An interesting Globe article argues Trump could not happen in Canada. The market is too small. Our conservatives rarely xenophobic. Interesting, given some of us are done with Trump (in terms of wishful thinking). But is it true?
I’m hoping the article is not pay walled. If it is I will summarize it.
Almost nobody expected Trump to happen in the USA. And while I agree that Trump and many of his cohorts are all about the money, there have been plenty of totalitarians in places a lot smaller and/or poorer than Canada.
Telling yourselves ‘it can’t happen here’ is a great way to be blindsided.
ETA: not paywalled for me, anyway.
I don’t think Trump could happen in any parliamentary democracy. The Brits have Boris Johnson but he didn’t come out of nowhere like Trump did.
You’ve heard the phrase American exceptionalism? It means that, sometimes, we can be exceptionally stupid. In fact, we’re number one in exceptional stupidity. I’m not sure other countries can compete. It has something to do with the bullshit myth of the rugged individualist that we cling to so desperately.
So no. It can’t happen in Canada, or other western democracies. Banana republics, yes. Failed former Soviet states, yes.
Trumpism isn’t just about xenophobia; it’s a whole host of other bigotries, most especially racial bigotry. Canada certainly has that. So, yes, it can happen in Canada.
We’ve had crazy leaders like Trump (eg Rob Ford, crack-smoking mayor of Toronto, who unlike Trump was an actual conservative) and the current premier of Alberta, while not crazy, fires his own inspector generals too. (Alberta is our most conservative province, and the Conservative Party has won all but one election since World War II. Their last majority was gigantic.)
We couldn’t go 100% Trump. There are racists and anti-immigrants who are typically right-leaning in Canada (but definitely not exclusively!) but most Canadian conservatives are sane and are embarrassed by the occasional Conservative “bozo eruption”. The last time the Conservatives won a federal election in Canada, in 2011, they did so by recruiting conservative immigrants and won a solid majority. Someone noted that stereotype of immigrants being left-leaning is just that, a stereotype. Most of our immigrants come from South Asia and are more conservative than most Canadians. The Conservatives forgot this in 2015 and lost. Polls indicated xenophobia had an impact on the Conservative vote in 2019 so I guess they forgot again, but don’t quote me on that one.
The Conservative Party had a leadership campaign recently and the vote will be announced on Sunday. We’ll know who the leader is then. Two of the four main candidates could be viewed as populists, but I don’t think they will win. I vaguely recall reports that one is openly racist, but nobody replicated Trump’s escalator speech.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge"
- Issac Asimov
Canada has a different political system, so that’s the first major barrier. We don’t elect the head of state, and the head of state is by design both apolitical and unimportant.
To be honest, looking at ourselves and saying “it seems Donald Trump won’t happen here” sort of misses the point that a lot of other bad things COULD happen here. We could get a fascist, populist government, and actually it’s unlikely to be the Tories; it could be some ascendant new party. Once in power, they’d have more power than Donald Trump does, because our system would allow for that. We could get a Communist government, with the same dangers. If that seems unlikely, well, think of all the other things that seemed unlikely five years ago.
I largely agree with you, but I think one of the underlying fundamentals is that because of storied national institutions like the CBC, and perhaps also in part because of our educational system, Canadians tend to be better informed on the issues than many of our American counterparts. If by some miracle a Trump-like ignoramus became Prime Minister – and I really can’t see it happening, but if it did – then said ignoramus would be out on his ass in short order. The thing that I believe could never happen here is the combination of a complete idiot being elected to lead the country, proving over the course of four years that he was both totally incompetent and criminally corrupt, and then standing a reasonable chance of being re-elected.
And I wouldn’t rule out the Tories being a potential platform for such an individual, though Maxime Bernier’s ridiculous “People’s Party” might be an even more likely prospect if they ever got any votes. Harper, after all, was something of a right-wing nutjob with autocratic tendencies, including being an all-out climate change denier, champion of fossil fuels, and, IIRC, a member of a church that believed in young-earth creationism. He was also personally staunchly anti-abortion as well as holding other beliefs of the American lunatic right, but politically astute and bright enough to know when these issues had no chance of political traction, although as you may recall a number of backbenchers in his own party were not shy about expressing their lunatic views and their bigotries.
The article refers to Kellie Leitch and Maxime Bernier as people who tried to be xenophobic. I think that description is slightly harsh, but there’s no doubt both suffered after media blowback. It also referred to the largely unsuccessful efforts of the Sun News Network.
It states leaders with a paranoid style (Huey Long, McCarthy, Wallace) have not proved popular in Canada.
But it also makes the point that right wing media in the US is enormously profitable and being a right wing star can bring millions in pay and spokesperson opportunities. It states the Canadian market is too small so Jordan Peterson or Faith Goldy market themselves to the US.
I think the article is right but overcomplacent and that there is a traditional of regional strongmen. Certainly the PM has enormous personal power and there is no prima facie reason to thing Canada is unique. It isn’t. And it can occasionally be smug about things.
That’s a good point I forgot to mention. Sun News Network was quite plainly a Fox News wannabe. But it was infamous for attracting hardly any viewers at all with their right-wing extremism from the likes of Ezra Levant. When they applied to the CRTC for must-carry status on cable, as a last-ditch effort to survive, they claimed to be a news channel on a par with CBC Newsworld, which does have must-carry status in the interests of an informed democracy. The federal regulator basically laughed at them, and shortly after, they turned out the lights and vanished into the night. Whereas in the US, I heard recently that Fox News is not just the most popular news channel, it’s the most popular network channel, period. What a sad state of affairs for informed voters, and for democracy.
Said another way, once somebody does decide to be Canada’s Trump, or to create Canada’s Trump, building up an effective RW propaganda machine is a prereq. One that will need to simmer for 10-20 years to build the groundswell of divisive ignorance that @wolfpup cites just above.
Once the baddies have that divisive ignorance in place, Canadians will be as vulnerable then as Americans are now. Which I suppose is a way of saying no culture is safe from deliberate sustained attack by well-funded hostile forces with a long view.
Canada may well be safe over the next 50 years, but if so it’ll be because nobody chose to attack the culture. Whether it’s too small, too well educated, too “good”, or too something else to bother with is for the bad guys to decide, not the good guys.
I can only hope your government and your society takes a cue from our errors and nips any such hostile effort in the bud before it gains material traction. As it seems they did with Sun.
It would be naive to state that the influential right wing media in the US could never expand to Canada rather than start it here de novo. The definition of influential media has changed and remains underegulated. It has the money and power but not much will.
Fortunately, efforts to this end have been thwarted by letting the American teams win recent Stanley Cups, and producing credible southern alternatives to Beavertails. Our team is working on more maple syrup substitutes. But we can only do so much.
In Canada, as well as in other parliamentary democracies, aren’t the prime ministers typically party leaders who have been selected by party insiders, and who are themselves also party insiders who’ve spent years working their way up through the party apparatus? I imagine it would be pretty hard for a political neophyte like Trump to gain much traction in a system like that.
Hell, if we had a similar system in the U.S., the Republican Party establishment would likely have shut Trump out in short order.
Right on. In Canada, the party chooses a leader. In principle, any member of the party can vote (as it happens the Conservatives are choosing a new leader today) but you have to pay a membership fee to vote and then the voters choose the party. Technically, they vote for a member of parliament, but that essentially means choosing a party since MPs have virtually no independence. A candidate for parliament must be approved by the party leader in order to use that party label. It is nearly inconceivable that a rank amateur like Trump could be chosen by the party as their leader.
But there is another question one can ask. Could a would-be dictator be chosen as party leader and then become Prime Minister? I see no reason why not, but the party could dispose of him at any time for any reason or no reason at all. You don’t need high crimes or misdemeanors. Just a vote of non-confidence and, poof, he is gone.
So could a dictator take command? Yes. Could an ignorant amateur do it? I doubt it.
Incidentally when I took 11th grade American history and we discussed the trial of Andrew Johnson, the teacher opined that had Johnson been impeached, the US might have evolved towards a kind of parliamentary system. But I doubt it. The 2/3 barrier is just too steep.
Similarly, there are a number of times the Republicans could have said no to Trump. They did not, for the most part, and presumably had their reasons.
In a larger sense, this type of question always reminds me of a quote from Primo Levi, the chemist and Holocaust survivor, that has haunted me for years:
“It happened, therefore it can happen again.”
Concur with both views. In the context of constitutional monarchy a populist leader of the Trump model can certainly rise to the top, but they couldn’t do that within a single electoral cycle.
Trump would not have considered running if it had meant working his way up the seniority ranks on Ways and Means. Or winning a gubernatorial contest and stint in a state house first.
I don’t know if it could happen there. Let’s just take the quick and easy way out and send him there.