With the volcanic explosion and newfound ubiquity of artificial intelligence (AI), a curious enigma appears to be emerging for the devoted Canadian fiscal conservative, staunch capitalist, and libertarian or perhaps even all three at once. As the use of AI in professional settings continues to climb precipitously in Canada, it is becoming increasingly evident that Andrew Yang was right when he posited that a tremendous portion of the labour force will likely be replaced through automation, robotics, or artificial intelligence more generally. Moreover, it appears that, in 2017, Kathleen Wynne's piloting of a three-year basic income project in the Hamilton area, Thunder Bay, and Lindsay was ahead of its time. Albeit, likely not for the reasons she had in mind. Nevertheless, the need for a robust universal basic income (UBI) program in Canada seems to be approaching at an accelerating pace. Yet, ironically, it is the insatiable capitalistic hunger for innovation, technological advancement, and digital acceleration that is pushing industrialized countries, like Canada, toward the need for a comprehensive, efficacious socialist framework capable of supporting an economy and labour market undergoing tectonic shifts. And so, as the most prominent champions of capitalism continue to tout it as the greatest economic system, they seem, unwittingly, to be leading us directly toward an entirely anti-capitalistic socio-political structure.In Canada, this puts the fiscal conservative devoted to private enterprise, the dogmatic capitalist, and the libertarian obsessed with shrinking government in an increasingly strange bind. They want to keep pushing technologies like AI to fuel innovation and profit, but in doing so, they are simultaneously forcing politicians and governments to pilot, or at the very least seriously entertain, what functional UBI programming might look like. So, it begs the question, in Canada, what happens to the capitalist ideology itself? As its core tenets become, well, untenable and internally incongruent, how does the Canadian capitalist reconcile the contradiction or perform the ideological gymnastics required to escape it?If one is committed to a capitalistic society, one must acknowledge that technological advancement will eventually lead to a system that can no longer function strictly on capitalistic premises. If the capitalist automates, digitizes, or AI-optimizes their way to a workforce of zero, they still require customers. They still need people with money and means to subscribe to their services or buy their products. If unemployment begins to far exceed employment, some mechanism must exist to put money in consumers’ pockets. Ironically, then, the capitalist may find themselves drifting into semi-socialist advocacy..A cornerstone of capitalist rhetoric is that capitalists are the backbone of Canadian society because they provide jobs. And, to a degree, this is true. But what happens when capitalism innovates itself out of the job-providing business altogether? What happens when the Canadian factory is fully automated, efficiently producing an exorbitant volume of goods, but the public no longer has the means to purchase them? Can the capitalist continue to believe in unbridled capitalism, or are they forced to rethink it? Are they compelled to understand the importance of social programming? If the bottom line remains their ultimate priority, and it takes the hardest hit, might they begin clamouring for the government to fill citizens’ pockets as quickly and consistently as possible? Might they become champions of socialist practices?Even if the capitalist remains cavalier and unconcerned about the Canadian workers displaced by these innovations, that indifference places them in an unsavoury and ultimately immoral position. A mature and healthy Canadian society cares for its citizens and neighbours and grapples with large-scale problems such as the one described here. Contemporary communitarianism is likely to be exercised at micro-levels of society, such as the familial, but for society to function, it requires at least some degree of collective concern. Without it, we slide toward a Machiavellian or Hobbesian social order. Now, one could argue that we already live in such a global rat race, but many still aspire to work for a more Rousseauian outcome.Thus, in Canada, the fiscal conservative, the hardcore capitalist, and the libertarian may need to shift their priorities. Or at least their ideological commitments if they wish to preserve even a fragment of the capitalist ethos. The great irony is that the same capitalistic forces driving ceaseless innovation are propelling us toward the very socio-political system they have long defined themselves against. They pride themselves on being the antithesis of socialism, yet at the exponential rate of technological advancement, they may soon require a universal or socialized income system simply to keep their businesses supplied with customers. And so, might we witness the eventual rise of the Canadian socialistic-conservative? A figure morphed, inadvertently, into becoming the very thing they once vehemently opposed. Might it be time for conservatives in Canada to seriously adopt and champion a universal basic income-supported system?
