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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I’m going to keep writing this Substack newsletter each week and continue to publish with a handful of other publications, too. I hope that work will sharpen my book editing skills and vice versa. As always, thanks for your support and happy reading.

This week saw the news that Rideau Cottage, “temporary” home of the prime minister, is “inadequate.” The house is small and insufficiently secure for a head of government. While I’m not inclined to argue that politicians ought to be living large at taxpayer expense as a rule, I’m embarrassed that the country routinely wrings its hands over where the prime minister lives and how he travels. Politicians need certain tools to do the job of governing a contemporary mass state. Debates about housing or travel, such as they are, don’t reflect serious disagreements over public policy or even our shared or disputed values. Instead, they’re occasions for nitpicking, pettiness, and supreme displays of insecurity. They’re silly and bad for us.

Today, Prime Minister Mark Carney is living at Rideau Cottage, just as Justin Trudeau did before him. He’s there because the official residence of the prime minister, 24 Sussex Drive, is a mess. It’s literally uninhabitable. The good news is that in February 2024, the home was declared rodent and asbestos free. The bad news is that’s a declaration one hopes a G7 country wouldn’t have to make. It’s the sort of thing that ought to be implicit. Does your head of government live in a house full of carcinogens and rat droppings? Of course not! Why would you even ask? For a long time, Canada did have to ask the question and the answer speaks to a national smallness that ought to understood as a big shame.

The cost of repairs and renovations to 24 Sussex runs into tens of millions, or what you might call a rounding error on a rounding error in the account books of a country with an annual federal expenditure of over $500 billion. Imagine buying yourself a new computer and haggling with the salesperson because you didn’t want to pay for the ‘Q’ key on the keyboard. You wouldn’t do that because it’s absurd and you have too much self-respect for that.

The public and politicians are both to blame for the sad state of the prime minister’s official residence. Politicians have at once politicized the issue. The opposition threatens to attack anyone who dares to care for the building or, gasp, improve it. The governments run by both parties have been too cowardly to expend the political capital it would cost to admit the whole debate is absurd, fix the place, and deal with it once for all.

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On the public side, we’re cheap and petty and all too ready to scream bloody murder should anyone so much as regrout a tile. It’s an impulse that is both regrettable and understandable. It’s also shared. In an episode of The Thick of It, a satirical series that sends up political life in the United Kingdom, Malcolm Tucker, the government’s sweary and scary factotum, berates a minister of the Crown for having an ergonomically suitable chair.

“Bin it,” he says to her. “People don't like their politicians to be comfortable. They don't like you having expenses, they don't like you being paid, they'd rather you lived in a fucking cave.”

A charitable reading of the public and political reticence to care for 24 Sussex reflects a shallow populism, a sense that politicians and other elites are getting something the rest of us aren’t. The government wants to give the prime minister’s home a makeover, during a housing crisis? What about me? The matter is optics and associations. Spending $37 million or $50 million or even $100 million on housing the prime minister has no bearing on housing or grocery prices, but it feels like it does. A “fancy” house is an accessible and visceral issue in a way that policy over, say, defence spending or trade policy might not be. We day-to-day folks tend to live in houses. We don’t tend to buy missile systems or ship tonnes of steel across oceans, and we shouldn’t try to.

The deeper problem here is that whinging about the prime minister’s residence, which ought to be understood as a necessary tool for doing the job, reflects and reinforces a deeper shared parsimony. By the same logic we might deny an adequate home to the prime minister, we might wish to deny healthcare to those we deem as “undeserving” or culture and arts funding because we decide they’re well outside the limits of a utilitarian state. When the welfare state comes in for cuts, we find there’s enough support for stripping away what makes us a country in the name of saving a few bucks. The cycle is a death spiral.

We need a national re-orientation, what parents often call an attitude adjustment, mister! That shift begins with us accepting that things cost money and having the reasonable tools to do the job of running a country, which includes a house for the prime minister and (gasp!) business lounge access for cabinet ministers, is non-negotiable. From there, we might bid ourselves up to accepting that investments in the welfare state, arts and culture, and infrastructure are also non-negotiable, the price of building a country worth living in.

Beyond these indulgences, we might begin to discuss broader and deeper state investments in citizen capacity and well-being of the sort that makes it so people aren’t in fact worried day-to-day about gas prices, housing access, school fees, and medical treatment because they aren’t constant existential threats. That would be a more confident, less petty, and much nicer way to live for everyone. But we might be better off reversing the order here, starting with ensuring that people aren’t worried about making ends meet and then watching them worry less about spending a few bucks on keeping 24 Sussex from mouldering into oblivion. It never hurts to build a country from the ground up, beginning with the people for whom it exists in the first place.

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Predicting the future is the ultimate scam in opinion writing. I try not to do it too often because it feels greasy unless you’re trying to calm everyone down and remind people that as a rule the most likely thing tends to happen most of the time. Opinion writers rely on predictions because if you’re right, you get to remind people of the fact and look like a soothsayer (so wise, so valuable). If you’re wrong, no one remembers and you keep your mouth shut. Prediction? What prediction? I don’t remember any prediction.

Canadians want to know what’s going to happen in the weeks, months, and years to come because they’re worried about their future. Looking ahead is reasonable because humans like predictability and stability, each of which are in short supply right now. So what’s going to happen in Canada?

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With all the talk of the changing world order, old order, Jedi order, or whatever, I’m reminded that for 99 percent of the population, that’s all gibberish. That doesn’t mean that things aren’t changing or that those changes don’t matter. They are and they do, but it also means that macro shifts in the structures that shape lives beyond the immediate control of people day-to-day are, at best, little known and less understood. For most people, immediate concerns are material concerns such as having enough money to make rent or the mortgage payment, filling the cart with groceries, and maybe saving a little bit for a vacation, these days probably one closer to home than wherever the trip aggregators are pushing as the deal of the month.

People worry about their health and that of their loved ones. They want to get their kids to school and, if they’re lucky, keep the house a little bit tidy. Maybe, after all that, they just want to flop down on the couch and scroll and stream or both. If they’re anything like me, they hear the word “order” and think, hmmm, maybe we dial up some pizza tonight?

What else do you expect people to do? In the liberal democracies we’ve built, or that have been built upon us, citizens are expected to be liberal first and democratic second, if at all. Individuals are meant to produce and reproduce and do the following things, more or less: pay taxes, obey the law, and vote. Beyond that, you’re not meant to make much trouble, and you’re certainly not meant to get involved unless it’s in service of something from the list above. Politicians would love for you to vote, provided it’s for their side. If the gears of the universe turn on, then it’s all working out as it should. If they cease to turn, then it’s something well beyond the ken of those who aren’t initiated in the sacred rituals of the deciders. It’s best to just mind your business, support the home side, and keep calm and carry on.

The distance between most people and the systems in which they operate is the same as the distance between the Earth and Jupiter. I don’t know how far that is, but I know it’s not close. That isn’t to say that changes over the last few centuries aren’t to be celebrated, remarkable as some of them are. In 1789, there were effectively no democracies, at least not as we understand them or at scale. Democracies are better than autocracies and they’re certainly better than absolute monarchies. It’s silly to try to convince anyone otherwise. But that’s not the bit in which lies the trap of our times. That bit is complacency, our own and, in particular, that of those who shape orders and institutions.

Our World In Data offers a handy chart to track the rise and fall of self-government over time. There are other sources and definitions that change the count here or there, but the upshot is the same. For a long time, there were very few democracies. Then there were more. Today, it could go either way.

After years of being mostly forgotten, by the dawn of the 20th century, democracy was on the board in single digits as a share of government types. Then came two world wars and big changes in what scholars and lunatics called the world order, though for different reasons. By 1950, liberal democracies on their own made up 10 percent of governing systems. If you include electoral democracy, a lower-bar that counts states with free and fair elections but not full-fledged human rights regimes, the 1950s through to the 1990s witnessed a steady climb for democracy up to 30 percent. Not bad given that for most of human history, democracy had been for most people a strange or unknown thing — the exception, certainly, and not the rule.

Then came the rise of post-Soviet democratization, such as it was. Between 1990 and 2010, the share of countries that counted as liberal democratic or electoral democracies rose from 17 and 19 percent respectively to 25 and 28 percent. Democracy was in the majority. by a smidgen Electoral democracy kept climbing, hitting a high of 32 percent. Everyone gets a television set, a pair of jeans, and a vote. Use it wisely, or not. Either way, it’s all set-it-and-forget-it. Nothing to worry about.

History and events, however, have a way of sneaking up on us just when we think we’ve licked them for good. We’re constantly reminded that however clever we think we are, well, we’re not. Maybe it’s a war. Or a pandemic. Or a botched response to a natural disaster. Or a financial crisis. Maybe a country elects a real piece of work and then elects them again, just for sport.

Between 2010 and 2024, democracy found itself in decline, what Larry Diamond warned of as a “democratic recession” back in 2015. Good thing we listened. By 2024, liberal democracies made up 16 percent of governments and electoral democracies accounted for 33 percent. That may seem good enough by number of states (though it’s not), but if you count population, there’s serious and obvious reason for concern. Democratic decline in India and the United States alone has accounted for just under two billion people who are living on the edge.

For years, I’ve argued that liberal democracy is too thin to withstand the weight of history and events, separating individuals too much from self-government while simultaneously asking too much and too little of them. Democratizing the economy by giving workers more control of their industries and workplaces and a greater share of the abundance they produce would go a long way to shoring up democratic capacity, especially if paired with more participatory democratic institutions, but few who make decisions have an interest in that. But we may have little choice but to take structural reform seriously or else let ourselves be carried away by the sweep of whatever is sweeping at the time. A cynical person might call the latter choice nihilistic, the sort of thing upon which future generations, should there be any, might look back upon and offer a tsk, tsk, tsk. What were they thinking?

The best time to have sorted out a change in course would have beeen before our present crisis. The next best time is now. Beyond that, who knows if we’ll have the option any time soon, if ever in our lifetimes. The thing about a crisis, though, is you shouldn’t waste it. Whether we asked for or invited the democratic decline global re-ordering, or whatever else we face is incidental to the fact that now we’re facing overlapping and intersecting challenges. Accordingly, we might think about rising to meet them in such a way that chooses a new path, and ideally one that moves forward.

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The delusional optimism of the 1990s, of course, is part of the suite of problems we face today. Notwithstanding the economic struggles that persisted for more of the decade than one might recall, there was a lot of heady hopes floating around, cheques written that no one could possibly cash. The belief in something like the end of history and the inevitability and immortality of a new world order paved the way to a post-new-world-order in which backlash and resentment are equal parts warranted and misdirected. Now, the international order, such as it is and with all its faults, is on the back foot. That would be enough of a project to sort on its own without having to deal with democratic backsliding and a renewed American imperialism that would make James Monroe very pleased indeed, after he’d finished wondering what an iPhone was.

Week to week, I dip in and out of the news at different depths depending on what I’ve got to do to pay the mortgage. Each week ends up being more or less the same. The arc of our current historical, ah, unravelling would be familiar to those in the early half of the last century: economic challenges, geopolitical upheaval, institutional decay, hopeless paeans of technological solutionism, people being mean on the internet. Okay, maybe not that last one.

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Opinion writers aren’t meant to offer tepid defences of things. We’re meant to be strong and certain. I’ve always thought the admonition to be stupid, since some things thoroughly deserve a sort-of defence. Floor crossing is one of those things.

On Wednesday, former Conservative member of Parliament Matt Jeneroux left his party to cross the floor to the Liberals. Previously, he said he would leave the Commons. His move strengthens the governing side’s standing in the legislature, putting them within reach of a majority and, in the meantime, buttressing their “working” equivalent of one. Since their election last year, the Liberals have maintained popular support, at once navigating and leveraging the threats from Donald Trump and the United States against Canada’s economy — and sovereignty.

Jeneroux’s crossing marks the third departure from the blue to the red side in the life of this parliament. As he left, observers drew their battle lines immediately. As always, differences of, ah, opinion were split between those who mark the switch as an act of conscience — and thus honour — or a betrayal, cynical and self-interested or otherwise. Parties, including the Conservatives, who bemoan such a move rarely remind us that when it’s them receiving a defector, the former explanation is a given. It’s all conscience and honour. When it’s a matter of losing a member, it’s always a betrayal. Politics and all that. Pointing out the double standard, the hypocrisy, is barely worth the clicks and clacks of the keyboard strokes.

Floor crossing is permitted. It’s a longstanding practice in the Westminster system and any party is welcome to tempt and admit crossers or to turn them away as they wish. As a voter, you might like crossings or not, but they’re perfectly legitimate and well within the boundaries of the rules. You might prefer a crosser stand down instead of leaving their party and run in a by-election. That’s a fair preference given the terms on which members tend to be elected — voters tend to cast a ballot thinking of party affiliation or leader over the local candidate themselves.

As reasonable of an ask as that may be, whatever our intentions when voting, we return individuals to be parliamentarians. We should expect and want them to exercise their judgment. Indeed, for all the complaining we do about MPs being trained seals or nobodies or whatever, when one finally decides to think for themselves, we get awfully worked up awfully fast. This tension captures how voters tend to be torn between wanting their MP to be a representative exercising judgment but also a delegate responding to the preferences of the individual. The job cannot be captured as a binary, though. It’s often a little of each, here and there, which suggests that individual member judgment is in fact paramount.

In our system leaders dominate parliamentary life. The tendency isn’t new, but it’s been growing since the 1960s and has really gotten out of hand. Floor crossing allows individual members a bit of leverage against the all-powerful centre. This is the best defence of floor crossing. Ideally, it wouldn’t be necessary, since members could work through their issues within their party or, worst-case, leave it and sit as an independent. The latter choice would remove or at least limit any perception of quid-pro-quo or any sort of personal gain from leaving one’s party. Sounds nice. But given the central role parties play in our system, it would also limit the member’s capacity to get things done during their time in office as they face constrained resources and a hard limit on roles (e.g. committees). Moreover, what if the member comes to truly, madly, and deeply believe in the value of being a part of a different party?

The upshot of this conundrum is that there is no ideal outcome. Whether you support floor crossing as a rule (or in particular circumstances) in any form or whether you’d prefer a different set of standards or rules, each position reflects or emphasizes a different set of values, priorities, or concerns. Parties or individual members? Solidarity or independence? Discretion and judgment or a close, enduring, delegate-style commitment to the electors who sent you to Ottawa (forgetting, of course, all those electors who cast a ballot while thinking of another candidate or party).

All told, I support floor crossing, if somewhat weakly. Within the system we have, it allows individuals to exercise their judgment, an act which is all-too-often in short supply. Moreover, it allows those same members to have a bit more control over their leader and — perhaps more importantly — the office of the leader. It’s a pity that a crossing undermines the will of the electorate, at least to an extent, but that’s the trade-off. If voters don’t like it, and they often don’t, they can make their displeasure known at the next election. The system will survive to disappoint another day.

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I’ve been following the New Democratic Party leadership contest on and off — on when it’s interesting and off the rest of the time. It’s more interesting than you might think. The race doesn’t seem to be a coronation, there are strategic and ideological differences between the candidates, and everyone seems to be raising money. The fundraising numbers suggest that there’s more interest in the party than you might expect or have predicted a few months ago when so many people were writing off the orange side as a goner. By the end of March, the party will have a new leader and one hopes a new energy to bring to the House of Commons and, god help us, an early election if one should come to pass.

The NDP doesn’t have much time to lose as rumours of an early election creep across Ottawa like a metaphor in a TS Eliot poem. I don’t think an election is likely any time soon, but who knows. In the meantime, federal polls suggest a polarized electorate similar to the one we saw during the election last spring, with voters split between the Liberals and the Conservatives, with everyone else left behind in the dust. If the trends persist — and we have no idea whether they will — the Canadian party system could shift to a more thoroughly two-party system in which the third, fourth, or fifth parties wither and die in all but name. And maybe in name, too.

In some theories of our first-past-the-post system, this shift is what’s predicted to happen. Why, after all, would you have parties who can’t win in a system designed in such a way that suppresses them? Why wouldn’t the system tend towards two parties who compete to win? Oh, I’m so glad you asked!

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In Democracy’s Second Act: Why Politics Needs The Public, Peter MacLeod and Richard Johnson offer a frank and productive assessment of the state and future of how we govern ourselves — one that emphasises the we. The book is full of examples of how a greater role for the public in governance can revitalize self-government and keep it, and us, around and kicking for many years to come. It’s honest, but hopeful, blending theory and practice.

To save democracy, I spoke to the authors by Zoom.

David Moscrop

I’m going to start with an easy question. I’ll start with you, Peter: Is democracy dying or is it evolving. Or both?

Peter MacLeod

I think it depends where you look. Right now we see lots of morbid symptoms, and part of the reason we wrote the book is because we think the rumours of democracy’s demise are probably greatly exaggerated, but there’s no sticking with the status quo. And one of the things that we’ve learned from our work is that democracy can evolve if we think a little bit differently about the public and what they’re capable of.

Moscrop

Larry Diamond has written about a democratic deficit. There’s lots of writing about democratic decline. I think back to the First World War, a period during which there weren’t many democracies. When we have a long period of democratization after the Second World War. And then the decolonial period. And I think that’s induced in people this sense that democracy is inevitable. But I also think that leads to complacency. Are we being complacent?

MacLeod

We’re being completely complacent, but I think you’re right to acknowledge the slow pace of our democratic evolution. And because it evolves slowly and in fits and starts, it can seem as though the democracy we have today is the democracy we’ve always had. But you don’t have to look any further than Canada’s parliament and its bicameral legislature to note that we actually have two ideas of democratic legitimacy from two different eras baked into the same institutional structure. We have our Senate and we have our elected commons. I don’t think any of us can believe that this is the final state of what democracy can achieve. So we need to be thinking about different kinds of institutional reforms that follow the trajectory we’ve long been on, which means opening up more opportunities for voice, for agency and for participation in the work of democracy

Moscrop

Richard, you write about the two acts of democracy. The first one I think people will be more familiar with than the second. What are those they?

Richard Johnson

We talk about how democracy has been developing on the current trajectory that we think is inevitable. In the work that Peter and I have done over the last number of years, we were seeing something quite a bit different from what we ended up calling the first act: representative democracy, voting and elections, choosing those who represent us and trying to hold them to account. Obviously, the first act has offered up some great gains, certainly in the pursuit of universal suffrage, more equality, and understanding the importance of elections and shaping how we govern ourselves. But there was this other piece, this piece involving members of the public working together.

In our work, we see the second act when it comes to citizens assemblies, when it comes to public forums where people were given the chance, they were given a mandate, they were given time and space to learn together, and they were given a question to wrestle with, to weigh, and ultimately to produce something along the lines of policy recommendations for public consideration. This seemed to be a different state of being a democratic society than the traditional things we’ve come to know. The second act is this piece beyond elections. It’s more about engaging the public.

Moscrop

Speaking of, do we need elections?

Johnson

Well, that’s a fair question. And I know that some people in the democracy space wonder if we need elections if democracy is grinding itself into the ground by relying on the same old framework. But we came to look at it from another perspective, which is that obviously there are roles to play for public servants and for politicians. But at the same time, it feels like democracy needs a lot more of the public, a lot more of the selected people in its work rather than just the elected.

We’ve come to look at it as a bit of a ‘one needs the other’ in order to build back trust, in order to build back hope, and in order to actually do the work of governing. So, we didn’t quite move as far as saying we don’t need politicians, but we do need to hold them to better account, and we do need them to make space for the public and to think about governing in a completely different way.

Moscrop

Democracy’s second act is premised on deep public engagement. That asks a lot of people. It also assumes and requires capacities I think some people might doubt day-to-day citizens possess. Peter, you challenge that notion. Is the public equipped for what the second act asks of them?

MacLeod

Absolutely. But first I want to say that we absolutely need elections and we absolutely need elected representatives. But if you look at the long arc of our democratic evolution, the reality is that while we gave everyone the vote, we haven’t appreciably increased the number of people in our society who actually get to — I’m going to use some choice words here — enjoy the happy burden of representing others. We haven’t created appreciably more seats at the table where people get to do the work of trying to accommodate different viewpoints and translate that into political action. And yes, we can talk about public engagement in the second act, but really it’s about harnessing the public’s capacity for problem solving.

You’ll be well familiar with the line about the how the worst case for democracy is a 10-minute conversation with the average voter. And then William F. Buckley comes along and says, ‘Hey, I’d rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than the collective faculty of Harvard’.

Moscrop

Thinking of Harvard these days that sounds pretty prescient.

MacLeod

Well, these lines really exemplify the tension between a technocratic view and a populist view. And maybe predictably as Canadians looking at the question of democracy, we want to argue for a third way that increases the capacity of the public to play that role alongside experts and afford them the status to step into the role of representative. But in the day-to-day work of policy making, often our public-sector executives actually feel a bit alone without a way to connect into publics that they are trying to serve.

To your point about the Second World War, though, that was a period in which governments had to invest dramatically in upskilling their populations. It was a period that coincided with major investments in adult education, but a form of education that privileged the arts and sciences and critical thinking, the humanities in effect. We have stepped away from that, and that’s why we think about a second act agenda as fundamentally being about creating informed, productive and engaged publics. It’s not enough just to go asking more and more people for more and more ideas.

Moscrop

Can’t ChatGPT, just do it?

MacLeod

I think there are a lot of people who would like to hand this over to AI, and one of the alarming trends is public opinion researchers who think that by creating ever more sophisticated algorithms that they’re going to be able to put the public on a chip and take us even further out of the loop. And that is a dead end for democracy.

Moscrop

Richard, how do you scale up and institutionalize practices of democratic self-government? Because that work strikes me as more than a technical or organizational challenge. It’s also a political challenge because you’ve got to get politicians to do something they hate doing, which is give up power or control.

Johnson

Those are very practical and real barriers. Part of how we came to look at this issue was starting with trust and how people feel that they can’t trust government, they don’t trust their politicians, they don’t trust the system as they see it. And we obviously see this in the numbers and the research that many have done. We flipped that around based on what we were seeing, which is that it’s not just that people don’t trust their government, it’s the government doesn’t even fundamentally trust their own people.

Client management is what government is able to do: providing services, managing issues, weighing competing interests, serving, the majority, and moving on. But the trust piece is critical. We need our governments to demonstrate trust again, to put their money where their mouth is, to put it into practice and yield space. So, what it takes to scale this up and out and make it practical is sharing that this work creates opportunities not just for us to trust our government, but for our governments to trust us. That’s obviously going to take political capital, and it’s going to take financing. In the book, we argue for democratic action funds, where governments would set aside even just 5% of the cost of running an election and park that into a separate budget to fund some of these initiatives in a sustained way. That would then level up the opportunity to scale them, embed them, and build whole new institutions where they then can work.

Moscrop

Peter, can you offer examples of where these practices work currently?

MacLeod

To pick up on the point around control, part of the challenge is that politicians have to stop pretending they have half as much control as they do. What we’ve seen in jurisdictions like France and Belgium and Ireland where they have used citizens assemblies in a more institutionalized way is that they’re able to tackle topics that are apparently polarizing, to find durable consensus, and then translate that into a legislative mandate that isn’t undone by the next guy who takes the big chair. So, we have mechanisms that allow us to address topics that seemingly have been out of reach for conventional political management.

We talk about a number of ideas in the book for this. We talk about the use of service ballots, a second ballot that electors are given that allows governments to create a pool of volunteers it can call on in the space between elections to take up public appointments to serve on public committees, to attend public meetings, and to volunteer for local initiatives. We think service ballots are a great way to conjoin the idea of voting for a representative while also stepping forward yourself and taking responsibility to be a more engaged participant in local life.

We have also pointed to democratic action funds, which Richard has mentioned, because of course we need to institutionalize this work and that will require resources. We talk about full suffrage, that is eliminating the voting age and making sure democracy is a practice that anyone who feels ready to exercise their franchise is able to do so. We talk about the use of civic lotteries to break up the phenomenon of the usual suspects often being the ones who take the seat at the table when a seat gets set. All in all, we list about a dozen mechanisms that we see being used in different parts of the world that we think anticipate a lot of what democracy’s second act can include.

Moscrop

I want to close out on this question for each of you. Peter, I’ll stay with you and then I’ll give the final word to Richard. When you were finished writing this book, were you left more or less hopeful about the future of democracy in Canada and around the world?

MacLeod

I finished the book feeling clearer about the challenges that we face. I think democracies throughout history have been intensely susceptible to demagogues. That’s the warning from the ancients and throughout history. Subsequently, though, one of the big things we’ve been wrestling with in the course of the past 30 or 40 years has been the advent of a theory of public administration called new public management, born of — let’s give it credit for some worthy ideas — greater efficiency, greater accountability, and greater transparency in the provision of public services.

I’ve long thought that the problem was that new public management redefined citizens as clients. I’ve since come to believe that maybe the bigger problem is that it is focused on delivering things to people rather than actually working with people to create public goods and public value. And so it has codified the idea of the public as a recipient, as a beneficiary rather than as a partner. In the book, we point to examples of how we can unlock massive public value by redefining how we think about and work with the public. If we do that at scale, then many of the challenges we see in democracy today start to go away. But we can’t just look to the public sector to solve these problems. We also need a generation of political leaders who see the public differently and create political parties that aren’t there to cater to segments of the population, but that are there to work with that population for the benefit of all.

Moscrop

And you, Richard?

Johnson

The process of creating, writing and finishing this book left me feeling a lot more optimistic and hopeful. Being able to connect the work that’s been done with citizens assemblies, with the work that’s done by independent groups of people who sponsored Syrian refugees, with stories of what happened in Germany with Holocaust remembrance happening at community levels rather than the big national scale, produced a lot of optimism.

There are a lot of other stories like this in the book and by the end of it we were feeling like there is a thread that weaves through this. There is a faith in the public that is not just a blind faith, but a very practical and tangible one. And so in some ways, finishing the book was more than just a catharsis. It was a renewal of faith for us. That’s the energy we leave and hand over to our readers to ask, Do you agree? And we’ll see what they think.

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I don’t keep a list of prominent people who’ve said stupid things about the political concerns of the day because there aren’t enough reams of A4 or zeroes and ones in the galaxy. Likewise, I try not to dwell on those who for the last decade or so have defaulted to “That won’t/can’t happen” and dismissed those of us who’ve warned that the bad days were here as chicken littles. One can be forgiven for being in shock in 2016, but long before 2026, there were no excuses left. The United States had long before entered terminal decline, imperial decay at scale, led by an authoritarian and beyond the point at which those hallowed “institutions,” whatever they may be, would rise to the occasion.

We knew that Canada wouldn’t, couldn’t, be a passive observer at distance, spared from damage, collateral or direct. But humans are good at wishful thinking and self-delusion, especially those who have no understanding or appreciation of history. Still, that’s no excuse. America is a place where everything and anything that could happen had already happened, or nearly so. Violence, institutional decay, authoritarianism, and imperial folly might have clashed with the sanitized mythical conception of the country as the shining city on a hill, but only a rube could believe in such a fabrication in the first place.

That Trump won, eroded norms, shredded institutions (already in rough shape) tried to pull off a coup, won again, raised a force of brown shirts, declared trade war on the world, tore alliances apart, and threatened the sovereignty of a handful of states was just one after another of “Okay, well, surely no further” hopes dashed against the reality that things can and do go bad — very bad — all the time. The centre, whatever it may be, cannot hold and tends not to. If you read the stories that comprise human history for the past, say, two thousand years, nothing reads as surprising. Rooting your expectations in the decade of the 1990s is a bit like watching a single down of a football game and expecting to be able to predict the final score. It doesn’t work and it makes you look like an idiot.

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By now, we need to accept that whatever might be thinkable trumps whatever might be unthinkable, which is to say the latter category has lost all use, if not all meaning. Ahead of the holidays, I overheard a conversation in a bookstore in which those present discussed whether they’d sign up to fight in a war between Canada and the U.S. or accept conscription. One fellow was particularly keen in a fashion that I ought not to repeat here. Let’s just say he’d sign on the dotted line and scurry right off to the armoury. How many of those conversations are taking place, casually or otherwise, throughout the country right now? Probably a lot more than were in 2015 or, for that matter, 2020. What might 2026 hold? Not less of that, I’ll bet.

It’s a lot to wrap your head around, but the trick to wrapping your head around chaos at scale is not to become numb to it or so cynical that you merely wave it off. Each is a defence mechanism and understandable, even permissible, in small doses. But over time, these responses serve to normalise and thus enable atrocious and destructive behaviour. That what’s happening in the U.S. and elsewhere is extraordinary (for us today) is not cause for us to get used to it.

The first step is accepting that it is indeed happening and that it could continue to happen, not to mention that it could get worse. The next step is asking yourself what you’re going to do about it in whatever small, medium, or large way you can, perhaps beginning within your own community such as by modelling a better way to co-exist with others, standing for office yourself, joining or starting a movement, or whatever. Even saying true things out loud among others and calling for us to recognize such things without accepting them as inevitable or the “new normal” is something. For those who spent years dismissing or trying to explain away the very real threats we face, they might wish to make particular amends, accepting their complicity, failure, and betrayal and joining the rest of us in reality. Everyone loves a comeback story.

The long, dark days of winter might not be the most inviting time to think about all of this but here we are. How does one resist the rise of authoritarianism? How do we do so individually and collectively? What can we do at home? Across borders? What are our own expectations, duties, and red lines? These are the questions we must ask. We’re well beyond “if” or “what if” and thoroughly into the territory of “What now?”

So, what now?

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After an extended holiday break, I’m back to writing this newsletter next week. I’m making some long term changes after a few years of running this space, perhaps in concert with a career shift (more on that to come). As I prepare, I’d like your feedback on how best to deliver something valuable as the news media collapses alongside the global world order and we all prepare to scrap metal to fuel the resistance.

I believe good, smart, human writing is essential right now, but I’m not so convinced 600-800 word hot takes repeating what everyone else is saying delivers that. Do we need another hit on why Trump is bad? Some of us have been warning about him for ten years. (Others in Canadian and America media have been doing the opposite, which is worth remembering whenever they bless us with their thoughts). Do we need another warning that Canada should be preparing for the worst? (See above). Another round table with political insiders? (We have plenty of those staffed with very informed people.)

So, what do you think? Please any any or all of the questions below, and if you have a suggestion that doesn’t fit into the choices, feel free to comment or email me.

As always, thank you for reading and for your support.

QUESTION ONE

QUESTION TWO

QUESTION THREE

Thanks for your feedback. I’m looking forward to being back at the typewriter. As always, feel free to

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When journalists were embedded with military units during America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, critics worried that war coverage would tilt in favour of the Pentagon. Embedded journalists got extraordinary access to the war on the ground, but traded state-imposed constraints and the risk that proximity, especially amidst the heat of the battle, would result in the ink-stained wretches both literally and figuratively getting too close to the subjects they were covering. In sum, they wouldn’t be able to do their job.

If the critiques seemed a bit precious — proximity in this business isn’t a new phenomenon — they were nonetheless circling the problem, that this was an extreme form of access journalism with life or death stakes, and costs. The US military knew what it was doing. Keep your enemies close and your critics closer. Whether the strategy worked depends at least in part on your horizon of analysis. In the long run, the depraved and morally bankrupt nature of the second Iraq war was plain to see. Today, defenders of the folly are few and far between as scholars debate the body count, which numbers in the hundreds of thousands however you add up the tally.

In the post-9/11 years, criticizing the government was seen by many as a step along the road to treason, if not an immediate bursting through its door. Don’t you know, it’s wartime? The sentiment wasn’t new. During the First and Second World Wars, governments all over, including Canada and the United States, had censored coverage and clamped down on free expression and debate. Eugene Debs ran for president in 1912, garnered 6 percent of the popular vote, and by 1918 was jailed for speaking against the imperial quagmire that was the Great War. He wasn’t alone. Thousands more were prosecuted, fined, or jailed. At the same time, criticizing the government was seen by a segment of the citizenry as undermining the state and thus the community during a crisis.

If all this seems like a rather melodramatic lead up to my point, it is. But when citizens in a free society begin to oppose or resent criticism of the government, I get awfully nervous, as should each of us. Last week, I lost my patience and lamented — or whined — about the effects of criticizing Mark Carney’s Liberal government:

I know, oh woe is me and may a thousand tiny violins play you off stage and into the heavens, martyred one. No one is forced to subscribe to anyone, especially for money, and nor should they be. No one is forced to read or listen to any critique or perspective they wish to avoid. If people don’t want to read your work, it’s a you problem. But at scale, the tendency towards group-think, toxic partisan polarization, and in-group sycophancy is very much problem for us.

It would be tyrannical to force someone to confront views they’d rather not consider, especially if it costs them. But it is in their own and our collective interest that they at least give it a good faith effort, assuming the critic is doing the same. I perhaps flatter myself but I do try to offer as much as a fair critique. Yes, bad faith critiques are a different and annoying category, just as lies and hyperbole are insidious, but not every criticism is such, even if you feel as though it is, and the border between the two can be blurry.

If you’ll permit me to play the greatest hits, I’ll remind readers that the classic defence of free speech and liberty offered by the likes of J.S. Mill and others promises that the salutary effects of open utterances apply equally to the speaker and the listener. In a free society, being able to speak your mind and criticize whomever you please, especially the powerful. Such expression is essential to maintain that free society, press the case for how you believe it ought to operate, express your individuality, and so forth. For the listener, confronting views that conflict with your own offers you an opportunity to change your mind or to firm up what you already believe, all the while further underwriting your present and future rights to express yourself. You win in each and every case, all for the low, low cost of daring to think while being open to the possibility you might have something to learn.

Canada is facing atypical and grave threats to our economy and sovereignty, but no government is above criticism and the gravest moments are the most important to times offer it. Giving governments the benefit of the doubt, letting them off the hook, and stifling dissent during extraordinary times is dangerous because it undermines future free expression rights and capacities while letting the powerful skirt accountability in the meantime. That is not only wrong in and of itself, but also increases the likelihood that those in charge make bad or crooked decisions that exacerbate the crisis at hand.

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Government decisions tend to produce winners and losers, just as they tend to serve some and not others. Governments are the only entities with the power to legally lock you up. They’re make or break enterprises for tens of millions of us. The stakes are high. That means that even “good” or “well-meaning” or “reasonable choices” must always be subject to intense scrutiny, review, and, as needed, revision or revocation. In a democracy, when we are deciding things for the common interest and good, nothing is true or right or beautiful or necessary or anything else until it’s been through a process of public review and approval. That isn’t true for what you might have for lunch or which sweater you’re going to wear, but it is true for national trade policy, climate initiatives (or a lack thereof), and criminal justice reform.

If you doubt on principle the value of always-on critique, I invite you to imagine that your least-preferred (or most-hated) party is in power. To what standard would you like to hold them, their supporters, and critics? Lest you rush to claim “That’s different!” because they’re the baddies, I’d further remind you that to someone else, your preferred party may be least-desired option, the threat to truth and beauty and progress, or the Great Satan. Yes, different things are different and asserting a point isn’t the same as proving it, but the process by which we arrive at preferences and conclusions and make decisions that affect the public is politics, and politics relies on free and frank speech and criticism.

One of the dangers of the social media era and sites like Substack is that writers or podcasters or others who rely on attention and clicks and subscriptions will pander to their audience, give them only what they want, and refuse to offer them a perspective or argument or criticism that won’t align with their prior beliefs or preferences. Who wants their numbers to go down?

This practice is corrosive to democracy, the public good, and the intelligence of each and every free thinking human being with a device, internet connection, and five minutes to kill. It’s offensive and infantilizing. Accordingly, wartime or not, literally or figuratively, we ought to embrace criticism and disagreement, engage with it, and continue to assert not only our right to critique the powerful, but our duty. In these pages, that will remain my goal. I hope you’ll continue to join me.

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Canada is a tough country to govern. It’s a cliché, but it’s worth recalling it from time to time. You’ve got to be at least a little nuts to try to run this place. You’ve got to be tinged with hubris and a distinct lack of self-awareness. You’ve also got to be willing to be branded in your own time, and perhaps by history, as an utter scoundrel of national proportions. Governing Canada is like trying to pass the Kobayashi Maru training test. The question isn’t whether you’re going to fail, but how. If you’re going to succeed at all, however, you’ve got to be able to do politics. That starts with managing the complexities of the country.

Way up the list of things that make Canada a nightmare to run is federalism. Not only does a prime minister have to negotiate relationships with Parliament (their caucus, opposition caucuses, the Senate), the judiciary, interest groups, social movements, Indigenous nations, foreign states, and the preferences and prejudices and expectations of individual voters, they must also sort out how to deal with sub-national units within the federation. You can’t manage in the style a chief executive officer would a company. You shouldn’t even try.

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If you’re looking to find a political party, movement, or ideology into which you’ll fit like a piece of tailored clothing, good luck. The variability and complexity of human perspectives, experiences, preferences, and interests are too great to offer complete agreement. Even if you could try to smooth over disagreement in an attempt to enforce a lasting consensus, the would be stultifying, even totalitarian. But nonetheless, there are better and worse fits. And for a lot of leftists right now — and even some centrists — finding a welcome political home can be tricky.

Earlier this week, I joined Personalist Manifesto for a podcast special episode, Mutant Socialists Assemble! to talk about finding — or making — a home on the left, what that might look like, and what trade-offs it would involve. There’s a link to the episode below, a few paragraphs down.

I think trade-offs are healthy, just as a I think disagreement and tension and struggle are essential elements of politics, even when we might broadly agree on some policy or good or course of action. Thinking of classic defences of free speech, such as those offered by J.S. Mill and others, we can say that disagreement, both offering it to and accepting it from others, can help us to come away with a clearer and stronger sense of what we believe and why. It can also encourage us to change our mind when presented with valid reasons to do so.

In the era of digital media, it’s particularly tricky to disagree in productive ways. I don’t mean to say that everyone should adopt civility politics for its own sake. Disagreement can be prickly. That’s fine. But political discourse strategically designed to engage for the sake of engagement, often relying on strategies of inducing negative emotional responses and negative polarization, aren’t likely to help anyone refine anything. Indeed, they’re often designed to keep eyeballs glued to platforms to drive ad revenue or else they’re not designed at all, they’re mere expressions of aggression, frustration, or anger masquerading as “doing politics.” Some of it is strategic and inorganic, farmed from domestic or international actors pursuing their own goals. None of this is productive and in the long run it’s a recipe for institutional and democratic decline and collapse, with a high probability that what replaces those institutions and the democratic polity will be far worse.

I hope you’ll take some time to listen to this episode, which you can catch anywhere you get podcasts, including through the link just below. It’s a fun and, I hope, informative conversation. I enjoyed taking part in it and I think you’ll enjoy listening to it.

Personalist Manifesto(s)

Mutant Socialists Assemble!

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5 months ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Personalist Manifesto(s) and David Moscrop

Thanks for your support! Oh, and please do feel free to…

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When I let myself dream, and I mean really dream, I imagine a world in which we could discuss public policy in a vacuum, a space free from – nay, beyond – politics. But we can’t. The how, why, and “who whom” of politics is part and parcel of policy discussions because these questions inform and reflect the power dynamics that yield some policies and not others; they’re the same considerations that decide who gets to make policy in the first place. Trying to imagine a modern polity with the privilege of forgoing strategic political concerns is like trying to imagine a square that isn’t a quadrilateral with four equal sides. You can’t do it. The possibilities and impossibilities are baked in by definition.

The federal budget vote earlier this week suggests a political landscape set to be dominated by Prime Minister Mark Carney and the Liberal Party, at least for the time being. That’s the lay of the land. The budget vote passed 170-168, with the Conservative Party and the New Democrats voting against the government, save for two abstentions each. The Bloc Québécois voted against, too, and Elizabeth May (and therefore the Greens) voted in favour.

It looked to be a close vote, but it wasn’t. If the Liberals had two fewer caucus members, a handful more members of Parliament from the opposition Conservatives or New Democrats would have abstained from the vote – whether due to a nasty cold, a technical problem with the voting app, or because someone got lost on the way to West Block. Neither the NDP nor the Conservatives wants or is able to fight an election right now, and the Liberals know it. The fact that each of them ensured two of their MPs abstained proves as much.

The orchestration of a close vote was a show, a pantomime, so that the opposition parties, save for perhaps the Bloc, could at once be opposed to the budget but not trigger an election. Don Davies, interim leader of the NDP, said as much, when he told As It Happens host Nil Köksal, “We made the fundamental decision that we cannot support this budget because it just doesn’t meet the moment, and in our view, respond to the urgent needs facing Canadians,” adding that because of “instability and overlapping crises” his party has decided it’s not time to head to the polls. That the NDP is broke, understaffed, and leaderless might count as one of those crises.

Ahead of the vote, the NDP tried to extract concessions from Carney. As the Toronto Star reports (in a great scoop), Davies and his party sought $10 billion in new revenue. That money was to come from a reduction in a planned boost to military spending and it was to be redirected to affordable housing, pharmacare, and other NDP priorities. No luck, alas. Davies was, as the Star puts it, “rebuffed ahead of Monday’s crucial budget vote.”

For their part, the Conservatives didn’t get the top items on their wish list, including a smaller deficit and an end to the industrial carbon price. But the government is spending big on the military and national projects, and it looks like an end to the oil and gas emissions cap is coming along with a possible Alberta-B.C. oil pipeline. All things considered, the last few weeks in federal politics and the next few months could be, let’s say, plausibly purple – just the way Carney intends it.

As things stand, the Liberals are the “who” in “who whom,” the agents acting upon the political world while the opposition parties meander along. The leaderless NDP and the Conservatives with their embattled boss can talk a big game, but the former risk becoming a doorstop in this parliament while the latter verge on redundant.

The opposition parties may still do their duty holding the government to account, raising questions, pushing for investigations as necessary, and studying legislation closely at committee if they’re so inclined. They could be obstructionist for the sake of it. They could mix the two. My guess is a mix.

For now, however, the Liberals know that neither the NDP nor the Conservatives have the appetite for an election, as the budget vote confirms. The political dynamic could change in the coming months, but it may be as likely as not that it will shift in favour of the governing side. If we end up in an election this spring or next fall, it may be an election triggered by the government itself.

Carney, however, a man prone to peremptory behaviour, is playing a risky game. Refusing to bargain or cooperate with opposition parties, proceeding as if he and he alone, the oracle, knows and sees best, may work when you have leverage, in the short run, but it also induces the opposition to be extra obstinate — and vicious. As Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet said of the Liberals, they were not “good partners” in the budget process, behaving in a way that will return to “bite their ass.” Indeed it may. But for now the House of Commons is thoroughly the government’s home.

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If you’re thinking of placing a bet on a trade deal between Canada and the United States, don’t. Predicting the outcome of bargaining with Donald Trump is like trying to guess the output of a random number generator, if the random number generator were also demented.

Canadians care about a deal with the US, at least as part of a broader concern about tariffs and Canada-US relations. It’s hard not to care. While Prime Minister Mark Carney and his ministry are trying to simultaneously diversify the country’s trade relationships and build more coherent and cohesive internal trade practices, the Yankees remain the top foreign destination for goods and services to the tune of roughly a trillion dollars each year. And you know what they say, a trillion here, a trillion there, and soon you’re talking about real money.

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We’re still several weeks out from the close of 2025, but I think it’s safe to say 2025 was…a whole thing. I could do a round-up of the news, but I think right now most of us prefer to…run away from the news. I think that’s healthy. Because 2026? I’m assuming it’s going to be another whole thing. As these whole things unfold, I tend to take refuge in books. I’m willing to bet some of you do, too.

Sharing reads I enjoy is truly a pleasure for me. I hope reading about them is a pleasure for you. In the spirit of that hope, for the year-end, here are half a dozen books I’ve loved reading this year. Not all of them are new, but some are. As in the past, I’ve reviewed some of these books or interviewed their author. In those instances, as always, I’ve linked to the review or interview.

Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History by Moudhy Al-Rashid (non-fiction)

I reviewed this one for the Globe and Mail and the headline called it “a tour of ancient refuse and relics.” That’s a perfect encapsulation of the book, which is a brilliant history of Mesopotamia told through a tour of the world’s first “museum” (there’s more to say on the use of the word “museum” here, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise).

Al-Rashid’s history is all the things an accessible mass market history book should be: thorough, fascinating, quirky, and not a word too long. Object by object, she takes you on a trip back to the fertile crescent of humanity’s forebears. I swapped back and forth between reading the physical book and listening to the audiobook, which she reads. I recommend either or both. If you’re after an edifying, entertaining, and thoroughly human series of stories, add this book to your list.

Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus (non-fiction)

If you want to understand the contemporary United States, you need to understand the life, times, and project of the late conservative writer and movement leader William F. Buckley. With Buckley, Sam Tanenhaus has written a comprehensive account of Buckley’s life and work, a thorough and even telling of the man and his mission. It reads like a biography by Robert Caro, which is perhaps the highest compliment one can pay a biographer. The work of decades, Tanenhaus turned every page.

The most remarkable thing about the book — which…isn’t short, coming in at 1040 pages including notes — is Tanenhaus’s even keel assessments of Buckley and those in his orbit. He’s sympathetic to Buckley, and he understands his undertakings, but he never strays into defences or excuses for the National Review founder’s sins and shortcomings. The book is a commitment for a reader, but one worth making.

Trigger Mortis by Anthony Horowitz (fiction)

Last year, I closed the calendar by recommending Double or Nothing by Kim Sherwood, a new-ish series reviving both James Bond and introducing a cast of MI6 characters around whom the bulk of the stories revolve. It’s a great series. Before it came Anthony Horowitz’s Bond trilogy, including Trigger Mortis, set in the 1950s amidst the space race and Cold War intrigue. Though written in 2015, it’s thoroughly reminiscent of Ian Fleming’s Bond, though updated, for the most part, to meet contemporary sensibilities. It is…a welcome update, to say the least.

Also welcome is a brilliant pacing, Grand Prix racing, and rockets. But, honestly, Horowitz had me at the title — and the brilliant cover, which appears above but which I’ve also posted below because it’s so damned cool.

The Mind Mappers: Friendship, Betrayal, and the Obsessive Quest to Chart the Brain by Eric Andrew-Gee (non-fiction)

From the first pages of The Mind Mappers, I felt the tug of pathos. The story of neuroscientists and surgeons Wilder Penfield and William Cone, the book is in parts biography, history, and a study of complex personalities — and psychologies. It documents how a complicated relationship between two men shaped so much of brain science in the last century.

In my review of the book for the Globe, I wrote

This book is remarkable because it tells several stories in parallel, each of which intersects and enlivens the rest without any seeming superfluous, including histories in miniature of brain science, Canada, Quebec, Montreal, and McGill University throughout the early-to-mid 20th century. Mind Mappers is first and foremost, however, two stories. One is the mapping of the brain during an exciting and often gruesome era of discovery. The other is the relationship between Penfield and Cone, one heavy with pathos in its biographical details and the author’s own capacity for insight and compassion.

Months later, I still think about this book and the tragic story of Cone, above all, but also Penfield and the times in which both advanced medical science by leaps and bounds, extraordinary breakthroughs that came at extraordinary costs. This book will make many best of the year lists, and it deserves to.

Interviews With History and Conversations with Power by Oriana Fallaci (non-fiction)

Oriana Fallaci is at best a figure of mixed repute. Her writing on Islam is quite reasonably criticized and condemned. Before that, however, her interviews with figures including Robert F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Golda Meir, Willy Brandt, Yasir Arafat, and Muahamar Gaddafi made her a legend. These interviews and more are collected in Interviews With History and Conversations with Power, and they show an interviewer at the height of her powers, conducting courageous, well-informed conversations with powerful figures who shaped the world and its events.

The book doubles as a history of the last century and a guide to interviewing — a style at times subtle, at other times direct, and always honest. Typically poignant. A conversation, yes, but also a game of cat and mouse. Thorough without much, perhaps nothing, wasted. It’s such a cliché, and I hope you’ll forgive me for relying on it, but we could use such skill right now.

Written On the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay (fiction)

You’ll be shocked, I’m sure, to learn that I reviewed Written On the Dark for the Globe and Mail. And I loved the novel. Guy Gavriel Kay is a legend, an iconic fantasy writer, and for good reason. He writes stories rich with historical allusions, literature that is at once compelling, entertaining, and edifying. His latest novel is the story of a tavern poet at the centre of a murder mystery, and high-power machinations set in a recognizable, if fictionalized, medieval France.

Reading Kay, I am often reminded of the Greeks, who knew tragedy and irony and comedy in ways we struggle to reach today, but to which we can scramble our way, if we try. The trying is worth it. If the effort is enjoyable, all the better. Written On the Dark is a blast to read, a pleasure. You can give it a surface read and enjoy a page-turner, or you choose to read more carefully, more deeply, and take more from it. Either way, it’s time well spent — especially if that time is passed in a cozy corner on a snowy afternoon or evening.

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It’s raining in Ottawa and it’s cold. It’s not a great time to play chicken with the future of the country, but here we are. The budget is next week and rumblings in the press suggest the government could fall over it. The opposition parties are weighing their options. Everybody is making demands, but there’s no ideal world, no theodicy, in which all the pressures and tensions and inconsistencies may be resolved — lower and higher taxes, more and less social program spending, government intervention to address the climate crisis and government abdication from that role. In short, something’s gotta give. So far, no one seems to want to be a giver.

The parties, or a sufficient number of them, may bargain down to their lowest reasonable offers and counter-offers and reach accord, or not. It could be a close call. The Liberals are just shy of a majority in the House of Commons, so close that mere months ago the proclamations in the press assured us Mark Carney had a working or functional or de facto majority. Now, we’re all hoping enough MPs get leave to fake a cold (there’s always something going around), miss the vote, and forgo a winter election in the cold and the dark, and amidst economic assaults from the global hegemon, who just happens to be our neighbour and top trading partner.

Fred Delorey, who knows plenty about political manoeuvring and party machinations, writes that we are indeed heading for an election. He makes a compelling case, particularly regarding the New Democratic Party, which is in the middle of a leadership election. He argues the party could gain seats in an election given their strong ground game and, at the very least, they would get to reset. He thinks the Liberals would stand a chance at winning the framing war over what the election is about, and who caused it. Is that a majority they see over the snowbanks? The Conservatives can’t possibly vote for this budget and expect to remain a government in waiting. The Greens — one seat — are out over fossil fuel subsidies. The Bloc, meanwhile, is making big demands around old age security of the sort the Liberals can’t possibly meet.

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