Terence Corcoran: Canada joins the long march with Xi to global statism

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Canadians today look out over a political landscape dominated by major political parties that feign conflict and ideological battle. The rhetoric and jargon of the last 33 days of electioneering and post-election speeches, reinforced by a compliant media, are filled with a façade of disagreement over policy and principles that camouflage the reality. Canada’s democracy is in the hands of statists who believe that government justifiably holds near-absolute power. Where once there were accepted limits to democracy, today the only limits seem to be the degree to which policy can be shifted in marginally different ways.

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Voters essentially have little choice. Party platforms were filled with the same buzzword issues and innumerable crises and marginally different solutions — housing, health care, COVID-19, climate, Big Tech, fiscal spending, rising inflation, child care, unemployment, energy, inequality, long-term care, wealth redistribution.

To resolve all these and scores of other separate and complicated problems individual Canadians were asked to cast one vote for one candidate in one riding, a process that in some imagined world of democratic equality should produce sound and rational decisions.

What is the best structure for health care? Is a carbon tax that sends cash back into voter pockets a good idea? Should Big Tech be taxed and brought under government control? The list of problems to be solved, real and imagined, are beyond the capacity of voters to grasp.

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The concept of imposing limits on the power of democratically elected governments has been debated for centuries. Constitutional democracy aims at limiting the power of government and to protect individual rights and freedoms.

There was little sense though the 2021 Canadian federal election that there are or should be limits on the power of democratically elected governments. Such limits exist in constitutional form, they are being overwhelmed in spirit if not in law. A tax on wealth and capital? Massive deficits? Restrictions on the right to buy and sell property? Break up corporations? No problem.

The overall ideological thread through the election has been that governments have the power and the right to do whatever they want — a trend that is global and entrenched, in democracies, at the United Nations and within the great totalitarian governments of the last 100 years.

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At this week’s General Assembly of the United Nations, bastion of statism and home to innumerable dictatorships, the world’s leaders are laying out their government-led plans to increase state controls. “We are on the edge of an abyss,” warned UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres Tuesday. “We face the greatest cascade of crises in our lifetimes,” he said, alluding to climate and COVID as the motivation for major expansions of government.

China’s Communist President Xi Jinping, now on a campaign within China to curb individual and corporate freedoms, brought his message of climate peace to the UN, promising his government would help fight carbon emissions. “China will step up support for other developing countries in developing green and low-carbon energy, and will not build new coal-fired power projects abroad,” Xi said, according to a translation tweeted by China’s mission to the UN. Within China, however, Xi is leading a massive coal plant expansion.

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Meanwhile, a Wall Street Journal report Tuesday describes Xi’s recent war on private enterprise and market forces within China as an attempt to return the country to a more Maoist form of socialism. “The Chinese President is not just trying to rein in a few big tech and other companies and show who is boss in China. He is trying to roll back China’s decades-long evolution toward Western-style capitalism and put the country on a different path entirely.”

None of this seems to bother leaders of Western democracies. In his speech to the UN Tuesday, U.S. President Joe Biden spoke of the need for a new spirit of global cooperation to fight the great challenges. “We are not seeking a new Cold War,” he said. Some might question that statement given the new U.S. nuclear submarine pact. But would it not be proper for freedom-based nations to maintain a cold-war caution against China?

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At the same time, all countries are mounting statist attacks on Big Tech, from real democracies such as the U.S. and Canada to fake democracies such as Russia. Vladimir Putin imposed more controls on online firms prior to recent elections with more to come. Putin accused some media of being “foreign agents” and forced them to close — a move described as “a continuation of a years-long effort to restrict the online access to information in the country.” Facebook, Alphabet and other firms have been forced to pay fines and close some information flows in Russia.

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In his speech to the UN, Biden talked of how democracies can work co-operatively and resist cold war confrontations that, at heart, were aimed at protecting the West against illiberal communist statism. Meanwhile, the U.S. Congressional democracy is struggling to approve a $3.5-trillion spending boondoggle that involves raising trillions from corporations and wealthy individuals, and many, many other Americans, and impose massive new interventionist programs on the economy.

In this new world, unlimited democracy in Canada and the U.S. seems to be vying with the 21st century’s most powerful undemocracies.

Financial Post

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