I’ve been immersed in Winston Churchill’s My Early Years, a ripping yarn that sees the future wartime leader take part in a cavalry charge at the battle of Omdurman in Sudan and escape captivity during the Boer War in the late 1890s.
As gripping as the incredible Boy’s Own adventures are his accounts of the fin-de-siecle British Empire — which, when he is writing in 1928, he described as a “vanished age.”
Ages always vanish, of course, usually because of traumatic cataclysms like wars or pandemics.
In our own time, COVID seems to have been the catalyst for a new age of discontent, accelerating anxieties that were already percolating, and taking with it the classical liberal consensus that dominated the postwar world.
It is paradoxical that a prime minister who ventured the thought that Canada is stronger because of its differences, rather than in spite of them, is now presiding over a political landscape dominated as never before by ill-will and alienation.
Politics in this country may never have been exactly civil — it’s been said the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory. But the respect and a broad policy consensus that undeniably existed has been replaced by loathing and partisan hostility. Illiberalism is the dominant strain on both the left and the right.
There is empirical evidence that Canada is a meaner country than it was a few short years ago.
Police-reported hate crimes have soared 72 per cent from 2019 to 2021. The homicide rate has risen steadily to its highest level in 30 years. Meanwhile, social trust has plummeted. Only a third of adults now agree that most people can be trusted.
The political system is a direct casualty of that disillusionment. A recent study by the Public Policy Forum into the rise of polarization, appropriately called Far and Widening, said only 50 per cent of the respondents it polled believe voting is the best way to enact change. One person in six said that only taking power from “global elites” would effect real change.
It used to be the case that most people could agree on what many consider to be “Canada’s advantage” — an immigration policy that has attracted the best and brightest from around the world.
Yet that too is breaking down, in large part because of careless, incoherent federal government policy.
Last week, a video on social media featured a long lineup of what appeared to be Southeast Asian students queuing to apply for jobs at a Food Basics supermarket in Hamilton, Ont. The comments in response to the video suggested that a nativist backlash to Liberal immigration policy is in full swing.
The government has overseen an explosion in international students coming to Canada — 900,000 this year alone — many of whom are using education as a back door to citizenship.
By paying tuition fees of around $25,000, students can come to Canada, study part-time at a private college, work legally in low-wage jobs and stay in the country for years after graduating. Coupled with a Liberal plan to boost the number of permanent residents to 500,000 by 2025 — double the number from a decade earlier — it is clear that there has been a massive increase in low-skilled immigration that threatens to put pressure on wages at the bottom end of the labour market.
The lobby group Colleges and Institutes Canada, whose members are the main beneficiaries of the huge influx in tuition fees, acknowledged as much when it said in a statement that the cap on international students being contemplated by Ottawa could “exacerbate current labour shortages.” A reminder: this is a program for international students, not temporary foreign workers.
As many economists have noted, such high numbers of newcomers have the happy corollary for the government of boosting GDP — immigration is likely to account for the total output increases of 1.5 per cent in 2023 and 2024.
But those gains will mask a cumulative decrease in output per person and add to the housing crisis. In short, Canadians will be worse off under this policy and resistance to similar levels of immigration will surely follow.
The Liberals have to accept a disproportionate share of the blame for the state we’re in because they have been in government for nearly eight years.
But the conditions for a more bitter politics were already ripe in 2015. After the Second World War, average real wages doubled in roughly 30 years. In the subsequent half-century they have been relatively stagnant. Poll after poll has shown the majority of Canadians think the next generation will have a lower standard of living than their parents did — an economic backdrop against which it is hard to generate optimism.
The advent of social media that prioritizes provocative content has helped erode the common ground most Canadians shared in the postwar world.
Politicians have found that what former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole called “performance politics” works for them: ramping up the rhetoric and demonizing their opponents in order to get noticed. MPs not viewed as being sufficiently combative are considered suspect by their colleagues and partisan constituents.
O’Toole’s successor, Pierre Poilievre, has fine-tuned the cartoonish manipulation of the outrage machine that is X (formerly Twitter), combining bombastic rhetoric and an indifference to truth. Impressively, in one recent tweet, he managed to malign the trifecta of Conservative scourges — the prime minister, the CBC and the World Economic Forum — in under 140 characters.
As Justin Ling, author of the PPF report on polarization, noted, political parties used to be big tents, a microcosm of the country at large, but they now more closely resemble special interest groups.
The pandemic only accelerated that division of Canadians into two tribes, when a material minority emerged who were vocal in their belief that governing elites had lost their connection to the people they are meant to serve. That gave birth to the truckers’ convoy protest that blockaded downtown Ottawa last year. It is a significant indication of widespread disillusionment that one poll suggested a majority of 18- to 34-year-olds sympathized with the protest against vaccine mandates, even if they didn’t agree with the blockade.
Justin Trudeau did little to reconcile alienated voters by calling a snap election and using vaccine status as a wedge issue. He even referred to his opponents as “often anti-science, often misogynistic, often racist” and wondered if they should be tolerated.
For a leader who is quick to blame those who disagree with him of engaging in “the politics of fear and division,” it revealed his own tendency toward intolerance.
His critics contend that Trudeau has been on a quest to transform Canada into something more closely resembling his own progressive leanings — and of portraying those who oppose him as uninformed, irresponsible or motivated by unworthy goals.
Moderation and the modest compromises that characterized much of Canadian political history have been jettisoned in favour of lofty goals that often come with unintended consequences, such as the immigration targets. It is telling that the debate around the cabinet table apparently was not whether 500,000 newcomers was too many, but rather whether that number was ambitious enough.
In the current fervid political environment, it is unrealistic to expect a politician to emerge who will appeal for calmer heads to prevail, like the medieval knight in the middle of melee in the Far Side cartoon: “Hey, c’mon. Hold it! Hold it! Or someone’s gonna get hurt.”
Voters are in a vitriolic mood. Appealing to their better angels is likely to leave any politician feeling like Winston Churchill after his first abortive venture into politics, “deflated as a bottle of champagne when it has been half-emptied and left uncorked for a night.”
Multicultural Meanderings 