of my Left-wing embrace of communes, anti-capitalist demos and niche sexual subcultures. She was quickly pregnant.

There were warning signs from early on. “If I ever disagreed with him in any capacity he’d just disappear, for days at a time. I remember there were nights where he’d call me worthless and pathetic, then get in this car and leave.” But she didn’t see them, thanks to the simplified anti-feminist ideology she’d absorbed and promoted: “I had this delusional view of relationships: that only women could be the ones that make or break them, and men can do no wrong.” So she didn’t spot the red flags, even as they grew more extreme. “He’d lock me out of the house. I remember having to knock on the neighbour’s door on rainy nights, because he’d get upset and drive off without unlocking the house. It was very strange, to go from being this public figure on stage with people clapping, to the girl crying, knocking on someone’s door with no home to get into, being abandoned with a baby.”

But as she tells it, the nightmare began in earnest when he was offered a work opportunity in his home country of Australia, a few weeks after the birth of their baby. She did not want to leave her support networks behind. But he used the political and religious importance she placed on lifelong marriage as a lever to force her to agree: “Whenever I wouldn’t do something, he would say: I’m going to divorce you.” So, feeling she had no other option, she assented.

He also insisted she should publicly quit work. His work required a high level of government security clearance; she was a Right-wing provocateur who had faced deplatforming, state investigations, and was even banned from entering the UK. In their early, giddy romance this had felt manageable. But “when we moved back to Australia, he really wanted to get back into his old work”. And Southern was a “hardcore liability”, so the pressure was on: “It was like: Lauren, you gotta hire lawyers. You’ve got to disavow everything. You’ve got to never talk publicly again.”

So, in 2019, she announced that she was leaving media and activism altogether. As Southern tells it, she was trying sincerely to put into practice the ideology she’d promoted in her videos. “I believed I had a certain role in my relationship,” she told me. “And it was to be the more submissive one that supports my husband’s dreams.”

Then, thousands of miles from friends and family, she reports becoming “the closest thing to a modern day, Western slave”.  With no income of her own, she had to do everything: “The lawns, the house, the cooking, the baby care, his university homework. And I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t have any support. There was no help changing diapers, there was no help waking up in the night with the baby. I’d still have to get up, to make breakfast before work. I’d be shaking and nervous, for fear I’m gonna get yelled at.” Then he’d berate her for spending all her time on tasks other than earning money: “I was told daily that I was worthless, pathetic. Deadweight. All you do is sit around and take care of the baby and do chores.” When Covid shut down all real-world public life, her situation became “hell on earth”. It was, she said, “the only time in my life where I idealised dying.”

Instead, between the lockdown claustrophobia and her husband’s behaviour, she began to revise her initial willingness to leave public life. In part, she told me, she hoped it would win back his love. “He was so much kinder, sweeter and more pursuant of me when I was this ‘boss babe’ travelling the world working. It seemed like becoming a mother made him lose respect for me. It was shocking to me, again, because the traditional view preached the opposite — that men love you more when you stop working and become a wife and mother.” In her experience, though, this was “very much not the case”. So, a year after retiring to embrace traditionalist domestic life on the Right-wing model, she posted her comeback video, and began making sporadic media appearances.

Never mind the pop-antifeminist ideal of a breadwinning husband and homemaking wife that Southern had once promoted — the freedoms (won by early feminists) for women to work and have interests outside the home turned out to be a lifeline. Those already inclined to dislike Southern’s politics might feel a certain vindictive satisfaction at this collision of ideology with reality. But arguably, in having taken so long to see the potential downsides of her own antifeminism, Southern simply shared the same blind spots as much of the mainstream Left and Right.

It is surely true that conservative advocacy for complementary sex roles sometimes ignores questions about women’s physical vulnerability, and the scope this affords for domestic abuse. Conversely, today many self-identified liberal feminists have also forgotten that the earliest women’s movement was grounded in the sex-specific material vulnerabilities Southern experienced first-hand. The magazine pop-feminism that I internalised in Nineties Britain seemed less concerned with such gritty realities than more nebulous goods such as “empowerment”, representation, and smashing stereotypes. By the time Southern made her first viral video denouncing feminism, this was still more pronounced — and joined by the even more disembodied ideology of gender identity. When the physical vulnerability inherent in becoming a mother gets downplayed across the political spectrum, for different reasons, perhaps it’s no wonder Southern only gradually came to grasp the practical value of some first-wave feminist victories.

But even though she was no longer a “deadweight” financially, her job failed to appease her husband. “He kept demanding I contribute more financially, but then would chew me out whenever I would work.” It didn’t seem to matter what she did: “He would just give me impossible tasks all day. Tasks that I simply could not finish. It felt like he would almost send me on errands with the intent of having me fail.”

All of this was, Southern tells me, difficult to square with her religious beliefs. She would pray by his bed when he was angry with her, hoping that if she gave him grace one more time he’d realise the depth of her love and be kinder. And if this didn’t work, she was encouraged to persist by the way online life had conditioned these beliefs into “listicle” form. But as she discovered, distilling religious traditionalism into viral bullet points does not provide an adequate framework for navigating the complexities of a real-world marriage. She thought, she told me, that “as long as I put on the high heels and the lipstick when my husband comes home, as long as I cook the best meal, as long as I’m always submissive, and say yes, sir, whatever you want, things will go fantastic.” And if it’s not fantastic? The listicle version of traditionalism would just say she should make more effort.

It was, she says, “an embarrassing wake up call, finding myself consistently applying these rules and instructions I found on Twitter, and then never getting the results they were supposed to get, in the real realm of relationships”.

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It seems to me, I tell her, that condensing millennia of religious belief and real-world domestic praxis into viral memes has produced a Right-wing gender ideology every bit as over-simplified, dematerialised, and radically disconnected from the complexities of life as the disembodied Left-wing version. In turn, both Southern and other women I spoke to within her wider “underground railroad” of ex-trad women think that, perhaps like its Left-wing analogue, the extremely online nature of this gender ideology attracts a higher than usual proportion of individuals with existing psychological issues.

Ellen (not her real name), 35, is another previously married erstwhile “trad” who is now in Southern’s network. She describes how the men who self-select into these communities are often “wayward, antisocial, disagreeable and very, very misogynistic”, frequently themselves from broken homes and with limited real-world social support. And when their relationships go wrong, as they often do, the very online “trad” gender ideology has no remedy. “If there’s a problem due to the fact that he’s crazy, violent, or hateful,” Ellen says, “that’s just how it’s supposed to be. So there’s nothing really done to fix it.”

Southern is careful to emphasise that she knows many traditionalists in happy, loving, complementary marriages. But, she says, it’s a fallen world, and her community includes many women whose husbands seem to have been drawn to listicle-style gender ideology precisely because of the power it offers over women. “Those guys want someone they feel they can definitely control, who’s never going to leave them, who they can do anything to.”

In the end, it wasn’t Southern who broke the spell, but her husband. Around the time her son was toddling, two family deaths prompted her to arrange a visit home to Canada. Her husband threatened to divorce her if she went, and Southern tells me she had to sign an affidavit promising to return. Finally he relented — only to text after she landed in Canada, declaring that because she’d chosen to travel, the marriage was over.

She moved in with her parents, then into the kind of affordable accommodation available to those on the breadline, in Canada’s brutally expensive housing market: a cheap cabin surrounded by woodland and trailers. Even then she still hoped her marriage could be saved: “I still wanted to make it work. I was texting my husband and calling him, begging to get back together. But he just said ‘No. I don’t even want shared custody.’” The cabin, she said, had an ant infestation; everyone used her washing machine because it was the only one. But, she says, it was unexpectedly healing, and filled with a genuine sense of community.

Still, it was a confusing time for her. “My brain was breaking between two worlds,” she says, “because I couldn’t let go of the ideology.” I was at a similar age when I fell away from the radical Left, and the sense of disorientation she describes is familiar. But where I was free to grapple in private with my cognitive dissonance, Southern had built an international profile promoting this worldview. “I had been banned from countries over this ideology,” she says. “I had destroyed my reputation internationally for this. How am I going let go of this?”

And yet, every manosphere talking point had turned out not to match her experience. It wasn’t true that only women mess up relationships. Being submissive didn’t fix everything. Yes, women mostly initiate divorce — but as she discovered, this can happen because a man wishes to avoid incurring child support liabilities. When she described her redpill-conditioned expectations of divorce to her lawyer, the woman laughed at how mistaken she was.

More than anything, though, what shattered the listicle mindset was simply realising how much nicer life could be, when you live the life that’s in front of you rather than trying to follow rigid precepts. Despite not being “the Right-wing ideal of aristocracy and everyone going to Mass”, she realised she was infinitely happier there in that woodland, among her working-class neighbours, than she ever had been in her marriage. “Every single thing I was experiencing in my real realm, not online realm, was the complete opposite of what I was being told.”

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When she first announced her marriage, she says, she’d been lauded by friends and fans; then, when she announced the separation she was inundated with messages lamenting how her life was ruined. But in both cases the exact opposite was true: “Post-divorce, after becoming a single mother, my mental health started to improve. I started to repair all these really important friendships. And I’m living a much happier, much healthier life than I was before….Some of the most miserable people I’ve met – in fact, absolutely the most miserable people I’ve met – have been stuck in this weird, larpy trad dynamic.” The happiest people she knows, on the other hand, “are just living in reality”.

In Southern’s view, the increasingly visible gulf between Right-wing gender ideology and “living in reality” has an analogue in the memes and talking-points of the broader e-Right — a phenomenon that, once again, is mirrored on the other side of the aisle. Here, viral and overly simplistic ideas replicate with seemingly very little reference to reality, human nature, or the world as it actually is. For example, she describes the “Repeal the 19th” meme, which calls for ending women’s right to vote, as “the Right-wing version of Defund the Police”.

Southern thinks the internet’s baked-in incentives encourage this drift toward ever more caricatured viral politics. For example, she tells me that where earlier generations of “red-pill” content merely focused on exploiting women sexually, it “has become just teaching men to hate women” – simply because this is a simpler, cheaper, and more viral message and therefore easier to sell.

Someone less online than Southern might reply: yes, but surely the error was disappearing into online ideological rabbit holes in the first place, and confusing memes for life principles. This is true; but so much of social life now happens online, including for children, that Southern is far from the only individual to have reached adulthood with a set of templates for life gleaned more from memes than real-world adult guidance. Nor is this a problem for just one side of the political aisle.

Against an online world with entropic, culture-dissolving effects at this scale, then, what hope is there for any of us? A pessimist might say the future looks bleak for interpersonal relationships, indeed for our public life tout court. But I think Southern’s story offers cause for optimism. It suggests that maybe, just maybe, our current crop of internet-generated political derangements will turn out to be a temporary symptom, driven by generations who grew up without the internet and hence without much psychological defence against its many pathologies. By contrast, the first generation to grow up online is now approaching middle age. A great many besides Lauren Southern have road-tested ideologies they developed in virtual space and are finding them inadequate to the real world’s complexities.

I doubt online “gender” arguments will abate any time soon. The tussle between men and women is a culture war as old as humanity itself: men and women always need to find a way to live together, which means negotiating those ways our material interests and physical capacities align or exist in tension. With the wider world in flux, it’s hardly surprising to find ourselves here again; the challenge is finding solutions that are grounded in reality rather than abstract, purist ideologies.

But the internet’s first generation of natives may be the ones who bring us back down to earth. Even the erstwhile queen bee of the extremely online radical Right is now a convert to “living in reality”. So perhaps there’s hope that the rest of us — and our politics — will also find our way back there, in the end.

When faced with this bleak picture, the natural response is to curse our dear leader. But while I’ve written my share of polemics against the prime minister, the fact is that a change in government probably won’t alter much beyond aesthetics, because our problems just run so much deeper. Indulging in “Trudeau Derangement Syndrome”, while most understandable after eight years, will only set one up for disappointment when our Daniel Hannan-approved Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre wins his majority. Like Javier Milei of Argentina, this ardent neo-Thatcherite will try to make neoliberalism cool again. He will be given a chance to change things, and he will fail, for none of his approaches to any of the major issues, most of all on housing and immigration, are fundamentally new or different.

If it is true that a nation deserves the leadership it gets, then this slim selection suggests there is something rotten in the state of Canada. Indeed, at odds with the Mounties’ fears of a revolt is the fact that Canadians — especially the youth — have remained just as self-effacingly polite and docile as ever, even as they are deprived of their futures.

Things clearly can’t go on this way, but where do we go from here? The American answer to moments of uncertainty has always been to “return to the founders”; to ask what Washington or Jefferson would have done. It’s a quirky but ultimately sound reflex that ensures a minimum of civilisational memory, even among those who would contest the founders’ legacy. Sadly, this attitude has no equivalent in Canada. Even before the erasure of our first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, in the name of “decolonisation”, Canadians (at least the English-speaking majority) have mostly been ignorant about what came before, who they are, and what their country is for. This goes for both the historical-nihilist Left and the market-fundamentalist Right, who tend to replicate the errors and contradictions of US fusionist conservatism.

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There is, in other words, little to no historical consciousness among Canada’s elites, who are generally contemptuous of their heritage. In light of such hostility, I will make the case that an aggressive recovery of Canada’s historical mission, stemming from “the Tory conception of the state”, is the only way for the governing class to overcome the country’s most urgent challenges.

To this end, we must ask: what is Canada — what sets it apart? The most compelling answer is that of the historian Donald Creighton, who theorised that Canada emerged from an opposition between the river and the seaboard, that is, the St. Lawrence River system that defined Canada’s early development, and the Atlantic seaboard on which the Thirteen Colonies were settled. Creighton argues that the St. Lawrence and the lands around it formed a natural unity. Here, a series of factors — including the relative paucity of agriculture, isolation from the coast, and the primacy of the fur trade — gave rise to a distinct form of developmental capitalism, which later matured into a “doctrine of material expansion through political unity” entailing “unification and centralisation of control”. By contrast, the Atlantic seaboard had abundant arable lands and easy access to maritime trade, which encouraged a republican ethos bound to the ideals of the independent yeoman-farmer.

For these reasons, there emerged a more deferential political order in the north that may be described as “Tory”, though it is different from Toryism in England, whose feudal past Anglo-Canada lacks. As philosopher George Grant explained, both halves of North America were dominated by dynamic Protestant liberalisms premised on the “technological mastery of human and non-human nature”. Canada, therefore, is no less a product of liberal modernity than America, but where the latter’s agrarian clime birthed a republican state, the former’s harsh geography created what we might call a company-state, with its emphasis on corporate order and commercial progress over popular liberty and civic virtue as a better means of achieving the conquest of nature. Canada was, after all, built on the imperial ambitions and avarice of its great companies, whether it be the mercantile firms of the Château Clique, the Grand Trunk and Canadian Pacific Railroads or the Hudson’s Bay Company.

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The whole point of founding the Canadian state in 1867 was to furnish a “credit instrument that would provide the resources necessary for the economic development of the British North American colonies”. Backed by capital in the metropole, this was the practical, overriding mission of Macdonald and the “Laurentian elite”. The deference (or docility) often associated with Canadians is not, therefore, that of the vassal to his lord but that of the worker to his manager, and that of the manager to the corporate board. For this is exactly the sensibility needed to run a company-state, one that follows orders and doesn’t ask too many questions.

At its best, this tradition, a kind of Canadian Hamiltonianism that wields the powers of state and market harmoniously to forge new economies of scale, is capable of vast creative potential, having built a country with railroads, factories, farms and mines spanning a continent. At its worst, it has led to colossal bouts of dysfunction, as is the case today. In any event, progressives in Trudeau’s camp recoil at this legacy because of its colonial origins, while conservatives in Poilievre’s camp ignore it (even as they pay devoted lip service to Macdonald) because it contradicts their rabidly anti-statist, free-market ideology. As a result, this school is dormant.

But can it be revitalised? Certainly not by the Boomers and Gen Xs, for they are the ones who despoiled Canada and led it into this abyss. But perhaps it could inspire ambitious Millennials and Gen Zs who are doomed to inherit this disintegrating society.

I’m thinking here of young elites in their twenties and thirties who occupy junior or mid-level posts across government, finance, tech, NGOs, and other prestige sectors. Though their credentials qualify them as “elites”, they are nonetheless subject to the same trends of material precarity, social immobility, and financial pauperisation as the rest of their cohort. This means that even as they rake in decent salaries and impressive job titles, they are unable to buy homes and meet the same comfortable measures of security that their parents had. This is the classic “pre-revolutionary” situation of frustrated young elites who lose their stake in the status quo. But the question is: do they have the potential to seize control and remake the country?

I should have some idea, as I went to graduate school with them in Toronto, and though I have since moved back to my home in the Alberta hinterlands, I am familiar with their ways. And the short answer is no, they do not have the makings of revolutionary subjects — at least not yet.

As it is, they are the embodiments of homo neoliberalensis, forever bound up with the proverbial “rat race” and prone to mistaking real life for LinkedIn. If they have any brilliance, it is not that of the visionary but of the ultra-efficient functionary, for there is little of the imaginative, the poetic or the statesmanlike in them. Like the bureaucrats in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, they know how to dress well and strut about with the appearance of purpose down the halls of power, without having any idea as to what power is or to what ends it should be applied. And like that film’s protagonist Sam Lowry, in their nervous hearts, they have “nothing, not even dreams”, only a wish for survival amid what literary critic Northrop Frye called Canada’s “garrison mentality”: “a dominating herd-mind in which nothing original can grow.”

However, in the years ahead, these rulers-in-waiting will possess greater control of the nation’s financial, political and cultural power. What is needed is a vision to rouse them from their timid state and spur them into heroic action, in spite of themselves. Already, a few of the most forward-thinking policy intellectuals in this class have stumbled on a new synthesis: to solve the housing crisis with a national industrial policy. This idea remains in its most rudimentary stages, but it is the first hint of what a new incarnation of the company-state could look like. It will have to be something on par with Macdonald’s project: what railroads had been to his century, housing can be to ours, the stimulative engine of a grand nation-building enterprise, through which novel modes of technological production and innovation can be unlocked. This is the object to which they must now devote their lives, for which they must learn how to wield the company-state’s awesome capabilities.

The young Laurentians will have to secure new sources of capital from abroad, and devise the requisite instruments of developmental finance with which to steer it toward productive and profitable investments in the real economy, particularly in manufacturing, prefab and modular construction, nuclear and hydrogen energy, transportation and public infrastructure. The goal must be to mass manufacture “ready-made neighbourhoods”. (Needless to say, an expansion of housing supply will also have to be accompanied by a contraction of demand, i.e. a reduction of immigration intake.) Yet this plan cannot take shape under Poilievre, whose heavily libertarian and anti-corporate style of populism is antithetical to the company-state: it will have to wait for the government after him.

The first Laurentian epic of 1867 conquered impossible distances to create an industrialised dominion from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The second, culminating in 1967, humanised that industrial economy and created a mass middle class. The third “neo-Laurentian” epic will have to do both: to reindustrialise Canada and restore a middle-class society. Looking forward to the Canada of 2067, we may hope for its success — or we can start to work for it.