Op-Ed: American elections show Canadians what’s at stake

For many Canadians, American politics is a spectator sport, a theatrical experience — with the byzantine numbers and stats (the electoral college), the archetypes (the villainous leader, the warm-hearted but somewhat bumbling challenger, the apparently innocent Pennsylvania swing voter) And it’s amplified by media in Canada, or piped in directly from American media or social media, obsessed with the drama (and the ratings and click-throughs that result). Though there are epilogues, sequels and rematches to be written or played, the Presidential election has produced a clear winner. And it has produced, if we can hear them amid the rancour, some real lessons for Canadians about how to have better arguments about what matters.

I won’t name or catalogue the record number of misleading statements that characterized this election (CNN’s (and formerly The Toronto Star’s) Daniel Dale is the authority on that). But as I write, President Trump has just publicly fired his cybersecurity chief (who authoritatively stated that there was no compromising of any voting system), while President-elect Biden soberly puts together his White House team, and makes plans to take on the pandemic. (Of the two, notice which name still came to my mind first.)

But the one big lie, the giant misdirection that the virus does not require an all-hands effort, was enough to focus attention. The pandemic made the stakes extraordinarily high, and Americans voted in record numbers (highest turnout in at least a century), in difficult circumstances, and with urgency. Exit polls have shown that the vote was highly correlated by those who thought that fighting the virus was more important (Biden) versus those who thought that re-opening the economy was more important (Trump). Trump in particular, and Biden less so, embraced this framing, pushing some other issues off to the side.

Which points to the second big misdirection — that those two priorities are in conflict. One consequence of the election that we all hope for is greater progress on fighting the pandemic (which may be accompanied by a quick and effective vaccine roll-out), which can allow for a quicker and more widely shared economic rebound.

That turnout causes its own inspiration because the stakes in Canada are just as high. And we risk being duped by the same false duality. And our public square is not yet activated in the same way, with the same drama, as we saw in the States. 

Yes Americans have work to do to fight injustice, and to root out the intersecting inequalities of racism and economic inequality, and the damage caused by conspiracy-driven echo-chambers.

Those factors, and the two-party system that rewards, have evolved over decades. We saw those dramas play out in spades in the American election.

The current toxic partisanship, mostly practiced by one party in the US, and the way people are starting to show up on the streets on a variety of issues, appears to raise the stakes there compared to what we face in Canada.

But don’t think that those issues are absent in Canada, or that our stakes are any lower. President Obama (whose memoir we can enjoy over the forthcoming holiday) recently compared Canada’s relative success in fighting the virus. But should we be smug at having “only” 300,000 cases or 11,000 deaths? And all those other issues that the pandemic has heightened — the inequality, the racism, the echo chambers? They’re here, too.

Americans don’t necessarily have healthy fights, but at least they have them. Many of the same issues and historic injustices, aired and battled over in America, are too often smothered or rendered inert by nice words in Canada. Inspired by the American examples, in all their flaws, let’s turn our attention to the dramas closer to home in which we can be players — and not just spectators.