Canadian politics needs a radical change

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/04/2025 (199 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s time to pull out our political first aid kit and slap another Band-Aid on our withering democracy.

At least, as of writing this, that seems what we are poised to do. I may be less convinced than most that a Liberal victory is assured, certainly less so than a CBC analysis which gave the Conservatives only a two per cent chance of forming even a minority government. But conventional wisdom suggests that it is Carney’s election to lose.

And who could blame voters? Canadians are worried about burgeoning totalitarianism south of the border and U.S. President Donald Trump’s continued threats to our economy and sovereignty. Many voters have rightly rejected Poilievre because of his Trumpian alignment.

But many have not. Plenty of Conservative Canadians see what Trump is doing and not only excuse it, but celebrate it. With the United States blatantly embracing not only fascism, but expansionism, one can’t help but consider historical precedents.

For example, I think it would behoove us to remember that in the Second World War, part of the reason France was captured and held so readily is because there was a significant political faction in the country who were ready to receive the Nazis.

So are Mark Carney’s Liberals going to govern in a fashion that quells the swell of fascism inside our own country? Is the way we currently conceive of government even capable of such a thing?

One of the most poignant critiques of representative democracy that I’ve heard came from the philosopher Carl Schmitt. Schmitt warned of the stagnating nature of our political structure, and how polarization will always eventually boil over into cataclysm in a society that insists all political differences can be solved through debating politicians.

“The essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion.”

Schmitt wrote these words long ago, but he might as well be talking about our contemporary governments. So many noble words are cast in our parliamentary and congressional halls, yet the social decay of wealth inequality and environmental degradation grows worse and worse.

No matter which party forms government, this trend will continue, because our entire political class is shackled to a dogma subservient foremost to the extraction of shareholder profits. They seem to believe they can go on offering lip service to worsening material conditions forever and that the citizenry will forever be placated by political theatre.

It is this sort of helplessness that drives people to political extremes like fascism, and Schmitt recognized this. He was also a harsh critic of the opiate of consumerism. Schmitt saw that due to dwindling religious community and national unification, people in contemporary society are left to build their identities around something else.

But all capitalism offers as identity constructs is a series of consumer choices and displays of material wealth. This was a vapid way to build a culture even before the degradation of our economic capacity to purchase such an identity. Now, as the labouring class continues to see their portion of society’s wealth decrease, clawed back to ensure the constant growth of shareholder value, consumerist culture becomes a less effective salve.

So we have a citizenry with virtually zero political agency to correct the environmental and economic crash course that our political caste insist on steering us into. Coupled with a culture void of unifying grand narratives, atomized and reduced to our capacity as labourers, and told that the only path left to spiritual fulfilment comes through the fashion in which you spend your dollars. Carl Schmitt recognized how untenable it is to conduct a society this way.

Carl Schmitt was also an unapologetic Nazi in Hitler’s Germany.

It’s so easy for us to see fascism and frame it as a simple matter of bad people mindlessly doing evil things because they are evil. But fascism is a purposeful doctrine and it knows where it can grow.

Schmitt and other fascists recognize the cracks in our political foundations and seep in and fester there. They seek to offer the identity and purpose which contemporary society has failed to offer. We aren’t going to weed it out with polite debate in Parliament and the deluded belief that political norms won’t buckle under pressure. We have to repair those cracks so it can’t take root in the first place.

So sure, let’s slap the Band-Aid on for now. But Mark Carney’s Liberals are not going to steer us out of this skid towards fascism. Our political class has shown that they steadfastly refuse to alter the policies which give us the material conditions where fascism grows.

We need to start thinking beyond these norms of governance which we have been conditioned to believe are inalterable and move on to a participatory system where we more directly govern ourselves.

Maybe then we will not only be able to create material conditions comfortable enough that people are not driven to political extremes, but also create a society that people can build a proud identity around again.

Because if we refuse to make these changes, we will eventually find them forcefully made for us, and probably by people who do not have everyone’s best interest at heart.

Alex Passey is a Winnipeg author.