The Final Election

Trump isn't even pretending any more

Canadian democracy is at grave risk from the planetary mass to the south. The nominated Republican candidate stated, this week, “You have to get out and vote. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four years, it will be fixed, it will be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore.. In four years, you won’t have to vote again.”

This is no idle threat. Trump has already attempted a coup to retain power in the United States and end what is left of its democracy. Once that failed he left office brandishing classified documents, the disposition of which is not known but it’s safe to assume that it wasn’t for his own bedtime reading pleasure.

After eight judges ruled that the case could go forward, one appointed by Trump said that the investigation itself was illegal and there was therefore no case, delaying any justice until after the election at best. Owning the judiciary is an important step in establishing a dictatorship.

All this to say I am done being nice. Those supporting Trump are no longer simply people with a differing political opinion. If you support Trump and wish for him to take power this winter, you share his values and are directly working to undermine the very fabric of democracy.

The trouble for those of us in the rest of the democratic world is that the military anchor ensuring democracies survive has, for the past century, been the United States. If Trump succeeds in his ambition of making the country his, there is no outside force strong enough to help, and the international power vacuum will belong entirely to China, which holds a dim view of democracy, and wannabe superpower Russia, which isn’t doing a lot better.

On that note, Trump has committed to ending the Ukraine war “in one day”. It is clear that he would do this by ending weapons supply and support for Ukraine and telling them to sue for peace, demanding they essentially surrender. Good for Russia, and a message to China on their Taiwanese ambitions. Pretty bad message for countries willing to fight for their democratic survival.

Vice President Kamala Harris is in a honeymoon period right now, showing up as the presumptive Democratic nominee by surprise at a pretty late stage in the race without giving her opponents enough time to define her. Whether that honeymoon status lasts all the way to the election, or even past the imminent selection of her own VP candidate, remains to be seen. Certainly we are seeing an electorate motivated by someone who is not on death’s doorstep being on the ballot.

In Canada, we have an ingrained belief that our democracy is safe. It’s permanent, unalienable, here for all time. What could possibly threaten it? Who can imagine it any other way?

What can threaten it is a belief that what is happening south of the border cannot happen here. Stephen Harper fundamentally believed in the rule of law and Canada’s constitution, even if he did not agree with all its points. He generally tried to change the system and weaken democratic processes through legal means, and ultimately accepted his electoral defeat with grace.

It was, however, his Minister of Democratic Reform, none other than one Pierre Poilievre, that introduced the Fair Elections Act. This particular law made it harder for non-Conservative demographic voters to cast their ballots by almost completely removing the ability for an identified voter to vouch for another and limiting acceptable identity documents that would preclude the need to vouch.

More importantly, it sought to weaken the office of the Commissioner of Elections, the team specifically tasked with enforcing election law, following the investigation into the 2011 RoboCall scandal. It has been over a decade, but for those who may have forgotten, this was an effort to direct non-Conservative voters to present to the wrong location to vote on election day in the city of Guelph using robocalls pretending to be from Elections Canada. Conservative staffer Michael Sona spent the better part of a year in jail for his alleged part in the affair, in spite of having neither the technical nor linguistic know-how to produce and send the bilingual message to be sent to people taken from data sets likely taken directly from the Conservative party database.

That the matter was not properly further investigated and the full story of this demonstrated and proven electoral fraud has not seen the light of day is a reminder that the Conservatives in Canada have little interest in a functional democracy, and, worse, that their current leader was the point man in undermining it the last time they were in power.

Both Canada and the United States face existential threats to our core institutions. We are not mere members of the audience. These democracies belong to us. Without a democratic anchor south of the border, there would be little to stop further attacks on our own democracy, and it is more brittle than we appreciate.

We can no longer accept that people who oppose the very function of our democracy simply have a different political opinion for which there are no real world consequences. There are consequences, and they will be mighty hard to peacefully undo.