A 2022 survey by Leger found that 70 percent of Canadians between the ages of fifteen and forty expected major upheavals—such as war, mass population movements, and natural disasters—in the foreseeable future. Almost 60 percent believed that Canadian governments were not doing anything about these dangers. The same proportion of respondents said that they felt helpless in the face of society’s problems. “Young Canadians express real fears about the future,” the study concluded. “They do not trust traditional institutions to make things better.”
The young Canadians who expressed these views are not mistaken. The remaining decades of this century will be very difficult. The country will face major upheavals. And our governments are not doing all they can to prepare for these challenges.
Political systems must be adaptable if they are to survive and thrive. An adaptable system is one that anticipates long-term challenges, generates an effective grand strategy for meeting those anticipated challenges, builds support for that strategy, and translates that strategy into action. Adaptability is especially important in periods of extreme turbulence—like the epoch we are entering now.
The adaptability of the Canadian political system cannot be taken for granted. The system is designed on the principle that political power should be widely diffused and individual freedom should be respected. This design promotes adaptability in some ways but threatens it in others. At its worst, the system may be vulnerable to short sightedness, confusion, and gridlock. Policy makers in Canada should always think carefully about how to maximize the system’s strengths and minimize its vulnerabilities.
Policy makers are not doing this sort of thinking as much as they ought to, or even as much as they used to. In several ways, the country’s capacity to formulate and execute grand strategy has declined. This is a serious problem. But it can be fixed.
N o political system lasts forever. Some systems expire after only a few decades; a handful last for centuries. A system might plunge into crisis and emerge in a different form, still governing roughly the same territory. Or it might fracture into many smaller systems. Or it might be absorbed into a larger system. One way or another, though, every system ends eventually. Leaders rarely acknowledge this fact—for understandable reasons—but it is a hard reality.
In the 1970s, Estonian political scientist Rein Taagepera calculated the lifespan of empires throughout history. Before World War II, most people lived within empires. Empires were the default mode of political organization, but they were also mortal. Taagepera calculated that the average duration of empires throughout history was three or four generations. Most were short lived. Fewer than one-fifth of the empires in Taagepera’s study lasted for more than ten generations.
After World War II, the remaining empires were broken up and states became the default mode of political organization. A state is a political system that exercises control over a defined territory and is recognized as the legitimate authority in that territory by other states. There are roughly 190 states in the world today, and Canada is one of them.
We take the world of states for granted, but it is just as brittle as the world of empires. Most states are very young. Two-thirds of those represented in the United Nations General Assembly are less than eighty years old. Most are also unstable, according to the research organization Fund for Peace. About half of the world’s population lives in very unstable states. Several have collapsed within the life experience of the average Canadian, which is about forty-three years. The most striking example of state collapse in recent decades is that of the Soviet Union in 1991.
We can list the problems that have contributed to the collapse of political systems in the past. The list includes rebellions by regional leaders, popular uprisings, invasions, economic shocks, plagues, mass migrations, and climate change, among other disruptions. However, a political system rarely collapses for just one reason. Usually, collapse happens because problems pile up. One problem aggravates another, which aggravates yet another. Political leaders and government agencies are overwhelmed. The entire situation becomes too complex to understand and manage, and the system unravels. This dire scenario is called a polycrisis.
The structure of any state, including Canada, can be seen as an apparatus for avoiding, or at least managing, problems that are potentially fatal to that state and, above all, for avoiding a polycrisis. For example, we give substantial power to provinces to reduce the risk of regional rebellions. We give people the right to vote to reduce the risk of mass discontent. We establish an army to protect against invasion, police forces to reduce internal disorder, regulatory agencies to prevent economic collapse, a public health system to avoid pandemics, and so on. In a sense, the state as a whole is like a giant risk management scheme.
Of course, we have positive goals for the state as well. We want to build a just and prosperous society, but this is possible only if the state itself survives. Political leaders must anticipate the worst case so that they can work toward the best case. Leaders must be vigilant about potential dangers. They must devise a grand strategy for achieving their ambitions, given the dangers they are likely to face. They must generate agreement about the wisdom of their proposed strategy. And they must build or renovate governmental institutions so that they are capable of doing all that the strategy requires.
Moreover, leaders must be prepared to revise their work. The world is a complicated place. Some threats abate with time while new ones come into view. Think about all the dangers Western countries have encountered so far this century that were dismissed as unimportant in the year 2000: terrorism, financial crises, pandemics, gross inequality, ethno-nationalism, and war. For any state, the threat matrix, as security specialists call it, is constantly evolving. In a world like this, vigilance can never be relaxed. Grand strategy always requires readjustment.
T he connection between Canadians and Americans is closer than it was forty years ago. People cross the border more often for work and vacations. They buy more goods and services from, and invest more of their savings in, the country next door. Canadians read and watch more American news and entertainment. The social media networks that have spread like kudzu over the past twenty years ignore national boundaries. Americans post messages on social media, and Canadians like, reply, and repost.
Deeper connections may have encouraged the tendency to regard the two countries as fundamentally alike. Politicians trying to maintain good relations describe Canada and the United States as “sister countries” with “common democratic values” and a “shared cultural heritage.” Researchers put “established democracies like Canada and the United States” in the same box, distinct from supposedly shakier regimes in other places.
Canadian politics, meanwhile, seems more and more like an echo of American politics. If a problem dominates the American agenda (ethno-nationalism, polarization, racially motivated police violence, vaccine resistance, restrictive abortion laws, culture wars), then fears about that problem intensify in Canada as well. American political and social movements sprout Canadian branches. Some Canadians now believe their system of government is built on the same principles as that of the United States and that it shares the same weaknesses. But the two systems of government are not the same, and the differences are critical when we think about the adaptability of each.
The most important advantage that Canada enjoyed in the twentieth century had nothing to do with the design of institutions. It related more fundamentally to political culture or, in other words, the Canadian way of thinking about politics. Most Canadians were realists, in the sense that they recognized the fragility of the political system and behaved accordingly.
The Canadian preoccupation with fragility has deep roots. Margaret Atwood observed in a now-famous 1972 essay that early Canadian writers were obsessed with survival. They told stories about European settlers struggling against the “savage grip” of an immense and wild territory. “Canadians are forever taking the national pulse like doctors at a sickbed,” Atwood said. “The aim is not to see whether the patient will live well but simply whether he will live at all.”
For a long time, Canadian politics mirrored its literature. The country created in 1867 was a composite of communities all fixated on survival. Upper Canada (present-day Ontario) was settled by people who fled the American Revolution and who worried for decades afterward about cross-border attacks from the United States. In Lower Canada (Quebec), French-speaking Catholics struggled against a conquering elite that seemed determined to suppress their language and religion. Maritimers sought protection from the United States but also feared domination by Upper and Lower Canada.
Until recently, Canadian historians neglected the most desperate struggle for survival, that of Indigenous peoples. European colonization led to the loss of Indigenous homelands, the division of ancient societies into scattered bands, and socially destructive campaigns by settler governments to “civilize the lesser race.” By Confederation, the Indigenous population was a third of what it had been at the time of first contact with Europeans.
The story of Canada since Confederation has largely been about the efforts of these different communities, and others added subsequently, to protect their ways of life. Often, that struggle has been told using the language of sovereignty and self-determination rather than simple survival. At the same time, Canadian politicians have wrestled with doubts about the survival of the country as a whole, given the centrifugal forces operating within it. The first secessionist movement in Canada arose in Nova Scotia only a few months after Confederation. In the 1920s and ’30s, the overriding concern of then prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King was national unity. Lester Pearson said that unity was his “most passionate interest” as prime minister in the mid 1960s. At the end of the twentieth century, prime minister Jean Chrétien warned that it was still dangerous to “take Canada for granted.”
Canada’s survival has been challenged by external as well as internal forces. Fears of an invasion by the United States, stoked by American rhetoric about annexation, persisted until the start of the twentieth century. The next forty years were absorbed by Canada’s campaign to achieve independence from Britain, while the decades following World War II were occupied with resistance against the economic and cultural hegemony of the United States. The political philosopher George Grant thought this struggle was a lost cause. In 1967, he mourned “the end of Canada as a sovereign state.”
An awareness of fragility is a necessary condition for adaptability because it heightens alertness to potential dangers. But alertness is not enough. An adaptable country must have methods for gauging the severity of threats, crafting potential responses, and building consensus about the path forward.
I want to make five claims here. The first is that adaptability matters. When we look at any political system, one of the most important questions we should ask is whether it has the capacity to reinvent itself to accommodate new conditions. Adaptability matters because there is no fixed or universal formula for governing that works in all places and for all time. Grand strategy, that set of generally shared understandings about national aspirations and how to achieve them, must be revised frequently. Institutions and practices, the means by which strategy is converted into action, must be overhauled as well.
This work of state renovation never ends. Any political system that cannot keep up with the work of renovation will find itself increasingly at odds with the world. Manageable problems will turn into unmanageable crises. Crises will feed on one another, overwhelming the capacity of leaders to respond effectively. The result will be some form of state collapse. This is not a rare phenomenon. Most countries in the world are counted as fragile, which is another way of saying they are uncomfortably close to collapse.
My second claim has to do with the prerequisites for adaptability. An adaptable political system must be capable of performing four functions. The system must anticipate potential dangers. It must be capable of devising grand strategies likely to be effective in addressing the whole set of anticipated dangers. It must be capable of building an adequate level of support among politically influential groups, and the public at large, for one grand strategy or another. And it must be capable of restructuring institutions and practices so that they can perform the tasks required by the new grand strategy.
My third claim relates to the adaptability of a certain kind of political system, what I call the federal-liberal-democratic—FLD—model of government. Arguments have been advanced about the superior adaptability of FLD systems when compared to technocratic-authoritarian systems like China. But the case for FLD systems is not open and shut. There is good evidence that adaptability might be undermined within FLD systems because of their tendency toward short sightedness, gridlock, and miscoordination. And we should avoid generalizations about FLD systems. They vary in terms of institutional design, practices, and culture, and these differences have an important influence on adaptability.
My fourth claim has to do with the adaptability of one particular FLD system at one moment in time: Canada in the middle to late twentieth century. To be clear, we should not be sentimental about Canada in that era. Most Canadians in that time were worse off than most Canadians today. Still, the system in that era had distinctive features that enhanced adaptability, allowing the country to survive and improve itself. People invested in forward thinking, worked hard at building agreement among leaders and citizens, and constructed bureaucracies that were professional, honest, and efficient.
My fifth and final claim has to do with governance in Canada today. Institutions, practices, and culture have changed—often for the better, sometimes for the worse. Short sightedness, a chronic weakness of democratic systems, appears to be resurgent in Canada. The capacity of the system to think about grand strategy for the next generation has been reduced. Routines that once helped to build common understanding among national leaders have been abandoned. The Canadian public sphere, which is an engine for producing common understanding within the entire population, is in trouble. The federal public service, a single but important part of Canada’s bureaucratic machinery, seems less nimble than it once was.
How did Canada arrive at this state of affairs? It is partly the unintended consequence of successful adaptation in the past. Canada is a more populous and diverse country than it was a couple of generations ago. Political power has also been redistributed: among orders and branches of government, between governments and citizens, and between governments and markets. By and large, these changes should be celebrated. But the end result is that the Canadian political system is now much more complex. It has more parts, all moving faster.
This means that the problem of coordination within the system is bigger than it used to be. We cannot take for granted that everyone in the system has a clear understanding of what everyone else is trying to accomplish, or that everyone is trying, so far as they can, to move in the same direction. An adaptability trap is a condition in which a system reinvents itself in positive ways but finds that it has inadvertently compromised its capacity for more reinvention. Canada may have moved closer to an adaptability trap over the past forty years.
Of course, there is more to the story. Canada has also been affected by what economists like to call exogenous shocks—big changes beyond the control of Canadian governments. The most obvious shock is the rapid transformation in information and communication technologies since the early 1990s. Another is globalization. These two changes have also made Canadian politics more complicated and frenetic.
There is a third, critical explanation of why adaptability in Canada has declined: inaction by governments. Falling into an adaptability trap is not inevitable. It happens when leaders do not think carefully about what must be done to hold a system together, and preserve adaptability, as it becomes bigger and more complex. Similarly, leaders ought to think carefully about the effect of exogenous shocks on cohesion and adaptability within the system and take the appropriate compensatory measures.
The good news is that Canada is on the edge of an adaptability trap, not in one. Canada remains one of the best-governed countries in the world today. And there are many steps that can be taken to improve adaptability. But so far in this century, Canadian leaders have not engaged in enough of this system-level thinking. Worse still, they have dismantled some mechanisms that once contributed to adaptability. Why have leaders done this? Maybe they have been distracted by the relentless pressures of day-to-day politics. Or maybe they are still suffering a hangover from the neoliberal ’90s, when many people thought that the world had reached the end of history and the future would be uneventful.
The remainder of this century will be a contest between democracies and authoritarian systems or between open and closed societies. The central question will be which form of government is better at adapting to rapidly changing conditions. Chinese leaders already have an opinion on this question. President Xi Jinping claimed in 2023 that the Chinese system has the advantage over Western systems because it is “forward-looking,” follows “the principle of strategy,” and is able to make plans that are “adhered to for a long time.” Our assignment is to prove that a trade-off between openness and adaptability is not necessary—that a highly decentralized system, designed to respect individual freedom and community rights, can also respond nimbly to looming dangers.
Adapted and excerpted from The Adaptable Country: How Canada Can Survive the Twenty-First Century by Alasdair Roberts, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024. Reproduced with permission from the publisher.
