Author: Andrew Nurse

Andrew Nurse is Coordinator of Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick.
Canada

Thank you for sharing

Can empathy make Susan Holt’s New Brunswick Liberals a different kind of government?

By
Issue 59

New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt

Shortly before Christmas, New Brunswick Liberal Premier Susan Holt’s office issued a series of “empathy guidelines”: instructions for staff, intended to present what CBC News called a “kinder, gentler” perception of government. The guidelines came complete with illustrations of wording staff could use, such as “Thank you for sharing” and “I can see how challenging that must be,” and were intended to depict the Holt government as “warm and caring.”

It’s tempting to see this empathetic language as little more than a public relations campaign on behalf of a new Liberal government that has been struggling with bad press following from plans to locate a power generating station on the Isthmus of Chignecto and is heading for a record deficit. But I wonder if it might point toward something more: a different kind of politics.

The New Brunswick Liberal Party has not been able to secure more than a single term in office since former Premier Frank McKenna left office in 1997. McKenna notably moved the provincial Liberals to the centre, focusing on the province’s economy and foreign investment while ditching the progressivism that had dominated the party since Louis J. Robichaud’s time as Premier in the 1960s. Holt’s guidelines are the first real effort since then to recreate a different kind of liberalism in the province, and they raise a number of questions: What is empathy? What role could it play in public discourse? And what might it look like in practice?

The road to government

The 2024 New Brunswick provincial election was a watershed event. Most commentary focused on Holt as New Brunswick’s first female premier, but in important ways the election was a referendum on Progressive Conservative Premier Blaine Higgs’s approach to governance. Higgs had become Premier six years earlier by virtue of the vagaries of the first-past-the-post electoral system. Despite securing a popular vote 6 per cent lower than the Liberals and with little representation in French-speaking parts of the province, Higgs’s PCs won a very slim minority and at first held government with the support of a small anti-bilingualism political party: the People’s Alliance of New Brunswick (PANB).

Higgs led New Brunswick into the COVID emergency and initially governed through an all-party consensus that introduced a series of restrictions similar to COVID-zero policies in other jurisdictions. The policies worked, and New Brunswick – at first – avoided the worst effects of the pandemic. Higgs won a majority in a snap election two years into his mandate.

At this point, he shifted ground. Higgs abandoned consensus government, began dismantling COVID policies and started to direct his attention to other matters, while pushing the PCs further to the right and openly courting extreme voices among evangelical Christians. In historical terms, Higgs’s government broke from the PCs’ own long-established political centrism, which accepted the reforms of the Robichaud era, such as bilingualism and a more inclusive politics.

The centrepiece of Higgs’s policies was a rollback in protections for queer public-school students, who could no longer use their preferred names or pronouns. Teachers were required to have parental permission if queer students wanted to use a name other than their legal name and would be required to inform parents of changes, in effect turning teachers into a gender-identity police force. Higgs also publicly ignored protesters concerned about these policies. His government opposed Indigenous land claims and ordered civil servants not to make land acknowledgements. He welcomed former PANB MLAs to this party and infamously told a civil servant he was not interested in evidence when assessing public policies. The rightward drift of the party alienated moderate Tories and promoted a series of resignations while drawing the support of religiously based anti-abortionists and antiqueer groups in the province and elsewhere in Canada.

The 2024 election could be interpreted in a range of ways, but it was a clear renunciation of Higgs, who lost his own seat, while the Liberals secured their most significant victory in two decades. During the campaign Holt’s Liberals attacked the government’s policy failures but also ran a remarkably upbeat and optimistic campaign. As might be expected, they drew attention to core issues – health care, education – but also portrayed themselves as a government-in-waiting that would listen to the people of the province. The Liberal Party’s election information on Holt listed her “empathetic leadership” approach as the number one thing it wanted New Brunswick to know about its leader.

Empathy and politics

Studies of political behaviour in the United States suggest that empathy is a complex approach to interpersonal and political relationships. To be clear from the beginning, empathy is about something other and deeper than simply being nice, with which it might be easily confused. As Stephen Morris, who has written about empathy and politics, puts it, on its most basic level “empathy is generally understood as the capacity to share in experiences or emotions that one apprehends in others.”¹ Empathy is not simplistic; it can involve several different dimensions, such as the ability to vicariously share emotions or imagine a response to a particular issue from another’s perspective.

While empathy alone does not determine how a person will vote, it does tend to be associated more with liberal or progressive politics. American studies suggest liberally and conservatively minded people have different forms of empathy. Conservative empathy tends to be reserved for other conservatives or for specific social groups – such as police officers – with whom conservatives identify. Liberal empathy tends to be broader in range.

Empathy is not an innate and unvarying psychological characteristic. A Canadian study, for example, links empathy for First Nations to knowledge.² In other words, education makes a difference. Empathy also mobilizes sacrifice, at least on some level. A study done in the United States suggests that empathy carries with it a willingness to forgo self-interest to meet public needs.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, empathy generates policies that could be taken as a mark of a good society. University of Toronto philosopher Joseph Heath once remarked that a humane and caring society should be seen as a historical achievement.³ As the series of shocks that have affected public life in a host of countries illustrate, this is an achievement that should not be taken for granted.

In promising to listen to citizens, Susan Holt’s Liberals were engaging with a necessary condition of a democratic order. Governments that are indifferent to citizen needs, voices and aspirations cannot, by definition, be democratic. In this sense, there is something more at stake in a consideration of empathy than a political style.

The “rights revolution” – as Michael Ignatieff and Dominique Clément called it – that defines the very basis of modern citizenship in Canada is both predicated on empathy and develops it as an outcome of the political process.⁴ The extension of individual rights was built around two core ideas: inclusion and communication. Inclusion suggests that as people we are a lot alike and share with one another hopes, dreams, concerns and fears. The differences that divide citizens are not so great that they prevent recognition of a common humanity. In this way, empathy becomes not only a core aspect of modern citizenship but the basis of inclusion and solidarity. Without it, difference becomes stereotype, indifference and often injustice.

On the second point, we can start by thinking about communication on a personal level. How do you want to be treated? If you have a concern, a problem or a matter you seek to raise, do you want to be dismissed or do you want to be heard? This is empathy’s key feature: it works on – and thus reproduces – some kind of caring humanism. When we speak, we look to others not simply to hear us but also to understand and share our perspectives. What is reproduced by empathy is a higher form of communication.

Will actions match words?

In the 2024 New Brunswick election, perhaps precisely because of the divisive policies of the previous government, significant sections of the electorate were looking for a positive and empathetic message. But what if it doesn’t work? This is the situation in which Holt’s government seems to find itself.

Empathy could help to fashion the kinds of reforms that are needed to improve health care and create better education, and to think about what constitutes fair wages for poorer people. An empathetic perspective would allow for a renewed discussion of the proper boundary between state and civil society, and between social action and individual responsibility. The key question is: how strongly does this government believe its own injunctions? And belief is demonstrated not through assertion but through practice. Amid what looks like a mounting budget crisis, the Holt government’s discourse is shifting.

In the short run, the government appears to have backed away from some of the more extreme budget-cutting policies it broached (such as merging St. Thomas University into the University of New Brunswick and privatizing the institution where I teach, Mount Allison). I hope it did so under the weight of both argument and empathy. The student protesters who converged on the provincial capital to oppose cuts to higher education were making their point, but they were also taking the government at its word: will you listen?

What happens next? There is more than one possible answer. There might be an inherent problem with empathy. The short way to explain this is that one could fake it. This has certainly happened before. Opposition parties will often try to increase their popularity by seeming to support policies they have no intention of implementing once in power. The Holt government has shifted to a different kind of language that laments “difficult decisions” that have to be made, without acknowledging the uneven effects difficult decisions carry with them.

In addition, liberalism itself can run into problems. Holt’s government seemed, at least, unprepared for the current budget crisis and it was clearly not what had been forecast. The discourse of “difficult decisions” suggests that the government will back away from its commitments and away from meaningful conversation because of the pressures of the times.

It would be a shame if that happened. Instead of being challenged by circumstances, empathy might be the answer to them.We can catch a glimpse of this on the national stage. Mark Carney’s victory in the last federal election was the product of many issues, including the need to respond to shifts in American trade policy and the dynamics of American imperialism. However, another factor was that large sections of the Canadian population simply don’t like Pierre Poilievre and find his right-wing populist approach to politics uncongenial.

To go further, some level of empathy might be needed to address environmental issues effectively, promote reconciliation, provide access to health care and higher education and tackle homelessness, among other policies. New Brunswick has such a legacy in the Equal Opportunity Program of the 1960s which, while often associated with bilingualism, addressed a host of social issues, inequalities and labour rights across the province.⁵

Thinking about empathy provides a mechanism to address the divisive “freedom convoy” politics of right-wing populism and to leverage consensus around a different kind of politics and policies. It suggests that an appreciable number of people are willing to make sacrifices to build a better society and that that process can – and should – be seen as a historical achievement instead of a set of policy injunctions.

I strongly suspect that the road ahead will not be easy for political leaders and movements looking to take these steps. Arguments made in favour of empathy will be rejected by those aligned with populist politics.⁶ However, to my mind, it is the very dangers of populist politics that make empathy even more necessary. I, for one, am glad that political officials are being asked to empathize with citizens. The alternative seems far worse.

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Book Reviews

The questions that hard power advocates don’t ask

Andrew Nurse reviews "Canada’s National Security in the Post-9/11 World: Strategy, Interests, Threats" by David S. McDonough

By
Issue 32

David S. McDonough, ed.,
Canada’s National Security in the Post-9/11 World: Strategy, Interests, Threats.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.
320 pages.

Canada’s National Security in the Post-9/11 World, edited by David S. McDonough, begins by asserting a serious dearth of thinking on Canadian security policy at what its authors view as a pivotal historical moment: the withdrawl of Canadian forces from combat in Afghanistan. This is a matter of no small importance for Canada. Even before 9/11, Canadian scholars, government and military officials, politicians and public figures had been engaged in a long series of debates about Canada’s place in the world, its support for and connection to the United States, the role of the military in security and foreign policy and, in fact, the very meaning of security itself. The international crises – humanitarian, economic, environmental – that unfold in front of Canadians on a daily basis only seem to make this debate more prescient.

In this regard, Canada’s National Security in the Post-9/11 World is interesting for two interrelated reasons. First, it does not really stake out new ground. Its approach to Canadian strategic studies broadly supports the policies ushered in by the current government and urged on Canadians by hard-power advocates over the last 10 or 15 years.1 Nowhere in this collection are the merits of hard-power-oriented policies up for discussion. Their legitimacy is the assumed backdrop against which prescriptions for further developments along the same lines are recommended. Second, precisely because it does not break new ground, this collection ends up replicating many of the mistakes made in previous arguments supporting the use of Canadian hard power as a primary instrument of national policy.

Canada’s National Security in the Post-9/11 World draws together 14 different essays – along with an editorial introduction and conclusion – that consider Canadian security policy through a five-part process: policy frameworks, domestic policy, Canadian engagement with various parts of the globe, the use of the military and threat assessment. Its contributors include academics and public commentators, almost all of who have some direct tie to the rising tide of militaristic scholarship that Ian McKay and Jamie Swift discussed in their book Warrior Nation.2 Some were well-known critics of the previous Liberal government’s approach to international and military affairs. At least one was an enthusiastic supporter of the American war in Iraq who expressed deep disdain for Canada’s refusal to participate.3

The authors urge Canada to focus on what they see as its interests: close cooperation with allies, particularly (at times almost exclusively) the United States, confronting security threats in other countries (or what McDonough calls “robust stabilization”), a stable international environment that ensures the movement of goods, and – sometimes – democracy. In short, this collection represents a “next step” argument on the part of hard power advocates. Having spent almost a decade publishing critiques of Liberal soft power policies, Canada’s rejection of the American ballistic missile defense (BMD) shield, cuts to military spending and the refusal to participate in the invasion of Iraq, the advocates of hard power now have a government that agrees with their perspective and can do something about it. The question for them is no longer the shape of Canadian foreign, military and security policy but how current policy trajectories can be strengthened, refined and enhanced.

Several key essays in this collection stake out the case for enhancing hard power policy in clear terms. In “NATO and the EU: Canada’s Security Interests in Europe and Beyond,” Alexander Moens argues that NATO remains a “vital interest to Canada” – of greater importance then the EU – “because it is the only effective vehicle through which to launch forward-based defensive actions.” He also isolates Russia as a potential new threat to Canada and NATO owing to its “autocratic tendencies” that have ushered in “a new type of ‘Cold War Lite.’” NATO is, moreover, a better vehicle for Canadian policy than the United Nations because the UN cannot mount effective military action. To support his point, Moens notes that without NATO, the United States would not have been able to put together its “coalition of the willing” in Afghanistan.

Thomas Adams makes a similar type of argument with regard to Canadian interests in the Asia-Pacific region, except that he sees Europe as of even less significance then Moens does. What makes the Asia-Pacific region important is not its economic potential (a matter drawn to Canadian attention in mainstream media) but its potential for war. After noting the volatility of this region, Adams explains that it “has been likened aptly to the powder keg of Europe prior to the outbreak of the First World War.” Here the real issues are North Korea’s supposed weapons of mass destruction and “the China-Taiwan situation is the flashpoint most likely to bring American and Chinese military forces into direct conflict with each other.”

For Adams, Canadians should not neglect this threat even though this potential conflict seems distant, because it “can nonetheless wreak havoc for Canadians at home.” Of even more importance is that the United States is involved in the Asia-Pacific, providing “a modicum of security and stability in an otherwise volatile region.” Because the United States is Canada’s largest trading partner, whatever affects it is, of necessity, of interest to Canadians. Adams does not mince words. In cases of conflict, Canada should “be prepared to stand firm with the United States and other allies against China.”

The most determined advocacy of hard power militarization, however, comes in J.L. Granatstein and David J. Bercuson’s chapter “From Paardeberg to Panjwai: Canadian National Interests and Expeditionary Operations.” The benefits of militarization, the authors contend, are many:

Doing so wins Canada diplomatic recognition, political acceptance, entree into arrangements, treaties and alliances that are important to Canada and Canadians, and a voice on how future international policies will be pursued. Were Canada not to take part in such missions abroad, friends and enemies alike would have concluded long ago that Canada is of no consequence, does not deserve to be heard, and ought not to be accorded any favours in bilateral or multilateral negotiations over any matter of consequence.

But according to Granatstein and Bercuson, not all foreign military missions are created equal. They suggest a series of rules to guide Canadian military deployment. It should be confined to situations where there are clear and achievable political objectives that are in Canada’s interest (hard power should never be used, they contend, for “chimerical aims”); hard power should be used only after being “authorized” by Parliament; Canada must retain control over its forces; and “Canada should not send forces abroad into combat operations … without some firm commitment of support … by the United States.”

The various chapters of Canada’s National Security in the Post-9/11 World, then, make the case for a hard-power-based foreign and security policy and suggest its key foci in terms of geographic areas, specific branches of the military and international relations. What we need to ask is whether or not this is the best course of action for Canada and the most effective role Canada can play on the world stage. In other words, should Canada continue – indeed, even enhance – remilitarization, the foreign deployment of Canadian forces and aggressive confrontational international rhetoric, and follow the American international military and foreign policy lead? There are good reasons to question such conclusions.

First, the idea that hard power secures interests, maintains friendships and wins international concessions lacks both substantive and historical support. We’ve heard these arguments before. The Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute’s In the National Interest: Canadian Foreign Policy for an Insecure World (2003) argued a decade ago that Canada’s efforts in the 1990s to address its massive deficit and huge public debt by taking advantage of the so-called post–Cold War “peace dividend” were a mistake. Instead of cutting spending to rein in the debt, the government should have increased it to modernize and expand the military. In the National Interest was one of a series of works claiming that lack of military power hurt Canada on the international stage, and particularly with the United States. In fact, these two issues – sway with the United States and international reputation – were treated as if they were synonymous. Canada’s refusal to participate in the invasion of Iraq and the Martin government’s decision to finalize Canada’s de facto rejection of the BMD shield were supposedly other examples. The costs, we were told, were low, and the repercussions of rejecting the United States were grave.

One interesting characteristic of McDonough’s collection is that it ignores the recent history of hard power advocacy, perhaps because that history fails to demonstrate many of the points it takes for granted. The invasion of Iraq turned into a morass and the United States now concedes that the BMD shield does not work. What has been either ignored or forgotten by Canadian hard power advocates is that both decisions – not participating in the invasion of Iraq and rejecting the BMD shield – ended up being the right decisions. Both policies were deeply unpopular with Americans who turned to a government interested in regenerating multilateral foreign policy and finding ways to bring American troops home. To have embraced the invasion of Iraq and BMD would only have saddled Canada with foreign and military policies designed to mirror those of the United States after the Americans had determined that neither policy was viable. Canada’s National Security in the Post-9/11 World indicates how quickly this history has been forgotten.

The same thing might be said about the use of the military to win U.S. and international respect today. Hard power advocates believe this point so uncritically that they do not even bother to provide evidence to sustain it. However, this position ignores a number of important questions: With whom does militarization win respect? Whom does confrontational international rhetoric actually influence? What concessions are actually earned?

These are not rhetorical questions. Previous discussions of Canadian hard power focused on ensuring influence with the United States as a primary goal and the importance of the United States is an oft-repeated theme of this collection. Granatstein and Bercuson, for example, are willing to accord the United States a de facto veto over Canadian military policy – something that strikes me as a threat to sovereignty and democracy. But whether or not remilitarization or even military support for American policy guarantees influence in Washington is an open question. As Jennifer Welsh notes in At Home in the World, Britain’s support for the American invasion of Iraq did little to win concessions in other policy fields such as trade. In the Canadian case, the long commitment to Afghanistan won U.S. praise, but produced no changes in American policy on contentious issues like softwood lumber trade and Arctic sovereignty.

Nor could it. As David Dyment has pointed out, U.S. policy formulation is complicated and involves Congress, federalism, arms-length corporations, local interests and an extensive range of cross-border and international agreements.4 The U.S. president – however happy he might be with Canada – remains bound by American law and constrained by American politics. Canada, quite simply, is a foreign country and so, of necessity, is of less importance than domestic interests.5

What is equally important to note for those concerned about maintaining access to the American market is the remarkable complexity of Canadian-American relations, a subject that goes without discussion in Canada’s National Security. By 2003, as Robert Wolfe noted some years ago, Canada and the United States had signed something like 270 different treaties and agreements regulating everything from trade to road signs.6 To argue that Canada needs remilitarization to ensure access to the United States requires a belief that the United States would break these agreements – in effect, violate international law – to force Canada into line.

The problem with this argument is its assumption that the United States does not benefit from the Canadian-American relationship (which includes NAFTA) and a relatively open northern border. Cross-border economic integration (such as just-in-time supply and production chains) and the fact that Canada exports important resources to the United States (not the least of which is energy) shows that hard power is only one part of a very large picture. The United States, as a sovereign country, has every right to be concerned about its own border security in the same way that any country does, and Canadians should not be too quick to attribute sinister purposes to American security concerns. But the open border is in the interest of the United States. Even after 9/11, problems with border transit were solved in what in retrospect was a remarkably short time – and this at the height, according to hard power advocates, of Canada’s supposed commitment to soft power.

Beyond relations with the United States, the idea that hard power “wins friends and influences people” becomes even more problematic. Exactly how Canada’s post-Liberal shift to staunch, unquestioning support for Israel, Harper’s original tough talk to China and now the decision to break relations with Iran enhanced Canada’s international reputation is not clear. Nor is it at all clear that Canada’s international reputation suffered during the supposed wrong turn to soft power. Much clearer are Harper’s backtracking on China and the UN’s embarrassing decision to reject Canada’s bid for a seat on the Security Council. The shift to hard power seems to have produced a response that was the exact opposite of the one its advocates hoped for.

Finally, it is far from clear how the use of hard power will help Canada address its own pressing international problems, such as Arctic sovereignty. In fact, the issue of Arctic sovereignty may illustrate the limits of hard power. Canada’s National Security isolates the Arctic as a site of potential conflict with Russia for which Canada needs to be militarily prepared. But how could Canada be militarily prepared to fight Russia? The level of militarization required, the level of state spending and the need to develop nuclear arms preclude that possibility. Moreover, focusing on a Russian threat neglects that fact that Russia is not the only country that does not share Canada’s views of Arctic sovereignty. Both the United States and the European Union dispute Canada’s position as well, an example of how the world does not break down neatly into categories of friend and enemy, ally and threat.

No one is saying that Canada should not have a presence in the Arctic (although I worry about any rush to exploit energy and other resources in that fragile ecology). What I am saying is that a negotiated solution that protects the Arctic environment and its people is in everyone’s best interest. Because of Canada’s Arctic land sovereignty, Canada must, of necessity, be involved in those negotiations for them to work on an international level. Rogue shipping through the Arctic is neither in Canada’s best interest nor anyone else’s; because of its land base Canada alone is in a position to do something about it. This is an example where the best course of action is to work with other countries and the inhabitants of the north.

Canada’s National Security in the Post-9/11 World is problematic precisely because it does not take advantage of the historic moment it claims to have found. We have already read the arguments its authors make. The difference is tone. Hard power advocates no longer seek to convince Canadians or their government of their perspective. They assume it needs no explanation and so can now argue for an even larger navy or for specific regional military deployment. This is this collection’s real problem as both policy and scholarship. Because it fails to assess the validity of its basic assumptions, it ends up repeating past mistakes and drawing problematic conclusions.

For Canadians, hard power comes at a cost, both human and economic. The human cost has already been well discussed, the economic cost less so. As the Harper government embraces hard power more fully, it outlines major new and potentially open-ended expenditures, further commitments to unproven technologies and long-range plans that seem designed to lock Canada into hard-power politics. This might indeed be a good moment to consider the merits of this policy. But to do so, scholars, at least, need to break new ground, question assumptions, examine history and explore the evidence. In doing so, they would make Canadian strategic studies more important and, I suspect, far less certain of hard power options.

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