Mirages of Mendacity

Canada needs a panacea, not a placebo

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, a mirage is “the deceptive appearance of a distant object or objects caused by the bending of light rays (refraction) in layers of air of varying density.”

Most famously it is referenced in stories where some hapless fellow, dying of thirst, looks to the horizon and notices something shimmering in the distance. Thinking it is water, he gets his second wind and frantically rushes to the oasis he sees – only to learn that it is just more of the same sand that has bedeviled his ordeal. Outside of some Hollywood melodrama set in the Sahara, you’ll notice it in the depths of a summer heatwave when there is an almost shimmering movement of air hovering over the hot pavement.

I am reminded of mirages, but not by the heat – as it’s still cold with snow on the ground. Mirages are not just physical, but metaphysical and it is that second type that I see a lot of.

Before I get into that, it is important to understand that mirages are not only an illusion of sight but of thought. Yes, your eyes tell you that there’s a pool of water in the distance, but your brain screams it at you. You’re dying of thirst, and when there is literally nothing more important than water, water is what you’ll see.

Given that Canada has 20 percent of the world’s fresh water, that is not the fixation of the moment – with the notable and still shameful exception of Indigenous communities who lack it and have lacked it for decades. The cri de coeur in this case is, quite literally, survival – survival as an independent and sovereign entity.

Fear, anger, anxiety – they are all on display, and understandable under the circumstances. By a significant margin, Canadians quite like being Canadian – even if we often argue amongst ourselves what that actually means. But those arguments are akin to those among members of a family, where siblings will often say the nastiest things to one another but drop their grievances in a heartbeat and turn on outsider – even if they said something far less offensive. That is, that we can talk smack about one another, but God forbid that someone outside the family do it.

To be a Canadian is to be someone both scared of a threat and defiant in the face of it. At some point, elements of logic kick in and you move through the Kubler-Ross stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.

At this point, very few, if any, are at the denial stage – unless you’ve been living under a rock. Acceptance is also not a well habited place on the continuum, although there are a few who ‘think’ they are there by rocketing to the extreme positions of either hoisting the Stars and Stripes on the front porch or digging a shelter in the back yard to store their ammo and freeze-dried beef stew to prepare for ‘la resistance.’ I say ‘think’ because neither of these extreme maximalist positions are acceptance, but anger, bargaining and depression masquerading as a final resolution.

No - my friends – we are all pretty much in the midpoint of this – the anger, bargaining and depression that comes from trying to wrap our heads around something enormous, surprising and threatening.

So, before you think I forgot about ‘mirages’, let me get back to that.

As we’ve already established, mirages are both a manifestation of our emotional desires and they are cruelly false and misleading. But a mirage need not be the flickering of heated air off a stretch of highway or shimmering sand – they can be the enticing flickering of overheated rhetoric in an opinion piece, or a blog, or a podcast.

I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count the number of such ‘contributions’ I have read or listened to that purported to have ‘the answer’ that would ‘save Canada’ from the threat emanating from the White House. To my credit, I do commit to listening or reading through to the end, but mostly I end in mid-stream, angry that anywhere between ten and sixty minutes of my life has been wasted, never to be refunded to me.

They are mirages – promising a plan to protect the nation but delivering nothing but hot air that flickers as it cools off into the ether.

I remember one podcast where the host had a guest on who “had a plan to save Canada.” The first fifteen minutes of the episode was simply a dry read through the guest’s CV, which I presume was meant to let the listener know that you were dealing with a someone with sufficient gravitas. Then - satisfied that the audience knew they were in the presence of greatness - came some more effusive flattery, followed by what I can only imagine sitting through a presentation from a partner at McKinsey would sound like. Buzzwords and trendy terms galore, followed by a humble brag plug for their website – the key to saving a Confederation that has weathered world wars, depressions and threats of separation.

I turned it off before he got into the predictable “we need to affect a paradigm shift by thinking outside the box in order to find synergies at a granular level” schtick, but I knew it was coming.

This podcast, like so much of the commentary, represents a mirage for Canadians looking for a solution to our current predicament. And like a conventional mirage, it promises you water and presents you with a glass of sand.

Now, full disclosure – I’m an outspoken advocate for CANZUK. That makes me somewhat self-interested in its promotion and adoption. And maybe you are skeptical about it – which is your right. Heck – I would say it’s your responsibility to be skeptical of any plan being floated for your support.

But our movement is not trying to sell you a “paradigm shift” or a “killer app.”

It is a fact that three times in our history has the United States has brought in massive tariffs against its trading partners, including Canada.

McKinley did it in 1890. We weathered it because we stood united with the rest of the British Empire and diverted our trade from the US to Imperial markets. In the end, the US relented and we came out the other end.

Hoover did it in 1930 with Smoot-Hawley – a huge contributing factor to the Great Depression. Canada’s Prime Minister RB Bennett brought Commonwealth leaders to Ottawa in the summer of 1932, resulting in another united front. One year later, Canada and the US would both experience peak unemployment – but Canada’s was 6 percentage points lower. The year after that, Smoot-Hawley was gone, Hoover was gone and the US signed a trade liberalization deal with Canada on raw resources.

But what about the third time? Well, folks – you’re living through it right now.

Canada shares a King with Australia, New Zealand and the UK. We share high level intelligence gathering with them (5 Eyes). The recent announcement of the ‘River class’ frigate program is part of the larger Type 26 platform – also used by the British and Australians.

On the trade front, before Brexit, fully 40% of Canada’s exports went to – wait for it – Britain. And of the 28 member states of the EU when our free trade treaty went into effect (2017), Canada had a merchandise goods deficit with all but 6 of them. And of the combined amount of surplus we had with those 6 EU members, fully half the amount was from the British.

And before you think we took advantage of the Brits, the overwhelming majority of that trade was in “precious metals and gems” – you know, stuff that the metals and commodities traders in London would resell to the rest of the world at a profit?

This says nothing of the research of Sarianna Lundan and Geoffrey Jones, commissioned by the Commonwealth Heads of Government back in the late 1990s, that found the ‘overhead’ for trade between Commonwealth jurisdictions was 15% lower than when trading with non-Commonwealth members – a number that has this “Commonwealth Effect” closer to 20%.

Oh – and the Brits, Aussies and Kiwis are also getting nailed on tariffs by the Yanks.

CANZUK is, and has been, a policy of the Conservative Party of Canada. CANZUK has been supported by the Liberal Party of Canada’s youth wing and was mentioned by Frank Baylis and (now Prime Minister) Mark Carney in the Liberal Party’s French language leadership debate. Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott recently wrote an op-ed supporting CANZUK in the National Post. Claire Lehmann, the Australian journalist and founder of the online magazine Quillette, endorsed it on social media – as did Postmedia columnist and author Brian Lilley.

Add to this the more than two dozen members of Canada’s Parliament who’ve spoken in favour of it, more than a couple of dozen MP’s and peers from all parties in the British Parliament, the New Zealand Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, who has endorsed enhanced Commonwealth trade, the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance, Britain’s Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs, and a number of business and labour leaders, academics and associations, combined with a grassroots campaign that has received the support of nearly a quarter-million people worldwide.

And so we get to the point.

Canada is presented with four choices – taking our chances with the status quo, annexation by the United States, ceding sovereignty to the European Union (with all that entails), or taking the lead on CANZUK.

But let’s be clear – none of these choices mean that Canada does not have work to do on the border, or on our military, or on interprovincial free trade. These are boilerplate to all four. But two of the four mean ceding sovereignty – either to Washington or Brussels. The third means crossing one’s finger’s and hoping for the best – or buying into yet another mirage being offered by someone trying to profit off a fear driven algorithm.

And CANZUK isn’t perfect. It isn’t going to 100% replace the US as an export market. No reputable CANZUK supporter has made that claim – although a number of disingenuous critics have said this, in addition to the bizarre claim of “resurrecting the British Empire”, which is only plausible in the mind of someone who’s done a lot of peyote after binge-watching the entire BBC “Pride and Prejudice” miniseries.

But if you want to minimize the damage and still come out intact as a sovereign and independent nation, CANZUK is literally the only option on the table. And given the tightness of the federal polls and the degree to which the threat from the Trump White House has sucked the oxygen from the room, tangible proof of concept for a Plan B could decide the next (and imminent) general election.

Choose your adventure – and avoid mirages.