In Canada The World Sees The Internal Weakness Of The Western Empire

SCMP  |  People don’t vote for realities, they vote for dreams, said Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. That’s why democratic politicians usually overpromise but under-deliver. In these populist times, people also vote out of anger.

In the United States, Donald Trump is staging a credible presidential return, and the Republican Party is rallying behind him. In Canada, Justin Trudeau, a classic Canadian liberal moderate, has been blindsided by a bunch of truck drivers. Right-wing politicians understand and know how to exploit voter anger; liberals in North America and social democrats in Europe have no idea why they have become the focus of that same anger.

The never-ending Covid-19 pandemic has one terrible, if not fatal, political consequence for the Western political establishment; that is, its on-again, off-again lockdowns and restrictions have upset everyone from small business owners to homemakers. Such voters tend to be right of centre or conservative.

The virus is not lethal enough to scare or kill off a big chunk of voters, yet is serious enough to disrupt and undermine their livelihoods, and living standards and routines. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that people are angry. And they need to blame someone for their plight. Why is my business failing? Why can’t my kids go to school? They may curse the virus and China, but they blame their politicians.

For more than a week, a long line of big trucks, cargo carriers, pickup vans, recreational vehicles and any number of cars have jammed central Ottawa, the nation’s capital. Ostensibly, the protest is against the federal government’s vaccine mandate for truck drivers entering Canada, first imposed in the middle of last month.

Compared with America, Canada’s angry populism is, to an extent, moderated by a more generous social welfare system and universal health care. But Canadian Medicare, the equivalent of the British National Health Service, is decentralised with each province and territory operating its own system. Outside of rich Ontario, public health care has been overwhelmed by Covid-19. With each passing decade, welfare is more restricted, queues for medical services grow longer and the list of totally free drugs gets shorter. The widespread use of generic drugs, while keeping costs down, has raised serious questions about quality control. Interestingly, it has been a source of national pride to compare them to the high, often unaffordable, costs of brand-name drugs in the US.

Polarised politics now threatens to degenerate into violent civil strife in the US. In Canada, at the very least, consensus politics is becoming a thing of the past. But its politicians are blind to the new emerging reality while its liberal mainstream press remains arrogant and complacent.