What Canada and Europe Can do To Strengthen Their Sovereignty & Make the World Safer
Ensuring the Rule of Law Prevails is Essential to Preserving And Enhancing Democracy, Freedom and Stability
Before I talk about what Canada and other countries can do, indulge me for a monent to talk about media and culture.
There’s a trope that comes up in science fiction a fair bit, which is the idea that alien species consume some particular pop culture, and base their entire culture around it. Star Trek, the original series used it with cultures that are entirely based around 1920s gangster films. The plot of the sci-fi comedy classic Galaxy Quest, which is a loving and brilliant parody of Star Trek, includes the idea. Sure, it’s convenient that the public domain intellectual property that the aliens have been consuming also happen to have fully constructed sets and wardrobe freely available.
The appeal of the idea has always gone beyond just the cost savings of a series trying to save money on sets and wardrobe.
In science fiction, the idea was used in a series of very funny science fiction stories called Earthman’s Burden, by Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson, of a planet of kind and amiable teddy-bear like creatures who binge-watched films and television and built entire communities around genres, like Westerns and mysteries.
In fact, the idea of someone being absolutely consumed and almost inhabited by what they have read or watched is the basis for what is considered to be one of the greatest works of literature of all time, Don Quixote. Quixote himself is an old man who has read too many books of romance and adventure, and makes himself a suit of armor made of cardboard. He can’t see properly either and he keeps charging off at enemies who turn out to be windmills.
It’s because stories and characters, both real and fictional. do consume us and they do shape real-world character and culture. It’s also a comment on our on how susceptible and malleable we are, and how powerful are the stories that we love.
I say all of this because it’s one way of thinking about our current reality, which is like one of those Zucker Brothers movies, like Airplane! Top Secret, or the Naked Gun. Where someone lies about knowing what they are doing and people believe it and they can’t admit they don’t know, so they fake their way through it. Like George Costanza pretending to be an architect, or a marine biologist.
At this point, it should be clear that every single person in the Trump Cabinet has no idea what they are doing, Elon Musk included.
So part of the insanity is that these people are all cosplaying in their positions. They’ve been cast by Trump as if this is a reality show, but they are all bluffing their way through everything they are doing, because they are are completely unqualified.
There are times that is not for the horror, it would seem much funnier, but the acts of war, blatant violations of human rights are the sort of thing we would have condemned as shocking when the USSR or East Germany cracked down on dissidents. The dyspotian future has become a harrowing present, written by Steven King and Armando Iannucci, both channeling George Orwell.
It is not just the post-war order that is under threat, it is the systems of government that define liberal democracy in individual nations. There is undoubtedly an economic factor related to large and continually growing disparities in wealth.
If today’s current events, which are undeniably extreme and seismic in scope cannot be explained with economics, why do we have economics at all?
First, countries need to reject austerity, both together and separately, in order to re-industrialize and increase production, as well as supporting their entire populations in a time of heightened global conflict, .
Ban Foreign Ownership of Media in Canada
Too much of Canada’s media is owned by Americans. As I have written, the owners of Postmedia - and two board members - were part of Trump’s hush-money scheme. They were the “eyes and ears” of Trump’s campaign.
Postmedia has effectively become a Fox News of the north, and as such is completely biased in much of its political coverage, including lots of junk economics and playing footsie with conspiracy theorists.
Rejecting foreign ownership of the media is an idea that was supported bu the U.S. Founding Fathers - Alexander Hamilton in particular.
TikTok’s ownership by a foreign adversary ran straight into the traditional American approach to regulating media and communications infrastructure, which is that foreigners, especially hostile powers, are legally prohibited from controlling what we rely on. These kinds of restrictions go back to the Constitutional convention. As Alexander Hamilton said about attempts to ward off external influence, ”Foreign powers also will not be idle spectators. They will interpose, the confusion will increase, and a dissolution of the Union ensue.”
In everything related to telecommunications law going back from the early 1900s to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, foreigners, especially those from adversaries, are simply treated differently. For instance, even Rupert Murdoch had to become an American citizen to buy certain regulated media assets. Recently, the U.S. government forced the gay dating app Grindr to divest from Chinese ownership over fears of blackmail and coercion. Zephyr Teachout and Joel Thayer have a good amicus brief explaining the history. I wrote up the backstory in March, when the bill passed.
Canada should require Canadian ownsership of Canadian media outlets.
Criminalize Cryptocurreny
The amount of crime related to cryptocurrency is mind-boggling. One of the most effective ways to reduce crime is to cut off criminals access to their funds.
Cryptocurrencies are the tool of choice to launder money for international criminal syndicates trafficking in drugs, terrorist organizations, and for bad actors funding spies and the development of nuclear weapons.
That is their main utility. They fund threats to public safety and to national and international security - worse than that, they fund the undermining of democracy itself, and are used for terrible scams.
A crypto amnesty could be declared to limit losses for law-abiding investors.
Ensure The Rule of Law Applies to Foreign Companies
I wrote at greater length about “Bringing the rule of law to the internet” and it really is just that:
Ensuring that Canadian governments are going to be able to enforce existing laws that already apply to every other person and corporation to internet companies as well.
Lots of the Silicon Valley Broligarchs and billionaires are calling for the dismantling of the “administrative state” because for decades they have made their money ripping people off without any consequences - collusion, anti-trust, price fixing, intellectual property theft, and being shielded from liability that any other person or corporation would face.
While there are people who are oppressed who justifiably resent corruption of justice, the flip side is that there are plutocrats who want to cry oppression when people apply the law to them.
The entire “philosophy” of libertarianism is and has always been an utter fraud.
There are two types of libertarians: suckers and thieves - and even the thieves sucker themselves into believing they are in the right.
Trade Is Not Enough: Each Country Needs Domestic Investment to Build Capacity
Canadians are currently eager to buy Canadian-made products from one another, and they cannot, because the production does not exist in Canada.
The pandemic made it clear that supply chains were too fragile, that suppliers and trade partners were not reliable.
“Free trade” has become equated with growth, the actual growth associated with these deals is sometimes incredibly small. Free trade deals are all pitched purely on the basis of size of the market being accessed - the number of people and the GDP, while ignoring that the benefits are miniscule.
When the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was being proposed, the actual benefits to Canada for increasing its GDP by $2.5-billion by 2035. Projections for CETA, with Europe, were similarly low.
Generally speaking, no one has been able to enforce the labor provisions of free trade deals.
Not only are free trade deals not always delivering what is promised, they are often not promising very much. The best case scenario for a EU-US free trade deal is that it would increase U.S. GDP by 0.5% by 2027. The Canada-EU free trade deal would actually cost Canadians more in increased drug prices than all the benefits to Canada combined.
Debt Restructuring
Canada & Europe in partnership with the EU could work with willing countries around the world, in order to provide debt relief, investment, coordination and idea sharing for wildlife-restoration climate projects.
Many of the crises we are facing today are directly related to the cost of debt overhead.
As global debts are at record highs, having reached 313 trillion dollars in 2023, Pope Francis, in his latest World Peace Day Message, called on nations to forgive developing nations' debts, abolish the death penalty, and allocate arms spending to combat hunger and climate change. Similarly, during his first Angelus of 2025, the Holy Father renewed his appeal to grant debt relief to the world's poorest nations.
Eric LeCompte is the Executive Director of Jubilee USA Network and explained that debt relief has improved the lives of millions of children:
Debt relief is really important. Since John Paul II's appeals and efforts for debt relief, along with Benedict's, we have moved policies forward and made changes within the international financial system at the United Nations, with the G7 governments, with the G20 governments, with the International Monetary Fund, an entity which affects our jobs and lives almost as much as the very oxygen we breathe. It's the primary institution which governs our global economic and financial system. We won several major global agreements endorsed by the Catholic Church, the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, and the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative in the early 2000s. Those sound like a big mouthful, but what those things actually mean, is that we won actual policies that resulted in $130 billion in debt relief.
Right now, because of debt relief, the most accountable form of economic aid that is delivered through the global financial system - it means 54 million kids in Africa have gone and are going to school, who never would have seen the inside of a classroom. It means amazingly and authoritatively that people all over the world, in the world's poorest countries, for the first time in their lives, were able to see a doctor or were able to get vaccines or healthcare.
Debt relief should be considered as a major tool for development as well as for cementing alliances.
This is entirely consistent with the recommendations of economist William White, who wrote this paper calling for the reform of monetary policy in developed countries, as well as calling for organized debt restructuring - as an alternative to explosive debt defaults.
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DFL
"There are two types of libertarians: suckers and thieves - and even the thieves sucker themselves into believing they are in the right."
That is what I call a true political chestnut!