As most readers and listeners of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY will by now know, yesterday Canadian voters elected the incumbent (neoliberal) Liberal Mark Carney to be the next Prime Minister. Canadian voters wanted a new master who would lead them in the face of Trump’s threats to Canadian sovereignty and Poilievre’s neofascist views and they got him. What a disaster. The election of this new Liberal (minority or majority) government will likely have horrible consequences for millions of disabled, poor, low-income, working-class, and other marginalized Canadians. Expect the incremental Liberal expansion of MAiD to resume soon.
Indeed, the election should not give rise to unqualified celebration. Unfortunately, Canadian voters bought the Liberal rhetoric that they should vote “strategically.” In the end, the federal New Democratic Party (NDP)–the party largely responsible for (among other policies of redistribution) the recently-introduced provision of dental care for millions of low-income, working-class, elder, and disabled Canadians–was virtually wiped off the map.
In effect, Canada now has a two-party system like the United States. Some of the most progressive, democratic, transformative-minded NDP MPs lost their seats, including Matthew Green in Hamilton-Centre who, with NDP MP Leah Gazan, has, for years, been the shining light of Left politics in the Canadian federal government with respect to a range of practices and policies, including Gaza, MAiD, safe-injection sites, LGBTQ issues, homelessness, etc. The new (strategic) Liberal MP-elect for Hamilton-Centre, Aslam Rana, does not live in the Hamilton-Centre riding and thus is almost certainly uninformed about the unique character of this vicinity of Hamilton, which is home to large disabled, racialized, elder, and homeless populations, a lack of familiarity (and lack of concern about it) that was demonstrated when Rana mysteriously failed to attend a recent candidates’ debate in the riding. In sum, the NDP no longer holds a single federal seat in Hamilton. Thankfully, Leah Gazan was re-elected in Winnipeg Centre.
I want to underscore that the election was a fiasco in other ways that should not go unnoticed and unmentioned. In particular, voters in some Indigenous communities were not given the opportunity to vote because polling stations in their communities were not properly staffed, closed early, or violated the Canada Elections Act in other ways. To read/listen to a CBC article about this disrespectful transgression by Elections Canada, go here:
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