It’s hardly a new development that the Liberal Party is accusing the Conservatives of importing “far-right American-style politics” to Canada. But one gets the sense the accusations have ramped up. Comparing Pierre Poilievre to Donald Trump, calling him a “puppet of the American right” and asserting that Canadian Conservatives are captive to Republican thinking has been central to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party’s key political message in recent months.

As evidence, they cite Poilievre’s vote against an updated free-trade agreement with Ukraine that codified the idea of carbon pricing, his support for single-sex spaces for women, and the Conservatives’ use of filibusters and marathon voting in the House of Commons.

Yet, despite this preaching around the Conservatives’ supposed adoption of American political ideas and tactics, there’s a persuasive case that the opposite is true: that the Liberal Party itself has greatly contributed to the “Americanization” of Canada. One can point to its importation of divisive identity-driven left-wing American-style talking points and politics, as well as its use of Democratic Party machinery and electioneering techniques as evidence.

The Liberals’ obsession with the United States

This Sunday, the Canadian Press reported on the Liberals borrowing the “weird” label that the Democrats have been using against former president Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance in their latest attack against Pierre Poilievre.

However, this is just the tip of the Americanization iceberg when it comes to their preoccupation with the Democratic Party, the United States, and its politics.

Liberals have a habit of copying Democrat messaging, often in a desperate attempt to catch part of a progressive wave of support below the 48th parallel. Just last week, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault published an X post referencing the viral “Kamala (Harris) IS brat” meme.

The practice has been around for a while. In 2020, the Trudeau government used then-candidate Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” slogan for its own pandemic recovery strategy.

But, the party doesn’t just borrow rhetoric—they also take advice and tactics.

Appearances by prominent American Democrats have become a staple at Liberal Party conventions. Their most recent gathering featured multiple American speakers, including former Democrat Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In 2018, they held a talk featuring senior Obama strategist David Axelrod. In 2016, they heard from campaign strategists for both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. And let’s not forget that they hired Democrat political strategist Jennifer O’Malley Dillon to help with their 2015 campaign.

Prime Minister Trudeau also has a history of commenting on U.S. domestic events. He’s commented on the death of George Floyd multiple times, often using his tragic death to call Canada systematically racist.

“In the US today, we saw accountability for the murder of George Floyd. But make no mistake, systemic racism and anti-Black racism still exist. And they exist in Canada, too. Our work must and will continue,” he posted on X following the conviction of officer Derek Chauvin.

Using American issues as wedges

More consequential than copying American political messaging or platforming Americans at their conventions has been the Liberals’ use of American events, protest movements, and culture wars for political gain on Canadian soil.

Following the February 2018 Parkland mass shooting in Florida, which ignited the March for Our Lives movement for more gun control in the United States, the Trudeau government introduced new gun control measures in Canada, including enhanced background checks. The prime minister then pledged to ban “military-style assault rifles,” a key demand of the American March for Our Lives protesters, in his 2019 re-election platform. In 2022, he announced a freeze of handgun sales after the Uvalde, Texas mass shooting, invoking the American tragedy as a reason for his freeze.

“We need only look south of the border to know that if we do not take action, firmly and rapidly, it gets worse and worse and more difficult to counter,” said Prime Minister Trudeau at the time.

In the process, the Liberal Party went after Conservatives and opponents of these gun policies using rhetoric similar to that of American Democrats. Trudeau claimed Conservatives are in step with an “American gun lobby” that “wants to put assault weapons back on our streets and in our communities,” while his party claimed that Canadians will be at greater risk of gun violence if Conservatives were elected.

But, the gun situation in Canada differs significantly from the U.S. In 2017, the year before Trudeau began his push for stricter guns laws, Canada had 267 gun homicides (0.72 per 100,000 people) while the United States had 14,542 (4.5 per 100,000 people). In 2021, the year before the government introduced its handgun freeze, Canada had 299 gun homicides (0.78 per 100,000 people) compared to 20,958 in the United States (6.7 per 100,000 people).

Some will say that 299 gun murders are too many, and that, therefore, more gun control is needed. However, Canada’s gun laws are objectively strict, most gun violence in Canada involves illegal firearms, and we are far less prone to mass shootings.

A report by Statistics Canada titled “Firearms and violent crime in Canada, 2022” found only 13 percent of handgun and 12 percent of rifle and shotgun homicides in Canada were committed by legal gun owners. Meanwhile, data shows that 77 percent of U.S. mass shootings between 1966 and 2019 were committed with legally acquired guns.

Rather than addressing gun violence in a Canadian context, the Liberals have framed the debate in American terms, something they see as politically advantageous.

The Liberal Party has also consistently imported the American abortion debate.

The abortion situation in Canada is far different from that in the United States. Since the 1988 R v. Morgentaler decision, Canada has had no abortion laws, and no major parties have proposed banning abortion in recent memory.

The Liberals adopted the American Left’s stance on abortion, supporting unrestricted access to abortion, even in instances of late-term and sex-selective abortions, and calling those who disagree anti-women. Pro-life candidates have been effectively banned from running for the Liberal Party since Trudeau took over.

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the country’s landmark Roe v. Wade abortion ruling, the Liberals seized the opportunity. Trudeau and several of his ministers chastised America’s top court. Ahead of the ruling, when the opinion was leaked, they invited American women to Canada for abortions and also announced $3.5 million in new funding for abortion-related services in Canada.

While boasting about how “pro-choice” they are, the Liberals have repeatedly falsely claimed that Conservatives want to ban abortion in Canada.

Among other things, they’ve cited the fact that the Conservative caucus has pro-life MPs, and that some of those MPs have pushed pro-life petitions and attended pro-life rallies.

However, the Conservative Party’s policy declaration states that “a Conservative Government will not support any legislation to regulate abortion,” and Poilievre has explicitly said he will not touch abortion.

Speaking to The Hub, Canadian-raised professor of politics at the University of Buckingham Eric Kaufmann said, “It is a common misperception that ‘culture wars’ are something only the Right does.”

He noted that the Trudeau-led Liberal Party is pushing what he calls “woke cultural socialism,” an ideology that “emerged from American progressive elite circles” and that has gone on to “stoke the cultural division upon which political polarization rests.”

“Trudeau has consistently signalled his support for this agenda, whether by centering race, gender, and sexuality on social media or in the press,” added Kaufmann.

The consequences of Americanization

The Americanization of our politics has not come without consequences.

A 2023 report entitled “Top Risks” by the Eurasia Group, a geopolitical risk firm, warned about growing American-style polarization in Canada, or what it described as a “contagion from the divided republic to the south.” It highlighted that deepening divides “will add to growing political instability on the continent,” and that “Canada’s combative partisan and regional politics are poised to take a turn for the worse.”

“Canada and the US are growing closer, but it’s less about alignment between Ottawa and Washington than cross-border alliances between sub-national governments and politicians of the same political stripe,” it explained. “In Ottawa, inflammatory attacks on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of the Liberal Party will be met by attempts to paint the Conservative opposition as a Canadian version of Trumpism. Both are overegged…but will gain traction.”

Data from a Pew Research survey found a 22 percent increase in conflicts between Canadians who supported different political parties from the year before—44 percent in 2021 to 66 percent in 2022.

Another poll saw 40 percent of respondents say they reduced interactions with friends or loved ones they know over politics. Respondents also said that the 2021 election—which featured a Liberal Party campaign strategy to import what could be argued were primarily American culture war debates over COVID-19—was among the most divisive issues of that year.

A 2023 report by the Public Policy Forum noted that 44 percent of young adults believe Canada’s political stability is at least moderately threatened by political division. Nearly 40 percent said they believed that division will get worse. Out of the most polarizing issues, they cited COVID, vaccines, and public health policies; gender and sexual identity; ethnicity, race and racism; and the role of government—all issues the Liberals have used as wedges.

Kauffmann believes, “There is no question that Trudeau’s Liberals, by mainstreaming American woke cultural socialism, have driven polarization in Canadian politics.”

“Americanization in the Canadian context refers to Trudeau’s adoption of U.S. woke cultural socialism, stimulating a rising reaction to left-liberal extremism,” he said. “By contrast, in the U.S., we have witnessed a mutually recursive radicalization process.”

It’s important to note that not all the responsibility for this deepening polarization falls on the shoulders of Prime Minister Trudeau and the Liberal Party. Experts have cited other factors, including an array of right-wing actors and narratives. But, it would be dishonest to say that the governing Liberals do not bear considerable responsibility.

Canada is not the United States. While we share some commonalities, we also share significant differences, differences that we should be proud of.

The Americanization of our politics has not been good. The time has come to deport America’s divisive and polarizing identity politics and to embrace unity and a nuance-driven Canadian way of doing things. That starts with Trudeau and the Liberals getting over their obsession with American politics.

This week, the federal Conservative and New Democratic Parties of Canada are demanding a parliamentary probe into how a man alleged to have dismembered a person with a sword on behalf of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) on foreign soil in 2015 was subsequently granted Canadian citizenship.

It’s a good question, even more pressing because the man in focus, Ahmed Fouad Mostafa Eldidi, 62, and his son, Mostafa, 26, went on to be arrested north of Toronto last week on six criminal charges related to plotting a terrorist attack, again at the alleged service of ISIS, but this time on Canadian soil.

The answer, however, is likely to be the by-now familiar and relatively straightforward matter of the failure of key Canadian security institutions to adequately share information and move it up their chains of command once in hand. Therefore, too narrow a focus for a truly useful review.

True to form on addressing matters of national security and the nefarious dealings of hostile foreign states and other entities, the Trudeau government is making matters worse by attempting to soft-shoe the issue aside. Per usual, Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc has referred the matter to the RCMP and promised a review of Canada’s screening practices. Going quiet behind the police instead of levelling with Canadians on some of the real issues in play likely has to do with the government’s panicked inkling of the depth of long-overlooked terror problems that are merely personified in the single instance of the elder Eldidi.

First, it is obvious to say that Canada’s immigration screening system is utterly inadequate. Eldidi’s alleged actions in hacking off the hands and feet of a prisoner accused by ISIS of being a spy were captured on a video released in June 2015 by Dijlah State, a subsect of ISIS in western Iraq. Such publicly-circulated ISIS propaganda videos are thankfully rare enough that it can be safely assumed that each of the main security and intelligence agencies of the Five Eyes alliance—including Canada’s CSIS—would have personally watched it.

Each of the Five Eyes lead intelligence agencies would have then taken steps to identify the visible face of the attacker and share this information with both allies and their domestic law enforcement, immigration, and border security agencies.

In this case, one of these agencies in the Canadian chain clearly dropped the ball. It is the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) that makes the call on whom to admit at our border. The Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) body handles credentials. Both do their work through close cooperation with CSIS and the RCMP. Either CSIS failed to pick up on the video making the international rounds and did not manage to circulate this information to the CBSA, IRCC, and the RCMP—or the CBSA and the IRCC failed to make use of it.

Communication between and up the chain of these security bodies is by now a publicly well-known weakness in the wake of their botched efforts to manage the freedom convoy in the winter of 2022 and more recent revelations of foreign interference in Canada’s political processes. Therefore, little news about the failings of this system is likely to be revealed through a probe narrowly focused on Canada’s screening practices.

Don’t forget about ISIS just yet

The nature and threats of terror activity writ large to the safety of Canadians is a far more urgent matter for an inquiry. While ISIS has been widely assumed to be a spent paramilitary force, it is indeed still amongst us. This is true in terms of foreign-born individuals, like Eldidi, who are allegedly directly recruited and engaged in their services overseas. Not only do we face the challenge of keeping foreign terrorists out of Canada, but we also have the ongoing—and arguably larger—problem of repatriating Canadian citizens who have left the country for the purpose of joining ISIS’ (and other terror groups’) cause abroad. Recent cases of such “Canadian Extremist Travellers” would indicate their numbers to be in the low hundreds, likely up slightly to match pace with escalating conflicts in the Middle East, since the last official count by Public Safety Canada in 2017.

Compounding this problem is the capacity of ISIS to recruit new members and inspire service through social media mis- and disinformation campaigns. For every Eldidi, there are likely dozens more lone wolf individuals already in Canada slipping down the dark rabbit hole of ISIS propaganda that swirls online. Look no further than the group of Western teenagers who just recently conspired to turn a Taylor Swift concert in Austria into a vehicular homicide and explosives rampage.

Far from on the wane, ISIS carries on in Canadian society as a decentralized ideology vocalized by a handful of influential “weathermakers” running stochastic terror campaigns in cyberspace: forever repeating hateful messaging and violent instruction until, inevitably, some number of lone wolves are worn down enough to do their bidding. There is nothing unique about ISIS in this regard. Violent extremist groups associated with Islamic fundamentalism are joined by ideological, political, and religious groups across the spectrum in promoting their projects to susceptible minds across the internet. This wide range of terror motivations is being met by a Canadian system meant to prosecute, deradicalize, and reintegrate, which is simply not up to the task.

Deradicalization is an intensive and bespoke process that must be tailored to the needs of the individual in question. Simply stated, there will be no one-size-fits-all intervention or counselling program to lead wildly different radicalized groups back from the path of violence—and waiting to address a growing problem will only add to its tremendous expense. Apart from common roots in isolation, the pathways people take to different violent ideologies are formed by biographical events and accidents. Undoing such pathways is often just as personal.

Far more useful than focusing on border screening lapses in isolation would be a diagnosis of Canada’s capacity to identify and intervene in cases where groups are edging towards violence before it’s too late. With an eye on generational progress, educating young people about stochastic terrorism and its dynamics in cyberspace through school-based programs will be essential.

The Liberal government’s latest efforts to downplay another national security issue contribute to the inevitability of violent attacks from within Canadian borders and beyond them.