246: Canada Has No Future Without a New Imagination
The Current Failure of Canadian Leadership
The most dangerous illusion in Canadian politics is the belief that we still have time.
Every public signal says otherwise. The United States is in the grip of a political regime that no longer recognizes limits, norms, or allies. Canada is watching this unfold as if it were weather: inevitable, external, and immune to intervention. The reflex is to retreat into the comfortable rhetoric of sovereignty, whether digital, economic, cultural, while refusing to confront the structural threat. It’s easier to produce reports than to build capacity. Easier to convene panels than to break habits. Easier to talk about the world as it should be than to prepare for what is already here.
The deeper problem is not a lack of intelligence or resources, but a crisis of imagination. Canadian leadership is unable—or unwilling—to perceive how quickly political and technological power now moves. Policy discourse defaults to conformity. The same small circle of institutions talk to the same small circle of people, rehearsing variations of the same narrow models. Dissent is politely ignored. Urgency is framed as impolite. Complexity is dismissed as unhelpful. Meanwhile the ground shifts beneath us.
Digital sovereignty is a perfect example of this paralysis. For years, Canadian officials and think tanks have warned about the risks of foreign platforms, algorithmic manipulation, and data extraction. They are correct on all counts. Yet the discussion remains fixated on data ownership rather than attention capture. Our institutions behave as if the threat is the storage of information, rather than the real battlefield: the shaping of perception, emotion, and behaviour. Researchers have shown repeatedly that attention is the scarce resource that determines political power in networked societies (see Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants). And still, the Canadian policy conversation persists in describing a world where data can be governed without confronting the media systems that organize our public consciousness.
This is not simply an oversight. It reflects a deeper pathology: the desire to maintain a discourse that feels safe, respectable, and non-disruptive. Conformity masquerades as consensus. Process substitutes for direction. Leaders perform the appearance of action while avoiding any mechanism that would force them to change course. The political class talks about sovereignty while ignoring the basic preconditions for autonomy: institutional independence, technical literacy, and a population empowered to understand the systems shaping their lives.
Meanwhile, the United States is moving rapidly toward a dual-state configuration—where formal institutions coexist with informal networks of executive power and private enforcement. The Trump regime is accelerating this shift. Canada cannot insulate itself from a neighbour undergoing authoritarian mutation. Yet our leaders insist on debating boutique policy reforms as if these forces were abstract, distant, theoretical.
The dysfunction of Canadian discourse is not just a liability. It is an existential threat. If we continue to treat politics as a stage for looking clever, sounding informed, or signaling loyalty to established frameworks, then we are already forfeiting the future. The question is not what we should do. The question is what we must do, now.
We need a participatory, diverse, and adversarial policy process—one that understands dissent as a resource rather than a problem. We need leadership that recognizes that sovereignty is not a slogan but a practice: the ability to collectively decide, act, and adapt without deferring to external power. We need systems that can respond to hybrid threats, technological disruption, and political destabilization with speed and clarity. That requires more than white papers. It requires mobilizing the collective intelligence of the country.
Canada has the talent. It has the knowledge. It has the lived experience of pluralism. What it lacks is a political class willing to relinquish the comfort of control and invite the country into the process.
Until that happens, our debates will remain superficial. Our policies will remain symbolic. And our sovereignty will remain imaginary.
If Canada wants a future, it needs to build one together.
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