A New ‘Fundamental Fairness’ Can Save Democracy, the Environment, and Canada
As major media focus on negotiations between Prime Minister Mark Carney and Donald Trump, it’s the Canadian people who are our best line of defence. We need a new fairness to empower ourselves.
We’re passing the mic again to communications campaigner Conor Curtis, who’s been helping to raise the alarm about Donald Trump’s annexation plans for Canada.
The only real check on power is people. People build economies and clean energy systems, and people fix problems like climate change. The decline toward oligarchy in the United States is not because grassroots resistance failed—it continues even now.
As with the decline of civilizations throughout history, it results from a failure to put a lasting limit on the accumulation of extreme wealth and influence in a few hands.
That failure is tearing away at the fabric of societies and democracies, obliterating confidence in institutions we should be able to count on and driving mistrust, cynicism, and despair through the roof. Along the way, the erosion of people power and the rising concentration of extreme wealth are undercutting our ability to confront the climate emergency, scale up the energy transition, and take meaningful action on intersecting crises like affordability, housing, equity, and more.
And it’s no mistake that this is happening. For the oligarchs who’ve purpose-built this multi-headed crisis to serve their own interests, it’s a feature, not a bug.
Billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and wealthy oil and gas executives, following a path set by the infamous Koch Brothers, set out to erode democracy. Their co-dependent accomplices in the Trump administration rig the market for their own, alleged, economic gain. These authoritarians hold back climate action and renewables, harming the American economy and supercharging more wildfires and other, increasingly dire, climate impacts. Many Americans are now losing human rights, necessities, and freedoms.
The capture of parts of the U.S. economy by wealthy interests is not new. But extreme wealth left unchecked is now inevitably evolving into full-blown oligarchy.
Canadian democracy is still the next target. Trump realizes he was too blunt about annexation and some premiers are still naive about his intentions. But behind the scenes, he’s as brazen as ever, DeSmog reports this week, offering a $500-million loan to help Alberta separate from the rest of Canada, the province’s separatist movement claims.
Meanwhile American hedge fund media, tied to big oil, and billionaire-owned social networks, have tried to divide Canadians and undermine our shared reality. Even AIs appear worried about their creators’ influence on their functions.
Whatever measures we use in Canada to confront foreign threats to democracy, we must also secure Canada from the primary centrifugal force tearing apart the U.S.: extreme inequality. After all, Trump doesn't want to control Canada for the benefit of America. Canadians care more about Americans than he does. He wants to control Canada for the benefit of his oligarch friends.
Global Warming and the Bending of Reality
There are remarkable parallels between increasing wealth inequality and global warming. Both are overall trends that then rebound on regular people and communities in sudden, often unpredictable ways—whether it’s extreme storms, or extremism that exploits social problems, corruption, and lost faith in the economy. They’re both facets of an overall trend that must be halted.
If we think of social structures as an ecosystem with a normal balance between competition, fairness, and the environment—a sort of ‘trilectic’—then the society we live in increasingly skews towards opportunity only for the few.
Humans naturally compete as surely as we naturally cooperate, and lots of people go into the private sector with good intentions. The problem of our age is that the ‘trilectic’ has fallen far out of balance, and measures meant to ensure fairness and environmental protection have not kept pace with raw competition.
That’s why, for far too many Canadians, life has come to feel like repeatedly respawning into a video game where one character, with all the power, instantly eliminates you. The market is less free with billionaires in it, and people struggle to compete and to cooperate, to the environment and society’s detriment.
That’s one of the reasons it was so remarkably silly to think consumer choices could prevent global warming when the richest 1% alone are arguably the determining factor in our ability to tackle climate change. The notion we all carry in our gut—that if we just “do our bit” to reduce our personal emissions, everything will work out fine—was supercharged by a remarkably successful greenwashing campaign launched by BP, the international fossil company previously known as British Petroleum, in 2004.
Since then, BP’s way of doing its bit can be summed up in two words: Deepwater Horizon.
The problem is that wealth distorts reality like mass warps spacetime. Just as large objects like stars or black holes have a gravity that pulls smaller objects towards them, great wealth pulls our perception of reality towards certain viewpoints. The legacy of public relations founders like Edward Bernays was to refine the conversion of dollars into public influence; mass into gravity. It doesn’t matter that many public relations professionals are well-meaning. Those who are not will do things like lie about climate change on behalf of oil and gas interests.
Like kings of old, oligarchs frame their ego-driven feuds over power as “noble”. But billionaires from Bezos to Russian oligarchs have immunity from consequence that a regular person, however hard-working or talented, could never normally achieve in a lifetime. Being ultra-rich isn't good for a person. Thinking themselves emperors, worthy of immortality, even their self-perception distorts.
Case in point: Oligarchs primarily use money, through communications services and media, to overturn democracy. Force and violence are only a subcomponent of their PR framing.
This distortion of reality only gets worse as wealth inequality deepens.
No Kings Means No Billionaires
Against this backdrop, procedural checks to political power or to prevent monopolies are like trying to fix a car with a broken radiator by changing out the headlights. Procedure doesn’t fix the core problem of an extreme imbalance in influence that allows the super-rich to rig systems of law and government to their own ends. Even the most fundamental checks on power in the U.S. can be eroded by declaring continuous emergencies or continuously pushing on a hot-button issue. Government services, meant to provide some social equity, are also attacked by turning people against each other, exploiting crises, or lying about wastefulness.
Build levees all day, it doesn’t prevent sea level rise.
Negotiate for Canada’s sovereignty with #ElbowsUp. But unless we deal with the underlying imbalances and inequities that spawned Trump, extremist threats will keep emerging after he’s gone. If wealth disparities increase beyond the point where we can hope to rein them in and prevent their impacts, new ‘Trumps’ will simply keep emerging externally and internally.
That’s why the idea that we simply should not allow anyone to be a billionaire is gaining political legitimacy. The problem is that, as with solutions to prevent global warming, any attempt to lessen wealth inequality will be attacked with disinformation by many of those who benefit from that inequality. So how do we get from here to there?
It begins with talking with your neighbours and finding common ground, as well as posting, protesting, and voting. There’s no one tactic that works in isolation; it’s about having a full spectrum of resistance—a concept you can find out more about here. The most useful, constructive conversations focus on the day-to-day problems we share, and the solutions that remind us that we’re all in this together. That’s the ground where it starts to make sense that we never should have allowed wealth to become so concentrated—and that radical extremists are not the community voices calling for something better, but the ultra-rich hoarders who are shutting us out and foreclosing our future.
Instead of tax cuts for the rich, we can shift the system so that it stops targeting regular citizens.
But we also need a fundamental fairness we can count on no matter who is in government. We need a solid, consistent effort to protect ourselves and each other from mis-and disinformation that assures a guaranteed balance of power between people.
A Resilient, Co-operative Democracy
Rebuilding that level of trust will mean working and advocating for the services and solutions we need, and that will earn wide public support—in areas as wide-ranging as environment and health, housing and affordability, and more. Looking to our governments to deliver those services goes out of style in oligarchic times. But it’s as true now as it ever was that there are a great many things we do best, or can only do at all, if we do them as a society—that’s how our taxes become an investment in our communities and our future, not just a sunk cost.
But trust is what holds it all together, or drives it all apart. Most people I talk to agree the ultrarich have too much influence but either don’t trust governments to deal with the problem, or get caught up in the weeds of what mechanism would be used to deal with this influence. To avoid spending more time debating solutions than building and advocating for them we need a common goal. That begins with a foundational measure for fairness that:
• Is simple, transparent, and easy to understand;
• Empowers individuals and communities to collectively defend democracy;
• Is timeless, resilient, and above immediate politics;
• Is non-judgemental and directed equally to everyone.
We also need a practical, effective measure to bring a fair share of economic influence back to people who’ve had it ripped away by cascading inequality. I would argue for:
• A limit on extreme individual wealth above healthy, competitive rewards;
• With any extreme wealth at the highest end of the spectrum clawed back and shared equally by all.
What you do with that equal share of clawed back wealth, redistributed directly to your wallet, would be up to you. Cooperatives function in a similar way by ensuring not only that everyone gets a vote, but that they have a financial stake in the profits an organization makes.
Limiting extreme wealth would not stop anyone from unleashing their creativity by competing, investing, creating jobs, or getting rich. In fact, lifting us all to a higher, fairer starting point would make those options realistic for a whole swath of the population—our friends, families, neighbours—who have no realistic hope of thriving in today’s deeply distorted economy. It wouldn’t stop anyone from living the life they want to live across the full spectrum of toque-clad espresso-loving urbanites to deep woods, cash-only recluses.
Just as important, it would help balance our democracy. The baseline equality would enable us to pursue social equity, give everyone scope for a wider range of lifestyle choices, and provide some measure of insulation from new, emerging crises—all by removing the material conditions for people to make themselves ‘kings’. It would bring us the wherewithal to strengthen and restore the social services and safety nets that give everyone a fair shot. And there’s a lot to be said (and much that has been said) for a basic income guarantee to address the affordability crisis head-on, undercutting a key wellspring of the despair, mistrust, and division that are eroding our democracy from within.
It’s a tall order, and it’ll be easier said than done. But in contrast to wealth taxes to sustain government revenue—a perfectly valid measure that I personally support —an actual limit on extreme wealth is what our era demands to address the rising imbalance of power between people. To survive over the longer haul, it would have to be recognized as a right and freedom—even a constitutional rate, some day—to guard against the distortions and inequities that are tearing us apart today.
Progress: Collective, Competitive, and Environmental
This is actually my mother’s idea. When I was young, amid a lively conversation over politics, she said she wanted a society with material power balanced between people. Excess power could be redistributed with Robin Hood directness. In my youth, I arrogantly dismissed the idea as overly simplistic. I now see her idea as self-evident—as obviously true as the Earth orbiting the sun.
After all, my mother knows how wealth bends reality. As a working class kid from the wrong side of the tracks, she wanted to become a teacher, but was told by her own teacher that was impossible (the inference being because of class). She went on to become a great teacher, inspiring youth like herself in Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador.
Most of us jump to help each other out in a crisis when we know systems are fair. That impulse is hindered when elites gain too much power, leaving too many of us with the feeling (and often the reality) that the odds are stacked against us. A limit on extreme wealth would unchain and empower our urge to help each other and our tendency towards mutual aid. It could help bridge internal divides, combat systemic social and environmental injustices, and defend sovereignty.
I hope the negotiations between Carney and Trump will lessen negative impacts for Canada. But it is the Canadian people who have so far successfully repelled the notion of annexation, partial-annexation, equivalents to annexation, and oligarchy. Only by empowering people, by making everyone a Robin Hood, can we continue to repel 51st-statism and future impacts resulting from rising global inequality. That distributed power is also what we need to speed our response to the climate emergency and embrace forms of local democracy and community control that bring us a whole different type distributed energy.
We’ve already seen how local renewable energy co-ops deliver on this promise in ways that build community and trust, helping to counteract Trump’s destructive influence. Imagine every Canadian engaged co-operatively with national political and economic systems. That should excite progressives and traditional economists alike, and might inspire other countries to follow a really promising and exciting example.
If the economy is a car with a broken radiator—if wealth is accumulating and concentrating like heat in an engine—then let’s finally fix the car’s radiator. (Just in time for a switch to electric vehicles, walking, and biking, but we won’t get there if the engine boils over first.) Nobody is coming to rescue us but us.
This piece reflects the opinions of the author alone as an individual.
Chart of the Week
Fracking’s Self-Inflicted Crisis: Wastewater Injection is Sinking Profits
The Nuclear Mirage: Why Small Modular Reactors Won’t Save Nuclear Power
U.S. Threatens to Quit IEA if Analysis Keeps Projecting Renewable Energy Future
Montreal Adds Nine More Car-Free Streets after ‘Mind Blowing’ Success
Pathways CCS Project Won’t Break Even Without Efficiency Gains, Steadier Revenue: IEEFA
Can Canada Be A Clean Energy Superpower? Not Without Tax Credits.
Oilfield Service Group Greets Counter-Tariff Relief for U.S. Frack Sand as ‘Fantastic News’
EU and China Pledge Climate Leadership Role as U.S. Retreats (Bloomberg)
Clean energy could meet growing electricity demand, study suggests (PV Magazine)
Oil industry continues focus on returning cash to investors over new big projects (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)
We’re still here. We still say ‘no’ to pipelines, northern tankers (The Hill Times)
Wildfires send Canada's carbon emissions soaring. And our peatlands emit even more (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)
Critics fear Trump will use flawed DOE report to push pro-coal agenda (Canary Media)
Top central banker defends climate work after U.S. pushback (Financial Times)
Rising food prices driven by climate crisis threaten world’s poorest, report finds (The Guardian)
How flood-ravaged Boston took on the climate deniers – and won (The Guardian)
Whitehorse dam licence must account for climate change and flood risk, residents say (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)
China embarks on world's largest hydropower dam, capital markets cheer (Reuters)
Global health organizations shun PR firms that work for fossil fuels (Corporate Knights)
|
 | A guest post by
|
Just a follow up comment to mention that probably the biggest real obstacle to the above limit in the article is our own tendency to overcomplicate the simple. We can't fix everything that's wrong in the world in one go, but we can create basic baseline measures (like a wealth limit) that then enable people to fix other problems together. And we can advocate for those baseline measures while also pursuing more specific measures aimed at specific problems simultaneously. The goal may seem difficult, but the alternative is much more difficult.
Yes - "It begins with talking with your neighbours and finding common ground, as well as posting, protesting, and voting." "Even the most fundamental checks on power in the U.S. can be eroded by declaring continuous emergencies or continuously pushing on a hot-button issue."