Is Canada next? Not if we do something about it
Image credit: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Authoritarian rule spreads by contagion.
I saw it first in Venezuela, over three years of political crises I witnessed as Canada’s ambassador to that country from 2014 to 2017. With each crisis, citizens would assemble in the streets by the hundreds of thousands, to show the government it no longer had their consent. Each time the government of Nicolas Maduro would escalate the tactics it would use to remain in power. Often the resulting stalemate would last weeks, testing the resolve of each side.
In these stalemates, international opinion played a major role in determining which side would blink first. That’s because international opinion played a central role in how Venezuelans would perceive the legitimacy of their government’s actions.
When the tide of international opinion turned against mass arrests of political prisoners in 2014, President Maduro was forced to release most of them. But by 2016 when he took control of the electoral authority and began dictating the terms of all subsequent elections, a growing number of populist authoritarian regimes stood by him while internal opposition crumbled.
When authoritarian behaviour becomes accepted as normal in one country, it helps normalize it elsewhere. That’s how the contagion spreads.
Witnessing how such behaviour had already spread through formerly democratic systems on every continent, from Turkey to Tunisia and from India to Israel, I feared it was only a matter of time before our own democratic norms came under pressure.
The return to power of Donald Trump raises that risk considerably. No other country shapes our perspectives about politics more than the United States. Not only does the U.S. dominate our media, our culture and our imagination, it is our indispensable trading partners and the cornerstone of our security. What passes as acceptable behaviour in the U.S. will be perceived by some Canadians as acceptable.
Will politicians begin blaming vulnerable populations for crime and job losses and weaken human rights protections to scapegoat them? Will they begin referring to journalists as enemies or traitors if they dare criticize the authorities? Will they seek to create their own truth with a media ecosystem that is so fractured and polarized that we no longer talk to one another?
There can be no doubt some will try. What is up for grabs is whether these attempts to alter Canada’s democratic norms will succeed or not. Because the legitimacy of political behaviour is ultimately up to us to accept or to reject.
And that will depend on how strong we are, as citizens united in defence of the values we want to define us.
Our work in the Remembering Project strengthens us. By acknowledging one of the greatest failings of human rights in our country, we are doing the hard work of renewing Canadian democracy. By committing ourselves to the difficult truth that Canada committed harm to generations of Indigenous children, we are standing up for truth in our national life. By taking action on the painful issue of residential schools, we are showing we can take action on other issues as well.
This is how we inoculate ourselves from the contagion.
Ben Rowswell
