Joe Rogan’s dangerous Canadian communist fantasy

Sometimes, all you can do is laugh.

That’s certainly how many Canadians responded to a clip in which American podcaster Joe Rogan described their country as “communist,” one that had the hashtag #CommunistCanada trending over the weekend. “Today in Communist Canada, we were permitted to travel in a government-allocated vehicle to a government-approved beach,” one user tweeted. “The sand and rocks were all government issue, and we were properly searched and questioned beforehand. Pravda!”

Canada, of course, is as much a Communist country as Rogan is a reliable source of information. He even acknowledged as much in his comments, saying, “I have zero understanding of their system. I never looked into it at all.” But that didn’t stop him from insinuating that Canada’s COVID-19 response was somehow informed by Justin Trudeau’s supposedly corrupt impulses.

“I would like to see where the money is coming from,” he said. “Why do you want everybody to get injected every four months? We don’t need that anymore. You can’t even get into Canada unless you’re vaccinated.”

Rogan doesn’t seem to know much about his own country, either, given that foreign nationals can’t get into it unless they’re fully vaccinated. But this complete absence of facts and evidence in his remarks, which included the now-familiar description of Trudeau as a “dictator,” didn’t deter the Toronto Sun from treating it as a legitimate news story. In a video, columnist Brian Lilley suggested that while he “didn’t love” seeing elected officials get called dictators, he “gets where they’re coming from. Trudeau has a tendency to use dictatorial measures.”

What, exactly, is Lilley referring to here? Why, the Emergencies Act, of course — the invocation of which was voted on in Parliament and received the support of three different parties, including the governing Liberals. You’d need to have the same level of understanding of Canada’s system of government as Rogan — that is to say, none at all — to believe the leader of a minority Parliament could exercise anything even remotely resembling dictatorial power. And remember: some of the politicians who have traded in this accusation were the same ones upset that the prime minister decided to call an election at this time last year. If Trudeau really is a dictator, he’s the least effective one in recorded history.

The truth of the matter, one that conservatives like Pierre Poilievre and his fellow travellers would like their supporters to forget, is that Canada is one of the freest countries on Earth. The Fraser Institute — no friend to Liberals or Trudeau, much less communists and dictators — released an annual update to its “Human Freedom Index,” which takes 82 different indicators and blends them into scores for personal, economic, and human freedom. Their ranking for 2021 saw Canada rise three spots to sixth best in the world, tied with Finland and just behind Ireland. The United States, by comparison, came in at 15th.

This ongoing attempt to paint Canada as some sort of quasi-Communist country and its prime minister as an aspiring dictator isn’t actually about freedom writ large. It’s about a very specific and small subset of freedom: the freedom to remain unvaccinated without any consequences. It’s what clearly animates Rogan’s perspective on our country, and it’s driving and defining the leadership races for the Conservative Party of Canada and the United Conservative Party in Alberta. The recent decisions by supposed moderates in both races — Jean Charest and Travis Toews — to pay homage to the anti-vaccine forces in their respective parties speaks to just how powerful that constituency has become.

This wouldn’t be a problem if it was just an internal party matter, but it’s infecting the broader public debate around the necessity of COVID-19 measures right as another wave of cases gets ready to hammer our provincial health-care systems. As hospitalizations start to rise (up 50 per cent already in Quebec) and experts suggest we ought to start considering renewed public health measures, our elected officials seem less willing than ever to do that. "We're no longer at the point of imposing things when people are well aware of the risks,” Quebec Health Minister Christian Dubé said last week. “It's just a question of reminding them.”

The front-runner in the UCP leadership race, Danielle Smith, has already promised she wouldn’t bring in new public health measures to deal with whatever this and future waves might bring. You can be sure that Doug Ford will wait until the last possible moment, and then a little bit longer, before doing anything to contain the spread of the virus in Ontario. Even our dictator-curious prime minister is probably going to be reluctant to impose any additional measures, given how much political blood was spilled over those he just lifted and how many other priorities his government has.

We’re on our own, in other words. That’s about as far as you can get from living in a Communist country, and it’s probably going to come at the cost of lives that don't need to be lost to a pandemic we know how to contain and control.

But, hey, at least Joe Rogan should be happy.