In 2019, I wrote a book about political decision making. I argued that members of a political community make bad political decisions all the time, but not because we’re unable to make good ones. Rather, it’s the structures, incentives, and nefarious actors around us who weaponize our psychological predispositions in such a way that we end up making uninformed, irrational, unreasonable decisions we can neither explain nor defend.

Under the right conditions, people can and will make rational, autonomous, consistent decisions for which they can give reasons to one another — and to themselves. Under these, assemblies can and will do the same. They will choose to discuss important issues in good faith; they will meet one another as moral and political equals; they will collect reliable information; they will assess that information; they will give reasons back and forth about what they prefer and why; they will reach a conclusion, if not a consensus, about what is to be done; they will respect the outcome and one another; they will leave the exercise with greater trust in the system and, indeed, the capacities and intentions of their peers. In short, they will deliberate.

Democratic deliberation by ordinary people isn’t a cure all, nor is it the only way to do democracy. A healthy democratic system is made up of varieties of political participation, some of which will be conflictual. Contemporary mass states will require legislatures made up of representatives elected by the population. That entails elections, political parties, and at least some level of partisanship, horse trading, debate, and theatrics. We can and should still incentivize and expect those representatives to deliberate with one another in good faith, but that will only get us so far. What if we want to go further?

To supplement our national legislature and improve our democratic politics and decision making in Canada, we ought to create a standing citizens' assembly (CA) that would raise and deliberate on issues of importance that would select and inform issues the elected legislature should consider and how they should to consider it.

The assembly would co-exist with the House of Commons and Senate, functioning as a citizen-led group to come up with policy solutions that politicians refuse to tackle or are unable or unwilling to address effectively. Members would be randomly selected through sortition, controlling for whichever variables we decide must be represented: region, gender, language, age, indigeneity, and so forth.

For a period of months or years, the asssembly would meet as needed — perhaps, eventually, in the House of Commons chambers built in West Block as a temporary home for members of Parliament while Centre Block undergoes renovation. The body would deliberate, be compensated for their time, have access to expert testimony, and make reports to the legislature and the public. They would sit as individuals, not as caucuses or parties. When their sittings were through, the body would dissolve and a new lot of participants would be chosen.

The assembly would have no power to legislate or make policy, only to advise. Their force would be the moral and political suasion developed through building trust with the population. Elected politicians could take or leave their advice, and pay the price accordingly. Members of the assembly could set their agenda based on the interests of ordinary people, removed from the political pressures of elections and strategic concerns. elected politicians would retain the final say over the national legislative agenda and would remain accountable through elections. The assembly would be a guide — and a useful one.

As always, governments would need to maintain the confidence of the House of Commons to govern. The assembly would have no direct standing on matters of confidence. We’d still have elections, which are necessary in our democracy but, as we’ve seen, insufficient to produce healthy political dialogue and agenda setting. Indeed, elections tend to be poor times for policy discussions as politicians focus more on strategic communications and media gets caught up in reporting the horse race.

This isn’t an original idea. Citizens’ assemblies, grounded in ideals that stretch back to antiquity, have been used around the world for decades. In Germany, the Bundestag used these groups “to obtain direct feedback from the center of society on a specific political issue, going beyond conventional methods such as opinion polls and lobbying.” Ontario and British Columbia each used a citizens’ assembly during their referendums on electoral reform just over two decades ago. The Council of Europe takes these assemblies seriously. The online encyclopedia of democratic participation, Participedia, lists hundreds of cases of CAs and other forms of democratic innovation.

We need a long term strategy to manage major political challenges. Elected politicians in the House of Commons and appointed politicians in the Senate aren’t, on their own, fit for the task. A standing assembly of Canadians would help us set a policy agenda that reflects the interests, needs, and priorities of the millions of people who are shut out of the political system. In the process, the CA would build civic capacity and trust. The only people who stand to lose are entrenched politicians and lobbyists. The rest of us, the majority of the country by far, stand to gain. So, too, do our democratic institutions, which would end up healthier and more robust for having the support of the complementary assembly — support our democracy desperately, and increasingly, needs.

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The new edition of the book is out now, reworked, expanded, and updated in light of Donald Trump’s 2024 re-election — a victory ushered in by, among other forces, neoliberalism. Accordingly, the new edition has a new title, Breaking Free of Neoliberalism in Trump Times, which reflects the higher stakes we face in 2026. It’s also got a new subtitle: “How Canada can strengthen our sovereignty and address the American challenge, inequality and the climate crisis,” reflecting just how many problems we’ve got piling up. Remember, kids, it can always get worse.

But while Himelfarb does an expert job at assessing our maladies and their origins, he also offers a cure and a reminder that things can get better, too, if we fight for it.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

David Moscrop

Whenever I talk about neoliberalism I start by making sure everyone’s on the same page. So, what do you mean by “neoliberalism?”

Alex Himelfarb

Neoliberalism is a movable feast. You can do it hot or cold. You can do it more or less. You can do it viciously or more kindly. That has led some people to say it’s not a useful concept, but I think it is a useful concept to help us understand how we got here. In its simplest terms, I think of neoliberalism as a single-minded focus on economic growth — as the answer to whatever ails us, and that growth is best achieved by removing as many barriers to profit as politics allows - cut taxes, deregulate, privatize.

In that context, it is more about what government’s for than about economics. The role of the state, then, is to create the conditions under which the market can flourish, to support the market, to extend the market, but not to interfere with the market. Democracy — demands for rights, protections for workers, families and nature, redistribution — acts as a constraints on neoliberal governance which is why neoliberalism has always worried more about too much democracy than too little. Neoliberal governments become managers and custodians of expertise. Democratic and moral questions are reconstituted as technical questions of efficiency and affordability to be answered by technical experts, fiscal economists, trade economists, and central bankers.

Moscrop

The conception of growth seems to be fairly unsophisticated. I often see conceptions of growth as aggregate, of GDP for instance. No one’s asking about distribution. The assumption is, well, the wealth will trickle down.

Himelfarb

The original 1940s neoliberals didn’t actually profess trickle-down economics. This notion of trickle down evolved as political rhetoric because somehow one had to convince people that not just the rich and powerful but everybody would benefit from tax cuts, etc. Neoliberals started out saying, “What we are proposing is good for civilization. There will be pain, inequality is inevitable, even necessary; some will suffer, but it’s worth it to save civilization.” The original neoliberals didn’t say a rising tide would lift all boats. They said some boats sink, some float, some tip over.

As a political project, trickle down became a kind of sales job. It became the argument for why this is all okay, and the justification for putting efficiency over equity, for putting economic efficiency over nature upon which all of us depend, including the economy.

You could sell this notion that efficiency and economic growth trump everything by saying two things. First you’d say the value of that growth will trickle down so all will benefit. Though, of course, what trickled down doesn’t seem to have been wealth, it seems to be something nastier than that.

The other thing you’d say is “Look, all of those things you care about, the cultural and social values, the environmental values, need to be paid for so first we’ve got to grow the economy so we can afford those nice things.” So, social , cultural, and environmental values are always down the waiting list. We’ll get to you, we’ll get to poor people, we’ll get to inequality, we’ll get to sustainability, we will get to the arts, but only when we can grow the economy big enough.” As if those nice things aren’t essential to a strong economy and society.

Moscrop

How did Canada end up with a neoliberal order?

Himelfarb

I think there’s a couple of things. It’s a mistake to ignore the powerful corporate voices. There’s an entire chapter in the book — and, by the way, it’s a great book and you should buy many, many copies [Editor’s note: you should] — called “A Network of Persuasion.” There are a number of people who think, “Oh, neoliberalism was the inevitable response to globalization and changing technologies” and so on. But the investment, the huge amount of money, the hundreds and hundreds of think tanks created through Atlas Network in Canada and elsewhere in the world, suggests that people who saw benefit for themselves in this ideology understood that you had to invest in persuading people of its merits. There was nothing automatic about it. There was rather this powerful network of persuasion.

The well-funded neoliberal think tanks in Canada have built huge credibility and found it really easy to get published in mainstream media. They’re more persuasion tanks than think tanks. And so number one, there’s a lot of money behind the movement. They’ve also gotten really good at persuasion, for instance centering values like freedom, which became the dominating value in the 1960s and ‘70s during the equality revolution. Of course, neoliberals are offering an extraordinarily hollowed out version of freedom — freedom from government, freedom to compete, freedom to lose, freedom to go broke, freedom to be unemployed. But their communication around freedom and against the so-called nanny state has been very effective.

So, there’s this network of persuasion, but then part of it is and has always been geography. When I was a pretty junior guy in government I remember the senior bureaucrats who had very strong relationships with their American counterparts and were really concerned with the shift in the US and UK towards the neoliberal Thatcher-Reagan ideas that we must unleash the economy so we could be more competitive in an increasingly competitive global economy. This was a time when a number of European countries that had been suffering post-war were increasing their productive capacity. Germany, France, others were now much more competitive, and former colonies who had won their independence were asking more for raw materials. Unions had gained huge power and had secured wage increases and benefits. Inflation was on the rise and growth in decline. All of that conspired to lower profits. And so you had the corporate sector really concerned about how you shore up their ability to maintain profits. No longer did it seem that profit and equity could co-exist.

And so there was a huge incentive to join on to this Reagan-Thatcher counterrevolution. For Canada, given our geography and the massive American market right beside us, a lot of these senior bureaucrats became convinced of the importance of guaranteed access to the American market. Brian Mulroney didn’t come into government with a commitment to free trade but he quickly became its champion. And there was a growing consensus that if we did not get guaranteed access to this huge American market and through it to the global market and global supply chains, we would suffer irreparably.

Long before NAFTA, Pierre Trudeau had warned that we had to be wary because we share a bed with an elephant. Then in the 1980s with NAFTA, we decided to get in bed and cozy up, cuddle in closer to the elephant. That’s a big decision, right? And then with Donald Trump’s election, the elephant went rogue and all the warnings from the left suddenly came home, that we should have been warier: we never got the guarantees and we hugely underestimated the non-economic costs of NAFTA, the costs to democratic, cultural and economic sovereignty.

In the end, we were, it seems, pretty desperate to get a deal. When you negotiate from desperation, you lose. And of course the negotiations were highly asymmetrical to begin with. When you need something more than your counterpart, and a more powerful counterpart to boot, you lose. And so we negotiated that deal.

Mulroney had previously killed the Foreign Investment Review Agency, and a number of other policies that constrained foreign investment. Instead of worrying about what foreign ownership meant for the loss of sovereignty, we started worrying about whether we were getting our fair share of foreign direct investment. The more the better. The whole thing got turned on its head. We were no longer asking “What’s the risk of foreign investment?” but “What’s the risk of not getting our share of it?”

That’s a significant turnaround. Obviously, we need some foreign investment. That’s fine. We need some of that capital, but investment for mergers and acquisitions or investment that buys up Canadian firms and then dismantles them or buys up public assets and key resources, none of that grows our economy. It often shrinks our economy and makes us less sovereign.

Moscrop

Have we learned our lesson? It doesn’t seem like it. Officials in Canada talk about a global rupture and the decline of the United States as a reliable partner, but I get the sense that if there were a new American administration tomorrow and we thought we could reestablish the old NAFTA deal or some similar iteration of the CUSMA, we would go for it. Will we fall right back into old patterns given the option?

Himelfarb

I think that’s a perfect question, and I think yes, we have learned a lesson, and yes we’ll still fall into the same old patterns.

Moscrop

That’s very Canadian.

Himelfarb

Carney has been impressive in his efforts to diversify. I don’t know the content of all these trade deals, but in any case, the commitment to diversifying is obviously important. The commitment to trading more with each other internally is also long overdue. The commitment to invest in Canada and a more active role for government to do so, those are positive things. Those choices signal to me we’ve learned something.

At the same time we hear talk about Fortress North America. And a number of corporate voices in Canada seem prepared to make significant sacrifices to get a deal, to do whatever it takes to restore what was before the Trump assault. And they are demanding more of the same – tax cuts, deregulation, privatization, scaling back the public sector.

But what was also clear as negotiations proceeded is that Canadians had had it with being pushed around, had had it with concessions. Canadians had given Carney extraordinary latitude and they obviously put their faith in him. His credentials, his experience, and his demeanor made him the perfect anti-Trump and that won the PM a lot of trust.

But there was a worrying string of concessions leading into these negotiations from the digital tax to the CRTC rules on streaming services to rumors about the online news act to what we did on the border, the Gordie Howe Bridge, and so on, that made it unclear where we were heading. And it seemed like we might make significantly more concessions which would have significantly reduced our policy autonomy, and locked in illegal and destructive tariffs — and all that as just the appetizer for yet more concessions when we renegotiate CUSMA. But it became increasingly became clear as Trumpian demands and insults escalated that these were not trade negotiations so much as an attempt to subjugate.

You could feel a surge of civic nationalism and with it a growing public angst and belief that we should walk away from the table. And no doubt these feelings were intensified by the front row seat we have to the dismantling of American democracy, to plutocracy run rampant, to public institutions subverted to private ends, to the sometimes violent stifling of dissent and the horrific abuse of immigrants. Most Canadians, with the exception of a small northern MAGA rump, understand that all this represents a profound risk to humanity and want no part of it.

And so Carney did the right thing by walking away. Given the risks, it was courageous and it was right. There are costs and there’s going to be uncertainty. But given the chaos of the Trump regime there was going to be chaos anyway. Some people and firms will pay a price, and we’ll have to spend what it takes to ensure they are protected. But saying no to Trump was the right call.

Moscrop

Do you think we’ll change and stay changed? Do you think that Canadians will look at the landscape and say, “Okay, we obviously need to diversify on trade, probably on defense, we need to reassert our sovereignty.” Do you think we’ll look inward and say, “Okay, well, when we’re talking about nation building, we should also talk about the welfare state, equality, and an industrial policy that’s linked to the well-being of workers and their families, not just to corporations?”

Himelfarb

That is the question. I have no idea. I like the answers embedded in your question — investing in the care economy, education, industrial strategy and the energy transition to diversify not just with whom we trade but what we trade, I write in the book that we have put a huge amount of trust in the prime minister, even more than in his party, and we’ve given him extraordinary leeway. I also write that this is totally understandable in a moment of crisis and given the energy, urgency he has demonstrated in his first year and the balancing act he must perform as he navigates the economic attack from without , and conflicting demands and threats of separatism from within.

I get it, but I think too much leeway for a government is a dangerous thing. Governments are at their best when challenged. So let me do a detour. I went back to the literature on disaster capitalism and I reread Shock Doctrine, and I was reminded how often crisis enables an attack on the public sphere. It happens over and over again, that the public sphere comes to be seen as unaffordable and we shift increasingly to the private sphere. We also accept things that would’ve been unthinkable before the crisis. We entertain things we would never have entertained. And the room for debate diminishes. It becomes “What are you criticizing the government for? They need your support. Get behind the government.”

This notion of allowing debate to narrow is really scary to me. We need more democracy, not less in these times of crisis because the decisions we make about what big projects go forward and what we forgo could lock us into the past and narrow our choices for the future. Investors, foreign or domestic, shouldn’t be deciding what we build and what compromises we make. Canadians directly and through parliament should be deciding. We shouldn’t sacrifice democracy in the name of speed. Respecting Indigenous rights and the duty to seek free prior informed consent are not discretionary.

We are not powerless. We are the ninth biggest economy in the world. We have an educated, diverse population We have unique natural resources. And we are reliable. Decades of neoliberalism may have blinded us to the collective tools we used to build Canada. We used to own things together if they were essential to our sovereignty and security or to the public good even if not privately profitable.

But that means we must also have a clear notion of where we want to go, and what we stand for in the world. We haven’t had that conversation. We cannot afford to let the attack of the Trump regime blot out the other “existential” crises and challenges: climate change, record breaking inequality, and the rise of authoritarian and nativist threats to democracy. And even as we build for the long term we cannot afford to ignore the struggles of Canadians right now, especially young Canadians, as they deal with record levels of household debt, the high cost of essentials, a precarious labour market, and limited government protections.

To return to your earlier question: Have we learned a lesson? Will we learn the lesson? We need this conversation. This is no time for us, any of us to be on the sidelines. And thankfully there are some very articulate voices fighting for a Canada less dependent on the US, but also one that is more equitable, sustainable, and democratic.

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Making the case against billionaires is almost criminally easy. I could ask if you’ve been to Loblaws recently or if you’re a Rogers customer and then spend the rest of my time on stage reading Nigella Lawson recipes before we wrap up and go for drinks. But that’s not very sporting, so I’m going to give it an honest, substantive shot, and I’m going to warn you that billionaires pose a threat to our democracy – to our capacity to self govern.

The formula is simple. Extreme wealth equals extreme power; extreme power equals extreme capacity to disproportionately shape political and economic outcomes; so, to hold billions of dollars in wealth is to hold exponentially more day-to-day votes on how we should live than the average person.

Billionaires shape our political, social, cultural, and economic life by wielding capital and influence in political and business circles. They set and advance agendas about what we should build or not build, what sort of legislation we should pass to regulate industry or not, whether and to what extent we should have a welfare state, under what conditions and to what end we should welcome newcomers into the country, where our manufacturing should be done or not, and plenty more.

Billionaires have the ear of the prime minister and those around him. They have the ear of provincial premiers and those around them. They have the ear of asset managers, bank presidents, and corporate heads throughout the country and across the world. In the United States, the hegemon whose politics and economy have a disproportionate effect on our politics and economy, they have the ear of the president, who is himself a billionaire, even if he’s a shitty, authoritarian one who somehow bankrupted a casino. But the point stands. Billionaires have the ear of the powerful. And you don’t.

By having the ear of the powerful, the ultra-rich not only set agendas, but define what is good, reasonable, necessary, common sense, and true. In a society, our shared reality isn’t objective and fixed. It’s constructed day-by-day through intersubjectivity, which is to say that we decide together what our reality looks like, and we process it subjectively. That means that what is good, reasonable, necessary, common sense, and true is subject to definition and redefinition, just as it’s subject to manipulation and hijacking by the powerful who wish to live in a plutocracy in which they set rules the rest of us must live by—rules which, no surprise, keep them ultra-wealthy and powerful.

In March of 2025, the Carney ministry dropped planned changes to the capital gains inclusion rate that the Trudeau government had previously pursued. Big capital balked at the idea that they might pay a little more tax on their passive income, as if sitting on your ass is tough work, which, to be fair, it sometimes can be, as I must admit as a writer.

But still, we might have had a bit more money in the treasury to heal sick people, feed the poor, house the unhoused, support the elderly, build public-owned and controlled infrastructure, take on climate change, and educate the next generation, who might someday, at this rate, be prone to mistake a book for an empty carton from Amazon because tech billionaires would rather the young, and the rest of us, too, spend their time farming out thinking to machines and deploying those “saved” hours to be spent loathing ourselves through invidious self-comparison on Instagram or fighting with lunatics on Twitter.

In June of 2025, the Carney ministry dropped the digital services tax, which would have required major tech companies, who pay little tax, to pay a bit more. The government did this in the hopes it would encourage the Trump administration to strike a trade deal and because the wealthy oligarchs who run and benefit from the dominance of our lives by Meta and Alphabet believe too much is never enough.

In late-July of this, the Gordie Howe Bridge opened, easing travel and life for those who still cross into enemy territory these days. The bridge was late opening and might not have. The wealthy owners of the original and alternative bridge crossing, the Ambassador Bridge, fought the project for decades, not wanting to lose their monopoly. Canada ended up paying a disproportionate cost for Gordie Howe and conceding to the Trump regime, a fantastic elbows up irony on at least two levels.

Just weeks ago, at Canada’s Investment Summit, the room was packed with the very people against whom we are ostensibly fighting for our sovereignty, including America’s BlackRock and Blackstone; BlackRock is a booster and perpetuator of fossil fuel dependency, which means it puts making the wealthy wealthier ahead of solving the existential risk of climate change, while the latter is infamous for buying up homes and pricing tenants out of them, sending them into the street. To them and others like them, we’ll now sell our industry, our infrastructure, and our sovereignty, because, to quote Don Draper, “THAT’S WHAT THE MONEY’S FOR.” Or, to paraphrase him, that’s what the power is for.

The ultra-wealthy used to build libraries. Now they shred them as they undo the democratic project we’ve been working on in one form or another since antiquity. The ultra-wealthy shouldn’t exist as a class because wealth should be created and distributed in such a way that it, and the power it entails, is broadly shared among those who have a hand in building it and who must live in the society and polity it shapes.

Accordingly, to preserve and perfect our institutions, our democracy, and our society, we ought to democratize not just our politics, but our economy, which for all intents and purposes, are one and the same. Solving the billionaire problem won’t solve all our policy problems or our economic problems, but doing so will start us on our way by ensuring that we get to fix them well and truly together.

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Yes, like all early elections, the first few days will be spent discussing whether the election should have been called. Very meta, as in self-referential, not as in the makers of the pervert glasses.

We’ll here a lot of chatter asking whether calling the election was a dirty move, or whether it was even legal. Was calling the election constitutional? Absolutely. Yes, next question. It wasn’t illegal and it’s kooky to suggest otherwise. Don’t be a kook.

But was it ethical? Maybe not the most ethical. Especially given that the BC Conservative Party had just lost its leader. But as observers and NDP supporters point out, it’s possible former leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay quit to preempt a call (if so, it was a bad gambit). Moreover, if the government was expected to wait on the BCCP getting it’s affairs in order, it would be waiting a long time indeed Still, the move feels…greasy. But that’s an ethical concern that voters can weigh for themselves.

So far, Eby leads in the polls, but he’s lost four Cabinet ministers who aren’t running again. At least so far. By the time you read this, it could be more. It’s a fluid time. It’s common for parties to cycle through candidates, including high-profile ministers, ahead of or at the outset of an election. At what number it goes from common to disconcerting and even on to catastrophic is a question of perspective — and partisanship — but so far the BC NDP is hovering around normal territory.

More worrying for the party, perhaps, was that the NDP’s campaign launch was uninspiring, low-energy, and focused on explaining why an election was necessary (which is a task to say the least). Spoiler: Trump, Donald Trump, president Trump, and the Orange Menace are the ostensible reasons. Rough start, maybe, but election day is a month away, on October 24th, so there’s time to work out the messaging, fine tune the attacks, and find some pizzazz or something like it.

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Commentators warn that the election call could rebound on Eby and cost him not only a majority, but his government itself. Maybe. But I’m not convinced. On Twitter, David Portier revisited seven early election calls and found that governments had a better than even chance to return, including five of seven that wound up in majorities. I’d have thrown Stephen Harper’s 2015 marathon federal election call into the early category (we can debate the finer nuances of this, if you insist), but you get the idea. It’s a risky election call, but fortune favours the central tendency.

If I had to wager — and I won’t, because I’m not a Polymarket stooge — I’d say the election call will pay off for the NDP. The opposition parties, all 700 and counting of them, don’t scream government-in-waiting. The BC Greens might enjoy a modest gain in the legislature, and they’d deserve it. Hopefully party leader Emily Lowan will win a seat. She’d be a welcome and refreshing addition to the legislature. But the balance of probability points towards the Eby ministry living on.

In the case of a hung parliament, it will be a shit show. I’ll save writing about that for later, because it’s way too late in the evening at the time of writing for me to drink six cocktails and take a handful of bennies.

Even if the NDP wins, there will be a cost for voters and democratic institutions alike. Early election calls are cynical almost as a rule. Sometimes they’re necessary, but this one will be a tough sell as an utterly non-negotiable, must-do-now, life-or-death call. Voters clock this, even if they hold their nose and reward the incumbent party. It’s a recipe for distrust and cynicism, and the dish is cooking at the worst possible time.

A week from now, however, voters aren’t likely to be talking or caring that much about the election call as an issue. They might support it, they might not, but most voters rank the call itself far down the ladder of issues that matter. A vocal few might make it seem otherwise, but watch for the revealed preferences of the average voter. They just aren’t going to care that much.

Good. BC, like Canada, has plenty of serious issues to talk about, and an early election isn’t ultimately one of them. It’s worth talking about, surfacing and judging, but it’s worth engaging with for a few days at most and then moving on to the essential issues that shape lives in the province.

By all means, take a day or two to rage, defend, judge, and pontificate. You’ve earned it. But then the real election begins. And the question on ballot isn’t whether it was mean or unfair to call an election, but who is best suited to sit as a member of the legislature in each of the province’s 93 ridings and who among those present is fit to govern the province itself. That question seems to me to have an obvious answer.

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Last night, I read the post that’s making the rounds of the internet and the world. A safety researcher at Anthropic, Jacob Coxon, quit the company and shared that he believes there’s a 10 percent chance the technology could wipe out humanity, and soon. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he wrote.

Anthropic’s Alignment Science lead — the person leading the group whose task it is to make sure AI development fits with the boundaries of human ethics, values, and common goals — agreed with Coxon, writing

Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.

In short, AI technologies are moving faster than our capacity to understand, regulate, and control them. They’re certainly moving faster than our capacity to decide if we even want or need them — to sort out whether or not they’re worth the risk. It doesn’t help that state efforts around the world to control AI and the companies developing it have been, at best, insipid. In the US, a significant portion of lawmakers would rather let AI companies run wild than ask them to behave themselves while others aren’t quite sure how to log on to the internet. The wealthy, corporate-captured gerontocracy running the global hegemon isn’t up to the task and, indeed, tends to find itself at cross-purposes with the well-being of the many, or the long-term security of humanity. We call that sub-optimal.

Some folks online and in the media are speculating that the latest round of AI doomerism could be driven in part by the dictates of corporate public relations ahead of IPOs. Nothing boosts the value of a company’s stock like a belief that its product is so powerful it could destroy humankind. How do you even value such a thing? The force. The power. The potential. What stock price would a company producing infinity stones command on the market? Enough to afford paying Tom Holland a king’s ransom for his next Spider-Man movie with some left over for a Disney+ throwaway side-quest show, surely? Whatever it is, it’s a lot.

Whatever the nature of the latest AI warnings, the existential risk reads as being at least remotely plausible, corroborated, and high-stakes, which is to say enough to cause serious concern. We should take that concern seriously since the cost of being wrong and ignoring it are so high, especially geopolitically.

At the heart of the problem is the same logic and trap that drove the Cold War standoff, from conventional arms to nuclear weapons to foreign invasions. You put groups in competition, separated by whatever (ideology, geography, resource competition, profit motive, etc.), and then you let them have a go at one another. Trust will be low, coordination difficult. So, the risk that one party might get ahead fuels the desire for the other to beat them to it. Since neither trusts the other, there’s little to no chance anyone will stop for fear that the other won’t. Each keeps going and going until something gives, like the security of humankind.

As things stand, companies and governments will keep developing AI and the technologies will be put to use by the national security state and the armed forces. In this case, the Cold War analogy is less a comparison of sorts than a direct analog. The US will develop AI not just for the mundane corporate purpose of profit, but also in an attempt to maintain a strategic advantage over its rivals, particularly China. For its part, China is almost surely thinking the same thing. So, off we go. As we learned in the last century, once these races start, they tend to get run the whole way until someone collapses from exhaustion or dies.

Where does that leave us? This morning I woke up and it was chilly and raining. My To Do list for the day is long, deadlines pressing ahead of a busy fall season. My inbox is full of emails begging for a reply, a reminder to water the plants on the porch, and a 2-for-1 coupon for belts. Walking to the coffee shop I work from a few days a week, I was holding my umbrella and listening to Warren Zevon (Bed of Coals: “I’m too old to die young and too young to die now.”)

I can’t remember the last time I was less motivated to work, or to do anything at all. I joked online that “I feel like learning there’s a 10 percent chance AI is going to wipe out humanity within a decade entitles us all to take a personal day today.”

Seems reasonable enough, right? Sort of. I don’t think humankind is going to be wiped out tomorrow or next month or in 2030. Humans aren’t always so good at predicting things, and I think a warning that we’re going to be destroyed by the computers within a decade is, at best, something to review critically before blowing through your savings and taking off to rusticate in a cabin in woods, awaiting the End Times.

The AI warning is nonetheless destabilizing. For one, it could be accurate, either precisely or close enough that it indicates major, widespread risks beyond the already-major risk of upending employment around the globe and setting off economic catastrophe. For another, we don’t know if it’s accurate or not, but the scale of the risk raises existential questions about why we’re here and what we’re doing with our time. It asks us to review our purpose.

Sometimes I quote the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who wrote in his 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness” that work is “of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so.”

Thinking about AI risks to humanity recalls Russell to me, leaving me asking what matter I’m moving or telling others to move, leaving me wondering if the plants really need watering or if I need another belt (or, I guess, two belts). I can’t read the news of existential threats to humankind, whether it’s the computers or climate change or nuclear war, without, at least for a moment, wanting to check out. How do you even go from we might all die, and soon to Dear TKTK, as per my last e-mail…

Perhaps it’s not satisfying when you’re in dread-mode, but I think the answer is when encountering the sort of devastating news that’s increasingly common of late, you need to take a beat, feel what you’re feeling, talk it through if need be (which is what I’m doing here, I guess), regroup, and move on — ideally in some capacity that’s useful to the human species you’re ostensibly so concerned about.

It’s okay if purpose is downstream of dread. But you’ve got to ensure to make it back to the purpose bit. I’ve written before that despair, checking out, or pre-surrendering is nihilistic and privileged; it’s better to be defiant, to double-down on doing better in the face of wretched headlines, malevolent corporate oligarchies, and the political class who produce and enable each. If there is indeed a 10 percent chance AI destroys us, there’s a 90 percent chance it doesn’t. What are we going to do with those odds?

If it’s better to be defiant, it’s better still to do it in a group. The way forward is to find purchase with others, to connect, and to mobilize locally, nationally, or internationally. Instead of tearing our hair out, we should focus on the values, goals, and work that serve humanity, the noble ends that get and keep us out of bed, out of our head, and — in the face of mass existential worry — fighting for a safer, more just world.

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On Thursday, when Donald Trump put on a little puppet theatre show and “renamed” Lake Ontario to Lake America, I thought for a moment we might have tapped the bottom of the well of stupidity. There can’t possibly be anything left to draw from it. Some sort of sense must thus prevail, right? Trump can’t unilaterally rename a shared body of water for all who share it or recognize it beyond our borders. U.S. states, beginning with New York, will refuse to play along with the bit. Trump’s most devoted cultists will clap along for fear of upsetting their leader, but most Americans will recognize the stunt as a petulant, juvenile outburst while they struggle to afford groceries and dodge poisoning by blueberries or lettuce. These are sensible checks against the mad king, and that must be something.

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On Wednesday, Bloomberg’s Eric Balchunas shared a graphic showing that 52 percent of American Gen Z investors had shifted investment funds to sports betting at least once in the last year.

A quarter of Gen Z, Balchunas writes, “treat sports betting as a deliberate part of their long-term financial plan.” In contrast, 15 percent of millennials are treating betting as an investment,6 percent of Gen Xers, and 1 percent of Boomers.

Overall, 24 percent of American investors have used investment funds for sports betting in the last year, while 12 percent rely on it as part of their wealth-building strategy.

Uh oh.

The growth of legal online gambling and so-called “prediction market” sites — which, I’ve argued, are “bookies with venture capital funding — have reduced the friction that in the past limited who gambled and how often. Before the internet, you’d typically have to make contact with a human in real time to gamble. You’d be stuck visiting a casino, buying a lottery ticket from a retail location, or calling a bookie (a person you knew, one way or another). Gambling took at least a modicum of effort and exposure to the world.

You couldn’t hide behind a screen at a distance if you were going to place a sports bet or roll the dice. You couldn’t type in a credit card number and click a few buttons. You couldn’t react to every shot, injury, or second on the clock. You couldn’t instantly indulge every impulse you might have to take a risk in the heat of the moment. You didn’t hold a slot machine, poker table, and sportsbook in your hand 24/7/365.

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God help me, I’m the sort of person who benefits from a good prompt. A gentle nudge. We often take for granted that something is obvious, but the disconnect between what’s apparent and what we do is real, and costly. Consider this post an invitation and permission slip to step away from the screen (not yet!) and grab a book. Doctor’s orders (don’t fact check this). But do go read a book. You’ll feel better. We all will.

That said, before proceeding, I should declare an interest. I’m a book editor for McClelland & Stewart. My job is premised on people reading books. My entire industry is. But I’m also a writer, a citizen of a democracy, and a human being. My interest in people reading is just as strong in each membership category.

Books are a personal and public good, however you read them. Physical books, ebooks, audiobooks all count. We don’t do book snobbery here.

Words on a page separated from the breaking news bulletin, the attention economy of social media, or the market imperative to be a producer and consumer form a sacred space unlike most others. In this space, we decode, encode, and share a language and a world, one that persists through time, even if interpretations of it will vary over the years. We bring that world to life in our minds and we inhabit it with others who do the same. That’s beautiful.

Writers and readers alike have long waxed poetic about the magic of the book, with its power to initiate a kind of transubstantiation of ink and paper or sounds or ones and zeros into life and movement. Stephen King called books “a uniquely portable magic” and Margaret Atwood said that “a word after a word is power.” Books shape and alter realities inside and outside your mind. They’ve inspired movements and schools of thought; they’ve raised and fell states and empires. More often than not, they’re simply a delight. And more often than not, that’s enough. But there’s more to the magic nonetheless.

The world a book creates, whether it’s fictional or real, is an oasis in which we spend long stretches of time, even if we dip in and out during shorter sessions. Beyond creating worlds, books model or communicate behaviours in fiction and reality, drawing reactions, approbations, judgments, and support while serving as a guide for navigating realities. In that sense, they’re pro-social, community-building tools. The good kind of community, for the most part.

Today, in the era of ever-present social media, digital connections and “connections,” and “multi-tasking” (a skill that doesn’t exist because it’s impossible to accomplish), books offer us a chance to centre ourselves beyond the growing intrusions we face. Time spent reading helps us break away from the attention economy driven by social media companies and proprietary algorithms designed to steal, keep, and sell our attention. Reading, in contrast, focuses the mind, invites us to reflect, and supports rebuilding our atrophied capacity to focus. In the same spirit, books allow us to connect with the characters on the page and then to further connect beyond those pages with those in our lives who also take part in the liturgy of the written word.

Distractions aren’t impossible to avoid, you might get a call or a notification while reading, but at least with physical books and ebooks, it’s hard to do much else while you’re turning the page. You can’t really double-screen and read a book. You can’t stream The Office yet again while you read. You can’t play your 6,000th hour of Civilization 6 while you read. You must be more or less present and focused.

On top of the benefits enumerated, book reading has health benefits and could help you live longer (time you can use to read more books). I hasten to add that because unlike so many other practices that extend lifespans and support good health, book reading is enjoyable.

You might try to sing praises similar to those I’ve raised here about magazines, websites, video games, or your preferred streaming service. Sometimes, you’ll find overlap or similarities — or benefits unique to each of those undertakings. That’s fine.

I’m a big fan of balance and variety, of each thing in its place and in moderation. So, please do read magazines, browse websites, play video games, and enjoy some good couch-binge time. But remember that books exist as a class of their own, long-form, permanent, and magical, with their own particular, extraordinary effects that we ought to recognize and treasure.

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Canada is burning. The skies are yellow, orange, and grey. Toronto has been beset with the worst air quality in the world. Around the country, locals are being advised to remain inside to avoid the toxic miasma. Northwestern Ontario is facing multiple evacuation orders. CN Railway had to shut down freight lines. The images on the news and social media are fit for the apocalypse. It’s not the first time we’ve lived through this and it won’t be the last. Wildfires are getting worse, and it’s because of climate change.

We can call this the new normal, because for a certain baseline it is. You see the label everywhere now. For those of a certain age, the weather and attendant scale of natural disasters don’t mirror the childhoods of our youth. The effects of industrial life on the planet are showing up regularly, altering the world we live in and how we move, live, and breathe within it. When you check the forecast day-to-day now, it’s not enough to glance at the risk of rain or the UV index; now, you must consider whether the temperature will bake you, whether the air will poison you.

We may become familiar with extreme weather fast because as a species, we’re good at pattern recognition and, where possible, adapting. To the best of our abilities, we will manage it. There’s a risk, however, that adaptability and resilience will give way to resignation. The last thing we need right now is complacency. We need to recognize the challenges we face and address them head on and at scale.

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A petition initiated by a citizen in Victoria and sponsored by Green Party leader Elizabeth May has Canadians asking whether the leader of the Opposition should have a taxpayer-funded home. At roughly $78,000 a year in upkeep and operation costs, plus occasional further investments, the residence is low-hanging fruit for those who dislike spending money, public things, the current occupant of the home, or some combination of the three.

The argument against Stornoway is easy to make, equal parts obvious and common sense. If we’re all tightening our belts, why should a mere official opposition leader enjoy lavish public housing? No other democracy pays to house such a person. Why should we? The only reason Canada bothers to is a quirk of history, a senator in the 1940s who decided it would be a good idea and raised private money to make it happen. Thus the home was held in trust for the country’s loyal opposition leader until the government took over the property in 1970 before passing it to the National Capital Commission nearly two decades later. Stornoway, while a heritage property, isn’t home to some grand tradition stretching back to Confederation. It’s a comparatively recent innovation, barely three decades older than the Toronto Blue Jays, depending on how you score it.

The case in favour of Stornoway is subtler, flying in the face of populist admonitions and (reasonable) cries of ‘hypocrisy!’ against politicians who preach fiscal austerity, move into public mansions, and criticize the government for spending money on 24 Sussex or Harrington Lake, the prime minister’s country home in Gatineau Park.

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Stornoway is a public thing, not in the sense that it’s open to us, which it isn’t, but in the sense that it’s owned and operated by Canadians in service of an office recognized by Parliament. The leader of the Opposition lives and works at there. They entertain and host events there. They keep a metaphorical watch on the government from there, as they do everywhere. In a sense, we do these things together, whether we support the opposition leader of the day or not, and we spend a relative pittance doing so. We maintain a public thing in the public interest of supporting an office that works to hold the government to account, an essential function in a parliamentary democracy.

There are precedents for Stornoway and housing essential office holders. The prime minister has two residences, though 24 Sussex is a case study in neglect if there ever were one. The governor general has Rideau Hall. Lieutenant governors in the provinces have homes quite literally called “Government House.” The speaker of the House of Commons has the Farm.

We ought to support public heritage residences in the spirit of doing public things, from housing these office holders to running state-owned enterprises in key industries to rebuilding a robust welfare state. These things aren’t the same, but the spirit in which we undertake them can be united in shared purpose. Rather than dismissing a property as an economic drag on the public purse or an aberration, we should appreciate that we can still do things together, that we can own and maintain heritage spaces, that we can understand that not everything we spend taxpayer money on is meant to return a profit — the underspecified concept of government spending as “investment” that we hear so often.

Giving in to a culture of austerity, of searching for “efficiencies” by default, and generally being cheapskates won’t serve us in the long run. Indeed, this strategy will continue to rebound on us, reinforcing the argument that when in doubt, we should be cutting spending and outsourcing; that whenever possible, we should leave it to the individual or let the market sort it out. To give in to such thinking is to diminish the public and thus the collective, the assembled many who make up the country and who have shared interests beyond the sum total of private wants.

We should reject playing political games with government properties, tempting as that is. Faffing about with such frivolities will undermine the arguments and spirit needed to create a country that exists for purposes other than historical accident, economic convenience, or enriching the plutocratic class here and beyond our borders.

Maintaining a broad public spirit requires us to defend Stornoway, even when we don’t support those who live within its walls, just as we ought to for 24 Sussex or the Parliament buildings themselves. That commitment is an investment in loftier goals — and a good one. We should make it.

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Before I became a book editor in March, I was a full-time freelance writer. It was my job to read the news and to write about it. I still write, but less often. I still read the news, but less often. I don’t miss having to write that much and I definitely don’t miss reading the news that much.

Every so often, I cover this topic because it’s important and the value of a reminder to keep your sanity is evergreen. And when it comes to reading less news, the research is on my side.

On June 16, a piece republished in Science Daily shouted the headline “Your brain was never designed for this much bad news.” The upshot of the article is that we face a disconnect between our contemporary news information systems — and the world that shapes and informs them — and our brain. When it comes to news consumption, the distance between the flow of the latest-and-worst from around the world and our ability to manage it leads to negative effects of the sort you’re almost certainly familiar with, including becoming tired of processing all that wretched information.

As developmental psychologist Ali Jasemi writes

news fatigue is not laziness, weakness or a generational decline in civic interest. It’s the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate.

Jasemi offers a few tips for managing news consumption, each of which we’d be wise to follow, including: limit the time you spend reading; go narrow and deep instead of shallow and wide; and skip the “rage bait.” This is easier said that done, yes, but it’s equally worth trying.

We ought to read the news, but we ought to consider why we’re reading it, and to what end and effect. Being informed is one thing; being fatigued, depressed, and demoralized is another. News consumption ought to serve the ends of navigating shared social, political, and cultural life, keeping us connected and more or less on the same page. In a democracy, these connections are non-negotiable. No free, self-governing people can remain as such in the long run if those connections are severed.

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Shared points of reference and knowledge bases are a common language and public goods that we are struggling to preserve in a digital media ecosystem increasingly dominated by clickbait, ragebait, AI slop, and mis/disinformation. The internet lowered the cost of sharing or publishing information and opened space to pluralize voices, which was a desperately needed departure from systems that shut out so many for so long, and still tries to.

An expansion of voices, perspectives, and arguments in the news and public sphere is not only valuable, but just. However, the same transformations in the media ecosystem provided space for bad actors who set to work eroding our commitments to shared facts while polluting that same environment. Governments and platforms have subsequently been unable or unwilling to tackle the problem. In parallel, years of affordability crises, war, pandemic, growing inequality, reactionary backlashes to social progress, and the increasingly frenetic pace of life have left good faith readers and writers drowning in a sea of bad news and bad news.

That’s no way to live, and no way to read. In the long run, it’s no good for you or your mental health, nor is it any good for those around you or for political life in your city, province, country, or planet.

Roughly 2,300 years ago, Aristotle wrote about a good life lived within the mean between extremes. He was on to something.

A balanced approach to news consumption of the sort recommended by Jasemi and in these pages from time to time emphasizes balance and deliberateness, a strategy premised on reading the right amount of news, for the right amount of time, for the right reasons, and from the right sources. You can think of this program as a sort of newsy phronesis, a practical wisdom adapted to keep you sane, happy-ish, and useful to yourself and your community. Give it a try. It could save your summer, and plenty more.

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The CBC’s 90-year run of broadcasting hockey in Canada, first on the radio in 1936 and on television in 1952, is over. Rogers Sportsnet is now the sole rights holder after it and the CBC failed to reach a sublicensing deal that would have kept the national broadcaster in the business of broadcasting the country’s national winter sport.

Anger, frustration, disappointment, grief, and shock over the end of CBC hockey broadcasts reflect a sense of loss, that something has been taken away from us, that we’ve sold out a public institution to a for-profit company. For some, the concern includes worry about access to watching hockey, since free broadcasts will disappear with the end of CBC’s rights deal. That means another fee, another streaming service, if you can afford it, if you can access it, and if the stream holds up (insert nightmares from the 2025 Blue Jays playoff run here).

Plenty of commentators have already assessed the cultural loss of Hockey Night in Canada. Historian Craig Baird had lots to say, and to the CBC itself. He captured the sadness felt from coast to coast to coast.

Baird’s “shock” reflects a mourning for the death of this institution, albeit one that’s been in decline for years and whose end had a feeling of inevitability to it. The death wasn’t written in the stars, though. It was a choice that emerged from the long-term decline of CBC and its mismanagement. The internal failures were exacerbated by years of, at best, government ambivalence and dithering over the public broadcaster’s role within a free and sovereign country that, from time to time, dares to think of itself as a nation.

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When I write, I think. That’s true for you, too. Writing is thinking. It’s part of our cognitive architecture. Artificial intelligence that writes for you, thinks for you. The ostensible return, instant and effortless communication, is ultimately a net negative. What you get back in time, you lose in capacity to discover, reflect, deliberate, sort, and dream.

We don’t become machines in the process of allowing them to write for us anymore than computers become human when we let them think for us. But while AI will never become human, as we extend more of our humanity into machines, we give up bits of ourselves. The exchange yields a flattened, monolithic cultural dynamic in which we speak the same few languages and say the same things, and nothing too interesting or meaningful or atypical. The risk of the homogenization of thought parallels a globalized era in which language, culture, media, dress, and so much more face a leveling to the grade of the global hegemon and its corporate underwriters. In that sense, the AI “revolution,” billed as it has been as the latest iteration of industrial upheaval, is the next step towards monoculture as a regression to the mean. How much poorer we’ll be for it.

I hasten to emphasize our growing poverty, a self-imposed impecunity, and how absurd a decision this is, to give up thought and struggle in exchange for a phoney baloney pretense to literacy while we rip one another off.

Artificial intelligence can’t actually think for us anymore than it can struggle for us, though it can displace our capacity to do each. The technology produces outputs based on vast amounts of data and patterns, guesses at what comes next in the sequence. To date, we’ve been the ones filling the stores of information from which AI draws, its stab at what follows drawn from hundreds, even thousands, of years of material produced by human hands and minds. To the extent we’ve shifted to using AI to write and decide for us, we’re standing on the shoulders of those who’ve done the work already, as if they’ve paid the collective human debt of thought and left us with enough surplus capital to coast until the sun burns out and we drift along as memories on a frozen, barren rock.

The struggle of sorting things out for yourself is part of the human story. That includes writing as thinking, but also the broader gifts that writing yields. Communities of writers and readers meet routinely throughout the world, at conferences and festivals and book launches and any sort of gathering or meet up or confab you can imagine. They meet as scholars, novelists, poets, non-fiction experts, technical report writers, and more. The communion of those gathered for the written word and for one another marks a high watermark of human achievement, an expression of devotion to thought and community. From these meetings, countless tendrils spread out in every direction imaginable and, perhaps, some that we can’t imagine, or at least can’t quantify.

In the most optimistic scenarios, including those imagined by thinkers including Karl Marx, automation, of which AI is a sort, can be put to good use to free us from the chains of labour drudgery. Let the machines do the work and let us flourish as artists, craftsmen, friends, lovers, and whatever else makes us human. Let the machines do the work and let us gather together to be together. We’ve turned our backs on this vision, opting instead to let the machines put us out of work while also doing the art and craft and even the loving, as reports of agentic romantic relationships suggest.

We’ve opted for the worst of all possible worlds, one in which AI thinks for us and erodes our ability to think for ourselves, in which AI does our work and our art, in which the relationships and communities that might have flourished in the extra time automation provides for us disappear as we turn inwards both literally and figuratively. Gen Z is drinking less, which is good news for public health, but one of the possible reasons they’re tipping fewer pints than their forebears is that they’re going out less. Instead, they’re at home, staring into the abyss, not noticing, as Nietzsche warned, that it has a tendency to stare right back into us.

It’s a cliché to say that we’ve never been more connected nor more lonely. It’s a cliché for good reason. It’s true.

At the very moment in which we ought to be connecting in coffee shops and bars, on sports pitches and tours of landmarks, at restaurants and concerts, in gardens and board game cafes, and wherever else we might find one another, we find ourselves inside alone or outside with others but separated from them, scrolling and tweeting and asking the AI agent if the sun above us is shining.

The problem is serious, but I can’t believe it’s unsolvable. In recent years, I’ve come to call myself a strategically hopeful person. In the face of, well, all of this, it’s easy to curl up into a ball and give up. It’s harder to hope, but it’s also more productive. If you begin from the premise that there’s nothing you can do about a problem, you’ve reached the end of your decision tree. If there’s nothing you can do, you stop. You give up. But if you start with the belief that you can do something, that a problem has a solution, then you’ve got something to work with. From there you proceed to think, to struggle, and to strive to solve the problem, ideally in concert with others.

As we face the challenge of AI replacing so much of what makes us human, I choose strategic hope and the task of joining the growing backlash and counter-movement that emphasizes that just because some technology can do something for us, it doesn’t follow that it should, or that we should let it. Despite what you hear from the sainted few who direct contemporary life from a handful of boardrooms in the wealthiest enclaves known to human history, we remain individually and collectively in charge of our future — at least while we maintain the ability to think for ourselves.

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In May, I spent just shy of three weeks on the road in Australia and New Zealand talking about political decision making, nationalism, Donald Trump, and Canada. I visited book festivals in Melbourne, Sydney, and Auckland, speaking to shockingly large crowds who wanted to get a better sense of what’s happening right now and what might come next. I was happy to see so many keen faces staring up from the crowd, but I kept wondering why people weren’t outside.

In Sydney, at the Town Hall, somewhere in the range of 1200–1600 people (I’m bad at counting) showed up to attend a panel I was on discussing the changing world order. That talk included a lot of discussion of what comes next for Canada. In Auckland, a meet-the-Canadians panel drew a crowd of over 400, with 200 more turned away for lack of seating, though that showing was more that a little thanks to the tremendously talented fiction writers on stage. Nonetheless, people showed up on sunny afternoons, early mornings, and rainy evenings. It was encouraging, invigorating, and the slightest bit disconcerting.

That Canada was of interest to crowds in Australia and New Zealand may be less surprising than you might expect. In New Zealand, there’s a sense of gentle parallel, a feeling that they sit in relationship to Australia the way Canada does to the U.S., though the dynamics of that relationship don’t quite entail the precise degree of existential threat faced here.

Listening to audience questions and speaking with attendees after panels, people cited Prime Minister Mark Carney as an example of a leader standing up to Trump, offering a vision, a way forward in a world gone mad. Many pointed towards Carney’s Davos speech about middle powers and the changing global order as a point of interest, even pride. They thought of Canada as the anti-America, as a bastion of sanity, progressiveness, and hope. Carney cuts a dashing figure among those who view him as a stolid technocrat (complimentary) offering stability amidst growing chaos and, whatever else he might be, not Trump — and he seems to know what he’s doing.

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Canada is a tough country to govern. In a sprawling, decentralized federation, relationships between the national and provincial governments are tricky to navigate during the best of times and between the best of minds. Each province has its own challenges, desires, imperatives, and peculiarities. Provincial cultures are not the same. A varied distribution of natural resources and industries further complicates matters since the interests of the provinces depend on who’s got what and to whom they’re selling it. Language differences — and not just between French and English — matter, too. Indigenous Peoples and nations, who are often forgotten or ignored, have their own needs and rights within both federal and provincial contexts.

We rarely live in the best of times, and we’re rarely led by the best of minds. So, right off the bat, we’re in trouble. But we try. Over the years, Canada has counted various approaches to managing the federation that reflect the preferences of prime ministers and premiers, and the scholars who try to assess how leaders keep this country stitched together.

We’ve had cooperative federalism and competitive federalism. We’ve had asymmetrical federalism, fiscal federalism, and executive federalism. These varieties blend together, mixing on the fly. On any given day, who knows what’s going on, but by god is it ever going on. We feel our way forward as a country, waiting for the inevitable crisis that will threaten to tear us apart, and we try to get things done when we’ve got the chance. The outcome is rarely perfect, but some days are better than others.

These days are not of the better variety. Today, the country is practicing shotgun federalism. You won’t find that in a textbook or scholarly paper, I don’t think. I just made it up the other day from the road, a long trip to Australia and New Zealand for book events, as I watched the country self-abuse from a distance. With the Carney ministry offering Alberta concessions on the industrial carbon price and a pipeline in the hopes of, let’s say, ah, nation-building and keeping the family together, the feds got in return exactly what you’d think: nothing.

The overestimated-but-still-dangerous forces of Alberta separatism weren’t placated by the bargain, and Premier Danielle Smith continues to try to walk a line so fine that it makes the threads of a spider web look like the trunk of a redwood. Her strategy of a “sovereign Alberta in a united Canada,” whatever that means, smacks of wanting-to-have-it-all-itis. I get wanting it all. I’ve been there. But it doesn’t work.

In British Columbia, a province that doesn’t care to have a pipeline cutting through its territory and running to tidewater, David Eby’s government has started to wonder what it would have to do to get the attention of the feds and a fair bargain for itself. If Alberta was going to act up to get what it wants, why shouldn’t B.C.? Maybe Cascadia calls.

Down the road to the east, the Parti Québécois has a serious shot at winning the upcoming election in la belle province. The party is promising a vote on separation if it wins. Its leader, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, is defending Smith for obvious reasons.

Quebec separatism isn’t new. Provincial leaders there have long known that threats to abandon the federation make for useful politics, because even if a vote on separation fails, you win: the national government, aware of the threat, will yield special concessions to prevent future votes from taking place, or succeeding.

Soon, other provinces are going to remember that they, too, exist. Expect demands to follow. What then?

Shotgun federalism is the art of walking around with a loaded gun in your mouth and hoping it doesn’t go off by accident. Each province wants a good deal within the federation, which is to say each province wants what it wants and doesn’t much care what the others get, unless the others get something good that they don’t. When a province decides it’s not getting a fair deal, it might elect to act up in the hopes that the tantrum will yield results.

The thing about walking around with a shotgun in your mouth is that it might go off. Or else some crazy bastard might decide to pull the trigger on principle. It’s no way to run a country. If the model of federalism we land on is everyone threatening to dismantle the institutions that hold us together unless they get what they want, we’re going to have a bad time of things. You can’t keep this place together in the long term that way. As Chekhov teaches us, eventually the gun must go off.

The solution to shotgun federalism is to put the gun down and talk. Call me an optimist, I guess. But I think it can be done. When I’m asked to compliment the late Conservative government of Stephen Harper, which I can indeed do, I often reference the former prime minister’s approach to federal-provincial relations. Harper understood something many of his predecessors didn’t, which is that when you bring the provinces together at scale and in grand ways, you get rolled.

Years of subtle, often bilateral, federal-provincial efforts kept the peace, more or less — at least comparatively. This approach limits what you can do, and perhaps means you can’t always fully rise to meet the moment when the country is called upon to do grand national things, but look what you get when you try to show off. Is that better?

I like the idea of a patient, hybrid, deliberative form of federalism that brings provinces and the feds together only when utterly necessary and then as quietly as possible. You’ve got to pick your timing and your battles. No sudden moves. Everybody stay cool.

If you’ve got a premier who’s going to make your life miserable, you may have to wait things out. If the matter at hand looks likely to provoke inter-provincial or federal-provincial war, you might have to take a beat unless you really, really have no other choice. But the moment you think you can ride the bull is the moment you get gored.

Alternatively, we might hope for a better batch of premiers and more responsible, even-keeled electorates who’d prefer not to be pandered to or mobilized as pawns in a demented game of political chess. Call that a long-term plan. Call it aspirational. In the meantime, I’d settle for everyone calming down for a moment, putting down their weapons, and seeing whether we can’t tackle some small things together as we build momentum towards accomplishing the bigger ones.

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People hate being surveilled, taken advantage of, or treated differently than their peers. Surveillance pricing — the individualized, algorithmic practice of charging one person more than another based on data harvested from them — hits the trifecta. Governments ought to ban the practice. It’s insane we must even debate the question.

The New Democratic Party has been on the case of late throughout the country both nationally and sub-nationally. Manitoba led the charge, introducing a bill to restrict algorithmic pricing in March. The Ontario NDP under leader Marit Stiles followed suit. So too did the federal party under new leader Avi Lewis, who called surveillance pricing “creepy” as his party introduced a motion in Parliament to ban it.

Lewis’s anti-snitch pricing advocacy put the issue on the national agenda, boosting provincial efforts that, in turn, helped make the federal case. Now, if you’ll pardon the pun, all eyes on the matter.

Spying on people to rip them off is bad. Ontario Premier Doug Ford prefers to call it capitalism and the free market, but it’s anything but. Even on terms set by capitalist theory, surveillance pricing isn’t capitalism. Adam Smith would have hated the practice, which is not a free exchange of goods and services, but the leveraging of a power imbalance by one party who is able to collect asymmetrical amounts of information in markets that are effective monopolies or oligopolies, like grocery retail.

Surveillance pricing is inherently exploitative on its face — no need to dig out any well-thumbed copies of Das Kapital. Not only are consumers unable to make informed decisions about their purchases in these cases, they have few other places to go or the time/energy to go there if they’re even aware they’re being ripped off in the first place.

Writing for the National Observer, Supriya Dwivedi gives a perfect case study of the problem:

If, for example, a retailer knows you’re looking at an item from within the parking lot, then they can charge you more for it using the logic that if you’ve already travelled all the way to the store and are looking up the item in the parking lot, so chances are you’d be willing to pay more for an item compared to someone who still needs to actually make their way to the store.

Dwivedi is characteristically right on the mark as she summarizes and analyses the problem and argues that Lewis is right to highlight the issue and frame it as a problem. I’ve made the argument time and time again that the power imbalance between consumers and sellers in our “free” market is such that practices like snitch pricing exacerbate relationships that are already inherently exploitative. Moreover, there is no personal action that can balance the scales. That’s why it’s up to the state to intervene to ban the practice.

Banning surveillance pricing is morally correct, but it’s also smart politics. Facing down yet another affordability crisis — just as the post-pandemic struggle was abating — is going to drive people quite simply beyond mad, and past the breaking point. Decades of persistent and compounding financial crises from the 1970s onward have taught anyone willing to pay attention that state intervention and regulation are necessary to discipline and control a “free” market that will otherwise run wild and operate as anything but free. Left to its own devices, capitalism devours the ecosystem it requires to exist until it collapses. Nothing is ever enough and there is no such thing as too much. For more on that, you can turn to Marx, but you shouldn’t have to.

During an affordability crisis, especially one that follows on the heels of a rough several years, people become frustrated, anxious, and unpredictable. Tack on to that a recent surge in populism and what do we even need to talk about here? While relieving human suffering is an inherent good that politicians ought to pursue, it’s also a good way to keep your approval numbers in check and maximize your chances of election or re-election in the face of an electorate that doesn’t love being pushed around for too long. I prefer that people do the right thing for the right reasons (see: Aristotle), but I’m plenty fine if they do them for the wrong reasons, if the outcome is the same.

In the long run, maintaining confidence and trust in our institutions is critical to maintaining the legitimacy of the government and state, and to preserve order. Better than a mere ban on surveillance pricing would be a ban accompanied by a thorough rethink of the economic system, including who gets to control the workplace and reap the benefits of the profits workers create. The latter is a heavier lift and a spicier debate; I’ll give you that. But the former ought not to be. Indeed, a ban on surveillance pricing is a no-brainer that every government ought to enact immediately.

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At some point, however, one hits their head on the ceiling that demarcates a division between necessary and indulgent. When the government of Ontario purchased a private jet last week for Premier Doug Ford, a head bonked. At $28.9 million (plus operating costs, with the price of fuel surging), the “used” plane, built in 2016, didn’t read as a bargain. I could buy a used Maserati and emphasize the thrift, but I don’t think I could sell the framing to my partner, because she’s not a fool. Ontarians aren’t fools, either.

I’d finished the first draft of this piece on Sunday just ahead of 11:30 am ET. That’s when I popped over to read the news, taking a break before edits. It’s also when I read that the Ford government was selling the plane, citing, ah, public feedback and this being the wrong time to spend tens of millions on a private jet. One wonders when a good time would be. Either way, it was a wise move for the government. It meant more edits for me. But a wise move indeed.

So what now?

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As far as politics is concerned, I rarely meet people who are truly apathetic. That’s good news, though I’ll get to the bad news in a moment. Staring down the many and growing challenges we face right now, it’s a good time to have an engaged citizenry. But here we meet the bad news. People may not be apathetic, but they’re alienated, and that may be worse.

Often when we hear someone talk about political apathy the speaker is referring to a state in which people don’t care about politics. They’re just not interested in it. But scratch the surface and you’ll find this isn’t true. Call it the reverse Maltese Falcon (spoiler alert); beneath the outer layer, the layer of appearance, we find substance. We find gold instead of lead.

If a citizen stays home instead of casting a ballot on Election Day or decides to hit the links on the weekend instead of attending a protest, we might conclude they don’t care about politics. But there’s more to it than that. If we think of apathy as a lack of interest in politics, and if we think of politics as a shared undertaking in which we sort out how we will live together — who gets what, when, and how? — we soon see there are few who aren’t interested in our shared life and how they fit.

To find the best publishing day, I’m experimenting with Monday posts. If you have strong feelings about which day is ideal, let me know.

You can experiment with this yourself. The next time you come across someone you take to be apathetic, ask them if they care about politics. You might get a ‘no’ in response, or ‘not really’. That’s the surface. Keep digging. Ask them next if they care about the state of the roads, the price of gas, tuition costs, healthcare wait times, tax rates, local parks, their public pension, what we sell to other countries and to what use they put it, how much control they have over their workplace, or even the flag. You’ll find that people tend to have thoughts, opinions, preferences, and feelings. Often, they’ll have strong ones. People care about such things, and more. But they’re detached from politics. The connection between what they care about is severed from their desire and capacity to do something about it.

The separation of individuals from political life is more about alienation than apathy, though the former may certainly induce the latter. If apathy leads to a withdrawal from public concerns, to the removal and isolation that characterizes alienation, then we might say the two are thoroughly bound up together. But the fundamental problem here is apathy, and that is what we must address first, and soon. I’m not sure who imagines the coming years will be easier than the preceding ones, the pandemic notwithstanding, but I’ll take the under. And for our collective good, we ought to take all the help we can get. It’s time to recruit.

Bringing people on board requires us to understand why they aren’t here in the first place. We political animals separate from political life for many (intersecting and overlapping) reasons, but a few take precedence. If someone isn’t socialized into politics, they might not think taking part is even an option. Beyond socialization, people may lack the material resources and skills they need or feel they need to take part in politics. It’s a vicious cycle.

If a person can’t afford the time or money to get involved — and politics takes both — they’re less likely to try. Moreover, elite institutions only go so far in including people in any deep sense. While political parties and organizations may love volunteers, for many, substantive engagement in shaping the world around them seems impossible or pointless. If political elites prefer to run the show themselves, which they often do, then why bother getting involved? If no one is listening, why bother speaking?

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As I wrote in Too Dumb for Democracy?, in liberal societies, the state and government tend to ask very little of people, at least as far as politics is concerned. You’re meant to be a part of the market society first, a consumer and producer, and a political being second, if at all. Every few years, you’re implored, lightly, to vote, but then everyone goes back to their respective corner. You’re asked to pay your taxes, obey the law, and do your job, more or less, and otherwise you’re left alone. You’re certainly not often invited in any substantive way to take part in self-governance. You come to doubt whether you’re welcome or whether your participation would matter if you were.

We need to rebuild civic capacity and redistribute opportunities to engage in political life. Not only are these goods in and of themselves, respectful of the inherent moral worth of each person, but they’re also essential to building a country that can withstand internal and external challenges. In the face of contemporary crises and uncertainties, we’re starting to wonder whether we’ve let our national muscles atrophy, anxious that when we find ourselves needing to meet the occasion, we won’t be up to snuff. Those are reasonable concerns, and we should take them seriously.

Addressing political apathy starts with bringing people into political life deeply and substantively. The state and both private and public organizations ought to support those who wish to take part with material resources and by reserving the time it takes to do such work. Those with power must listen to those they exist to serve and must take their preferences seriously even when they clash with elite and entrenched preferences.

The probability of us bringing everyone into politics is low; the chances that we can dramatically increase participation rates in both shallow and deep engagement are much better. More to the point, however, the return on investment earned by engaging more of the population is politics will be robust and, equal and opposite to the cost of leaving them out. The way forward, then, is as necessary as it is obvious.

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Stephen Lewis was a Canadian icon. Such people are rare, but less common still are those whose status was earned entirely in the service of others. You can read any number of obituaries celebrating Lewis, highlighting his lifetime advocacy for human rights, social justice, economic fairness, and global multilateralism. You can read of his accomplishments, including leading Ontario’s New Democratic Party to official opposition status in the 1970s, advocating for those living with HIV/AIDS, co-founding the Stephen Lewis Foundation, serving as Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations — under Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, no less — and fighting apartheid in South Africa. You can read of his unmatched capacity and eloquence as an orator; he spoke in the way I imagine Cicero might have.

You can read of all this, and so much more. Everyone should.

I heard of Stephen Lewis for the first time during a high school social studies class, or perhaps from an English teacher who taught his course as if it were one. Among the progressive educators in that Catholic school, he was a legend, and I could see why. Even then, what struck me above all was Lewis’s relentless sense of moral clarity. I never met him, but Lewis seemed to me at once human and yet somehow set just above us mere mortals. I don’t mean above in a patrician sense; I mean above in such a way that even at a distance you’d be inclined to trust him immediately, certain that he was above reproach.

To know what is right and what ought to be done and to speak of each with a conviction that exists in your soul is to be blessed. Lewis was so blessed. Every time I read him or heard him speak, I felt the sense that he at once expected more of us all and worried that we might not be up to the task. But that didn’t stop him from putting in the work, which is the mark of an enlightened and selfless human being, one who sets high standards but doesn’t let the gap between hope and expectation become an unbridgeable chasm that induces one to walk away from building bridges altogether.

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Lewis was a democratic socialist, and a proud one. Today, the word “socialist” is still suspect in many circles, including on the left. So, too, is the program of structural reform it carries. As a political leader, Lewis advocated for a program premised on justice and fairness, including a democratic distribution of political and economic power that would underwrite commitments to each. Having such a prominent and respected figure use the word while identifying the maladies of our time and their cures was a welcome exception. It was no small thing to have someone in the national spotlight reminding us that if we wanted to change things, we would have to change them. We could use a lot more of that.

The news of Lewis’s death has been met simultaneously with national grief over the loss and ecumenical celebration of his life. You’d have to look long and hard to find anyone saying anything but a kind word. The reactions speak to what Lewis meant to the country, but also what he represented, including a belief that one can fight like hell for what they believe in while encouraging even one’s opponents to live up to the prospect of becoming their better selves.

I’m sad that Lewis is gone. In part, I must admit to a selfish aspect to my sadness. Along with the loss of the man is an anxiety that we might not have many more like him. It’s a cruel twist of fate, of irony in the make of a Greek tragedy, that this absence comes precisely when we need so many more of him. Truly.

There’s never a bad time to have someone like Stephen Lewis in the world, but by God we need so many more people like him right now. Amidst my anxiety, however, is the hope that his life and legacy will continue to inspire others to do more and better, and to do it in service of others. There couldn’t be a more fitting tribute to the man than that.

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We’ve reached a point in global history during which it feels like just about anything might happen, and Canada isn’t exempt. For a few recent decades, it seemed like we might be approaching a convergence, and a stable one at that. If we were, we got knocked off course. But we probably weren’t. The supposed convergence was likely illusory, a fever dream. The death of history, the nation state, and conflict were greatly exaggerated. Now they’re back. Boy, oh boy, are they ever back.

One who is theologically inclined might wish to say I told you so. A long time ago, First Corinthians warned us that “everything is permissible.” That was less permission than warning. Nearly two thousand years after that, Fyodor Dostoevsky shared a similar concern by way of the Brothers Karamazov with the worry that perhaps “Without God and immortal life, all things are permitted then,” an anxiousness shared by G.K. Chesterton and those who looked around and saw us becoming unmoored.

You don’t need a god or a belief that it takes a deity to ground oneself or one’s society to worry that something has gone awry. Today, we’re speed running a course to map the limits of what indeed counts as “everything” and we’re doing it without sufficient supports to help us through the worst of what we might induce. Like the sense that we’ve entered a dodgy alley in our collective journey, it shouldn’t take a deity of the omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent variety to guide or restrain us. I doubt that any reasonable reading of history would offer up the eras of any sacred text as a necessarily and inherently gentler and more stable time. But at some point in the story of humankind, you start to expect that we’d come to know better.

Without laying down odds, it’s fair to say that we could lose democracy during the lifetime of a child born today. We might find borders redrawn or erased without the blessing of those who dwell within then. We may witness the rise of an automated society owned by oligarchs that drives working populations to the brink, replaced by machines at just enough of a rate to discipline labour into powerlessness. If that sounds ominous, there’s always a chance climate catastrophe will shatter societies and remake the world for the worse. None of these risks are mutually exclusive, and, indeed, any of them might intersect with and exacerbate any other. It’s all permissible.

In Canada, I worry about our future. The nationalist fervour of them moment has rallied the country, but to what ultimate end is to be determined. This week, we hit the customary NATO spending goal of 2% of gross domestic product on defence. One wonders if that is in service of maintaining the old order led by the United States or preparing for its demise. The Liberal government, up in the polls, has the support of a plurality of electors, nearing a majority, who want Ottawa to sort it all out and who are willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt, at least for now. The Mark Carney ministry is looking around for new trade and security partners, removing some eggs from that one big basket and distributing them as best as it can. Many observers are watching this unfold and wondering why we didn’t do all of this sooner. Some muse about the country going nuclear — and they’re not referring to energy production.

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Lost in the flag-waving and wide berth given to the government is the one small trick that builds social trust and encourages national buy-in while supporting Canadians in their day-to-day lives: the welfare state. Poll the country and you’ll find Medicare ranks towards the top of what Canadians value from this joint, believing at once that it brings us together as a nation and sets us apart as a country. For all the grumbling we see about spending, people tend to like knowing someone’s in their corner when push comes to shove, as it always does.

Last fall, I argued in the Globe and Mail that the new Liberal government’s first budget was a chance to affirm a commitment to social welfare and define what Canada was to be about. The welfare state didn’t feature prominently in plans at the time as defence spending and cuts to the public service, among other targets, took precedence. But in the long term, the thing that will tie us together isn’t cuts, but spending on ourselves and one another, on what we traditionally and narrowly define as medical care alongside dental care, pharmacare, disability supports, unemployment benefits, and more.

These services define and unite us because within them we find a there and a why. Spending on the welfare state is spending on a promise to take care of one another, the sort of thing many Canadians believe a country exists for in the first place. As we face democratic decline, geopolitical instability, climate crisis, and affordability struggles, our inclination and that of our government ought to be to huddle closer together and watch each other’s backs. If we wish to protect and preserve Canada, our first task ought to be establishing and protecting a shared purpose and sense of belonging, which is to say, we ought to unify.

You can unify in different ways, including mobilizing against a shared enemy — a classic if there ever was one — but the virtue of uniting by way of a robust welfare state is people tend to be happier, healthier, and better off when you choose to support them with the material resources they require to live and participate in society.

To put it in corporate terms, we ought to invest in ourselves. Investments are good because done correctly they yield a return. Set aside the fact that helping one another out is the right thing to do and you still find that structural aid and assistance at scale builds a nation and supports all the other things we might wish to accomplish, including making it through the work day, navigating fallow or crisis periods, supporting a family, or stepping up to fight for the country should such a necessity arise.

The best way to behave is to do the right thing for the right reason; the second best way is to do the right thing for the wrong reason. Right now, we ought to be satisfied with either. And the right thing is to go all-in on a renewal of the Canadian welfare state.

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