David Polansky: You need to be angrier, Canada

You need to be angrier.

Of course, anger is most often not a good thing. It clouds judgment, it leads to rashness and poor decision-making. Anger in politics is worse still: it is the food of charlatans and demagogues; it encourages us to see our fellow citizens as enemies rather than just rivals or opponents in the political sphere; it produces bad policies.

And yet a deficiency of anger produces its own problems. This is the condition that presently characterizes too much of the Canadian electorate. With Prime Minister Trudeau announcing his resignation this week, even as his party maneuvers to stay in power, one cannot help wondering at the lack of anger over the years of misrule.

In the wake of former minister Chrystia Freeland’s unexpected resignation, many began belatedly acknowledging the scope and depth of the Canadian government’s failures during the reign of Trudeau. But Canada is, notionally, a democracy, and its leaders serve at the pleasure of the people (this is why we call them “public servants,” whether they act like it or not). The leniency with which Canadians have treated their governing class still receives insufficient attention. It is no longer possible, with the exception of a few loyalist hold-outs, to deny the failures of the current government. Why, then, did the Canadian people put up with it for so long, at increasing material cost to themselves?

Yes, Trudeau’s Liberal Party benefited from certain particularities of the Canadian parliamentary system, along with the gormlessness of the NDP under Jagmeet Singh, and the wildly uninspiring alternatives the Conservatives found themselves fielding prior to the rise of Pierre Poilievre. However, none of this is sufficient to explain their complacency—their lack of anger, as their situation grew steadily worse culminating in the present crisis.

Finally, the focus of anger is not just retrospective. Trudeau will leave office, while leaving behind a lamentable legacy, but he is in the end just one man. His lengthy time in office was enabled for many years by a broader establishment—along with a pliant national media apparatus—that reserved far greater ire for critics than for anyone wielding real political power during that time.

True, mildness has long been a recognizable feature of the Canadian national character—much remarked on by both Canadians themselves and non-Canadians, and a staple of Canadian humour. But it has historically coexisted with a surprising if understated toughness—mastering one of the planet’s wildest landscapes, enduring physical and economic hardship without complaint, and participating in two world wars.

As Aristotle wrote, moderation is a virtue. But Aristotle also teaches that true virtue is the mean between two vices. And the present posture that much of the Canadian public has toward its government is not moderation but meekness. This is a rejection of the obligations of self-government, which requires a certain degree of spiritedness in the electorate. For, Canada’s citizens have abandoned any expectation that their legitimate interests will be advanced by their elected leaders.

Anger is a check against the arrogance of elites—and what other word could we use to describe the leaders of the ruling party? Who when pressed on their very real, very material failures, have the gall to lecture their constituents in high-minded language reflecting a superiority they have never managed to otherwise demonstrate?

Arrogance is blithely reversing course on failed immigration policies after years of accusing their critics of racism for making the same claims the government has now adopted. Arrogance is flitting from photo op to photo op all around the world, speaking of Canada’s great place on the world stage while declining to fund the military whose power is the precondition for being heard in the geopolitical arena in the first place. Arrogance is an urbanized minister of the environment who has never owned a motor vehicle lecturing Canadians who must live and work across the vast, far-flung territories of the country. Arrogance is a government that avoided presenting a budget for months, only to reveal that its deficit was 22 billion dollars larger than advertised, even as it had spent years pressing frugality on ordinary Canadians. Arrogance is proroguing Parliament for two months in order to find a way to hold onto power with Trudeau gone, during a geopolitical crisis.

All of this and more reflects the sensibilities of a governing class that believes deep down that it is beholden to no one, and all the while it praises itself for upholding democracy. This is arrogance personified. And all of this would be wholly contemptible save for one thing: they are not really mistaken in their belief that they are above accountability. How else would one describe their situation in practice throughout the past decade? For all their errors and misjudgments, they have gotten this one thing right: they have taken the measure of the Canadian people and recognized that they could in fact do as they pleased. They were in fact correct that they would not be held to the same standard as the lowliest office clerk in the private sector.

They have not, thus far, overestimated the complacency of the Canadian public. Without anger, without a jealous solicitude for their rights and prerequisites, the people in fact have very little. They are a democracy in name only.

Indeed, at present the Canadian public is being effectively held hostage by the Liberal Party, as it takes the time to settle its leadership disputes at the nation’s expense.

As they are denied a trip to the ballot box, Canada’s citizens are in need of a “preference cascade,” in which they can commonly and openly recognize how much they agree with one another and disagree with their government on a range of important issues, from energy to immigration to cultural politics.

In the end, there is probably no substitute for greater local political engagement. Gone are the days when one could assume that elected representatives from premiers down to school board trustees shared your understanding of what politics requires. Much of this extends also to the country’s major media organs, which have acted as court stenographers for a decade. A casual viewer whose only news exposure came from the CBC would be unlikely to have any notion of the material decline the country has undergone during the last few years. Above all, ordinary Canadians need to close the gap between their actual needs and the purposes of the institutions charged with representing their interests.

But, above all, you need to be angrier.