Canada feels broken? You can blame our undermined institutions

The second instance occurred recently when my wife attempted to drop our son off at basketball practice at a nearby Jewish community centre, only to find the entrance and egress blocked by an aggressive mob (this was nowhere near any embassy or consulate). She was able to maneuver away, with some assistance from one of the police officers on the scene, but he made clear he and his fellow officers were under strict instruction not to disperse the mob itself. The trouble was not just that there is a contingent of cretins who think harassing Jews is a good way to spend a January evening in Toronto (though this is not nothing). The larger issue is that one has limited faith that the municipal police will protect you if things go south, and no amount of social media posting can change that.1This is not a statement about the competence or decency of the median officer; the rank and file have little say over policy. Indeed, the problems of public order go well beyond police departments, such that it is now common to see news items involving criminals who were in fact arrested receiving either improbably light bail terms or improbably lenient sentencing, no matter how serious the crime. This has now reached the point that police have begun rearresting offenders within comically short windows of their facing trial. One does feel for the police departments in these cases. They might have thought their work was done (arresting perpetrators and seeing their cases through to successful prosecutions), but alas, they now require contingency plans to ensure that those same perps don’t wind up posing a threat to the general public again within hours of being sentenced. That these stories have now appeared across multiple provinces rather suggests that the problem is a systemic one: throughout the country, significant segments of the judiciary are pursuing political agendas with little or no connection to the interests of law-abiding citizens. And it should be clear that compassion is not a meaningful factor here, because kindness to criminals is still cruelty to both past and future victims of crime. Meanwhile, the fact that many of these instances also involve non-citizen residents implicates yet other institutions, these involving the country’s border control and immigration management. It is an old story by now that those convicted of a crime will no longer face deportation, and that in many cases leniency will be shown precisely to avoid triggering a deportation of the convicted, and finally that those facing deportation anyway can invoke refugee status, thus further overburdening an already overburdened system for processing refugee intake. That there are grifters or antisemites or criminals in the world will not—or should not, at any rate—shock anyone. What is more disturbing, however, is that major load-bearing institutions cannot be relied upon where such people are concerned. Enforcement of contracts and policing and general security are, after all, among the core purposes of centralized political authority. Yet all these instances speak to the way that core institutions and those who staff them have become the masters rather than the servants of the public. But it is easy—too easy, in fact—in a democracy to rail against elites, whether it’s the rich, or the government in Ottawa, or the larger coterie of Laurentians from which the governing class is overwhelmingly drawn (or some combination of the three). But the real problems are both more diffuse and closer to home. The institutions themselves are not necessarily “elite” but entirely prosaic—there’s hardly a town in the world that doesn’t have need of police, or a judicial system, or a school board, and so on. But these very ordinary institutions are only nominally what they once were. One can no longer cavalierly assume that the trustees and police chiefs and judges and ward councillors are basically like you and your neighbours in their choices and preferences. For example, just this past week, a Toronto city councillor managed to attract attention even outside of Canada after having successfully renamed a city park “Ethennonnhawahstihnen.” I think it is fair to say that virtually no one residing in the community and using this public space was served by this name change. Its immediate purpose was not to benefit those who use (and ultimately pay for) the public space. Its purpose was rather more abstract: not to represent but to impose higher norms upon a benighted population. The British social critic Auberon Waugh used to say that democracy is only rule of the people in name; in practice, it is rule by busybodies and niche enthusiasts who dominate governing institutions while normal people are too busy working, taking care of their kids, and so on. This more or less describes the present impasse. The question Canadians—especially anyone under 50—increasingly have to answer is: do I really believe, when push comes to shove, that those institutions will work for me? That they are for me in a constitutive sense? And if they are not, what is to be done about it?