In a nation of nearly a billion eligible voters, the idea of the electorate can be amorphous. On rare occasion, though, that amorphous entity speaks in one voice in India. The general election of 2014 that made Narendra Modi prime minister was one such instance, with his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or the BJP, winning 282 seats in a 543-member lower house of Parliament—the first time a single party had managed to win a majority on its own in thirty years. The verdict of the 2019 election, which returned Modi to power, was even more emphatic: the BJP winning 303 seats and the opposition Congress party a distant second at just fifty-two.

But that same amorphous Indian voter is also known to cut leaders who dishonour and squander their mandate down to size. That is what happened to Modi on June 4, when the results of this year’s national election were announced.

In the face of a months-long campaign, in which he loomed larger than ever on the country’s destiny, the Indian voter delivered a surprising pushback that few foresaw, bringing the BJP’s tally down to 240, well below the 272 needed for government formation. While Modi returns for a third successive term in power—a feat not accomplished by any leader since independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru—he does so as a much-diminished man, an authoritarian leader now constrained by the compulsions of maintaining a coalition government, in alliance with temperamental partners known for frequently switching sides and thus likely to keep his demagogic tendencies in check. The remarkable sagacity of India’s vast and diverse electorate has prevailed.

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We spoke to Sanjay Ruparelia, who holds the Jarislowsky Democracy Chair and is associate professor in the department of politics and public administration at Toronto Metropolitan University, about the significance of the election, particularly for Canada–India relations, which have been strained in recent months.

What are your thoughts on the Indian election—the way campaigning progressed as well as what ramifications the results will have for the future of a country that describes itself as the world’s largest democracy?

The campaign was surprising in several ways. First, voter turnout was slightly lower, after setting new records in 2014 and 2019. High turnout gave an advantage to the BJP in the last two elections. Second, Hindu nationalism ideologically defines the ruling party. But few expected the prime minister so openly to invoke anti-Muslim tropes, such as the idea that many are “infiltrators” whose national homelands lie elsewhere and that they pose a demographic threat to the Hindu majority, or to claim that the opposition Congress party would redistribute the wealth of Hindus to Muslims if it recaptured office. The failure of the election commission to take swift action against these violations of the code of conduct further damaged its authority.

Finally, there were growing signs of voter frustration with the ruling party in northern states—over inflation and lack of decent jobs—where it has traditionally done well and which it needed to retain in order to win a third term.

The BJP has once again emerged as the single largest force in Parliament. But exit polls failed to predict the outcome. Yogendra Yadav, one of India’s most acute psephologists, was one of the very few to forecast that the BJP would lose seats in the Hindi heartland. The party’s aura of invincibility, and that surrounding Prime Minister Modi, is now punctured.

What exactly is at stake for Canada, given that the two countries have deep people-to-people ties?

The stakes are many, significant, and asymmetric. The Indian diaspora is the fastest-growing segment of new Canadians. India sends the largest share of international students to Canada. The Trudeau government also expected India to play a pivotal role in its new Indo-Pacific strategy to counter the perceived growing threats from China, to expand commercial, investment, and trade opportunities, and to expand Canada’s influence in Asia in a century that will be defined increasingly by the latter.

India denied involvement in the killing of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar last June, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi, without naming any country, did say in one of his campaign speeches that his government has eliminated terrorists in their own homes. What do you make of this new aggression in India’s relationship to Western powers, and how vulnerable is Canada to it?

There are several dimensions to this question. First, successive Indian governments in New Delhi have raised their concerns over support for Khalistan over many years, and made several extradition requests more recently, claiming that Khalistani advocates in Canada have provided material support and participated in illegal activities to back the separatist cause in Punjab. Authorities in Ottawa have repeatedly said that the evidence provided by New Delhi did not meet its legal standards and thus was insufficient to act.

Second, like other rising powers in the South, India has become far more confident in pursuing its perceived national interests across many policy issues, from trade and climate change to global health. That is natural and inevitable given its massive economy, status as the world’s most populous country, and rising strategic importance. The current international order also privileges Western states in many domains. That said, the Modi government is far more assertive and brash in how it defines and pursues these interests.

Third, Indo-US relations have grown much deeper across the board over the past two decades. But unlike South Korea or Japan, two other major powers in Asia, India prizes its strategic autonomy. New Delhi seeks to bridge various divides: East–West as well as North–South. Consequently, it is unwilling to join formal alliances dominated by the West, and maintains strong relations with Russia, Iran, and other states that the latter opposes.

The relative power of states in the world shapes the outlook and conduct of decision makers in New Delhi as much as it does in Washington. Their relations are far deeper and more consequential strategically than Indo-Canadian ties. Given these factors, a convergence of views and positions and strong co-operation between Ottawa and Washington would bolster Canada’s position.

India became a major issue domestically in Canada after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused the Indian government of orchestrating Nijjar’s murder. What is your assessment of Canada–India relations a year later?

The situation remains quite difficult. On the one hand, there is a clear effort to highlight the many interests both countries share, while pressing their respective concerns. On the other, though, the murder of Nijjar remains unresolved. Ottawa stands by its allegations that Indian government agents were involved. There are now further allegations by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) that India and Pakistan interfered in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections in Canada, alongside China, making a hard situation even more difficult.

Going beyond the political and diplomatic levels, what effect have the tensions had on the large Indian diaspora in Canada, a huge proportion of whom are students?

We have seen growing tensions between advocates of Khalistan and supporters of Hindu nationalism in particular: the desecration of mandirs over the past couple of years, public rallies and community events that display provocative images and signs, and so on. But the Indian diaspora in Canada is extremely diverse in terms of its linguistic and religious make-up, political views, and generational differences. I imagine members of most communities want to maintain good relations within and between themselves, not an escalation of conflict.

Canada is looking ahead to its own federal election next year. Do you see the current state of affairs continuing unless there is a change in government in either country?

That is a good question. The tensions over Khalistan and allegations of foreign interference transcend the current governments in Ottawa and New Delhi. That said, given the impasse over the past year, new political faces in either capital, or both, could help the two countries find a way forward. Given the verdict in New Delhi, India will once again have a national coalition government, led by a diminished BJP. This could alter the dynamic.

What will it take for the ties between Canada and India to improve?

Resolving the issue that has brought relations to a new low. Canada wants India to take accountability for the killing of Nijjar and, if the CSIS allegations are true, an end to foreign interference too. India wants Canada to show credible evidence that it was involved and take its long-standing concerns over the alleged threats Khalistani separatism poses to India and its officials here more seriously. So a lot rides on whether the RCMP investigation, or US indictments into the murder plot against Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, reveals and names clear links.

Given the severity of the issue, neither India nor Canada can afford to let it quietly go away without losing face and damaging their political credibility. It is hard to see the relationship improving substantially without enough movement on both sides.

It’s hard to pinpoint when exactly Montreal started becoming unaffordable. Like most major social issues, few people initially noticed, until suddenly, everyone did.

Scores of homes were purchased and flipped at inflated rates during the low-interest-rate pandemic buying spree of 2021–2022. Montreal’s Griffintown district, abandoned and dilapidated for decades, now has an abundance of glass condo towers. Young DINKs (dual-income-no-kid couples) walk their dogs along the Lachine Canal.

The biggest change has been felt by tenants. Rents are rising fast. People in my Saint-Henri neighbourhood group on Facebook now frantically post messages, asking for any leads on affordable apartments in the area. Anyone daring to ask for a two-bedroom under $1,000 is promptly met with laughter. Renters face the additional challenge of especially scant supply: in Greater Montreal, the overall vacancy rate fell to 1.5 percent in 2023, one of the lowest in twenty years, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

Demand is so high that even those with leases aren’t safe. Thanks to ineffective rent control oversight, an explosion of bad-faith schemes by landlords led to a 132 percent increase in forced evictions between 2022 and 2023, as reported by a tenant advocacy group. A recent article by the Rover, on artists being priced out of the city by runaway rents, quoted a local nightlife organizer warning that Montreal—legendary for being grunge, punk, stylish, a rich aesthetic vibe on a bargain—is on track to become “a Toronto that speaks French.”

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The province’s right-of-centre Coalition Avenir Québec government has faced criticism for policies seen as favoring landlords and developers over renters. It’s a pressing issue, considering Montreal is fundamentally a city of renters. A 2024 study by the Angus Reid Institute showed it to be the only large city in Canada where more people rent than own a home.

When Premier François Legault made France-Élaine Duranceau—a former real-estate agent—his housing minister in 2022, many worried that things would only get worse for tenants. Sure enough, in June 2023, Duranceau announced Bill 31. While the government presented the legislation as an attempt to “re-establish balance” between renters and landlords, Bill 31 essentially eliminates lease transfers by giving landlords the power to refuse the request for any reason. Lease transfers are a mechanism that kept apartments in Quebec at below market rate for years, sometimes decades, as it allowed tenants to pass on the lower rate to new leaseholders. Ending it will therefore eradicate what little remains of housing security in the province.

After the bill officially became law earlier this year, the province was rocked by demonstrations for months. Protesters refered to Duranceau as the “housing speculation minister” and sweaters were sold depicting her as the former French monarch, Marie Antoinette. An investigation by Ricochet Media also revealed that Duranceau was actively lobbied by her recent business partner, Annie Lemieux, who is the president of a company that owns hundreds of rental units in Quebec. Lemieux also flipped properties with the minister only months before she was elected. Quebec’s ethics commissioner eventually ruled that Duranceau had breached the National Assembly’s code of ethics by fast-tracking a meeting with Lemieux. In another fumble, Duranceau then showed up to inaugurate a social housing project in black Louboutins worth $1,200. The optics of wearing luxury designer shoes while Quebecers scramble to keep a roof over their heads didn’t win her points.

The CAQ government likes to counter criticism by putting the blame for the housing crisis on new immigrants and asylum seekers. While new arrivals may have strained current insufficient housing supplies, they’re not the culprits. If they were, Quebec wouldn’t be experiencing major housing shortages in regions where immigrants are rarely found.

The real problem appears to be CAQ’s reluctance to spend where needed. Alongside the ending of lease transfers, there is an ongoing failure to allocate more funds to affordable housing: a fact decried by a coalition of Quebec non-profits, who say that only 4,000 housing units have been built out of the 14,000 originally promised by the government. Earlier this year, according to the CBC, Montreal mayor Valérie Plante called Legault’s commitment to building social housing—government subsidized dwellings made available to people with low incomes—“vastly insufficient,” accusing CAQ of “making a choice to ignore the housing crisis.” Even the Quebec Landlords Association criticized CAQ’s budget for not providing enough incentives to “stimulate construction.”

But building affordable housing for future use is one thing, keeping people currently housed is another. The Trudeau administration seems to have leapt into action with the creation of a “Canadian Renters’ Bill of Rights,” which would require landlords to disclose their properties’ rental price history to prospective tenants, thus empowering tenants to negotiate fairly. Housing policy expert Steve Pomeroy told CBC that “[I] don’t think, in practical terms, that [the bill of rights] can really be implemented in a way that’s going to have a meaningful impact on rental affordability.” Knowing what a previous tenant paid, argues Pomeroy, won’t necessarily increase tenant bargaining power in a tight rental market. It’s also unclear how much reach the federal government has over housing, when provinces dictate how it is developed and managed. (And indeed, CAQ has already denounced the measure as meddling and an invasion of Quebec’s jurisdiction. “The answer is simple, it’s no,” said one minister.)

But CAQ is paying attention. In a move one opposition member called “a public relations venture to rehabilitate Minister Duranceau’s image,” the government will now ban certain kinds of evictions for the next three years, protecting more senior renters from the practice. It’s a major change of direction for the government, and a welcome one. But an eviction moratorium does little to answer the larger problem: that renters have no real rights and stability and are at the whim of landlords and policy. Nor will it do much to slow gentrification. Montreal’s role as a multilingual cultural hub—attracting talent from across the country and around the world in music, theatre, literature, dance, and even the videogame industry—has been due, in large part, to its lower cost of living. And stopping evictions won’t safeguard that.

What might help is reframing housing as a human right and not just a commodity—as well as elected officials willing to recognize it as such. This shift demands bold policies: rent controls, more affordable homes, and strong tenant protections. Trudeau’s Liberals appear to have made one ambitious step toward this, with a series of large-scale commitments in the form of a 28-page housing plan geared, in part, to “make the playing field fairer for renters.” While Canada signed a United Nations treaty affirming housing as key to the well-being and dignity of every person, most provincial governments refused to even acknowledge it. And Duranceau? She ghosted the reporter who dared ask the question.

The Canadian Race Relations Foundation and The Walrus are celebrating the second year of their partnership with the announcement that Arthur Dennyson Hamdani has been selected as the second CRRF Fellow for Emerging Indigenous, Black, and Racialized Journalists.

Dennyson Hamdani is joining The Walrus for a year and will be working closely with the editorial team to fact-check stories, attend editorial planning sessions, and shadow-edit articles.

“It is such an honour to be selected as this year’s CRRF fellow! I am very excited to be a part of The Walrus, learn what it means to be a fact checker in a professional newsroom, and strengthen my skills and instincts as a visual journalist.”
—Arthur Dennyson Hamdani, CRRF Editorial Fellow

The fellowship is designed to give an up-and-coming journalist the opportunity to gain on-the-job experience in editing, fact-checking, and all other aspects of producing journalism at a national media organization. Dennyson Hamdani will be provided with in-depth training in fact-checking and sessions on topics ranging from editing to circulation to nonprofit management. He will also get to meet and work with a range of seasoned storytellers inside and outside the organization.

“More diverse newsrooms give us stories that are impactful and powerful, told from different angles and different narratives with greater depth and nuance. In today’s world, we need to hear these voices more than ever. The CRRF is proud to continue to support this initiative and create opportunities for a new generation of journalists in Canada.”—Mohammed Hashim, Executive Director, CRRF

The Walrus is thankful to continue this partnership with the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. Dennyson Hamdani is part of a growing cohort of The Walrus Fellowship program. The program plays an important part in the organization’s equity and inclusion work, ensuring that Canadian media represents a diversity of perspectives.

Arthur Dennyson Hamdani is an early career journalist based in Toronto. Alongside writing, copy-editing, and fact-checking, he has experience as a photographer, illustrator, and graphic designer. His works have appeared in blogTO and Ricepaper Magazine. He was a mentee at a journalism mentorship program for BIPOC called Shared Bylines. Before The Walrus, he worked as a design editor at the University of Toronto’s student paper, The Varsity. He holds an honours bachelor’s of arts in journalism, English literature, and migration studies from U of T.

Social Media:
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For more information, contact:
Monita Mohan, Marketing Manager, The Walrus, at monita@thewalrus.ca. 

About The Walrus
The Walrus provokes new thinking and sparks conversation on matters vital to Canadians. As a registered charity, we publish independent, fact-based journalism in The Walrus and at thewalrus.ca; we produce national, ideas-focused events, including our flagship series, The Walrus Talks; and we train emerging professionals in publishing and nonprofit management. The Walrus is invested in the idea that a healthy society relies on informed citizens.

About the Canadian Race Relations Foundation
The Canadian Race Relations Foundation is a Crown Corporation that works to create systemic solutions and advance public policy on anti-racism in Canada, through partnership engagement, creating awareness and mobilization.

On May 17, the Whitehorse Daily Star—one of Canada’s last independent newspapers, having “dawned in 1899 as a tent,” according to its editor—ended a 124-year run. For contributing writer Rhiannon Russell, who covered the Star’s final edition in a story for our website, its demise was only a matter of time. “[N]ewspapers aren’t a viable business anymore,” she explains. “Canadians increasingly get their news online, and advertiser dollars have followed suit.”

The mourning touched off by the announcement of the Star’s closure was a reminder that the Northern outlet, which had housed its own printing press, was more than another failed business. A shuttered newsroom, Russell writes, is a civic catastrophe, resulting in “institutions not being held to account and important stories going uncovered.” For those of us lucky enough to still be in the game—still publishing journalism, still fighting to outrun changing habits and technology—such closures make it more urgent we get it right.

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Part of getting it right means sharing any morsel of good news. As it happens, we have some: more of you are reading us than ever before. Over the past year, we launched a contributing writer program, setting up regional desks covering Quebec and the North and thematic desks covering arts and culture, Indigenous issues, and climate change. We also zealously doubled down on politics, investigative features, and timely international stories, with an emphasis on Afghanistan and India. The dividends on this strategy have been dramatic: the sharpest rise in website traffic and reader engagement since The Walrus began logging such metrics in 2009.

But our real focus isn’t building up numbers. It’s building an audience. We want The Walrus to be a national watchdog, a mirror, and a forum. And that requires a lasting relationship not with single views or fleeting impressions but with humans. Editorial judgment, rather than algorithmic whim, is core to that approach. As Jacob Donnelly recently wrote in a newsletter for A Media Operator, publishers need to start treating people who decide to spend time on their sites “with a bit more care.” That means seeing audiences not as one half of a commercial exchange but as attention that deserves to be rewarded.

And what do readers seem to want? Good writing on issues they worry about: cost of living, housing, misinformation. They want to understand events happening in other regions of the country, and the world. They like seeing us take chances on stories because we think they’re worth telling, even if they won’t necessarily go viral. And they’re excited by us taking that extra step: not simply reporting the news but making sense of it.

In media, time isn’t on anybody’s side. The rise of AI-generated search—which will reduce the need for users to click through to websites, further eating away at advertising revenue—may only hasten the inevitable. But we’re not helpless either. As one of the few publications in Canada that doesn’t have a paywall, we’re proving good journalism can win, especially if you think about your readers first.

There are numerous drafts. Some parts are written in pencil, some in pen, some on a typewriter, and some on a computer. Several pages were printed on old-timey paper attached to each other along a perforated edge, unfurling like a scroll, and some were saved on a 3.5-inch floppy that can now be retrieved only as a file of randomized numbers, like code in the Matrix.

The progression of technology seems to imply a hierarchy of edits—that the pencil draft is superseded by the pen draft, the typewritten pages supersede the longhand ones, and the perforated paper supersedes them all. However, scenes rarely appear in more than one edition, meaning that each ensuing draft was more addition than revision.

Everything is unstapled; pagination happens randomly and redundantly. “Page one” repeats like déjà vu. There are notebooks labelled “The Fortress Before Armageddon” or “Origins Pt II: Plus Messiah’s Speeches” or “THE WAR” (emphasis in original), but it is impossible to discern sequence. There’s a typewritten stack, bound by a paper clip, that is titled “CHAPTER” but without any ensuing number; and beside it, in demonstrative red ink, is written “DONE.” There’s a folder labelled “OUTLINE.” It is empty.

There is orphaned loose leaf; there are algebraic formulas; there are hand-drawn character sketches. The point of view veers between third and first. Sometimes it takes the form of a memoir; sometimes it’s epistolary; sometimes there is what one would call poetry.

The narrative itself takes place across several books, over multiple generations, on several astral planes. There is a timeline of reality, which begins as a straight shot but then pivots into cubes that stack upon themselves. One scene is dated 1982, another is dated 2500 AD, and another features a knight with a sword. The cast includes Jesus, Plato, the Buddha, and Descartes. There’s also this guy named Garner, who seems central to it all but is not to be confused with another character named Ganor.

There is a pyramid. There are dog fights. There is Heaven and there is Hell and they connect at Drumheller, Alberta. There is a Golden Web (always capitalized). There is an astute knowledge of what to do during a bad LSD trip.

There is one notebook (the thickest) that ends with the declaration, “If this is true, it has only happened a few times in the history of life itself. It has marked a turning point both here and on earth.” But at the bottom of that final page—of a scene that seems earmarked for epiphany—there is a concluding footnote: “Continued in previous section.”

All of this—the notebooks, the loose leaf, the worlds—is gathered in the briefcase. The paper is brittle in the open air, and such frailty gives each sentence a sacred weight. Because with every storming of a castle and boarding of a starship, with every flourish of calligraphy and strikethrough of red pen, there is an unspoken yet deafening declaration: I will write a story, and I would sooner die before I let it be incomplete.

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Eight years ago, my mother met a woman named Laurene. When my mother told her she had a son who was a writer (I hate it when she does this), Laurene exclaimed, “I have a story for him!” And Laurene, I came to learn, meant this in the most literal sense.

Two weeks later, in her kitchen, Laurene told me her late husband, Jim, had spent decades writing a novel that he had always planned to finish upon retirement but died before he got the chance. He was not a professional writer, rather a surveyor by trade. Laurene presented me with a large leather briefcase, heaving it onto the table and resting both hands upon the lid. “His notes, his chapters, his everything is here.”

She summarized the plot for me. (My takeaway, in essence: reawakened inhabitants of the universe’s peripheral dimensions organize a primeval army in order to save the Earth.) But, she said, the ending was still undetermined.

“Do you want me to proofread it?” I asked.

“I want you,” she said, “to finish it.”

As Laurene slid the briefcase toward me, her eyes shone like she was giving a great gift. I assumed she felt she was handing over an easy fortune because the hard part was already over—the labour of birthing an idea—and all I had to do was towel it off and spank a bit of life into it. So how to explain to her that right then and there, sitting in her kitchen as she told me of her late husband’s life’s work, even as I accepted the briefcase, I knew I would never add a word to the story? How to convey to her that I had neither the temerity nor the tenacity to write about a world that could be saved? How to break it that there was no hope?

I accepted the briefcase because I was polite and uncomfortable, too embarrassed for both of us to decline. But there was another thing: a vague yet implacable connection I felt to Jim, that I ought to care for him the way I would for myself, because in that moment, the two of us seemed much the same, separated only by age. At that time in my life, I was at a fulcrum in my career: all the glitz of writing—its shining promises—had rubbed off, and what remained was a knowledge of the unnavigable distance between where I was and where I wanted to be. As a novice writer, I had thought that once I began to publish, the route would prove easier. But the exact opposite had happened. It was only when I began to publish—and witnessed the immediate irrelevance of it—that I understood the impossibility of my ambitions. The briefcase seemed to know this too, having learned it in defeat.

Later that night, as I sat in the blue light of my laptop screen while a Word document’s cursor blinked back at me, I flipped up the clasps, and the briefcase’s hinges creaked open. Inside were thirteen notebooks, a stack of legal pads, ballpoint pens, a floppy disk, and piles of paper, yellowed with time. The headlights from a passing car poured through the window and across my shaking hands.

I laboured through the drafts, and the hours rubbed against each other like knives being sharpened. “So this,” I said to the briefcase, “is what it means to be a writer.” How paltry and vain, how arrogant in the face of inadequacy. I closed the briefcase, vowing to never open it again.

But I did not abandon it. Spanning eight apartments and two provinces, I have kept the briefcase with me, stowing it snugly into each bedroom closet, behind the laundry basket and beneath the violin I never play.

I have considered throwing it out, tossing it into a Goodwill drop-off. But then there’s the image of all that loose leaf tumbling in the updrafts of the recycling depot. Because to forsake the briefcase would be to admit the expendability of writing, and that, in time, a similar destiny awaits me.

For the better part of a decade, I had believed Laurene’s request unique. But, as the cliché goes, every story has already been told.

“People ask me to do this all the time,” the editor of this very essay told me when I first explained my situation. “Everyone is either filling a briefcase themselves or trying to get somebody to empty their briefcase. And when people find out you’re a writer, they know which one you are.”

A reporter I know concurred. She told me of serial requesters, of email blasts that begin “Dear Esteemed Writer.”

“You’re not special,” she told me.

A third writer disagreed but only on a level of semantics. “Everyone’s special,” he said, before telling me about the epidemic of ghostwritten biographies. “My Presbyterian grandmother, who believed that none of us are special, would have been appalled.”

But I contest that the fact the briefcase novel is just that—a novel—separates Laurene’s request from the chaff that clogs up an inbox. This was not a pitch for a story, or a fragment thereof. It was worse. It was an entire story—just a few wormholes in the narrative, and all I had to do was step into them and chart their course.

Writing a story, no matter the length, requires obsession. It is the only emotion that can withstand the tedium. And so the act of adopting someone else’s story—no matter how trivial or fictional—is revealing for not only the one who proposes but for the one who accepts. Because amidst the onslaught of offers that are nothing, there is one that becomes your everything. A project is not given to you; rather, it is you who gives yourself to it. With both hands, you accept the file and say, “This is me.” And because Jim’s briefcase novel held such apparent failure, I refused to touch it, lest I be infected.

I know another author who has been writing a story without end. He began a novel six years ago with the plan that he’d be done within a month. The manuscript has now ballooned to over 280,000 words. And it is growing.

I told him of other writers I know, writers who’ve banged off a novel in weeks. And my voice had an anger I did not expect: “Are you not envious of them?”

“Yes,” he admitted.

I reclined, appeased.

“But they,” he said, “should be envious of me.”

The years passed, Laurene and I fell out of contact, and I continued to write in my plodding way. I was never happy with any manuscript I wrote; I was instead exhausted by them. And each time I sent one away with a prayer for it to be published, I felt a great burden lifted, as if the problem was now someone else’s.

It was usually at these times, in the lull between assignments, that I would hear the siren song of the briefcase. I wondered if, in my balking at the project, I was affecting an aesthetic sanctimony that has long precedence of being breached. Take, for example, the editors who posthumously worked on Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden, Nabokov’s The Original of Laura, and Tolstoy’s Hadji Murád. And then, too, there is Poodle Springs.

Before he died in 1959, famed detective fiction writer Raymond Chandler wrote the opening four chapters of a story tentatively titled Poodle Springs, the eighth Philip Marlowe novel. At this stage in Chandler’s career, his talent was waning, a decline epitomized by the seventh Philip Marlowe novel, Playback, which the New York Times called “his worst book.” Three decades later, after Chandler’s literary estate asked writer Robert B. Parker to complete the manuscript, the novel was published to critical acclaim, became a New York Times bestseller, and was adapted into a Tom Stoppard movie starring the leathered-but-not-yet-collagenically-frozen James Caan.

But it would be incorrect to say that Parker “finished” Chandler’s novel. Chandler reportedly left behind only thirty-one pages; Parker filled in everything else. Those opening four chapters by Chandler merely sketch the setting of the novel and reintroduce a couple of established characters. The plot itself is devised almost entirely by Parker. More than being a collaboration of writers across astral planes, Poodle Springs is fan fiction.

But the briefcase novel is not so simple. There is no identification of genre, no coherent narrative voice, no deep-pocketed literary estate offering guidance; there are no seven preceding novels that explain the backstories of Garner or Ganor. All that the briefcase offers is an endless number of pages written, with an endless number of pages to write.

And it was during one of those lulls between assignments that I quit writing. There was no one to take my resignation, so I simply said it out loud—“I quit”—and let the words fill the room. A cold sadness rose within me before draining away into a hollow calm. It was a feeling I had previously known only in breakups that I did not want to happen: when all the denial and delusion was spent and there was no longer the anguish of optimism.

I had not seen Laurene for seven years, since she handed me the novel. She had moved to a different city and disconnected her landline. (“I kept on meaning to check in,” she said when I finally got hold of her on the phone. “Just to see how Jim’s book is coming.”) On the eight-hour drive to her new suburban home, the briefcase sat shotgun, buckled in, quiet as a teenager who will not co-operate with the conversation.

When she answered her door, I was surprised by how excited we both were to see the other. In the ensuing years, she had met someone new. I’d had a child.

She said we could talk in the back, and she led me to a patio shaded by flowers blooming from trees. She set a pitcher of iced tea on the table, and the sunlight refracted through the crystal and across the lawn. There are times when I think that this career has given me every beautiful moment in my life.

But then: “So,” Laurene said, lighting a cigarette, “you’re writing an article on Jim’s book, but you’re not writing the book itself?”

I was hot with shame. “An article,” I mumbled, fidgeting with my recorder. “I just need some more information.”

Much like how the unfathomable expanse of our universe might be traced back to a pinpoint, the briefcase novel originated in a single cigarette. Jim started his novel in 1974 as a way to quit smoking. “He needed something to do with his hands,” Laurene explained. “He’d go to a restaurant and sit for hours.”

Quitting smoking didn’t last for long, but the book stuck around. By the time Jim was diagnosed with stage four esophageal cancer in 2013, it had been nearly forty years since he started his novel.

“Once the kids were in bed, he’d go downstairs, have a toke, and work on it,” Laurene told me. “He wasn’t the type to need the house dead quiet. I once had a girlfriend who was living with an author, and it was ridiculous. I said, ‘Why are you putting up with him?’”

I‘ve often thought that the worst part about being a writer is that virtually everybody can do it. The widespread practice of the craft places it only one rung above improv at the very bottom of art’s hierarchy (with, obviously, classical cello and daredevil juggling at the top).

But the more I have read the briefcase novel, the more it seems the greatest quality of writing is its ubiquity. There is the cliché that every Starbucks barista has witnessed: “Everyone has a novel inside them.” But in that sentence’s simplicity, a key fact is overlooked: it’s not that everyone can have a novel in them but that they already do, whether they want it or not—a story of great insight and revelation, a story that is full of heartache and transformation, of struggle and triumph and (if the plot requires, as Jim’s novel does) flying horses, a story that takes in the shaggy humongousness of the world and compresses it into unity, into recurring combinations of twenty-six symbols. And so, to abandon that story—how it turns chaos legible—would be to abandon all semblance of meaning and succumb to nihilism.

There is a type of novel that seems conceived to kill its writer. There’s Kafka’s The Castle, Woolf’s Between the Acts, Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. In 1969, John Kennedy Toole took his own life, leaving behind a manuscript that he had tried for years to get published. For the next eleven years, his mother, Thelma, relentlessly submitted it to publishers until one acquiesced, and A Confederacy of Dunces ascended into the canon. (There is a path to the assuagement of the dead, but how few have the doggedness to trudge it.)

All of these novels vary stylistically and thematically, but they are united in their intent: to write something—long or short—that conveys what it is like, truly, to exist. Each narrative argues that we experience life not with the enlightened rationale of the Dewey Decimal system but rather within the dark confusion of an earthquake that has toppled the stacks upon us.

The most pertinent example of a novel with Icarian aim would be Austrian writer Robert Musil’s near-2,000-page tome, The Man without Qualities, often considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Needless to say, I have not read it; but like in my English undergrad days of yore, I’ve read a handful of excerpts and now feel myself apprised. Musil began writing his book in 1921 and was still writing it twenty-one years later when he died of a stroke (not of the genius variety, mind you).

The Man without Qualities is set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but the plot is as sprawling and labyrinthine as a slum and similarly sardined with characters. The first chapter is called “From which, remarkably enough, nothing develops.” There is no structure, no scope, no cohesion. Musil reportedly referred to his novel as “a bridge into space,” which is to say a long linking into nothingness.

Jonathan Lethem, in his introduction to the Picador Classic edition, writes, “Musil, in his torrential evocations, seems to be conducting an inventory of what it is to be alive and human.” The Man without Qualities was never finished, but not because Musil failed—rather because he struck the bull’s eye. The more accurately Musil portrayed his subjects—their stunted relationships and corkscrewing conversations, the mixed metaphors and dead-end plots—the more his novel mushroomed like a cloud. Lethem writes by the novel’s final pages, “The unpublished fragments tail into contradiction, pensiveness, and, finally, inchoate notes.” Because to build a bridge into space means that the massiveness of the endeavour will eventually outweigh its planetary anchor, and the whole globe topples off its orbit.

There is a novel that I, too, yearn to write. I have notes, I have pages, I have a hand-drawn map. I have a timeline that’s more cerebral than linear. Like Jim’s, my novel is also intergalactic; it, too, spans lifetimes, features rural Alberta, and depicts a tangible God. Once a year, I try to write it. But each time, failure is abrupt as a guillotine. Within the first sentence (“I was born on the ship, but I will not die on the ship”), I am overcome by everything moving away from me. It is a feeling so intimate and embarrassing you forget it’s universal: the harder you try to write about a subject, the more that subject eludes you. The faster you run, the faster it flees.

Every act of writing is an act of faith: that your words will hold together and take root, that they will endure the spans of doubt and insult, and that, given enough time, all of those words will blossom into something splendid and godly and you will be alive to see it. But when I sit to write my novel, all I see is a pursuit into oblivion, a bridge into space.

How to have faith in the shadow of such uncertainty, where one afternoon, after you’ve had a bit of difficulty swallowing, the specialist speaks the words “stage four,” and life is a loan called back? Laurene told me that during Jim’s sixteen months of chemo, they never discussed his novel. But there must have been moments of quiet, of waiting for the doctor, of the hypnotic beeps of medical machines. And in those moments, did Jim wish that he had worked on the novel more or not at all?

Laurene turned her face to the setting sun and I asked her for a cigarette.

She passed me one, and I said, “Do you think he knew how his book ended?”

“He didn’t chart out the story,” she replied, sparking the lighter and offering me its flame.

I thought, surely, Jim must have had some help. “In all the notebooks and notepads, there’s different types of handwriting,” I said.

I showed her pages covered in handwriting, pages written in all caps, pages written with a pen so heavy it punctures the paper.

“That’s Jim,” she said. She explained that he’d been working on the book for so long his penmanship changed.

In that moment, it appeared to me that if Jim hadn’t developed stage four cancer—even if he had lived another 100 years—his briefcase novel would never have been completed. In whatever version of the future you imagine, in whatever dimension you visit, Jim always concludes before his book does.

At some point, creation will always overtake creator. Ask Frankenstein and the scientist whose name he has subsumed. And so, as the decades drew on, is it not possible that the novel came to understand Jim better than he did? Night after night, it took his confession, gave shape to his dreams, delivered worlds made just for him. It listened to him, sat with him, watched him. And from its vantage on the desk, did it note the slight swelling of his throat as the cancer grew from stages one through four?

The novel’s characters are always saying things like: I will explain soon, but right now there’s not enough time.

O ne autumn morning, I opened an email from a woman I’d never met. She accused me of plagiarizing a short story, one that I had written a long time before and which had been recently named a finalist for a literary award. Of course, I had excuses, flimsy ones that used words like “overlap” and “pastiche.” But no one was much interested in hearing them.

Despite trying to quit writing, it never occurred to me that I could be fired. Editors disavowed me; I was suspended from teaching; in a final besmirchment, a literary magazine revoked its solicitation of an unpaid submission. I became so spiteful and indignant that I sealed myself off from the world, the way a besieged porcupine will roll itself into a ball and become pure urchin.

A couple months later, during another afternoon with nothing to do, I searched for my violin in the closet. And there it was: the briefcase. True, the novel had its issues—the glancing lecture about DNA engineering, the painstaking asides on scuba diving, a surprise cameo by Immanuel Kant—but the manuscript was so completely of itself that it would be impossible to think otherwise. Out of everything the briefcase novel was, there was one thing it was not—a fraud.

I stood in the closet’s doorway, perfectly still. Because I was no longer a writer—because I had irrefutably failed—I pulled out the briefcase and opened its lid. Here is the best I can explain the feeling: on a bus in summer, sweltering heat, the gridlock of rush hour, when someone from the back cracks open the emergency hatch in the ceiling and the ocean breeze tumbles down, and you did not realize, this entire time, you had been holding your breath.

Why did I open the briefcase once again? Because the story inside started to seem impossible in breadth and target, and I began to think that my memory had inflated the manuscript and let it loom too large, that I was cowering before a god who was more curtain than clout. I thought that by letting the story see daylight, it would evaporate, and I would be absolved of my failures.

But the exact opposite has happened. Such a fine line between a gift and a curse, between an honour and an affliction—so fine, in fact, that perhaps there’s no line at all.

And then, after all those years, Laurene is on the phone with a voice so deep with mercy she whispers: “Would you like to give the briefcase back to me?”

At first, I am polite and say no, but later in her backyard I concede and say yes, and then a few months later, while in the lineup at the post office, I decide no.

The briefcase novel has taught me nothing about writing; it hasn’t taught me how to sculpt a sentence, how to develop character, not even how to craft a sex scene (from the notebook titled “Personalities”: “They made love, and she died.”). But the briefcase novel, and the surveyor who made it, has taught me everything about being a writer.

The briefcase still sits in my closet, its lid shut tight as the mouth of a judge. I’m often hunched over my desk, exhausted, but wanting just another five minutes. Because what can damn a life’s work—condemn it to the limbo of words unwritten—is not too little time, but too much, when we are allowed to expand into our full and total selves, boundless and infinite, and alight upon an astral plane. But if such be the rules, does it not seem more of a failure to be done than undone?

In the summer of 1968, officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) were worried about the accelerating space race with the Soviet Union and whether the United States could keep up. By the end of July that year, the Soviets had launched forty-five rockets into space; America managed half that. The Central Intelligence Agency warned that the Soviets were restarting their Soyuz spacecraft program and were close to making an attempt to orbit the moon. Meanwhile, technical problems plagued the US’s Apollo program. Prospects for meeting John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s looked grim.

NASA met the challenge of a fast-moving space race by speeding it up even further than many thought possible. The accelerationist strategy won out. By December, Apollo 8 circled the moon. Seven months later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left footprints on the Sea of Tranquility. The Soviets never made it.

Looking back, the idea that the space race was moving too quickly in the 1960s seems quaint. What was once a contest primarily between two superpowers angling for military advantage has become a crowded ecosystem of countries and commercial actors. Facilitated by a steep fall in the cost of blasting things into space, launches and missions have occurred so frequently over the past decade that only full-time observers can keep track. In 2023, according to data collected by Harvard University astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, 223 launch attempts were made from more than a dozen countries, with more than half initiated by private companies. Nearly 2,900 satellites were successfully deployed—twenty times more than in 1968. Close to 30,000 large objects are currently in orbit. Roughly a quarter of active satellites belong to a single company: Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

As the new space age picks up speed and more countries and companies get involved, it is increasingly difficult to manage risks to the environment, the economy, and the lives of astronauts and people on Earth. The exponential rise in untracked and uncontrollable objects in space increases the likelihood of collisions that could knock out global communication and navigation systems. Opportunities to use space for social and economic benefit are being hoarded by rich countries and businesses. China, India, Russia, and the United States are locked in a race to deploy and test weapons in space.

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On its current trajectory, the new space age could be its own worst enemy. Existing treaties and agreements are simply not up to the task of governing space in ways that minimize the existential risks to humanity.

The rules governing space come mainly from the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST)—officially the Treaty of Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. Adopted by the United Nations during the Cold War and signed by over 100 countries, including the major spacefaring powers China, France, India, Japan, Russia, and the US, the OST emphasizes that space activities should be carried out “in the interests of all countries” and “exclusively for peaceful purposes.” It prohibits sovereignty claims in space, forbids states from placing weapons in orbit or on celestial bodies, and urges states to “avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies.”

For many years after its adoption—and, in some ways, right into the current space age—the treaty served humanity well. By 1975, Soviets and Americans joined forces on the first international space mission. Behind-the-scenes negotiations, along with a thaw in the Cold War, resulted in the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project, a test of rendezvous and docking capabilities for potential rescue missions. States have tried to abide by the treaty. Even when space activities bend or break its principles—such as the US’s 2015 Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which gave US citizens rights to resources on asteroids and other celestial bodies—many states make efforts to argue that their actions are consistent with the OST. In such cases, the treaty continues to have normative, if not always practical, force.

Over the past decade, however, space has become much more contested and harder to govern. Nearly 1,000 private companies now offer space-based products and services. Expanding satellite constellations offer better internet access in remote and developing communities, enabling more people to access online health care, work remotely, and connect with family and friends. Space technologies also support better weather and climate monitoring, improve navigation and transportation logistics, and enhance agricultural productivity through the use of land- and water-quality sensors. All this has contributed to a space economy with an estimated value of $447 billion (US), on a trajectory to reach $1 trillion by 2030. And missions focused on exploration and scientific discovery are expanding—including the US-led Artemis program that aims to land human beings on the moon for the first time in over fifty years.

But this new space age poses substantial risks. Orbital debris from inactive satellites, discarded rocket parts, and anti-satellite weapons tests threatens the infrastructure on which our social and economic well-being now depends, as well as the lives of astronauts working on space stations. In addition to the 30,000 objects large enough to track, there are an estimated 1 million debris fragments—between one and ten centimetres in diameter—that are too small to be picked up by ground-based radar and surveillance networks. Experts put the likelihood of future collisions between these objects at near certainty, with potential for cascading and catastrophic damage including entire satellite communication systems being taken out and larger debris fragments falling to Earth and threatening lives and ecosystems.

The environmental impact of the new space age isn’t promising either. While rockets tend to use less-polluting fuel than is common in the aviation industry, the volume required, the increase in launches, and the fact that rocket emissions are deposited higher in the atmosphere worry many environmental scientists. A mix of chemicals produced by many kinds of rocket launches—including black carbon, hydrogen chloride, and alumina—can increase stratospheric temperatures and contribute to ozone depletion. Moreover, when space objects “burn up” on re-entry, the particles do not simply disappear but instead hang in the atmosphere, posing additional risks to Earth’s ozone layer.

It also looks like the current space age may exacerbate global inequality. The OST and the 1979 Moon Agreement speak of an “equitable” sharing of the benefits of space and call for “special consideration” to the needs and interests of developing countries. Yet estimates of space mining revenues reaching into the trillions of dollars have spurred private companies to initiate resource-grabbing missions, with powerful governments creating room for them to operate.

The prohibition on the ownership and appropriation of locations in space also seems to be breaking. The US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act has been criticized by China, Russia, and others for potentially violating the OST’s prohibition on “national appropriation,” but these same countries have their own mining ambitions and are already returning samples from the moon and asteroids. Bottom line: by the time less-developed countries get their act together on the launch pad, space may be too crowded for them to participate.

One of the biggest worries is weapons. Aspirations to keep space peaceful seem to be slipping away. China, India, Russia, and the US have all used anti-satellite weapons to shoot down their own satellites to brag about their military capabilities, and Russia is reportedly working on nuclear anti-satellite capabilities in space. While publicly challenging the Russians on this development, the United States Space Force is simultaneously preparing for what it calls “responsible counterspace campaigning”—a term many observers agree is a euphemism for deploying military capabilities in space.

Moreover, as space security expert Jessica West has noted, the challenge of keeping space weapons-free is complicated by the proliferation of dual-use technologies that ostensibly serve peaceful purposes but can easily be repurposed or redeployed as a threat. For example, China’s robotic space arm and the US’s mission extension vehicle, while intended for servicing the satellites of the respective nations, could be used to sabotage other countries’ space-based technologies.

Major space powers and private sector actors are testing the limits of the OST and other international agreements. Their activities reveal the treaty’s ambiguity on some issues, silence on others, and the same enforcement challenges that all international agreements face—namely, the lack of an independent authority to assess violations and impose binding penalties and sanctions.

International cooperation is making some progress on managing symptoms—but very little on more fundamental questions about who should be permitted to put what in space and at what cost to the current and future well-being of people and communities on Earth. Coordination on tracking and managing objects in Earth’s orbit, as well as sharing information to avoid collisions, is one area where optimism about our collective space future might be warranted. Representatives from all major space agencies regularly meet to discuss mitigation strategies at the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee and other fora. While countries closely guard their debris monitoring systems, norms around mutual notification of potentially dangerous debris have emerged.

At the same time, the number of objects being deployed into orbit is accelerating. With ambitions to generate revenue by providing comprehensive and relatively low-cost communications services around the globe, SpaceX plans to add another 30,000 satellites to the already 6,000 that make up its mega constellation. Racing to claim space in low Earth orbit before it becomes too congested, other countries and companies are deploying similar swarms of satellites. This is all happening at a pace that threatens to overwhelm debris monitoring and mitigation efforts and that outstrips the capacity of less-advanced countries to claim their fair share of orbital space. Existing governance mechanisms were not designed for this level and kind of activity.

In 1969, astronauts Frank Borman, Bill Anders, and Jim Lovell were aboard Apollo 8, making the third of their ten orbits around the moon. As the spacecraft returned from the moon’s far side, Anders looked out the front window and saw Earth. He took an unscheduled and now iconic photo: Earthrise.

In an interview years later, Anders reflected on the experience. “When I looked up and saw the Earth coming up on this very stark, beat-up Moon horizon . . . I was immediately almost overcome with the thought, ‘Here we came all this way to the Moon, and yet the most significant thing we’re seeing is our own home planet, the Earth.’”

Hope for a well-governed new space age might be reasonable, but it will depend on all spacefaring actors recognizing, as Anders did, the “most significant thing” and the needs and vulnerabilities of all people who live on it.

Reprinted, with permission, from the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

I’ve knocked on a lot of doors over the years. I’ve been in politics for long: as a congressional intern, a field organizer, and a political staffer in the Boston mayor’s office (the above name is a pseudonym as I’m still involved in politics). Dealing with voters directly is the “ground game” of field organizing, built on contact between campaigns and voters. Candidates, staffers, or volunteers knock on doors (canvassing), give would-be supporters a call (phone banking), or send a text reminding them to donate to a campaign or get out and vote (text banking). With 2024 promising to be a busy election year in the US—a lot of big issues and high stakes—it’s worth paying attention to these smaller connections. Volunteers and paid organizers who do the groundwork are the foot soldiers most campaigns rely on to win elections. For less prominent but important offices at the local and state or provincial levels, the ground game can be the single most important factor in determining the victor. This reality is reflected in high-profile campaigns too. In 2016, senator Ted Cruz invested heavily in the Iowa caucus, engaging in old-fashioned campaigning on the ground. He was rewarded with an unlikely win over his main rivals, including Donald Trump, the eventual nominee. And even with all the institutional advantages of his position, Trump and his campaign invested heavily in the 2024 New Hampshire primary, with a focus on the ground game.

AI is already being used in innovative ways to change the ground game ahead of the many US elections happening in 2024. Existing technologies are capable of texting, writing fundraising and political emails, and generating social media posts. In fact, most of the in-office aspects of campaign work can be done by AI, which does not require rest, food, coffee, office spaces, or mental health breaks. This means relentless, non-stop campaigning is a new possibility. There is a lot of rightful consternation about the potentially volatile introduction of generative artificial intelligence into politics. Fake audio clips, images, and videos are already making their way to political airwaves and may have dangerous real-world impacts. But the use of generative AI may very well also have the counterintuitive impact of making politics much more old fashioned. I would argue that, thanks to AI, professional politics will become increasingly human as back-office tasks become automated.

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In Pennsylvania, Harrisburg city councilwoman Shamaine Daniels ran in a crowded Democratic primary for Congress. Daniels used an innovative phone-banking operation using super volunteer “Ashley,” created by the London-based start-up Civox. While she was unsuccessful in winning the election, her approach did highlight a growing use case for AI campaign tools. Far more engaging and responsive than a robo caller, AI programs like Ashley can produce a higher call volume than any human organizer can. For example, Ashley is fluent in a variety of languages and can directly reach out to voters from all kinds of communities—another way that AI’s translation abilities can help politicians build bonds with voters who may not otherwise be contacted. Language access has been seen as an area of neglect for Democrats, who are struggling with communities such as Latinos and Asian Americans. Apps like WhatsApp and WeChat, which are popular with these communities, are often flooded with misinformation that goes relatively unchecked. The lack of engagement has played to the advantage of Republicans, who have eagerly embraced the line that Democrats are socialists. As many of these communities are deeply fearful of socialism, this narrative has become a growing area of concern for the left. The ability to directly engage voters in their preferred languages has been seen as a crucial path to improving Democratic prospects.

This ability to build bridges across a variety of languages and cultures is part of a broader trend in the AI-fication of field organizing. Using publicly available information from voter rolls and social media, AI tools could create increasingly personalized appeals. The start-up Votivate is pushing such usage to its limits. Aiming to compete with NGP VAN, the industry standard app for Democratic campaigns, Votivate offers similar services—including donor management, canvassing, fundraising, event planning, and volunteer management—except the tasks will be automated. It offers tireless AI phone bankers, fundraisers, and campaign managers. In doing so, Votivate hopes to democratize politics by giving lesser-known and lesser-funded underdogs an edge over more established opponents.

But what tactics actually work? A 2018 study on campaign texting found that, on their own, direct campaign texts to voters raised voter turnout by 1 percent on average. While that’s not much, it is enough to flip a close race, and this impact was outsized amongst younger voters, who are frequently a low-impact group during elections.

Phone banking, or directly calling voters, is another tactic that has some questionable benefits, due to a very low response rate. While it is known to increase turnout only marginally, it is still worth doing, especially with the emergence of predictive dialling, which allows for database integration, call recording, real-time analytics, and improved efficiency. These tactics really become effective only when they are combined with direct canvassing. Back in the 1990s, a study found that door knocking could increase voter turnout by 8.7 percent—which could be a decisive factor in any close race. Canvassing is still a tried-and-true tactic that is standard for any serious candidate for office. Normally, this means having a series of short conversations where a canvasser delivers a stump speech, designed to quickly spread awareness about a candidate, and moves on to the next household.

In 2018, a Massachusetts ballot question on transgender rights gained attention for a campaign’s use of deep canvassing, an innovation on the tactic of direct engagement through door knocking, turning the standard on its head by instead opting for longer face-to-face conversations, with non-judgmental exchanges and active listening. The efforts were rewarded on election night, when the “Yes” campaign earned a resounding victory. Instead of memorized stump speeches and bullet points about candidate backgrounds and policies, field staffers had up to twenty-minute-long conversations, sharing personal stories and anecdotes with voters. While more time consuming and intense, this approach proved far more effective in persuading listeners to change their attitudes on even controversial issues. As the Deep Canvassing Institute demonstrates through its work, the tactic appears to work quite well for specific policy-focused goals. Down Home North Carolina, an organizing group focused on small towns and rural communities, claimed a victory in organizing for a Medicaid expansion, pressuring Republican legislators into voting for a bipartisan bill that dramatically expanded health care. In the coming 2024 cycle, it’s likely that North Carolinians will find themselves encountering more deep canvassers as the elections heat up.

So where does AI fit into this? Over the next few election cycles, we are going to see political candidates try to automate away back-office tasks that could be done from home or in the campaign’s headquarters. We’ve already established that AI can handle phone banking, text banking, emails, and social media. These are the kinds of entry-level functions that have otherwise been performed by volunteers, interns, or lower-level staffers. But beyond these roles, AI can also take on more elevated tasks, producing high-level strategy memos that could just as easily come from a political consulting firm. Votivate provided journalist Micah L. Sifry with a demonstration of their “Campaign Assistant” tool, which produced a memo for a fictional candidate, offering solid advice on fundraising and messaging that any political consultant would produce.

If you look at the hierarchy of typical political campaign roles, the most expensive ones include campaign managers, fundraisers, communications directors, or political directors. If I were a candidate for office wanting to run a lean campaign, I might choose to save money by consolidating tasks typically associated with high-paying, office-heavy jobs into “body person” roles—personal assistants who must be glued to their bosses, keeping candidates on schedule, driving them around, handling meetings and sensitive documents. As this technology improves and becomes more reliable, we may see changes in campaign hierarchies. Instead of hiring an experienced press secretary or social media director, I could have AI do media monitoring, social media posts, and press inquiries while calling and texting voters and churning out fundraising emails at the same time. With the technology still in its relative infancy, it might require some human supervision from an enthusiastic volunteer, intern, or maybe an entry-level staffer, but it could shave a lot of money off a tight campaign budget.

Perhaps traditional titles will lose their meaning or change as campaign roles become consolidated and shift away from desks. For the cost of an expensive campaign manager, I could hire multiple door-to-door canvassers to focus on direct community engagement, spending more of their time in deep conversations with voters. You would see a lot more of me too, as I would be spending more time fundraising from my Rolodex of contacts, pitching interviews to journalists, canvassing, and hosting rallies, events, and fundraisers.

Bustling campaign offices with non-stop phone calls and cigar-chomping political operators staring at maps could become a thing of the past as bots cut turfs and identify battleground areas through real-time data analytics. AI-generated individualized media, produced with personal information, could proliferate on social media feeds, texts, and phone calls. Maybe campaigns will invest entirely in this new technology, forgoing old-fashioned canvassing, which might be seen as slower and less efficient. But there’s an opportunity here for campaigns using AI to also shift back to the streets, intensively targeting voters at their doors while their phones and screens are bombarded, using bots, with calls and texts directly tailored to them. Campaigns could become more automated and more human at the same time. Voters may find themselves having more earnest heart-to-heart conversations with canvassers as elections draw closer. Organizers trained in deep canvassing techniques may be empowered. And, hopefully, this could bring temperatures down and enable a much more empathetic style of politics.

If you feel like everything keeps getting worse and your quality of life is increasingly compromised by annoyances great and small, I’ll wager that started in the early 2000s, around the time retailers introduced self-checkouts on a wide scale.

The checkout has long been embedded in our retail model. You pick your goods from the shelves and visit a cashier who rings them up. You pay. You leave. With a drive to cut costs following the 2001 recession, supermarket chains began implementing self-checkout lanes in the United States and, soon after, in Canada. The technology promised a faster, more convenient experience for the shopper and, of course, labour savings for the retailer. In the process, retail giants shifted the checkout burden from employee to consumer. You still had to collect your bread, milk, and bananas and queue up. But it was now your job to also scan, pay, and bag the items while dealing with the inevitable errors and confusions that left you frantically flagging an overworked attendant to come and fix things as a dozen other people did the same.

Some days, getting out of a store with any remaining sanity is a tall order. You’re annoyed, nursing an unsettling sense that—beyond the promises of tech purveyors guaranteeing a long healthy life, a self-driving car, and a robo-butler just around the corner—the world was in a kind of death spiral. There’s a term for the steady decline of so many aspects of contemporary life, online and off: enshittification. Coined by author and journalist Cory Doctorow in 2022, it initially referred to a decline in service quality on the part of tech giants who had so thoroughly captured users that they could extract value from them without being sensitive to their preferences or needs. Social media platforms, for example, hoover up your personal data and, in return, fill your timeline with bots and trolls. Or rideshare services gouge you because it’s busy hour and you’ve hit surge pricing, but you have few other options because the apps crushed the taxi industry and public transit sucks.

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Enshittification thus gets into everything, creating what Doctorow has christened the enshittocene. It’s a broad expansion of the capture–exploitation–decline cycle that can explain our analogue existence more and more as consumers become increasingly bound by limited choice, high prices, and poor experiences in oligopolistic markets.

In many ways, self-checkout is the shining jewel of enshittification. First, the technology can be deeply exasperating. According to one survey published in 2021, 67 percent of American customers said they’d experienced a failure at the self-checkout lane. Nor is it true that people whiz through: lines get clogged while staff assist with bar codes that aren’t working or payment problems. But the concept has also inspired some remarkable dystopian creativity. Amazon bragged about the Just Walk Out technology used in their Fresh grocery stores which sent customers their receipts after they had left the store with their items. However, the model was reportedly powered by low-paid workers in India who watched customers from afar and reviewed about 70 percent of purchases. (Amazon has denied these allegations.)

The behemoth is now transitioning to Dash Carts, a kind of self-checkout on the fly, allowing customers to scan their items as they shop. Sounds alluringly efficient. But apparently, it’s anything but. Tech news site GeekWire found the shopping carts equipped with cameras and sensors “clunky, inconsistent, and difficult to navigate.” The big chains can package an assault on labour as convenience because they have so little competition. If the handful of big-box grocers decide to use self-checkout, where else will you go?

The hypertrophied scope and scale of enshittification also means that retailers—confident of their market share and of their freedom to make user experience as awful as they please in order to boost revenue—bear the brunt of it too. Self-checkouts appear to have caused a surge in “shrink,” or inventory loss. The technology accounts for a shrink rate of 3.5 percent of sales in the US—which is sixteen times higher than with cashiers, who can prevent theft and are less likely than customers to make scanning errors. US retailers reported over $100 billion (US) in losses in 2022, blaming them in part on self-checkouts. In 2023, Toronto Police Service claimed retail theft to the tune of $5 billion, while shoplifting rates were up 31 percent in 2022.

Retailers have built a surveillance apparatus around self-checkouts to deter shoplifters and to detect “errors” as shoppers scan their items, often incorrectly. In the US, big-box store Target is adopting TruScan technology across its nearly 2,000 locations to watch customers and detect any unexpected items in (or not in) the bagging area (while limiting its express self-checkout lanes to those with ten items or less). In Canada, Walmart customers are monitored via video, including at self-checkout. Today, not only do folks take on the labour of purchasing their items—they’re now also closely surveilled in exchange for the privilege.

Food giant Loblaw, which has a nearly 30 percent share of the Canadian grocery market, has rolled out an array of sometimes heavy-handed measures to combat what it calls “organized crime.” The beefed-up security can include wheel-locking shopping carts and looming Plexiglas barriers (creating what one user on X called a “jailhouse feel.”) In March, Loblaw also began testing receipt scanners in Ontario. The pilot required shoppers to scan a receipt’s bar code to open a metal gate to let them leave the premises. Consumers immediately hated it, as it led to confusion at the exit, with loud alarms constantly going off. One customer quoted by the CBC said that, at a time of skyrocketing grocery prices, the measures are “just kind of kicking [shoppers] while they’re down.”

Earlier this year, some Costco locations in Canada and the US adopted their own customer scanning requirements—but not on the way out of the store. As a deterrent to a rise in membership sharing as it builds out its own self-checkout, the warehouse retailer required shoppers to scan-in as they entered the store and to be checked by a camera against their membership. More surveillance.

Despite the odds being stacked against shoppers and labourers, there’s been a recent self-checkout consumer backlash, even a decline in consumer loyalty, but it’s been modest. Still, the overall frustration has led to small wins. In April, posters encouraging shoppers to steal from Loblaws on May 12 began popping up. Later, May became the “boycott Loblaws month”—a temporary protest that, for some, is set to stretch on indefinitely even as the company met with one of the boycott organizers. At that meeting, according to Yahoo Canada, Loblaw CEO Per Bank shared the company was ditching its multi-buy promotions, which forced shoppers at No Frills locations to buy multiples of an item to get a discount. In another concession, the company finally signed the voluntary federal grocery code of conduct, which is meant to formalize and govern the relationship between food retailers and their suppliers. But it looks like Loblaws is keeping self-checkout.

Not everyone is, though. Some retailers in Canada and the US, including a handful of Canadian Tire and Walmart locations, have done away with the model. Still, the tech remains widely in use. Even when a store ditches the machines, it’s likely out of concern about shrink than customer experience.

Doctorow argues for a right of exit—the opportunity for users to easily move from one platform to another to avoid being locked in. That’s a form of competition and consumer power we could apply to the retail consumer market too. But governments aren’t exactly rushing to make this happen—to break apart retail oligopolists, to induce competition, to preserve local shops and small players as an alternative. The upshot is we are citizens of the enshittocene with no clear way out.

The story of how Ottawa failed to deal effectively with the three-week “Freedom Convoy” protest in January 2022 is a particularly Canadian story. As with so many problems we can’t fix, it involves jurisdictional overlap that allowed officials to do nothing because they would not be blamed for doing nothing.

When Canada announced that, as of January 15, 2022, no unvaccinated truckers could cross the border into the United States, it was a major challenge to an industry that had been under intense pressure since the start of the pandemic. Many truckers had a tough time during COVID-19, when businesses closed their bathrooms to them, leaving them struggling as they did their vital work between two stricken countries. “We worked eight months with no sanitizer, no face masks, nothing, smack dab in between Windsor and Sarnia,” Brigitte Belton, a trucker from Wallaceburg, later told the Public Order Emergency Commission. “We had no bathrooms. We had no showers. We were refused everywhere we went. You have no idea what it’s like to pee in a park on your way home from work.”

Because they were deemed essential workers, carrying essential supplies to keep the country moving, truckers had not been required to be vaccinated. Most of them were, but for thousands of them—mostly people who wrongly believed conspiracy theories about the vaccines—this mandate put them in the lurch. They could stop crossing the border, but that would mean a severe pay cut. Many had to get the jab or lose their trucks. Belton, a mother and grandmother, was facing bankruptcy. She testified that she contemplated taking her life because of the trauma around the border crossings.

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On November 16, Belton had a hard time crossing at Windsor after a run to the United States. She can’t wear a mask because, she says, she has been a victim of violence, and covering her face makes her anxious. At the border, she was confronted by an officer with the Canada Border Services Agency. He got fed up after a couple of exchanges, directed her to wait in a parking lot, and told her he was going to bring in the Windsor police. Frustrated, she recorded a TikTok video on her phone in which she vented all her anger: “In Canada we’re no longer free,” she said. “This may be the night where I go and ask for exile into the US, because this isn’t my country, this isn’t what my grandparents came for, being harassed at the border over a mask.”

Chris Barber, a Saskatchewan trucker, was one of many who saw the video. He contacted Belton, and they started talking about organizing a protest. Belton mentioned that she had once been stuck on the Blue Water Bridge during a CBSA union work stoppage. If CBSA agents could shut down the border, truckers could shut down a city. They had the beginning of an idea. Barber was also networking with James Bauder, who had organized the 2019 United We Roll convoy to Ottawa—inspired by the Yellow Vest protests in France—both of which had been criticized for links to far-right and racist groups. Barber was also talking to Pat King, a far-right activist and conspiracy theorist in Red Deer with a big following on social media, and Tamara Lich, who had been active with Alberta separatist parties. A loose organization started to come together.

By January 22, 2022, the trucks were rolling in two convoys, one from Red Deer and the other from Vancouver. A few days later, other convoys left Nova Scotia and southwestern Ontario. Supporters lined overpasses and held signs encouraging the protesters. Belton was touched by the support: “Canadians finally peaceful,” she said. “Canadians supporting each other.” The convoyers kept their spirits up through social media networks—and they were growing stronger by the day.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau denounced them. “The small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa, who are holding unacceptable views that they are expressing, do not represent the views of Canadians,” he said in a news conference as they rolled toward Ottawa.

The convoyers wore his comments as a badge of honour. Belton could not believe that Trudeau was attacking people like her. “The wording that he used was division, the whole time,” she testified later. “I draw the line when my government wants to throw something into my body I cannot remove . . . Bodily autonomy, it is mine. It is not my government’s.”

Most Canadians supported the government’s agenda on COVID-19, but there were millions who did not, and they had had enough. The convoy was forty kilometres long by the time it was rolling through eastern Ontario, with throngs cheering it on. On January 28, the trucks arrived in Ottawa in a cloud of diesel smoke. The city had no idea how to respond.

Ottawa police are used to welcoming protesters, including farmers who annually park their bulky equipment in front of the Parliament buildings to remind MPs of their existence, so they helped the occupiers find places to park their vehicles and gave them an additional parking lot at Coventry Road, five kilometres away. It quickly became clear that the truckers weren’t conducting a normal protest. Unlike the farmers, they were settling in for the long haul. By noon on Saturday, January 29, the protesters had gridlocked the frozen city. Big rigs lined the streets in the downtown core, their engines running constantly, their horns honking.

Randy Hillier, the former Ontario MPP who had been leading protests against health restrictions from the beginning of the pandemic, went in for the day to join the demonstration and was so taken with the festive spirit that he checked into a hotel. “You had never seen such overwhelming friendship and love,” he told me later. “I think euphoria was the best word that I could come up with. It was festive.”

For the protesters, it was a great party, a joyful and peaceful expression of freedom and togetherness. Most of the protesters were not truckers, but many were tradespeople. They built temporary shelters and set up hot tubs for adults and bouncy castles for kids.

For residents of downtown Ottawa, few of whom agreed with the protesters, it was a sudden nightmare in their neighbourhood. Many protesters were uncouth, drunk, and aggressive, taunting the masked and refusing to wear masks in stores and restaurants. The massive Rideau Centre mall had to shut; small businesses lost their customers. Protesters danced on the National War Memorial, put a protest poster and a ball cap on the statue of Terry Fox. Staff at the Shepherds of Good Hope soup kitchen reported being harassed and assaulted.

The residents of the many high-rise buildings near Parliament Hill were constantly bombarded by the chaos in the streets, the stench of diesel fumes, and the sound of horns, making it difficult to sleep or relax. “The first thing you noticed when you stepped outside was all the snow, because services were unable to be rendered due to the occupation that was going on,” Zexi Li, a young public servant who lived downtown, told the commission. “The snow was often coloured yellow or brown due to the public urination and defecation that took place gratuitously. . . . And oftentimes there were illegal bonfires and just trash burning right next to cans of fuel or near the same areas where these individuals would later set off fireworks.”

Running errands became a nightmare, she said. “I’m a small Asian woman. I wore a mask most of the time due to the situation that was going on. It made you a target because it signalled to the people on our streets that we were not supportive of their cause and that we were not one of them. And in turn, they would increase their honking, and target their honking, and shout at us, shout at me, about how they were doing things for us and that they were fighting for our freedoms when, at the same time, I was unable to walk the streets feeling safe.”

The protesters laughed at the residents’ objections. They saw them as Trudeau voters and Liberal mandate-supporters who deserved what they got. “The honking will continue until freedom improves,” ran one slogan.

The convoy movement was steeped in conspiracism, the toxin that spread through algorithmic social media networks during the pandemic, boosted by anti-vaxers selling quack COVID-19 cures, attention-seeking wellness hucksters, antisemites, and foreign propagandists who wanted to increase discord in our society. An increasingly agitated minority was convinced that United Nations troops were being flown in to establish the New World Order, that 5G towers caused the pandemic, that the World Economic Forum was going to force everyone to eat insects. Some of them were furious, believing that politicians were in on a vile conspiracy, and their fury made them dangerous.

Ottawa was in the grip of militants who would not leave until the government handed power over to them. Bauder’s group had posted a memorandum of understanding that laid out the protesters’ demands. The document demanded that the Senate and the governor general “agree to immediately cease and desist all unconstitutional, discriminatory and segregating actions and human rights violations,” deposing the freshly elected legitimate government.

The protesters wanted a meeting with Trudeau, and well-meaning people called for the government to extend some kind of olive branch and negotiate, but Trudeau, who had contracted COVID-19 again, said no. “We are not intimidated by those who hurl abuse at small business workers and steal food from the homeless,” he said in a news conference as the protesters settled in to their expanding camps. “We won’t give in to those who fly racist flags. We won’t cave to those who engage in vandalism.”

Trudeau would not give in to the convoyers. It was a police matter, but the police could not clear the streets.

At the beginning, Ottawa police seemed too friendly to the protesters, posing for pictures and generally trying to be helpful to a group of white people whose values and beliefs they found relatable. An Ottawa Police Service intelligence report later made public described the convoyers as “a truly organic grass roots event that is gathering momentum.”

Under pressure from miserable residents, police chief Peter Sloly tried to take action, but he was stymied, in part, by front-line officers who were reluctant to confront the protesters. Frustrated, he lashed out at his subordinates, which only made things worse. Raids he ordered did not happen. He wanted more officers from the Ontario Provincial Police, but the operational plans he sent to that force were deemed inadequate, and his request went unanswered.

Ottawa was not being policed. Ticketing didn’t start for days. Tow-truck companies hesitated to move illegally parked trucks for fear of losing business from truckers after the protests ended. Protesters were refilling their trucks with jerry cans of diesel. When the police were ordered to put a stop to that, protesters began to carry empty jerry cans en masse to overwhelm law enforcement, but they needn’t have bothered: front-line officers were not following orders to stop them from gassing up. There were reports that sympathetic officers were sharing police intelligence with protesters. Anything the police did could backfire. Families with children were living in some of the trucks, and there were reports of firearms in others.

Throughout, Sloly and Ottawa mayor Jim Watson were ineffectual. Premier Doug Ford, in distant Toronto, had direct constitutional responsibility for policing Ottawa, but he sensed that the public considered the standoff Trudeau’s problem and stayed out of it. He never visited Ottawa and instead left town to go snowmobiling at his cottage.

For the Conservatives, the convoy brought a burst of energy to Parliament Hill. The city was suddenly full of people who felt about the prime minister the way many of their constituents did. An Angus Reid poll showed that the public mood was turning against mandates: 50 percent of Canadians wanted restrictions lifted, and that rose to 80 percent for Conservatives.

Conservative leader Erin O’Toole tried to straddle both sides: he couldn’t embrace the convoyers, whom he viewed as lunatics, nor could he ignore them. He met with some truckers outside Ottawa but not the convoy organizers. The Liberals still attacked him, and the freedom-loving members of his caucus criticized him. Former Conservative leader Andrew Scheer led a group of Saskatchewan MPs to meet with the convoyers to show their appreciation “for the hardworking, patriotic truckers who have kept our supply chains healthy and grocery shelves stocked for the past two years.”

O’Toole tried to keep his MPs from siding with the protesters. “Let them blow their steam,” he said. “I don’t support people breaking the law, so we can’t support this. . . . Once we get through the COVID craziness, the media focus will then be Trudeau running again. I said, get through this and we will crush the next election with the same approach we had.” They refused. On January 31, a third of O’Toole’s caucus signed a letter calling for him to step down. On February 4, MPs voted seventy-three to forty-five to end his leadership.

Pierre Poilievre was waiting in the wings.

Ottawa residents had had it. Abandoned by the police, they were tired of the noise, the fumes, and the maskless louts peeing in snowbanks.

On the day the Tories stuck the knife into O’Toole, Paul Champ, an Ottawa human rights lawyer, was introduced to Zexi Li, who was fed up with her neighbourhood becoming an outdoor toilet. Li agreed to be the lead plaintiff in a class action suit against the convoy. The next day, Champ filed a statement of claim, seeking monetary compensation for those affected by the constant honking.

Days later, Champ won an injunction not only to stop the honking but also to freeze millions of dollars in bank accounts controlled by the organizers. Spurred by friendly coverage from Fox News and viral posts on social media, donations of about $20 million had poured in, helping to pay for hotel rooms, diesel fuel, and logistics in general. The normally quiescent citizens of Ottawa had finally reached their breaking point and were pushing back. On February 13, a neighbourhood dog-walking group from Ottawa South organized a counter protest and blocked a small convoy of flag-bearing vehicles. Police pled with convoy opponents to avoid confrontations.

That same day, at the Canada–US border at Coutts, Alberta, Mounties arrested thirteen convoy protesters who had blockaded the crossing. They seized firearms, body armour, and ammunition. Four protesters were eventually charged with conspiring to murder RCMP officers. Two of them were linked to Jeremy MacKenzie, the Afghanistan War veteran from Nova Scotia who had founded the far-right group Diagolon. Every day, MacKenzie was livestreaming with his friends from the convoy compound in Ottawa.

After the Coutts bust, police moved to clear the blockade at the Ambassador Bridge, the Detroit–Windsor border crossing, which had jammed supply chains for auto-parts manufacturers on both sides of the border. Ford may not have cared about a bunch of Liberal and NDP voters in downtown Ottawa, but he would not let the auto industry get shut down. In a phone conversation with Trudeau, he promised that the Ontario Provincial Police would clear the border. “This is critical,” he told Trudeau. “I hear you. I’ll be up their ass with a wire brush.”

After that border was cleared, the province began to shift police to Ottawa, to augment the beleaguered local force. Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, which enabled him to take extraordinary measures to end the siege. He announced the crackdown in the National Press Theatre, flanked by Chrystia Freeland, Marco Mendicino, and David Lametti. “We cannot and will not allow illegal and dangerous activities to continue,” he stated.

The act empowered the RCMP to play a greater role in policing Ottawa, froze bank accounts being used to fund the protests, and allowed the government to force reluctant towing companies to move trucks. It also stipulated that, within a year, a Public Order Emergency Commission would have to report on whether this use of extraordinary power was justified. Interim Conservative leader Candice Bergen, who had wanted Trudeau to negotiate with the protesters, said invoking the act was a mistake: “The prime minister had the opportunity to talk and listen to so many he disagreed with, and he refused to do so, so this looks like a ham-fisted approach that will have the opposite effect.”

Poilievre, preparing to launch his leadership campaign, confidently asserted what he thought Trudeau should have done: “Real simple. Listen to the science, do what other provinces and countries are doing, that is to end the mandates and restrictions so protesters can get back to their lives and their jobs. The only emergency is the one that Justin Trudeau has deliberately created to divide the country and gain politically.”

A new partisan divide was taking shape, with health measures as the dominant issue around which everyone would have to orient themselves. That had been Trudeau’s choice. In danger of losing an ill-considered election campaign, he had polarized the electorate around vaccination mandates. His gambit worked—just barely—but it led to blowback, cranking up emotions that would have been better soothed. It even unnerved members of Trudeau’s own party.

A few days earlier, Joël Lightbound, MP for the Quebec City riding of Louis-Hébert and chair of the Liberal Quebec caucus, held a lonely news conference in which he objected to Trudeau’s rhetoric. “I fear that this politicization of the pandemic risks undermining the public’s trust in our public health institutions. This is not a risk we ought to be taking lightly.”

For public servants and office workers, the pandemic had been mostly about hunkering down at home, but for street-level workers, life was different. “I think it’s time we stop dividing the population,” Lightbound said. “Not everyone can earn a living on a MacBook at a cottage.”

Police started to clear the streets on February 19. They set up a hundred checkpoints, hemming in the area between the Queensway and the Hill, and slowly moved in, arresting some people. Protesters yelled, “Hold the line,” but they couldn’t, and slowly the police made them leave. “We are in control of the situation on the ground and continue to push forward to clear our streets,” said interim police chief Steve Bell. “We will run this operation twenty-four hours a day until the residents and community have their entire city back.”

Bell had taken over from Sloly, who had been driven to the point of collapse by the crisis and ultimately forced out. With reinforcements from across Canada, the Ottawa police finally had the resources and authority they needed. Tamara Lich and Pat King were arrested and charged. Within forty-eight hours, the streets were cleared and the state of emergency lifted.

Trudeau later testified at length at the Public Order Emergency Commission as commission counsel took him through a record of his behind-the-scenes communication with officials and politicians throughout the crisis. Calm and friendly, he was able to explain his interactions and state of mind with a thoroughness and precision that surprised viewers used to his pep talks full of platitudes and virtue-signalling warnings about extremists who don’t share Canadian values. He was accounting for himself thoroughly and convincingly. “I am absolutely, absolutely serene and confident that I made the right choice,” he said. He had acted when he had to: “The situation was out of control, with the potential for violence, not just in Ottawa but across the country.”

Nomi Claire Lazar, a political science professor at University of Ottawa and the author of States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies, believes things could have gone much worse. “I don’t think anyone can contest the fact that the situation was resolved in a way which was far safer, better than anyone could have hoped.” Lazar was a member of the research council for the commission but also lived through the convoy. “I live just two or three blocks from the cordon area—and we were really expecting that things might go badly. Everyone thought that it might become violent. The situation got resolved without anybody being seriously injured, nobody being killed. It was resolved quickly, effectively, efficiently, safely.”

Commissioner Paul Rouleau, the Ontario Court of Appeal judge who presided over the inquiry, found that Trudeau had met the “very high” threshold necessary to invoke the Emergencies Act. “In my view, there was credible and compelling information supporting a reasonable belief that the definition of a threat to the security of Canada was met.” He did, however, criticize Trudeau for calling the protesters part of a “fringe minority,” which cranked up the tension and energized them. “More of an effort should have been made by government leaders at all levels during the protests to acknowledge that the majority of protesters were exercising their fundamental democratic rights.”

However, this would not be the final word. In January 2024, Federal Court justice Richard Mosley issued a ruling agreeing with an application from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Canadian Constitution Foundation. Mosley ruled that the government’s invocation of the act did not “bear the hallmarks of reasonableness.” A government “cannot invoke the Emergencies Act because it is convenient, or because it may work better than other tools at their disposal or available to the provinces,” he wrote.

Mosley noted that the protests in Alberta and at the border had been cleared by police, that Ottawa could have been managed similarly, and therefore found that the Emergencies Act had not been warranted. He also found that when the RCMP had ordered banks to freeze the accounts of protesters without due process, the government had violated Charter protection against “unreasonable search or seizure.” And by ordering the streets cleared of all protesters rather than merely acting against the law breakers honking horns and blocking roads, the government had violated the political rights of law-abiding protesters.

Both Mosley and Rouleau took care to note that the questions are difficult. “Reasonable and informed people could reach a different conclusion,” wrote Rouleau. “Had I been at [the government] tables at that time, I may have agreed that it was necessary to invoke the Act,” wrote Mosley.

The government immediately announced that it will appeal, so the Supreme Court will ultimately decide which of the two judges was correct. The question of whether the invocation of the act was justified is one for constitutional scholars, but the Mosley ruling was a blow to Trudeau, reinforcing Poilievre’s long-standing critique of his handling of the convoy. “He caused the crisis by dividing people,” Poilievre tweeted. “Then he violated Charter rights to illegally suppress citizens.”

And the invocation of the act opened Trudeau up to more intense attacks from outside Canada. Fox News treated the episode as proof that the Liberal poster boy was a hypocrite, suppressing lawful dissent with the help of jackbooted thugs. On February 21, Tucker Carlson, then the top-rated Fox talking head, warned that northern-style totalitarianism was coming to the United States: “At this point it’s pretty clear that if you want to know the future they are planning for us in the United States, look north to Canada.”

Excerpted from The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau by Stephen Maher. Copyright © 2024 by Stephen Maher. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster Canada, Inc. All rights reserved.

They knew how to pull the sun to the horizon
or fix a lunar that might do for days
of dead reckoning when the sky closed up.

In their wooden boats of spirit, the saints
saw little of God. Mostly the weather
of their affections, hunger for a name,

a better meal, some generous mouth to kiss,
and none of it could be quelled. It was not
a desolation. I think the best

of hearts can trust only upon occasion,
as banks of fog give way to sun, moon, stars,
in the ocean of things as they obscurely are.