Social Cohesion, Public Media, and the Language We’re Losing

A reflection on public media, democratic language, and why treating “social cohesion” as suspect weakens Canada’s shared civic life.

This essay is part of my Work, Home & Everyday Life category series, where I write about how politics and public language show up in daily Canadian life.

Public spaces like libraries remain one of the few places Canadians still gather to talk, listen, and think together.

When Words Are Bent on Purpose

I’ve been unsettled lately by how easily ordinary democratic language is being turned against us.

Not slogans. Not ideology. Everyday civic concepts—like social cohesion—are increasingly framed as suspect, foreign, or authoritarian through rhetorical sleight of hand that travels quickly across platforms.

Not because of one policy decision, or one minister, or even one committee exchange—but because of an uptick in attacks that earn traction through rhetorical sleight of hand. Attacks that don’t argue on substance so much as shift the meaning of words, quietly, until something ordinary and necessary starts to sound dangerous.

This week, that sleight of hand was easy to spot.

A familiar civic phrase—social cohesion—was suddenly treated as suspect. Not because of how it was used, but because of where critics suggested it came from. In a committee exchange, the term was framed as foreign, even authoritarian, on the grounds that similar language appears in Chinese state rhetoric.

That framing is what I find disturbing. Not because it’s sharp, but because it’s wrong in a way that harms us.

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What social cohesion actually means

Let’s slow this down and be precise—because precision is the antidote to rhetorical games.

In liberal democracies, social cohesion refers to a society’s capacity to hold together while disagreeing. It isn’t a slogan or a vibe. It’s a set of conditions that make pluralism workable over time.

Those conditions are well understood across democratic systems, and they’re surprisingly practical. Social cohesion means:

• Trust that institutions apply rules fairly, even when outcomes are imperfect

• Belonging that is civic rather than cultural—no one has to be the same to be included

• Participation that remains open—people believe engagement still matters

• Shared reference points—a common information space where facts can be debated

None of this requires agreement. All of it requires maintenance.

Cohesion is social infrastructure. You don’t notice it when it’s working. You notice it when it starts to crumble—when rumours outrun facts, when disagreement turns personal, when people begin to feel that society itself is coming apart.

That isn’t abstract theory. It’s lived experience.

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Why ceding this language to autocracy makes no sense

Here’s the part that deserves to be said plainly: authoritarian states do not own the concept of social cohesion.

Autocracies don’t rely on trust freely given. They rely on compliance, discipline, and enforcement. When China speaks about “harmony” or “unity,” it isn’t describing cohesion in a democratic sense. It’s describing conformity backed by power.

Democracies talk about cohesion because they can’t enforce sameness. They govern difference.

Trying to brand “social cohesion” as inherently authoritarian is like arguing that because autocracies hold elections, elections themselves are authoritarian. It’s not analysis—it’s contamination by association.

And when we allow autocratic misuse of language to shrink our own vocabulary, we make it harder to describe the work democracy actually requires.

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Canada is, by design, a cohesion project

If any country should understand this instinctively, it’s Canada.

We were not built through ethnic homogeneity or revolutionary rupture. We were built through negotiation—often clumsy, sometimes unfair, but persistent.

Confederation. Federalism. Bilingualism. Multiculturalism. Treaty relationships.
Each is an attempt to answer the same question: how do we keep living together without forcing sameness?

That question doesn’t go away because someone tries to brand it foreign—or worse, as language “owned” by an autocratic system. It becomes more urgent.

Cohesion isn’t a feel-good add-on to democracy. It’s the mechanism that allows disagreement to remain political rather than existential.

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Public media, clarified—not collapsed

This brings me to the media portion of the debate, because this is where the rhetorical sleight of hand does real damage.

When Marc Miller said that a healthy democracy depends on a healthy media ecosystem—and that this ecosystem can include publicly funded but editorially independent media—he was describing a standard democratic distinction.

Publicly funded does not mean government controlled. Independence is the point.

But critics increasingly blur that line on purpose. If public funding can be equated with propaganda, then any public-interest institution becomes suspect by default.

And here’s the reality that often goes unspoken: CBC/Radio-Canada is, at present, the only truly pan-Canadian public forum we have.

Canada has no Canadian-owned social media platforms. Our digital public square—Facebook, X, YouTube, TikTok—is entirely American-owned, governed by American corporate rules, and optimized for American political incentives.

In that context, CBC/Radio-Canada—imperfect, frequently criticized, often frustrating—is one of the few places where Canadians across regions and languages are still speaking primarily to one another, rather than being sorted, amplified, and monetized by foreign platforms.

There is a sad irony here.

Those who most loudly claim to be standing on guard for freedom of expression are not calling for more Canadian platforms or a richer Canadian media ecosystem. They are calling instead for the elimination of the single national forum that is designed, mandated, and accountable to Canadians as Canadians—not because it never covers the world beyond our borders, but because it exists to serve the Canadian public interest and to provide a shared civic space where Canadian voices and perspectives are centered rather than incidental.

Many of us write, speak, and organize as Canadians on platforms that are not Canadian at all, shaped by foreign ownership and foreign incentives. That doesn’t erase our voices—but it does make places designed explicitly for Canadian public life rarer, and therefore more valuable.

So when the call is not to expand that shared civic space, but to eliminate it, what’s being demanded isn’t greater freedom of expression. It’s the removal of the one national place where Canadians are still meant to speak to one another at scale.

That isn’t a defence of free speech. It’s a demand for silence in the only space that still belongs to all of us.

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Why this feels personal

When something like the tragedy in Tumbler Ridge happens, I want Canadian perspectives to dominate our national conversation—not because Canadians are better, but because context matters.

Without public-interest media, those moments don’t disappear. They get filtered through American-owned outlets with American incentives, priorities, and frames. We already live with that dominance every day.

Public funding doesn’t create control. It creates counterweight.

It ensures that when Canadians experience something together, Canadians are telling the story.

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About that “we have your back” quote

There’s another piece of this story that has been deliberately muddied.

The quote that’s been circulating—

“Prime Minister, know that every person in this room and the 180,000 people who work in this industry have your back, just as we know you have ours”

did not come from news journalists.

It was delivered in late January 2026 by a representative of the Canadian Media Producers Association, addressing Mark Carney.

The CMPA represents film and television producers—people whose work lives or dies on whether Canadian stories can exist in a U.S.-dominated market. Their message wasn’t about favourable coverage. It was about cultural space and policy support for Canadian content.

Collapsing producers into journalists isn’t scrutiny. It’s misrepresentation. And when that misrepresentation sticks, public trust erodes—not because institutions failed, but because language was bent.

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The real risk of turning cohesion into a smear

What worries me most isn’t any single exchange. It’s the pattern.

Civic language gets reframed as foreign.
Public institutions get painted as conspiratorial.
Shared concepts get treated as coercive.

Over time, the effect is corrosive.

If every collective idea is recoded as control, the only posture left is permanent suspicion. Suspicion feels sharp. It feels vigilant. But it’s a terrible foundation for a country.

• Trust becomes obedience.

• Public service becomes propaganda.

• Cooperation becomes compliance.

That worldview doesn’t produce strong, free citizens. It produces a brittle society—one that snaps under pressure because it no longer believes it can hold disagreement without breaking.

Canada doesn’t need less debate. We need better debate—debate that can still hold basic distinctions:

• cohesion vs conformity

• funding vs control

• criticism vs delegitimization

Once those distinctions collapse, we don’t become clearer thinkers. We become easier to steer.

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A quiet, firmer close

I’m not asking anyone to stop criticizing institutions. Criticism is healthy. It’s essential.

What I am asking—quietly, and as a fellow citizen—is that we notice when language itself is being bent. When ordinary democratic concepts are turned into dog whistles. When the framing of a question does more work than the argument that follows.

As we try—imperfectly—to stay open to voices across party lines, there’s a small habit worth cultivating. If you catch yourself feeling discomfort, or the impulse to clap back, or to shut the conversation down altogether, pause for a moment. Not to override your judgment, but to examine how language is being used to frame the narrative or the question being asked. Very often, what’s shaping our reaction isn’t the argument itself, but the meaning that’s been nudged into place before the argument even begins.

Social cohesion isn’t propaganda. It’s the daily, imperfect work of living together in a country that has never been one thing.

If we surrender the words that describe that work—if we allow them to be recoded as suspect or “owned” by autocratic systems—we don’t just lose an argument.

We make Canada harder to hold, at exactly the moment when holding together still matters.

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If you’d like to hear the exchange for yourself, I’m linking here to a six-minute committee clip in which Rachel Thomas, the Member of Parliament for Lethbridge, questions Marc Miller, Canada’s Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, about the meaning of “social cohesion” and a separate remark by film and television producers that was widely mischaracterized as coming from news media journalists. Shorter excerpts from this exchange circulated widely across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms.
https://youtube.com/shorts/MbBP6a3ZL8s?si=9_lGSA0huSVnOOmL

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If this resonated, I’d welcome your examples—moments where shared civic ideas were recast as something darker. These shifts don’t announce themselves loudly. They spread because we stop naming them.

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If this reflection helped you see the language around public life a little more clearly, I’d welcome your support. You can leave a comment, share the piece with someone who values careful civic conversation—or, if you’re able, buy me a coffee to help support the ongoing work here at Between the Lines.

☕️ https://buymeacoffee.com/lenispot

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