Avi Lewis is the new leader of Canada’s NDP. I have not been particularly keen on the NDP for some time and I am waiting to see what Lewis is able to do, but I was cheered by his defence of public ownership. His quick rebuttal of the need for public services to make profits and his refusal to entertain “advice” from Thomas Mulcair bode well.
Avi Lewis is, in some respects, the NDP’s Justin Trudeau. Lewis comes from a long line of democratic socialists. His mother wrote for the Toronto Star before the paper was bought by conservatives. His father was leader of the Ontario NDP and a diplomat. His grandfather was the leader of the federal NDP. In sum, Avi Lewis is an orange princeling even if he is best known to foreigners as Naomi Klein’s husband.
The NDP belatedly condemned the genocide in Gaza and is the only major-ish to officially oppose the genocide and the war on Iran (the party currently does not have official party status in the House of Commons). These positions and a strong argument for investment in public infrastructure, particularly against the backdrop of Carney’s blue Liberal conservatism and Poilievre’s small-mindedness, do have a constituency in Canada.
Canada is a very provincial place and most Canadians are not familiar with places outside the United States and the Caribbean. They have no idea how far behind the country is. There is little understanding of what others have already accomplished while we dithered and did nothing. Canadians are cheap and many of our politicians encourage our stinginess. They dole out tax cuts to the rich and tell us that the country cannot afford nice things. If Avi Lewis can convince Canadians otherwise, our lives might actually improve, which is an entirely fantastical idea at the moment.
Pierre Poilievre is trying to make sure that things do not improve. He has come out against Carney’s very modest project of building very limited high-speed rail in Ontario and Quebec. He says he will cancel the project should his Conservatives get elected before the project gets built.
The backdrop to Poilievre’s threat is that Canada has been talking about and studying the possibility of building high-speed rail for longer than I have been alive. We have so far built nothing.
It is telling that when high-speed rail is discussed in Canada, the media invariably mention such systems in Europe, particularly France, and China. When I was young, the same stories cited France and Japan. The average Canadian is probably unaware that countries they would look their nose down at, such as Morocco and Laos, already have high-speed rail.
More than thirty years of privatization, tax cuts and lack of public investment have left Canada in very bad shape. How do we turn things around? Can we ever make improvements again or is the decline terminal? One thing is for sure: we cannot address our problems until we admit they exist.
Canadians suffer from second hand delusions of grandeur inculcated in us by our proximity to the United States and the American empire. There are still those in this country who use the term “G7 country” unironically, as if being America’s wingman in a group of declining powers is something to brag about. The decline of the American empire poses both an existential danger to Canada – because an empire in decline is apt to attack its neighbours – and a threat to how Canadians view themselves as their standard of living continues to decline.
Will we muster the courage to see the situation as it is? Will we follow the example of our imperial rulers and exhaust ourselves by shadowboxing? Will we blame immigrants and refugees for our circumstances? These questions are particularly troubling in light of the fast-approaching oil shock caused by the illegal war on Iran that both Carney and Poilievre have done their part to cheer on.
In the speech that Poilievre made attacking the proposed high-speed rail line, he sketched out an exceedingly small and mundane vision for Canada. Indeed, vision is too highfalutin a word to describe what Poilievre thinks Canadians deserve: food, a house, an internal combustion engine car or truck, plentiful gasoline, a mortgage and a job. Under Poilievre, Canadians can aspire to nothing except the delusion that we can continue to live in a simulacrum of 1985.
For Poilievre, there are no possible solutions to the problems of the 21st century because solutions cost money. Instead, he invites us to wish away the floods, fires, storms, droughts and other calamities that we will inevitably face.