A Country at a Crossroads

It started with a seminar on uncivil discourse and an election south of the border that nobody quite expected. For Dr. Max Cameron, professor of political science at UBC’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, those two moments crystallized into something larger: a question about what Canada is, what it could become, and whether its citizens are prepared to defend it.

His new book, Divided We Fall, arrives at a moment when that question feels urgent. Across the democratic world, polarization is accelerating. Institutions are under strain. And yet, Cameron argues, Canada is not simply a smaller version of the United States — it has its own political traditions, its own fractures, and its own reasons for cautious optimism.

The book is, in his words, written by a political scientist as a citizen for fellow citizens.

The Spark Behind the Book

Cameron traces the project’s origins to a Lind seminar he co-taught with Kathryn Gretsinger, associate professor of teaching at UBC’s School of Journalism, Writing and Media. The seminar examined polarization and uncivil discourse in the American context, and it left Cameron convinced that Canada needed its own version of that reckoning.

Then Donald Trump won a second term and began speaking openly about Canada as a prospective 51st state. Something shifted. Rather than fracturing along familiar regional and partisan lines, Canadians pushed back together — elbows up, as the phrase went — with a renewed sense of shared identity that Cameron found striking enough to build an entire argument around.

“Rather than becoming more polarized, Canadians suddenly became more united,” he notes. That collective reflex, however fleeting, became the book’s animating example.

What Polarization Actually Means

Cameron is careful not to treat all political division as pathological. Some degree of polarization, he argues, is not only normal but necessary in a pluralistic democracy — people enter political life precisely because they hold different visions of how society should be organized. He cites Governor General Louise Arbour’s observation that extreme consensus is as dangerous as extreme division, since genuine disagreement fuels critical thinking and democratic creativity.

The line Cameron draws is between productive conflict and what researchers call pernicious polarization — the kind where differences become so entrenched that citizens begin tolerating, or even welcoming, anti-democratic behaviour from leaders they perceive as allies. That, the historical record suggests, is almost always the precursor to democratic breakdown.

Navigating that distinction demands something specific: compassion and genuine listening, yes, but also the willingness to name and resist polarization when it is being deployed as a tool of domination rather than a natural expression of political difference.

Canada’s Position — and Its Vulnerabilities

Cameron does not offer Canada a clean bill of health. The country carries its own deep tensions — between federal and provincial authorities, between Quebec’s distinct political culture and the rest of the federation, between Indigenous nations asserting sovereignty and a constitutional order still working through what that means in practice. Regional grievances, from Atlantic fisheries policy to Prairie energy politics, are real and deserve serious attention rather than dismissal.

What Cameron suggests is that Canada’s institutional architecture — its parliamentary system, its federal structure, its tradition of negotiated accommodation — gives it tools that other democracies lack. Those tools are not self-executing. They require citizens who know how to use them.

The Responsibilities of Citizenship

This is where the book shifts from diagnosis to something closer to a civic argument. Cameron’s central claim is that sovereignty — real, meaningful sovereignty — depends on citizens who are genuinely capable of self-governance: engaged, informed, willing to enter the discomfort of political conflict rather than retreat from it.

Many Canadians, he observes, are conflict-avoidant by disposition. Politics feels negative, so people withdraw into private life. But a community that collectively disengages from its own governance is no longer, in any meaningful sense, self-governing.

The habits Cameron calls for go beyond voting, though voting matters. He points to joining civic associations, voicing opinions in public, telling stories that build social cohesion across difference, developing the skills to engage in conflict constructively, and finding ways to serve community life directly. These are not abstract virtues — they are, he argues, the practical character traits that democratic self-governance actually requires.

And despite everything, Cameron says he remains optimistic. Not naively so, but with the measured confidence of someone who watched Canadians, briefly and imperfectly, choose solidarity over division when it mattered.

About the Author

Max Cameron holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley (1989) and is a professor in the Department of Political Science and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. Divided We Fall is available now.

For years, parents working outside the conventional Monday-to-Friday workweek in Vancouver had few options when it came to licensed child care. Nurses pulling weekend hospital shifts, restaurant workers clocking in on Saturdays, emergency responders on rotating schedules — all of them navigated a system that simply wasn’t built around their reality. That gap, long acknowledged but rarely addressed, began to close this past Saturday.

The Champlain Heights Community Centre, located in Vancouver’s southeast, quietly made history by opening the city’s first licensed weekend child care program for school-aged children. The service runs Saturdays and Sundays from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., welcoming children between the ages of five and twelve. It is a modest but meaningful step, one that advocates say has been overdue for a generation.

The idea grew out of a straightforward observation. Robert Baxter, president of the Champlain Heights Community Association and a parent himself, noticed that the community centre’s child care facility sat largely empty on weekends — space and staff going unused while families in the neighbourhood scrambled for coverage. “We realized that our child care centre was being underutilized on the weekends,” Baxter said. The solution seemed obvious once someone stopped to look for it.

What makes the program especially notable is its structural flexibility. Rather than requiring families to commit to a fixed weekly schedule, parents can register for a single day or book as many weekends as their situation demands. That kind of adaptability is rare in licensed child care, where rigid enrollment models have historically failed workers on rotating or irregular shifts. Baxter acknowledged that this flexibility was central to the program’s design, precisely because it mirrors the unpredictable nature of the jobs many parents actually hold.

Vancouver city councillor Sean Orr welcomed the opening, framing it within a broader conversation about who child care policy is actually designed to serve. “Not everyone works a nine to five job,” Orr said. He pointed specifically to newcomers to Canada, who often lack the extended family networks that many longer-established residents rely on for informal weekend coverage — a reality that makes accessible, affordable, licensed care not merely convenient but essential to economic participation.

Sharon Gregson of the Coalition of Childcare Advocates of B.C. offered a sharper edge to the celebration. She called weekend child care long overdue and noted that workers in health care, emergency services, hospitality and real estate have struggled for years to find arrangements that fit their schedules. “It’s still a big culture shift to think about licensed child care on the weekends,” Gregson said — a candid reminder that Saturday’s opening, welcome as it is, represents a beginning rather than a resolution. The broader child care system, she suggested, has yet to fully reckon with the diversity of how Canadians actually work and live.

With less than three weeks until Quebec voters head to the polls on October 5, all four major parties fanned out across the province on Saturday to deliver a flurry of campaign pledges, spanning public safety, health care, transit and education. The Coalition Avenir Québec led the day’s headlines with a promise to hire 300 new police officers and 50 Crown prosecutors, while rival parties staked out competing visions for the health-care system and public services.

CAQ leader Christine Fréchette made her announcement at the Quebec police academy in Nicolet, committing $196 million to expand both the Sûreté du Québec and municipal police forces. She framed the pledge squarely around the evolution of criminal activity in the province. “In recent years, crime has changed in Quebec,” Fréchette said. “Now, criminals are recruiting our young people online. Harassment, fraud, and extortion are now happening online. Armed violence is a growing concern for citizens.”

Beyond the officer and prosecutor numbers, the CAQ would spend $13 million to deploy joint teams pairing a police officer with a mental health professional in regional communities — a model that acknowledges the limits of purely law-enforcement responses to complex social problems. Two technological expertise centres, one in Montreal and one in Quebec City, would be established at a cost of $14 million to coordinate intelligence across police forces on fraud, online recruitment of minors, youth radicalization and illicit trafficking.

On health care, both the Parti Québécois and the Quebec Liberal Party presented reform visions that share a common thread: shifting the system’s centre of gravity away from hospitals and toward prevention and primary care. PQ leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, speaking in eastern Montreal, promised to invest $150 million over four years in CLSCs, positioning them as the primary gateway to care. His party would also increase the public health prevention budget by $550 million over four years, with measures targeting physical activity, mental health and the over-prescription of medications. St-Pierre Plamondon also called for expanding medical school cohorts and establishing programs at regional universities to address persistent shortages of health professionals outside major urban centres.

The Liberals took a complementary but distinct angle. Speaking in Trois-Rivières, Liberal spokesperson Charles Milliard announced that a PLQ government would gradually raise the share of health spending devoted to prevention, reaching 5 per cent by the end of the next decade. The funds would support cancer screening programs, chronic disease prevention and vaccination drives. The party also proposed a personalized Quebec Prevention Pathway for eligible residents, delivering tailored invitations to screening and preventive interventions based on age, sex and individual risk factors.

Québec Solidaire moved on transit. Spokesperson Ruba Ghazal announced in Montreal that a QS government would make public transit free for riders under 25 and those 65 and older, while offering a 20 per cent tax credit to all other users. The party estimates the combined cost of free fares and the tax credit at $270 million annually, with an additional $230 million earmarked for maintaining and improving services — a total commitment of $500 million per year. Ghazal argued the measure would save a Montreal family with two teenagers up to $2,100 annually, and a single adult up to $792.

“We don’t want cities to bear the burden of expanding public transit and meeting the population’s needs — the Quebec government must step up,” Ghazal said.

The Quebec Conservative Party turned its attention to education, with leader Éric Duhaime promising to dramatically restructure the French-language school system. The PCQ would reduce the number of school service centres from the current 61 to just 17, refocusing their mandate on support and coordination rather than administration. Schools would receive direct funding and gain greater authority over program offerings, staffing and transportation. The party also proposed ending residential proximity as the primary criterion for school enrollment, allowing families to choose a school in a neighbouring area if it better fits their child’s needs. The reforms would begin as pilot projects in targeted regions before broader implementation.

The breadth of Saturday’s announcements reflects the compressed urgency of a campaign entering its final stretch, with each party working to consolidate support across a province where health care, public safety and the cost of living remain top concerns for voters.

Ontario’s court system is grappling with a cybersecurity incident that may have exposed personal information belonging to individuals who have appeared in court proceedings or been named in court documents. The province’s three chief justices disclosed the breach in a joint statement posted on September 2, confirming that unauthorized access to a court records platform had occurred more than two months earlier.

The incident traces back to June 30, when Thomson Reuters Canada detected what it described as “unauthorized activity” on its C-Track case management platform — a system used by Ontario courts to store and manage documents and records. Once the intrusion was identified, Thomson Reuters moved to contain it and began assessing what data had been accessed, ultimately determining that some court information was among the compromised material.

The scope of what was exposed remains uncertain.

“Because there remains uncertainty about the exact content of the files that may have been accessed, it is still unclear what information may have been compromised,” the justices wrote. “However, if individuals have been involved in court proceedings or may have been mentioned in court documents, it is possible that some personal information relating to them could have been involved in the incident.” That caveat covers a broad population — anyone who has ever appeared before an Ontario court, been a witness, or simply been referenced in a filing.

The statement was issued jointly by Michael H. Tulloch, Chief Justice of Ontario; Patrick J. Boucher, Chief Justice of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice; and Sharon M. Nicklas, Chief Justice of the Ontario Court of Justice. Their public acknowledgment, while measured in tone, signals the seriousness with which the judiciary is treating the breach, given that court records routinely contain sensitive personal details — addresses, financial disclosures, testimony, and family information — that carry real risks if misused.

On the financial side, the justices offered a degree of reassurance, noting that there is currently no indication that any systems used to process financial transactions related to court proceedings were affected. They also confirmed that, to date, there is no evidence the incident has resulted in identity theft.

Thomson Reuters has since implemented additional safeguards and security enhancements to the C-Track platform, the justices added. The investigation, however, remains ongoing, meaning the full picture of what was accessed — and by whom — has yet to emerge.

Courts are among the most sensitive repositories of personal information held by any public institution. A breach of this kind raises legitimate questions about how private-sector vendors that manage public judicial infrastructure are vetted, monitored, and held accountable when something goes wrong. The two-month gap between the June 30 incident and the September 2 public disclosure will also draw scrutiny, even if some delay is common while investigations are underway.

For now, Ontarians who have had any involvement in court proceedings — as parties, witnesses, or simply as named individuals — are left in a state of partial uncertainty, waiting for an investigation to tell them what, exactly, was taken.