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

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

When it comes to China, Canada's position is to actively ignore China as it is, in favour of a China we wish it to be

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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.

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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.

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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 target.”

To believe that threat has abated, one has to believe that the admission of 49,000 Chinese-made EV vehicles into Canada annually will cause China to rethink, in the words of the foreign interference inquiry, targeting “members of Chinese Canadian diaspora communities for the purposes of repression, influence and forced return of … individuals to the People’s Republic of China.”

That it will no longer deploy “a wide range of tradecraft to carry out its activities, one of which is to use a person’s family and friends living in the PRC as leverage against them.”

And that China will cease using “its diplomatic missions, PRC international students, community organizations and private individuals, among others, to carry out its transnational repression activities” in addition to its standard operating procedures of industrial espionage and intellectual property theft.

In his now famous Davos speech, Carney justified such doublethink by proclaiming that Canada will, going forward, “actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be.”

In reality, when it comes to China, Canada’s position is to actively ignore China as it is, in favour of a China we wish it to be.

As John Robson described it in an excellent National Post column last week titled, “In Mark Carney’s Canada, nothing matters”:

“Given firm evidence that Chinese Communists are subverting our elections, penetrating our institutions and intimidating our citizens, we do nothing whatsoever. The police don’t swoop. The promised foreign agent registry never materializes. Politicians don’t stop flying to Beijing. Exactly as if being conquered doesn’t matter.”

Doublethink is also required to accommodate the contradictory positions of a federal Liberal government that for a decade condemned all opposition to its consumer carbon tax as wanting to let the planet burn, to one that now claims the consumer carbon tax was never a key component of its failed, $200-billion program to address climate change, which never hit a single industrial greenhouse gas emission reduction target it set for itself.

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It requires squaring the Liberals’ dismissal of the consumer carbon tax today with then-Liberal health minister Mark Holland’s responding to a Conservative request to temporarily remove the consumer carbon tax on gasoline during the summer of 2024 with:

“Mr. Speaker, there is good news for kids. They can take a summer fun-time vacation where they are locked in a car for 10 consecutive days non-stop, with no bathroom breaks, and the Conservatives have a plan for them to have that summertime fun. What is the cost? It is to give up the future of the planet.”

Again, to hold these two contradictory positions on the value of the consumer carbon tax simultaneously requires sending down the memory hole every Liberal environment minister’s political statement and government report on the importance of the consumer carbon tax starting soon after 2015, when the Liberals were elected, up to March 2025 when Carney killed it.

Whether they realize it or not, doublethink is also the logic being employed by the three Conservative MPs who recently defected to the Carney Liberals –Chris d’Entremont, Michael Ma and Matt Jeneroux– to justify their floor-crossing as something more than political opportunism.

Far from being outliers, they represent what modern politics has become.

That is, a performative arena in which actors holding contradictory views at the same time, representing the death of critical thinking, are the norm rather than an aberration.

That is why they – and any future Conservative MPs who defect – will fit in with the Liberals perfectly.

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