The current framing of Canadian elections is fundamentally flawed

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” 

—Didion, Joan. The White Album. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009, p. 3.

Canadian electoral politics presents a carefully crafted facade of choice. Party platforms, debates, policy pivots, and rhetorical clashes all contribute to the illusion of a functioning democracy. However, beneath this surface, a deeper continuity prevails: regardless of the election outcome, the fundamental coordinates of governance remain unchanged. Elections have transitioned from opportunities for renewal to mere rituals of rotation.

This illusion of choice is not imposed from above, but rather, it is a more insidious form of authoritarianism that citizens unwittingly participate in. It convinces them that they are agents of meaningful change, while in reality, nothing fundamental is altered. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to this as an “ideological fantasy”—the stage remains lit, the actors rotate, but the script remains the same.

Canada’s political class is deeply invested in this model. It lets them speak the language of justice and climate while leaving the economic architecture untouched. Even seemingly progressive policies—the carbon tax, capital gains reforms, green energy investments—are designed for minimal disruption. These are diluted gestures, carefully calibrated to avoid offending capital. The result is not transformation but sedation.

When the only choice on offer is between variations of the same ideology, democracy ceases to be a mechanism of agency. It becomes a managed performance. The language used to sell this consent—buzzwords like “affordability,” “inclusion,” and “middle-class prosperity”—becomes hollow. It’s not politics. It’s branding.

The real question isn’t “who should govern?” but “Why does governance look like this at all?”

Crisis of Command

Canadian political discourse has a strangely provincial feel—fiddling with rebates and tariffs while the foundations crack beneath. The country is not collapsing through war or economic catastrophe but through the slow erosion of civic coherence.

Borrowing metaphors from thinkers like Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin, we’re witnessing less of a policy crisis and more of a firmware failure. Land, a theorist of “accelerationism,” argues that liberal democracies can no longer self-repair. Yarvin goes further: democracy itself is outdated. His alternative is a CEO-style governance model, where sovereignty flows from clarity, not chaos.

Canada is not embracing these models but imitating their worst implications. Our political class performs governance while real power has migrated into platforms, financial markets, algorithmic systems, and unelected global institutions.

This federal election is less about choosing a leader and more about co-signing a pre-written script. Mark Carney, former central banker and Davos regular, is positioned as the “adult in the room,” the technocrat who safeguards against right-populist volatility. But technocracy is not a vision. It’s just another version of the status quo—polished, credentialed, and empty.

To say Canada is unravelling is not hyperbole. It’s not collapse—it’s bureaucratically managed incoherence. The country’s founding narrative—liberal democracy, multiculturalism, peacekeeping—no longer maps to lived reality. Indigenous sovereignty is suppressed. Western alienation grows. The Arctic, melting fast, is now a site of geopolitical struggle. This is not a distant future, but a present reality that demands our attention and action.

Power has become polycentric. It no longer resides in Ottawa but in cloud infrastructure, global portfolios, and trade regimes. Canada’s elections, framed around tariffs and rebates, dodge the fundamental question: does democracy retain any command authority here, or is it now just a ceremonial interface? This loss of democratic authority should not be accepted but challenged and reclaimed.

The Managerial Mindset

At the core of Canada’s political inertia is managerialism—governance as risk management. This isn’t unique to Canada, but it’s particularly entrenched here. The cultural premium on “stability” and “order” has mutated into a deep aversion to disruption. Leaders speak in deliverables, not principles. The policy is crafted in Excel, not public forums.

Wendy Brown has written about how neoliberalism transforms citizens into consumers and governance into administration. That’s Canada in 2025: not a democracy in crisis, but one in slow decline, steered by consultants and stewards of inertia.

Take the housing crisis. The response has been marginal incentives and density bonuses. Or climate change: Canada touts carbon pricing while approving new fossil fuel projects. These aren’t solutions. They’re public relations tools. Crises that demand rupture are met with bureaucratic modesty.

The danger of managerialism is that it limits political imagination. Radical policies are dismissed not for lack of merit but for not “fitting the system.” In this way, technocratic logic doesn’t just manage the present—it polices the future.

As Hannah Arendt once said, politics is where the new begins. But that requires vision, which Canadian politics, in its current form, is built to avoid at all costs.

Mark Carney and the Theology of Productivity

Mark Carney isn’t just a technocrat—he’s the high priest of what might be called Productivity Theology. His speeches and writing frame productivity as an economic metric and a civilizational virtue. To him, a society that produces more is a society that has regained its purpose, its value, and its moral centre.

But what if the gods of growth are dead?

In his 2021 book Value(s), Carney, his primary application to be the prime minister,  attempts to chart a post-crisis path through finance, climate, and pandemic. He calls for markets re-anchoring in “true values” like solidarity and sustainability. Yet he never questions market supremacy. He wants capitalism to be more efficient, not just.

Carney’s climate proposals are revealing: decarbonize portfolios, develop green instruments, and price emissions correctly. But all of this assumes the solution to capitalism’s harms is more capitalism—just friendlier and better managed.

His obsession with productivity is not unique. Figures like Christine Lagarde have similarly used the language of competitiveness to justify austerity. The crisis is never distributed. It’s always output. It’s never power. It’s always efficiency.

Compare that with Thomas Piketty, who shows that productivity gains, without redistribution, deepen inequality. Or Mariana Mazzucato, who dismantles productivity as a political construct, not a neutral measure. In Carney’s world, such critiques are too destabilizing. He prefers calibration to confrontation.

In this, Carney isn’t a villain. He’s worse: a sophisticated apologist. His credibility lends new life to a system that should be on trial. He is not the future of global finance—he is its alibi.

Politics Without Purpose

Canadian politics has mastered the grammar of empathy—equity, affordability, inclusion—but it lacks a soul. Rhetoric has replaced the principle. Campaigns are built for retail politics, selling policies to demographic slices like product features. Vision has been replaced by message discipline.

Terms like “middle class” and “climate leadership” are used so vaguely they become meaningless. Progressive branding masks regressive reality: pipelines approved after land acknowledgements, climate funds that subsidize polluters, and equity strategies without redistribution.

Cornel West said justice is what love looks like in public. By that measure, Canada’s politics is sentimental but unjust. It performs empathy without obligation.

The country doesn’t lack thinkers. Charles Taylor, George Grant, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson—all offer blueprints for a different civic horizon. But these insights rarely make it into politics. Our leaders quote polls, not philosophers.

The result? A democracy that can manage but not imagine.

Canada clings to its image as a peacekeeper and moral broker on the global stage. But that myth no longer holds. In Gaza, Canada hedges while war crimes are documented. In Yemen, it sold arms. In Afghanistan, it echoed U.S. blunders.

The peacekeeping brand survives because it flatters the national ego. But it is a mask for strategic compliance, a form of bad faith. We say we stand for justice—but only when it costs nothing.

The world sees through this. So do younger Canadians, whose politics are shaped not by Cold War pride but by imperial collapse and climate despair. They want accountability, not nostalgia.

The Generational Moment Canada Won’t Touch

History rarely offers clean openings. But this is one: a moment cracked open by climate collapse, rising fascism, and a generation done waiting. And yet Canada, polite as ever, hovers at the threshold—watching, equivocating, branding it “a generational election” while doing everything possible to keep the choreography intact. 

That phrase—“generational election”—has become a marketing hook, not a moral reckoning. Urgency is simulated, not seized. Instead of rupture, we get rebrand: new slogans, slightly younger faces, the same script. But the moment demands rupture. The old political order—built on carbon, colonization, and cautious centrism—can’t meet this moment. It was never designed to.

Young Canadians know this. Across the country, they are organizing around climate justice, Indigenous sovereignty, prison abolition, and Palestinian liberation—not as niche causes, but as urgent imperatives. And the response? Performative empathy, diluted promises, and warnings about “electability.” What they demand is moral courage. What they get is strategic evasion. 

Just think: Canada’s election is in full swing—but on Gaza, every leader’s gone mute. Demand the Leaders Debate the Genocide. 

This is more than a political failure—it’s a failure of imagination. Canada mistakes stagnation for steadiness. It manages crisis with procedural calm while the ground shifts beneath it. We are, as Gramsci wrote, living in the interregnum—where the old is dying and the new struggles to be born. And in that gap, Canada defaults to drift.

But what if we didn’t? What if we treated this moment not as a threat, but a call to build? New cities. New energy systems. New diplomacy rooted in justice, not deference. The crisis is real—but so is the chance to begin again. History has offered Canada a door. Will we walk through—or close it quietly behind us?

The “hollow centre” is a political condition

Canada’s political condition is not irreversible. But it demands a new kind of politics—less managerial and more moral. It is less obsessed with calibration and more concerned with clarity. It is less focused on preserving the centre and more willing to question what the centre even is. And yet, what we receive from the political class is an elaborate choreography of stasis: neoliberal technocrats recycling old programs in a new language, parties posturing as agents of change while promising to keep everything familiar.

This is not a uniquely Canadian failure, but we are particularly adept at hiding it. Our national myths of politeness, stability, and “not being America” allow us to dodge the more profound reckoning with our complicity, colonial foundations, and failure to lead when it matters most. 

The “hollow centre” is more than an ideological position—it is a political condition. It is what happens when a country loses faith in its ability to be bold. When its leaders speak in euphemisms, its institutions substitute procedures for purpose. When imagination is treated as a threat rather than a resource.

That means asking more significant questions: Who holds power? What kind of future are we building? And who gets to decide? 

The current framing of Canadian elections is fundamentally broken—not because the wrong party is ahead in the polls, but because the political discourse has hollowed out. We are offered choices without change, rhetoric without substance, governance without imagination. The centre holds—but only in the sense that it prevents anything new from being born.

Canada cannot afford another election about nothing, not in a world on fire. The myths are crumbling. If it is willing to shed the safety of centrism and speak with clarity about what it stands for in a fractured world, and if it is willing to stop managing decline and start building futures, the future is up for grabs. 

Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva.