Matt Gurney: Donald Trump is Canada's only reliable accountability mechanism

That's not a good thing.

Coming soon to a Jewish daycare centre near you, sadly

By: Matt Gurney

Every well-functioning society needs effective accountability mechanisms. It needs something that can reliably deter bad guys from doing bad things, or at least catch them and stop them when they try. Hell, it also needs some sort of immune system that simply prevents the good ones from getting flaky and lazy, and to prune out the soft corruption that can easily settle in in comfortable and generally affluent societies.

“Accountability mechanism” is a broad term, but it has to be. It can be many things. It can be as basic as a strict moral or religious code, enforced by a priestly caste or even simple scolds. Or, ahem, a thriving press, with reporters and columnists poring over all the information they can find for examples of bad things that need fixing and then making a lot of noise about them. In democracies, effective opposition parties are a key part of this; so are government accountability officers, like auditors and ombudsmen. In a pinch, even just a healthy sense of personal honour and shame can work.

In a perfect world, you’ll have many or all of these, and they’ll be mutually reinforcing. Does Canada have any? Or, as I’m increasingly worried, have we basically outsourced this key democratic function entirely to the United States, and specifically, Donald Trump?

This bleak thought occurred to me after I watched, with equal parts horror and relief, a recent video put out by the Toronto Police Service. You can see it for yourself here, but, in short, it’s a promotional video for the new public order mission that is putting heavily armed and armoured officers onto the streets of Toronto to secure sites at risk of attack. The video has an intensely martial vibe; the deployment looks much more like a military operation than a police patrol. Though the video doesn’t say so directly, the intended purpose is clearly stopping the sustained attacks we’ve seen on Jewish religious, commercial and cultural sites in Toronto since Oct. 7, 2023.

I support the new mission — it’s necessary and long, long overdue, which is why The Line has been highlighting the appalling and disgraceful abandonment of Canadian Jews for years. But I can’t help but notice that this large, muscular and intentionally well-publicized deployment began not after the years of attacks and harassment on and of Jews, but mere weeks after someone, as yet unidentified, fired bullets into the U.S. consulate in downtown Toronto. That seems to be what finally convinced our leadership that something had to be done.

I can understand the logic of that, on a cynical level. Our political class had obviously concluded that they could get away with “thoughts and prayers”-style responses to the suffering of our Jewish citizens. But what they were clearly not prepared to risk was American wrath. The day after the consulate had been shot up, I happened to be downtown, on University Avenue, just a few buildings from the scene of the crime. The police presence on the ground was enormous. And it occurred to me even then that the city and the province and probably the feds were absolutely terrified of some kind of American response. It didn’t even need to be a formal response. A Fox News segment or a right-wing podcast with a MAGA audience that went on about how Canadians are now shooting at Americans could be all it took to cause us enormous problems. Based on how fast and how overtly Toronto responded, I have a hunch the thought occurred to some of our political leadership, too.

So here’s a fun question: should we care?

I think we should absolutely care that it took this long for Toronto to get organized and serious, but now that we have, should we care that it took fear of the Americans? I care to the extent that I wish we’d just done it ourselves because it was the right thing to do. But since that didn’t happen, I’m morally and emotionally absolutely fine with it being fear of a U.S. response that forced our hand.

And, let’s be honest. This isn’t the only recent example where fear of an American response has forced us to do something we should already have been doing. Some of you might remember the proposed Digital Services Tax announced under the former prime minister; if you don’t, The Line helpfully explained why it was a terrible idea. But it was a bad idea that we were determined to proceed with ... until we dropped it like a hot potato after the White House expressed its displeasure. We weren’t even subtle about it, and made it explicitly clear that we were scrapping the tax to smooth over things with the United States.

There was also border security and fentanyl. I’m fully aware that the White House exaggerated both issues so they could use them against us. But I’m equally aware that Canada tends to ignore issues even slightly related to national security. A few tweets from Trump changed that. Some of our initial responses, like a czar and a pair of leased Blackhawks, were symbolic, clearly intended for Trump’s consumption. But Mark Carney has continued to ramp up our border security, and make a point of saying so. Again, we did this to avoid Trump’s wrath.

The biggest example, though, is clearly defence spending and rearming the Canadian military. Canada had long pledged to hit the NATO target, but never did; indeed, the former PM reportedly told our allies he had no plans to even try, as it wasn’t a domestic priority. But then Trump comes along and scares the crap out of us and, voilà, we’re hitting the target. Some of that is creative accounting, but not all of it.

Again, Trump did this. He scared us into doing the right thing.

As with the cops patrolling near synagogues, my feelings on this are mixed. I’m glad we’re doing the things we should have been doing. I’m depressed that it took Trump to force us.

And I’m terrified, genuinely, at what seems to be a pan-Canadian collapse in accountability, period. What is the cost of failure in this country? Actually, let me rephrase that. What is the cost of failure that is levied upon those responsible for the failure, instead of the poor suckers who experience the failure? How often does a politician or bureaucrat lose their job? Are failing programs cancelled? Are bad ideas walked back?

Sometimes! It’s not unheard of, but it’s rare, and I have concluded it’s so rare because Canada is a country that was rich enough and comfortable enough for long enough that we just politely sanded down all the sharp edges that made life even occasionally and mildly uncomfortable for the people with power. Consequences are unpleasant and awkward, so we just gradually whittled them away. Failure isn’t called failure. Consequences are skipped or minimized. What information the public and media can access is gradually but inexorably curtailed. Entire careers are spent pushing paper as pensions accrue and mortgages are paid off. There aren’t a lot of tangible links left between job security for the people who can control outcomes and the actual results (or lack thereof) of their efforts in the real world the rest of us live in.

None of this happened because we’re bad people. I don’t think the people in power are bad people! I think they just got comfortable, and had the luxury of building a system that kept them comfortable.

That worked for a while. We were rich enough to coast. But it’s stopped working. This country has major problems. This isn’t really denied by anyone. Some of our leaders seem to grasp this, and why it’s a bad thing — and I include the prime minister in that. But a lot of our leaders don’t, and even the ones that do can only use the tools they have. And these tools are not optimized for directly confronting problems in the hopes of fixing them. In the main, they’re optimized to push them out of sight and out of mind, so that no one gets in trouble. Fixing problems is not a primary Canadian public policy objective. Avoiding awkward consequences is the goal.

I don’t see anything domestically that can fix this. The public isn’t engaged, or, if they are, simply enjoys the blood sport of politics, and is happier to blame their rivals for a problem than to see the problem fixed. The media isn’t effective. Government accountability officers are ignored. Opposition parties can barely get noticed, let alone drive change.

So we drift and decay. And I really don’t see a way to turn this around.

Well, with one exception: one of the only things I can see out there that actually reliably forces us to take action to fix problems is the president of the United States. Or at least the fear of him. And that’s really bad — it’s bad because he doesn’t wish us well, and it’s bad because of what it says about us.

But okay. Whatever. Let’s work with it. How can we get Trump tweeting about the deplorable state of our emergency rooms? Can we get some MAGA podcaster freaked out about our decrepit infrastructure? Does anyone know how to entice Fox News to put a full-time reporter on the Canada’s-lenient-bail-policies beat? Can someone conjure up a vice-presidential Twitter thread about obstacles to ramping up Canadian housing starts?

I’m half joking, I think. But only half and maybe not even that much. I don’t know what else might work. Our accountability mechanisms are totally ineffective, to an extent I’m not sure they can self-correct — have we nerfed our accountability mechanisms to the point where there’s no mechanism left that can keep them accountable? That’s not word play. I am very worried that this is our actual problem. Sometimes things break beyond repair.

Have they? I’d like to know. So let’s try, maybe? We can either fix our problem ourselves, assuming we’re capable, or we can resign ourselves to the last best hope for meaningful public policy improvement in our country being our terror of the guy running the country next door.

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