As Trump sets out to double the size of his own country...

A leading progressive Canadian journalist & activist tells us about the search for Captain Canada in the world's second largest country by size, 38th by population.

Snow is forecast in Edmonton, Alberta, CANADA tonight (14 March) and the temp is expected to dive to minus 18 C. Weather only a Canadian could love!

Meanwhile - and apologies for the cheesy reference - Donald Trump has been doing his very best to warm up his northern neighbours to volcanic levels over the past month or so.

And while I am a Canadian by birth, I moved to the UK in 1995 and so I thought it best to have a progressive journalist who lives there tell us how Canadians have responded to the threat posed by Trump and set out who may be succcessful as the next purported Captain Canada. Whether nationalism and choosing such a captain are the answers is a whole different question.

With Canada now in the crosshairs of Captain America, its upcoming election may garner more global interest than usually occurs when Canadians go to the polls. Who knows? As a gesture of solidarity, some people around the world may soon start wearing Maple Leaf lapel pins. (Below I have done a brief piece titled “STOP PROVIDING LEFT COVER TO STARMER.”)

By Nora Loreto (GUEST POST)

Amid the sabre rattling of an impending trade war, a photo went viral in Canada taken by Mervyn Sequiera of Burlington, Ontario.

In it, a Canada goose honks towards a bald eagle, and Canadians instantly saw themselves embodied by the noble honking beast.

This bird, whose temperament is perfectly described by its name in the Indigenous Haudenosaunee language, káhonk, is belligerent and sometimes dangerous. Canadian geese are also messy, irritating and when they take over a park, you have to be careful where you walk: if you don’t find yourself in a battle with a Canada goose, you will likely find yourself stepping in their shit.

But they’re scrappy, and that’s what Canadians are begging for right now: a scrappy, bold and imperfect (even irritating?) leader who can stand up to Donald Trump.

Who is our goose-made-flesh? Who will be Canada’s saviour?

Wherefore art thou, Captain Canada?

Canadians like to feel as if their leaders are taking care of their interests and as Donald Trump threatens to annex Canada, this feeling has not been stronger in living memory.

That’s bad news for Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre who, up until now, seemed like the unstoppable next Prime Minister of Canada. Poilievre’s brand is intimately tied to outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: Poilievre has made himself into what Trudeau is not. Poilievre is the son of working class parents while Trudeau’s father was a former Prime Minister. Poilievre is new, Trudeau tired, and so on. There is very little substance in Poilievre’s message, aside from what many online call verb the noun (a reference to Poilievre’s monosyllabic slogans like axe the tax or fight the crime).

But Poilievre’s ascent came to an abrupt halt when the threat changed. After years of an affordability crisis that Justin Trudeau’s Liberals did not do enough to address, Donald Trump kool-aid manned himself across the 49th parallel and announced that he wanted to annex the country.

For Canadians, this has been no joke. In a flash, the sun set on Poilievre’s steady popularity and rose over the newest member of the political establishment, Mark Carney. Polls have the two parties neck-in-neck if an election were to happen tomorrow (and one very well may be called that soon).

Former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney now heads the governing Liberal Party of Canada and will be sworn in as the Prime Minister of Canada today ( 14 March).

Carney has the bona fides to be a credible and steady prime minister. He navigated Canada’s economy through the economic crisis of 2008-09, the United Kingdom through COVID-19 and then moved to one of Canada’s largest asset management companies, Brookfield, where he was the chairman of the board up until he ran for Liberal leadership. Unassuming and sharp, Carney is the opposite of what Poilievre, a life-long Member of Parliament who has never held a non-elected job before, has fashioned himself to be.

Carney, who officially becomes Prime Minister today, may well win the next election, and it’s all thanks to Canadians’ need for their own Captain Canada.

The polls bear this out clearly: where just 33% of Canadians trust Pierre Poilievre to navigate the chaos that is the Trump administration, 47% of Canadians trust Mark Carney’s abilities. There are similar distances between Canadians who trust Carney much more than they trust Poilievre on how they might manage the economy and the affordability crisis.

And so, where just two months ago it seemed all but absolutely certain that Pierre Polievre would be anointed Prime Minister, now that Donald Trump has passed from side show to the main event, Canadians aren’t so sure about the Conservatives any longer.

Of course, this moment won’t last. The Liberals are surely reading every tea leaf they can get their hands on to figure out how much time they need to cement a Carney election win. A snap election just happened in the largest province, Ontario, where most political experts know that the odds of Ontarians electing a Conservative government provincially and federally are low – it’s rarely happened in the last 120 years. That election gave Ontario Premier Doug Ford a third majority in a row. Ford was quick to set up a photo-op with Mark Carney over breakfast at a suburban diner just after he won the Liberal party leadership this past weekend.

Indeed, from asset manager chairman to Liberal leader to Prime minister in a matter of weeks, Carney’s rise has been meteoric. He has never even won a riding election before.

Last week this very large Canadian flag was draped across the front of the Province of Manitoa legislature in Winnipeg.

Tariffs, trade and take-over

The Carney-Ford breakfast conversation focused on Donald Trump, naturally. Ford’s social media posts highlighted their united concern about new trade tariffs, an American Brexit of sorts, ending almost forty years of free trade and economic cooperation between the two countries. Ford wrote, “Team Canada has risen to the challenge and proven that no one should ever underestimate the strength and resilience of the Canadian people. Together, we will get through this more united than ever before.”

Ford fashions himself Captain Canada too, though different from the Captain Canada persona Carney is donning. Despite their different political parties, they have found common cause in promising to save Canada, but, perhaps more importantly, the newfound political currency that will buy them both a political future.

Ontario’s 121 federal ridings ( constituencies) means that this province is a kingmaker in Canadian politics, where there are 343 seats up for grabs at election time. In Alberta, for example, where their Conservative premier has decided to cozy up to Trumpian politics (she is joining Ben Shapiro on stage in Florida at a moment where Canadians have decided in record-breaking numbers to not visit the United States), they only have 34 seats. The Liberals have to win the most seats in a majority of ridings. In most parts of Canada, there will be a two-party race, as the lefter New Democratic Party has been sliding towards irrelevance, never repeating their successful breakthrough election in 2011.

The one province where this isn’t the case is Quebec, where 78 seats will be distributed between three parties, and the majority of them will likely go to the Bloc Québécois. The Bloc has been the primary benefactor of anti-Trudeau and anti-Poilievre sentiment and, while Quebecers aren’t any more interested in being annexed by the US than anywhere else in Canada, they aren’t likely to line up behind Carney the way Ontarians will. His French is weak and he’s a non-entity in Quebec politics. Up against Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet, Carney is unlikely to make any inroads in the province, though he may save the few seats they have outside of the city of Montreal that could have been swept away from an anti-Trudeau wave.

Ultimately, the one thing that can be said with certainty is that Canada’s electoral system will deliver a false mandate to whoever ends up being elected. The Liberals governed with just 33.12% of the popular vote – less than the opposition Conservatives received (with a voter turnout of 62.3%). Of the 343 ridings in Canada, just 38 are labelled a toss-up by aggregate polling website 338Canada.ca. And so whoever’s Captain Canada bit is the most successful, it will be up to a small number of voters to decide whether our Prime Minister will be Red or Blue.

BTW - Ottawa is spelled incorrectly in this Financial Times cartoon. (editor)

Powerlessness, disenfranchisement

The voting system is one of many forces that depress voter engagement, but the other forces are just as powerful at leaving Canadians with a feeling of hopelessness. Where First-Past-The-Post encourages people to make cynical electoral decisions (an ABC campaign has already started – Anybody But Conservatives), Canada’s myriad crises are not helping things. Decades of neoliberal economic policies have turned Canada’s housing market into its largest gambling den and the affordability crisis has hammered working class people.

If Canadians are looking for a saviour to protect them from Trump, they’ve been looking for a saviour to protect them from their own economic system for longer. Except for that, only Poilievre came close, despite his lack of policies. It’s left Canadians feeling disenfranchised and unsure about how to actually make change within society.

Decades of neoliberalism have realised Margaret Thatcher’s famous declaration – there is no such thing as community – and Canadians more than ever do not have the community structures to fall back on to force political change. Spare time has evaporated under the heat of unpaid care work to make up for crumbling state services, or working multiple jobs. It isn’t by accident that the year that Canadian businesses made the most profits since 1867 was 2022.

Under these conditions, it’s easy to see why Canadians are seeking their Captain Canada, and why politicians like Doug Ford or Mark Carney are trying to be their own version of Captain Canada to curry political favour. The difficult truth is that no one is coming to save us – not from our homegrown economic crises, and certainly not from Mr. Manifest Destiny, who looks up from Washington and dreams of having dominion over our land the way that Great Britain once did, except he won't even need to conquer the French army to do it.

Nora Loreto is a journalist and activist based in Quebec City Canada. You can read more about her work HERE.

Click HERE to read the archives of her substack and subscribe.Or follow Nora on bluesky HERE.

++++++

THE GOOD NEWS

THE LEFT LANE has gained over 600 subscribers since it was launched in January 2024.

THE LESS GOOD NEWS

A very small percentage are paid subscribers, a far smaller percentage than Nora’s has. TLL was NOT created to be a money spinner, but editorial costs ( e.g. costs of travel to cover stories) means it is now a money loser. Please consider upgrading to become a paid subscriber; my hitch-hiking days are behind me.

+++++++++++++

STOP PROVIDING LEFT COVER TO STARMER

By Alan Story

A definition of “providing left cover”: what socialist and left-leaning political figures do when they seek to justify, legitimise and give credibility to either centrist and right-wing ideas or the parties, such as Labour, which are promoting them.

Remember, they claim, such parties are always better than the “other one”, such as Reform or the Tories. So, stop complaining.

++++

Zarah Sultana, the left-wing MP for Coventry South, is right. The huge cuts that Starmer and Reeves are planning - which represents a vicious war on disabled people - are very nasty indeed. ( For a few details, see HERE and HERE for the link to mental health). So why doesn’t Sultana, who has already lost the Labour whip for more than eight months, tell Starmer that she no longer wants to be part of his anti-working class party any longer? Instead, why not advocate for the creation a mass socialist party?

Speaking of war: this is what Nottingham area Labour MP Nadia Whittome posted on Facebook the other day:

Whittome is also right. Israel has committed war crimes in Palestine.

So how can she remain a member/ an MP of a party, as well as back a government, that has decided Israel has NOT committed genocide in Gaza and keeps selling weapons to the genocidal regime of Netanyahu.

Her leader, Starmer, was cheek by jowl with Joe Biden on Israel and remains so with Trump, a political figure which Starmer remains very keen to suck up to; see last week's The LEFT LANE. Am I the only one who thinks Whittome is in the wrong party?

Or look at what Norwich South MP Clive Lewis, another Labour lefty, is trying to do. At the end of March, the Commons will be debating his private member’s bill aimed at bringing our water utilities back under public ownership. ( See HERE and HERE for details.)

But why isn't it a government bill? After all, when Starmer became Labour leader in 2020, he campaigned to bring water supply and sewage treatment under public control. Lewis is following Labour policy. Moreover, if Lewis’ bill is ever voted on, Labour’s members will likely be whipped to oppose it.

All three MPs have ideas that progressives should support: Stop attacking people with disabilities. End the Israeli genocide. Bring water under public ownership and control.

Whipped Labour MPs are main opponents

The main opponents? The Labour Party (as well, of course, as the Tories and Reform.)

It is past time for serious left-wing MPs who call themselves socialists to blow the whistle on Labour, to directly and publicly challenge the neoliberal stance of those running Labour, and call for a socialist alternative.

One of the main reasons – mind you, not the only one – that Labour has become more and more right wing is because such an alternative does not exist.

And there is no viable strategy for even a centrist social democratic leadership to take charge of Labour until well into the 2030s. That is the last thing the overwhelming majority of its +400 MPs want.

++++++++

Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

Read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE ( 66 in total) here

Follow us on THE LEFT LANE Instagram and on THE LEFT LANE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/leftlanepolitics.bsky.social