On Canadian calendars, Nov. 3 is nothing special. And yet, this Tuesday will be one of the most important days in our history.

In 1969, Pierre Trudeau went to Washington and told Americans that living next to them was “in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt." Fifty-one years later, the whole world is sleeping with an elephant. And these days, the beast is definitely not even-tempered. The fate of the Trump presidency will be decided on Tuesday — although we may not know the results of the U.S. election for days or even weeks. There is no shortage of opinions in other publications about why “the worst American president in modern history” should be defeated.

The charter of The Conversation states that we will “provide a fact-based and editorially independent forum, free of commercial or political bias.” What does “editorially independent” mean? It means we publish articles from all sides of the political spectrum, as long as those analyses are backed by facts and research. We have, for instance, published stories that were critical of Justin Trudeau, Erin O’Toole and Jagmeet Singh — all astute analyses backed by facts.

But I will be the first to admit that the majority of our stories about U.S. politics have made the case against a second Trump term. And this is why the “fact-based” part of our charter is so important. Former U.S. senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once famously said: “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” But what we’ve seen happen over the past four years is that if people don’t agree with your opinion, they simply won’t acknowledge the facts. This has become a problem for journalism.

The mission of The Conversation is to share knowledge in order to inform decisions. But what happens to a democracy when a large portion of its citizenry habitually dismisses facts and expertise? One of the most disturbing stories I’ve read as the U.S. election approaches was by Charlotte Alter in Time magazine. She spent three weeks driving through Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — blue states that unexpectedly turned red in 2016 — and discovered what she called the “unlogic” that drives many Trump supporters. “Unlogic is not ignorance or stupidity; it is reason distorted by suspicion and misinformation, an Orwellian state of mind that arranges itself around convenient fictions rather than established facts,” she wrote.

Win or lose on Tuesday, Trump’s lasting legacy will be his role as the champion of anti-truthers. The president’s thousands of lies are well documented (mostly by Canadian journalist Daniel Dale, who works for CNN), but his attacks on scientists and expertise have implications far beyond the U.S. border. Trump’s bastardization of the term “fake news” — an expression popularized years ago by another fact-finding Canadian journalist, Craig Silverman of Buzzfeed News — has now become the familiar refrain of autocratic leaders around the world who reject legitimate criticism. It’s a disturbing contagion. We’ve seen the rise of conspiracy theories about COVID-19 in Canada, and social platforms like Facebook recently tried to stop the spread of QAnon followers in Québec.

Even if Trump is defeated on Tuesday, the campaign against facts will continue. Undaunted, we will continue to do our part to fight the good fight. That’s because facts matter. Evidence matters. Research matters. Expertise matters. Truth matters. 

For your weekend reading, I’ve assembled some excellent fact-based stories from the global network of The Conversation about the U.S. election — including an analysis by former MP Peggy Nash (now at Ryerson University) about what the election results will mean for feminism.