The next federal election is not going to be about polarization.
One party is going to reap the harvest of alienation it has planted and so carefully tended.
Another party will win with what looks more like Big tent politics than anything we’ve seen in Canada for a couple of decades.
Paul Wells has a new book coming about Justin Trudeau.
Justin Trudeau on the Ropes: Governing in Troubled Times.
To promote the book, Paul gave the Globe and Mail an op-ed on the weekend, which reads like a shortened version of part of one chapter.
Trudeau “didn’t cause the polarization of Canadian politics, but he noticed it, acted on it, nudged it along,” Wells writes. “By 2021, that polarization came not only to save his career, but to define it.”
About Trans Mountain Pipeline: There “was acceptable and unacceptable debate in Canada; that Mr. Trudeau would decide which was which; and that the Conservatives, who had won 220,000 more votes than the Liberals in the previous election, could be disqualified from public discourse as he pleased.
And then after a quick paragraph explaining why Trudeau’s team knifed moderate Bill Morneau in the back, the conclusion:
Mr. Trudeau didn’t start the gradual estrangement in our national politics, and neither is he the only leader contributing to it. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is all about affective polarization, too, which helps explain how we got the politics we have today. The centre, however, is crumbling, and the Prime Minister certainly didn’t help. The supporters of one big party are now strangers to the supporters of the other big party – and they don’t even particularly want to know one another better. And the interests of both big parties lie in benefiting from that drift, not reversing it.
Three things.
First: there is nothing new in this at all.
Nothing.
Second, the middle ground in politics hasn’t crumbled, as Wells claims. It’s still there.
And Justin Trudeau did way more than not help it from crumbling.
The entire Liberal strategy in 2019 and again in 2021 as well as in all the times before, in between, and since, Trudeau took an axe to anyone not on the extreme with him. Bill Morneau. People who questioned the government’s heavy-handed COVID policies. All unacceptable. All undesirables.
Third, Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives are actually *not* “all about affective polarization any more. They have a base that he stokes but the Conservatives moved also into the political middle space that Trudeau and his team deliberately abandoned and then demonized. It’s simplistic and it’s wrong to say that Trudeau and Poilievre are alike in their love of political polarization.
What the Conservatives have done over the past year is adjust their messaging and the perceptions of Poilievre to take up the space Trudeau and Liberals abandoned. The Trudeau Brain Trust won the 2015 election with the help of a base of habitual Liberal voters. But what they found after 2015 was that this was not their old man’s Liberal party. Not his old man’s Liberal party.
continues below link…
They hadn’t changed. The Party had. The Conservatives attracted many of them quite easily and with the deliberate shift in messaging and policies more recently they locked those folks in place and drew a pile more. One of Pierre’s favourite messages these days is that he wants to be the Prime Minister for all Canadians. This is a brilliant line because it immediately does three things:
it reminds both CPC core voters and ex-Liberal and ex-NDP converts of why they and the rest of the Undesirables don’t like Justin and the Liberals,
it makes soft Liberal and Dippers uncomfortable because they know why folks are abandoning the Liberals but don’t want to say it, and
most importantly, it makes it impossible for Justin to lash out at Pierre without reinforcinghis own negatives in the process.
People don’t like Justin Trudeau for a reason and when Justin is Justin, as he has been lately, that just reinforces the Conservatives more centrist messaging to Trudeau's detriment. So, Paul, there’s something a lot more obvious going on than admitting Justin’s polarising but adding that so is everyone else.
Thing is it’s not just Justin. Andrew Furey’s crack in Toronto about Newfoundlanders and Labradorians being “quasi-educated” about Churchill Falls is like a comment the New Brunswick Pea Seas picked up on from another provincial Liberal. They tweeted about it just like their NL cousins did about Furey because it is just another reminder of that perception that Trudeau and the Liberals are smug, arrogant, and condescending toward ordinary Canadians. And both provincial Pea Sea parties are part of a campaign very smartly tied to the federal Conservatives to exploit the linkages Liberals in both provinces have made with their federal relatives. It’s political karate, turning what used to be a Liberal strength into a weakness.
continues below link…
Truth is that Trudeau pere was smug, arrogant, and condescending too. His political opponents pointed that out all the time but unlike Trudeau fils, Pierre Trudeau led a party that was a big tent. It was a coalition and the party had strong representatives across the country who people could attach to, besides Pierre. Like Don Jamieson or even in in specific ridings with people like Bill Rompkey or George Baker. Liberals in Newfoundland and Labrador don’t have anyone like that any more. Full stop. And the party didn’t go out of its way to alienate large swaths of the traditional Liberal base as the Justin Trudeau Liberals keep doing even as their poll numbers stay locked in the toilet.
The latest Abacus poll shows the depth of the Liberal problem that comes out of its failure to adapt to a new political environment. The image at the top of this column shows which party voters feel can best handle their top issues. The Liberals only come out on top in climate change, which is not one of the top three issues for Canadians. The Con’s own those by huge margins. The Dippers only hold one issue as decisively as the Cons and that’s poverty. The Liberals don’t dominate *any* issues as decisively. All three split health care evenly.
When you look at how people of different age groups plan to vote, the tale for the Liberals is exactly as bad. They cannot even dominate the 18 to 29 age group, which is bad because young people tend to be more heavily Left. The Liberals are tied with the Dippers at 20% but Conservatives even own *that* demographic as strongly as they do the others. That’s not what you would expect if the Conservatives were - as Wells would have it - as much about polarization as Justin Trudeau’s Liberals.
Political and social polarization are not going to be the tale of the next federal election. It’s going to be alienation. And one party - the Liberals - will reap the bitter harvest it has so carefully sown and nurtured. Another party - the Conservatives - will win the votes they have cultivated by changing their ways to attract people into what looks more like traditional big tent politics than anything we’ve seen in Canada for a couple of decades.
Political Science Postscript
Polarization is a normal, natural feature of any human society. We sort ourselves or we can be sorted by others into different groups based on different things.
Polarization comes from many sources in society. Many observers, including so-called experts, mistakenly say polarization comes from the signs of it like what people say on social media or what political parties say.
Many observers also mistakenly think of polarization as a bad thing. It’s not good or bad, in itself. The challenge for any society is in how it deals with polarization. Deal with it badly and you get a society that is violent, for example, or is unable to develop evenly and fairly for all members. Deal with it successfully and you can get a highly functioning society that is wealthy and prosperous with wealth well distributed across the society.
When Paul Wells mentions “affective polarization” he is talking about something that is very simple. It’s about how people in society view “Others” or all the people who don’t think like them on whatever subject we are talking about. “Affective” literally refers to whether people like or dislike “Others” and how strongly they feel that emotion. Big words can hide really simple ideas that lots of people could understand and find useful.
In thinking about polarization alone, success doesn’t mean that there is less polarization, necessarily. You don’t have to be willing to let Other live next door to you or marry into your family. And if your society has a way of managing differences that allow for high polarization and accommodate it well - that is, resolving conflicts between and among poles that everyone is satisfied with despite lots of sharp and deep disagreements - you can be highly polarized and successful.
Arguably, Newfoundland was a highly polarized society in the 19th and 20th centuries with deep divisions on religion and social class, among others. There was a political accommodation for religious polarization but that accommodation came at the price of a society that was too fragmented to function successfully. Modern Israel is highly politically polarized, with a blinding number of tiny political parties and factions. Yet it is a functioning democracy that bridges those factions or cleavages in the legislature or, to put it another way, the parties broker deals among themselves.
Canada has lots of ways to divide people: language, race, religion, region, social status, education, and on and on. Some definitions of polarization rely on the idea of a spectrum with two extremes on either end and a centre in the middle. With that view, polarization cannot deal with differences like urban versus rural or language. What’s the central position on language in a set up that, in itself, doesn’t have two end poles?
Well, the key idea to think about here is how society deals with the cleavages. Wells mentions the idea that old parties had many different factions inside them. They were Big tents as I’ve called them or, as political scientists like to say, they were brokerage parties. The party would “broker” deals and compromises among them all. Bridging is another way of saying the same thing.
In the piece I wrote a couple of years ago (linked in the main part of the column) I pointed out that more recently the two major parties worked differently. They stressed the differences between themselves on an ideological basis, left right. The Conservatives “untied the right” in one party, which initially also had a huge rural face to it, while the Liberals deliberately shifted their campaign to win over traditional NDP voters from the left as well as voters who were urban in the location and outlook.
The Liberals won initially because they had a huge base of voters who didn’t see the shift in party strategy. As they saw the Liberals in power reflect views that weren’t there’s, their allegiance to the party slipped. And what really drive them away was the rhetoric that Paul very accurately describes in Justin Trudeau’s attitude towards those who disagree.
In 2019 and 2021, the Conservatives took the same approach as the Liberals: there’s our side and everyone else is undesirable. The result was the result we saw, with not only very close popular vote numbers but also relatively close seat counts. Between 2021 and 2024, one of the parties changed and the other has doubled down on the demonization of people who don’t agree with the official party line.
The result is plain in the polls: the Conservatives dominate every issue and every demographic and across all regions to the point where it is hard to see how the Liberals could even tease out enough seats to stay in power using the convention that in a hung parliament (no majority party) the ones in power before get to carry on until they cannot form a workable coalition.
Paul Wells is broadly right in his description of the Liberals’ current position and the role conscious decisions by Trudeau and his allies have produced their current spot in the polls. Where the piece goes off is in summarising the views of Eric Merkley, a political science professor at University of Toronto and, in the process missing out the cause and effect relationship between polarization and what people think is going on in the divisions in society on the one hand - itself a massive issue - and what the parties are doing.
Wells leaves the clear implication that the parties are driving polarization, which is flatly described as bad in itself, and that’s not really the case. Do parties cause polarization or reflect it? Neither. And both. The answer Wells gives - parties drive cleavage - based implicitly on Merkley relies on an assumption that political parties in Canada have way more social influence than other research says they do today. And historically, we know that parties can and have worked to lessen social divisions, cleavages, and polarization.
“The old notion,” wells offers, “that ‘at the end of the day, we’re all working for Canadians’ is not the sort of thing you hear in Ottawa these days.” Then he cites a Harper example from 17 years ago. What he missed was the Poilievre line about being a Prime Minister for all Canadians.
Whether that attitude continues in power is another matter, since the Conservatives have to win first. But if you look at successful political parties over the past 20 years that have been sharply divisive in their election rhetoric - like say Doug Ford - they’ve been able to win and hold power by shifting their views. In fact, the example Wells gives of Harper circa 2007 is relatively small in the greater scheme and relatively trivial compared to how the party actually governed once in office.
That difference between a few numbers and the more complex reality, dear friends, is the meaningful difference, which is the sort of thing that political scientists sometimes have difficulty with. There’s more to what’s happening than numbers in response to poll questions.
FIN