Trump imposed tariffs, insulted us and threatened us. Unsurprisingly everyone wrapped themselves in the Canadian flag and swore to keep their elbows up. The federal election was fought on the question as to which leader and party had the best chance to show the bully to the south that we Canadians were not lackeys. We were distinct, better, and would show it by rebuilding and restructuring ourselves to meet our more virtuous national objectives. Of course, there was no ready-made blueprint telling us what an invigorated sovereign and better Canada should look like.

In this setting, those on the left of the political spectrum saw a glimmer of an opportunity. Economic delinking, with the possibility of political and social delinking from the American empire, might be put on the table. There was a faint possibility that the necessary reflections and struggles might lead to a politics of greater respect for the multinational reality of the land we call Canada. The collective aspirations of Indigenous peoples and Québecois might be accorded a legitimacy which they have not yet attained. There was even some hope that thinking about what kind of sovereign polity we want to be might give substantial impetus to a radical departure from the neoliberal idea that more is always better, that quantity is more important than quality. The counter idea that the development of a political economy not driven by profit-maximizers but by satisfying human needs and protection of the environment might come to make sense to more people as their imagination was fired up.

None of this is happening. While there have been some feel-good statements about the need to consult Indigenous peoples as we continue to extract and exploit, the agenda is neither “reconcile, baby, reconcile” nor “democratize, baby, democratize.” Rather it is, as the winning Carney Liberals have explicitly said, “build, baby, build.” More pipelines, more mining, more infrastructure, less taxes for the ultra-rich and middle class, homage paid to environmental improvements by the means of costly market and technical aids (like the spectacularly unsuccessful carbon capture schemes or the development of disaster-prone and expensive nuclear plants, both of which will benefit profiteers but not the environment), more policing and criminalization of the poor and dissidents, less tolerance for refugees and more spending on defence as Carney has announced his desire to participate in Trump’s Golden Dome and in the EU’s ReArm initiative to dramatically raise armaments’ spending, a kind of militaristic Keynesianism spelling disaster for peace-seekers and environmentalists alike. Meanwhile, the position of Minister for Labour has been eliminated—replaced by a Minister for Jobs and Families—while a new Minister for AI has been appointed, tasked with managing the job losses inherent in AI development and promoting the massive, ecologically damaging energy demands it entails.

These federal strategies have encouraged junior governments to pursue goals which they (as right-wing, corporate-dominated governments) have always had, with more gusto than ever. They are enacting legislation which will let their chosen private profit-seekers rip up our good earth, at the expense of the environment and Indigenous peoples. In Québec, Bill 97 intends to create industrial zones in about 30 percent of its precious forest areas. In British Columbia, Bill 15, the Infrastructure Projects Act, sets out to get projects off the ground more quickly by allowing the provincial government to override environmental assessments, public consultations, and Indigenous consent processes. Ontario has two such bills on its agenda: Bill 5, the Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act, and Bill 17, the Protect Ontario by Building Faster and Smarter Act.

The score box reads dismally. The dominant class and its cheerleaders, intent on doubling down to maintain a social system which proudly features gross inequality and inequity, are clearly out on top. The working class and its leftist protagonists, hoping to fuel a movement for a radical rethinking of our polity to get closer to a social system which advances equality and altruism, find themselves at the bottom.

Why was it so hard for leftist voices to make themselves heard? Why was it so easy for the ideas and goals of capitalists to be further embedded?

There is an obvious answer. In Canada’s political economy, as in any market capitalist economy, the creation of overall wealth and welfare is to be left to competing individuals freely choosing how to deploy their talents and resources in order to garner more wealth for themselves. It is ‘natural’ for governments to help individuals do their thing. Governments are in the ‘business’ of inveigling those with resources (and in Canada a handful of people control most of the wealth) to invest their assets. They declare themselves open for business; they pass laws and regulations which will give investors an assurance that their investments will not be subject to the volatility and the gyrations of domestic politics; they remove barriers to profit maximization, often referred to disparagingly as red tape; they offer private resource owners subsidies to lure them to produce goods and services in their jurisdiction (as in giving Stellantis and Volkswagen handouts which exceed the subsidies offered them by the US to produce EV batteries).

In a capitalist state, then, the policies dovetail with the unchallenged presumption that the owners of the means of production have a sacrosanct right to deploy their property as they wish. This includes the inherent right not to invest—that is, their right to strike. It permits them to dictate the terms and conditions they want to prevail. Bourgeois political parties have internalized these ideas. Every now and again, a new crisis, such as Trump’s tariffs, forces them to adapt their existing model. Intuitively, they look to the owning class for direction. What leading capitalists and their allies in the mainstream media and intellectual circles told all others anxiously wrapped in the flag was that the best thing for Canada was to re-arrange the old furniture, not build a new house. Canada would be protected better if they, the dominant class, were enabled to extract more stuff, exploit workers more easily in Canada.

This, there was a concerted drive to get rid of interprovincial trade barriers. Those so-called barriers have a long history. They protected the autonomy of provincially elected governments to control aspects of employment and licensing of enterprises to suit their populations. Big capital has persuaded governments that, in the interest of the nation-building required to ward off the US’s baneful encroachments on our sovereignty, we should agree to abandon local concerns historically left to democratic local entities. No more ‘artificial barriers’ impeding big capital. The Carney government and most provincial governments are buying into this plan, even though some safeguards for some people in some parts of Canada will be lost.

In the Toronto Star, a recent full-page Enbridge ad (accompanied by a red maple leaf emblem, of course) argued that the Trumpian assault and the political parties’ reactions to them had revealed that Enbridge and its fellow energy corporations had always been on the right track when they said they should be given greater latitude. Let us, the ad urged one and all, get on with perfecting our wealth-creating vision. That is, let the dogs loose so that Canada will become a superpower in oil and gas, and a leader in LNG exports. Of course, we should help some Indigenous people buy into the projects by lending them money. This should appease all Indigenous people.

Enbridge’s self-serving ‘advice’ reflected the private elites’ overall strategy. The evidence of how Canadian owners of production seek to guide our main bourgeois parties as they position themselves to respond to the Trump chaos is abundant. They make it as clear as they can that growth generated by private profit-seekers, deploying any means necessary, is the way to go. A couple of instances follow.

Flavio Volpe, President of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, lobbied fiercely for the development of the Ring of Fire, arguing that this would give Canada the ability to be a self-standing, sovereign country. He advocated attracting players like Vale, Glencore and Rio Tinto to be major investors. Undoubtedly, he chose them because they are giants and not American ones. He was not perturbed by the fact that they are not Canadian; he seemingly was not concerned that each of them has been accused of shocking treatment of Indigenous people, of workers, of physical environments. No, they had money and they could be asked to use it to help Canada’s automotive industries grow despite the US onslaught. This agenda is in line with Doug Ford’s playbook to let private capital have its way. That is what unleashing the economy means to him. For their part, Carney and his government are offering a very similar piece of legislation, Bill C-5. They are in complete agreement with Ford as he pushes for an environmentally damaging project, one likely to dispossess Indigenous peoples once more. “Build, baby, build.”

One of the major issues this past election was affordable housing. Progressive activists hold the broad view that housing should not be seen as a commodity but as a necessity and, therefore, should not be left to the logic of the market. While there is much debate on how this goal should be pursued, the activists are agreed that there is a need to build public housing, rather than build houses for trading and private profit maximization. Capitalists think the opposite, and they persistently tell our politicians that they can and will take care of the affordable housing problem. All governments have to do is to make it easier to make profits. David Wilkes, President and CEO of the Building Industry and Land Development Association, a major industry lobby group, has made this plain. He has warmly embraced Ford’s Bill 17. It will do away with builders having to pay development charges up front; it will streamline planning and standardize municipal requirements designed to take local conditions into account and remove all other such ‘red tape’ barriers. And, most importantly, according to Wilkes, governments must look to the private sector to build housing. Only those with wealth to invest and who want to accumulate more wealth should be entrusted with this task. Barriers must be removed, subsidies offered. For instance, the federal government is being urged to make federal land available—cheaply, of course. Thus far, the announcements made by the Carney government about building affordable housing read as if they will follow the script provided by the building industry.

***

In the end, our flag-waving, ‘elbows up’ politicians agreed that some re-arrangement of our wealth-creation policies should be devised to deal with the immediate impacts of the Trumpian trade war. They did not choose a path which rejects the private wealth creation regime which depends on super wealthy individuals continuing to enrich themselves at the expense of all others and of their environments. They did not feel pressured to think in any other way. Their capitalist-favouring choices seemed natural to them because they could not imagine any other worldview, any other ideological framework.

The left was unable to counter the hegemonic ideas which maintain capitalist relations of production.

Marx wrote, accurately, that, in any epoch, the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas. They are the ideas which make the existing system of social relations look normal and natural, hegemonic. Those who fight their particular causes against one or other aspect of capitalism’s repressions, subjugations, impoverishments, discriminations and environmental outrages, are confined and constrained by the enveloping fog of the ruling class’s ideology.

What is making the policies being pursued by our self-proclaimed Team Canada politicians seem natural are the uncontested building blocks of market capitalism. The fundamental blocks are simple. All individuals’ autonomous choices are to be free from intervention. The right to exclude all from the enjoyment of property that is privately owned is inviolate. So too are any agreements made by autonomous individuals; they are to be treated as legally enforceable contracts whose privately agreed-to terms cannot be questioned by any outsiders. Until those activists who want to generate a movement for radical transformation of social relations come to grips with the need to confront the ideological underpinnings of market capitalism, they will fail. It is not enough to point to the harsh outcomes of the way in which capitalism is practised, to lament the oppression of marginalized groups, to point to egregious conduct affecting the most vulnerable amongst us—all of which give rise to righteous anger and agitation. To get people to join a movement for radical change, they must be persuaded that a society based on the collective good, on the sharing of property and the guarantee that all material needs should be met, is a logical and practical way to organize a society. They must be shown that there is nothing natural about individualism, the right to private property and of enforceable contracts between unequal individuals. They must be shown that it is possible to imagine a different world, that the end of capitalism is not only possible but realizable. This is very difficult because the opposite set of ideas is continuously re-enforced by the very existence of capitalism and its supporting ideological framework which imbues its material operations, its cultural and legal messaging. The ideology maintaining capitalist relations of production is invisibly inserted into our daily lives. It is as if it is part of the ambient air we breathe. We hardly see how we are being shaped. One example of how deeply embedded this stealthily disseminated major mind-moulding set of capitalist-maintaining beliefs arose during a minor controversy during the federal election.

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre stirred the chattering classes into momentary excited outrage when he announced he was going to be much tougher on criminals than the government had been. Clearly it was not his idea that caused the outrage. After all, the Liberals also turned up with a law and order platform that rivalled Poilievre’s in every way. This is now reflected in the first bill they offered Parliament after their victory, the Strong Borders Act. It allows for an extraordinary level of surveillance and invasion of privacy, more direction to judges to be tough on crime, harsh treatment of asylum seekers and temporary visa holders, all Trump-like and Trump-pleasing in their repressive nature. No, what upset the chattering classes was that Poilievre had actually said that, in order to fortify his draconian approach to the punishment of serious criminals, he would be prepared to use the notwithstanding clause to defeat any Charter challenge to his proposed legislation to get tough on crime. Poilievre was cast as a politician who, in his zeal for law and order, was willing to threaten the efficacy of the most important institution we have in our democracy, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. And it is easy to understand why the public views the Charter in this way.

Section 2 of the Charter guarantees everyone freedom of conscience and religion, thought, belief, opinion and expression (including freedom of the press) and of peaceful assembly and association. Every decent society, including a non-capitalist one, would want these kinds of freedoms to reign. At a minimum, these freedoms help sustain electoral democracy: to participate meaningfully, everyone needs to be able to think as they like, to express themselves as they see fit, to assemble and to associate with others. This undergirds the oft-heard contention that, even though it is legal, governments should refrain from using the Charter-granted notwithstanding clause to curb these freedoms.

But the guaranteed freedoms, as defined and interpreted in our Charter, also happen to suit the ideological framework which permits our version of capitalism flourish. That is, while this was not the intent when introducing the Charter into the Constitution, the prestige now accorded the Charter and its ideals, contribute to the invigoration and internalization of ideas which capitalists and bourgeois political parties use to maintain and perpetuate the status quo.

Our Charter makes people think that they are all equally free and autonomous, regardless of whether they are wealthy or not. It does not explicitly say so, but it is interpreted as assuming that, as free individuals, all are equally free to have their private property protected, if they have any. More, these Section 2 freedoms, known as fundamental freedoms, are specifically stated to be freedoms which belong to individuals only. They are not intended to be available to collectives. This re-enforcement of the virtue of individualism is helpful to the dominant class which profits from having us all compete with each other as individuals. In part, it explains the very reluctant and slow acceptance by the Supreme Court of Canada of the fact that workers’ right to associate should include a very limited and easily curbed right to strike, something which has been a boon to the employing class. Not only are the fundamental freedoms individualistic ones, they are also only available against the state and its agencies. Again, whether intentional or not, this assists our capitalists. Their coercive power, which gives them their economic and political sway and which may affect the ability of individuals to be the free, autonomous individuals the Charter envisages, cannot be treated as a violation of a fundamental freedom. Famously, Franklin Delanor Roosevelt identified this as a grave problem with the already existing US Bill of Rights. In 1944, he proposed that, as well as the freedoms we call fundamental freedoms, the Bill of Rights should provide guarantees for material welfare and security. He argued that impoverished people could not be autonomous people: “Necessitous men are not free men.” His proposal was not accepted, neither in the US nor in Canada.

As if this loading of the dice in favour of the capitalist class was not enough, the fact that the Charter’s goal is to protect individuals from the state’s abuse of powers also makes it easier for the dominant class to convince many people that their greatest enemy is the public sphere and its elected governments, rather than the for-profit actors in the private sphere. The wealth owners (and, let us remember, they are the few) are empowered by the implication that government is the source of unfreedom. It makes their incessant contentions that their choices as to how to use their wealth should be free from any governmental interference seem perfectly reasonable. Of course, they gleefully accept those interventions which provide them with more opportunities to accumulate more wealth. Arguments for deregulation, privatization, subsidies, unfettered mobility of capital, all are common sense in this ideological setting.

The ideological support for market capitalism’s legitimacy is not solely attributable to the Charter, of course. There are many other ways in which the prevailing system of social relations makes its existence appear normal and benign. But the Charter’s prestige and logic helps embed these pro-status quo ideas more deeply in the public’s consciousness. It is, therefore, very important to change people’s minds about how differently they might live. Their imagination must be ignited. The right did it consciously as they sought to counter the post-World War II gains made by the working class. As Margaret Thatcher explained in an interview after she had defeated the coal miners, people had to be educated to accept the futility of redistribution by state action, they had to accept the need to be self-reliant. She explained her agenda: “Economics are the method. The object is to change the soul.” We know she read Hayek but she may not have read Gramsci. Still, she echoed his insight: “No regime can rule for very long if its sole means of doing so is by directly coercing the ruled. The ruled must be persuaded that the status quo is normal.” Thatcher’s government and the many governments aping her approach have served the capitalist class extremely well. It is time for the left to re-educate people, to show them how they have been misled and that it is possible to live differently—and indeed better.

It will be extremely difficult. As Fredric Jameson observed, people find it hard to imagine a viable alternative system of social relations. If they cannot imagine it, it is unlikely that even natural allies of socialists who are suffering under capitalism will join a militant movement to bring about radical change. But Jameson did not say it could not be imagined. Activists must develop a consistent critique to dismantle the ideological framework by which capitalism legitimates its rule. By nature this is a long-term struggle, one which it is difficult to keep in the forefront of the minds of those activists when they go into battle to get relief from specific hardships and hurts, one at a time. Yet, the lack of bite the left had during this current crisis suggests that it is a necessary battle if a movement with transformative potential is to get off the ground.

Harry Glasbeek is professor emeritus and Senior Scholar of Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. He has taught in both Australia and Canada and has written 140 articles and 12 books, including Between the Lines titles Wealth by Stealth: Corporate Crime, Corporate Law, and the Perversion of Democracy, Class Privilege: How Law Shelters Shareholders and Coddles Capitalism, Capitalism: A Crime Story, and Law at Work. The Coercion and Co-option of the Working Class. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.