George Orwell’s dystopian vision of the future, 1984, was supposed to be a warning about the dangers of dictatorship and the loss of objective truth, not a guidebook on how to achieve it.

That said, in Canadian politics these days, one of the primary tools used by Orwell’s all-powerful government of Oceania known simply as “The Party” – “doublethink” or the ability to hold two contradictory views at the same time – is on full display.

GOLDSTEIN: Face it Canada, we’re living in Orwell’s 1984 Back to video

How else to explain the Canadian public’s acquiescence to Prime Minister Mark Carney calling China our greatest security threat in April 2025 and a strategic partner in January 2026?

To hold these two contradictory views simultaneously requires not only doublethink but the practical application of Orwell’s “memory hole” in 1984, the mechanism by which the Party systematically destroyed the historical evidence of its previous positions when they contradicted its new ones.

In this case, the historical evidence – barely a year old – is that of Canada’s foreign interference inquiry, which reported in January 2025 that China “is the most active perpetrator of foreign interference targeting Canada’s democratic institutions” and sees Canada as “a high-priority........

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