“Having to wait until one’s death to be allowed to live is really quite an ontological feat.”
– Robert Musil, Austrian Novelist, Journalist and Writer
Like a phantom limb, the unfinished The Man Without Qualities haunts the landscape of modern literature. It is a testament to the elusive nature of meaning in a society adrift. Robert Musil constructs a portrait of a glittering and hollow society—a civilisation luxuriating in refinement, brimming with ideas, yet paralysed by its inability to act.
Reading Musil today feels like holding a mirror to our uneasy times. Nowhere is this resonance more poignant than in Canada, a nation celebrated for its civility, stability, and moderation yet burdened by a quiet decadence of its own.
Set in the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kakania, as the empire is affectionately satirised, embodies a world caught between the weight of its traditions and the absence of a guiding future. Kakania, coined by Musil to describe the empire’s intellectual and cultural stagnation, where intellectual vitality is matched only by its stifling inertia. It is not a civilisation in collapse but in decline, an empire at once thriving and incapable of renewal.
Like Musil’s Kakania, Canada is a society prosperous in ideas but curiously averse to their execution, a place where ambition is dulled by comfort and where the machinery of governance churns endlessly without producing vision. The parallels are as unsettling as they are illuminating. Canada, in its way, mirrors this disposition. It has cultivated an identity of moderation and pragmatism, a middle ground that avoids extremes but risks hollowing itself out. While fostering stability, this ethos has bred a political and cultural inertia, a reluctance to pursue bold or transformative change. Ulrich, Musil’s central character, is the quintessential “man without qualities”—an intellectual sceptic, brilliant yet unmoored, unwilling to commit to belief or action. He drifts through the world with detachment, his refusal to choose emblematic of a society that has grown distrustful of grand narratives yet unable to navigate their absence. The “Parallel Campaign,” an elaborate attempt to celebrate Austria-Hungary’s greatness, collapses under the weight of its abstraction, a farcical testament to a society out of touch with its realities. Canada’s political machinery, though less theatrical, exhibits a similar stasis.
Trudeau Resigns
Justin Trudeau has announced his resignation as Canada’s prime minister, marking the end of an era that began with promises of renewal but collapsed under paralysis and disillusionment. Standing before his Ottawa residence on a frigid January morning, Trudeau delivered his parting words with characteristic polish, yet behind the measured tone lay the unmistakable echoes of failure.
Citing months of gridlock in what he called “the longest session of a minority Parliament in Canadian history,” Trudeau revealed he had asked the governor general to prorogue Parliament until March 24. “Despite best efforts to work through it, Parliament has been paralysed,” he admitted; the cracks in his once-untouchable leadership are now fully exposed. This, then, is Trudeau’s final act: not a triumph but a quiet retreat from a stage that had grown hostile, leaving behind a government in limbo and a country still searching for its next chapter.
Justin Trudeau’s sheen has worn thin, and his image of effortless charm and progressive ideals is now a shadow of its former self. The falling poll numbers aren’t just a referendum on his leadership but the closing lines of a political tragedy. His fate—once buoyed by youth, charisma, and a promise of sunny ways—now feels inexorably tied to the quicksand of his own making. The sudden resignation of his deputy and Finance Minister, Chrystia Freeland, is less an isolated incident and more a damning indictment of a government running on fumes. In a political theatre increasingly consumed by spectacle, Freeland’s exit feels like the ultimate curtain drop—abrupt, calculated, and mercilessly final.
It was not with an anodyne effect, a term meaning a soothing or calming influence, but a deleterious development in Canadian politics. For Freeland, the cerebral face of Trudeau’s cabinet, walking away at this juncture is as much an act of self-preservation as it is of strategic disavowal. After all, who wants to go down with a ship that insists on hitting every iceberg? Her departure punctuates an era that began with breathless ambition but has devolved into a hapless exercise in managing crises—many of which are self-inflicted. The country’s finance portfolio under Freeland’s watch became a high-wire act between policy paralysis and performative governance, emblematic of the broader malaise gripping Trudeau’s tenure.
But Trudeau’s fall is not just a story of personal hubris or political entropy; it reflects the Canadian electorate’s growing disillusionment with promises that age poorly under the glare of reality. His brand, once invincible, has been caught in the undertow of affordability crises, ethical scandals, and a cultural landscape that has grown weary of Instagram diplomacy and symbolic platitudes. Freeland is not a peccant persona, and her resignation, a baleful act, doesn’t just mark the end of a partnership—it signals the unravelling of Trudeau’s carefully curated narrative, leaving behind a hollow man in a house of cards.
Without a coherent story to tell
Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland aren’t the architects of Canada’s decline—they are its symptoms, bright veneers masking a nation at the edge of its idea. Trudeau’s fall from grace and Freeland’s abrupt resignation merely underscores the deeper unravelling: a country once brimming with promise is now stumbling through the politics of decadence and fragmentation. Their exits are less about individual failures and more about the hollowing out of a national narrative, leaving Canada adrift in the fog of its contradictions and societal issues.
A nation without a coherent story to tell itself or the world remains—a patchwork polity subsumed by competing diasporas, policy inertia, and a timid political class. The sunny optimism of Trudeau’s early years has curdled into a brittle cynicism, emblematic of a more profound crisis: Canada lacks the philosophical impetus to meet the seismic challenges of the coming decades. The climate emergency, the affordability crisis, and an increasingly multipolar world demand a clarity of purpose that seems beyond the grasp of its leaders and institutions.
This is Canada at the edge of its idea, a nation struggling to define itself in the face of profound fragmentation. The two-nation compact of Anglophone and Francophone identities has been overwhelmed by competitive diasporic rivalries—Ukrainian, Jewish, Sikh, Hindu, and Chinese—each vying for power, influence, and narrative supremacy. It all is embedded in the public eye in different ways. One is the Government of Canada, which established the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions instituted on September 7, 2023—the final report to be tabled by the end of January 2025. One of the manifestations can be described in the downward spiral of the diplomatic relations between Canada and India, underlining the growing clashes between the Sikh and Hindu communities. In another reported incident, the City of Surrey had to intervene and close down an exhibition at the Museum of Surrey after a major Sikh organisation demanded its removal.
Similarly, in the fall of 2023, Jewish groups demanded an explanation after Anthony Rota, the then speaker of Canada’s House of Commons, introduced a 98-year-old veteran of an SS unit Yarsolav Hunka as a “hero” and how the mainstream dealt with the generally unspoken issue of Canada’s Nazi problem. However, in Canada, these memories and their public display have returned to haunt. Unsurprisingly and away from the media glare and the Capital, an Oakville cemetery 20 miles south of Toronto finally “removed “a monument that pays tribute to a Ukrainian unit — the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division, which was unveiled on May 26, 1988. Nevertheless, its enduring presence has not shielded it from controversy. It has weathered condemnations, petitions for removal, and sporadic acts of vandalism, culminating in a defacement in 2020 when it was labelled as a “Nazi War Monument.”
Insalubrious as it might seem, this cacophony of diasporas has become the key driver in shaping public discourse, influencing policy, and redirecting narratives around national identity and governance. This dynamic has created a complex web of political allegiances, cultural grievances, and ideological contradictions, which, rather than enriching Canada’s democracy, has often exposed its fragility and lack of ideological coherence.
Trudeau and Freeland are but actors in this larger drama, their rise and fall mere chapters in the broader story of a country grappling with its meaninglessness. What was once an aspirational experiment in pluralism now teeters on the brink, its politics reduced to shallow gestures, its vision clouded by decay.
At the same time, this competition operates against the backdrop of Canada’s crises of affordability, cost of living, and climate policy, all while highlighting the absence of a robust ideological foundation in the country’s political landscape. The result is a vacuum of capital-P Politics—the kind that grapples with fundamental questions about power, purpose, and the future of the nation—and an over-reliance on superficial identity politics or reactive policymaking.
The idea of Canada—its promise of pluralism, equality, and an alternative to the political decadence of other Western democracies—has eroded in the melee of neoliberalism, empire, and the Cold War’s lingering residue. What remains is a nation without a coherent narrative, subsumed by the politics of decadence and fragmentation and without the philosophical impetus to meet the challenges of the coming decades.
The Ghost of an Idea
Canada’s identity has long been entwined with the notion of being a “middle power,” a moral voice in global affairs that eschews the swagger of imperial ambition. Yet, this identity was always more aspiration than reality, tethered to Canada’s role as an appendage to British colonialism and, later, as a junior partner in the American empire. The Cold War provided the scaffolding for a vision of Canada as a bridge-builder, a peacekeeper, and a land of refuge. But this vision crumbled as the Cold War gave way to the neoliberal world order.
Today, Canada’s foreign policy often operates as an echo chamber for Western powers, a hollow mimicry of U.S. priorities dressed up in the language of rules-based order. The crisis is not merely one of geopolitics but of intellectual impoverishment: Canada lacks a robust philosophical framework to imagine itself as a meaningful presence in the world. Without this, it risks becoming a political afterthought—a nation defined by its deference rather than its agency.
Figures like Chrystia Freeland and Justin Trudeau epitomise this politics of decline. With her technocratic fluency and staunch Atlanticist worldview, Freeland represents a Canada eager to insert itself into the machinery of empire but reluctant to challenge its fundamental assumptions. Trudeau, for all his sunny rhetoric of inclusion and progress, embodies a superficial progressivism that prioritises branding over substance. Together, they illustrate how Canada’s political class has become ensnared in the contradictions of neoliberalism, offering symbolic gestures in place of structural change.
The Archetypes of Decadence
Freeland and Trudeau encapsulate the decadent politics of contemporary Canada, each offering a distinct facet of the nation’s malaise. Freeland’s technocratic pragmatism represents the managerial approach to decline, a politics that prioritises stability over ambition and rhetoric over vision. Trudeau’s performative idealism, by contrast, reflects the triumph of branding in a fractured nation, where the appearance of progress suffices in the absence of genuine unity or purpose. Both figures are ideally suited to a Canada adrift in the aftermath of empire and the Cold War. They are leaders for a nation that has abandoned the hard work of nation-building in favour of image management. This country has traded its aspirations for a politics of survival. Their archetypes reveal not just the failures of individual leadership but the broader decadence of Canadian politics—a decadence rooted in the loss of a coherent national identity and a unifying vision for the future.
Freeland’s rise reflects Canada’s transformation into an agent of global hegemonic power structures. Her credentials—a blend of polished intellectualism and fluency in geopolitical jargon—make her a darling of the international elite, yet they mask a politics steeped in decadence. Her much-lauded commitment to liberal internationalism translates, in practice, into a continuation of Cold War-era alignments and imperial logic. Freeland champions NATO’s eastward expansion aligns Canadian foreign policy with U.S. priorities and reinforces a Western-centric worldview that prizes military alliances over genuine diplomacy.
Her 2017 House of Commons speech, celebrated as a defence of democratic values in uncertain times, epitomises this veneer of moral clarity. Cloaked in the language of freedom and resolve, it positioned Canada as a stalwart defender of the liberal world order—a euphemism for Western dominance. Freeland’s invocation of her family history, as the descendant of Ukrainian immigrants opposing Russian aggression, lends her narrative an emotional potency that distracts from its deeper implications. It allows her to wield selective memory, championing solidarity abroad while ignoring Canada’s complicity in undermining sovereignty through arms sales to Saudi Arabia or support for coups in Latin America.
Freeland’s archetype is the technocrat in service to decadence—a figure who skillfully manages decline while avoiding the risks of transformative change. Her politics offer symbolic victories and rhetorical grandeur but cede substantive independence and agency. She exemplifies a liberalism that sustains relevance not through innovation or moral leadership but through subservience to established hegemonies of the empire.
If Freeland is the calculating steward of Canada’s decadence, Justin Trudeau is its charismatic figurehead—a leader whose appeal lies in the spectacle of his persona rather than the substance of his governance. Trudeau’s archetype is that of the idealistic reformer, the embodiment of youthful energy and inclusive politics. Yet his tenure reveals a politics of contradiction, where soaring rhetoric meets the hard wall of inaction.
Trudeau excels in performative leadership. He kneels at Black Lives Matter protests and offers tearful apologies for Canada’s colonial sins, but the structural injustices persist. His government speaks of climate leadership, yet emissions remain high, and pipelines are pushed through unceded Indigenous territories. Reconciliation is promised, but the machinery of extraction continues. Under Trudeau, progressivism becomes a mask for inertia, a politics of gestures that obscures the absence of meaningful transformation.
This performative idealism extends to Canada’s global posture, where Trudeau has carefully crafted an image of the nation as a progressive counterpoint to Trumpism and Brexit-era chaos. Yet beneath this façade lies a country complicit in perpetuating the very systems of exploitation it claims to oppose. Canada profits from arms sales avoid accountability for corporate abuses in the Global South and offers tepid responses to global crises. Its soft power is leveraged not to disrupt the status quo but to sustain it, trading on reputation rather than taking risks for substantive change.
Together, Freeland and Trudeau reveal the contours of Canadian decadence—a politics that manages rather than inspires, that gestures toward ideals without committing to their realisation. Their leadership reflects not just individual failures but the broader malaise of a nation adrift, a country unwilling to confront the contradictions of its identity or imagine a future beyond the comforts of its carefully curated image.
Liberal technocracy and authoritarianism
As B. Jessop argues, Canada blazed a trail for austerity, becoming a poster child for an ‘austerity polity’ where budget cuts weren’t just a temporary fix but a deeply ingrained way of life. “Austerity, a multifaceted doctrine, extends beyond mere fiscal restraint. It demands the relentless pursuit of efficiency through market-driven public services and the ruthless restructuring of labour markets to enhance ‘competitiveness.'” Authors such as Alicja Paulina Krubnik and Stephen McBride have elaborated how this insidious system, “built on a foundation of neoliberal ideology, ensures that political and economic elites relentlessly push to dismantle social programs and return to a ‘business-as-usual’ of austerity, regardless of the human cost. In Canada, monetary austerity is being fought on the backs of workers and homeowners. This ideology, deeply embedded within the Canadian psyche, has become a self-perpetuating force. The constant pressure to maintain balanced budgets is a subtle yet insidious constraint, effectively stifling any attempt to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy. This ‘fiscal prudence,’ a convenient euphemism for austerity, ensures that any significant deviation from the prescribed path is met with fierce resistance. The seeds of this austerity regime were sown during the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, a period marked by a dramatic dismantling of the welfare state. The federal government, embarking on a relentless crusade of spending cuts, deficit elimination, and state retrenchment, laid the groundwork for this enduring legacy. Far from being a historical anomaly, these policies have become deeply ingrained within the Canadian political and economic landscape, shaping its priorities and limiting its potential. Canada, in essence, has transformed into an ‘austerity polity,’ where the pursuit of fiscal restraint has become an unquestioned dogma, shaping its destiny.”
Given Canada’s deficit, the $61.9-billion deficit recorded in 2023–24 was $21.8 billion higher than the $40.0-billion deficit projected in the April 2024 federal budget. The argument of Canada as a Polity of austerity, here I am reminded of the brilliant inquisition by Clara Mattei in her book, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, published in 2022. One of the book’s most unsettling revelations is the continuity between liberal technocracy and fascist authoritarianism. While these political forms are often presented as opposed, Mattei reveals their shared reliance on austerity as a disciplinary tool. For instance, she notes how liberal economists supported Mussolini’s economic policies, lending intellectual legitimacy to fascist austerity measures. This blurring of boundaries, Mattei argues, should prompt us to reconsider comforting binaries between liberalism and authoritarianism. Austerity, she shows, has an inherently anti-democratic thrust, insulating economic decision-making from popular accountability and reinforcing hierarchical social relations. Mattei also addresses contemporary implications, noting how austerity persists without a revolutionary threat. In the neoliberal era, austerity has been deployed preemptively to forestall challenges to capitalist stability, illustrating the ruling elite’s acute awareness of the system’s vulnerabilities. Austerity continues to function as a bulwark against systemic change by normalising economic hardship and fragmenting collective action. Mattei’s analysis thus serves as a stark reminder that the logic of austerity is not confined to history; it remains a pervasive force shaping our present. Ultimately, The Capital Order is not just a critique of austerity but an incisive examination of the political economy of capitalism itself. Mattei’s work challenges readers to see austerity not as a neutral economic policy but as a weapon wielded in the ongoing struggle between capital and labour.
The Trudeau Liberals, despite their branding as progressive reformers, have governed in a way that implicitly aligns with Clara E. Mattei’s thesis in The Capital Order. While the rhetoric of inclusivity and economic justice has been central to Justin Trudeau’s political persona, the substance of his government’s macroeconomic policy reveals a more profound commitment to stabilising and perpetuating the “capital order” that Mattei critiques. By balancing progressive gestures with neoliberal economic orthodoxy, the Trudeau Liberals have consolidated the logic of austerity and the class dynamics it sustains, even as they distance themselves from its overt proponents.
At first glance, Trudeau’s fiscal policy appears to reject traditional austerity. His government increased spending on social programs, child care, and pandemic relief, starkly contrasting with the austerity-driven Harper years. However, a closer examination shows that this spending has been carefully structured to avoid challenging the foundational hierarchies of capital. For instance, their target rather than structural spending: Many of the Trudeau government’s initiatives, such as the Canada Child Benefit or pandemic relief programs like CERB, have been temporary or narrowly targeted. They provide immediate support without creating a permanent structural change that could shift the balance of power between labour and capital.
Despite these expenditures, the Trudeau Liberals have maintained a steady focus on deficit reduction and fiscal sustainability, signalling to markets and elites that the government remains committed to neoliberal principles. The 2023 federal budget emphasised fiscal prudence, reflecting an ongoing concern with reassuring investors over expanding long-term social protections. This balancing act mirrors Mattei’s depiction of how austerity is often disguised through selective, politically symbolic spending.
On monetary policy and market discipline, the Trudeau government’s tacit endorsement of the Bank of Canada’s strict inflation-targeting regime exemplifies Mattei’s argument about the role of monetary policy in reinforcing labour discipline. Despite their disproportionate impact on working Canadians, Trudeau has publicly supported the Bank’s aggressive interest rate hikes in response to post-pandemic inflation. By prioritising inflation control over employment and wage growth, monetary policy under the Trudeau Liberals aligns with Mattei’s critique of monetary austerity as a tool to sustain the capital order. Higher interest rates increase unemployment, suppress wage demands, and ensure workers remain dependent on precarious jobs. Similarly, the government’s inaction on structural housing reform and monetary tightening have exacerbated Canada’s housing affordability crisis. Rising mortgage costs, fueled by higher rates, have enriched financial institutions and landlords while deepening market dependence for ordinary Canadians—a quintessential example of how austerity perpetuates inequality and disempowers labour.
In Mattei’s framework, austerity is a rational, if deeply political, project to maintain the capital order by structurally disempowering labour and normalising precarity. The Trudeau Liberals, despite their progressive veneer, have governed in ways that reinforce this logic. By balancing targeted social spending with a broader commitment to neoliberal orthodoxy, they have consolidated the conditions of austerity while masking its more overt features. The Trudeau government’s policies—spanning fiscal restraint, monetary discipline, and industrial deregulation—have upheld the structural hierarchies Mattei identifies as central to perpetuating capitalist stability.
This dynamic highlights the enduring relevance of Mattei’s thesis to contemporary liberal governance. While the Trudeau Liberals may not fit the traditional image of austerity’s champions, their policies have served the same purpose: stabilising the capital order in moments of uncertainty, ensuring that workers remain dependent, capital remains dominant, and systemic change remains out of reach.
Breaking the ‘Cosmic ceiling’
In his insightful analysis in The Decadent Society, Ross Douthat identifies the ‘cosmic ceiling’ as a defining characteristic of our decadent age, a symptom of our collective failure to embrace ambitious, transformative projects. Ultimately, Canada faces a stark choice: succumb to the ‘cosmic ceiling’ that confines its ambition or embrace the spirit of audacious possibility. Like Kakania in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, Canada risks intellectual and cultural atrophy if it remains tethered to incrementalism, prioritising pragmatic maintenance over transformative vision. The path forward demands a radical reimagining – a leap of faith beyond the familiar contours of its political landscape. Whether through bold climate action, ambitious infrastructure projects, or a reinvigorated cultural imagination, Canada must dare to dream of a future that is not merely functional but transformative. Only then can it break free from the inertia that threatens to define its legacy and chart a course toward a future as bold and unfinished as Musil’s masterpiece.
Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic, essayist and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva.
