The rise of antisemitism in post-pandemic Canada is just the latest demon in our growing national confusion.
Canada no longer appears to have any properly national interests. For if the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement of 2020 succeeded in vassalizing our country in law and reputation to Washington, the only manner in which we now seem able to respond to international events and pressures is by identification and counter-identification with our various domestic diasporic communities.
If something happens in China, our political leaders serially proclaim that they “stand with the people of China.” And then they stand “with the people of Taiwan.”
If something happens in Russia, our leaders claim to “stand with the people of Russia.” And then we “stand with the people of Ukraine.” And “with the people of Belarus.” Not necessarily in that order, of course.
And if something should happen in Iran, we apparently “stand with the people of Iran.”
There must be at least a dozen countries with whose people we in Canada today “stand.”
Who stands with Canada?
Few Canadian leaders or analysts seem bothered to query this absurd turn of phrase. Who asked Canada to “stand with the people of Country X”? And who is Canada to claim, from a great distance, to represent and know the interests and preferences of the people on the ground in Country X?
More centrally still: If Canada stands with the people of so many other countries, who stands with the people of Canada?
The answer, of course, is that a vassalized country does not, by definition, have any national interests to define or defend. Tout court! Not only can it not stand with the people of foreign lands, but it can scarcely stand with its own people on many matters. All major decision-making, for any foreseeable future, has been outsourced.
The vassalized country certainly imagines that it defines and defends, but in reality and practice, its strategic cage has been set by the vassalizing power. The vassalized country henceforth expresses itself strictly in tactical, often episodic terms. At the margins of strategic life – which is where we now live in Canada – it flails expressively, thumping its chest on social media, seeking applause and affirmation from ever-diminishing internal audiences.
In external terms, then, we in Canada are not really “standing with the people” of any country at all. Nay, we are very much speaking to ourselves – and more peculiarly to various ethnocultural segments of ourselves.
Canadian foreign policy – so-called – now operates predominantly through tweets and posts on social media platforms developed and controlled by American interests and America-centric algorithms. There is no better metaphor for the vassalized cage in which we find ourselves than the degenerate exercise of asserting Canadian positions (and values) against electronic algorithms created and mediated by foreign powers, even as our most pious defenders of “free speech” imagine themselves to be expressing themselves untrammelled.
Our national obsession with the virtual space – consolidated wholesale during the pandemic – has cannibalized the very serious, real assets required of a serious country to partake in serious international affairs: deep, differentiated, long-term relationships around the entire world; credible, deployable diplomatic, military, economic and informational capabilities; and finally, proper, professional, non-ideological analytics and intelligence on what is happening outside of our country and bleeding into and out of our country. The less “like-minded” (another favoured Canadian turn of phrase), the more valuable the asset.
Caveat emptor: All of these strategic capabilities require time and huge work to develop and perfect. No amount of online volleys, slogans and zoom calls – our post-pandemic Canadian tradecraft posing as statecraft – will get us there.
Unable to operate with effect beyond our borders, Canada’s domestic political discourse is now dominated by diasporas lobbying and manipulating government, with political leaders in turn manipulating and instrumentalizing the diasporas themselves – the first for sentimental effect, and the second for electoral effect.
Unable to operate with effect beyond our borders, Canada’s domestic political discourse is now dominated by diasporas lobbying and manipulating government, with political leaders in turn manipulating and instrumentalizing the diasporas themselves.
The rise of antisemitism
In the aftermath of the pandemic, however, this « dialogue de sourds » has become, in strategic terms, a « dialogue de l’absurde ». For the pandemic saw many of Canada’s institutions of state and society historically destabilized – resulting, as I wrote previously in these pages, in multiple crises of system in Canada. And it is in this context of systems crises that we must understand the current excitation of Canada’s diasporas – an excitation that has suddenly yielded to the most perverse outcome of them all: the rise of an antisemitism that Canada has not seen or known in well over a century.
The pandemic (and pandemic response!) conspired to weaken greatly the institutional and psychological glue that held Canadians together peaceably, over a century and a half, across the world’s second largest land mass. Even Canada’s schools, which were the primary vehicles of Canadian assimilation and integration across all linguistic, ethnic and religious boundaries, were grossly destabilized during the pandemic school closures. More generally, longstanding public norms of behaviour, order and interaction were collapsed across the country, releasing within the society very wild, radical and radicalizing energies. And antisemitism, in the history of man, is the wildest energy of them all.
All of this begs the following questions demanding urgent, substantive answers and on-the-ground action: What is Canada post-pandemic? What is a Canadian post-pandemic? How are we going to live together, post-pandemic, as successfully as we did pre-pandemic?
If the negotiated idea and identity of the Canadian have been destabilized, then the Canadian is no longer a citizen in a community of other Canadian citizens, but instead, as if by deus ex machina, a Jew or non-Jew, a Chinese or non-Chinese, an Arab or non-Arab, a Muslim or non-Muslim. These are all “more essential” identities – to be sure. But in their essence, they make a workable Canada impossible, and increasingly so with time and events. Indeed, those dyads have nearly nothing to do with the highly nuanced, elegant politics and policy of compromise – starting with the constitutional compromise between French and English – that have made Canada so admired and livable, through time, among almost all nations and tribes.
What’s to be done? Answer: A very long road awaits. Systems crises cannot be solved in a day or in a tweet – regardless of the quantum of retweets!
Grosso modo, we must reassert, aggressively, the Canadianness of all things in our country. We must speak Canadian and in Canadian terms only – in English and French alike. And we must reinvent a Canadian strategic imagination that, before long, allows a devassalized Canada again to think for itself.
We must reassert Canadian national interests strictly, without sentimentality. Such Canadian interests can only be asserted on the backs of Canadian realities and Canadian citizens – never in the name of any one of Canada’s many tribes, ethnicities and linguistic groups – and on the strength of real strategic assets, capabilities and big bets.