279: From Taxpayers to Caretakers
Why the Canadian Prairies Are at War With a Fiction
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A reader asked a question in response to our last issue on the delusions of the disgruntled taxpayer: How can a modern democratic nation deal with complexity in ways that feel human and emotionally true? And if the taxpayer-as-consumer model is false, what replaces it?
The urgency of that question is no longer theoretical. It is playing out, in real time, across the Canadian prairies, where what we have described as a hybrid civil war continues to deepen, because the dominant model for understanding authority cannot make sense of our current moment.
TL;DR: Taxpayers don’t take care of each other, they fend for themselves. Albertans are not taking care of each other, and are rightly upset that Canada isn’t taking care of them either. The answer is to take care of each other. Duh.
The prairie conflict is often framed as alienation from Ottawa, cultural resentment, or ideological polarization. Those descriptions are incomplete. What is actually breaking down is a relationship of care that has been misdescribed for decades as a transaction. When farmers, rural communities, and extractive workers experience compounding pressure, whether from climate volatility, market concentration, debt, or regulatory instability, they reach for the only political language they have been given: I paid, therefore I am owed. When relief does not arrive, disappointment hardens into suspicion.
The consumer model promised responsiveness and delivered opacity. It personalized politics while stripping it of emotional truth. Political parties have become empty corporate entities that focus on marketing rather than policies or public service.
Under this model, delay becomes neglect, constraint becomes punishment, and complexity becomes evidence of bad faith. Hybrid warfare exploits precisely this gap. It does not need to invent suffering; it needs only to reinterpret it. The state is no longer strained or misaligned, it is malicious. Care failures are reframed as betrayal.
The vast majority of conspiracies are far easier explained by acknowledging widespread incompetence and indifference. The forces of evil are far outnumbered and outmatched by those who just don’t fucking care.
Across several past issues, we’ve argued that societies do not hold together through exchange alone, but through ongoing, asymmetrical acts that cannot be settled or priced.
Farming is a clear example. You do not get what you “pay for” from soil, weather, or ecosystems. You inherit consequences over time. The same is true of political systems. Taxes are not purchases; they are contributions to capacities that no individual can command or fully perceive.
A care-based model of democracy begins here. Citizens are not customers purchasing outcomes. They are participants sustaining systems under uncertainty. This does not make authority gentler, but it makes it legible. Care does not guarantee satisfaction. It guarantees effort under constraint. It acknowledges loss without assigning immediate blame.
The hybrid civil war playing out in the Canadian prairies escalates because care has been stripped from the political imagination. What remains is grievance without a framework for endurance. Conspiracy thinking rushes in to fill that void, restoring the fantasy of intentional control. Someone must be responsible. Someone must be cheating. Someone must be punished. Someone must care.
These narratives feel emotionally satisfying because they preserve the consumer expectation that someone, somewhere, is supposed to make things right on demand.
But a care-based system does not promise repair on command. It promises continuity through stress. Hospitals do not exist to please patients. Fire departments do not exist to prevent loss. Food systems do not exist to guarantee abundance. They exist to manage failure without collapse. Judged as services, they appear cruel. Understood as care infrastructures, they appear strained but coherent.
This reframing matters politically. When citizens understand themselves as contributors rather than customers, conflict shifts. The question stops being what did I get? and becomes what is breaking, and why? Grievance gives way to grief. Suspicion gives way to analysis. Hybrid warfare loses traction not because trust is restored, but because the emotional misfire it exploits no longer lands.
A democracy that understands itself as a system of care does not promise responsiveness; it promises responsibility. It does not eliminate anger, but it gives anger somewhere real to go.
The gift, in this sense, is not benevolence. It is shared endurance. And without that frame, every drought, regulation, or market shock will continue to look like proof that someone, somewhere, has picked up the phone and chosen not to answer.
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