The world may be going to hell in a handcart, but Canada is not. Not today

Open this photo in gallery:Prime Minister Mark Carney attends a Forever Canadian rally in Edmonton on Oct. 16. John Ulan/The Canadian PressThings fall apart; the centre cannot hold. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. You may remember those lines – William Butler Yeats, 1919 – from high-school English. They should really be on today’s political-science curriculum. In Germany, political parties and voters are running for the extremes. Something similar is happening in France, where politics is increasingly dominated by the far-left La France Insoumise and the far-right Ralliement National. Last weekend’s unprecedented explosion of pillage and looting has made a lame-duck centrist government look more impotent than ever, six months before national elections. In Britain, the head cheerleader for the own-goal of Brexit – the far-right Reform party – spent most of the past year at the top of the polls. The Labour Party recently moved back into the lead, but under a Prime Minister whose popularity is born of a doomed promise to avoid the upset of vigorous action against economic and fiscal crises. This isn’t centrism; it’s a sleeping pill.