Talk of creeping authoritarianism mostly conjures images of foreign places—the toxic influence of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán in the European Union as he exports his particular brand of “illiberal democracy” abroad, the attempted takeover of mechanisms of the state by the former Law and Justice Party regime in Poland or the current battles over corrupted elections in Georgia and Romania. It can be attributed to places like Mexico, where now-former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador would publicly target journalists and critics for his devotees to harass. It has now landed fully in the United States with the re-election of Donald Trump, and that malignant influence is seeping over the borders into Canada.
The construction of an authoritarian state is fully on display in the U.S. right now, as Trump names cabinet secretaries and high-level appointments who are not only clearly unqualified but whose very purpose in those portfolios is to clearly engage in arson in order to dismantle key elements of the state, most especially around things like law enforcement. Picks in these high-level posts are broadcasting loud and clear that they intend to engage in lawfare, and the targeted harassment of their enemies using the power of the state. The “checks and balances” that Americans like to tout are no longer present—the Republicans control both houses, and the confirmation process will be used as a loyalty test for Republicans in the Senate rather than to vet those picks and ensure that they’re not dangerous or there because of nepotism. There is also little recourse to the courts because they too have been politicized, and the U.S. Supreme Court has essentially given immunity to Trump for actions he takes in office.
We are not there in Canada yet, but the warning signs are flashing, starting with the provinces. We saw New Brunswick, followed by Saskatchewan and Alberta engage in the scapegoating of trans people, along with drag performers and sexual education curriculum in some cases. Scapegoating queer and trans people is one of the earliest signs in, and is a key page out of, the authoritarian playbook. Use of the Notwithstanding Clause in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms—political anathema for nearly 40 years (outside of Quebec) is suddenly being used almost casually, whether it’s to try and revoke labour rights, to attack primarily Muslims and Sikhs who work in the public sector, to shut down political action groups ahead of an election and now to remove the rights of trans youth. Only in New Brunswick has this been punished at the ballot box, and that may very well have been for reasons that are entirely separate from the attack on trans youth. This is unlikely to deter federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s promise to start using the clause to do away with the presumption of innocence, or prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment.
Guardrails in Canada are being eroded as well. In Alberta, Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party (UCP) has been weakening ethics rules, and is set to weaken them even further so that ministers and senior officials can start getting “gifts” without reporting them publicly. Smith’s government is also removing rules as part of seat redistribution that will make it easier for them to gerrymander ridings to ensure that there are fewer urban ridings that can vote for the provincial NDP, thus ensuring that the UCP remains in power in perpetuity. (Ensuring that your opponents can’t win is a major Orbán strategy.) The UCP has also started firing the boards of arm’s-length oversight bodies like health authorities or the provincial pension fund, and replacing them with loyalists (such as former prime minister Stephen Harper), which is another tactic widely used in authoritarian or illiberal states.
On the federal front, Pierre Poilievre is also taking pages from the playbook on a number of different levels. One of the most obvious is his constant declaration that the country is “broken.” He also has worked to make Parliament completely dysfunctional, particularly though a current filibuster predicated on a motion that abuses the sacrosanct privileges of Parliament as a weapon against perceived enemies by trying to force the RCMP to investigate them when there has been no indication of criminal wrongdoing. In trying to force this motion, Poilievre blurs the separation of powers between the legislative and judicial branches. These are banana republic tactics that the other opposition parties have been going along with for the sheer value of embarrassing the current Liberal government, broader implications be damned, and which mainstream newspaper columnists in this country can’t see for what they are.
Poilievre has taken to broadcasting the narratives of far-right influencers who have “weaponized” Canada as a kind of cautionary tale for their audiences, and Poilievre takes that tale to build his “broken” narrative. Historian Anne Applebaum, who has written extensively on modern autocracies, says that the constant allusions to crisis, disaster and chaos serve several purposes.
“One is to throw scorn on the whole political system, because if the political system is a disaster, then you need to clear it out, you need a revolution, you need to destroy it, you need to bring in something totally different. It prepares people to accept really major changes,” she said during a recent conversation on stage about her new book, Autocracy, Inc..
Some of this is related to the authoritarian tactic of saying that “only I can fix it,” which Poilievre certainly has been broadcasting, once asserting in Question Period that only he has the “brains and backbone” to save the country from Trump’s predations. But he also engages in other behaviours common to authoritarian or illiberal regimes such as attacks on the press (most especially the pledge to “defund the CBC”) or judges, because they are the guardrails. He has also constructed a dystopian alternate reality for his followers to adopt, something Applebaum also says is used as a way authoritarians (Trump included) have their followers show loyalty, to prove that they are part of his “in-group.” And while these behaviours are all happening in the open, legacy media pundits in this country keep telling us to relax, that it won’t be that bad. There are alarming things in this country, and queer and trans people will be the first on the line as it goes down. This year has been an object lesson in why Canadians can’t let our guards down as we move into an election year.
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