Your Party Is Not Your Country

September 27, 2026 UnrulyNorth 0 Comments

Political loyalty becomes dangerous when protecting the party matters more than judging what it does. Canada and the United States show how that bargain excuses broken promises, shields abuses of power and leaves the public paying for principles politicians no longer have to honour.

Illustrated citizens shine a light on gears and torn papers behind red and blue political stages. — When loyalty protects the party, citizens must look behind the performance to hold leaders accountable.

A political party has acquired extraordinary power over its supporters when it can abandon a principle and count on them to explain why the principle never mattered.

Canada has watched Conservatives propose carbon pricing and Liberals dismantle the federal consumer charge they once defended. It has watched a government promise to change the electoral system, abandon that promise and carry on under the arrangement it had pledged to replace. The United States has gone considerably further: on returning to office in January 2025, Donald Trump used presidential clemency to protect people convicted of offences connected to the attack on Congress that followed his election defeat. The proclamation records precisely what he ordered.

These events differ profoundly in severity. Changing a climate policy, breaking a democratic-reform promise and rewarding participants in an assault on democratic government belong in different categories. Treating them as interchangeable would conceal the most serious abuse.

But they raise a common question: what actually constrains a leader when the people best positioned to demand accountability have decided that protecting the party comes first?

The danger is larger than hypocrisy. Once supporters become reliable defenders of whatever their leadership does, politicians gain room to govern against the standards that supposedly justified electing them. Principles become campaign materials. Accountability becomes something demanded of opponents. The public is left with vigorous political competition and increasingly conditional restraints on power.

For Canadians, this requires looking critically in both directions: across the border at a more advanced democratic crisis, and at home at the habits that allow our own politicians to escape consequences.

When belief follows the leader

Party identification can be useful. Nobody has time to investigate every regulation, budget line or parliamentary vote. A party’s record provides clues about its priorities, competence and likely conduct.

The arrangement breaks down when that shortcut becomes an exemption from scrutiny. Instead of asking whether a proposal serves a public purpose, supporters ask whether defending it helps their side. Instead of investigating an allegation, they investigate the political affiliations of whoever raised it.

Research shows that leaders can influence the convictions their supporters believe they already possess. In an experiment using Donald Trump’s actual policy statements, political scientists Michael Barber and Jeremy Pope found that strong Republicans, Trump supporters and self-described conservatives were among those most likely to follow his position—even when the position pointed in a liberal direction. The finding concerns susceptibility to a leader’s endorsement, rather than proof that every supporter lacks principles. Its significance is that political identity can remain fixed while the policy content underneath it changes. Barber and Pope, “Does Party Trump Ideology?”

Hostility makes that influence more potent. In 2022, Pew found that 72 per cent of Republicans regarded Democrats as more immoral than other Americans; 63 per cent of Democrats said the same about Republicans. When opponents become morally contaminating, conceding a fact can feel like helping dangerous people. Pew’s research on partisan hostility documents how far that judgment had spread.

Some political threats are real. Opposition to authoritarianism, racism or the removal of rights is not evidence of irrational tribalism. Nor should we assume that everyone defending abusive conduct has been deceived; some approve of the conduct.

The failure occurs when fear of an opponent becomes unlimited permission for an ally. A party can be the better electoral choice and still lie, abuse authority or protect powerful interests. Its comparative merits do not erase its obligations.

Carbon pricing and Canada’s convenient convictions

Canada’s carbon-pricing debate provides a revealing test because the party positions have shifted while the underlying problem—reducing emissions—has remained.

In 2021, Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives proposed a consumer carbon levy that would direct proceeds into personal accounts for approved environmentally beneficial purchases. It differed from the Liberal system in rates and design, but it still put a carbon price on consumer fuel purchases. Opposition to the Liberal approach had become support for a Conservative alternative.

There was resistance. Angus Reid found that 19 per cent of people who had voted Conservative in 2019 said the proposal made them less likely to support the party. That measures a stated reaction, not subsequent voting behaviour, but it rules out the comforting caricature that every supporter obediently reversed position. Angus Reid’s assessment of O’Toole’s proposal recorded both opposition and opportunities to attract other voters.

Under Pierre Poilievre, the party moved in the opposite direction. His 2025 proposal called for repealing the federal carbon-pricing law, including the backstop requiring provincial industrial pricing. That was a substantive change from offering a Conservative consumer-pricing system. The Conservative announcement states that commitment.

The Liberals supplied their own reversal. Mark Carney’s government set the federal fuel charge to zero effective April 1, 2025, and removed the federal requirement for provincial and territorial consumer-facing carbon prices. Industrial pricing remained part of the federal approach. The consumer rebates were also wound down, with a final payment beginning that April. Finance Canada’s explanation establishes those distinctions.

Those details matter. Removing a charge and ending its associated rebate requires an assessment of the household’s net position. Keeping industrial pricing means the government did not abolish carbon pricing altogether. Comparing alternative climate plans requires examining emissions reductions, costs, distributional effects and implementation.

Partisan argument becomes evasive when it replaces those questions with ownership. If a policy was essential when one Liberal prime minister defended it, supporters should demand a serious account of why his successor could remove it. If carbon pricing was acceptable under O’Toole, Conservatives should explain why their party later sought a much broader repeal.

A defensible answer might involve effectiveness, public acceptance or a better replacement. But electoral convenience does not establish policy success. Ending an unpopular measure can solve a party’s campaign problem while leaving the public-policy problem unresolved.

The necessary standard is demanding but straightforward: show what changed, show who gains and loses, and show how the replacement achieves the stated objective. Supporters who supply excuses before seeing those answers relieve politicians of the work.

Ottawa’s accountability problem reaches beyond policy

Electoral reform exposed a different failure: a government abandoning a commitment about the rules governing its own power.

The Trudeau government explicitly committed to making 2015 the last federal election under first-past-the-post. That promise remained in government communications in 2016. In February 2017, Trudeau’s mandate letter to Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould removed changing the electoral system from her responsibilities, citing the absence of a clear preference or consensus. The letter is unambiguous.

Disagreement about the replacement was a genuine political obstacle. It was also the kind of obstacle an unconditional promise undertakes to overcome. The government had promised an outcome and delivered its reasons for abandoning it.

That deserves to remain a breach of trust even in the assessment of voters who preferred the Liberals’ other policies. When supporters retrospectively downgrade an explicit commitment into an optional aspiration, they teach governments that promises can secure votes without creating durable obligations.

SNC-Lavalin presented a more serious test involving the exercise of public authority. In his August 2019 report, ethics commissioner Mario Dion found that Trudeau contravened section 9 of the Conflict of Interest Act by seeking to influence attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould in a manner that improperly furthered SNC-Lavalin’s private interests. This was a statutory ethics finding, not a criminal conviction. It concerned prosecutorial independence and the rule of law, not merely an awkward communications problem. The Trudeau II report sets out the evidence and finding.

Earlier that year, Trudeau had expelled Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott from the Liberal caucus. He justified the decision through broken trust and party unity, warning that political opponents benefited when Liberals were divided. Reuters’ contemporaneous report captures that reasoning.

The sequence deserves scrutiny: the former ministers who challenged the government lost their places in caucus; the prime minister subsequently found to have breached the Act remained at its head. Whatever a voter’s broader electoral judgment, party unity had plainly become a competing demand against public accountability.

It is insufficient to answer that Conservatives would have governed badly. That may explain a vote. It cannot establish that the Liberal conduct was acceptable. A voter choosing between imperfect alternatives still owes the facts an honest description.

The American line that cannot be blurred

American hyperpartisanship has crossed a boundary that ordinary arguments about policy inconsistency do not adequately describe.

On January 20, 2025, Trump commuted the sentences of 14 named January 6 defendants, pardoned the other individuals convicted of offences relating to the attack, and directed the attorney general to seek dismissal of pending indictments. The presidential proclamation establishes the breadth of that intervention.

The beneficiaries included people convicted of assaulting police officers. Associated Press reported that roughly 200 defendants had pleaded guilty to assaults on law enforcement. Its reporting on the clemency also distinguishes violent offenders from defendants prosecuted for less serious conduct.

That distinction makes the blanket intervention more revealing. Individual consideration could have distinguished offences, circumstances and sentences. Trump instead extended relief across cases arising from an attack aimed at stopping the transfer of power after his defeat.

The political message was that committing offences in service of his cause could be followed by presidential protection when he regained office. Calling that a disagreement over “law and order” understates the issue. It rewarded conduct directed against the democratic process itself.

Canadians should resist the temptation to soften that conclusion by immediately searching for an equivalent Democratic offence. Equal standards require comparing evidence and consequences. They do not require manufacturing equal severity.

Democrats nevertheless have obligations under those same standards. On December 1, 2024, Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter after repeatedly saying he would not. The pardon covered federal offences committed or potentially committed over a period beginning in January 2014. Biden argued that his son had been unfairly targeted; that was his justification, not an independent finding establishing the necessity of the pardon. His statement and the clemency document make its scope clear.

The decision privileged the president’s family and broke his public commitment. Some Democrats criticized it, demonstrating that allegiance need not require automatic defence. Reuters documented that criticism, including concerns about the precedent and damage to confidence in justice.

The two cases therefore require different judgments. A president’s sweeping protection of his son is a serious abuse of public trust. Presidential protection for participants in an attack on the transfer of power carries an additional threat to democratic government. Recognizing the first does not diminish the second.

The convenient partisan response is to use either case to excuse the other. The democratic response is to keep both standards intact and recognize the greater danger where the evidence establishes it.

Who benefits when dissent becomes betrayal?

It is too easy to place the entire burden on individual voters, as though democratic deterioration could be solved by asking everyone to become less emotional.

Political organizations shape the choices available to their supporters. Leaders benefit when criticism of their decisions is treated as disloyalty to the group. MPs and candidates have reasons to preserve access, advancement and the party’s electoral machinery. A supporter who fears the alternative government may remain loyal even after recognizing misconduct.

Together, those incentives can reverse the direction of accountability. Instead of representatives answering to voters, voters become volunteers in the representatives’ defence.

Canada’s parliamentary discipline intensifies that problem. The Samara Centre’s examination of the 2015–2019 Parliament found that the average MP voted with their party 99.6 per cent of the time. Even the most rebellious MP did so 96.6 per cent of the time. These are findings about that Parliament, not a current measurement or proof that every vote was coerced. They nevertheless show how little visible independence existed in recorded voting. Samara’s House Inspection also found continuing problems with debate and scrutiny.

Some cohesion is necessary to maintain confidence and implement a programme. But maintaining a government cannot be an adequate answer to every demand for scrutiny of that government. Parliamentary accountability weakens when the people expected to examine executive conduct feel responsible for protecting its political reputation.

First-past-the-post adds another pressure. A voter may reasonably fear that withdrawing support from a disappointing party will help elect a less acceptable opponent. That creates room for parties to retain support through the comparative danger of the alternative.

The practical response must therefore extend beyond voting. Caucus members can demand answers, committees can pursue evidence, party members can challenge leaders, and independent watchdogs can establish findings that campaign messaging cannot legitimately erase. Their effectiveness depends partly on whether supporters defend their independence when the findings hurt.

Calls for civility are inadequate here. An accusation can be angrily expressed and true. A government can evade accountability in perfectly courteous language. The relevant question is whether scrutiny changes behaviour and produces consequences.

Canada has strengths worth defending—and exposure it cannot ignore

Research does not support declaring Canadian voters hopelessly captive to party brands. A study published in Political Behavior in March 2026 found that adding explicit party labels did not reduce the weight Canadians placed on agreement with candidates’ policies in its experiment. That finding is specific to the research setting, but it directly challenges the claim that substance has ceased to matter. Treger and colleagues’ “Party or Policy?” provides evidence of a democratic capacity worth protecting.

The national picture of institutional trust is also more complicated than a story of universal collapse. Environics’ analysis of its 2025 Canadian survey found that trust had generally held steady over 15 years, while declining among Conservative supporters since their party lost office in 2015. Some Liberal–Conservative trust gaps were comparable in width to American partisan gaps. The report emphasizes the importance of governing versus opposition status.

Distrust can be deserved. But a democracy is in trouble when confidence in its institutions depends primarily on whether one’s party controls them. The same courts, election administrators and investigative bodies must remain entitled to exercise their responsibilities after producing an unwelcome result.

Canada also bears consequences from American political choices without participating in them. Statistics Canada reported that the United States received 71.7 per cent of Canadian merchandise exports in 2025. That dependence gives American policy instability direct implications for Canadian businesses, workers and investment.

For that reason, Canadians should evaluate American politicians by their conduct toward Canada and democratic government. Shared ideological language offers no guarantee of shared national interests. Admiration for a foreign leader becomes a liability when it interferes with recognizing harm to this country.

The same scrutiny must apply to Canadian leaders claiming to defend us. External pressure does not suspend their obligation to explain decisions, disclose trade-offs and demonstrate results. National solidarity must leave room to examine whether a government’s response actually serves the nation.

Support should come with conditions

No serious standard of accountability requires abandoning a party over every compromise. Governing involves uncertainty, competing interests and decisions whose consequences are difficult to predict. Changing a policy in response to evidence can be a mark of competence.

But that defence requires evidence, an explanation and an assessment of results. It cannot be granted automatically because the reversal came from a preferred leader.

Supporters need to distinguish between an imperfect policy, a broken undertaking, an abuse of public authority and an attack on democratic rules. Each calls for a proportionate response. Treating every failure as equally disqualifying makes judgment impossible; treating none as disqualifying makes accountability impossible.

A party that can count on support regardless of its conduct has little reason to respect the principles of those providing it. Public criticism, internal challenges, independent investigations and—when warranted—the withdrawal of electoral support make those principles consequential.

This is particularly important when the opponent is dangerous. Defending democratic government requires preserving the restraints that distinguish it from government by personal loyalty. Sacrificing those restraints to help the preferred team win makes the promised defence increasingly hollow.

A useful test is to identify what would remain unacceptable if one’s own leader did it. If the answer changes whenever the allegation becomes politically inconvenient, the standard was never secure.

Canada’s institutions will not be protected by congratulating ourselves for having avoided the worst American outcomes. They will be protected by refusing the bargains through which accountability is gradually surrendered: silence for access, excuses for unity, and unconditional support in exchange for protection from the other side.

Your party is entitled to make its case. It is not entitled to rewrite your standards. When keeping it in power matters more than what it does with power, it has stopped earning your support and started exploiting it.