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Lessons Canada’s Liberals Refuse To Learn From US Politics
Why emulate strategies that helped the Democrats lose?
The 2024 US federal election was disheartening for much of the world. Here in Canada, it marked a frightening shift. Canada and America have long been widely intertwined. Watching our boisterous next door neighbour plummet into full throttle hostile fascism is a rude shock. Or, for those who have paid more attention in recent decades, a long predicted inevitable continuation of ugly visible trends. The Overton window’s been relentlessly ratcheted to the right by venal billionaires in control of media and social media since long before Trump considered politics. The same escalating disinformation that plagues US politics firmly has its grubby fingers in Canada’s landscape as well. Chatham Management Group, a consortium of Republican hedge fund billionaires in New Jersey, control Postmedia, a collection of more than 120 formerly Canadian news media organizations that currently exist to provide >20 million Canadians terminally slanted coverage on every topic and direct them to vote for the right in every single election. This puts parties that frame themselves as progressive at a disadvantage.
Although Canada has more political parties than the USA, both countries seesaw back and forth between rule by only two of them. Rather than placing informed votes based on an understanding of actual policies and how they work, low-information voters are primarily swayed by simplistic slogans, emotional appeals, and hard-wired political tribalism that ties their sense of personal identity to membership in a certain team. Once a party’s been in power for a while, it starts to feel stale to swing voters in the electorate, who start believing it’s time for a change. Canada’s ruling Liberal Party of Canada (LPC) has held office for a solid decade, a very long time in Ottawa. Thus the pendulum appears poised to swing.
A few months ago, polls suggested an easy landslide victory for Canada’s right, led by Pierre Poilievre. A career politician with zero work experience outside of running for office, he is the only sitting member of parliament with a compliance agreement with Elections Canada for previous violations of election law. He’s also Canada’s only party leader without a national security clearance…
