Jen Gerson: The cost of Canadian complacency
We are a trusting lot with belief in each other. Maybe we've needed just a touch of the crazy.
By: Jen Gerson
Your strengths are your weaknesses, and your weaknesses are your strengths. That’s an idea that strikes me as more obviously true as I get older, and it’s one that can be applied to both individuals and nations. Most of us are pretty ordinary and similar around the middle, but if you want to understand where your vulnerabilities lurk, look at the strengths you’ve built up around yourself. And if you ever want to discover the ways in which you are uniquely strong, lean into the discomfort of weakness.
Two items had me chewing on that point this week; the first, most obvious, was Prime Minister Mark Carney’s “Forward Guidance” video — a banker’s fireside chat delivered to Canadians ahead of what is likely to be three months of unpredictable chicanery preceding the renegotiation, extension, or full-blown abandonment of CUSMA/USMCA/MUSCA.
“Many of our former strengths, based on our close ties to America, have become weaknesses. Weaknesses that we must correct,” Carney noted in a 10-minute presentation that, for some reason, absolutely refused to retire Mike Myers as a shared symbol of Canadian resistance.
There is absolutely no question that Canada’s geopolitical and cultural closeness to America has, historically, been among its greatest strategic strengths; simultaneously, our inter-dependence is also an incredible liability when the U.S. goes bonkers. Which, historically, it does tend to do from time to time.
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Recently, I was re-reading a spot of U.S. history and couldn’t help but find myself yelling at the page: “Good lord, the Loyalists were right! Those ‘patriot’ rebels were hypocritical, conspiratorial loons who killed and dispossessed their neighbours over duties on tea.” I mean, King George was no winner as far as British monarchs go, but if the rest of the Anglosphere is any indication, the U.S. would have soon gained responsible government with the rest of us in short order without bloodshed.
It’s hard to read any U.S. history and fail to conclude that our beloved revolutionary kinsmen to the south are reliably cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs. But then, maybe a touch of the crazy is a necessary precondition for those with the audacity to build a new system of government that eventually sends men to the moon and seeks to lead the world under a liberal order.
Strengths and weaknesses. See what I’m saying, here?
The next item that tipped me off on this point was this graph that made the rounds of late, based on polling on morality by the Pew Research Center. It found that Americans were almost uniquely likely to rate their fellow citizens as morally bad. (To which I say: do you see what they do to each other periodically throughout history? Again, the Loyalists were correct to flee into the northern wilds still controlled by the British.)
Of course, for all our cultural similarity, Canada proved the polar opposite of the 25 countries studied. We were bizarrely willing to rate our neighbours as morally good.
As Canadians are wont to do every time a graph comes around that puts us at the top of something, we shared this fascinating bit of research with a very characteristic helping of smug glee. This is the kind of unearned self-regard that a genuinely moral person would try to guard against, but given current events, I suppose we can give ourselves the odd point.
A high sense of our own morality and trust in our neighbours, that’s generally regarded as an unmitigated good. This is the kind of shared feeling that promotes community, and fosters and maintains shared resolve in the face of adversity. It’s the sentiment that allows groups to come together in moments of crisis.
Our high-trust society is something that is almost universally — perhaps uncritically — regarded as a strength.
You see where I’m going, here.
We don’t often ask ourselves wherein lies the weakness of this trait.
Firstly, trust in one’s neighbour ungrounded by judgement and discernment isn’t a virtue. It’s dumb. Carney’s quote: “Many of our former strengths, based on our close ties to America, have become weaknesses,” is painfully passive. Our close ties to America were not merely the happy accidents of geography. We chose those economic ties. We trusted them and we allowed ourselves to grow complacent and dependent as a result of that trust — which, in hindsight, seems about as smart as trusting a crackhead neighbour to look after the family puppy while we went on vacation. We did it because it was easier, I guess.
Secondly, the Pew research assumes we believe ourselves to be morally superior, but is this actually true? What shared moral standard are we even judging ourselves by? So much of our own self-perception is rooted in assumptions like our robust social safety net — our health care and education systems, for example.
Fine, as far as it goes. But what happens to that perception, and to the identities we’ve built around that perception, if we’re forced to confront the reality of those systems right now? The health care, education, and other social programs we believe define us so sharply from America are in states of decline and decay, guys. Is our compliant, moral nature helping us, here? Or has our high-handed attitude prevented us from confronting the state of ourselves honestly and forthrightly?
During last week’s podcast, I recounted an anecdote from several years ago. For a brief period, CBC ran a comedy vertical called, originally, CBC Comedy because, for some reason, the public broadcaster has to be absolutely everything to everybody and then complain about its lack of funding to deliver much of anything particularly well.
CBC Comedy, if you remember it (and I bet that you don’t), was exactly as funny as you’d expect from a government-sponsored-comedy vertical, which is to say, not even a little bit. In fact, the only gratification any single taxpayer got out of this failson of an endeavour was the joy to be gleaned by making fun of it — which I and several other journalists did quite religiously for a time.
Anyway, one day we all received nearly identical DMs from the vertical’s editor asking us, nay, pleading with us, to please lay off.
Because, as unfunny as this thing clearly was, the writers were trying really hard.
Being morally superior Canadians, we proceeded to publish these earnest pleas in full, mercilessly mocking CBC Comedy, its bosses, and everyone who ever worked there.
Shame failed to have the intended effect. CBC Comedy never got better. And, having never improved, now no longer exists.
Ever since then, I see this attitude eating away at everything in Canada. In fact, it’s gotten worse.
The journalists willing to call out subpar performance are aberrations in a culture that lionizes niceness as a defining virtue. Perhaps if we trusted each other less, our media culture would be more effectual at policing real power. The old accountability mechanisms are simply no longer attached to meaningful consequences; we publicize inputs instead of outputs; the metrics of how we declare success are never objectively defined; the bureaucracy expands to meet the growing needs of the bureaucracy; timelines and goalposts shift; projects stall indefinitely; demands for answers to governments go unanswered; failures become learning opportunities; and boondoggles disappear into the night.
Hey, does anybody remember those superclusters? Never mind, something something gay AI Supercomputers, now. Onto the next thing, with zero lessons learned. It’s the Canadian way. And speaking of computers, we are now at the point that re-publishing a Government of Canada press release serves as its own punchline:
“This program, part of the Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy, will enable the development of large-scale, Canadian-based compute infrastructure to advance AI research and innovation, while safeguarding Canada’s national interests.”
You don’t even need to add anything to that statement to make it objectively hilarious. I hear a laugh track in the back of my mind as I read it. CBC Comedy, eat your heart out.
This is the wasting illness that is eating at the bones of the polity.
Sure, everything has gone to shit, we can’t actually build anything, the economy is going into a tailspin, we’ve lost a definable sense of ourselves, and nobody ever seems to be held accountable for any single thing that goes wrong.
Well, but, everybody means well.
(Do they?)
This is the trap of a high-trust society.
Everybody is trying hard.
(So what?)
We trust that we’re mostly good enough — right up until the moment personal circumstances force us one by one to confront the reality of our own institutional decline.
But, hey, we’re nice people, after all. Moral. Better.
Look, a little smarm is healthy for the soul. Too much works like acid to leech the calcium that’s meant to hold the structure upright.
Your weaknesses are your strengths. But your strengths are also your weaknesses. If we hope to withstand the madness of the lunatic revolutionaries on our heels, we’re going to need to stare square-face at both.
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100%! I, for one, lost faith in everyone since about 2015. I trust no one. I assume everyone is lying to me or incompetent or both. I mercilessly demand and pursue accountability at every turn. I have my successes in doing so, but it’s painstaking and exhausting. But if I don’t do it, I know it’ll never happen. Our institutions, the people who run them and their reputations are all shit. Canadians need to seriously give their heads a shake. Yet, as Jen notes, everyone has been centrally preoccupied in how nice we are, how tolerant we are, how forgiving and good natured we all are, and how trusting we are — and Canadians (especially our leadership) are smug as fuck about that — regardless of the fact that we have no reason to be. It’s fucking irritating.
You guys are getting better all the time. As always every coin has two sides, strengths and weaknesses as you put it. I generally still have faith in institutions and in those who choose public life to do it for the right reasons: trust. But delegation should never be abdication. I still need to notice that every development decision Doug Ford makes enriches his friends, and that the foundations of our social cohesion, equality of opportunity through great public education and caring for each other through public healthcare, are under attack from his government. Why is the media not on this? You answer that question well.