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With Russia at war, fascism has taken hold of its young people, Canadian researcher finds
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As Ukraine’s allies wait and wonder about what gains its military’s much-anticipated counteroffensive against Russia could bring, a Canadian researcher is looking beyond the battlefield to the war’s eventual end.
And what he sees is dire.
Ian Garner, a cultural historian and Russia analyst from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., is touring the United Kingdom discussing his new book, Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia’s Fascist Youth, and his conclusions about the prospects for a lasting peace with Russia are pessimistic, to say the least.
His gloomy message is that with or without Vladimir Putin as president, support for his regime’s toxic outlook is deeply pervasive, including among young people, who have typically been seen as the most “Western-friendly” Russians.
Garner said he spent months reaching out and interacting with younger Russians on social media sites, such as Telegram and VKontakte, who support their country’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
Out of the hundreds of people he tried to connect with, eventually a few dozen agreed to engage with him — and Garner said he came away with the conclusion that fascism is firmly entrenched.
“I found … an alarmingly large number of young people who were engaging [using] the genocidal language of the state,” Garner recently told an audience at the Pushkin House cultural centre in London.
“They wanted me to understand that they are the good guys, that when they talk about killing Ukrainians to save Ukraine, they genuinely believe it and that it is the morally right thing.”
Ukraine seen as ‘disease’ threatening Russia
Garner said he was repeatedly told that the most dangerous “disease” that threatens Russia is Ukraine.
“If we can cut off the tumour [Ukraine], maybe we can destroy the disease,” he said, referring to the twisted logic that is being indoctrinated into Russian youth groups and the state education system.
If Garner is correct, the implications for a permanent, peaceful resetting of the relationship between Russia and its Western neighbours after the fighting ends are profound.
“When Putin goes, or if the war were to end tomorrow, when you look within Russia, we still have a problem that is sitting there and that is the Russian people as they exist today,” he told CBC News in an interview.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, has resulted in the most viscous, destructive conflict in Europe since the Second World War.
Entire Ukrainian cities such as Mariupol and Bakhmut have been razed to the ground from Russian attacks.
Thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been killed in bombardments and airstrikes, including unrelenting Russian attacks over the winter on Ukrainian infrastructure, such as power generating stations.
The United Nations has concluded that Russian troops committed widespread war crimes, in cities such as Bucha, by torturing, raping and executing civilians.
And the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Putin himself, accusing him of ordering the illegal deportation of children and the unlawful transfer of people from the territory of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.
Most young people oppose war: pollster
Garner’s assessment about the extent to which Russian youth have embraced fascism has its detractors, however.
Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, who continues to live and work in Moscow, said opposition to the war remains highest in younger demographics, and many young people have taken enormous risks to demonstrate that.
“The best of them are resisting courageously, and the brightest are leaving Russia for work and education abroad,” Kolesnikov told CBC News in an email.
Others note that Russian people, in all age groups, are largely non-political and often just go along with the authorities because they are presumed to be the people who know best.
Denis Volkov, one of the few independent public opinion pollsters remaining in the country, said his research with the Levada Center, where he’s the director, suggests that among Russians under 30, only 10 per cent are hard-core supporters of the war.
“They are more resilient towards propaganda and more critical of the government,” Volkov told CBC News in a Zoom interview.
Likewise, British researcher Jeremy Morris, a professor of global studies at Aarhus University in Denmark, said he believes the views of younger Russians are not especially dissimilar from young people in Europe or even the United States.
“On issues like drug use, sexuality, divorce, abortion, tolerance towards minorities, for young Russian people there is no evidence that there is some ‘fascist-ization’ going on,” Morris said in an interview.
There are inherent difficulties in extrapolating broad trends about youth behaviour, he said, when only the most fervent believers of the war agree to take part in a study, such as Garner’s.
Morris, who continues to travel to Russia, said he was doing field work in the country as recently as October 2022.
Fears of war’s impact on young minds
None of the experts CBC News reached out to ultimately disputed Garner’s gloomy assessment of the difficulties in reconciling Russia’s future relationship with Western nations.
“Young Russians are being pressed from both [sides],” Volkov said. “From the Russian state and from the West — they are being rejected by the West as well…. They are in a hard situation.”
In his book, Garner tries to identify several paths forward, however challenging.
If the online environment has helped to emphasize genocidal aspects of Russian fascist ideology, then perhaps social media can be turned around to create more positive “alternate realities” for Russians, too, he said.
“Russia under Putin has searched for things to destroy that are holding back the country,” Garner told the Pushkin House gathering.
“We can nudge people to different identity pathways. We have to be there to support them, as hard as it is to do the psychological hand holding.”
For Denis Volkov, the danger is that the longer the war in Ukraine goes on, the more success Putin’s regime will have at converting younger people to a destructive mindset. Even so, he still sees some glimmers of optimism.
Russian people in general — and young people in particular — see the war largely as a clash between governments, not nations, Volkov said.
Indeed, even at this point, 15 months into Russia’s catastrophic invasion, he said, surveys suggest Russians continue to hold fairly significant goodwill toward Americans and Europeans.
“The majority thinks ordinary people can come to terms, but the governments are not able,” Volkov said.
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Whereas Garner argues that the deeply entrenched moral rot within Russian society will confound efforts at reconciliation, Volkov suggests that Russia’s masses are likely to do what their leaders — Putin or someone else — tell them to.
“More depends on [Russia’s] elites, not so much on ordinary Russians,” the pollster said.
Of course, it’s impossible to find anyone who expects that Vladimir Putin will willingly exit Russian politics because of the war and the difficulties his military has faced.
Indeed, Putin has given every indication he intends to keep the war in Ukraine going for as long as possible — as conflict with the West has become an intrinsic part of Russia’s cultural identity.
More money will land in the pockets of Canadian families on Friday for the latest Canada Child Benefit (CCB) installment.
The federal government program helps low and middle-income families struggling with the soaring cost of raising a child.
Canadian citizens, permanent residents, or refugees who are the primary caregivers for children under 18 years old are eligible for the program, introduced in 2016.
The non-taxable monthly payments are based on a family’s net income and how many children they have. Families that have an adjusted net income under $34,863 will receive the maximum amount per child.
For a child under six years old, an applicant can annually receive up to $7,437 per child, and up to $6,275 per child for kids between the ages of six through 17.
That translates to up to $619.75 per month for the younger cohort and $522.91 per month for the older group.
The benefit is recalculated every July and most recently increased 6.3 per cent in order to adjust to the rate of inflation, and cost of living.
To apply, an applicant can submit through a child’s birth registration, complete an online form or mail in an application to a tax centre.
The next payment date will take place on May 17.
News
Capital gains tax change draws ire from some Canadian entrepreneurs worried it will worsen brain drain – CBC.ca
A chorus of Canadian entrepreneurs and investors is blasting the federal government’s budget for expanding a tax on the rich. They say it will lead to brain drain and further degrade Canada’s already poor productivity.
In the 2024 budget unveiled Tuesday, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said the government would increase the inclusion rate of the capital gains tax from 50 per cent to 67 per cent for businesses and trusts, generating an estimated $19 billion in new revenue.
Capital gains are the profits that individuals or businesses make from selling an asset — like a stock or a second home. Individuals are subject to the new changes on any profits over $250,000.
The government estimates that the changes would impact 40,000 individuals (or 0.13 per cent of Canadians in any given year) and 307,000 companies in Canada.
However, some members of the business community say that expanding the taxable amount will devastate productivity, investment and entrepreneurship in Canada, and might even compel some of the country’s talent and startups to take their business elsewhere.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland unveiled the government’s 2024 federal budget, with spending targeted at young voters and a plan to raise capital gains taxes for some of the wealthiest Canadians.
Benjamin Bergen, president of the Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI), said the capital gains tax has overshadowed parts of the federal budget that the business community would otherwise be excited about.
“There were definitely some other stars in the budget that were interesting,” he said. “However, the … capital gains piece really is the sun, and it’s daylight. So this is really the only thing that innovators can see.”
The CCI has written and is circulating an open letter signed by more than 1,000 people in the Canadian business community to Trudeau’s government asking it to scrap the tax change.
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke and president Harley Finkelstein also weighed in on the proposed hike on X, formerly known as Twitter.
We need to be doing everything we can to turn Canada into the best place for entrepreneurs to build 🇨🇦<br><br>What’s proposed in the federal budget will do the complete opposite. Innovators and entrepreneurs will suffer and their success will be penalized — this is not a wealth tax,…
—@harleyf
Former finance minister Bill Morneau said his successor’s budget disincentivizes businesses from investing in the country’s innovation sector: “It’s probably very troubling for many investors.”
Canada’s productivity — a measure that compares economic output to hours worked — has been relatively poor for decades. It underperforms against the OECD average and against several other G7 countries, including the U.S., Germany, U.K. and Japan, on the measure.
Bank of Canada senior deputy governor Carolyn Rogers sounded the alarm on Canada’s lagging productivity in a speech last month, saying the country’s need to increase the rate had reached emergency levels, following one of the weakest years for the economy in recent memory.
The government said it was proposing the tax change to make life more affordable for younger generations and fund efforts to boost housing supply — and that it would support productivity growth.
A challenge for investors, founders and workers
The change could have a chilling effect for several reasons, with companies already struggling to access funding in a high interest rate environment, said Bergen.
He questioned whether investors will want to fund Canadian companies if the government’s taxation policies make it difficult for those firms to grow — and whether founders might just pack up.
The expanded inclusion rate “is just one of the other potential concerns that firms are going to have as they’re looking to grow their companies.”
He said the rejigged tax is also an affront to high-skilled workers from low-innovation sectors who might have taken the risk of joining a startup for the opportunity, even taking a lower wage on the chance that a firm’s stock options grow in value.
But Lindsay Tedds, an associate economics professor at the University of Calgary, said the tax change is one of the most misunderstood parts of the federal budget — and that its impact on the country’s talent has been overstated.
“This is not a major innovation-biting tax change treatment,” Tedds said. “In fact, when you talk to real grassroots entrepreneurs that are setting up businesses, tax rates do not come into their decision.”
As for productivity, Tedds said Canadians might see improvements in the long run “to the degree that some of our productivity problems are driven by stresses like housing affordability, access to child care, things like that.”
‘One foot on the gas, one foot on the brake’
Some say the government is sending mixed messages to entrepreneurs by touting tailored tax breaks — like the Canada Entrepreneurs’ Incentive, which reduces the capital gains inclusion rate to 33 per cent on a lifetime maximum of $2 million — while introducing measures they say would dampen investment and innovation.
“They seem to have one foot on the gas, one foot on the brake on the very same file,” said Dan Kelly, president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.
Some business groups are worried that new capital gains tax changes could hurt economic growth. But according to Small Business Minister Rechie Valdez, most Canadians won’t be impacted by that change — and it’s a move to create fairness.
A founder may be able to sell their successful company with a lower capital gains treatment than otherwise possible, he said.
“At the same time, though, big chunks of it may be subject to a higher rate of capital gains inclusion.”
Selling a company can fund an individual’s retirement, he said, which is why it’s one of the first things founders consider when they think about capital gains.
Mainstreet NS7:03Ottawa is proposing a hike to capital gains tax. What does that mean?
Tuesday’s federal budget includes nearly $53 billion in new spending over the next five years with a clear focus on affordability and housing. To help pay for some of that new spending, Ottawa is proposing a hike to the capital gains tax. Moshe Lander, an economics lecturer at Concordia University, joins host Jeff Douglas to explain.
Dennis Darby, president and CEO of Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters, says he was disappointed by the change — and that it sends the wrong message to Canadian industries like his own.
He wants to see the government commit to more tax credit proposals like the Canada Carbon Rebate for Small Businesses, which he said would incentivize business owners to stay and help make Canada competitive with the U.S.
“We’ve had a lot of difficulties attracting investment over the years. I don’t think this will make it any better.”
Tech titan says change will only impact richest of the rich
Toronto tech entrepreneur Ali Asaria will be one of those subject to the expanded capital gains inclusion rate — but he says it’s only fair.
“It’s going to really affect the richest of the rich people,” Asaria, CEO of open source platform Transformer Lab and founder of well.ca, told CBC News.
“The capital gains exemption is probably the largest tax break that I’ve ever received in my life,” he said. “So I know a lot about what that benefit can look like, but I’ve also always felt like it was probably one of the most unfair parts of the tax code today.”
While Asaria said Canada needs to continue encouraging talent to take risks and build companies in the country, taxation policies aren’t the most major problem.
“I think that the biggest central issue to the reason why people will leave Canada is bigger issues, like housing,” he said.
“How do we make it easier to live in Canada so that we can all invest in ourselves and invest in our companies? That’s a more important question than, ‘How do we help the top 0.13 per cent of Canadians make more money?'”
More money will land in the pockets of Canadian families on Friday for the latest Canada Child Benefit (CCB) installment.
The federal government program helps low and middle-income families struggling with the soaring cost of raising a child.
Canadian citizens, permanent residents, or refugees who are the primary caregivers for children under 18 years old are eligible for the program, introduced in 2016.
The non-taxable monthly payments are based on a family’s net income and how many children they have. Families that have an adjusted net income under $34,863 will receive the maximum amount per child.
For a child under six years old, an applicant can annually receive up to $7,437 per child, and up to $6,275 per child for kids between the ages of six through 17.
That translates to up to $619.75 per month for the younger cohort and $522.91 per month for the older group.
The benefit is recalculated every July and most recently increased 6.3 per cent in order to adjust to the rate of inflation, and cost of living.
To apply, an applicant can submit through a child’s birth registration, complete an online form or mail in an application to a tax centre.
The next payment date will take place on May 17.
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