Guest post: Driving Canadian Democracy to Oblivion: The Ideological State of the Canadian Establishment

A short letter to the editor from Anna Zalik

[Friends: You can catch up with what I’ve been doing for the past few weeks at Youtube, where I’ve been posting a series of sit reps on the war. Meanwhile, friend of the Anti-Empire Project, Anna Zalik, sent me this letter to the editor that the Globe and Mail declined, after publishing a long and embarrassing op-ed consisting of advice for the left, which is behind a paywall and only available to hardcore Globe and Mail readers. The op-ed is of what I call the “left’s best friend” genre, in which someone who despises you and your cause gives you advice about how you should be going about your work.]

Driving Canadian Democracy to Oblivion: The Ideological State of the Canadian Establishment

Anna Zalik, Toronto

In a poorly written OpEd published in the Globe and Mail on January 27th, embittered UofT humanities PhD Stephen Marche offers a “painfully clarifying reflection on the ideological state of the Canadian establishment.” In a conflation of facts, weakly organized examples, and cherry-picked polling data, Marche tries and convicts a group of people - various employed by universities- who allegedly postered an Indigo bookstore in downtown Toronto. Studiously avoiding reference to Israel’s genocidal attacks on Palestinians which the Canadian government and Reisman’s Heseg Foundation materially support, nor the destruction of all of Gaza’s universities, Marche’s piece could easily have been written by those in the Ontario government seeking to defund public post-secondary education. Precisely what ‘ideology’ Marche refers to is never clarified, but it is clear that his own is the same old elite populism that maintains the status quo - berating racialized and transgender activists, and defending police violence.

Particularly disturbing, Marche shields himself behind a non-sensical invocation of liberal multiculturalism that “leaves its shoes at the door”. Leaving one’s shoes at the door seems to consist of acquiescence to the new McCarthyism all around us. Indeed, despite a hat-tip to Netanyahu’s fascism, Marche’s piece never uses the words Palestine or Palestinians, nor does he acknowledge that various of his favoured targets, including Naomi Klein and Lesley Wood, are Jewish. If it’s best not to scratch the itch activists purportedly pose, why does Marche do so?

Ultimately, Marche does his part to drive Canadian democracy to oblivion.