How best to sum up the current Canadian political situation? “Mark Carney looks like Paul Martin — and baby boomers think it’s still the 1990’s.” Their children, however — and their grandchildren — know nothing of such Liberal leaders. They live in the current decade. Consequently, an unprecedented divide now exists between Canadians this election cycle, segregated by age.
According
to pollster Nanos
, 55 per cent of those over 55 favour the Liberals under the leadership of Mark Carney, and 29 per cent the Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre. Among those aged 35-54 party support converges, with 44 per cent favouring the Liberals and 39 per cent the CPC. Among the youngest voters, Conservative support is pronounced: only 33 per cent of Canadians 18-34 support the Liberals, while 43 per cent approve of the CPC.
This reverses the standard proclivity with regards to politics and age. People tend to start left in their youth and move towards the right as they age. As the cliché has it (with the wisdom that such cliches so often encapsulate): If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.
One interpretation of this well-documented age shift toward the Conservatives is that older people are simply more hidebound, and that radicalism, however necessary it might sometimes arguably be, just doesn’t sit well with those too set in their ways.
Another view, which I believe to be more psychologically valid, is that there is little difference between holding traditionally classic conservative/liberal views and being sensibly mature. According to this view, not widely held (yet), idiot radicalism (and the heedless hedonism that inevitably accompanies it), is an expression, not of brave and forthright revolutionary sentiment, but the constantly screaming political voice of the still immature and pathologically entitled.
In any case, Canadians are apparently bucking the universal developmental/political trend, with the youth tilting to the right (insofar as Canadian Conservatives can be considered right) and the elders in our society rejecting their political coming of age and support for tradition. This all could be read to perversely set the radical elderly against the wise and cautious youth in the Great White North.
But is this truly the case? Those who hold that view must simultaneously assume that the CPC is the party of tradition, and that older Canadians perceive the federal Liberals under Carney as more radical or progressive. Neither of these assumptions are warranted.
Before we dive into this question, some initial considerations, for context.
First: there is no doubt that the Justin Trudeau Liberals were an unmitigated disaster, even when considered from the narrowly economic side. Canada fell from parity with the U.S. with regard to per capita GDP growth a decade ago to stagnation today.
Second: it’s not as if Canadians failed to notice this catastrophe as well as the much more fractionated and much less generally functional, stable and happy country the Liberals produced. Canadians noticed, and two months ago, the Trudeau Liberals were set for an electoral disaster of unprecedented magnitude. They could well have lost their official party status.
Then, in a fit of good fortune and Machievellian brilliance, they put the narcissistic Justin unceremoniously out to pasture and coronated Carney as leader and prime minister. Simultaneously, the orange-haired demon to the south (or so the story goes) started rattling his sabres and snorting and pawing at the ground with regard to Canada and the rest of the world. One unexpected consequence of this posturing was that Canadians — even progressives — remembered, however temporarily, that they indeed had a country, if they could keep it.
Liberal fortunes almost instantly reversed. According to Polymarket, a place where people have to put their money where their mouth is to express a political opinion, Pierre Poilievre’s popularity as leader peaked in support in mid-January, at 90 per cent cent to the Liberal’s 10. Now, the odds have reversed. Carney bets stand at 70 per cent; Poilievre at 30. Now, is this a reflection of the strange emergent radicalism of older Canadians? (Who even has this opinion?)
No. However misguided, it is still a modern and quintessentially Canadian variant of the age-old pattern of older traditionalism.
Consider the persona of our prime minister, rather than his actual continually stated and written views. He is grey-haired, calm, sensible, a bit peevish in a manner of a wise father who’s simply been asked too many stupid questions — the very image of 1990’s (or even 1950’s) reliable patriarchy. He is Mark J. Carney, after all, banker, economist, former governor of the Banks of Canada and England — a man vetted by our betters; a man of international cachet and renown. Could there possibly be a better symbol of the essentially conservative desire of mature old age and judgement? Who better to stand forth against the imprecations of Donald J. Who better to put forward the eternal vision of Peace, Order and Good Government still so dear to central and Atlantic Canada’s establishment heart?
The boomers aren’t radical, or even particularly leftist — let alone globalist or green. They are simply pining for the Old Canada — you know, the one that Trudeau said no longer needed to exist; the pre-post-national Canada; the Canada that from the end of the Second World War until even ten years ago was reliable, sane, peaceful, productive, orderly, industrious, tolerant, and appropriately self-regarding. And who better than three-piece-suited, pro-capitalist, free-market-but-not-too-harshly, “I’ll set things right, you bet,” Mark J? After all, he looks the part — just as his fashionable but ultimately narcissistic-to-the-point-of-delusion predecessor looked the part that seemed so desirable 10 years ago; looked every inch the deliveryman of the bright tolerant sunny ways he promised while producing exactly the opposite.
And then, shudder, contrast the staid and reliable Carney with Poilievre, a westerner (so is Carney, although you’d never notice, and thank the Heavens for that). He’s a populist, a man who smacks-of-America and un-Canadian rallies — often pugilistic. Are we sure he’d behave appropriately in civilized Toronto company? Would he upset grandma with his critical tone and his impolite concern that things have gone seriously sideways? Is he, despite Trump’s explicit disavowal, somehow allied with that dreadfully unwashed lower-class MAGA crowd south of the border — those Confederate flag-flying, pistol-packing, truck-driving car-racing fans, misogynists and racists all, the alleged funders of the too-similar-for-Canadian-taste Freedom Convoy, according to Trudeau.
Better to go back to what’s safe and time-tested. Better to go back to the time of Paul Martin, John Turner and, better yet, Lester Pearson. Better to return at least to the pre-2010 glory days of Canada, when we were nearly as rich as the Yanks, but so much better as human beings. We made a mistake with Justin, admittedly — so say the elders. But the ever-reliable Liberals have learned their lesson (despite being all the same people). They’ve returned to staid and respectable centrism under their staid and respectable banker/father-figure and pragmatist. He’ll surely set things right. And it is possible, even necessary, to have some sympathy with this perspective. Older Canadians are tired of drama, and they have reason to long for the good old days.
But younger Canadians have known nothing but drama, and they didn’t have the good old days. Worse still Mark Carney is not Paul Martin, nor Lester Pearson. He’s not even John Turner. He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and the older citizens of Canada, deluded by his slick, charming, well-practiced and professionally stage-managed persona, have no idea whatsoever how the world has shifted in the last twenty years. Worse, they have little desire to know, taking refuge as they are in their too-convenient and too-willful blindness.
Carney claims to be the old-school, essentially centrist/conservative Liberal “outsider” who will bring sanity back and normalize Canada. But he is no outsider, that’s a walloping lie, and one that Canadians would do well to notice. Furthermore, he is no industrial magnate in the 1950’s — or 1990’s mode. He is, instead, The Man who believes that carbon dioxide poses a threat so catastrophic and immediate that strict control of fossil fuel emissions is not only necessary, but morally required. He has indicated in his own writing that all means at hand must be employed (and watch out for that “must”) to ensure that every single financial decision taken by every company and every individual — man, woman and child — must prioritize NetZero and decarbonization.
He is The Man who indicated, in his own writing, in his alliance with the UN and the World Economic Forum, that the free market cannot be relied upon in its distributed decision-making capacity; that all important decisions in fundamental issues must be taken by the appropriate concerned experts (remember the COVID “emergency,” folks); that the entire world economic system must be radically re-tooled, despite the untold trillions that this has and will continue to cost. He is The Man who assumes he and his compatriots are the only ones wise and informed enough to manage such a retooling, despite its increasingly evident impossibility. He is The Man who believes fervently that at least three-quarters of the world’s fossil fuel must remain in the ground (bye bye Alberta, and the transfer payments that Quebec depends on so appallingly). He has written that businesses who cannot or refuse to adapt to the hyper-expensive and anti-industrial reality that must be imposed will “cease to exist” in a war for the survival of the planet.
He is The Man who believes he can wave his magic wand and make a whole new sustainable green economy arise out of nothing in a manner that will somehow make Canada — even Alberta — richer and morally better. How? `
And who are this “outsider’s” compatriots, allies — friends? “Outsider” Carney — a descriptor accurate in that the man who is now our PM has never stood for election, however minimal — is tightly associated not only with Chrystia Freeland, former deputy prime minister under Trudeau, to whose child he serves as godparent — but with one Gerald Butts. This is the selfsame Gerald who was prime advisor to Trudeau before stepping down in the wake of the now-almost-forgotten Lavalin-SNC scandal.
That didn’t slow Butts down one bit, let it be known. A man with his connection network remains valuable, no matter how incompetent. He continued to operate both behind the scenes as Liberal Party strategist and consultant and, simultaneously, as now-vice-chairman of the Eurasia Group, a consultancy which emphasizes radical net-zero financial adjustment for the world’s largest corporations. Butts, like Carney himself, is a main player in the network of companies, governments and media organizations that make “climate change” the zeitgeist that justifies a green revolution.
What does all this mean? It means that Carney is a degrowth radical masquerading as a 1990’s banker. He’s been pushing a radically leftist globalist green agenda for years — with far more effect, nationally and internationally, than Trudeau whom he’s replaced. It means that Carney will do to Canada exactly what the equally deluded Boris Johnson did to the U.K.: break it, while moralizing madly about the role he is playing, as veritable planetary saviour.
Everything is justified, when the world is at risk. Or is it that the world must be made to seem at risk, when the true desire is unearned moral status and the unlimited power made necessary by an unprecedented and global emergency? And, older Canadians, if you think this is a vision too extreme, too pessimistic, too “conspiratorial” — ask yourself this: why do young people reject the man that appeals to you so deeply, in your desire to turn back the clock? Is it possible that they know something you don’t, given that their entire future is at stake? Terrified as you are of Trump and his idiot bullying machinations; tempted as you are to parade your admirable anti-populist fashionable anti-Americanism — your children and your grandchildren are much more terrified of Carney, the globalists, and lifelong downward-spiralling poverty, and rightly so.
You want to feel good about your country and your green delusions. You want to pretend that your new leader can, and will, stand up to Trump, even though the Liberals you now trust were the very people that purposefully placed Canada in a position where the orange-haired demon holds all the cards.
Your children and grandchildren want an economy instead of moral comfort. Your children and grandchildren want the kind of jobs you had, the kind of future you looked forward to — the economic and familial opportunities you had — a house, at some point, and a wife or husband and some kids. They don’t think that they are likely to get it — not under Carney, for sure, and possibly not ever.
Unlike you, many of your children and grandchildren don’t like Carney. They don’t believe his all-too-convenient pro-industrial stance. They are skeptical of his association with the World Economic Forum, which promises young people, so famously, that they’ll “own nothing, and be happy.” They know that while governing the Bank of England the U.K. housing became so costly that young people there are perhaps even more desperate for the future than they are in Canada. They are not the least bit impressed that he served the UN as “climate envoy” — they live in Canadian winter in a country that depends for its very survival on the fossil fuels that Carney, his wife, and their global networks condemn in the harshest and most absolute possible terms.
Thus, unlike you — because they have much more to lose — your children and grandchildren see Carney as he is: not as the warm-milk and grandfatherly-advice 1950’s Jimmy Stewart banker who will stand up to the mad Yankee mob and Make Canada Sensible Again but as The Man at the vanguard of antigrowth economic collapse and authoritarian financial control.
And they’re right, old folks, and you’re wrong. And you’re apparently willing in your blindness and desire for a long-vanished security to hand the country over, once again, to the Trudeau Liberals — but this time on steroids. Top it off, he’s chosen the shortest election period possible.
Carney is not only not who he appears, and not who you think he is, he is much worse. He is everything terrible about Trudeau, with a greater reach, internationally, and with more executive and managerial skill. The country will not return to it’s pre-2010 glory, under the oh-so-conservative appearing Carney.
Preston Manning, the man who reconstructed and revitalized the Canadian right — a very reliable and careful sort — has already in writing indicated the necessity for Western Canada to consider an immediate post-election convention aimed at restructuring the country. This is talk of secession, folks — and from someone who is a lot more sensible than many very annoyed people in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and all of B.C. outside of Vancouver and Victoria. And the young people in Canada see the writing on the wall.
And that, boomers, is not a return to the pre-2010’s peace, prosperity and sanity that you were fortunate to mature during. It is instead a move forward to a future so radical you can’t imagine it — or won’t, judging by your current willful blindness and willingness to betray your children and your country.
And your children and grandchildren know it, and plan to vote accordingly. So what’s it going to be, grandma? Grandpa? Your past — or their future?
National Post
