The Canada We Tried to Explain

In early 2000, a small group of academics and students built a website to help explain Canadian politics, government, and institutions – to Canadians and to the world. It was called Maple Leaf Web, and later RePolitics.com. The purpose held throughout: to make Canada’s political system, parties, and public life understandable, and to take them seriously.

It was worth doing, and I think we did it well.

Looking back, it is hard to imagine those same people recognizing the country today. Political parties are still subsidized by taxpayers through election expense reimbursements and donation tax credits, even as they grow more preoccupied with their own preservation. Much of the national media has grown dependent on the very public subsidies it should be scrutinizing. Universities that once valued open inquiry now reward conformity and discourage dissent. Public debate has narrowed, trust has eroded, and a civic culture we hoped to strengthen has become thinner, less honest, and far too comfortable with censorship.

RePolitics.com was built on the belief that citizens deserved to understand how their country worked, and that it mattered. That belief now feels more distant than ever.

So this is where RePolitics.com ends.

Not with celebration. Not with thanks. Not with the comforting fiction that this is simply the natural close of a successful project.

It ends with disappointment. In what Canada has become. In the institutions that failed to defend their own legitimacy. And, I’ll be frank, in a public that has grown more timid, more managed, and less willing to confront the obvious.

RePolitics.com was built to explain Canadian democracy. Its closure reflects how much faith in that democracy has been lost.