Peter MacKinnon is a lawyer, former law professor, a former Dean of Law at the University of Saskatchewan, and a senior fellow at the Aristotle Foundation among other accomplishments. He served as president of the University of Saskatchewan, and interim president at both Athabasca University and Dalhousie, resigning this last position in January 2020.
In a January 2019 interview with Dal News, he reflected on his pursuits as an author: “I don’t want to write a memoir, and I didn’t want to write local history. I wanted to write about policy” following his term as president at the University of Saskatchewan.
On a second occasion he was asked by Muslim students to create a space where only Muslims could go for their daily prayers. “This request I declined, informing them that as a public, secular institution the University of Saskatchewan would not designate space exclusively for any single religious group.”
The word, illiberalism, which MacKinnon wished to “confront,” according to the book’s title, is of recent vintage. Most accounts trace it to a 1997 article in Foreign Affairs by Fareed Zakaria, a political scientist and journalist who expanded criticism of Francis Fukuyama’s argument that the end of history was upon us in the form of universal capitalist liberal democracy. Originally Fukuyama’s critics pointed to Pacific Asia as a counter example. Zakaria extended the argument to include regimes around the world that limited the freedom of the people they nominally represented.
There is, however, no consensus on what the word precisely means. As is true of most who use it, MacKinnon provides his own understanding by way of examples of how illiberal practices can be hidden behind what look like liberal procedures.
A useful question: Who deserves “equity”? The question almost answers itself: “women, Indigenous peoples, visual/racialized minorities, persons with disabilities, and LGBTQ2S persons.” White males, if they do not qualify by identifying with one of these categories, were excluded, no matter what their academic qualifications and achievements. Obviously, as MacKinnon observes, “individual equality rights that are fundamental in liberal societies” have been ignored by the administration—from the president on down—at the University of Calgary’s burgeoning behemoth of an administration.
Pace illiberalism in Western Canada, equally well-known is the atrocious treatment accorded Lindsay Shepherd by Wilfrid Laurier University in 2017. Shepherd, then a 23-year-old graduate student, was found “guilty” by a self-appointed star chamber composed of her supervisor, the head of her academic program, and another staffer, of this thought crime: exposing her first-year communications class to the words of Jordan Peterson, whom Wilfrid Laurier University’s inquisitors compared to Adolf Hitler. One may recall that this comparison arose because Peterson, then a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, refused to use locutions such as “zie” or to use “they” as a singular pronoun despite instructions from his administrative superiors that such usage was compulsory.
One of the attributes of “politics” in Crick’s sense is its spontaneity, which often makes political action a surprise even to the actors. In recent Canadian history, it seems to me, the most significant “political” event was the 2022 truckers’ convoy in Ottawa, the one protesting COVID-era lockdown mandates and forcibly put down by the federal government with the Emergencies Act.
Not, however, according to MacKinnon. According to him, it was a “populist protest,” and populism is a “threat” to politics as Crick understands it. The reason—as other authorities, Cas Mudde and Christobal Rovira, argued—is that populism is “almost always” combined with various kinds of ideologies, and ideologies are invariably divisive, which makes political action more difficult.
This last part of MacKinnon’s argument is, I believe, correct but it does raise two additional questions. First, is liberalism an ideology? If not, why not? Second, with what ideology was the truckers’ convoy associated?
Granted, it is difficult to provide an acceptable definition of populism.
As for the truckers, it seems to me that the purpose of the convoy, as they so often said, was to protest government vaccine mandates. After all, before vaccines were available, the truckers were praised as heroes for delivering vegetables from California’s Central Valley to the markets of Ottawa and Montreal. MacKinnon, however, rejects the self-understanding of the truckers.
Another observation: MacKinnon argues that there is an expectation of trust and accountability in liberal democracies such as ours, regarding the behaviour of their governments. This is no doubt correct. However, the example he introduced as a suitable authority on the question of trust, former Gov. Gen. David Johnson, seems to me to have been inapt.
“Trust is the bedrock of democracy,” said Johnson, notwithstanding the fact that his appointment as special rapporteur was a prime example of how trust is eroded. Johnson was chosen by Justin Trudeau—despite being a friend of the Trudeau family, and what the Chinese leader called an “old friend” of China—to be the “special rapporteur” charged with looking into Chinese interference in Canadian elections. Given these links, his report was not trusted by many Canadians, and he resigned under pressure from the opposition parties.
Despite Peter MacKinnon’s insightful and commonsensical remarks about various illiberal events in recent Canadian history, it is still not clear what liberalism entails, and perforce about illiberalism as well. The reason is not a result of any defect in MacKinnon’s scholarship, but results from the vagueness of liberalism as an element of political reality. In fact, many of the illiberal practices he quite properly criticizes as consequences of anti-liberal collective identity politics have emerged on the left from progressive liberal positions. This observation should remind us that, historically speaking, and for clear methodological reasons, any unambiguous description of liberalism is difficult to make.
Liberalism is hard to delimit because it changes, sometimes radically, over a relatively short period of time. MacKinnon, it seems to me, is a decent moderate and commonsensical liberal who, with the help of Crick’s arguments, would like this ideology to be stabilized. The problem is not Mackinnon’s alone and may be summarized by the observation that any account of liberalism and illiberalism will of necessity be valid only temporarily because of the aforementioned changes in the meaning and policies of liberalism over time. That is, liberalism constitutes a phase within a broader modern progressive Western political movement, so its meaning will vary with the phases of the development of the latter. The optimal clarity regarding the meaning of liberalism, as MacKinnon indicates, lies in the 19th century after which it is exceedingly difficult to specify its identity.
Today the liberalism of, for example, John Stuart Mill, has transmogrified into the illiberalism of DEI bureaucrats. Again to paraphrase Sowell, the instability of liberalism explains why, two generations ago, if you said that all citizens should be judged by the same standards, you would be denounced as a flaming radical. A generation ago, you would be called a liberal. Today you would again be denounced, this time as a racist.
