Is Canada still a free and democratic society？
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Summary
In this episode, Dr. Travis Smith joins me to discuss the question: Is Canada still a free and democratic society? Dr. Smith is a scholar, professor, and writer who has written a series of essays critiquing our culture in the face of draconian public health restrictions.
Transcript
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Is Canada still Canada? Are we still a free and democratic society? I'm Candice Malcolm and this
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is The Candice Malcolm Show. Hi everyone, welcome to The Candice Malcolm Show. Thank you so much
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for joining us and tuning in today. Now if you're anything like me, you have watched the change
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that's happened in our society, sort of like a slow motion train wreck has happened over the
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course of roughly the past two years. And what we have seen is an unbelievable erosion of basic
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liberties in this country, basic rights and freedoms, things that we took for granted. We
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took for granted so much so that five years ago, so go back to the first time that Justin Trudeau
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was elected in 2015. If at that time someone were to say in the Trudeau mandate, Trudeau will
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completely suspend your rights and freedoms. He will use health quarantine rules to impose lockdowns,
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make everybody stay home, close down businesses, lock people out of the country, prohibit people
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from leaving the country, prohibit people from coming to the country, any of these things. If
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someone had said that was going to happen, you'd shake your head and say, no, that's a conspiracy
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theory. That kind of stuff doesn't happen in a country like Canada. If you were told that we
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would live in a country where neighbours were snitching on neighbours, where there was derision
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and hatred, people pitted against each other, a huge distrust of other components of society,
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different groups sort of pitted against each other. Again, you would say, no, not in Canada.
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Canadians are good hearted. There's a sense of community. Canadians wouldn't do that. If you
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in any way were to describe the scenario of the past two years to your previous self, to your 2015
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self, you would have said, no way, not in Canada. And yet here we are. Here we found ourselves in
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this situation where public health order after public health order, we continue to see people
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complying, people saying, okay, I'm going to do what you say because you're the expert. I trust you.
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And at the end of the day, I just want to be healthy. I just want to live. I want my physical
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health above all else. We live in a society where people are placing their health above their
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freedoms. And they're willfully doing that. They're willfully doing that. If you were to think about
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the last election, the federal election in 2021, we had the prime minister of this country, Justin
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Trudeau, willfully scapegoating an entire portion of the society, blaming a portion of society
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for the lockdowns, for the fact that we're still in this pandemic, and openly showing his
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contempt towards people who are unvaccinated. We've never seen anything like that in modern
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Canada to the point where it doesn't really feel so much like Canada anymore. And I want
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to talk about this topic today with a brilliant Canadian scholar. My guest today is Travis Smith,
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a professor at Concordia University. He's a scholar, professor, and writer. He's written a series
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of thought-provoking essays critiquing our culture in the face of draconian COVID-19 restrictions.
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One essay I particularly enjoyed is called Have We Become Not Canada. It's really good. It's worth
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the read. Smith warns that time is running out to free our country from its pandemic-induced
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contagion of distrust, resentment, and contempt of our neighbors. Another essay, which is actually
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a two-part series on the religiosity and the zeal of our society's reaction to COVID-19,
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as well as this idea that we have put, we've elevated our bodies and our physical health
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above our minds and our souls. And he talks about the fallout of the sort of thought experiment where
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we trade off our liberties and our freedoms in exchange for good health, or at least the promise
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of good health, because no one can guarantee good health. But regardless, very, very good essays worth
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reading. And to discuss these topics and break down these issues on a bit of a deeper level,
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I'm very pleased today to be joined in the program by Dr. Travis Smith. Travis Smith teaches
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political theory at Concordia University, and he did his PhD on the politics of medicine he studied
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at Harvard University, where he completed his doctorate. And so he's very well positioned to be
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discussing these topics today, because he's been thinking and writing about them for a very,
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very long time. So, Travis, thank you so much for joining the show, and welcome.
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Thanks for having me on the show today, Candice.
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And so before we get into some of the themes and the topics that you've been writing about
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in these essays, these essays about COVID, and the sort of overarching heavy handed response from
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our political class, why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself, about your background,
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and specifically your academic research, and the work that you've been doing up to now, because
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it seems to me like you're perfectly positioned, perfectly prepared to be commenting on the situation
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that we're that we're in right now, given that you have been studying this exact topic of the sort
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Well, I mainly stick to, as an academic, writing articles about things like early modern political
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thought, or I teach classical political science, write about thinkers in modern times like Hobbes and
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Tocqueville. But I wrote my dissertation on the role of medicine and early modern thought in thinkers like
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Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and tried to understand, you know, what role medicine
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would play in modern society, in shaping how we regard to the human condition and how we should
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treat each other and what kind of powers those, you know, those who rule should wield over us and for
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what purposes. And so medicine was something that in early modern times was right at the very center of,
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at the core of what they believe the modern political and technological world should look like.
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And one of the ways it was expressed was that the things that in pre-modern times, people who
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tried to practice magic or alchemy, what they wanted but could not get through their means, we could,
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we could get the very same things that the magicians and the alchemists wanted, but through a new kind of
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science, new kind of technology. And so given that a lot of the goals of magic and alchemy were medical
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goals, you know, they were just looking for a new way to do the things that they had wanted to
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accomplish or achieve before, indefinite prolongation of life and so forth, finding ways to change human
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nature. And so it was also the case that you found that the language that was used was one where they
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could take old words and give them new meaning. And so you could have, you know, instead of faith in
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God, you would have faith in human reason that would be applied in a scientific way. Instead of having
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hope for an afterlife, you would have hope for the future where we would manufacture for ourselves
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a better world. Instead of charity being about caring for people's souls, charity would be about
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caring for people's bodies. And the greatest part of charity would be medicine. And another thing that
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I looked at was how these ideas were not originally articulated in a fashion that was consistent with
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liberal democracy, but rather the opposite. And so I became, you know, as I was doing this research
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concerned about whether or not medicine could be used in a way, advanced medicine could be used in a way
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that would be damaging to liberal democracy. So, you know, we're blessed in Canada to live in a society
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that has liberal and democratic credential. We are concerned about freedom and equality. Those are
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our highest political goods, but we're also concerned about things like medicine a lot. It's one of the
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things when you ask Canadians, what do we care about the most? Medicine has always been one of the things
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that we say we care about the most. Maybe even before the pandemic, a lot of people would have said they
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care about medicine even more than freedom and equality. And so the thing is, when the justification
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for modern medicine was even originally articulated, even like 400 years ago, there was this double
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justification. On the one hand, you offer a public justification that medicine is for what they
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call the relief of man's estate. So it would be something that could reduce all human beings suffering.
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And at the same time, there was an acknowledgement among the scientists, as it were, the people who
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would be engaging in the development technologies, that all of technology, including medicine, was
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really for the pursuit of unlimited power. And the moral argument was something that was offered,
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as I said, for public consumption. But really, the scientists would, and had to, for the sake of the
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goods that they were pursuing, the goals that they were pursuing, have to be willing to do anything,
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try any experiment, you know, both human and non-human, in order to find out how we might,
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the expression was, supersede human nature, or how we might impose new natures upon us.
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And so that was always there at the beginning. And so the question of something like the role of
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consent in this has always been ambiguous, the role of freedom in this, we think that medicine
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is good for freedom, because if we have healthy bodies, you're more free to live your life,
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right? Medicine is something that speaks to us as equals, because we all have bodies that get sick,
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we all have bodies that die, so we're equal in those ways. But medicine, like all technologies,
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can be used in ways that could be negative with respect to our freedoms. And also medicine is
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something that, or health is something that we see also speaks to the ways in which we're unequal,
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because some people are healthy, and some people are sick. And even at the get-go of modern technology,
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they wondered whether or not it might be possible to use all technologies, including medicine,
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in order to enhance the species, or to reduce the species to a condition of a kind of herd contentment
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and social control. These were all sort of thought about 400 years ago, at the very beginning of modern
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political thought. So that's kind of what I investigated there. So when I see today's stories,
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I saw in the news a couple days ago, a story about some new technology that they can use to read
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people's minds. Saw this on Smithsonian Magazine. And it's always the case that they say, you know, we
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develop a technology that will read people's minds, because it's going to help the disabled,
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which, of course, who could argue against helping the disabled, finding some way for them to have
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greater freedom, finding some way for their conditions to be more equalized with those of us
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who don't struggle in the ways they do. So that sounds like it's fully consistent with liberal
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democracy. But for those of us, you know, who've watched any science fiction movie, we have to think
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twice about whether or not, you know, technology that can read our minds is something that might not be
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badly abused by the powerful should they decide to do so, we have to really trust that it doesn't get
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used in ways that are harmful. You know, or what goes on in our minds, almost looking right now to
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be the last vestige of our privacy, right, where everything else is surveilled, or everything else is
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watched. You know, at least we've got our the privacy of our minds, and they will not really,
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you know, we can we can have a machine that will read your minds too. And so it goes with that,
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you know, part of it is for the relief of suffering. But part of it is also for the
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indefinite acquisition of power for whatever purpose the powerful might put it to. And so
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there's always this tension that is both medicine is always both something that it's it makes
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perfectly good sense that we liberal democratic people love it, right, and want more of it,
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almost worship it, depend on it. And at the same time, medicine is among the technologies that is
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potentially most threatening to most dangerous to the very things that we people who love freedom
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and equality hold dear. Well, so let's let's bring this all back into the context and Travis of COVID-19
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and what we have seen go on in the last two years, because, you know, what what at first we were told
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was, you know, two weeks at home to flatten the curve has turned into an evolving set of restrictions
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that there's a certain, you know, swath of the population that's just completely happy to do
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whatever they're told from health authorities. They're happy to, you know, go along with this
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idea that we can scapegoat people who choose not to get vaccinated. We saw in the news last week that
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Austria, a country in Europe, is choosing to impose health restrictions and quarantine onto people who
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are not vaccinated. We see in Australia as well, sort of extreme uses of public health rules to
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sort of quarantine people who get COVID or quarantine people who aren't getting vaccinated. And so we see
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people going along with very extreme measures that I don't think that Canadians, in theory, would agree
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to. But just given the circumstances, given the stress that we're under, you know, almost two years
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into this pandemic, so many people are choosing willfully to sort of give away certain aspects of
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their freedom, like you said, their cherished, beloved freedom, in exchange for greater safety,
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greater security, health. Can you sort of walk us through your perspective on this as someone who
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sort of studied it from a political theory perspective? Is this predictable? What can be made of
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it? And how can we sort of start to push back those of us who still cherish the idea of Canada
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as a country of free individuals? That's a lot, Candace. I'll try my best. Okay.
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Look, let's give Canadians credit at first, right? I mean, at first, when we were told that there was
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this pandemic, and we were told two weeks to flatten the curve, Canadians came together and said
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to themselves, yeah, that's the kind of thing we do. We look out for each other. Canadians are
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compassionate. Canadians do have a sense that we're not just, you know, selfish, you know, look out for
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number one types, but that we care for our communities. We care for the vulnerable. And so
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appealing to us on that basis was something that Canadians across the political spectrum, in a lot
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of ways, we say, yeah, sure, that makes sense. We want to protect ourselves. We want to protect the
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people we care about, our neighbors, our family members, our fellow Canadians, right? And as we're
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recording, I'm waiting to find out whether or not the Ontario government is going to extend the
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emergency order through to the end of March next year, which I think some of us have been
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anticipating they would do anyways, we just didn't know how long they would extend it for. And we've
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come to wonder whether or not the emergency will ever end. And if there isn't any number of,
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you know, reasons that they might continue to extend it. You know, we have had a campaign to
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fight this virus for a long time. And somehow our numbers keep getting worse and worse again,
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despite all the efforts. At least that's, you know, that's the information we're given. And so
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we were stuck now wondering, do we ever get our lives back? And there's a sort of I mean, you're
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you're a mother, right, Candace, you have children, you know, you know what, what you have to do in
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order to habituate your children to good behavior, what kind of behavior you want out of them.
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And, you know, I've seen people compare the way in which Canadians have been treated for the last
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year and a half. Not so much to good parents, but how children are treated by abusive parents,
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or how people are treated by abusive spouses, or how prisoners have their will broken down by various
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tactics. And this is like, you know, the, you know, the bad child rearing, in a sense that we're being
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trained to see what will comply with next. I had a conversation with somebody very recently,
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where they just said, boy, I wish we'd be rewarded for doing what we're told. But sort of once you've
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already embraced that mindset, if, you know, you run the risk that, you know, you're not ever going to
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be rewarded, you're just going to keep being told, because you keep hoping for the reward that may never
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come. Or if they give you a little bit of reward, they take it away again, very shortly. And this is
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where I'm concerned, is that, you know, especially, for example, what really got me concerned more than
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anything else this summer, I mean, I sat on the fence about a lot of this for a long time, and just
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observed, had lots of conversations with people, just looked at the information my public health
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unit was giving me, and tried to sort of scrutinize their charts, and make sense of their
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interpretations. You know, watch the news, and, you know, talk to talk to people in my community,
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outside of academic circles, it was very important for me to talk to lots of people outside of my
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academic circle. So a lot of academics get stuck in only talking to other academics, like people in
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any profession, get stuck mainly talking to people in their own profession. And things stopped making
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sense. At a certain point, and more than anything else, it was the introduction of the passports
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or the certificates, and especially the way they were introduced in Ontario, where the public health
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unit said they would do it if the government didn't. And that struck me as a kind of usurpation of
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authority of the sort that we've seen from public health. You know, the kind of thing that really
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should belong to our elected representatives, being something that was being, you know, imposed upon
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them or threatened, if they didn't do it themselves, that sort of got me upset. I got concerned about
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the certificates, I got really upset about the mandates. And part of it was, I'd always been the
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kind of person who was aware of what, you know, the kooky, crazy people said, you know, when this all
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started. But these kinds of measures were the kinds of things that they had predicted from the get-go.
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And so when I started seeing that being implemented, my attitude was, you know, gosh, I really hope they
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stop making, you know, the conspiracy theorists look good. Please stop making them look good.
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Please stop making it look like they were right about anything. I don't want them to be right about
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anything. But once they were introduced, and people embraced them, people were excited for them,
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people couldn't wait to use them and brag about using them. And I got very disturbed when I teach
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the concept of liberty to my undergraduates, Candace. One of the examples I like to use
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is the way in which we see no left turn signs when we're driving in traffic.
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And I grew up in Ontario, and I got used to the no left turn sign, that's the one that has the left
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arrow, and the red, no, don't do that, right? And then I work in Montreal, and in Montreal,
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they like the other sign, the one that's got the green circle with the up arrow and the right turn
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arrow. And I explained to my students, and these are not the same. They say technically they're the
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same, but they're not the same, because what's the principle behind them? But the principle behind
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the red, no right turn sign is that you should be, you should assume you could turn in any direction
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at any given intersection. That's, you know, generally, it's your right is everybody's right
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to turn in any direction, any given intersection. But for some very specific reason here, you're not
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allowed to turn left. Sorry, this one, no. But the green, go straight or go right sign, I mean,
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the naked green, so it sounds nicer, red, it sounds mean. But the green sign, the premise behind it,
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the principle behind that is, unless we tell you what you're permitted to do, you don't know what
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you're allowed to do. You have to wait for explicit instructions from the authorities to give you
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permission to do what you may be allowed to do here or there. So when you come to an intersection,
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you're like, oh, I get to go right, or I get to go straight here, because they're letting me.
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And the psychology behind those two is quite different. And when I saw the certificates get
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introduced, it struck me as sort of a massive sort of implementation of the transformation from the
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first mindset in Ontario to the other that says your freedoms are the things that the authorities
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give you. You're only free to do the things that we allow you to do. And unlike rules of the road,
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these certificates will now apply to individuals, one person at a time. And with respect to particular
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compliance with respect to one particular requirement presently, but who knows down the
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road, whether or not any number of other factors might be added into them to give you the requisite
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permissions to do what you want in life to meet with who you want to meet with to go where you want
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to go, to enjoy what you want to enjoy. And in a world in which we're sort of trained ever more to
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always have to make sure we're checking all the boxes so that we can get the requisite permissions,
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and then we're supposed to call that getting our freedoms back when it's actually having our freedoms
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taken from us. You know, government no longer being the authority that tries to arrange things
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so that everybody can exercise their natural rights and freedoms, but instead only getting to exercise
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what particular permissions are granted by those who deign to make the rules to decide what you're allowed
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to do on what criteria. That's concerning to me. And so there's a sort of, you know, training of us to
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embrace and to accept, not even to notice the change. I was saying before earlier about how words get changed
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without us necessarily seeing the ways in which words get changed. And so here's a way in which
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freedom has been radically changed in the way in which it's being understood and practiced, and in
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which sort of, you know, the fact that people don't notice it, or even that they're thrilled to see it.
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And part of that thrill is because they get, some people get to see that they get freedoms that other
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people don't get, and that they're being, as they reward it. You know, you're, I said, you're a mother,
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it's like, you know, you've been a good boy or girl, you get a cookie, but they've been bad, so no cookie
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for them. And it's just, you know, I understand the, the, the public health justification that's
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offered for it. We could get into that if you wanted to. But, but it's, it's something, it's something,
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it suggests something much greater, something more. Right. Well, I, I mean, one of the, one of the
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things that I sort of picked up on in reading some of your essays, and, and some of the things
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you're talking about now, is how this pandemic, in so many ways, has brought out the worst in people,
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that, you know, the whole idea at first was that we're all in it together, and I remember people
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would go out onto their stoop, you know, the front door in Toronto, and people would applaud and bang
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pats and pans, thanking nurses for, and hospital workers for their sort of bravery at the very beginning
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of the pandemic. And there was this sort of sense of community that, that we started to feel.
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And, you know, that has been completely torn apart to the point now where, you know, you see this sort
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of, you know, that, that, that, that infamous Toronto Star headline that ran in the, in the front
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page that ran in the summer, about, you know, let them die, people who are unvaccinated. We saw
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Justin Trudeau. Yeah. And, and, and Justin Trudeau during the last election, just willfully, you know,
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scapegoating and demonizing people who weren't vaccinated and, and sort of running his campaign
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against them. And, and, and we've seen this sort of ugliness, nastiness come out because
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I, I mean, to me, I think it's because people are just frustrated with the, with the scenario
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that we've been put in and they just want it to end. And, and they're told, you know,
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by their political betters that if you just follow these guidelines, it'll be over. And
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to your point, we keep following the guidelines and nothing's changing. So just final question
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for you, Travis, what, what do you think, what do you think we can do as Canadians, as freedom
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loving Canadians who, who want to restore, you know, the, the, the, the, the basic rights of
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individuals, putting freedom ahead of all these other things, but also, you know, appreciating the
00:24:11.780
community that we live in and that, you know, Canadians are free so we can have different choices.
00:24:15.520
What, what do you think the best thing that we can do at this juncture in time to, to, to prevent
00:24:21.020
the sort of medical tyranny from continuing to stand up and say enough is enough? What would you,
00:24:26.380
what would you advise in that regard? Um, that's, that's a, that's, that's not an easy question,
00:24:35.260
Candace. Um, what can ordinary Canadians do other than that are upset about this? Uh, and, and, and,
00:24:43.620
uh, what, what can they do to express that? Uh, is, um, uh, you know, there, there are those who are
00:24:53.760
making an effort to express it through, uh, communicating to their MPPs through, uh, showing
00:25:02.220
up at, uh, demonstrations where they're vilified for being at a demonstration, um, or if, you know,
00:25:09.500
if the media covers it, right? Um, and, uh, you know, trying to talk, you know, I make a big point
00:25:18.380
in one of my articles about just trying to talk again. One of the things that the lockdowns have
00:25:22.880
done in isolating us, individuating us, making us feel alone and powerless and weak, um, is that we
00:25:30.840
stop talking to each other. Uh, and I think that it's important for people to actually have
00:25:35.960
conversations with each other again and have conversations with people who don't agree with
00:25:39.960
you about everything. I think that's important too. Um, and, uh, yeah, I don't, I don't know
00:25:47.760
where else to, to place my hopes in terms of, uh, ordinary Canadians. Um, uh, I'm, I'm sort
00:25:58.140
of more concerned about what might come down the road. I mean, as I said, we've been sort of
00:26:03.480
trained to go along with one thing or another, with the understanding that if only we comply
00:26:07.320
here, then maybe next time, uh, we'll get rewarded for our compliance, um, only to find out that we
00:26:14.120
have to comply with something else and something more. Uh, and I'm also concerned about the way in
00:26:19.380
which on the other side of things, uh, the people who enforce the rules are being trained to get used
00:26:24.940
to enforcing rules that, you know, challenge, if not, uh, violate people's rights. Uh, and what are
00:26:33.100
they getting used to, uh, going along with? And, uh, the, the, to me, the most, the biggest moment
00:26:40.120
of hope in the last year or so was when, uh, Ontario police declared they would refuse to do
00:26:44.980
spot checks when the government told the police to do spot checks and they said, no, we won't do
00:26:49.040
them. That was the greatest sigh of relief to me. It says to me that people in positions of law
00:26:57.600
enforcement know that there are things that they should not do, uh, know that there, there are jobs
00:27:03.460
that are not appropriate for them to, or orders are not appropriate for them to follow. There are,
00:27:09.960
it's not their job to do that. Um, and, and so I have to continue to, uh, have faith and trust that,
00:27:18.760
you know, should, you know, they be given further instructions that look like they go further in
00:27:26.840
challenging or violating ordinary Canadians rights that they will, you know, say, no, that's not what
00:27:36.680
we do. And so I, I have to have a lot of hope in that. Well, great. I, I really appreciate the,
00:27:43.280
the essays that you wrote. And I think even just, you know, by writing them and articulating some of
00:27:48.500
the problems that we're having, it gave me hope that, you know, some of the fears and concerns I'm
00:27:53.320
having about our country and the way things are going, I'm not alone. And so I, I appreciate,
00:27:58.020
uh, your contributions and, uh, it's great to have you on the show, Travis. Thank you so much
00:28:02.120
for joining us. Thank you, Candice. Thanks for having me on the program. Thanks for everything
00:28:05.860
you do at TrueNorth. All right. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm Candice Malcolm and this is