The task of looking back to January of 2024 and reviewing the whole year is, to be frank, painful.
The news of the past 12 months has been almost unrelentingly bad, especially on the larger world stage.
Wars in Gaza / Lebanon and Ukraine continue to exact a huge and utterly unjustifiable human toll. Other sanguinary, ongoing conflicts, in Sudan and Burma for instance, are equally devastating, even if they do not receive the attention they merit.
Then, there is (still) climate change, and its catastrophic consequences, which will only get worse. This growing crisis for the planet has almost totally fallen out of favour as a policy priority everywhere on the globe.
On Monday, December 16, question period in Canada’s House of Commons was almost uniquely obsessed with what, from the outside, might have looked like nothing more than a family quarrel in a governing party.
Former finance minister Chrystia Freeland’s melodramatic resignation, accompanied, as it was, by an open letter damning the policies she had championed as recently as the previous day, had us all in its thrall.
For almost the entire period in the House that day, members from all three main opposition parties peppered the government side with questions – or, more accurately, rhetorical denunciations disguised as questions – focused on the former finance minister’s bombshell.
It was left to the leader of the tiny Green Party caucus of two, Elizabeth May, to speak about something that might be almost as consequential as political infighting in Canada: the fate of the planet and humanity.
May’s last question for the year 2024 was:
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has told us that if we do not globally reduce emissions, and see dramatic reductions ‘at the latest before 2025’, we will shoot way past the Paris Agreement targets, shoot way past 2°C, and face climate disaster. I think of the words in that film The Age of Stupid: What were we thinking, to avoid the opportunity to save ourselves when we had the chance? [Sadly] perhaps this question period answers [that] question!”
As 2024 ends, the man pollsters and pundits expect to become the next Canadian prime minister, Pierre Poilievre, is promoting what amounts to a climate-change-denying platform.
His main slogan is: Axe the Tax, meaning the carbon tax. He repeats it ad nauseam. But the Conservative leader has barely uttered a sentence, let alone a whole speech, about his climate change policy.
We have to conclude he does not have one.
Liberal-NDP deal’s successes go unnoticed
In a more tranquil time, the unfolding achievements of the NDP-Liberal supply and confidence agreement, signed in 2022, would constitute significant and memorable highlights of 2024.
Those achievements include: a first step toward coast-to-coast single-payer pharmacare, public dental care coverage for those who do not have it now, legislation protecting national $10 per day child care, federal anti-scab legislation, a housing accelerator fund, and the re-focusing of the rental construction finance initiative on affordable housing.
Mind you, many of the NDP-Liberal deal’s measures are still in the early, formative stage.
To fully implement such items as child care, pharmacare and dental care, the federal government needs agreements with each of the provinces. Talks to achieve those agreements remain works-in-progress.
In other words, it is too early to expect voters to give anyone credit for the confidence and supply agreement’s very real accomplishments. Most Canadians are not yet experiencing the impact of those accomplishments in their daily lives.
Until a few months ago, New Democratic politicians and strategists were whispering: “Just wait until pharmacare and dental care are fully implemented. That’s when we will reap the political rewards”.
But then, in September of this past year, the New Democrats themselves grew tired of waiting.
NDP leader Jagmeet Singh made a big show of, in his words, “ripping up” his party’s agreement with the Trudeau government.
Singh’s stated reason was not that the Trudeau team had failed to live up to its side of the bargain. It was rather, in Singh’s words, that “Liberals are too weak, too selfish and too beholden to corporate interests to fight for people.”
In his next sentence, though, Singh revealed his motive was based on politics, not policy: “They (the Liberals) cannot stop the Conservatives. But we can.”
New Democrats had come to fear the confidence and supply agreement was dragging them down, making them seem like nothing more than the junior partners of an increasingly unpopular Liberal government.
If NDPers were to have any chance of portraying themselves to a restive electorate as agents of change they would have to create significant daylight between themselves and the Trudeau government.
Singh hoped then – and still hopes now – the many voters who have been telling pollsters they intend to vote Conservative will see the NDP as a more humane, friendlier and less anger-driven version of change.
That has not happened yet, but there might still be time.
A first step for Singh and the NDP would be to come up with a serious and robust suite of policies, and then expend some serious energy communicating it to Canadians.
The far Right is on the march everywhere
That’s the story on the Centre-Left.
Truth to tell, however, the big political story of 2024, in Canada, as in the U.S. and many other countries, was not on that side of the political ledger. It was on the know-nothing, populist Right.
In the Netherlands, the nationalist, anti-immigrant Party for Freedom, which had won the largest number of seats in the 2023 election, joined a new coalition government in July of 2024, a first for that country.
Earlier, in France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (the RN, or National Rally) had enjoyed a strong showing in spring elections to the EU parliament.
Then, president Emmanuel Macron called an early election for the French parliament, the National Assembly, where, in the first round, the RN won the most seats.
A last-minute cooperation agreement among left wing parties, the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP, or New Popular Front), spearheaded by Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the progressive grass-roots group La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), headed Le Pen’s party off at the pass in the second round of voting.
To the surprise of every pundit and pollster, the NFP won the most seats. However, there are presidential elections in a bit more than two years, and, right now, Le Pen’s party is leading the pack. Or, at least, that’s what all the polls tell us.
In Hungary, prime minister Viktor Orban revels in extolling European (aka white) Christian identity. He has made life miserable for refugees, immigrants, and the large Roma community, who have lived in Hungary for something like 1,000 years.
Orban has won five elections in a row, making him the dean of right-wing populists.
In Italy, Giorgia Meloni was only elected two years ago. But she is now firmly entrenched as prime minister. She heads the anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ Brothers of Italy Party, which has its roots in Italy’s post-World-War-II neo-fascist movement.
The Scandinavian countries have long stood as models of social democratic tolerance.
Now, in Sweden, the far-right, anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats are the second largest party in parliament. The far-right group is almost a part of the current government. The Sweden Democrats have entered into a confidence-supply-agreement to keep afloat a minority coalition of more moderate centre-right parties.
In Austria, the ultra-nationalist Freedom Party (FPO) won the largest number of seats in the most recent election, in September 2024.
The FPO’s leader, Herbert Kickl, advocates for something he calls Fortress Austria and proposes a massive program to send immigrants back to where they came from. Sound familiar?
In Germany the far-right, ultra-nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) sits comfortably in second place in the polls, with an election expected in late February.
The AfD sometimes tries to portray itself as a more-or-less normal right-wing party. But its leaders speak frequently about the need for Germany to stop apologizing for the horrors the Nazi regime inflicted on humanity.
They do not necessarily deny the Holocaust, but want to, without chagrin or ambiguous feelings, celebrate what they call the historic (pure) German identity. That kind of ethnic chauvinism flirts dangerously close to Adolf Hitler’s Nordic racial superiority ideology.
On December 21, a driver mowed down scores of people, killing five, in a Christmas market in the German town of Magdeburg. Police arrested a suspect, a doctor originally from Saudi Arabia, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen.
Because of the identity of the suspect, some immediately assumed the motivation for the attack was extremist Islam. It now seems the opposite was the case.
We have learned that the doctor is a committed anti-Muslim, and a supporter of the AfD.
These days the most powerful man in the U.S. might not be Donald Trump, but rather his confidant and supporter, Elon Musk, the world’s richest person.
Immediately after the Christmas Market attack, Musk tweeted offensive and derisive comments about current German Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Musk was clearly suggesting the German political establishment has been too welcoming to Muslim immigrants.
The day before the Magdeburg attack, Musk had tweeted: “Only the AfD can save Germany.”
Musk’s interventions, neither of which Donald Trump has disavowed, signal the beginnings of a trans-Atlantic axis of far-right nationalist movements. Just as the World War II Axis had an Asian component, this new axis extends well beyond North America and Europe.
Not just in Europe
In Latin America there is Javier Milei in Argentina. He’s the economist and media personality who was elected to the presidency a bit more than a year ago. Milei wants to take a chainsaw to his country’s budget, and has described concerns about climate change as “deceptions promoted by neo-Marxists”.
Then there is Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, who lost his majority in the 2024 election, but still has a firm grip on power.
Modi has had a long career as a Hindu nationalist, going back to his days as head of government in Gujarat state, in the west of India.
The current Indian PM has never succeeded in erasing his association with the violent Hindu mobs who massacred Gujarati Muslims, decades ago, during incidents of what Indians call “communal violence”
The population of India is over 1.4 billion. Close to 15 per cent, about 200 million, are Muslim.
And the strongman trend does not stop at India. There are also similar strongman governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Turkey – not to mention Russia and Israel.
In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party used to form coalitions with mainstream Right and centrist parties.
Now, Netanyahu has chosen to find a different sort of dance partner. He has formed a coalition with Israel’s far right, extremist, ultra-nationalist parties – parties which used to be considered beyond the pale in Israel’s fractured politics.
These extremists, who include senior Netanyahu ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, not only support the most brutal military tactics imaginable in response to Hamas’ reckless and vicious actions on October 7, 2023, they openly seek to formally annex the entire occupied West Bank, between the Jordan River and the pre-1967 Israeli border.
Far-right Israeli politicians never say precisely what should happen to the two and a half million Palestinians who live in the West Bank territory.
One thing is certain: they have no intention whatsoever of offering those Palestinians anything remotely resembling citizenship in the new Greater Israel they envision.
Our neighbour’s populist strongman
Finally, there is the U.S.
Donald Trump managed to coast to a second term on widespread dissatisfaction with (very real) inflation and what his followers believe to be out-of-control waves of asylum seekers streaming across U.S.’s southern border.
There was a moment during the Democrats faltering campaign, just after President Joe Biden stepped aside, when it seemed Kamala Harris could execute a successful rescue operation.
But it was not to be.
In the end, Donald Trump made it seem easy. He won both the popular vote and the electoral college. The last time a Republican did that was 20 years ago.
When he won for the first time, in 2016, Trump seemed a bit dazed and disorganized.
In 2016, rookie politician Trump dithered and hesitated throughout the process of selecting cabinet members and other senior officials.
For secretary of state, for instance, Trump interviewed numerous candidates, until finally coming up with oil company executive Rex Tillerson. Remember him? Like a good many of Trump’s appointees Tillerson didn’t last long.
This time, with help from the Project 2025 folks at the Heritage Foundation and other great minds of the emerging populist Right, Trump is firing on all cylinders, even before he takes office.
He has named almost his entire new cabinet and even found time to select a new ambassador to, of all places, Canada.
This country has, indeed, become a somewhat surprising target for the president-elect.
Not long after the election he took to social media to threaten both Canada and Mexico.
Trump threatened to impose 25 per cent tariffs on goods imported from the two
countries if they did not stop the flow of illegal drugs and irregular migrants into the U.S.
The Mexicans were defiant in their response. By contrast, in Canada, there was near
panic.
Prime Minister Trudeau almost immediately flew down to Trump’s residence in Mar-a-
Lago Florida for a chat and dinner. Trump enjoyed the attention, but gave no indication
that any of Trudeau’s entreaties had moved him.
Then, in the final days of the year, Global Affairs minister Melanie Joly and Dominic
Leblanc, who had just been appointed Finance Minister to replace Chrystia Freeland
after her sudden resignation, flew to Florida to meet some of Trump’s key counsellors.
They too came back empty handed.
Trump has also found time to start a conversation we have not heard since the days of William Henry Seward.
Who was that, you ask?
Seward was the U.S. secretary of state who negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia, in 1867. At the time, many of Seward’s contemporaries scoffed. They called the $7 million deal with Russia Seward’s folly. He’s having the last laugh now.
After the Alaska triumph, Seward wanted to move on to more conquests, and he had his eyes on Canada.
Specifically, Seward wanted the U.S. to acquire the vast territories in the West and North that, on July 1 1867, did not become part of the new Dominion of Canada.
Today, we call those territories Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, Yukon, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and a good chunk of northwest Ontario.
Seward thought those resource-rich lands were ripe for the picking. He had long marvelled at Canada’s “vast wheat-fields in the West, its broad hunting ranges at the North, its inexhaustible lumber lands, the most extensive now remaining on the globe, its invaluable fisheries, and its yet undisturbed mines.”
Other American leaders, licking the wounds from their recently-ended civil war, were more cautious. They did not think the U.S. needed more expansionist adventures at a time of reconstruction.
Now, we’re in a different time.
The U.S. economy, despite the querulousness of many Trump voters, is soaring. It’s growth and productivity far outpace all other wealthy countries, including Canada.
Historically, when rich countries have felt the blood of wealth and power coursing through their veins they have turned to expansionism. But Trump’s acolytes want to reassure us about his ambitions. They say he’s just joking with all of his 51st state talk.
But is he, really? Is it all just childish, bullying behaviour from a pathologically self-involved man who has an insatiable appetite for attention?
That might be the case.
Or, is Donald Trump now trying to finish the job William Seward started more than a century and a half ago?
2025 promises to be quite a year.
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