Episode Transcript
Episode 40: We Live on This Planet to Change It
Guest: Nora Loreto
Matthew Remski: Hello everyone. This is Matthew Remski, host of Antifascist Dad podcast, and this is episode 40: We Live on This Planet to Change It, with journalist Nora Loreto.
Nora Loreto: We live on this planet to change it. We live on this planet to do good work. We don't leave anyone behind.
Matthew Remski: You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name. I'm on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad. And the Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast, where supporters get early access to a second weekly episode. Now, sometimes it's the second half of a main feed interview, but this week it's an audio essay, a coda picking up on a thread that Nora and I discuss today about the tension and synergy between the news cycle and a coherent vision of history. It's about something that happens in good journalism, but also, I think, in good thinking life, and maybe in life in general, that we learn how to zoom in but also zoom out. And remember, if you can't afford to support the show on Patreon, those episodes all eventually get unlocked.
Also in the show notes you will find a link to order my book Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. And if you've got your copy, if you've read it, please review it wherever you review books. You can do that with the ebook and with the audiobook as well.
So I've followed my fellow Canadian independent journalist Nora Loreto for a long time and I've always been super impressed by her work ethic, her tenacity, and the deep underlying leftist coherence of everything that she does. I've been reading her Substack. I've been listening to her podcast, which is called Sandy and Nora Talk Politics, with her co-host Sandy Hudson.
But just recently I've been getting into Nora's extremely ambitious project, which is a five-book series subtitled Canada in Decline, in which she provides a forensic history of the seemingly relentless dismantling of our social democracy by the forces of capital.
Volume one came out in 2024. It's called The Social Safety Net and in it she describes the forty-year dismantling of the welfare state. Book two is called Corporate Control. It was out last year, 2025. It describes how corporations have become more aggressive in privatizing whatever they can. It describes the corporate capture of the state and the privatization of Crown corporations, the financialization of housing and care. And out soon is volume three, which is all about how Canada is maybe the least democratic of its peer nations through its strange parliamentary and provincial systems. And in our interview, Nora said that volume four is about culture, the far right, and religion, and volume five is about the emergence and impact of the security state.
I'm almost done, she said.
So I don't know anyone who's doing anything this ambitious while managing to stay approachable, engaged on social media, and funny. When I think of, you know, Boomer and Gen X men like Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt writing these doorstop books, I know they're riding on high salaries and the labour of research assistants. But Nora has really taken on and is living a working-class project knit together by a kind of low-key Marxist analysis that never gets jargony. And that's why I wanted to talk with her.
What I didn't know heading into our conversation was how much uncanny symmetry we share. We were both church organists in Catholic churches. Get this — our dads were both teacher-librarians, our moms were both English teachers.
But that difference of ten years between us — I'm the older one — means that we grew up in different eras. She never knew a time before neoliberalism. And maybe that informs the cannonball of her productivity. Unlike me, she's always lived in a world of decline, whereas I'm still somehow shocked by what's happening. So here's our very wide-ranging conversation about Canada in Decline, and what knits people together as we document things and fight back.
Nora Loreto, welcome to Antifascist Dad. It's a pleasure to have you here.
Nora Loreto: Thanks for having me.
Matthew Remski: We were just chatting before I hit record, and you actually said that you were an organist when you were a kid in the Catholic church. That's kind of incredible because that's what I did as well.
Nora Loreto: No way.
Matthew Remski: Yeah, right through my high school years. It was my first job. So that's kind of incredible. Wow. So that was a big part of your life?
Nora Loreto: Well, music was, in general. From a very young age I was always in my community choir. And my community choir was conducted by a guy who had been a prodigy — an incredible conductor. Ends up being charged and convicted of sexual assault later on. But he created this world in my very small hometown where there was this five-hundred-voice choir divided into five divisions, and I was in three of them or something. And even though I had been going to church — I grew up Catholic — he was an organist in Brampton at a United Church. And so my entry into church music was... I mean, my grandmother was the organist, my aunt's an organist, my other aunt plays the piano. It's just in all of both sides of my family.
Matthew Remski: Incredible.
Nora Loreto: The United Church and the Catholic Church. And so it was very natural for me. By the time I was seventeen, eighteen, I was practicing at the church organ and then accompanying masses and funerals and weddings. And then I did other stuff that was kind of crazier. Like, I became the only student in Toronto to study the carillon at the time.
Matthew Remski: Oh my goodness. Well, was it at Metro United that had the — okay, yeah.
Nora Loreto: So I practiced on those bells for a period of time. I was the only one up there practicing, other than the carillon player. But that was pretty amazing. So where were you playing? What was your story?
Matthew Remski: I grew up going to St. Michael's Choir School, and I probably started playing organ in eighth grade or something like that. And there was kind of a whole big deal about getting practice time, because there were two instruments. You could practice in the auditorium or you could practice in this really dingy basement with a strange old instrument — it was kind of early modern, a bellows-operated pump organ.
Nora Loreto: Amazing.
Matthew Remski: And that was a huge part of my life. That was me leaving the house probably before six in the morning to take the subway downtown to get the first auditorium spot. And practice, and practice, and practice. I had a horrible, horrible teacher — completely authoritarian and non-encouraging. And despite that, I loved the practice environment almost more than anything else, because you get to hang out in churches late at night or early in the morning. And I think that was formative to my imagination and to my yearning for a better world, which I think we're actually going to talk about. Do you think that this music experience gave you some sort of spark for what you've gone on to do?
Nora Loreto: Yeah. I mean, most of my music life was secular, technically. But because you can't really be in the choral world and only do secular music, you spend so much time with religious texts. And I think it is formative to be playing a Mass when you're eighteen years old, you're hungover, you're like, what am I even doing here? This isn't an old person's job. I am telling the priest to stop singing because he's bad at it.
Matthew Remski: Oh wow.
Nora Loreto: And the choir is looking at me because they're all in their seventies and eighties, and like, you can't tell the priest what to do, Nora. And it's like, I'm the choir director. Yes, I can. What are you talking about? That's my job.
Matthew Remski: Incredible.
Nora Loreto: And I would sit — so there's the music side, which I can talk about in a sec. But I would sit in the rectory, the house of the priest, between masses, because there was only an hour between masses. I wouldn't go home for that. And he would read me the Globe and Mail and talk about global politics and war and how evil war was. And he wasn't, I don't think, a particularly progressive guy — he was like a southern Ontario farming background kind of guy. And I had such a fun time with him in between the masses at the kitchen table in the rectory. I think that was pretty formative, for sure.
And then the music itself — there's nothing more communal than voices together. There's nothing more communal than doing that work together with these lyrics that have really stood the test of time. The poetry within hymns is incredible. I've gone on to collect hymnals now. I have a whole bunch of old hymnals, and my favourite is the red hymnal from the United Church from about the 1970s. I love Voices United as well, which is the current United Church hymnal. But yeah, the politics of it I think is there. And then you're also forced to meditate on these religious services. You'd sit through the same mass four times —
Matthew Remski: — in the same day.
Nora Loreto: In the same day. And I wasn't particularly religious at all. And so you have to sit there and reflect on the same sermon, on the same readings, on the same reflections for the week. And that is formative, because you do sit there and realize this is a text that means whatever the person in the pew needs it to mean for them today. Which is a really powerful expression of community. And I would say — communism.
Matthew Remski: I think that this background actually leads somewhat into my first question, which is a question of scale. Because in your journalism you do an incredible diversity of things — you have a zoomed-out perspective and you have a zoomed-in perspective. And I think there's something going on between going from the church to the rectory talking about the Globe and Mail that reflects that sort of balance. You and I are both on socials. We put out various types of content for these hellish platforms. And to the extent that we're glued to the news cycle, we're always tortured by speed. You do this really well — just the other day you put out an excellent analysis of the manifesto written by the Montreal shooter, the day after it happened. But then you have this other mode, this investigative long-form mode, where you are tackling huge historical dimensions. Canada in Decline sounds like Democracy in America, People's History of the US, Shock Doctrine. So how do these two modes interact for you?
Nora Loreto: Oh, that is such a good question. I think that the skills that one has after writing and thinking and doing deep analysis and research prepare a person to do the rapid stuff really well and really quickly. At least that's my own experience. And it's funny, because that piece — that morning I had recorded with Sandy, my co-host, and I hadn't even read the manifesto yet. That was at 8:15 or 8:30. Then I did a two-and-a-half-hour presentation to a union on how to podcast. And while I was doing this workshop with them, I was like, I have to read this, because I saw the way it was being spun by Rebel News. And I'm like, there's no way this guy's a left-wing person. No left-wing person shoots people randomly in Canada. That's not part of our left-wing tradition. Unless you've organized a provisional government or something like this, which hadn't happened.
Matthew Remski: It's never happened. We know it wouldn't match any pattern.
Nora Loreto: Yeah, no, exactly. It would be completely weird. And being weird isn't necessarily left-wing. I mean, it can be, but you know. So yeah, I think the stuff that people really like that I do tends to be the stuff in that twenty-to-forty-five-minute range, versus the features I write for the Walrus, which take months, or the books, which also take months. But I also do write in short spurts. And so you can even read my books and kind of imagine that every chunk of 1,200 or 2,000 words was actually probably done in an hour and then I stopped, and then another hour and then I stopped. But for me, I feel like I need to do everything, which is probably one of my weaknesses. I just need to have my hands in a lot of different things. Which also means that if you really pick it apart, you'll find errors, you'll find half-thought-out thoughts or whatever. That piece is riddled with typos. I don't have an editor.
Matthew Remski: Right, right. Well, it makes me think that — I appreciate that this journalistic advice at the top of the show is: if you have a long-form skill, then you have some sort of muscle for tackling whatever comes up in the news cycle at the crest of the wave. And to me, that suggests that there's a worldview that's built, some sort of ideological coherence. And as I read the zoom-out material in this trilogy you're working on, it has a lot of the signposts of Marxist history — a single relentless, embittered battle being waged by capital on workers. But not a lot of Marxist jargon. That's not how it's written. But is that the general framework you're working with? And if so, did you keep the theory on the down low on purpose?
Nora Loreto: No. The secret is I studied journalism at Ryerson, where you don't learn theory at all. My educational formation was — no theory at all. I didn't actually encounter theory until my master's degree in education. And that was the first time I started to read the real theorists and to actually engage with texts and think deeply through stuff. I didn't do my master's on a regular track. I think I was twenty-five when I started, twenty-six — I didn't finish until I was twenty-nine. I was pregnant. So, yeah. I had already done the activism thing for so long that when I finally came in contact with the theorists, it was like, oh, this is the vessel through which we should understand the world. It fit very, very well. So I'm actually not very well read in theory, but I think that Marxism is so important because it allows us to understand who has power, how do they use that power, and who are the dispossessed. And if you just start with that basis, things become really easy to understand right away. And I think the shooting in Montreal was a really good example. I saw a lot of people — left-wing people, people who do good work, people who would call themselves progressive — really grasping at how to understand what this guy was about. And for me it's like, well, it's obvious, isn't it? You just read it and you're like, yeah, here's how power works and here's how power subjugates, and he has been subjugated by power. And then rather than blaming it on the correct forces, he blames it on women. So when I write, my main goal is to not impress people with how much theory I know. I'm not an academic, so I don't have to respond to peer review being like, you didn't quote Engels at his highest watermark moment of 18-whatever. I have a strong theoretical background, but it also means that I gravitate towards really good sources. Stanley Ryerson is going to feature super prominently in my next book. Ian McKay features super prominently in my next book, because you're writing about Canadian democracy. I know enough to start with Ian McKay and to go to the historical look from Stanley Ryerson. It's not all left-wing, of course — I use right-wing sources as well. That's really important when writing about Canada. But the most important thing for me is I want someone like my father-in-law, who doesn't really read books, to read my book and go, wow, that was amazing, that was interesting. I'm not here to impress someone who studies Marxism.
Matthew Remski: I think what the underlying worldview provides — whether it's explicit or not — is a counter to what seems so common within most liberal and mainstream media practice, which is this sense of bumping from crisis to crisis, story to story, as though every day is completely different. There's this new subject here, and then, oh, there's climate, and then, oh, there's the war in Iran, and oh — it's a very inefficient and fragmented way to deal with polycrisis. It doesn't really connect any dots. And I think that's the distractive point, or maybe it's an effect. I don't want to say that it's intended, but that's certainly what happens.
Nora Loreto: I think it is intended. Because if you're bouncing from these issues without actually understanding them, first of all, that increases anxiety tremendously — you're just always being bombarded by things. And I'm asked all the time, how am I not depressed? How am I not living in a dark room clutching my knees, being like, oh my God, the world is ending? And we can go back to the whole religious aspect, the whole background in the choral world, because I think when you have connection with generations before you, you know that every generation thought it was the last generation, and we are no different. So, everyone needs to relax.
Matthew Remski: It's a little bit grandiose —
Nora Loreto: Literally, there's not one generation that thought they were just going to — well, in the modern era. Before that, we were spiritual enough to understand that of course the world will continue, and we should be thinking about that. But I think it's so important to be able to see the world through that lens of power, because all of a sudden these fragments completely fuse. There is no difference between Mark Carney and really weird and bad housing policy and Mark Carney and really bad taxation policy and Canada's role in the world saying, yeah, let's go to war. It all actually totally makes sense. There is a coherence to all of it.
And one of the things I've always been asked most, which is a question I never have a good answer for, is: well, where do you get your politics from? Where do you read? How do you develop this analysis? And because my answer was always, well, I read everything, like everything I can — which isn't a satisfying answer — I decided to start a daily news podcast, which is called The Daily News, just to help people hear a news source that does give that same perspective through all of the stories, so that it doesn't feel so overwhelming. Of course there's going to be this story of police brutality here and also over there and also over there. Plus climate change is being ignored. Plus also war. Plus plus plus. You can hear it all come together. And it's the biggest slog of my work, this daily news podcast, as you can imagine. It's the thing I would drop the fastest if I could. But I really feel that people get a lot from it, and I get a lot from it — being able to think through this every single day. So I think that if we resist allowing ourselves to be pulled by all of these different forces in all of these completely incoherent ways, we really do help our mental health and help our collective, general understanding of what's going on, which then allows us to see solutions a lot better.
Matthew Remski: Let me go back to the generation thing, because I was struck in reading through your materials about our generational difference. I'm a little bit older. You're recounting the story of the Shamrock Summit, which really locked in Canada's neoliberal slide, and you're describing being quite young and thinking of Brian Mulroney's voice as kind of like a comforting noise in the background of your childhood. I'm a young teen at that point, from a union family. My parents hate his guts, and so his voice does not sound like that to me. And I'm not exactly sure what's happening. I know it's something bad. What I do know is that very quickly after that begins to unfold, I'm immersed in an arts community in Toronto, a writer's community that came out of the seventies. And everybody around me is my parents' age or a little bit younger, and they know that the neoliberal hammer is coming down. So as a Gen X kid, I'm surrounded by a lot of despondency over what's being lost to austerity, and everybody's sort of looking back to this golden age of grants and Canada supporting the arts. But I think you've grown up with all hammers all the time and no real sense of a non-neoliberal past. Is that fair?
Nora Loreto: Yeah, no, absolutely. I've always been a bit different. I have a typical millennial upbringing in that my father was a teacher-librarian, and every single year of my youth, the hammer was above his head, ready to fall, and he was going to —
Matthew Remski: — lose his job. Because it's crazy, Nora — my dad's a librarian. Teacher-librarian.
Nora Loreto: No way.
Matthew Remski: That's crazy.
Nora Loreto: Really?
Matthew Remski: Yeah. Russian historian. He did everything but dissertation, looked at the job market, said no, I should go to teachers college.
Nora Loreto: Oh my God. And what's also extraordinarily weird is that men don't do that job.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Nora Loreto: Both of our fathers to have done that job.
Matthew Remski: Yeah. And then he works at a Catholic girls school and spends thirty years or something like that helping young women find resources in the library. And working in the union, in leadership. And so when people ask me where I get my politics from, I'm like: him and mom, because they were doing the same thing.
Nora Loreto: Was she a teacher as well?
Matthew Remski: She was a teacher as well. She did industrial arts. She was one of Ontario's first women industrial arts teachers.
Nora Loreto: Okay. So my mom also was a teacher — English. And so the benefit for me — sorry, the light in my office will go on and off because it's too high for me to fix — the benefit for me was that my parents would edit, not edit-edit, but actually properly edit my essays. So from a really young age I had proper essay editing help.
Matthew Remski: Yeah.
Nora Loreto: That is so crazy that we have that. My parents were also involved in the union — very involved with OECTA, but they never held positions beyond local committee positions. So when there was a strike, they were super involved, but they never went on to other union work. But I do think that idea of helping people in the library, helping people search through knowledge, is so, so important. I remember probably being four or five years old — it was still in the eighties — drawing the front page of a newspaper. And my headline — there were two competing headlines. One was that it was almost Halloween. And the other one was that no one likes Brian Mulroney.
And the reason why I said his voice is comforting is I think it's strictly because of the age that I was. Midday was on in the house and there's Mulroney talking — it wasn't because we were listening to him. But I've always looked back to other generations, so I've never been one of these people who has solely lived in the years they inhabited. It's not too surprising that I ended up with a guy who's a decade older than me — that was totally not a surprise to me at all. And this looking back and looking at a Canada that used to be — because I was in a small town, all of the hallmarks of that Canada was what really drove the town. The only good jobs were city and town jobs. The only things to do was to drink in the woods. The only places to gather was Tim Hortons, where you could still smoke inside, or the baker's dozen, the disgusting donut shops. And watching the neoliberal assault on my friends — I was aware that when one friend's father was laid off from Nortel and a mother was on strike at Miracle Mart, I knew what was going on, even though it was grade three, probably because of my parents talking about it with me. So I didn't have to play catch-up too much in those politics. And what I realized, looking back after writing The Social Safety Net, was that I had more stability than most kids, because my parents were teachers with union jobs. Even if my father was going to lose the library, which would have broken his heart, he at least would have gone back to being a teacher in the classroom. But half of my class — those kids' parents — were completely precarious. And then you start to think about all of the people that you've encountered over your lives who at some point were uprooted from this part of Canada to that part of Canada because Dad's job moved. And the collective trauma that that creates — it's like, oh, but that's the foundation of the millennial generation. That's what it is. And it's all of those changes with free trade that, when you look at the retrospectives, everyone's like, free trade was great, it boosted our GDP, it did exactly what we needed it to do, it allowed corporations to be wildly successful. And then it's like, but what was the impact on average people? It was devastation. It was relocation and it was uprootedness.
Matthew Remski: Yeah. If anybody wants to tell you that at all, or if anybody can tell you that story in a coherent manner.
Nora Loreto: Well, and they can't, because it's not obvious. It's just how it was. You know, when you talk to someone who's like, oh, I'm from Vancouver Island, but I grew up in New Brunswick. You're like, that's weird. That's so far apart. What are you talking about? My father's in forestry. Of course. Yeah, of course. And there are lots of cross-Canada moves like that. The pressure on fathers to keep it together while their entire world is collapsing, because they're the ones in the industrial jobs. And then the moms being completely reliant on the state in terms of public service jobs. That shifts how we experience the world as people. And when I graduated — well, I didn't graduate at that point, I was supposed to graduate, but you know, it became later — when you enter into the world in the 2008 economic crisis and I was in journalism and everyone's like, well, there are no jobs, we have no options, let's just go back to school. That precarity sets into your life and then you're just in this perpetual catch-up of like, I'm still a kid. I've never grown up from that moment. I'm still not taken seriously in my industry. I don't feel secure. I don't have the economic security that I need. My kids might even be in high school and I still feel like I haven't grown up. It's a real, poisonous mentality for such an enormous number of Canadians.
Matthew Remski: I just want to concentrate on your good fortune in the dad-as-librarian, which I share with you, before I move on. It's not just that despite all of this happening, the job is for him to help people find knowledge. There's also a way in which my dad helped me always say, okay, well, there's probably another book on that, there's probably another point of view, it's not quite the full story, there's a little bit more context. And so even now, I'll run segments of this podcast by him, or send him various written pieces, and he will say, okay, you also want to go here. And he might not have the complete picture, but he's always pushing me to add a little bit more or consider a little bit more. And I think there's something sustaining about that in terms of intellectual life, as neoliberalism cracks everything else apart.
Nora Loreto: Yeah. So your father was into history? My father was a Canadian literature guy. So I didn't get that question, but I did get a question that has always been my basis of writing, which is: why? What is the point of this? Why are you saying this? What does this add? Is this advancing your point? And I can see my essays that he would mark up — just: why? Why? So what? Who cares?
Matthew Remski: So what?
Nora Loreto: So what? Who cares? Right?
Matthew Remski: And he wrote in "who cares"?
Nora Loreto: Oh yeah. Like, what is the point of this? Why? Because, again, he's a literature guy. My father did his master's on W.O. Mitchell. Like, I don't get my politics from my parents. I actually didn't really know how they voted until I was an adult. And also, we're in a small town, so maybe you vote NDP, but it's never a useful vote kind of thing. Well, I know how they voted in the last election because the riding had almost two votes separating the Conservatives and the Liberals, and my parents were like, oh, should we have voted for the Liberals to stop the Conservatives? But that question of why, and that literature approach to my writing, absolutely comes from my father and my mother — as an English teacher. The two of them are very similar in their outlooks on writing and on understanding language. But it's this striving to always learn more. I definitely grew up with that. And my father also ran a bit of a racket with magazines in his library. We had every single magazine you can think of delivered to our house so that he could read it first and then bring it to school. And he collected small fines from the students to pay for this two-hundred-magazine library. He started pushing the bounds — he got Pueblo español and realized there was borderline pornographic content, so he was like, okay, we can't have that in the library, unfortunately. But I was reading the Economist and Adbusters and Entertainment Weekly and Seventeen magazine by the time I was in grade four.
Matthew Remski: Wow. Okay.
Nora Loreto: That's crazy. And I also think about my father's deep anxiety with Wikipedia. He was like, what is this going to be? This is like walking into a room where someone has taken an encyclopedia, ripped the pages all apart, and you're told to figure it out by picking up the pages off the floor. That's how he saw Wikipedia in the early days. What it's turned into now is what the dream of Wikipedia really was. But this idea that you can't — you need someone to shepherd you through the stacks. You probably don't know what you need to read for this. And maybe you do, or maybe you think you do, but you need someone who's like, yeah, definitely start with this, it's foundational, this is going to help flush everything else out. And just the act of: oh, I have an essay due, I'm going to call my dad and ask him to pull a bunch of books for me. I did that all the time in high school.
Matthew Remski: All the time. And because my dad is listening, I have to say that my late mother was not only an industrial arts teacher but an English teacher as well, with a master's in English. And she did not do the "so what?" editing of any of my work. But what she did was thrust books into my hands at various transitional times in my life. And I don't know how she knew, but — for instance, who wrote The Stone Angel? What's her name?
Nora Loreto: Margaret Laurence.
Matthew Remski: Margaret Laurence. She pointed to the passages where Hagar is at the end of her mental health, adorning herself with beetles. And I don't know why my mother handed me that, but she wanted me to know something about the gravity of, and the wealth of, human emotion that was available to me. She handed me Beautiful Losers, which is bizarre to me — mom, why are you giving me this? But she opened specifically to the page of "God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot," that whole sort of poem with capital letters that Cohen goes off on, where he talks about the saint like the escaped skier down the mountain. And there was something about that that my mother just couldn't get over. She couldn't resolve it. It was too beautiful for her not to share with me. So I just wanted to make sure that that wasn't lost to this conversation.
Nora Loreto: Your parents didn't go to Western as well, did they?
Matthew Remski: No, no. My dad was from Detroit, my mom was from Windsor. They had a cross-border meeting and romance. And then he was in the service during the Vietnam era — not in Vietnam, but in the service. So I was born in Michigan, actually, in 1971, at an air force base.
Nora Loreto: Okay.
Matthew Remski: Yeah. And then my mom said, as soon as we can, we're moving back to the other side of the border, because this place is not sane.
Nora Loreto: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's amazing. Because there's also this classic debate in Canadian literature: what kind of Margaret are you?
Matthew Remski: Yes.
Nora Loreto: And my mother also is a Margaret Laurence person. My parents are Margaret Laurence people. And The Diviners for me was foundational — probably still the best book I've ever read. And it's funny, because for me, having this connection to Canadian literature — I'm not a literary fiction writer — but I am so obsessed with the need to litigate our literary present and our literary history in this country. Because through these stories we created something that actually was its own country. We actually created a literature and a body of work that Canadians could point to and say, look, we're this — we're Hugh MacLennan, we're Robertson Davies, we're Margaret Laurence or Margaret Atwood or whatever. And of course there are deficiencies in this completely, and it's not representative. And there's been a lot of course correction in the last twenty years, which has been really great and has enriched Canadian literature. But the reality is that this costs money — it costs state money. You're not going to let the market create a Canadian literature. Cohen was commercially viable, but was also insane and the writing is nuts. You needed a world that was going to welcome that kind of writing, and that world was completely state-funded.
Matthew Remski: That brings us to volume one of Canada in Decline, which is about the social safety net and how it has been eroded systematically over time. And I was struck in reading through, maybe for the first time, how much neoliberalism is a pretty simple strategy of neglect and quiet erosion that amounts to a war of attrition against any kind of common value. It's kind of like a parent standing somewhat aside from the child and shrugging constantly and saying, yeah, you'll be okay. What made you lock into this undercurrent of leaders constantly snipping the net in this postwar period?
Nora Loreto: Well, I was a couple of months out of having published Spin Doctors, the book I wrote about COVID. And when you write a book about COVID, it's impossible not to talk about the broader reality we're all experiencing. So I found myself in Edmonton on an afternoon with a bunch of time and I was like, I am going to imagine a current State of the Union book on Canada. And I wrote it all out in a really rough draft and realized it was going to be too long. I went to the publisher and said, I know this is nuts, you're not going to say yes, but can I write this? And he said, yeah, it's too long. And I said, well, what if we broke it up into a series and you actually let me write a series of books? And they miraculously said yes.
And so then the question was: where do you start with a story of neoliberalism in Canada? How do you set the table? Because I knew that I wanted to do something on the corporate world and on democracy, but I didn't think I could enter that discussion with those two pieces. And there are two other books after that, by the way. This is actually a five-book series. I know. It's so crazy. I don't know why I said yes to this.
Matthew Remski: Did they contract you for all five or just the three?
Nora Loreto: The contract is signed.
Matthew Remski: What?
Nora Loreto: Yeah. I'm waiting for the publisher to finally announce it. I don't know when they're going to do that. But the next book I have to start writing is going to be about culture in this country — culture, the far right, and religion. And then that will end with the final book, which makes a lot of sense, which is going to be the security state. So, yeah, I'm almost done.
Matthew Remski: You're also, like — you're not almost done. What are you talking about?
Nora Loreto: Two books to go.
Matthew Remski: Well, two books to go after this one. Or is Democracy already filed?
Nora Loreto: Oh, Democracy has been filed. I do have to edit it. But it's written.
Matthew Remski: It feels like this is extremely ambitious. Is there anybody else trying to do anything like this? I just feel like you're taking this position of, oh, yeah, I can actually bring together the larger story here if I have the right resources.
Nora Loreto: Well, I think it is ambitious, but I think of someone like Arshy Mann, who's doing it in his own way with podcasting and his project The Hatchet — he's telling stories like this that need to be told, but in a podcast format. It's something to check out if you don't know about The Hatchet. But I mean, if you look at Peter C. Newman — the guy wrote like a hundred books. You know, Pierre Berton writing all the time. There's no shortage of Canadians in our history who wrote a lot of books.
Matthew Remski: Yeah.
Nora Loreto: And for me it's like, I want to tell this story properly and I don't have enough pages to do it, because publishers don't like Peter C. Newman-sized books anymore. And I don't have the access to politicians that those guys had. I don't have the backroom stories, the campaign stop stories, the late-night hanging out with Lester Pearson stories. So I have to do it a different way. And so: how do you tell this story? I thought the most accessible way was to talk about what touches people the most, which is the social safety net. And the way The Social Safety Net is written — because it's the first book of a series, and you don't know if I'm going to die before the second book is done, I don't know if I'm going to have an aneurysm and can't write — I kind of wrote this book to stand on its own. And it actually has a conclusion in the way that the other books do not. I did that because I don't need to explore anymore. I know what the answer is. And the answer is quite simple: we have to stop what we're doing. We have to just do an about-face. It's not much more complicated than that.
But I also was really fascinated by telling the story of Canada the good, and always reminding that those good pieces were always wrapped up in bad. There was always good for the majority, bad for minorities. And it's okay to say it's good for the majority — it's not like we have to be ashamed that we came up with these great social programs that helped people. The shame is that it didn't help everyone when it could have, and that it caused active and serious harm to other people when we didn't need to and shouldn't have.
Matthew Remski: It's like that balance has flipped, actually. Now the focus is on benefits for the few and nothing for the many.
Nora Loreto: Yeah. And this was just a path to create Canada into this white Christian nation. Right. All of the services and benefits developed especially in the postwar period give us the industrial base we need to actually become a country that is competitive globally. That was the economic system we were in, and all of the benefits of health and education and social services are all to make sure we're able to operate as a nation. And so to start with the social safety net made the most amount of sense. I then felt kind of relieved that it didn't have to touch certain things, knowing that the corporate control book was coming next — I could really dive into free trade, the GST, the economic crash and bailout in 2008 and 2009, and how that has all led to today, where we've got this enormous rich and poor divide, historically high, never been higher. And then again, writing that, I was relieved that I didn't have to start talking about issues of democracy, because that gets wrapped into it as well. And so it has just been this really nice piece-by-piece building — like a wall of an analysis. If you've got the patience to read five books, I'm very, very hoping that people might read all five. But if you don't have the bandwidth for that, you can pick the issue that you like the most and just take that. And they're quite different books. Corporate Control is so different from The Social Safety Net.
Matthew Remski: Yeah.
Nora Loreto: And Democracy is totally different again. And I'm really excited about it, because it makes the argument that we are not even close to democratic in this country. We are the least democratic of our peers. And Canadians have been raised to accept the amount of power that the prime minister has as normal. And it is not normal in Western democracies, speaking comparatively.
Matthew Remski: And I think this will tie a bunch of issues together. One of the most common assumptions from the outside — and American progressives will talk about this all the time — is that Canada, or they'll refer to Scandinavia and the Nordic model, has managed to create some kind of ideal balance of market and social policies that the world should emulate. But I think overall your research shows us that this balance is very complicated and its sustainability is contested. Is that fair?
Nora Loreto: Yeah. And honestly, that balance line has been more propaganda than anything else. European nations have the balance way better than us. It's hard to find a Western European nation that doesn't have a better balance of market protections of people and free-market capitalism than Canada does. We get away with saying it because we're so close to the United States.
Matthew Remski: Just by virtue of being in the shadow. We can put on a flashlight.
Nora Loreto: It's not that bad. We're better in a slight way. But it was funny — I was in the middle of writing this, having dinner with someone, and they said, well, at least we're not as bad as the United States. And it's like, well, okay, Donald Trump is a fascist, but their political system is still more democratic than ours. If a Donald Trump got elected into the prime minister's office, he could literally run Canada as a dictatorship fully. And there'd be nothing to stop him —
Matthew Remski: — other than courts, maybe, starting on day one. And it wouldn't actually be that controversial. It would be sort of what we feel coming from the PMO on a daily basis — well, now he's doing this, and now we're doing that, and now we've made this announcement, and I guess we'll go in this direction.
Nora Loreto: Well, Carney spent sixty-five billion dollars in the last year — new money on the military. He didn't promise to do that during the election. Canadians have never said we wanted that. And sixty-five billion is a lot of money. So what's the deal? We don't have the opposition structures to be able to hold someone to account in the prime minister's office. And what's worse is the prime minister is able to get elected with about a quarter of votes in favour of his party, not for him. Obviously we don't vote for the prime minister. That's including people who don't vote. So why does someone have a mandate that is basically: oh, I have one hundred percent of support, so I have one hundred percent of power? And then you can look at things like patronage — Canada's patronage history is so fascinating. Patronage is the grease that used to oil the machine of politics in Canada and helped to create so much about how this country operates. And now you have a prime minister who's in charge of hundreds of appointments across the civil service, across boards and stuff, and they all serve at his pleasure. They all owe him their appointment.
Matthew Remski: We're heading towards the democracy topic, but just on volume two: you position rising corporatism in Canada as the next step as the social safety net is snipped and power moves from the public to financial markets, and corporate elites get direct political access. This drives the privatization of national industries and human needs because shareholders are king. Do you think — because I'm pretty sure you probably filed this before the current explosion of interest in data centres — do you think that data centres, as objects of focus, are waking more people up to this devastating impact of corporatism?
Nora Loreto: I think it's a pretty good symbol — a giant building that does nothing other than make noise and take your water and your energy and create a heat dome. Maybe. It certainly is a perfect issue to mobilize around, especially in smaller towns where it might be harder to get people on the same page. But everyone is going to be opposed to this big, giant, stupid building that's doing nothing. I actually see the data centre issue similarly to what the EV battery bonanza was like a couple of years ago — tons of promise, tons of money poured in. At the time I wrote Corporate Control, we had committed something like thirty-eight or thirty-nine billion dollars to EV batteries, and all of it was going to the corporations themselves. It wasn't like we were handing that money to the National Research Council of Canada or creating a new EV battery centre or giving it to universities. Canada is a leader in batteries — the lithium-ion battery was invented in Canada. Tesla's main battery guy is a professor at Dalhousie. We could be doing batteries ourselves, and instead we just give it to the Hondas and the Stellantises and the LGs of the world. Almost all of those deals have fallen through now. And I read this book and I'm like, oh my God. I asked the publisher: can I have a footnote in a newer edition, being like, none of this actually happened?
I think we're going to see similar situations with data centres, because I heard someone very recently explain AI as being the first technological advancement that sucks and no one wants. All of the other tech advancements have been like, oh, actually, this is amazing — I do want to program my lights from work, or spy on my friends from high school or whatever. But AI really does suck. And if these data centres are what's actually propelling AI, I mean, no one wants that. And I think that after this bubble pops, generative AI will go back to being used in research and highly technical fields. It's not going to be all of us trying to outsource our daily chores to this stupid machine. So can we mobilize people around it? Yes. I think the proof in Regina is really exciting. Downtown Vancouver data centre — obviously people fight like hell against that. And I also just heard that the biggest cluster of data centres operating right now is in Montreal, of all places.
Matthew Remski: Yeah. And they're in urban settings, aren't they?
Nora Loreto: Yeah. And as the price of real estate interacts with all of that, and people just don't want to live around them, I think there's going to be a really rapid shift away from these things. The question right now is just who can make the most money while the going's good before the bubble pops.
Matthew Remski: Yeah. I mean, I think the democratic implications have been very stunning to me, given the fact that these centres are usually pushed through with very little consultation. There are overrides for environmental protections. They'll go to whatever planning commission they have to, and they won't be able to say how much water they're going to be drawing from the local system or how much power they're going to need. When I went to research the one being built two miles from my house, there were no answers on these very basic questions. Like, when it's at full capacity, how is it going to be operating? And the city councillors can't even tell you. They've been bypassed somehow. And it really drives home this point you make consistently in a lot of your work: that Carney is running the PMO, and this has trickled down to the way Doug Ford runs Ontario and a bunch of other places. It's kind of like the Bay Street boardroom. And we have Danielle Smith in Alberta doing similar work in terms of executive power. They're good at running government as though it's all-or-nothing business, and they're doing it mask off. And is this really at the root — is this where the connection between corporatism and the failures of Canadian democracy hits the ground for you?
Nora Loreto: Yeah. And actually, if you read up on fascism, we're getting pretty close to the classic definition of fascism, where the corporate world is running government. So I think — and this is all actually in the new book — the attacks on local democracy right now being waged by provincial leaders and some municipal leaders is pretty stunning. And I think Carney is a symptom of a moment. It makes sense that Canada's best leadership option is going to be someone who has been the central banker of two different national banks, who comes from the investment world, who is the chair of Brookfield, a company with long historical roots in capitalism in Canada. All of this stuff makes sense. And Carney hasn't changed much about the PMO. He's doing what Trudeau was able to do. He's just an effective guy. What is different is what we're seeing from leaders like Doug Ford and Danielle Smith. These two are like the extreme ends of the conservative spectrum. Ford is really trying to do Red Toryism in a way that is populist — not angering so many people that he would lose power, but really angering people who would never vote for him. And then Danielle Smith is like the opposite end, where it's complete wackadoodle craziness.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Nora Loreto: She doesn't give a rat's ass about anything. And I think the conservative movement in Canada is watching these two experiments to see who is going to collapse first, who's going to be more successful. And knowing a thing about Canada, we know that Doug Ford is going to be more successful. Ford will be able to pull it out of the fire, regroup. The fighting will remain stick-handled. They've got better referees internally. Whereas Smith might literally be in the back alley somewhere, being eaten alive by the rats that surround her.
Matthew Remski: Well, I think also it has something to do with Ford being able to throw the barbecue. And what does Danielle Smith really have to offer?
Nora Loreto: You don't want to party with her.
Matthew Remski: Anti-vax smoothies. Not much.
Nora Loreto: She's not very fun. So Ford's attack on local democracy, though, I think is like the biggest crisis facing Canada right now. He has introduced legislation, and in some cases imposed legislation, allowing for mayors to have distorted amounts of power, allowing the mayor and a small cabinet to have minority rule over the majority — which overturns two hundred years of municipal governance in this country of always respecting majority rule. And he's got this ability to impose special economic zones wherever he wants. And once they have them, there's no say of any local democracy within that and laws are suspended.
Matthew Remski: I love the special economic zone as a label for "do whatever the fuck we want."
Nora Loreto: Literally, that's all it is. I mean, the Ring of Fire — of course we want to develop the Ring of Fire. Oh, except the First Nations communities up there will absolutely not allow it. Okay, we're going to drop that. Okay, we'll make the 401 a special economic zone so we can build a tunnel under it. It's like, you're going to tunnel under the busiest highway in North America with no laws? What are you talking about? No, you're not. Who's investing in that? The risk is enormous. And then you go through the list — oh, a dump. They're going to declare a new dump up on Lake Huron. That's a special economic zone. The dump is so important that it is a special economic zone. It's nuts. But we've seen already that they're appointing regional chairs to chair the various regions that bring together municipalities across Ontario. And these attacks on local democracy are being done just so they can push through their own pet project issues — we don't like speed cameras, we don't like bike lanes. And they're going to push these things through, or uplift a local cadre of municipal councillors that support what they want to do, by allowing anything to happen as long as it's in line with provincial political priorities. This is poisonous. And it's been done so slowly that Ontarians don't really appreciate the gravity of it. There are a lot of people ringing the alarms. There are some municipal leaders saying, whoa, this is nuts. I know that the town of Stratford, I think, challenged this, saying, we do not want this power. That kind of stuff is great. But Ford doesn't care. You actually have to make him feel uncomfortable. And so OPSEU crashing Ford Fest — great. You've got to do that, because that's the kind of stuff that's going to knock him off his game.
Matthew Remski: And you know it made him feel uncomfortable because he sent his lackeys out to alter the photographs afterwards — to turn the OPSEU t-shirts from blue to purple, or purple to blue.
Nora Loreto: It's amazing.
Matthew Remski: You've given a lot of time, Nora. I don't want to keep you too much longer. But a big part of this show is centring parenting and relating to young people and sharing solid information about antifascism between the generations — with a kind of worldview that I think we started talking about, some sort of background that gives a muscle to greeting every day. And so I always try to find out if my guests are parents while I'm preparing. You are a parent. But I also found this interview on Substack where you said something that really made me laugh. You say: "When I first had kids, I realized that every writer who thinks they're living parenthood for the first time in the history of humanity tries to write about their absolutely not unique, mundane experiences as if they're the first person to ever live them. And I find it to be the most boring, navel-gazing shit out there." Do you still feel that way?
Nora Loreto: Yeah, totally. It's like: give us something. I had this thought staring at my cat — I have a cat and I'm not a cat person — and I thought, it is impossible for me to have a unique thought about cats. It's not possible. Cats have been around forever. Writers have thought about every single aspect of cats. And I think it's the same thing with kids. You can do it in a way that is interesting, but certainly when my children were three or four — they're twelve now — I hated seeing my colleagues being like, oh my God, did you know this about a five-month-old? It's like, yeah, it's not that complicated, folks. It's just parenting.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Nora Loreto: But I'm a very chill parent. Maybe.
Matthew Remski: Yeah, I appreciate that. I think we probably resonate there. I mean, I think we've also turned parenting in some ways into its own content and its own social identity. And I'm very uncomfortable with that, especially on behalf of the kids. But all that said, and at the risk of being boring and navel-gazing: how does all of this difficult work that you do, all of which concerns the future and your twelve-year-olds, enter into your parenting life? And how do you talk about the world with your kids?
Nora Loreto: Yeah. So first of all, my partner and I are very political, and so the political conversations are happening all the time. And we do not have the conversations with the children. Like, I'm talking about Iran being bombed — we don't stop and go, now kids, what do you think about the bombing in Iran? We're having an adult conversation. They can listen.
Matthew Remski: Yeah.
Nora Loreto: If they have a question, of course we'll answer it or talk about it. But I've never really — I live my politics outside of my writing life. And so I interact with my children in the same way that I interact with the guys I play soccer with, my friends. Politics are everywhere, but they're not something I'm constantly obsessing over. So with the kids, it more expresses itself in: when there's a kid problem, there's usually a political aspect to it. Anytime there's anything happening at school and it looks like a kid who's not white is being targeted in any way — bullying, people making fun of him, a teacher picking on him — we'll always talk about racism. Is it possible that this is racism? Do you think this might be because this person isn't white, or doesn't speak French? We're in a French environment. Of course, my kids are outsiders as well, because they are Anglophones and they don't have French names, and their cousins aren't in the school. Quebec is very small that way. So I think that's been very important for us — we're not. We want them to absorb our politics, but there's no imposition of any political ideology. Because I'm not having a political conversation with a ten-year-old. It's a ten-year-old. I'm not sitting there being like, oh well, actually, did you know Dr. Seuss was very critical of the America First movement? That's ridiculous.
But I realized that whatever we had done was working when I read a poem that my kid wrote in grade three for Remembrance Day that was literally: you decided to go to war and died. Congratulations, you lost.
Matthew Remski: That was the poem. Wow.
Nora Loreto: It's like, okay, so we've got some anti-war stuff going on — also with some William Carlos Williams simplicity to it, right?
Matthew Remski: Yeah, that's right. So yes, it's very much like — well, it's kind of like municipal politics. Parenting is the most basic day-to-day thing. I'm Italian, so there's a lot of yelling. I wouldn't say there's gentle parenting, but it's always full of respect for whatever they're interested in and whatever they want to do. And we've just shown our politics as well, because my partner and I are very involved locally. I used to bring my kids to meetings just out of childcare needs, not because I wanted them to be exposed to anything. But when we launched a campaign to save the tramway that's supposed to be built here, the kids obviously couldn't escape being part of that. And so they are little tramway kids. They'd come home from school and be like, oh, so and so doesn't like the tramway. And we'd have a political conversation about that.
But my philosophy with parenting is very much: kid has to be loved, kid has to feel loved, kid has to be fed — I'm not so good at that sometimes. And they need to be supported. The question of politics doesn't enter into it in direct conversations, but it's very much about enveloping the household with: we live on this planet to change it. We live on this planet to do good work. We don't leave anyone behind.
We live in a neighbourhood that's quite mixed income — literally a two-million-dollar house right across the street from social housing just behind us. And they've seen — we've had people come to the door. We had a woman come to the door once who managed to get frozen chicken from a free fridge and was like, can you cook this for us? It's like, of course. So, what are you guys doing? We're cooking chicken. We're vegetarians. What do you mean you're cooking chicken? There's a woman outside waiting for her chicken. Oh, okay. That's nice. You know — that kind of thing. Making sure that's just a normal thing you do in this neighbourhood, and you help people out when you see that they need it.
Matthew Remski: Nora, here's to normal things in abnormal times. Thank you so much for your time and I really appreciate your work.
Nora Loreto: Oh, thank you very much.
Matthew Remski: So that's the show for this week, folks. Up now on Patreon, bonus episode 40.1 is called Episodic and Thematic Thinking and Feeling, and it picks up on this mystery of zooming in and zooming out of the news, out of history, and life itself. I look at some research by media analyst Shanto Iyengar from the 1990s on the tension between what he calls episodic and thematic framing of news coverage, which shows that mainstream journalism's default mode — treating each crisis as a disconnected event — is not neutral, but structurally serves existing power arrangements by preventing systemic critique from coalescing. This is what Nora was getting at, and what we were starting to really get into. And I think there's a lesson there about any trees-and-forest situation in knowledge or even in daily life, and certainly in parenting. Until next time, take care of each other, everyone.
