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Christopher Snook: Can we talk about this? Why Canadian politics needs more debate, not less

Commentary

A demonstrator yells into a megaphone during a clash of rallies in Vancouver, B.C., Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2023. Ethan Cairns/The Canadian Press.

It was an early 20th-century commonplace that “what is under works up.” This was true of Freudian psychoanalysis, which presaged our commonplace assumption that the repressed finds one way or another to return. It was also true of the period’s literature (think of T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf) which explores the difficult and pervasive presence of the past. As William Faulkner famously notes: “The past is not dead. It is not even past.”

These old intellectual insights are worth bearing in mind in the modern age of populist politics. As Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde notes, populism is in part a political movement dedicated to “repoliticizing” issues that political elites have sought to depoliticize. Whether these are issues of the Left or Right, from strong support for much higher taxes on corporations and high-income earners to the critical mass of Canadians with misgivings about the country’s immigration policy, the point is that views that are left unacknowledged rarely go away. The repressed returns, sometimes in the form of highly combustible populist politics. The political conversations we don’t have, then, are nearly as important as the ones that we do.

Perhaps the most depoliticized issue in Canada is abortion. This was evident in the initial Canadian media response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. The legacy media’s coverage of the decision was both predictable and notable for the consistent absence of an otherwise fundamental virtue of the journalist’s profession: curiosity.

The decades-long Canadian consensus on abortion has been, effectively, that its public discussion is impolitic at best, redneck and ruffian at worst. Deferral to bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom are knee-jerk cultural responses whenever abortion or abortion-adjacent issues arise. Though the media spotlight periodically shines on a social conservative, no federal party is seriously considering any sustained reflection on abortion in Canada. This is not entirely without cause—70 percent of Canadians support the status quo.

The example of abortion is a helpful window into the larger malaise of Canadian political discourse because of its inherent contradictions and tensions. For example, gender-selective abortions and abortions due to disability diagnoses largely fly under the radar at the very same time that Canada vocally celebrates its support for women and girls as well as for the disabled. From decades-old initiatives encouraging women’s education in STEM (great) to the recent sporting of cringe-worthy period bracelets (less great), policy commitments supporting women’s equality are well-established.

Likewise, institutional mandates across the country are aggressively addressing accessibility concerns for the disabled. My institution, for example, (Dalhousie University) boasts the nation’s only Disability Caucus which, among other things, hosts an annual disability awareness week. All of this occurs even though it is well-established that some 90 percent of pregnancies in Canada with a diagnosis of Down Syndrome, for example, are terminated. Can we talk about this?

The nation’s apparent inability to reflect on the tensions animating the abortion issue is only one instance of a much larger Canadian predilection for the too simple. Other such tensions abound, especially in the sphere of health care.

MAID in Canada, for example, breeds contradictions almost uncontrollably. The most obvious is the massive federal and provincial investment in suicide prevention alongside government-funded suicide provision. That proposed expansions to MAID would include the mentally ill and mature minors only deepen the tensions. Not only will these expansions place youth suffering suicidal ideation at remarkable risk, but these accommodations are emerging during a widely affirmed youth mental health crisis and a loneliness epidemic—not an altogether obvious time for the increased erosion of every taboo with respect to self-harm.

As the Canadian think tank Cardus notes in its most recent report on MAID, the early judicial claim that MAID would be “stringently limited” has given way to the fastest-growing MAID regime in the world, with MAID now effectively the fifth-leading cause of death in Canada. For political parties courting the votes of Indigenous communities, the issue is even more fraught. Even though First Nations suffer higher rates of youth self-harm than the national average, the federal government passed its first MAID legislation immediately on the heels of the Attawapiskat crisis—a tone-deaf capitulation to a highly questionable “right” that continues to leave our government talking out of both sides of its mouth with respect to mental health in Indigenous communities.

Why is complexity so elusive? How is it that a nation can hold positions whose internal contradictions are rarely, if ever, addressed?

George Grant, the great Canadian philosopher, noted decades ago that a source of our modern politics of contradiction is hidden in plain sight: the triumph of euphemism. The subtle and at times aggressive massaging of language that has become the cultural stock and trade does the unseen work of limiting, directing, or shutting down conversation. This is familiar to us all: We “downsize” rather than fire; inflict “collateral damage” rather than kill civilians; are “creative with the truth” rather than liars. Alongside euphemism, we might add sloganeering and word-policing as contributing factors to a politics of the overly simple that drains political discourse of nuance.

Tthe great danger of the rhetorical shorthand that often passes as political conversation in Canada and elsewhere is the failure to recognize a key feature of most ethical issues: they are profoundly dynamic and percussive. That is, over time they get more and not less complex.

This dynamic operates most powerfully relative to life issues. The justification, for example, for a more robust political conversation with respect to reproductive health is precisely because emergent issues have little to do with the well-tread ground of past conversations and more to do with new (even dystopian) developments that fall well outside the “my body, my choice” consensus. Agitation by the Quebec College of Physicians for parental rights to terminate infants’ lives up to one year of age has been circulating since at least 2021. Such proposals piggyback on the kinds of legislation already established in the United States. The omission of life-saving medical care to infants born alive in failed abortion attempts is permissible by law in Democratic VP pick Tim Walz’s Minnesota, a formalizing and updating of what has been historically referred to as “benign neglect.”

This predilection for soft-peddling the morally difficult has reached its apotheosis with the endlessly repeated dictum “quality of life.” Now used to support the termination of pregnancies as well as state intervention to end life under MAID, Grant was quick to note that “quality of life” has little content in a culture where reverence for life itself has disappeared behind the ever-shifting target concealed by the evaluative language of “quality.” That this terminology effectively subordinates the human person to economic and quantifiable categories that evade any sustained reflection on the proper good of a human life and the proper role of the political community in relation to the individuals that make it up (other than radical permissiveness) seems entirely taken for granted.

It also fails to reckon with the simple fact that whatever “quality” may be, there are ample historical cases where its content is determined not by individuals in any simple sense but by the powerful. It is not insignificant that eugenics was both fashionable and widely accepted well before the Nazi horrors of the Second World War (which began with the “compassionate” killing of the disabled). American scholar Wesley J. Smith states the issue with remarkable clarity: “the quality of life ethic is deadly. When doctors fail to recognize life itself as a good, and only deem as ‘good’ those lives they perceive to be of sufficient quality, the weak and vulnerable are put at material risk.”

Camille Paglia, the enfant terrible of American feminism, has been one of the most strident critics of a euphemizing culture. Her determination to side-step euphemisms in the public arena is a welcome corrective to the lack of curiosity that animates the public conversation in Canada. The settled positions relative to which Canadians have become accustomed, especially with respect to health-care legislation, may be those most in need of robust and repeated political engagement if we are not to become a society whose contradictions become unsustainable as we tip from being a culture determined to safeguard those in need to a nation that steadily erases them.

The situation in Canada with respect to life and death simply mimics a larger reality—traditional Canadian confidence in our institutions has now shifted from passivity to carelessness. In the gap arises a legislative agenda and judicial decisions that push to the limit a certain vision of maximal choice for individuals. But in so doing, what we discover is not liberty, but the reduction of the human person conceived primarily as a “point” of pure consumption, outside any vision of a common good or the restraint this good might require.

Canada suffers from a self-imposed immaturity, perhaps nowhere more powerfully indicated than by our refusal of complex conversations and the endless transformation of serious social questions into political footballs. To become a serious nation again we need to see, as the late Christopher Lasch observed, that democracy is not the easiest form of government but that it is, properly understood, the most educational.

But this education depends on the ability to think hard questions and not, in the name of a soft tolerance, to effectively surrender any real interest in the moral life of the nation. To pretend that the complex is easy is to settle for a politics of decline. A renewal of curiosity may be the first step in a national reawakening.

Christopher Snook

Christopher Snook is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Dalhousie University in his hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia. A widely published poet, he is the author of one collection, Tantramar Vespers. He is tremendously grateful that his employment allows him to share his love of…...

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