As expected, Donald Trump walked away with the Iowa caucuses on Monday, taking more than 50 per cent of the votes and leaving his rivals in the dust.
There is, of course, a lot more politicking to go before the U.S. presidential election in November, and taking Iowa is no guarantee that the winner will go on to become the Republican nominee.
But the results are still far from comforting for people who fear the consequences of a return to power by the authoritarian-adjacent Mr. Trump. And that, apparently, includes a majority of Canadians.
An Angus Reid poll released Monday found that two-thirds of Canadians worry that American democracy will not survive a president who openly campaigns on a platform of turning his country into a retributive police state.
A similar majority said they believe the re-election of President Joe Biden would be better for Canada than the return of Mr. Trump. (The online survey from Jan. 9-11 used a randomized sample of 1,510 Canadian adults; the margin of error is plus or minus 2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.)
Canadians are right to worry about the (re-)election of Mr. Trump this fall; the whole world ought to. The British magazine The Economist has called his possible return to the White House the greatest global threat of 2024.
But it would be naive for Canadians to focus their anxiety on the next U.S. election without also worrying about where their own country’s politics are headed.
This is not to say that Canada has come anywhere near the dysfunctional polarization between left and right, between Republic and Democrat, that defines U.S. politics, or that this country is in danger of electing a self-dealing serial fabulist who will be spending as much time this year in courtroom trials as he will on campaign trails. But we are making mistakes that could lead in that direction.
One is the erosion of consensus politics. Parliament is there to govern for all Canadians, but this has been perverted by a first-past-the-post electoral system in which a party can be elected to a strong majority with less than 40 per cent of the popular vote.
Federal politics has been reduced to the cold science of winning swing ridings by campaigning in a narrowcast fashion that targets the interests of some voters at the expense of others. The parties also pander subserviently to their bases, in order to prevent them from being hijacked.
The Liberals formed a minority government in 2021 with just 32.6 per cent of the popular vote (one percentage point less than the Conservatives). Current polls, meanwhile, project that the Tories could win around 200 seats, a super-majority, with just 40 per cent of the vote.
Neither is attempting to build a big-tent party, instead exploiting demographic and regional tensions for political gain, and possibly creating canyons so deep that they can’t be crossed. That’s the outcome in the U.S., where the Democrats and the Republicans are now locked in a battle “for the soul of the country,” as President Biden likes to keep saying.
Where is the party in this country willing to speak to all Canadians, from coast to coast to coast, instead of playing grievances off against each other and dividing the country into incompatible camps, each of which believes it is the container of the true Canadian soul?
Another mistake being made in Canada is the Liberals’ failure to address the immigration issue. The government’s refusal to take obvious steps to end even the worst abuses of the student visa program, for instance, risks harming Canadians’ support for immigration.
Canadians should take note of how ignoring immigration issues has worked out south of the border. Decades of incompetence by both Republican and Democratic administrations has led to the point where the two sides cannot reach a bipartisan solution. That impasse has opened American voters to the idea of a radical fix, and has allowed Mr. Trump to win support for his inhumane threat to put illegal immigrants in concentration camps.
Canadians can look at the mess in the U.S. and be relieved that our democracy has not come to a similar breaking point. But no country should ever assume that it is immune from the kinds of forces at work in an America that is defined by Mr. Trump’s noxious politics.
A democracy requires vigilance to remain healthy, and vigilance requires looking in the mirror with an honest eye.