Amid the coronavirus epidemic, American liberals once again look north to Canada with envy. The management of the crisis in the United States has been given to Vice President Mike Pence, whom they view as an anti-science Christian and responsible for a slow response to HIV as governor of Indiana. At the same time, Canadian doctors are leading the worldwide effort to find a cure to the coronavirus.
And with Obamacare’s existence once again put in jeopardy by lawsuit, left-wing Democratic candidates such as Bernie Sanders will once again praise Canada’s healthcare system. The old myth of Canada being the heaven that Martin Luther King described still resonates in leftist American circles.
But the idea of Canada being the anti-American left-wing country par excellence wasn’t true in King’s time, and it still isn’t true today. In fact, despite the actions taken regarding the virus, Trudeau’s Canada and Trump’s America aren’t very different.
Canada, for instance, is often portrayed as a country with a generous welfare state and strong environmental policies. But the reality is that over the last 35 years, Liberal and Conservative federal governments have alike embraced the neoliberal ideas of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, thus privatizing many state-owned companies and practicing major cuts in the social net.
Noninterventionism has also led Canada to be quite tolerant of pollution despite its ecological reputation. Worse, the Canadian state seems less interested in helping its citizens and more in helping business — especially oil companies in western Canada, one of the most polluted regions of the planet.
Canada’s oil industry seems to have a monopolistic kind of influence on political parties. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who likes to present himself as a great defender of the environment, has approved a $4.5 billion pipeline project. Even the New Democratic Party, the radical “socialist” party, has promised to build a polluting refinery in Alberta with public funds.
With the disengagement of the federal government from the social services field, provinces could have stepped in with a more interventionist approach, since many services (healthcare, education) are mostly provincial responsibilities. However, many provinces have elected, over the last decades, politicians associated with neoliberalism, such as Mike Harris, Gordon Campbell, Ralph Klein, Bernard Lord, Jean Charest, and so forth, as premiers, pursuing corporatism, cuts, and environmental laissez-faire.
Canada also has its own religious right, with strong opposition to same-sex marriage and pro-life convictions. In fact, the former leader of the Conservative Party, Andrew Scheer, came under scrutiny for speeches against same-sex marriage and abortion, even though the latter has been legal for the last 50 years. And Scheer increased his party’s number of seats in Parliament, meaning that conservative positions are quite successful in many regions of Canada, and the future of liberal laws is anything but assured.
In short, the same conditions that led to President Trump’s election exist in Canada. Even the Trudeau government practices Trumpian kind of policies regarding immigration. The Canadian Ministry of Immigration has illegally detained migrants, including children, which has sparked an Amnesty International campaign against the ministry.
Trudeau also has a history of bypassing First Nations’ basic human rights. He has come under fire for botching a government investigation into murdered and vanished First Nations women, by denying mercury poisoning at Grassy Narrows Community treatment center, and by being patronizing toward an indigenous militant who protested at one of Trudeau’s fundraiser cocktail parties with millionaire contributors.
This is without mentioning the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s memo recommending the shooting of First Nations protesters on the TransMoutain pipeline site.
These abuses are just the latest in a long list of Canadian failures to honor the True North’s international reputation for tolerance, interventionism, and environmentalism.
Orian Dorais is a cultural journalist at Ciné-Bulles and an occasional columnist at Le courrier de St-Hyacinthe, the oldest French-Canadian newspaper, and Le Devoir.
