Canada as counter-environment: Canadian democracy in a digital world

Abstract

This article follows Innis, McLuhan and others in exploring the concept of space, but does so in relation to the survival and evolution of Canadian democracy within our emerging digital world. First considering the spatial implications of Canadian geography, the country’s constitution and institutions, along with the federal government’s spending power, it then considers those associated with economic staples and particularly how these affect our institutional infrastructure, especially in disturbing cases of ‘state capture’. Alongside identifying and addressing a number of concerns relating to digital space as now configured (and which will require fundamental reform), I also probe the concept of ‘inner space’ or interiority. I do this specifically in relation to its role as one of the most valuable resources of the digital age, not only in its commercial exploitation but also in terms of its defence: ultimately, in the service of mobilizing towards a more democratic culture. In demonstrating how Canada, following McLuhan, might function as a ‘counter-environment’ that makes the ‘world environment’ of the United States perceptible to its global occupants, I maintain that what we require is the exact same cultural remedy that Innis prescribed to counter the biases of the space-binding and time-annihilating electronic space of his own time. Namely, what is required is the retrieval of what Innis referred to as ‘oral tradition’, accompanied by the necessary and concomitant re-embedding of people within their local communities.