Job One for 2025: Protecting Canada from US Oligarchs

Guarding against the risks of American imperialism — political, economic, cultural — is a central theme of the Canadian experience.

Many of our country’s most important and enduring decisions are a direct consequence of this. Consider the building of our national railway, the creation of the CBC, the establishment of multiculturalism, even the act of Confederation itself.

The decision Canadians make in the next federal election will be just as historically significant. How our country should respond to a revived threat to our sovereignty is now the ballot question.

In recent weeks, returning U.S. President Donald Trump’s musings about Canada becoming the 51st state, including a trolling social media post, have dominated the public discourse and elicited strong reactions from Canadians.

Although receiving less attention, challenges to Canada’s sovereignty have been part of a pattern from the American far right in the past two years. In 2023, former Fox News host and Trump booster Tucker Carlson produced a documentary arguing that the United States should send its armed forces to “liberate” Canada. Another Trump ally, Rep. Lauren Boebert, made a similar comment during Canda’s 2022 convoy uprising to then-Fox News host Pete Hegseth, now Trump’s nominee for secretary of defence.

Early analysis suggests these comments should not be taken literally; see Trump’s “Oh Canada” post mistaking the Swiss Alps for the Canadian Rockies.

But if annexation threats may be dismissed, for now, as unserious, efforts by American oligarchs to derail the Canadian way must not.

These efforts — by bullying oil tycoons, bombastic tech bros and other brash billionaires — include relentless attacks on the norms, policies and institutions that define our values, distinguish us from Americans and defend our sovereignty.

Privatizing plutocrats

While American industrialists have long sought access to our country’s natural resources, and reports of renewed interest in Canada’s abundance of fresh water only reinforce this, an even larger prize is the profits to be gained from the privatization of social programs, the weakening of public safety regulations and the erosion of safeguards on our democracy. Canada’s medicare system alone represents a $300-billion annual public expenditure, offering boundless opportunities for those wishing to privately profit off public illness.

There are additional reasons. In an interconnected world, Canada is a respected leader. Global advocacy and co-operation on protecting human rights, fighting climate change, regulating social media companies and cracking down on tax avoidance are sensible policies benefiting the public good, and Canada is among the countries at the forefront of this work.

Such policies, however, threaten the private profits of U.S.-owned multinational corporations while reminding American voters there are political antidotes to ignorance, intolerance and injustice.

Underpinning the response of the American plutocracy is a sophisticated strategy that enlists the support of compliant Canadians; this incudes American dark-money networks funding Canadian think tanks, U.S.-owned industries backing Canadian lobby campaigns, and an American hedge fund owning a major chain of Canadian newspapers.

Consider that the Atlas Network, the well-documented group of billionaire ideologues pursuing a libertarian agenda while evading transparency, partners with 11 Canadian think tanks — some of them charities — including the Canadian Constitution Foundation, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the Fraser Institute, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, the Montreal Economic Institute and SecondStreet.org to promote discredited views on vaccines, climate change, labour rights, medicare, public education, Indigenous rights and fair taxation.

Another American dark-money group, the fossil-fuel-industry-funded Heartland Institute, one of the key organizations behind the democracy-threatening Project 2025 in the United States, has deep connections with Canadian policy organizations the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, Energy Probe, Canadians for Sensible Climate Policy and Friends of Science — all groups spreading disinformation about the threat of climate change and how we can confront it, among other egregious initiatives.

A third group, the Cato Institute, which was co-founded by fossil fuel magnate Charles Koch, regularly comments on Canadian affairs and partners with the Fraser Institute on a “Human Freedom Index” report. The Cato Institute appeared to be particularly incensed about the Canadian government’s response to the “freedom convoy” insurrection, which, curiously, attracted about half of its funding from American sources and strong public support from conservative U.S. politicians and pundits.

Some American industries are more direct in their attempts to influence Canadian public opinion and policy. Canada’s largely American-owned fossil fuel industry, for example, has been leading a supposedly grassroots advocacy campaign to weaken support for climate action, and pollution pricing in particular. Meanwhile, the notorious U.S.-based National Rifle Association has long concerned itself with fighting Canadian firearm laws and continues to express its opposition to the federal government’s recent strengthening of gun control policies.

Canada’s pro-Trump corporate media

What nearly all the aforementioned groups have in common is that their messaging routinely appears in Canadian daily newspapers associated with the American-owned Postmedia chain, a business that has run afoul of its regulator.

On its opinion pages, Postmedia publications lead a daily assault on some of Canada’s most defining laws and principles, attacking the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, medicare, reconciliation, tolerance and commitment to inclusion, to say nothing of their fanatical opposition to policies protecting our environment and fighting what one op-ed called the “alleged climate crisis.”

The attacks on Canada’s civic solidarity are deliberate and well devised. These are the same attacks used in the United States by those who delivered Donald Trump the presidency, then returned him to it, to the great benefit of the wealthy elite.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s first campaign manager, perfected the art of cultivating and weaponizing online anger through his Breitbart website. He then set about interrupting and distorting the flow of truthful information via his “flood the zone with shit” strategy.

A new generation carries on Bannon’s work. Christopher Rufo, described as a far-right provocateur, has been at the forefront of leveraging so-called wedge issues to misinform and divide voters, delegitimize civic institutions and win political power. Core to Rufo’s strategy is his self-declared “shaming and bullying” efforts. A number of Canadian online media sites, podcasters and social media influencers echo such tactics.

In a further demonstration of the pervasive influence of American oligarchs’ interests in Canadian affairs, Atlas Network “partner” the Canada Strong and Free Network hosted Rufo at its September conference as a keynote speaker. Rufo’s presence was so controversial that several sponsors cut ties with the conference. Other invited speakers included representatives from several other Atlas-funded Canadian think tanks.

At stake this election

Standing in the way of this incessant effort to undermine the Canadian way and, by definition, our sovereignty is the resistance of the Canadian people. This makes the next election a critical one for the future of our country.

To an unprecedented degree, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre — Canada’s self-declared “candidate for prime minister” — has aligned his messaging, policies and comportment with American oligarchs and their increasingly far-right Republican allies.

Poilievre has adopted the same toxic rhetoric and culture war diversions, exhibits the same disdain for Canadian decency and civility and deploys the same tactics designed to devalue truth, social cohesion and democracy.

Is it unsurprising, then, that Poilievre is lauded by American conspiracy theorists, radical activists and plutocrats like Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, Libs of TikTok, Megyn Kelly, Elon Musk and the previously mentioned Christopher Rufo?

Just as the ties between American oligarchs and the Canadian right-wing media and policy ecosystem are strong, so too are Poilievre and his Conservative party increasingly tied to the oligarchs’ preferred political instrument — the Trump-led Republican party.

Aside from Poilievre’s blatantly Trump-imported “Canada first” slogan, his framing of taxes on the wealthiest as a form of being “punished” and his support for insurrectionists, the Conservative leader and his team have appealed to Trump ally Elon Musk to support party causes, from their campaign to try to discredit the CBC to serving as a possible internet connectivity contractor to the federal government, in spite of possible national security risks.

In early December, Trump’s vice-president-elect, JD Vance, took time out of his schedule to chastise a Canadian journalist who criticized Vance’s close friend, high-profile Conservative MP Jamil Jivani, for the latter’s sudden crusade to combat anti-Christian bigotry.

Last year, Conservative MPs refused to condemn Tucker Carlson’s remarks about invading Canada. Today, 21 per cent of Conservative supporters back the idea of Canada becoming an American state.

Meanwhile, Poilievre’s Conservative party enjoys a significant lead in public opinion polling.

Yet, according to these same polls, Poilievre is offside with the views of Canadians on nearly every issue he champions. These include use of the notwithstanding clause to override the Charter, abandoning the fight against climate change, pursuing budget cuts and tax changes, opposition to pharmacare, defunding the CBC, legalizing assault weapons, abolishing vaccine mandates, blocking the regulation of social media companies, and the bullying of the LGBTQ2S+ community.

Many of those policy issues are the same ones American plutocrats and their dark-money networks have been campaigning against, or mobilizing for, in recent years. This further crystallizes the choice in the next election as one of who can best defend Canadian sovereignty and citizen well-being from this threat.

For the good of the country, that choice cannot be Pierre Poilievre.

These have been a difficult few years in Canada. In addition to all the disinformation and division “shit,” the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are still being felt, climate change continues to wreak havoc, economic inequality continues to persist, and too many Canadians continue to be confronted by hate.

None of these struggles improve by implementing policies that prioritize the interests of American oligarchs over the aspirations of Canadian citizens. Nor does the political drama of the past two weeks distract from this fact.

The year is coming to a close. Let us resolve to return in the new year to fight for the Canada we love.

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Happy holidays, readers. Our comment threads will be closed until Jan. 2 to give our moderators a much-deserved break. See you in 2025!