By focusing solely on China or Russia and other state actors, Canada is missing the potentially far more troubling forces that proved so disruptive during last year’s convoy protest, Susan Delacourt writes.
I gotta say, as someone who visited Toronto and Canada for the first time a few months ago, it was super weird when our Quebec native tour guide randomly went on a Trump / MAGA rant in the middle of our very multi-cultural Niagara Falls expedition.
I was pretty convinced that Trump mania was a purely USA sort of issue
From the trucking incidents last year, it seemed like it was b/c people in Canada actually enjoy that stuff. I mean like, a Canadian trucker, living & working entirely in Canada for a Canadian company, and currently in Canada, wearing a MAGA hat and a pro-Trump t-shirt.
So it’s not so much that it’s being forcibly inserted so much as actively invited and brought in? Love it or hate it, people like what they like - maybe they shouldn’t, but they do. You can warn people of the dangers of smoking, but you can’t quite forcibly stop them from doing so, in private spaces.
So they’re being radicalized…?
I’m not sure of the legal definition of that, but engagement algorithms, like click bait article titles, do tend to work better when they enrage the audience. Therefore it would be astonishing if that was not taking place, somehow - it would be a huge untapped money-making scheme just waiting to be exploited.
It really comes down to the question of whether or not non-state actors can conduct ‘foreign interference.’
That is, if Joe from Wisconsin donates money to the trucker convoy that occupies Ottawa, is that foreign interference? Or, if I write an article on why Trump is a terrible thing for the USA, and post it in an American forum, am I conducting foreign interference in some way?
To which, if the answer is “yes,” then are some forms of foreign interference acceptable?
It’s kind of demarcation problem. Where is the line on all of this? In many respects, there is a global society where the lines are more ideological than they are geographical. When is it okay to cross those lines?
You’re 100% right. In the case of China, it’s the Chinese government interfering. In the case of American interest groups, they’re just collections of people with a particular perspective.
That being said, we do let the American government and American state consorts have enormous influence over our policies. But it is viewed as collaboration, rather than interference. Mostly because we identify with America, both being liberal democratic states with subsequently similar ideology. We may disagree on particular policy, but we essential are disgareeing on how to best run capitalist liberal democracies. We don’t disagree on the more foundational ideological terms.
What worries me is that we don’t see this American collaboration and influence as highly problematic. It isn’t problematic for the same reasons that Chinese interferences poses. But it is nonetheless problematic in more subtle ways. I think the source article tries too hard to make the two comparable, and don’t think they are. But that doesn’t diminish the concern we should have with it comes to the American influence.
