CPAC screencap

By Lisa Van Dusen

May 27, 2025

“The world is a more dangerous and uncertain place than at any point since the Second World War,” King Charles noted in the Speech from the Throne on Tuesday. “Canada is facing challenges that are unprecedented in our lifetimes.” In keeping with the divine right of kings to bury the lede, that section didn’t come until 660 words in. But it certainly summed up the context.

The latest competition for global dominance between autocracy and democracy has, in its first quarter century, seen advantage go to the autocrats based largely on the industrialization of means-to-an-end BS in the form of anti-democracy propaganda, performative and otherwise.

The world order represented by the institutions of rules-based, post-war multilateralism (often labelled “the west” for divisive purposes but including non-western democracies such as India, Indonesia, Japan, Brazil and Philippines, among others) has had a hard time rallying in the face of the operational tactics that have disrupted it from outside and in, including strategic corruption, technology-boosted narrative warfare and, more recently, unprecedented economic warfare.

“The system of open global trade that, while not perfect, has helped to deliver prosperity for Canadians for decades, is changing,” said King Charles on Tuesday’s speech. “Canada’s relationships with partners are also changing.”

That accelerated change is just one among many degradations of America’s linchpin status as a democratic superpower, in this case incited by a reality-show performer whose role as a propaganda actor extends beyond mere optics to the implementation of previously unthinkable transformation misdirectionally posing as nationalism and attributed to ignorance and behavioural volatility.

Yes, the Trump tariff war seems indiscriminate, but its systemic consequences are already registering via the fragmentation and replacement of a multilateral global trade status quo which, as the economic infrastructure of that world order forged in the wake of the last century’s epic manifestation of organized evil, has been under operational assault by its political and geopolitical rivals since the turn of the millennium.

Every day, the world is subjected to a relentless feed of democracy-discrediting, America-debasing headlines that provide narrative cover for the sort of shifts in the global balance of power that once required military force rather than economic, autocratic, and soft-power aggression and self-sabotage.

Canada may now be reinforcing its default approach of bringing reason to a lunatic fight by — to quote the scion of a different dynasty — going to the mattresses in the propaganda battle of what The Economist recently characterized as ‘a mafia-like struggle for global power’

That Canada’s sovereignty has become a ludicrous meme within that daily assault has produced the most avoidably hostile, disarrayed chapter in its bilateral relations with the United States since the Treaty of Ghent was ratified in 1815.

With Prime Minister Mark Carney’s enlistment of King Charles as a contrast foil to the propaganda actor next door, Canada may now be reinforcing its default approach of bringing reason to a lunatic fight by — to quote the scion of a different dynasty — going to the mattresses in the propaganda battle of what The Economist recently characterized as “a mafia-like struggle for global power.”

Donald Trump’s value as a disruptive, anti-democracy actor stems, ironically enough, from the rapidly depleting power of the American presidency, including as an un-ignorable, non-discretionary coverage magnet. There are two other mandatory-coverage, content-generating job titles with reliable global reach: the pope and the British monarch.

The outpouring of patriotic glee that greeted King Charles and Queen Camilla on Monday and Tuesday in sunny Ottawa was, as widely reported, infused with an annexation-repellant, anti-Trumpian sentiment that has inspired renewed enthusiasm for the king as our head of state.

In other words, sure, we’ve been ambivalent at times, and even hankered for a less eccentric, Shakespearian form of government, but given the choice between Shakespeare and Puzo, we’ll go with the tasteful absence of economic coercion and calling-card horse’s heads. We are Canadian.

“Democracy, pluralism, the rule of law, self-determination, and freedom are values which Canadians hold dear,” the King said Tuesday in the segue section between his opening comments of the speech and the Carney government’s text, “and ones which the government is determined to protect.”

In an information ecosystem hacked by preposterous levels of disinformation, psy-ops manipulation, and tactical fabulism, it can be difficult to break through the static of weaponized absurdity.

Having a king as your messenger helps.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, senior writer for Maclean’s and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.