As the new Liberal government takes shape after Election 2025, the relief at finally having a functioning Parliament again after an unjustifiably lengthy prorogation, is tempered with deep concern about how easily our political classes sidestep the people of Canada, and manipulate our democratic institutions and practices for partisan gain.
Canada’s faux-democracy is a phenomenon, the details and consequences of which played out over the three Justin Trudeau Liberal governments, that is described in my eBook critiquing Canada’s faux-democracy, and in the chart of the distribution of political power in Canada, attached to my blog titled Mark Carney leads Canada’s faux-democracy into uncharted waters without a compass.
Canada’s faux-democracy continues to thrive as the new Liberal leader takes control.
The relentless expansion of concentrated power in the prime minister and the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), accompanied by the hollowing out of the Liberal Party – the so-called natural governing party of Canada – has placed Canada potentially on the same trajectory into authoritarianism that we see in the US with the crumbling of the Republican Party. Ordinary Canadians have no influence over the choice of our faux-democratic party leader who asks for our vote in a federal election. This is controlled by insular political elites. There is technically nothing to prevent a ruthless, ignorant, narcissist like Donald Trump from becoming the leader.
In between elections, the prime minister consolidates his control of parliament through a tentacled PMO and the exercise of his enormous unaccountable, untransparent, discretion with minimal accountability. The prime minister orchestrates a comprehensive range of appointments: the chairs of most parliamentary committees and the Chiefs of Staff to cabinet ministers, who all report to the PMO, Senators, the Governor-General, federal and Supreme Court of Canada justices, heads of Crown Corporations, ambassadors etc.
Justin Trudeau’s contempt for parliament and our democratic foundations became obvious within a year of his 2015 election when he unilaterally cancelled his popular campaign promises to reform the electoral system, and introduce other structural reforms to ensure greater accountability and transparency in parliament. Trudeau consistently valued polarization and short-term wedge issues – like carbon pricing and immigration – and micro-managing docile Liberal/NDP MPs out of the PMO to maintain political power.
Three consecutive faux-democratic Liberal governments dangerously weakened our collective economic and social resilience and international coherence; accelerated the decay of our democratic institutions and practices; undermined the principled, coherent, civic consciousness essential for Canadian unity; and made us increasingly vulnerable to the eventual attacks on our economy and security by Donald Trump.
Because Justin Trudeau failed to put the necessary effort into building a consensus across regional and partisan divides, there was no progress in areas crucial to our collective national interest. The following challenges were left to his successor:
· Incoherent foreign, defence, and national security and intelligence policies.
· A balkanized internal Canadian economic market with enormously costly internal barriers to flows of goods, services, investment, and people.
· An incomprehensible, inefficient, and unfair tax system, and costly regulatory and licensing regimes across a jumble of jurisdictions.
· A tragic K-shaped post-Covid economic recovery that favours high-income and older Canadians, while exacerbating inequality and the affordability crisis for the vast majority of ordinary Canadians with precarious incomes.
· Public servants demoralized and sidelined by countless outside consultants hired by political staff, and bogged down by countless bureaucratic processes and procedures preventing effective, efficient service to Canadians.
By the end of 2024, Canadians had thoroughly lost confidence in the government’s ability to help improve our standards of living and future prospects. Too many Canadians faced long-term stagnation of incomes, with high inflation reducing real incomes further and making basic necessities like food and shelter unaffordable.
In Election 2025 – a snap election referred to now as “presidentialized” – Canadians used their leader preference as the proxy for determining which of the two main federal parties – Liberal and Conservative – received their vote. Policies did not matter. However imperfectly, Canadians simply decided between Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre.
The election result was close: the Canadian popular vote was essentially split between the two leaders. The result confirmed that a significant majority of Canadian voters are non-partisan, and have no party affiliation. We float around in the wide centre of the political spectrum, and are uninterested in worn-out left/right ideologies and petty party politics.
Once again, our antiquated electoral first-past-the-post winner-takes-all electoral system produced an unsatisfactory distribution of MPs across regions – east-central-west, urban-rural – that, at best, does not resonate with us. At worst, the vote exacerbates regional and demographic divides, as too many people vote strategically to avoid a particular result, only to end up with that undesired result anyway.
Encouragingly, the new prime minister has indicated that he will immediately pursue bold, decisive action to strengthen our national economy and national security. But he stated during the election that addressing “structural issues in our democracy” would have to wait until he had dealt with the pressing economic and security issues.
Yet the success of the policies and initiatives Mark Carney wants to implement to strengthen our slumping economy and national resilience and to “redefine Canada’s international, commercial, and security relationships”, depends on concurrent structural changes in two areas discussed in detail in my eBook.
The first area is democratic reforms to encourage genuine collaboration and cooperation across regional and partisan divides in Parliament, and help the crafting of a national consensus by our MPs (helped by public servants, not high-paid lobbyists and consultants) who bring to the table the views of ordinary Canadians outside the Ottawa bubble.
The second area is to build a new architecture of federalism to encourage more transparent and accountable collaboration and harmonization in the national interest across Canadian jurisdictions. All levels of Canadian governments need a more effective way to agree on mutually-satisfactory trade-offs and collective compromises to strengthen the Canada-wide economy. Changes could involve a new structure like the Council of Canadian Governments, to supplement ad hoc First Ministers’ conferences, as described in Part III of my eBook.
Mark Carney does articulate well the general urgency of bold national leadership. But will he succeed in implementing meaningful and durable change to strengthen our national economy and security, within our current dysfunctional federalism architecture? We shall see. For the moment, the prospects are at best cloudy.
Our ad hoc First Ministers’ meetings and premiers-only Council of the Federation meetings are of questionable impact and practical value. And the multiplying bilateral provincial agreements to remove barriers to the movement of goods, services, investment, and people across Canada or establish east-west energy corridors, are also not enough.
We must be able to conclude coherent, accountable, national multilateral agreements that include the federal government, in which all provinces participate with everything on the table so we can crunch out tough compromises (hello supply management). We must also be able to speak with one voice internationally to strengthen Canada’s hand in international negotiations and prevent Canada from being drawn more and more into the U.S. orbit with less and less influence.
The efforts to build a more functional intergovernmental structure to support a vibrant national economy and eliminate costly internal barriers to flows of goods, services, investment and people, are particularly essential to national unity. For example, the efforts must address the very real alienation surfacing with new force in Alberta and Saskatchewan and hopefully make unnecessary the referendum proposed by the unpredictable Alberta premier.
But Quebec will require a different approach.
Many Canadians believe even now that we cannot continue to accommodate persistent demands from a Quebec government, whatever its political stripe, to resist/block federal initiatives in Quebec and prevent constructive collaboration with other Canadian governments.
We are unfortunately weighed down by Brian Mulroney’s legacy of appeasing separatists in Quebec by accepting their argument that the vote of federal MPs from Quebec in parliament, in favour of the patriation of the 1982 Constitution, was not legitimate. Then, when Mulroney’s subsequent attempt to amend the Constitution was firmly rejected by 72% of Canadians (including Quebecers) voting to oppose the Charlottetown Referendum, we were left with the Bloc Québécois as an obstructive party fixture in the House of Commons.
We are further weighed down by Justin Trudeau’s regrettable legacy of conceding to Quebec’s immigration demands and standing down on unconstitutional Quebec initiatives like Bill 21 and Bill 96, and the pre-emptive use of the notwithstanding clause.
Despite a welcome resurgence of Canadian nationalism in Quebec responding to the threat from Trump in Election 2025 (and a concomitant decline in the number of Bloc Québécois MPs), separatist sentiment and the BQ no doubt will rise again in Quebec with calls for another referendum to separate from Canada if the separatist Parti Québécois is elected in 2026.
But thirty years after the last separation referendum in 1995, there is no longer any sentiment among Canadians outside Quebec for a rest-of-Canada effort begging Quebec to stay. And there is equally no tolerance among Canadians to continue to subsidize a Quebec separatist party in parliament that is dedicated to destroying Canadian unity.
Our federal government, whether Liberal or Conservative, must be proactive and prepared to call a national referendum on any proposed Quebec separation, just as there was a national referendum in 1992 on the Charlottetown Accord. Ask all Canadians – including Quebecers – the same question once and for all: do we want to stay together and on what conditions?
One last point: our federal government must more effectively challenge narrow diasporic political groups in Canada whose leadership, whether inside or outside Canada (see foreign interference in our party nominations process), too often undermine our ability to build the principled, coherent civic consciousness/identity we need to strengthen democracy.
Canadians want to pull together to build a uniquely compassionate and productive country that is fiercely independent and more than a sum of fragmented parts. We need our federal government – the one government elected by all Canadians – eliminate the creeping faux-democracy, rejuvenate our democratic and federal institutions, and support our collective efforts to strengthen national unity.
Deborah Coyne