Category: Politics

Friends, like many Canadians, I was delighted to see Mark Carney defeat Pierre Poilievre and the MAGA Conservatives. I was also impressed by his recent speech at Davos, where he called out the collapse of the rules-based order and the need to align with middle powers of goodwill. Carney is a strong fighter for Canada on the international front.

On the domestic front, however, I am concerned. Today’s Liberals are indistinguishable from the old Progressive Conservatives, sidelining climate policy and the health and community issues the NDP once kept firmly on the agenda. There is now a gap in the political centre that the NDP are well positioned to occupy.

Unlike the U.S., Canada’s third parties have historically exercised real leverage at key moments, preventing extremism and helping to keep Parliament and the country balanced. For these reasons, I have joined the NDP and will be voting for Avi Lewis as its new leader. I encourage you to join as well, so you can make your choice for leader. The deadline is January 28.

https://act.lewisforleader.ca/become-an-ndp-member

What Václav Havel Would Ask Mark Carney About Power and Truth

Mark Carney’s speech at Davos this past week, heard around the world, was unusually clear-minded about the moment we are in. Speaking to an audience fluent in the language of global cooperation, Carney stripped away the comforting myths that have long sustained the rules-based international order and named its quiet collapse. The unresolved question his speech leaves hanging is whether Canada and the middle powers will repeat this failed pattern of power among themselves and at home, or take the harder lesson and change how power is shared.

The rules-based international order was the postwar system meant to replace raw power with shared rules and institutions, underwritten by U.S. leadership. It relied on bodies such as the UN, global trade rules, and international financial institutions to create predictability, limit the use of force, and give smaller states some protection from great-power coercion. In theory, disputes were settled by process rather than pressure, and economic openness was balanced by collective security.

Carney argues that for decades countries like Canada went along with this order even though we knew it was only partly true. We knew the strongest states exempted themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and that international law was applied unevenly depending on who was accused and who was harmed.

We accepted this unevenness because we prospered under the arrangement. But the bargain no longer holds. We are now in the midst of a rupture. Carney did not name the United States, but his meaning was clear. The U.S. is using economic integration as a weapon, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, and supply chains as vulnerabilities to exploit.

Carney said that we tolerated the system’s inconsistencies because it served our own prosperity. Canada went along with the unevenness, discrepancies, and injustices because it worked for us. It worked for us. Don’t miss that.

This makes Carney’s invocation of Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless especially interesting. Havel argued that the power of a system often rests on shared rituals and unspoken compliance, and that late communism endured partly because people acted as if they believed in it. The rules-based order functioned in much the same way. But Havel would have insisted that naming the lie is only the first step. The real test is whether those who benefit from a system are willing to stop performing belief in it themselves. For Havel, truth was not a rhetorical insight but a lived risk. He might have asked whether Carney’s use of the story leads to genuine relinquishing of power.

The hard question is what this rupture means in practice, both among middle powers and at home. Have they learned the lesson of failed rule-based orders, or will they reproduce the same dynamics in a new alignment?

Carney declared that Canada was among the first to hear the wake-up call. Will Canada emerge as a leader of the middle powers, offering yet another convenient fiction of cooperation for as long as it suits us? Or will we fundamentally change how we cooperate with other nations?

And what lesson does Carney bring home to Canada? Renewal should not come through further concentration of federal and prime-ministerial power. It means finally moving forward on electoral reform toward proportional representation. It means sharing power more widely by strengthening local governments and communities. If this sounds complicated in an increasingly complex world, it is. Difficulty is not an argument against doing it.

Could Canada survive economically without free trade with the United States? It’s a bit like asking whether we could survive without computers and the Internet. Both free trade and the digital revolution reshaped our economy in the nineteen nineties. I’m a GenXer who grew up alongside globalization and who thrives in digital tools and open markets. But these forces shaped us without ever being the source of our resilience.

Canada survived and even thrived before NAFTA, before permanent preferential access to U.S. markets, and before the commercial Internet remade everything. Our prosperity didn’t begin in the nineties. We built a high standard of living long before those agreements and technologies arrived. We could do so again, though it would require patience, adjustment, and a deliberate shift in national priorities.

Life in Canada before free trade was plenty great too — a place that created public health care, built its own space program, and kept a sprawling northern nation stitched together with culture, grit, and good winter coats. We carried a quiet confidence that our best ideas didn’t need permission from anywhere else.

Trump’s Tariffs offer Canada a Window for Change

Canadians need to fall back from globalization. We need to disentangle from American economics and culture, reinhabit our own geography, and rebuild a local economy and culture that reflect who we are.

Resistance Fails with the 1988 Election

Canada’s deep integration into the global economy began with the 1988 Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between Brian Mulroney’s government and the United States. It marked a turning point. For the first time, Canada committed to binding trade rules that prioritized corporate cross-border interests over national economic autonomy. This paved the way for NAFTA in 1994, then the USMCA in 2020, accelerating Canada’s embrace of globalization.

The 1988 federal election was fought primarily over the FTA. Liberal leader John Turner, like Mark Carney, had inherited the role of prime minister without a general mandate. Turner opposed the deal, In the televised leaders’ debate, he accused Mulroney:

“We built a country east and west and north. We built it on an infrastructure that deliberately resisted the Continental pressure of the United States. For 120 years we’ve done it. With one signature of a pen you’ve reversed that… and will reduce us, I’m sure, to a colony of the United States.” He lost to Mulroney, and with him, the last serious resistance to American economic integration faded.

Since then, Canada’s economy has become deeply embedded in both North American and planetary systems of trade, finance, and information. Our manufacturing supply chains n auto, agriculture, and energy are tightly synchronized with U.S. markets. Cultural imports dominate our media and entertainment. Our market reacts not just to decisions in Ottawa, but to Washington, Beijing, and Frankfurt. Over time, our economic, political, and cultural autonomy has quietly eroded.

The Cult of Cheap

Free trade brought Canada a range of benefits. Export markets opened. Some industries modernized. Consumers got cheaper goods and greater variety. For the urban middle class and corporate sector, the gains were real. But these gains were not evenly shared. Rural economies were hollowed out. Factory towns disappeared. Wages stagnated. Cultural industries struggled under the weight of American content. In exchange for efficiency, we accepted precarity. For abundance, dependency.

And then came the more difficult truths. “Globalization is slave labour making things for the unemployed,” said Marine Le Pen (a name I invoke only for the words, not her politics). An indecent formulation, but one that reveals the indecency beneath the system. In pursuit of cost savings, corporations outsourced production to wherever wages were lowest and protections weakest. Sweatshops. Child labour. Unsafe factories that collapse on their workers. Supply chains engineered to maximize opacity. Accountability became a public relations issue, not a moral one. While human rights frameworks were drafted and conferences held, the basic ethic remained unchanged: profit first.

Globalization didn’t just make goods cheaper; it made desire cheaper. Fast fashion, disposable gadgets, novelty without function. Things to be bought and discarded, not repaired or cherished. Marketing became the true engine of consumption, turning manufactured abundance into perceived need. Our homes filled with items we didn’t ask for but somehow couldn’t resist.

The environmental costs are everywhere. Forests cleared to make way for export crops. Rivers polluted by synthetic dyes. Oceans choked with plastic waste. And all of it moved by fossil fuel—across oceans, over highways, through the air—because distance, once a deterrent, became irrelevant to the logic of capital.

Globalization is an Extension of Colonialism

Globalization is an extension of our colonial past. Where empires once used flags and armies, corporations now use contracts and debt. Control by other means. Former colonies remain stuck in extractive roles: raw materials out, cheap goods in. Infrastructure still follows the colonial blueprint—roads and rails designed not to connect communities, but to move resources out efficiently. Multinational corporations behave like modern imperial agents, profiting from labour and land in the Global South while evading responsibility.

Canada, a settler colony, remains both beneficiary and captive of this system. We extract, export, and import culture at a loss. We profit from exploitation while absorbing the dislocation it causes.

The Future of Globalization

The world is, undeniably, interconnected. When governed justly, global cooperation can spread knowledge, contain pandemics, mitigate war, and address climate breakdown. Trade, done well, can lift people out of poverty. Cultural exchange, approached with respect, can deepen understanding.

If globalization is ever to redeem its potential, it must be rooted in fairness, accountability, and restraint. Labour standards must be binding. Environmental protections must be non-negotiable. Trade must be reciprocal, not extractive. Cultural sovereignty must be protected, not flattened. We need not abandon the global—we need to reimagine it.

Tariffs and a Window to Rethink

Trump’s tariffs—erratic, politically motivated, economically disruptive—may nevertheless offer Canada a narrow window. The impulse to disentangle is rarely rewarded in a global system that punishes local initiative. But tariffs shift the calculus. They create space.

Yes, there will be costs. Prices may rise. GDP may dip. But GDP is a poor compass. It counts wildfire reconstruction as growth, but ignores the trees lost. It values speculation over community well-being. It is a tally, not a measure of health.

The deeper question isn’t whether we grow—but whether we grow wisely.

The Wisdom of Contraction

There is an ecological intelligence to contraction. Forests regrow after fire. Bodies heal in rest. Civilizations, too, need intervals of reflection and repair. The past few decades have been a phase of rapid expansion—for capital, for technology, for consumption. We have reached the limits of what this phase can sustain.

Falling back is not regression. It is rhythm.

To fall back now is to begin again with intention. It is to shorten supply lines and reconnect producer and consumer. It is to value durability over disposability. It is to invest in local industry, food systems, arts, and energy—all the things that make a place livable and resilient. It is to make room for silence in the cultural din, and listen to the stories that rise in its absence.

Re-entering the World Differently

This is Canada’s chance—not just to recover what has been lost, but to think beyond what was. To step out of the trance of inevitability, to remake our global connection.

We must name what globalization has externalized: the extraction of labour without rights, the erosion of ecosystems, the destruction of cultural diversity, the hollowing of local economies, the amplification of inequality, the soft tyranny of scale. These are not accidents. They are outcomes. And they can be reconsidered.

Imagine a future where nothing crosses a border unless it honours both human dignity and ecological sanity. Where corporations are taxed not only on earnings but on impact. Where communities are empowered to define their own development. Where technology is shared to solve shared problems, not to hoard advantage. This is not utopia. It is a matter of design.

And so, let us fall back—not to withdraw from the world, but to re-enter it differently.

I Urge You to Vote for Something Hopeful

Canada heads to the polls on Monday, April 28, 2025, in what many deem the most consequential federal election in the nation’s history, shaped by rising tensions with the United States, deepening economic challenges, and an urgent climate crisis. This election offers a stark choice between cautious adaptation and the real risk of democratic backsliding. Poilievre’s conservatism, driven by populism, nationalism, and a rollback of environmental and social protections, stands in contrast to Carney’s renewed liberalism, offering stability, institutional resilience, and continued action on climate. Poilievre taps into economic anger and cultural resentment, mirroring Trump’s populist messaging and downplaying threats to Canadian sovereignty. Carney presents a steadier, if cautious, vision of Canada’s future, openly criticizing Trump as a destabilizing force and emphasizing the need to strengthen democratic institutions and international alliances.

A record-breaking 7.3 million Canadians cast their ballots during advance polls held from April 18 to 21, marking a 25 percent increase from the 2021 election. This surge does not necessarily indicate a higher overall turnout or favor any particular party, but polling shows the Liberals under Mark Carney on track to secure a modest majority government.

The Liberals Are Not What They Used to Be

Over the past decade, Canadians have elected three consecutive Liberal governments under Justin Trudeau: a majority in 2015, followed by minority governments in 2019 and 2021. Securing a fourth term would be a significant achievement, given that until recently, a Conservative victory under Pierre Poilievre seemed almost certain.

Many Canadians say they want governance from the political centre. But the centre has shifted dramatically over recent decades. Traditional Liberal centrism focused on building strong public institutions, regulating markets to serve the common good, and protecting Canadian sovereignty through cautious engagement with international trade.

In 1988, Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives negotiated the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement (FTA), aligning Canada with Ronald Reagan’s free-market revolution. At the time, Liberal leader John Turner strongly protested, warning it would erode Canada’s sovereignty and make it a satellite of the U.S. economy. Today’s Liberal centrism prioritizes globalization, free markets, and deregulation, defending cross-border economic integration even as they fight against tariffs imposed by Republican President Donald Trump—measures that disrupt the very trade structures earlier Liberals once feared.

Under Justin Trudeau, the Liberals positioned themselves as global climate leaders, introducing carbon pricing, committing to net-zero by 2050, and investing in clean energy. A key achievement was the 2018 Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, which included a consumer carbon tax and regulations for large emitters. By 2025, however, public backlash and economic strain, amplified by Poilievre’s ‘Axe the Tax’ campaign, forced a shift. After Trudeau’s resignation, Mark Carney took over as Liberal leader and promptly scrapped the consumer carbon tax, citing affordability concerns. While Carney has retained emissions caps and supports green investment, he has also pushed for expanded oil and gas projects, prioritizing economic resilience over climate ambition—a marked shift from Trudeau’s approach.

Strategic Voting Is a Maladaptive Feedback Loop

If Canadians elect a fourth Liberal government on Monday, it will be a significantly different Liberal government than in the past, one increasingly compromised on sovereignty and climate. This shift reflects a defensive response to the rise of the far right. The Conservative Party has moved sharply away from the political centre, embracing populism, nationalism, authoritarian tactics, and conspiracy theories. Their rhetoric pits ‘us versus them,’ scapegoating immigrants, minorities, and dissenters, echoing historical patterns of fascism and posing serious threats to democratic pluralism and social cohesion. To block the far right from power, the Liberals have edged rightward themselves, hoping to contain extremism even at the cost of diluting their own progressive commitments.

Liberal policy keeps shifting right, and voters reinforce it by voting for them—a maladaptive feedback loop. Strategic voting happens when citizens cast ballots not for the candidate or party they most support, but for the one most likely to defeat a greater threat. It makes sense on the surface, blocking immediate dangers like Poilievre forming government. Unfortunately, it carries hidden consequences. By repeatedly choosing the ‘lesser evil,’ voters unwittingly become agents of the very shift they fear, pushing mainstream parties further right. Over time, this maladaptation hollows out genuine alternatives, erodes progressive ambitions, and normalizes compromises that once would have been unthinkable.

The Far Right Has Called Out the Wolves

In information theory, systems often settle into stable but suboptimal patterns, avoiding change because it carries risk and uncertainty. Strategic voting reflects this dynamic: voters choose major parties, not because they match their values, but because they fear losing to worse alternatives. In doing so, they entrench political compromises that cannot meet urgent crises like climate change. Today, the Liberals’ rightward shift is a clear example—stabilizing around survival rather than renewal, while deeper problems continue to worsen.

Theorists suggest introducing ‘wolves’ into such stable systems—disruptive forces that compel adaptation. Wolves raise the stakes, making the risk of staying put greater than the risk of trying something new. On the political right, wolves manifest as populist demagogues like Trump or Poilievre, spreading misinformation, stoking fear, and eroding democratic norms. The far right understands disruption. Their wolves frighten voters, pushing them into reactionary politics.

The far right has called out their wolves. Progressives must match that urgency. What might wolves look like on the left? To start, a correction: the wolf has long been used as a cliché for evil, but this view is misguided. Wolves are not inherently malevolent; they are essential parts of healthy ecosystems, balancing populations and maintaining natural cycles. There is nothing healthy about Trump.

Vote for Something Hopeful and Transformational

The climate crisis is certainly fearful. It poses existential threats that render cautious incrementalism irrational. Catastrophic wildfires, floods, and heatwaves scream urgency, making safe, incremental policies obsolete. Yet progressives hesitate, reluctant to risk bold action, continuing to vote strategically rather than for transformative solutions.

Another correction is required. Fear-mongering is not the right approach to inspire climate action. While fear can grab attention, it often leads to paralysis, denial, or despair rather than the sustained hope, courage, and collective effort needed for meaningful change. Animals that symbolize hope include doves, representing peace and renewal; swallows, harbingers of spring and safe return; and deer, symbols of gentle resilience and new beginnings.

Symbols aside, the left must call out visions of hope for which voters will take risks. I can give you a personal example. I live in Alcove, Quebec, through which flows the Gatineau River—the Tenàgàdino Zìbì in the Algonquin language. The river is central to community life, and residents have taken up a growing movement to recognize the river as a person with rights. Not surprisingly, this issue never surfaced in the federal election. I was very close to voting Liberal when I heard my local New Democratic Party candidate speak on it. Gilbert Whiteduck, a respected Algonquin leader and former Chief of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation, described the river as a living being, teaching that it be respected and cared for, and advocates for its legal personhood to protect its cultural, spiritual, and ecological integrity. At the ballot box, I made a last-second decision to vote for Whiteduck.

I urge you to vote for something hopeful. Think local and transformational. It is a risk. If enough people stop strategic voting, there is a risk of losing your riding and the election. But we must be willing to take risks, supporting candidates who advocate genuine, transformative change. It will signal politicians the direction to change policy. Strategic caution may feel safer, but in the face of planetary emergency, caution itself becomes irrational. If we continue to stabilize around survival instead of renewal, we risk losing not just elections, but the future.

Break the Pattern Before It Breaks Us

At this moment, we are not simply casting votes. We are shaping the patterns that will define our future. Fear urges us to cling to what feels safe, to compromise a little more, to delay real change a little longer. But the cracks in our world are widening. Climate collapse, democratic erosion, and rising authoritarianism are not distant threats—they are already here. If we vote only to survive today, we will lose tomorrow. Now is the time to vote with courage, to break free from decaying patterns, to demand bold action, and to take the risks that true renewal requires. Our future depends on it.

Beyond Billionaire Fantasies to a Collaborative Economy

In my previous essay, Billionaire Consciousness, I explored how extreme wealth accumulation distorts the human psyche and encourages escape fantasies, from bunkers in New Zealand to colonies on Mars. These dreams of departure are not just personal delusions, but symptoms of systems designed to benefit the few while severing ties with the earth and one another. If we are to resist these gravitational pulls away from shared reality, we need to examine one of the core infrastructures that makes billionaire consciousness possible: money.

Money has always had a social life. We share it, manage it, and worry about it together. But the design of money tells a different story, one of private possession and individual control. That story is not natural or eternal. It is the result of relatively modern choices in financial infrastructure and ideology.

Historically, money emerged not as a private commodity but as a social technology, a way to record obligations, coordinate exchange, and manage trust in communities. As Felix Martin argues in Money: The Unauthorized Biography, early forms of money resembled collective ledgers, not coins or bills. Value was relational, not possessive.

But in modern financial systems, money has been reframed as something that must belong to a single person, stored in an individual bank account, accessed by a personal password or card, and tracked as a personal asset. This individualization of money, as Brett Scott explains in Cloudmoney, is embedded in the architecture of digital finance. Every transaction flows through personally identifiable accounts, routing wealth through centralized infrastructures controlled by a small number of institutions and beneficiaries.

This design, of money as an individualized, digital possession, scales. It empowers those who already own capital to move it faster, deploy it more flexibly, and accumulate more of it. It also isolates those who need support, making collaboration in money management feel like an exception or a workaround. In short, the very architecture of money contributes to its concentration. The more individuated and abstract money becomes, the easier it is for it to pile up in a few hands, giving rise to billionaires whose financial power exceeds that of many nations.

But for those of us who intend to stay, to live together on a warming, interdependent planet, this design is insufficient. It is not just unjust; it is impractical. Our real lives are collaborative. People share financial responsibilities with partners, caregivers, friends, and family. Financial life is social and dependent on informal arrangements. These improvisations, from shared bank cards to verbal agreements, are risky, often breaching terms of service and exposing users to fraud or loss. People persist with them because the systems they rely on do not reflect how they actually live.

The concept of collaborative payments begins with this recognition. It is not a technical product, but a shift in design philosophy, a reimagining of money as something we often manage together. It invites us to move beyond the all-or-nothing mechanisms of power-of-attorney and joint accounts, toward models that support consent, context, and care. It is not a return to the past, but a design for people rooted in the present, investing in a shared future here on Earth.

Collaborative payments can be understood as an extension of programmable money, a growing area of interest in financial technology. At its core, programmable money refers to conditional, automated payments. A certain trigger leads to a specific financial action: if this, then that. The conditions can be personal, environmental, or social, anything from a recurring bill to a pattern of overspending.

These conditional rules can introduce new forms of financial cooperation. For example, someone might configure a system to alert a friend when their spending exceeds a limit, not to hand over control, but to invite support. Another person might automate a series of payments tied to seasonal needs, income thresholds, or shared responsibilities. In all cases, the point is not surveillance or dependency, but the ability to shape money in ways that reflect life as it is lived, embedded in relationships, rhythms, and shared responsibility.

To support these possibilities, systems must be designed for configurable consent. This means giving people the ability to choose collaborators, define their roles, and set boundaries for what is shared. A person should be able to invite others into their financial life without forfeiting autonomy. And they must be able to adjust or revoke access at any time.

Of course, configuring consent requires its own kind of ability, a form of digital literacy that not everyone possesses. Children may need guidance. Seniors may need support. People with cognitive or emotional challenges may need options that are both protective and empowering. In some cases, oversight by a trusted institution or third party may be necessary. But this does not negate autonomy; it reinforces it by making it real and usable.

Importantly, collaborative payments are not only for the vulnerable. They offer value to anyone managing financial complexity, from families coordinating budgets, to friends co-planning travel, to small business owners juggling multiple streams of income and expenditure. Even intelligent systems, digital agents that flag unusual activity or automate repetitive tasks, can be integrated into this collaborative frame.

What matters most is the shift in orientation. Money is not just a tool for personal freedom or accumulation. It is also a medium of relationship, of care, accountability, and shared decision-making. Collaborative payments reintroduce this idea at the level of design. They challenge the myth of financial individualism, not by rejecting technology, but by bending it toward our real lives.

We do not need to return to paper money to rediscover the social nature of finance. But we do need to rethink the assumptions that shape digital systems, the ones that prioritize isolation over connection, control over trust, and scale over inclusion. Collaborative payments point toward a future where money serves not only individuals, but communities. Not only transactions, but relationships. Not billionaires escaping Earth, but earthlings learning how to stay.

The Delusion of Capitalism at the Edge of Collapse

There is a peculiar kind of consciousness emerging in our time, not spiritual, not collective, but intensely personal and hyper-capitalist. Billionaire consciousness. It is not defined by the size of one’s bank account alone, but by a way of seeing the world shaped by unimaginable wealth, power, and detachment. Think of Musk launching cars into space, Bezos building rockets named after freedom, or Trump, endlessly proclaiming his greatness while leaving wreckage behind. These men are not simply rich. They inhabit a different psychological planet, orbiting far above the daily concerns of ordinary people. And the tragedy is not just that they live this way, but that the system is guiding us all toward their altitude, or at least toward believing that we should want to.

In many ways, billionaire consciousness is the logical endpoint of capitalism. It begins with the promise of opportunity: work hard, innovate, and success will follow. But the slope is steep and slippery. Capitalism rewards accumulation, and once a certain threshold is passed, wealth multiplies without work. The rich get richer not because they are smarter or more moral, but because the game is rigged. What began as aspiration hardens into separation. Billionaire consciousness forms in this altitude, where basic needs are long forgotten and control over systems, people, and even reality itself becomes the obsession.

It is a mindset defined by detachment. When you can buy anything, time, labour, even influence, the idea of shared sacrifice becomes abstract. The billionaire does not wait in lines. They do not worry about bills, healthcare, or housing. Their concerns become strategic, global, often absurd: how to colonize Mars, how to upload consciousness to the cloud, how to outlive death itself. These are not merely ambitions. They are escape plans, crafted from a deep fear of falling back to Earth, to vulnerability, to being like the rest of us.

And yet, the rest of us carry the cost. The billionaire’s freedom is built on the exhaustion of others, warehouse workers, gig drivers, unpaid interns, drained ecosystems. While they shape narratives of disruption and innovation, the public sphere withers: schools starve for funding, hospitals close, housing becomes speculative. The billionaire believes they are solving the world’s problems. But more often, they are bypassing them, privatizing the solutions and charging admission.

Worse still, billionaire consciousness spreads. It infects culture. We begin to admire them, even defend them. We internalize their logic: hustle harder, scale faster, be your own brand. The dream of becoming a billionaire, or just escaping precarity, keeps us in line. But it is a dream, and like most dreams, it is not shared equally. The vast majority will never join the club. Meanwhile, democracy erodes, inequality widens, and attention becomes the most mined resource of all.

What makes billionaire consciousness so devastating is not its extravagance but its emptiness. It is a hollowing out of human connection, of the idea that we rise together. It replaces meaning with metrics, relationships with transactions, and wonder with spectacle. The billionaire may escape to space, but they leave a scorched Earth behind.

And so, we must wake up. Not just from the illusion of ever becoming billionaires, but from the system that tells us we should try. There is another kind of consciousness worth cultivating, one rooted in community, in limits, in care. A consciousness that sees freedom not as personal detachment but as shared dignity. The billionaire may live above the clouds. The future, if we are to have one, must be grounded here, with each other.

Understanding Trump’s Appeal Through Fear, Identity, and the End of Globalization

When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, like many, I was stunned. When he lost in 2020, I believed the country had turned the page. His comeback in 2024 was unprecedented and baffling. To make sense of it, I turned to trusted sources: science, sociology, and history.

Fear and the Conservative Brain

Part of the answer lies in the way our brains are wired. Neuroscientists Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long, in The Molecule of More, explain how dopamine, the brain’s chemical of desire and motivation, drives human behavior. It governs our engagement with the future, pushing us to seek, plan, and imagine.

Liberals, they argue, tend to be more dopamine-driven, drawn to change, exploration, and progress. Conservatives, by contrast, lean more on the “here-and-now” chemicals like serotonin and oxytocin that foster connection, stability, and contentment with what exists. Complementary findings show that conservatives have stronger activity in brain regions linked to threat detection, like the amygdala, explaining their heightened sensitivity to danger and preference for order.

Trump speaks directly to this psychology. He doesn’t offer a hopeful future, he offers protection from a fearful one. His message is not about building something new but defending what’s being lost. For brains wired toward security, this is a powerful appeal.

Alienation and the Deep Story

Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild offers another insight in Strangers in Their Own Land. She embedded herself in conservative communities in Louisiana, trying to understand what she called the “deep story” of the American right. It wasn’t just about policy; it was about identity.

Many of these communities suffer from pollution, poor infrastructure, and economic decline, yet they resist environmental regulation and progressive reforms. Why? Because they feel insulted, ignored, and stereotyped. Hochschild describes their worldview as one in which they’ve played by the rules, worked hard, and waited patiently, only to see others “cut in line.” The result is a potent mix of pride and resentment.

Add to this a fractured media environment. With traditional journalism in decline, many turn to partisan outlets like Fox News. Without broad exposure to differing viewpoints or tools for critical thinking, disinformation thrives. Trump’s messaging, rooted in grievance and emotional appeal, finds fertile ground.

The End of Globalization

Underlying it all is a deeper shift: the decline of the globalization era. From the 1990s to the 2010s, globalization promised prosperity through free trade, open borders, and technological exchange. But while it enriched some, it devastated others—offshoring jobs, hollowing out industries, and widening inequality. Entire regions were left behind.

By 2024, Americans knew exactly who Trump was, a vindictive, self-serving felon with a well-known policy playbook: mass deportations, trade wars, tax cuts, and environmental withdrawal. And yet, they voted him in again. Why? Because he spoke to the disillusionment globalization left in its wake. People feel angry about immigration, fearful for their jobs, distrustful of government, and helpless in the face of climate change. These raw emotions are not just political; they are personal, embodied, and deeply human.

A New Lens Understanding Trump’s enduring appeal requires more than disbelief or outrage. It demands empathy, science, and attention to the long arc of history. Beneath the bluster lies something elemental: fear of loss, longing for order, and the ache of being left behind. It’s not just about Trump, it’s about the world that made him possible.

Political consciousness is essential to strength, solidarity and change

People respond to difficult political times in many ways, shaped by temperament, values, and circumstance. Few of us have a direct way to influence politics, so the news creates anxiety. We struggle to stay mentally healthy. Here are some different personal responses:

Withdrawal. Some don’t believe they can understand the complexity or make a difference. They limit exposure to news, avoid political conversations, and focus on personal well-being or family. It may not be apathy, but self-preservation.

Cynicism. A darker response. When overwhelmed, people may grow cynical or desensitized. It can be a defense, or the first stage before choosing a different path.

Social Media. Courageous, perhaps, but social media often spreads misinformation. These participants operate on the level of folk politics: emotional, localized, moral appeals that may feel right but miss the bigger picture. It can escalate into rage and lead to burnout.

Spiritual Practice. Faith, meditation, or ritual can help people hold despair and hope in tension. For some, politics becomes sacred; for others, it’s set aside to seek peace.

Study. Some turn to books, history, or philosophy. They look for patterns, deeper causes, and long-term perspectives. Wisdom becomes a way to steady the mind.

Bridging Divides. Some make it their mission to talk across lines, listen deeply, and build understanding. It’s slow and frustrating work, but necessary for healing.

Creativity. Artists and writers channel the chaos into stories, paintings, or poems. Expression becomes resistance, or at least a way to stay sane. Comedy disarms fear, helps us make sense of absurdity, and builds solidarity. Think late-night monologues or political memes.

Community. Rather than fight the whole system, some focus locally: mutual aid, neighbourhood projects, or care networks. Quiet politics, rooted in relationships.

Activism. Some people dive into action. They protest, organize, and write to their representatives.

While minding your boundaries, political consciousness is essential to strength, solidarity and change. Personally, I find myself studying and bridging divides, rising in mutual aid and intentions to mindful activism. What is your response?

The Weaponization of Journalism and Social Media in Canadian Politics

Canada’s media landscape is embattled, with traditional journalism under attack and social media increasingly weaponized by political interests. As the Conservative Party, led by Pierre Poilievre, seeks to defund the CBC and eliminate funding for local journalism, the country faces critical questions about the future of news, democracy, and informed citizenship. At the same time, government attempts to regulate digital platforms, such as the Online News Act, have been met with resistance from tech giants like Meta. The battle over who controls information in Canada is not just about policy—it is about the fundamental nature of political discourse and democracy in an era of rapid technological change.

The Global Village and Frayed Nerves

Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the global village envisions a world interconnected by electronic media, where distance and time shrink, and people experience events simultaneously. He saw mass communication as an extension of human senses, dissolving national and cultural boundaries to create a shared consciousness. However, McLuhan warned that interconnectedness would not necessarily lead to harmony but could amplify tensions as diverse perspectives collide in real time.

McLuhan compared the global village to a nervous system—just as nerves transmit signals throughout the body, media technologies create an instantaneous network of communication, making events in one place immediately felt elsewhere. This heightened collective awareness increases sensitivity to shocks, conflicts, and disruptions, reinforcing McLuhan’s warning that hyper-connectivity does not guarantee unity; it can overstimulate and fray the nerves of entire societies.

The Fractured Media Landscape

In 2025, we are overwhelmed by a deluge of information on crises: rising costs of living, homelessness, humanitarian disasters in Gaza, Congo, Sudan, and Yemen, the resurgence of fascism, and an accelerating climate crisis. Our human nervous systems are frayed.

Reliable journalism could help manage the stress, but media itself is transforming. At each technological leap, political powers have undermined journalism, favoring neoliberalism and fascism. One wonders if our capacity for knowledge is causing as much trouble as it solves. Awareness prevents crimes in the dark, yet unfiltered and manipulated information inflames division. A mix is optimal—selectively reading good sources, taking breaks, and processing information before deciding on action.

The Erosion of Journalism

When social media first emerged in the early 2000s, it was heralded as a democratizing force. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube enabled global communication, empowering grassroots activism. The Arab Spring in 2011 was a key example of this potential, as social media helped protesters organize and bypass state-controlled narratives.

Yet Web 2.0 significantly undermined traditional journalism. Newspapers, television, and radio, once the primary sources of news, operated with editorial standards and business models based on subscriptions and advertising. The rise of free, fast, and engaging news on social media diverted advertising revenue away from traditional outlets, leading to layoffs, closures, and the decline of investigative reporting. Anyone could publish content, making misinformation rampant.

Canada’s Response: The Online News Act

In 2023, Canada passed the Online News Act (Bill C-18), requiring tech giants like Meta and Google to compensate publishers for using their content. Meta refused and blocked Canadian news on its platforms, but Google ultimately complied. This legislation was just the first step in Canada’s broader strategy to regulate online media.

Other initiatives followed, including the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11), which updated broadcasting regulations for digital media, and the Online Harms Act (Bill C-63), which sought to address hate speech, extremism, and child exploitation. However, only Bill C-11 was enacted; others stalled or died with Parliament’s prorogation in 2025.

Poilievre’s Attack on Journalism

Pierre Poilievre opposes the Online News Act, calling it a government-mandated subsidy for failing mainstream media. He pledges to repeal the law and cut $1 billion in federal funding to the CBC, effectively defunding its English-language services. He also plans to eliminate funding for the Local Journalism Initiative, which supports reporting in underserved communities.

Attacking mainstream media is a standard right-wing tactic. By portraying the press as biased and corrupt, politicians erode trust in independent journalism, making space for right-wing media that amplifies their messaging unchallenged. This fosters an “us versus them” mentality, where negative coverage is dismissed as propaganda. It also pressures mainstream outlets to self-censor or give undue weight to conservative viewpoints, shifting public discourse in favor of the right.

The Weaponization of Social Media

Poilievre, like other populists, prefers social media over traditional journalism. He relies on YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram to bypass media scrutiny and communicate directly with supporters through highly produced videos and live streams. He engages with alternative and right-wing media, reinforcing narratives that align with his views.

Far-right movements have weaponized social media, exploiting algorithms that amplify outrage and misinformation. These platforms facilitate radicalization, conspiracy theories, and distrust in democratic institutions. The January 6th U.S. Capitol riot exemplifies how social media can mobilize violence.

Elon Musk’s takeover of X has bolstered Donald Trump. Musk reinstated Trump’s account, endorsed his campaign, and relaxed content moderation policies. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta followed suit, eliminating third-party fact-checking and replacing it with a “Community Notes” system, mirroring Musk’s approach. These changes align with conservative interests, raising concerns about the spread of misinformation and the erosion of democratic discourse.

The Shift to Web 3.0

Web 2.0’s social media is fading as Web 3.0 transforms media consumption and production. Traditional platforms like Facebook and Twitter are losing influence to AI-driven content models, which automate news aggregation and content moderation. Media is shifting from mass broadcasting to AI-curated, user-controlled ecosystems. This decentralization may empower individuals, but it also risks amplifying misinformation and increasing the role of anonymous dark money in politics.

Canada had introduced several Web 3.0-related bills, including the Critical Cyber Systems Protection Act (Bill C-26) to strengthen cybersecurity, the Consumer Privacy Protection Act (Bill C-27) to regulate AI, and the Online Harms Act (Bill C-63) to address harmful content. However, with the prorogation of Parliament in January 2025, these bills were terminated. Future efforts will need to reintroduce legislation to address cybersecurity, digital privacy, and online safety.

Staying Politically Conscious

As we navigate an era of media upheaval and political uncertainty, it is more crucial than ever to remain engaged and discerning. The flood of information can be overwhelming, but disengagement is not an option. Instead, we must cultivate media literacy, seek out reliable sources, and critically evaluate the narratives shaping public discourse. Supporting independent journalism, advocating for transparent media regulations, and holding politicians accountable are tangible ways to counter misinformation and protect democratic values.

The challenges are significant, but history shows that societies adapt and innovate in response to media transformations. The tools of digital connectivity, when wielded responsibly, still offer opportunities for positive change—fostering global awareness, mobilizing grassroots action, and amplifying marginalized voices. The future of information is uncertain, but our collective vigilance and commitment to truth will determine whether the global village strengthens democracy or succumbs to division.