I confess that I have a hard time feeling emotionally invested in the Canadian news cycle (especially English-language) that largely revolves around Justin Trudeau’s leadership crisis since the Liberal defeat in Toronto-St. Paul’s. Given my work, this disaffection deserves to be questioned.
It’s not that I don’t care about federal politics, quite the contrary. It’s rather that there is this habitual, even cultural, way of compartmentalizing the internal and the international in political analysis that triggers in me a visceral reaction that is increasingly close to claustrophobia.
To describe this deeply insular side of Canadian politics, we often talk about the Ottawa “bubble.” This bubble increasingly feels like a bunker to me. I don’t know how we can watch the Americans select for us the most powerful politician in the world between a criminal liar and a man who struggles to form complete sentences—and then talk about Canadian politics as if we were living in another, completely hermetic galaxy. I don’t know how we can watch the far right not only take France by storm, but gain momentum throughout Europe—and then comment on our partisan theater as if the G7 democracies were not under unprecedented strain. I think that from an ethical point of view, it is becoming increasingly irresponsible, even inexcusable, to wallow in this “bubble.”
If the words are harsh, it is because the situation is serious. 2024 is a historic election year: more than half of the world’s population lives in countries where people will have gone to the polls before the end of December. The crisis of traditional media and the rise of social media and artificial intelligence are influencing our relationship with the truth and the ability of democracies to survive in a space of rationality. During this election year, the consequences of these transformations are taking shape before our eyes. And we would like to talk about the unpopularity of Justin Trudeau and the rise of Pierre Poilievre while ignoring the rest of the planet?
On Tuesday, colleague Jean-François Nadeau was in great shape. He gave us a fine example of the caliber of analysis we need to make sense of our world in 2024: talking about ideas and not just the latest “developments,” and drawing the necessary links between the past and the present, the here and the elsewhere. In short, we burst the “bubble.”
Nadeau wrote in particular that Poilievre “takes advantage in part of a deleterious global context to allow himself to multiply rants worthy, at times, of alley cats.” We presume that we are talking here about the climate in parliament in general, and the tone – let’s call it right – absolutely disgusting during question period. The openly displayed contempt for journalists and the growing refusal to address traditional media announce a deep crack in the health of Canadian public debate.
But there is more. Tuesday, in the Toronto StarBruce Arthur highlighted Pierre Poilievre’s growing personal attacks on citizens whose expertise contradicts conservative proposals. If doctors, civil servants, university professors can become the target of insults bordering on harassment from the likely future Prime Minister of Canada, the cost of expression and therefore of free citizen participation has just increased radically.
Of course, these are processes that are already undermining American democracy, French public debate, and many other nations. That is why the Ottawa bubble seems so dangerous to me. By turning off the part of our consciousness that is interested in the world for the time it takes to talk about Canadian politics, we guarantee ourselves to repeat American, French, and other mistakes, a few years, or even months later. We are setting ourselves up to become—or remain?—a poor branch of the declining bloc of liberal democracies.
To make sense of what is happening to us, it is imperative to raise the average level of analysis, on all platforms. We can no longer afford to talk about politics with the detachment and good-natured laughter that would be appropriate if the parties were hockey teams whose playoff prospects were being sought. Not when you’re mired in lies, attacks on human rights and freedoms, or defending a war that is killing, maiming and starving children at a record rate.
We need to make much more room for in-depth analysis, and much less for today’s anecdote and our predictions about tomorrow’s anecdote—in print, on the radio, on television, on the Web. The media themselves are undergoing transformations that do not make the task easy. But let’s still name one of the main obstacles to the height of public debate, namely the idea, too widespread among our cultural elites, that “people,” “the lady in Saguenay,” “the man stuck in his car in Terrebonne” do not want to “rack their brains” with content that is too complex. Class contempt oozes from everywhere.
I am rather deeply convinced that “people” want, no, fundamentally need to understand the world around them as best they can. As democracies crack, this routine of leveling down is leading us to our doom. The habit of critical thinking is what trains people to resist manipulation, lies, the drying up of compassion and the death of the awareness of our shared humanity.
I am taking advantage of the summer to remind people of this, in case there is still time – in the manner of the American Democrats – to hold emergency strategic meetings, and to ask myself if we are really so ready for the media and political comeback of the fall.