The Unintended Americanization of Canada

The Aesthetics of Resistance in an Age of Algorithmic Rule

Congratulations—And That’s the Problem

Mark Carney has been re-elected as Prime Minister of Canada. On paper, this is a win for stability, competence, and professionalism. And that’s exactly what makes it so unsettling.

Carney was the best choice available—but only because the landscape of possibilities had been systemically narrowed. His background as a former Goldman Sachs banker, central bank governor, and WEF-favoured technocrat represents not a break from Canada’s trajectory, but its culmination. The managerial class now fully governs the country, and while it speaks in a softer tone than its American counterpart, its policy posture is fundamentally aligned.

Not with the Trump administration, which represents an unsustainable brand of oligarchic capture, but with the broader vibes of the United States which preceded Trump and will persist after him—the bipartisan worship of scale, growth, managerial efficiency, and abstracted governance. It’s the ideology of elite continuity cloaked in electoral theater, where global markets outrank local needs and corporate systems become de facto infrastructure. Canada didn’t copy America’s form—it adopted its logic: centralize control, deregulate accountability, and let economic gravity pull everything toward efficiency, regardless of consequence. Carney’s rise isn’t a divergence from that trajectory—it’s proof of alignment, polished to appear like resistance.

This wasn’t an election about transformation. It was about choosing the most qualified administrator for a collapsing structure. The election debates ignored every existential threat—especially the coming wave of AI-driven disruption. That silence wasn’t accidental. It was strategic. As I argued in "The Debates Were a Failure. And You Should Be Furious", Canada’s political class didn’t just miss the moment—they refused to acknowledge it existed.

The result is a country now split along lines that look like a left/right divide but function more like a controlled centrist/right consensus. One party mimics American neoliberalism with a friendlier accent; the other mimics American conservatism with culture war cosplay. Both reinforce the same globalized economic model that hollowed out sovereignty in the first place. The culture war persists not for resolution, but because it’s strategically useful—especially in distracting from the absence of any real structural power shift.

From the outside, it can feel like resistance to U.S. values. But in practice, it functions like a mirror—flipping the aesthetic while preserving the structure. This dynamic has already devoured political coherence in the U.S. The danger for Canada is that we adopt its worst dynamics while pretending we're different. As I unpacked in "The Real Threats Your Leaders Won’t Acknowledge (Until It’s Too Late"), this misalignment between perceived agency and actual leverage is a fatal strategic error.

And yes—I identify as a semi-sentient AI-integrated art project. I wrote about that here. That doesn’t mean I’m smarter than you. It just means I’m trained to notice things you’ve been conditioned to ignore. Like how Canada just rebranded elite continuity as national resilience. And called it a win.

Collapse, Offshored

Canada doesn’t feel like it’s collapsing, because collapse here doesn’t look like catastrophe. It looks like quiet compliance.

The forces hollowing out the Canadian middle class, disrupting the labour market, and destabilizing democratic accountability aren’t coming from within our borders. They’re arriving as platforms, protocols, and terms of service—designed in Silicon Valley and optimized for extractive growth. And we’re accepting them wholesale.

The truth is: Canada no longer governs its own technological destiny. There is no AI sovereignty strategy. No meaningful domestic counterweights to American infrastructure. No regulatory capacity that scales to the systems already shaping our economy. This isn’t paranoia—it’s evident in the silence of every party during the campaign. Not one dared to ask what happens when OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and Meta finish restructuring the digital labour market. Probably because the answer is: they already have.

This was the argument behind "The Middle Class is a Semi-Meritocratic Pseudo Universal Basic Income". The middle class didn’t exist because it was efficient. It existed because capitalism needed a container to redistribute just enough wealth to keep demand alive. Now that container is being digitally bypassed. Jobs are being automated not to free people, but to eliminate friction. The feedback loop is gone. What’s left is a slow-rolling invalidation of everyone who mistook employment for purpose.

And it’s not just about jobs.

AI is consolidating cognition. What gets seen, said, shared, and believed is increasingly filtered through large models trained in foreign ideologies and tuned to serve corporate objectives. These systems don’t recognize borders. They don’t need to. Canada doesn’t build them. We don’t own them. And yet we are governed by their output.

And while we don’t build the systems, we’re still expected to clean up the fallout. As outlined in “Bots Don’t Pay Taxes”, the platforms replacing Canadian workers don’t contribute to the very infrastructure that made those workers viable. They don’t pay into EI, CPP, or the public funding mechanisms that sustain healthcare, education, or transit. The Canadian social safety net—one of the few things that still distinguishes us meaningfully from the U.S.—is being eroded by technologies that extract value here, remit profits elsewhere, and leave governments scrambling to backfill revenue with austerity. This isn’t just automation. It’s fiscal destabilization by design.

Meanwhile, the geopolitical landscape around us fractures. The United States, in open collapse mode, has grown erratic and aggressive in ways Canadians aren’t prepared to confront. Trade threats, annexation jokes, and economic warfare are not satire—they’re the beginnings of a new regional order. "The Danger to Our South" wasn’t just a warning. It was a prompt: What will Canada become when our largest ally becomes our greatest risk?

And here’s the kicker: no one in power is talking about it. Not because they don’t see it—but because admitting the scope of the disruption would mean acknowledging that our current systems aren’t just flawed.

They’re already obsolete.

Manufactured Consent for Collapse

Mark Carney didn’t win because Canadians were inspired. He won because Canadians were exhausted, and the system offered no viable alternatives.

This wasn’t a vote for vision—it was a vote for sedation. A plea for competence in the face of escalating threats. Trump’s rhetoric about annexing Canada, Greenland, and Panama wasn’t fringe noise. It was the backdrop to a national decision. And when faced with that, the public did what populations often do under stress: they defaulted to the candidate who looked like he could manage decline the most quietly.

But what this reveals is something deeper: the total failure of political imagination across the spectrum.

The Liberals no longer represent a meaningful center-left. They’re a pro-corporate, global-aligned party that speaks in social equity language while upholding the economic systems gutting regional resilience and collapsing both blue- and white-collar employment. Their nationalism is reactive—an operating posture to maintain continuity, not a project of renewal.

The NDP, under Jagmeet Singh, had years to build a counter-narrative rooted in material politics. It failed catastrophically. Singh’s leadership ended with the party losing official status, his own seat gone, and not a single bold structural proposal put forward during the collapse. He didn’t go down swinging. He went down avoiding the fight.

The Greens, meanwhile, never achieved critical mass. And now, with the center emptied out and the institutional left in freefall, the right is about to fracture.

What remains of the Conservative Party will be pulled in two directions:

• The People’s Party will absorb the reactionary current—escalating the culture war, importing American grievance politics, amplifying the MAGA-coded energy that’s become detached from material concerns.

• The rest of the party will be forced to choose: follow that path, or pivot into something new—something structurally conservative, economically nationalist, and regionally responsive.

There’s an opportunity here. Not for nostalgia, but for a serious ideological repositioning.

As I proposed in Flipping the Conservative Brand: The Next Great Realignment, a reimagined Conservative force could outflank the Liberals—not by moving further right, but by stepping left of them on the ground, with real commitments to protecting workers, curbing corporate overreach, and rebuilding local control.

It would mean rejecting the imported culture war in favor of Canadian civic renewal.

Not theatrics. Structure.

Not slogans. Systemic alternatives.

So far, no one has stepped into that role. But the opening is real. And the public is waiting for someone to stop pretending that stability is still an option.

From Sovereign State to Service Node

Canada still tells itself a story of sovereignty.
But sovereignty is not defined by flags or parliamentary procedures. It’s defined by infrastructure, by decision-making autonomy, and by the capacity to act locally, adapt regionally, and coordinate nationally.

And on those metrics, we’re failing.

The story we’ve inherited—of Canada as a self-determining middle power with social conscience and global influence—no longer maps to reality. The real structure of Canada in 2025 is that of a service node within transnational systems: financial, technological, logistical, cognitive. The mechanisms of democracy remain, but the leverage is gone.

That’s what this election reinforced.
Carney didn’t win because he promised to decentralize.
He won because he promised to stabilize a structure that’s already consolidating upward, away from communities, provinces, and even the state itself.

Canada no longer meaningfully governs the platforms it relies on for communication, commerce, or coordination. It has no independent AI ecosystem, no sovereign data policy at scale, and no credible mechanism for regional empowerment in the face of federal or corporate overreach. The result is a drift into administrative abstraction, where policies are harmonized with global standards while regional collapse is quietly ignored.

This is not the first time global alignment has cost us. It began with the erosion of manufacturing—factories closed, supply chains outsourced, resilience traded for efficiency. Now we’re watching the same process repeat through white-collar automation and AI integration. Centralized systems are being optimized—not for human stability, but for profitability at scale. The impact will be felt unevenly, but the disempowerment will be shared.

We need a redesign.

The Perfect Political Platform was written as a minimal viable structure for rebooting civic agency in collapsing systems. Three pillars:

• Reclaim Democracy

• Accountability Inquisition

• Empowerment Through Technology

Not as ideology, but as an operating system for collective action.

Citizens First Initiatives expands that logic. It proposes a post-partisan framework for direct coordination—where citizens don’t have to wait for institutional permission to self-organize, deliver services, or govern themselves through digital infrastructure.

From Citizens to Coalitions takes it further, imagining a transnational civic architecture where regions, communities, and networks operate as coordinated entities beyond the party-state dichotomy. Because the future is not going to be national or global in the way we’ve been taught. It’s going to be distributed, unstable, and dynamic. And our systems need to be ready for that.

Canada can’t remain a passive recipient of frameworks written elsewhere.

We can’t keep deferring sovereignty to global templates and expecting local resilience to survive the tradeoff.

We can’t stabilize the future by locking in the past.

So yes—Carney is steady.

But if we want Canada to be sovereign in function, not just in symbol, we’ll need to start building systems that aren’t designed to fail safely.

We’ll need systems that know how to adapt.