Social Policy in Ontario

The words are an appropriate meme for how the lion’s share of Canada’s media and much of the country’s institutional elites are dealing with populism, the most important force currently reshaping our political and socio-economic environment as well as disrupting advanced democracies throughout the Western world. They don’t understand. They don’t get it.

They have embraced the notion that Canada is somehow immune to what’s happening in Europe and America, although the forces of populism will be a significant presence in the forthcoming federal election and, in many respects, Canada is moving in lockstep with the United States — toward a class war and a vision war.

Populism in Canada has been masked by a paucity of research and thinking. It has been belittled, dismissed, with most expert opinion falling into two categories: patronizing and sneering. It has been viewed as the problem all on its own with little thought given to what has caused it or what can be done to encourage it to go away.

In Britain and the U.S., the media and intellectual cohorts were largely caught napping by its molten eruption in the Brexit referendum, the presidential election of Donald Trump, the alt.right shifts in much of continental Europe. You’d think that what has happened there should be a clue for us here. But no, we are Canada the Narnia bear, believing that somehow we are standing apart from the rest of the world.

Well … almost. Federal Conservative Party strategists, in fact, have got what’s going on (as far back as 2015 when former Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch and her campaign adviser Nick Kouvalis talked about vetting immigrants for “Canadian values”) and, less than four months away from an election, the party is a magnet for populists and leading in the polls.

This essay’s purpose is to define what kind of populism has come galloping into our midst, to identify its ingredients and what has created them, to shine light on the dark mischief they are causing and to explore how, possibly, to deal with the phenomenon.

Read more:

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Any kind of populism has two key ingredients: The idea that there is a corrupt, power-holding elite of which the people — the public — are deeply suspicious, and the belief that power should be removed from the domain of the elite and restored to the people (which is why Ontario Premier Doug Ford speaks on television with a placard across his tummy reading “For the People”).

We label the particular variant of populism that the advanced democracies of the West are encountering as “authoritarian populism” or, preferably, “ordered populism.” The two terms are interchangeable — they capture the same constellation of outlooks — but the first has a history.

Authoritarian populism was a label created by post-Second World War German social scientists seeking to understand how one of the most civilized societies on Earth could have descended into the horrors of fascism and the Holocaust. Their conclusion was that fearful, Depression-era Germans sought order in the face of an exaggerated sense of external threat (and internal threat from “others” who were among them, like Jews) and economic hopelessness, and embraced obedience and respect for strong authoritarian regimes to lead them into green pastures.

Using a term connected to Nazism and fascism obviously presents problems today. Ordered populism is a much less-charged label — the search for order in response to what is seen as chaos and threat, the persisting menace of another 9/11, the perception that economic and social progress has ended and that globalization has undermined the status quo of some golden past.

You’ll see that what the German social scientists uncovered 75 years ago pretty much fits with today. Ordered populism, the kind overtaking Canada and the rest of the developed world, has four key conditions:

• A declining middle class, wage stagnation and hyperconcentration of wealth at the very top of the system;

• Major shifts in social values which see more progressive values displacing traditional social conservative values which, in concert with the conditions listed above, produce a cultural backlash by those seeing themselves falling victim to loss of identity and privilege;

• A growing sense of external threat expressed in a rise in the belief that the world has become overwhelmingly more dangerous as well as a rise in the perception that the country and its public institutions are moving in the wrong direction;

• Declining trust in public institutions plus a rise in ideological polarization.

All those conditions are present in Canada. They predominate among less-educated males.

They look as if they’ve suddenly appeared by magic but in reality they have roots dating back 20, 30 and 40 years.

Since the beginning of the century less than two decades ago, the percentage of adult Canadians self-identifying as middle class has declined from around 70 per cent to about 50 per cent. Since 1980, the bottom 90 per cent of working-age Canadians have had no real income gains while the earnings of the top 0.1 per cent have increased on average by 500 per cent.

Self-defined middle class is strongly linked to income, but even more strongly linked to health and quality of life. Clearly, such a profound hollowing of the middle class has registered dramatic impacts not only on economic outlook, but also on basic health and happiness in upper North America. EKOS has found that, by a margin of more than two to one, Canadians believe that if present trends with inequality at the top continue then the country will witness “violent class conflicts.”

In 1996, University of Toronto political scientist Neil Nevitte published The Decline of Deference: Canadian Value Change in Cross National Perspective, a seminal and unexpected account of how Canadians were becoming an undeferential lot, an increasingly sophisticated, cosmopolitan, well-educated and politically engaged society unwilling to be pushed around by hierarchical authority (and embracing protection of the environment as a defining idea of fundamental moral behaviour). The antithesis of authoritarianism.

But values surveys carried out at the same time by EKOS Research revealed a profound gulf between the attitudes of best-educated Canadians and those of their less-educated fellow-citizens on a wide range of issues (including the environment), a gulf that very much has widened ever since.

In other words, not all of us embraced this cool, cosmopolitan outlook and EKOS today is finding a growing cultural backlash against it by Canada’s ordered populist cohorts.

You might ask yourself why it took so long.

In 1999, only three years after Nevitte’s book appeared, a Senate committee on social cohesion in Canada chaired by Conservative Lowell Murray reported that the country had entered a period of economic, social and political turbulence that “poses severe challenges … Economic inequality is increasing. Skills that were valuable yesterday are suddenly obsolete. It is more difficult for people with limited skills to find ‘good jobs,’ but opportunities open up for great increases in wealth for those who are able to exploit new technologies and emerging markets.

“As the gap widens between rich and poor, between high earners and average workers, governments will need to work much harder if they wish to fill their traditional role of including the unincluded in society. The result is likely to be severe tension between the market and those at risk of being marginalized, with governments caught in the middle.”

That was 20 years ago, a snapshot of the roots of ordered populism laid bare.

Remember? Since 1980, the bottom 90 per cent of working-age Canadians have had no real income gains while the earnings of the top 0.1 per cent have increased on average by 500 per cent.

David Goodhart, the founder and former editor of Britain’s Prospectmagazine, has characterized today’s struggle as between the “somewheres” and the “anywheres,” the people rooted in a specific place or community, socially conservative, often less educated, mainly male, mainly but by no means exclusively older and white, and those who come from anywhere — footloose, often urban, socially liberal and university educated. There’s the class war.

The somewheres and the anywheres have created two irreconcilable Americas, two irreconcilable Britains and two irreconcilable Canadas.

The Narnia bears of Canada’s media point out that the numbers of Canadians being drawn into the populist camp are not noticeably increasing. Which is true, but they’re missing the point. It’s not the numbers — about 34 per cent of the adult population, smaller than the 44 per cent in the U.S. — it’s the extreme polarization exhibited by those swept into the populist vortex: the depth of their feeling, their anger and their passion. Plus in the last few years they’ve become politicized, drawn almost entirely into one political party, the Conservatives.

It’s those last two qualifiers that have been largely overlooked by the media and institutional elites: the age of rage, as the Guardian has observed of British populists, and the partisanship.

The majority of Canadians obviously reject the orientation toward populism but they’re diffused across four centre-left political parties while populists fall almost entirely within the ranks of the Conservatives and Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party. That is why their political influence is likely to be felt in the forthcoming election.

Arthur Lower, Anglophone Canada’s most nationalistic historian, once said it is as necessary for a people to integrate their personality as it is for an individual. Populism is unintegrating us.

The next election may well be both a class war and a vision war — a class war because populism has shown itself to be a magnet for less educated Canadians who have had troubles making their way in the new economy and who tend to have social conservative views, and a vision war that will focus on what kind of country Canadians want to hand off to their children. What values should define the future — should Canadians be the inhabitants of the cosmopolitan land of anywheres that Neil Nevitte found or the drawbridge-up world of ordered populism? How do Canadians want their country seen by the broader world?

The Conservatives, the party of the financially secure and contented under Stephen Harper, have become the party of the pessimistic and financially insecure under Andrew Scheer.

They’ve become the party mistrustful of the media, science, experts and climate change, preferring to base decisions more on moral certainty than reason. They become a party tending those who favour nativism — who support the interests of native inhabitants being promoted against those of immigrants.

They have become a party overrepresented by self-identified working class supporters (from 25 per cent to 38 per cent since 2013) and hugely overrepresented by male segments of the population (the shift in male support from Liberal to Conservative has been 25 points since the 2015 election) and non-university educated.

Although there’s one important exception to all this. The Conservatives are also welcoming into their tent significant numbers of the self-defined upper class — the Tories have a huge lead with them — who are not acting out of solidarity with oppressed workers, but because they’ve observed in the policy promises and rhetoric of the federal and provincial parties pledges that serve their class interests, like cuts to social programs, tax reductions for business and keeping minimum wages low. This largely hidden alliance of the losers and the top winners in the new economy is critical to ordered populism’s success. Exactly the same thing has happened in the U.S. and Britain.

Attitudes to visible minority immigration are a good proxy for an ordered populism outlook. While aversion to visible minority immigration has been stable in most of Canada over the past several years, it has risen dramatically among adherents of the new Conservative base since the last election.

Sixty-nine per cent of Conservative supporters currently think too many visible minorities are being allowed into the country, up from 47 per cent in 2013. Comparable figures for Liberals (and the NDP is about the same) is 34 per cent thought too many were allowed into the country in 2013 and but only 14 per cent in 2019. EKOS found, however, that Liberal supporters inclined to be opposed to visible minority immigration have moved to the Conservatives since the last election.

Finally, when EKOS asked Canadians if they thought the country would be better governed if more women were in political office, 56 per cent of NDP supporters, 53 per cent of Liberal supporters, 47 per cent of Green supporters and 26 per cent of Bloc Québécois supporters answered yes, but only 18 per cent of Conservative supporters gave a yes answer.

It’s not an utter dialogue of the deaf. The Canadian bears of Narnia can have hope.

Most of the international literature agrees that a critical cause of today’s ordered populism is the prolonged economic stagnation and dramatic escalation of wealth concentration at the top and a new-found public desire to directly target those problems. Some academics see other factors possibly being more important such as cultural backlash and identity loss.

But what is true is that it’s economic stagnation and the hyper concentration of wealth that have set this force in motion and the most promising strategy for reversing it lies in direct confrontation.

Half of Canadians believe that economic stagnation and the concentration of wealth at the top is responsible for the country’s socio-economic and political problems. Only a small minority oppose (the rest are indifferent), meaning that the idea is embraced by both sides of an otherwise dysfunctional societal divide.

Half support taxing all income over $1 million at 70 per cent, an increase from 50 per cent. And 67 per cent believe the federal government should implement a wealth tax on all assets of the super rich.

So to conclude:

There are virtually no examples of ordered populism serving the public interest, no examples producing positive societal impacts. It typically doesn’t solve the problems that it’s supposed to solve. It’s mainly bombast and rhetoric (“For the People”) but little of positive substance although from the past there have been horrifying historical conclusions. It tends to be xenophobic, nativist, and mistrustful. While there is justification for sympathetically understanding the fear and anger that engender this force, its expressions are not healthy for democracies, economies, or societies.

At the same time, ignoring the problem or sneering at it as deplorable and wrong-headed is ineffectual. That merely strengthens the emotional engagement of those drawn to this force, and denies the empirical reality that most of those drawn to populism’s outlook are the losers in the new economic machinations of hyper-globalization, automation, and lingering neo-liberalism and the withering of the middle-class dream of shared prosperity.

So Narnia bears of Canada, don’t shake your furry heads and say you don’t understand — or, worse, say the problem doesn’t exist. There’s an appalling low level of awareness. Get to work.

Frank Graves is the president of Ottawa-based EKOS Research Associates and an honorary fellow of the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy. Michael Valpy is a senior fellow of Massey College and a senior fellow in public policy at University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2019/07/10/why-canadians-need-to-wake-up-about-populism.html