I’ve been musing on this post for weeks and weeks. Never expected, when that thought process started, that “they” would have become so obsessed with the idea of making “us” part of “them”.

Lordy.

Whomever the US decides to elect President always affects the rest of the world, especially the countries next door. But the US usually doesn’t give us much thought.

That was better.

One of the points I’d wanted to make originally was that Trump should never have been able to run for office, because he committed treason. But in the four years since that happened, no criminal case has been brought against him. This is a puzzle to me.

But not, it appears, to Sarah Kendzior. She not only explains this situation, she rather predicted it, in her various columns and books. Though she’s an excellent writer, I’m not always able to fully follow her train of thought. It’s just so American. But it’s often fascinating as well.

On this point, of how Trump got away with leading an insurrection, you could refer to her blog post, Servants of the Mafia State (written in November 2023). Here’s a key quote from it.

The Biden Placeholder Presidency was designed to exist between two terms of Trump, Mafia Grover Cleveland style. The threat of Trump returning to office to complete his autocratic agenda is severe. But that he is able to do it – that the US is the only country in history to allow a coup to go unpunished and a seditionist to run for president again – is due to Garland, the DOJ, and their accomplices in Congress.

Garland is not unique in his role as a mafia state enabler. He follows a long line of DOJ cover-up operatives marketed as saviors of American democracy: James Comey, Robert Mueller, Bill Barr, Cy Vance, and so on. Over and over, Americans are told that these prosecutors are going to “get Trump” and dismantle his criminal network. Over and over, they serve their real role, which is to run out the clock and allow criminal elites to escape accountability.

Trump thus freed to run for office, what else assisted him in winning?

• The lingering trauma of the pandemic
• The unwillingness of political parties to better police themselves.
• The sea of misinformation in which we currently reside.

Canada, and Ontario, don’t have a character as odious as Trump running to lead them. But we’re also affected by these factors. And we’re heading into elections for both soon.

Pandemic eras

In The Globe and Mail recently, Doug Saunders wrote a long article looking at anti-democratic forces globally. I might be referring to it a few times. He didn’t write much about Canada specifically, but certainly the US was an included example. One of the points he made was that

The worldwide wave of anti-incumbent anger experienced this year appears to have been rooted in the experiences of the pandemic, when citizens of most democracies endured a frightening period of genuine economic insecurity and, sometimes for the first time in their life, being explicitly told what to do by their governments, which then cut off aid during the recovery.

“Cut off aid during the recovery.” All governments seem to have done this. Choosing the status quo over the possibility of “building back better”. A missed opportunity for progressives if ever there was one.

I’m not saying Americans now and Canadians soon will head to the polls thinking explicitly about COVID and who will do a better job of managing the disease. I’m saying that the simple fact that all governments have abandoned us to permanent illness is not going to lead us to think of government as a force for good. Hence, why not elect someone appalling?

In How COVID Helped Trump Win, Julia Doubleday and Walker Bragman bring the receipts (from a US perspective). Biden was elected in 2020. COVID was the top issue then. He promised to deal with it. He claims he has! But objectively:

To date, more than 800,000 have died from COVID since Biden took the oath of office, more than double the number that were lost under Trump—and most within a similar timeframe. When the U.S. crossed the million-death mark in early May 2022, Biden led in average weekly deaths, even when we attribute deaths before June to his predecessor.

Biden went with a vaccine-only strategy—no indoor air cleaning, no ongoing mask policies, no worker safety policies, no permanent protections in schools—and stuck with it even as it became evident that vaccines provided limited protection against infection, and this waned quickly. And he ended all the pandemic programs that had provided economic relief.

Sarah Kenzior again, in Welcome to Boomland (January 2024), made a similar point:

The Trump and Biden administrations acclimatized Americans to mass death through the spread of covid, about which each administration lied and hid public health data. They are still hiding essential data about the long-term effects, the pervasiveness of long covid, and the means we could take to protect ourselves. Officials have mocked calls for empathy. Their followers have mocked the dead.

And Doug Saunders also makes the case that this all leads to people being more comfortable about electing authoritarian leaders:

voters can’t really be held to blame for all the extremists winning elections. They’re just expressing a worldwide anti-incumbent mood, almost inevitable after the trauma of the peak pandemic years. That mood is being taken advantage of by demagogic leaders, who seize control of “normal” conservative-leaning political parties, drum up angry fictions about the state of the world, and make themselves the only visible alternative. Most people voting for them don’t subscribe to their ideology or world view, but also don’t think there’s much harm in it.

Canada didn’t have such a tidy narrative arc. It’s all a bit more muddled here, with health being primarily a provincial responsibility, but with the federal government having a role as well. The Canada and Ontario were generally thought to have done a reasonably good job of managing the early pandemic years, particularly in contrast to the United States. In 2021, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party tried to take advantage of that to parlay their way into a majority government. They failed, Canadians ending up with another split parliament, the makeup of which was almost identical to what it had been.

Doug Ford had a rocky start after the Progressive Conservatives (PC) were elected with a majority in 2018. Though there was plenty to criticize, overall the pandemic gave him a chance to exceed the low expectations of him. The 2022 election was hardly run on COVID issues; it was little mentioned, even as two opposition leaders came down with it mid-campaign! Turnout was abysmal and the PCs again won a majority of seats.

I think the more determinative event for Canada (and Ontario) was the Convoy protest. All those people of confusing and mixed ideology and beliefs and dark money origins, taking the country’s capital hostage, harassing the citizens, closing downtown businesses, creating a cacophony. The one thing they seemed clear on was that they were done, done, with being asked to do anything to protect other people’s health. No vaccines, no masks, no social distancing. Not anymore.

Though some of the organizers continue to make their way through the court system, ultimately Canada and Ontario followed the United States lead and gradually dropped all protections while equally refusing to invest in clean air and public education. In that sense, the convoy’s protest was supremely successful. They got absolutely everything they wanted, with all citizens given permission—almost encouraged, in fact—to freely infect everyone else.

Also following the US lead, pandemic economic programs like CERB and small business assistance were dropped, and governments went after individuals to prove they deserved to get it in the first place. The federal government did bring in paid sick days, 10 of them (thanks to the NDP!), but none of the provinces did, and most Canadian work for provincially regulated companies. Governments, whether progressive or conservative, pushed workers back to the office same as private employers did, even though none of them did anything to make those workplaces safer. In response to huge school absences due to illness, the requirements to stay home when ill with infectious disease were loosened.

And this is (partly) how Canadians end up supporting Pierre Poilievre for Prime Minister, despite disagreeing with him on most key issues, and finding the man himself somewhat off-putting.

To be continued! Maybe.

But I’ll post this in the meantime.