By Oliver Garner
On 28 April the Canadian Liberal party led by Mark Carney won the Canadian federal elections. The incumbent governing party has not won a majority of seats at the time of writing, with 155 ‘ridings’ (constituencies) secured compared to the Conservatives’ 133. The victory sealed a four-month turnaround in fortunes for the Liberals, following the resignation of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on 6 January.
Mark Carney, who acted as ‘caretaker’ Prime Minister before the election, comes to lead his country following a career consisting largely of ‘technocratic’ rather than political public service. He was most notably Governor of the Bank of England between 2013 and 2020 after holding the same role in Canada between 2008 and 2013.
Trudeau’s resignation auspiciously came just over two weeks before the inauguration of the President of the U.S.A, Donald J. Trump. The ensuring global upheaval of Trump’s (second) first 100 days in office has been the inescapable backdrop to the Canadian electoral campaign.
Amidst threats of annexation, the imposition of billions of dollars’ worth of tariffs as part of the Trump administration’s Global Trade War, and even physical violence exploding between the nations (albeit on the ice, rather than on a traditional battlefield), Donald Trump has made Canada’s poll an existential issue.
Carney’s background as a central banker, following a 13-year career in the private sector through various international positions with Goldman Sachs, would seem to place him within a camp that Trumpists would deride as the ‘Globalist Elite’.
Compellingly, however, Carney’s campaign has arguably taken a (maple) leaf out of the book of the strongmen populists. Eschewing conventions of grammar (at least in its English as opposed to its French incarnation), Carney’s campaign opted for the slogan ‘Canada Strong’. The imploration to donate to the campaign places Donald Trump quite squarely as the U.S. bogeyman antagonist to Carney’s Canada Strong protagonist, with the imperative request to “Support Mark Carney’s plan to stand up to Donald Trump and build a stronger Canada”.
The synthesis of technocratic expertise with populist strongman rhetoric has been innovatively conceptualized within academia as ‘technopopulism’, drawing mostly upon case studies involving European Union Member States.
The sheer extent to which Carney’s campaign has been framed in opposition to Donald Trump may, however, call for an even stronger syncretic categorization: ‘Techno-Schmittianism’. Carl Schmitt – card-carrying Nazionalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei jurist, and darling of the horse-shoe bothering Marxist cutting edge in critical theoretical academia – has been interpreted as framing all politics around a ‘friend-enemy’ distinction.
Trump’s positioning as “enemy” was clear from the repeated references to the U.S. during Mark Carney’s victory speech, including emotive terms such as “American betrayal”, the claim that “President Trump is trying to break us so that American can own us” including “our land, our resources, our water, our country”, and the firearms metaphor that Canada found itself in the “crosshairs” of the U.S. leader.
Crucially, however, the discourse may be regarded as taking a truly Schmittian turn insofar as such references to the enemy south of the border were framed within the context of constructing a Canadian identity to be protected in distinction thereto. Carney structured his speech around three “Canadian values” – humility, ambition, and unity. Whereas the first has become part of the stereotype of Canadian culture, intriguingly the second may be regarded as redolent of the fact that Canadian society and culture may not be so far removed from its larger neighbor with regard to socioeconomic competitiveness. The last value, however, is the key concept with regard to the construction and reinforcement of Canadian identity and security.
Carney, tellingly, spoke both French and English during his speech, reflecting the official bilingualism of the state. This is a linguistic marker of the divergent colonial histories of the provinces and territories of Canada, with Quebec existing as a particular outlier by virtue of its origins in the French ancient regime, resulting eventually in secessionist pressures that required judicial settlement. More recently, the Western provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta have also expressed unrest at the federal regime in Ottawa, to which Carney made humorous allusion during his speech, to accompany a more emotive appeal to Quebec.
Canada’s Prime Minister recognized these fragmentary realities in a passage from his speech that is worth reproducing in full to substantiate the extent to which the campaign has culminated in an identitarian construction of ‘us’ against ‘them’:
Canada is more than a nation. We are and we always will be a confederation. A sacred set of ideas and ideals built on practical foundations that we know were not always perfect, but we always strive to be good. We do things because they’re right, not because they’re easy and we see kindness as a virtue, not as a weakness.
The ‘strongman’, populist, and arguably Schmittian tone of the speech was offset by a more conventionally ‘liberal’ focus on economic growth and security. This may be regarded as the ‘technocratic’ element of an electorate betting upon a former central banker to deliver prosperity. Parallels may be drawn not only to the European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s own forays into the ground of the post-liberal populists in Europe – especially on migration – but also perhaps more tangentially to the UK Labour government of Sir Keir Starmer, despite members of that government’s protestations in extra-governmental public speeches to be framing their program in direct opposition to populism.
As efforts to secure peace in Ukraine continue to face uncertain ground, the world inevitably seems to be ossifying into separate ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’ blocs, with the previously taboo topic of armed conflict apparently moving from the unthinkable to the legitimate as the Overton window on military action expands.
The ‘techno-Schmittian’ synthesis employed by the Canadian Liberal campaign to hold on to power may have proved to be effective in the short term. Its intoxicating promise of economic and existential security being guaranteed against a common enemy should, as with all illicit substances, come with a long-term health warning.
When one’s ostensible ‘enemy’ has also dug into their identitarian trenches, then the space for dialogue and diplomacy is foreclosed, and previously ‘peaceful’ countries and ‘friends’ may find themselves sucked into an ice vortex spiraling inevitably towards the destructive force of conflict.
