Covered sky. Risk of severe thunderstorm. It’s a bad time for democracy.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
Regardless of the final outcome of the midterm elections, the way is wide open for the return of Donald Trump, even if he undermined the institutions of his country like no one else.
No need to harbor illusions. Canada is not immune to the wave. We are in the same boat as the Americans. On both sides of the border, our democracies are leaking.
The parallels are scary.
Just see how our electoral processes are being interfered with by foreign dictators.
In Canada, we learned this week that China secretly funded the candidacy of at least 11 candidates for the 2019 federal elections.
The situation is serious, it is a question of national security, by the very admission of our counterintelligence services. Let’s stop being naive.
Dictators are not our friends. By manipulating us on social networks, they seek to destabilize us to pull the strings of the planet to their advantage.
We saw it in the 2016 elections that brought Donald Trump to power.
Those who still refuse to admit that Russia helped him get into the White House need only listen to Yevgeny Prigojine, a businessman close to Vladimir Putin. This week he candidly admitted to interfering in the US election and wanting to continue to do so “carefully, precisely, surgically”.
Afterwards, how can we be surprised that Trump called the invasion of Ukraine a stroke of genius?
Since the House of Representatives is expected to fall into Donald Trump’s camp, there are serious concerns that the Americans will reduce their support for Ukraine, which fights by proxy for all democracies. Not just his.
But the foundations of our democracy are also being shaken from within, in Canada as in the United States.
The new leader of the Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre, has taken up entire pages of Donald Trump’s instructions.
Just like Trump who demonized the US Federal Reserve, he has not spared his attacks on the Bank of Canada, which he accuses – like Justin Trudeau – of being responsible for inflation.
PHOTO ADRIAN WYLD, THE CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVES
Pierre Poilievre, Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada
According to Pierre Poilievre, inflation is a purely Canadian problem, when that is completely false. It is not by destroying the credibility of our central bank that we will solve the problem, quite the contrary.
But as a good populist, Mr. Poilievre likes to find easy scapegoats. As he also likes to turn his nose up at the media, another famous Donald Trump recipe that poisons democracy.
The most disturbing thing is to see the facts completely take over.
PHOTO JASON FRANSON, THE CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVES
Danielle Smith, Premier of Alberta
With the arrival of Danielle Smith as Premier of Alberta, the conspirators have taken power. Science ? Not really his thing. She is more the type to relay Russian propaganda and go to the front against the Davos Economic Forum, associated with a far-fetched theory that a group of wealthy people are using the pandemic to take control of the planet. Nothing less !
It is deplorable to see that a person who disregards the facts in this way is in power here in Canada. At least she was not elected, but rather nominated by her party.
But in the United States, voters did vote for followers of the “big lie” that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, even if that is totally false.
However, these elected officials will be the guardians of the results of the next presidential election, in 2024. They risk blocking the certification of the results, if Donald Trump is not elected.
It sends shivers down the spine.
More than ever, we have proof that democracy, which we thought was acquired, is more fragile than we think. History is not over, contrary to what the researcher Francis Fukuyama said after the fall of the Berlin Wall, imagining that liberal democracy would no longer have a rival.
If we do not want the next chapter of history to be too dark, we must take very seriously the attacks on democracy, in Canada as in the United States.