cancel culture is cancelled

even in Canada (but I could be wrong)

Photo by Melani Sosa on Unsplash

Christine Blasey Ford’s memoir was published this week to polite reviews, tepid fanfare and an inevitable cluster of think pieces which sniffed at the fragrant corpse of MeToo then pronounced it officially dead.

The key change or “vibe-shift,” as one writer called it, was summed up by the writer Kat Rosenfeld who recently mused in Unherd that, in retrospect, the collective MeToo fever dream, “stemmed not from our sympathetic feelings toward victims of sexual assault, but from a sense that allegations could be used to political advantage, that even the most powerful man might be toppled if credibly accused.”

In hindsight, it’s obvious the virtuous fervour of MeToo concealed a darker impulse, one that was both avaricious and chaotic and which, in addition to putting some really bad guys behind bars, also destroyed many not-so-bad and blameless people’s reputations and lives. Is there any recourse? Sadly not. Timing’s a bitch, but like all familiar stories the tale of MeToo has a lesson to teach us. The collective desire to seize back something, anything, in order to justify the pain-spasm of our collective sense of victimhood felt thrilling at the time, but the effect was negligible at best. Few were helped by MeToo and many more were hurt, some for no logical reason except that inflicting pain somehow felt logical at the time. It’s not surprising. Movements fuelled by self-righteous moral outrage often result in over-corrections that, in the end, reinforce the same problems they initially purported to solve. If you don’t believe me, google ‘History.’

With the recent vibe-shift comes a kind of tacit acknowledgement that many women in the public sphere (in addition to Blasey Ford) found ourselves being eviscerated on Twitter and elsewhere during this time. Many of us lost income we desperately needed to feed our families. In addition to these shenanigans, plenty of powerful people cannily seized the moment as an Overton window for the purposes of knocking out rivals in the interest of enriching themselves further, because that’s just the kind of tactical shit powerful people do best. Did MeToo actually change anything for for the beleagured girl squad in material terms? Looking at the numbers across Western democracies — the various pay gaps, rates of domestic violence, femicide, etc. — the answer is no.

Even those of us who (like me), at the time, bridled at the cries of “witch hunt,” because there were no witches ffs, long ago gave up pretending that the so-called “watershed moment” actually shed any water at all (assuming that’s what successful watersheds do). There’s little consensus to be found anywhere about anything these days, but if there’s one front all sides seem fairly united on, it’s that cancel culture is officially cancelled (thank christ). I’ll leave the final accounting to sociologists and historians, but consider this: After all that moral reckoning and castigating, the public shaming and blaming and parsing of ancient tweets, does the world feel any safer or more reasonable to you?

When rich kids move fast and break things we end up with Facebook; when poor people do the same thing, stuff just gets broken. That sounds cynical but I promise you I’m not. History shows us that positive social change is absolutely possible and symbols do matter. But there’s a boring caveat: Real change takes patience, hard work and years of good-faith negotiations around boardroom tables where the majority in attendance are still powerful white men. It took women a century to get the right to vote, and we did it not by flinging ourselves under horses and honing our victimhood, but by insisting on a seat at those tables and then sitting down and negotiating tirelessly into the night.

Any cultural climate in which minor differences of opinion are perceived as a form of violence and regular people are forced to clam up for fear of losing their livelihoods is not fertile ground for healing historical wounds. Cancel culture sought to purge society of baddies one groping boss and cultural-appropriator at a time, but like any exercise in scapegoating, it was a false catharsis — a old shell game trick designed to make the meek feel momentarily powerful without altering the underlying balance of power.

(Cleansing breath.)

I am from Canada, a vast nation with a tiny population, plenty of natural resources and an economically-gutted fourth estate. Cancel culture hit Canada hard, or as my Dad would say, ‘like a tonna bricks.’

As a people, Canadians tend to be earnest and polite to a fault. We pride ourselves on being reasonable, but in unreasonable times this trait combined with a desire to please and avoid causing offence at all costs, became a form of self-sabotage. Back in 2018 when the handsome rogue Social Justice rode into town on his high horse, the Canadian establishment was instantly seduced, like the silly sister in Pride and Prejudice. Off we galloped, clinging to the waist of our charlatan lover, only wake up in the railroad hotel of 2024, bewildered, reputation in ruins.

In Britain, my adopted home, everyone seems to disagree about everything more or less all the time. And yet somehow, compared to the nation of my birth, there’s far less moral righteousness and zealotry — evidenced by UK’s lack of any tangible religious right. The UK is a shouty, pissy, perennially damp place, but it’s best quality is the constant on-going public argument. People feel safe enough to disagree with each other here, and they do it all the time — in the media, parliament, the back of taxis and down the pub. During the Covid-cancel-culture years the UK felt like a much safer place to live than Canada for this reason. You could say what you thought and while someone might affectionately call you the c-word, no one gasped, which I personally think is more impolite.

Canada, by contrast, got on the cancel culture bandwagon and our jolly moral certitude fuelled a bonfire onto which blameless bodies were thrown. At a certain point cancellation began to seen almost normal there. It was happening to everyone, including, most notably, the great Margaret Atwood¹. If you had a voice or a “platform” in Canada in the late 20-teens and you didn’t get cancelled, basically you weren’t doing your job. It sounds funny now but it wasn’t funny at the time. Especially in the hobbled Canadian media sphere, the terror of social justice marauders was palpable. Everyone on all sides of the political spectrum I spoke to understood something bananas was going on. A kind of Maoist inversion of reason seemed to have taken hold. The human and cultural toll cancel culture took on Canada, compared to other rules-based Western democracies, is difficult to measure but I rarely go a week without a British friend asking (in relation to some niche social justice issue) ‘Leah, why has your country lost it’s mind?’ There are many examples of the human toll this temporary madness took but the most startling one for me was the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s cold dismissal of the respected broadcast journalist Wendy Mesley back in 2021. Wendy’s story beggars belief, if you want to know more you can watch my interview with her here. It’s the first one she gave after being fired and it’s fantastic. She also co-writes and hosts a brilliant Substack and podcast, Women of Ill-Repute with the hilarious clever Maureen Holloway.

Long before that, way back in 2018, at the height of MeToo, before the arctic chill set in, I published a long feature story in Toronto Life magazine about the rise and fall of the Canadian theatre mogul Albert Schultz. I went into the assignment knowing little about the scandal or the people involved, and what I found out was terrifying. Schultz was no angel, but his take-down by way of public shaming was an orchestrated and strategic public execution not by Twitter mobs but the mainstream media. His punishment, by any measure, was wildly disproportionate in light of the accusations involved². In the years since then, stories like Schultz’s began to seem almost normal in a country known for it’s law-abiding love of reason. It was a bewildering time for Canada, thank god it’s over. But wait, is it really? It’s hard to tell with all that fog over the Atlantic. If you’re reading this in Canada, do let me know.

Speaking of Canadians in London, I recently had delightful dinner at the Wolseley with two visiting readers of this newsletter, a mother and daughter, both established artists. Both women were so thoughtful and warm that I came away feeling homesick, which almost never happens anymore. The daughter, who was my age, happened to mention she was in a book club. She and her (non-Indigenous) friends wanted to understand more about the perspectives and stories of Canada’s historically disenfranchised First Nations, so they’d decided to devote the reading list entirely to Indigenous authors (this is how utterly decent Canadians progressives are). She was distraught, however, because the club had recently been criticised by other members in her social circle as an exercise in cultural appropriation. The daughter wanted to know what I thought — was the idea of an Indigenous Canadian book club for non-Indigenous readers wrong or right?

I told her honestly I was hardly the person to ask, but then in an effort to be helpful I proposed a solution: Why not play it safe and devote the reading list to the novels of Charles Dickens instead? The Canadian mother hooted, her daughter looked stricken. I pressed on undaunted, invoking the right to offend likeminded girlfriends over dinner.

With Dickens, I told her, you can educate yourselves on the economic horrors of the Victorian empire and colonialism and be genuinely entertained at the same time. Plus bonus: Dickens is a dead white man which means everyone’s allowed to read him, ergo, no one gets cancelled!

She laughed, then looked a bit guilty for laughing. In Britain no one ever looks guilty for laughing. If anyone’s up for starting a Dickens book club here on Substack, I’m in.

1. A recent nationwide poll revealed not a single Canadian can remember precisely what Atwood was cancelled for, not that it matters now.

2. Accusations he disputes which were never tested in a court of law.