The federal election and the need for critical engagement

The much-anticipated federal election is now upon us, and we are seeing first-hand the role that new technology, money, and willingness to influence/interfere with our election will have on the electoral politics of this country for the foreseeable future. From deepfakes to loud minority opinions online, it is a challenging time to try to make sense of what we are being told and sold about our country, our leaders, and even our own electoral system. In a time of such geopolitical uncertainty, brought on by the openly expressed fascism of a second Trump regime in the United States, we need to take note of and act against the peddling of mis- and dis-information in our country. We also need to push back against this affront to truth, fact, and our sovereignty. If we don’t, we risk losing our own country (and along with it the freedoms and identity that Canadians hold so dear) to the tyranny of fascism and its systematic elimination of rights, liberties, and the ability of all but a very few to pursue happiness.

While this has been slow in coming, in this election-themed post we hope to highlight just a few of the issues as we see them in our election and the roles/impacts that these issues have relative to the far-right in Canada. Moving from broad to specific, these issues permeate the Canadian electorate and each carries with it significant risk.

At the broadest level, Canadians lack both critical thinking skills and the desire (or ability) to locate source information.

With (generally) robust and (mostly although declining rapidly) well-funded education systems, Canada should be positioned to be an international powerhouse in education across all levels. Increasingly however, and especially post COVID-19, Canadian educational standards appear to be falling – something apparent in international educational rankings (TIMSS 2023, THE World Reputation Rankings 2025) and well as the lived experiences of the people teaching our young people. While the specific content we teach is always in flux with changes to social priority and need, the lack being seen in our students (and therefore our general population) is particularly pronounced in important life skills – especially critical thinking and understanding how things work in Canada.

The first of these issues is broad in its impact: without the ability to critically take in and evaluate information we are susceptible to all manner of influence. Living in a post-truth world opens up all manner of information to be seen as fact, equating, for example, information from an academic study that has received ethical clearance and multiple peer-reviews with a guy in sunglasses ranting in the front seat of his truck. Lack of understanding about how different these two information sources are, combined with an inability to think critically about those differences, allows some Canadians to “do their own research.” The results, as we have seen in resounding waves since 2020, have been steep rises in conspiracism and anti-vax sentiment in this country. The “look it up” crowd has, among other things, allowed for Measles (a very serious and deadly disease - especially for young children) and other previously eradicated diseases to reassert themselves, and for folks to confidently state oblique falsehoods as facts. Luc recently experienced this first-hand with a man in line behind him declaring that Canadians spent more per-capita on healthcare than anyone else in the world (this is simply untrue as in the most recent published data on the topic Canada lands somewhere between 6th and 12th in this area according to the World Bank and OECD).

By OECD. Also, text was added via an image editor such as freeware IrfanView. - https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/7a7afb35-en/1/3/7/2/index.html?itemId=/content/publication/7a7afb35-en&_csp_=6cf33e24b6584414b81774026d82a571&itemIGO=oecd&itemContentType=bookStatLink: https://stat.link/m6pzqb, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=126701185

More pointedly in the context of the rising far-right in this country, the inability to think critically allows for the lies of fascist ideology to find purchase with Canadians. Ideas like public healthcare (or health measures) are attacks on the individual (they are not), equity, diversity, and inclusion work as a modern day tyranny (it is not), or that we have some kind of radical leftism in Canadian mainstream politics (we absolutely do not), become rally-points based on clickbait titles, decontextualized clips, and rage content. Without basic critical thinking skills, Canadian take in (and often take on) the mantras of these coordinated orientations to division.

This also creates an atmosphere of Distrust – a suspicious and cynical, and settled mindset, coupled with negative emotions like antipathy and resentment that may encourage alienation and destructive attitudes. While pollsters like Angus Reid still believe Canadians are up for disagreement and discussion, atmospheres of distrust create spaces where Canadians are less able to do so. This results, we posit, in a political and social situation where we are not able to critically think or even legislate ourselves back toward equilibrium. Without hyperbole, the roots of this distrust grow out of a reduction in our ability and willingness to take the time to think and process - a situation that creates the death-spiral of democracy as we are seeing in real-time in the United States.

Canadian don’t even know how Canada works

Leading up to this election we had a liberal leadership race, and this was a real lesson in how little Canadians know about our own political systems. Fueled by the constant and personal attacks by political opposition, and the persistent and pernicious influence of US media on Canadian culture, Canadians have been convinced that our system operates in the same way as the US political system. It does not. 

We need only look at the Liberal leadership race to examine this idea. With the resignation of Justin Trudeau, the Liberal party was obligated to choose a new leader and did so through a leadership race. They, legally and within the bounds of our political system, prorogued parliament in order to complete this process of choosing a new leader. After that process concluded, that new leader called an election (and here we are). Importantly though (the fact that Mark Carney did not have a seat notwithstanding for the moment), they didn’t have to. In the parliamentary system we have in Canada, we do not vote for the leader of a party (unless they happen to run in your riding), and so if the Liberals had chosen a sitting MP (like Karina Gould) they could have carried on without an election. The argument that they would not have had a mandate is preposterous and simply not how our political system works. The amount of dis and mis-information about this fact we found depressing, and illustrates the simple lack of knowledge about our own systems that we have in this country. We need to do better.

Facebook post from @TrudeauMustGo sharing misinformation about the Canadian electoral system and dictatorship.

The pervasive nature of our ignorance, along with the desire for others to profit from this ignorance, leave Canada in a weak position when individual grifters (read: traitors), movements, or foreign actors wish to undermine our electoral process and sovereignty. Not only does it make Canadians susceptible to ideas like anyone in this country would be better off if we were the 51st US state (nobody would – except perhaps arch-capitalist traitors like Kevin O’Leary). It also emboldens citizens and elected officials alike to undercut Canadian values and sovereignty by declaring allegiances to forces outside of this country as we have seen Danielle Smith do recently in interviews and discussions with members of the American Far-Right grift marketplace.

All watching and no thinking makes Canadians dull folks

At the most granular level, a lack of critical thinking skills and over-exposure to media that is designed and amplified to accomplish certain goals puts us all in great jeopardy. It leaves many Canadians, for example, unable to see the deeply problematic nature of the persistent attacks on Trans and non-binary people in this country – a minority of Canadians so small (about 0.33% of Canadians or ~100,800 people according to Statistics Canada) that if it had the purported influence on individuals and culture claimed by far-right firebrands and Russian-paid pundits it would most certainly be the most influential and important group of individuals this country has ever seen.

It leaves Canadians unable to see that the building of legislation that limits Canadians individual rights and puts politicians between Canadians and their doctors, limiting the rights and abilities of University academics to do research across areas that do not align politically with governments in power, or the dismantling of legislation that protects renters from the crushing weight of an elitist neo-liberal dedication to housing as a commodity rather than a right, as the giant waving red flags they are. These red flags signal: 

🚩 what authors like Táíwò and Robinson call Elite Capture, 

🚩 the fragility of equity-based gains that have occurred in this country over the last 50 years (they are disappearing faster than we can recon in the US), and 

🚩 the increasing lean in many Canadians to move toward types of radical individualism rather than the collectivist ideas that have given Canada its most important social connection points like single-payer healthcare.

As we race toward the end of this election, and members of the more radical right in Canada lay the groundwork for contesting election results, we continue to hope for better. We hope that you, the reader of this blog, will make conscious and informed decisions when you vote, and continue to think critically about the information presented to you - even from CIFRS. Regardless of the outcome, CIFRS will continue its work of exposure and discussion about the far-right in Canada. We hope we can count on your continued support.

Luc Cousineau Amy Mack Mariel Cooksey

If you are interested in supporting CIFRS, please contact us - info@cifrs.org