As the American election results continue to grind along, there are a couple of things that have emerged that we should take to heart – one is that “Trumpism” wasn’t a fluke in 2016, and that it’s a real force that America needs to contend with honestly. The other is that the polarisation in the country has become so acute that adherents to each tribe party are now living in alternate realities, where facts don’t penetrate. This was punctuated by something that Gerald Butts has been saying over the past couple of days, that there are also two “information ecosystems” in the US, that perpetuate these alternate realities, in that each side’s news media is fairly disassociated from one another (and in some cases, facts and reality).

This is the real nub of it: https://t.co/DMMTzrfTwe pic.twitter.com/NPw0HKkHaj

— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) November 4, 2020

Why do I think this matters in particular? Because I see elements of this culture war bubbling up in this country, in somewhat inchoate and fledgling forms, but it’s there. We may not have the alternate forms of media in this country, but parties – Conservatives in particular – are building it over social media instead of traditional broadcasting (though they did make an honest effort with SunTV). The complete disregard for facts has well and truly wormed its way into the party’s discourse, and we’re now on their second party leader for whom bald-faced lying is now a daily occurrence, and this gets built into shitposts for those social media channels that they are promulgating, in some cases presenting their own alternate reality versions of situations. The NDP aren’t much better, importing wholesale the rhetoric of a segment of the American democratic party, and their own adherents refuse to believe the facts of situations (such as the existence of federalism in this country), as their leader deliberately misleads or omits facts to present the image of a government that simply doesn’t care to do things rather than the truth of their not having the jurisdiction to do them.

This is a problem that we have been complacent about addressing in this country, because we insist that it’s not as bad as in the US – and sure, we don’t have the same level of tribalism and political duality as they do, but just because we’re not as far down the road as they are doesn’t mean we’re not on the road here. There was an attempt to create that duality here – it wasn’t that long ago that the Liberals were considered to be a spent force, politically, and the Conservatives and NDP spent early Question Periods of the 41^st Parliament patting themselves on the back that there was finally a real contrast in parties in the House of Commons (while the whole of the pundit class demanded that the remains of the Liberals merge with the NDP, as though the parties didn’t have fundamental ideological differences). We keep adopting Americanisms in our political systems and structures, and way too many political staffers (and more than a few reporters) spend their days LARPing episodes of the West Wing. Too many Canadians are keen to import all of the same problems that are turning America into a failed state because we think they’re more “exciting,” or somehow enviable in other ways. We should be repudiating this and shedding these American affectations from our politics, but nobody wants to do that, and this is going to cause an increasing number of problems the longer we go down this road. America is a giant flashing warning sign to turn back – can we do so in time?

Good reads:

• Justin Trudeau assures Canadians that he is keeping a close eye on the American election (as Jagmeet Singh and Yves-François Blanchet slam Trump).
• Opposition parties agreed to fast-track the new commercial rent relief bill so that it’ll pass by Friday. (Parliament isn’t sitting next week, so it won’t pass the Senate).
• Eleven weeks after the Cabinet shuffle, Chrystia Freeland still doesn’t have a public mandate letter.
• Bill Blair says the new system to help people affected by the no-fly list will be up in two weeks, and that it took so long because they needed a new IT system for it.
• The Public Health Agency has new guidelines about aerosol transmission, which other health bodies have been warning about for a couple of months now.
• The Parliamentary Budget Officer says that pay equity legislation will cost the government an additional $621 million (but I have doubts about his methodology).
• The NDP are going to use their Supply Day to demand an unworkable wealth tax and a similarly unworkable “excess profits tax” (for reasons I explained here).
• Andrew Coyne takes an acid look at Erin O’Toole journey from being a pragmatist and principled conservative to a populist nationalist who will say anything.
• Heather Scoffield suggests that now is the time to lure foreign talent educated in the US to Canada to boost our own economic future through immigration.
• Susan Delacourt considers Trudeau’s scars from managing the Trump administration for the past four years.
• Colby Cosh needles the “turnout nerds” as they try to reconcile the higher turnout in the US with the health of the country’s democracy.

Odds and ends:

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