A BOOK REVIEW ABOUT CHINA

John Ivison: Poilievre should know better than to tear down Canadian institutions

John Ivison -  National Post

Pierre Poilievre, contender for the leadership of the federal Conservative party.

OTTAWA — On Labour Day, Conservative leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre repeated his denunciation of “Trudeau’s central banker,” Tiff Macklem, for advising business leaders not to raise workers’ wages.

The Bank of Canada governor has said he is confident inflation will come down, if companies don’t build increases into wage contracts.

The would-be prime minister, on the other hand, encouraged workers to demand pay increases to match rising prices — the typical “power without responsibility” prerogative of opposition leaders and harlots down the ages.

What struck me, beyond the debate about wages, was Poilievre’s continual pounding on institutions like the Bank of Canada and the Supreme Court, to the extent he is undermining their legitimacy. These institutions and others — Parliament, health authorities, police, universities and the electoral process — have rarely been under greater threat in the age of chronic rage.

Yet, they provide the constitutional checks that sustain our democracy and constrain the power of flawed politicians like Justin Trudeau and Poilievre.

The horseshoe theory in political science holds that, rather than being at opposite ends of a linear political continuum, the far left and far right closely resemble each other.

There are few better illustrations of this than American leftist Naomi Wolf’s new book, The Bodies of Others, which opens dramatically with the Canadian trucker convoy offering “joyous hope” to all those fed up with “pandemic totalitarianism.” The freezing of bank accounts without a court order by the Liberals meant “for a time, representative government was suspended in the nation of Canada” — all part of a plot to “dissolve human civilization” and replace it with a “techno-fascist culture,” wrote Wolf.

Sam Routley: How would Poilievre govern? Look to Ronald Reagan

Brian Bird: Pierre Trudeau and Poilievre would have been friends in freedom

Poilievre, another convoy supporter, has dipped his toes into similarly conspiratorial waters. In his speeches he has railed against government bureaucrats being given the power to manipulate social media algorithms, so that only state-approved content is visible; he has hammered on the government’s use of laws that “empower police to seize the bank accounts of political opponents” during the truckers’ convoy; and has said he will repeal Trudeau’s “censorship laws and vaccine mandates.”

While it is becoming clear the Liberal government used a sledgehammer to crack a walnut in its invocation of the Emergencies Act (as I said at the time ), the federal government’s actions fall far short of the oppression that both left and right would have you believe. For one thing, the Emergencies Act is multi-layered to protect rights and requires the government to explain itself after the fact.

All of which brings me to my late summer reading — and the real threat of techno-autocracy. In Xi Jinping — The Most Powerful Man in the World, to be released in English later this month, German journalists Stefan Aust and Adrian Geiges detail the Chinese president’s idea to use internet censorship, video surveillance and artificial intelligence to create what he sees as the perfect society. “The goal is no less than the creation of a new kind of human being,” the authors wrote.

The idea emerged from the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008, when Xi used a network of surveillance cameras equipped with facial recognition to prevent demonstrations. When he became president in 2013, the system was expanded across China — by 2020, there were 600 million cameras.

According to the authors, Xi sees digitization as a way of improving communal life and enforcing Communist Party rule, via a so-called “social credit system.” Points are awarded for “good” behaviour, for example, aiding promotion at work, and deducted for “bad” behaviour, hindering job mobility or travel.


People stand in front of images of Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Museum of the Communist Party of China in Beijing.© Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images

The system has been trialled in cities, including Rongcheng, population 670,000, where the scores of citizens are publicly displayed. Every citizen begins with 1,000 points. If you reach 1,050 points you are awarded the title “model of honesty.” But behaviour deemed “dishonest,” including “illegal religious behaviour,” means points are deducted. If your score sinks below 850 points, you receive a warning. Below 600, you are publicly exposed as dishonest and life becomes much harder.

Such an extension of the power of the state clearly creates the prospect for massive abuse — as has happened to Muslims in Xinjiang province, where one million citizens (or perhaps as high as three million by some estimates) have been interned in re-education camps.

People are locked up in these camps for any number of “suspicious factors,” including having an “extremist” name such as Mohammed or Fatima.

Aust and Geiges recount that teaching begins at 7 a.m., when an instructor stands in front of dozens of uniformed, shaven-headed Muslims in clanking leg irons, who are forced to learn about topics ranging from Chinese wedding customs to Xi Jinping’s speeches. “The Muslim inmates repeat together: ‘I’m proud to be Chinese’ and ‘I love Xi Jinping’.”

The new authoritarians are not to be found in Ottawa or Washington, but they are thriving in Beijing and Moscow.

Yet, in the West, trust and patience is running on empty.

“It seems that democratic principles and the proper functioning of states are increasingly standing in an antagonistic relation to each other,” said Aust and Geiges.

The answer to that is to reinforce our institutions to withstand the anger and to perform better, not to tear them down. What social psychologist Jonathan Haidt referred to as “the exhausted majority” needs to rouse itself from its slumber and resist the mob dynamics from partisan minorities who are not representative of the broader society.

Citizens should demand transparency and competence, not snake-oil solutions.

It’s a time of turmoil and confused people are being convinced by cynical politicians that the blame lies with elites and “the deep state.” But changing societies need to fall back on their traditions and customs. The purpose of conservatism should be to conserve institutions designed to reduce social conflict. Poilievre should, and indeed does, know better.