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Front Burner Transcript for August 2, 2023

Host: Tamara Khandaker

TAMARA KHANDAKER: Hey, everyone. Tamara here. Before we begin, I just wanted to let you know that we've started putting the show on YouTube every day. A lot of people are listening to podcasts there, so it just made sense. And you'll still be able to find us on all of the podcast apps. But if you want to listen on YouTube, you can find us on the CBC News channel under 'Podcasts.' All right, that's it. I hope you like today's episode.

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(Horns blaring, drum beating, cowbell clanging)

CBC REPORTER: About 10,000 people, by one police estimate, are now in the nation's capital.

(Convoyer shouts excitedly)

CBC REPORTER: The crowd is very pumped up, boisterous, excited to be here.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: When you look back at pictures from the Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa - the wide lens shots of the sea of people by Parliament Hill standing in the bitter cold, waving Canadian flags and handmade signs - what do you see? It's a question the independent think tank Public Policy Forum recently posed to 1500 young Canadian adults. Looking at the exact same image, one saw a, quote: "Peaceful protest against a tyrannical ruler." While another saw a bunch of people driven by, quote: "lies and misinformation, disturbing the peace of everyone, and being bigoted." These two perspectives on the same event, they're so different. Totally irreconcilable. And they're a microcosm of a greater concern in our political culture right now – the concern that Canadians are polarized. But despite the widespread anxiety about polarization, the public discussions of it often feel surface-level. For the last little while, journalist Justin Ling with the Public Policy Forum has been doing a deep dive on this, and today they published a new report called 'Far and Widening: The Rise of Polarization in Canada.' Justin's on the show today, and we're going to talk about political polarization here, what's driving it, and how it's impacting young Canadians.

[Music: Theme]

TAMARA KHANDAKER: Hey, Justin.

JUSTIN LING: Hey, Tamara. Thanks for having me.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: Thanks for being here. So I think if we're going to spend the whole conversation talking about polarization in Canada, it would be good to start with defining our terms. So what do we mean when we talk about polarization?

JUSTIN LING: That is a really good question that does not really have a short answer, which is too bad. It's one of those things in the report I sort of just say, you know, we know it when we see it. And we do. And if we poll Canadians, we consistently say this country is polarized. But when you get to trying to measure it at a country level, it gets really murky. Now, if you go to the U.S., it's easy, because you can see the effects of polarization in the politics with the rise of people like Donald Trump. You can see it on issues; the huge divergence on abortion access, on LGBTQ rights. So it's really, really easy to point to polarization in the U.S. and elsewhere. It gets really hard in Canada because we haven't seen quite that explosion of populism. We haven't seen that huge shift on policy matters that even led to one pollster declaring rather smugly that Canada is sort of free or maybe even immune from polarization altogether. But really, I mean, if you look at things like the Freedom Convoy, the protests that have followed the prime minister around; if you look at some of the breakdowns in communication, the growing animosity and distrust and anxiety and paranoia about not just the state of our economy, but the state of our politics and society; if you look at some of the decline in trust of traditional institutions, from the media to government; if you look at the ways in which people have increasingly become angry towards our politicians and leaders, I think all of that, taken together, indicates that we do have a real polarization problem in this country. But again, if you go and talk to people, they feel it. They have stories from their everyday lives. They have experiences over the last couple of years through the pandemic that they can point to and they can say, you know, we are getting more polarized. And they feel it. So I think, frankly, that's good enough for me.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: Yeah. Yeah. But when I think of issues that are more contentious elsewhere - like you mentioned, things like abortion, immigration - there's still fairly broad consensus here, no?

JUSTIN LING: Mm-hmm. And absolutely. But there's no guarantee that's going to hold, right? I mean, generally speaking, Canadians kind of pride themselves on their small-l liberalism. We are a country that has had this kind of cross-partisan consensus on some of these big issues for quite some time. That doesn't mean we can't go backwards. But that also doesn't mean that just because we agree on some big social issues that we're immune or prevented from polarization, right? You can have partisan affective polarization. You can have people who can no longer be in the same room; who can't discuss things, who can't come to a consensus on things, who can't work together. You can have all that, even as you agree on some big social issues. And that's kind of currently what we're seeing. There's some really great research by a University of Toronto professor named Eric Merkley. He actually helped advise on this report -- he wrote some research that I relied on in writing this. And what he's found is that increasingly, partisans in this country don't recognize each other. And it's a really interesting thing that mirrors the divide between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S.

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ERIC MERKLEY: It's not just that. It's also, you know, media sensationalism around partisan conflict in the cut and thrust of politics that gives people a pretty distorted view of what-- of both the social composition of the parties, and how different they really are in terms of race, class, religion and the like. But also in terms of their ideological beliefs.

JUSTIN LING: Even if we still have this consensus on some social issues, what you tend to see are conservatives who don't identify at all with liberals; who see them as 'other' or alien, or in some cases anti-Canadian or corrupt. And on the flip side you see liberals who see conservatives as being deeply illiberal, as being kind of against Canadian values; as being racist and anti-vaxxers. And he actually quantifies it, right? Conservatives overestimate the number of LGBTQ liberals by a significant margin. Liberals overestimate the number of unvaccinated conservatives by a huge margin. So the fact that we no longer even recognize each other is indicative of that divide growing between us, and the lack of sort of overlap and conversation that we used to have in this country and that used to be a sign of kind of constructive and useful politics.

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TAMARA KHANDAKER: If political polarization is a concern, it's probably worth looking more closely at politicians themselves, which you do in the report. How are we seeing our politicians become more polarized here in Canada?

JUSTIN LING: It's funny. You know, they are both sort of a mover, and moved, by polarization, right? Our politicians absolutely bear a tremendous amount of blame for our current polarized state. The ways in which they describe their opponents--

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JUSTIN TRUDEAU: He is in love with the sound of his own voice.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: He calls single mothers polluters because they buy groceries.

JAGMEET SINGH: You got 'say nothing,' and 'do nothing'...

JUSTIN TRUDEAU: The Conservative leader has been purposefully using his videos to appeal to far-right, misogynistic online movements.

JUSTIN LING: The ways in which they talk to their supporters, the ways in which they frame matters of public policy and issues of national importance, have all contributed to Canadians demonizing their political opponents. And have also contributed to this rising anxiety that has made politics and some of these issues a sort of a life or death matter for some people. But at the same time, their own supporters - their voters, their party members, their donors - are also being affected by this state of polarization, and are demanding more ideological purity, more cut-throatedness from their politicians, and more sort of this quest for blood in the political arena. So there's sort of a reaction and an opposite reaction happening here. You actually heard outgoing Conservative leader Erin O'Toole say exactly this when he stood up in the House of Commons for his farewell speech.

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ERIN O'TOOLE: Instead of leading, instead of debating our national purpose in this chamber, too many of us are often chasing algorithms down a sinkhole of diversion and division.

JUSTIN LING: He said we have to be leaders -- not followers of our followers. Which I thought was a really interesting way of phrasing that. And this is driven by a whole bunch of things: a need for social media engagement; a need to win leadership in nomination races; a need for fundraising dollars. But what it's led to has been both a radicalization of some of our politicians and of their supporters, and it has led to some of this animosity getting outright violent. You know, I heard from certain members of Parliament who point-blank looked at me and said, "We've become afraid of our own supporters." You know, how can you exist in the political realm when you're relying on the support, but are also deeply fearful, of the people who are voting for you? That's a really problematic place to be.

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TAMARA KHANDAKER: Can you give me some recent examples of how you see polarization or polarized political rhetoric in Canada?

JUSTIN LING: Yeah. So I mean, if you go into the 2021 election, right? You know, the way in which Justin Trudeau referred to unvaccinated people-- and, you know, there's a lot of excuses being made for the way he phrased it, but, you know, he point-blank said that people who are unvaccinated tend to be misogynist.

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[French TV program]

JUSTIN TRUDEAU: Mais aussi, des gens qui sont farouchement opposés à la vaccination--

HOST: Sont extrémistes.

JUSTIN TRUDEAU: --qui croient pas dans la science, qui sont souvent misogynes, souvent racistes aussi. C'est un petit...

JUSTIN LING: And he even admonished his political opponents for not being strong enough on vaccines. That sort of rhetoric deeply divided people. As one Indigenous leader phrased it to me, it made people add up the score, right? They looked at a man who was supposed to be their leader, who was supposed to be unifying them in this public health project, right? No matter what your feelings are about unvaccinated people, the leader of the country talking that way was incredibly polarizing. And then on the flip side you saw the reaction to that, right? When Pierre Poilievre was running for leader after Erin O'Toole had been ousted, he looked at those people who felt disaffected, who felt, you know, cast down upon, who felt like they'd been marginalized by the prime minister, and he spoke to them in their own language.

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PIERRE POILIEVRE: They also don't want any scrutiny of this grand reset the prime minister is now talking about. This idea that he's going to renovate Canadian society...

JUSTIN LING: He actually repeated and mirrored some of the conspiracy theories that had taken root in that movement, and used their energy and excitement to raise money and eventually to win the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada, right? You know, these people know what they're doing. They know that they're leveraging distrust and animosity and polarization present in Canadian society, and they're weaponizing it for their own political futures. It is contributing to our current polarization crisis.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: Mm-hmm. And speaking of raising money, one thing that I found interesting in the report is the role that you found fundraising is playing in all of this. How do the pressures of fundraising contribute to this issue of polarization?

JUSTIN LING: It's massive. We don't talk about this a lot, right? Over the last 20 years we've got rid of corporate and union money in politics, and I think we mostly agree or almost entirely agree that was a good thing. At the same time, we got rid of the per-vote subsidy that was taxpayer funding for parties-- major political parties. I think a lot of people remember that happening. They kind of think to themselves, 'Great. Now individual donors are contributing to our political system and all is well.' Well, all is not well. The constant anxiety that members of Parliament face to raise money from their constituents and their supporters is constant, right? They use dollars raised as a sign of their own momentum and support, and it is a constant battle to get people to open their wallets to contribute a dollar, $5, $10, $20. You know, $1700. And to do that they use these high-energy, high-emotion appeals to fear and anxiety and worry that kind of pushes people to give money in order to take back their country, or protect what we've built or, you know. It becomes a moral imperative to give money. And once you start that financial relationship - one where, you know, you need to give me cash so that I can keep fighting to preserve what we built, or to stop, you know, the barbarians at the gates - once you build that financial sort of relationship, it really embeds that emotion kinda going forward, and gives the most energized, the most activated people, you know, a stake in what you're doing. And that can be a productive and a positive thing. I think you can look at Bernie Sanders as somebody who managed to sort of bridge the divide between, you know, disaffection and polarization, but also sort of positive messaging. But on the flip side you can point to Donald Trump, who is constantly bilking seniors out of huge amounts of money and making them angry in the process. Every single political party and candidate does this. They do so by, frankly, weaponizing misinformation in some cases. You know, Pierre Poilievre talks about the evil World Economic Forum off in Davos, Switzerland that is maybe trying to take over the country.

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PIERRE POILIEVRE: Work for Canada. Work for Canada. If you want to go to Davos to the con-- that conference, make it a one-way ticket.

JUSTIN LING: That if you don't give $5 now, Klaus Schwab will come to your house and kick your dog or whatever, right? The Liberal Party says that the Conservatives are going to give everyone an AR-15.

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LIBERAL CAMPAIGN AD: This is an AR-15 rifle. It was designed to kill people. Erin O'Toole promised the gun lobby that he would legalize this, and 1500 other assault weapons.

JUSTIN LING: All of this kind of ridiculous rhetoric is necessary to push people to keep donating. And these parties are constantly cash-starved. And it's a real problem that we do not talk about.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: Yeah. Another thing I realized when I was going through the report, is most of the time when I see what's happening in the House of Commons is when there's a clip that goes viral.

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REPORTER: An angry Jagmeet Singh called Bloc MP, Alain Therrien, racist.

JUSTIN TRUDEAU: Conservative Party members can stand with people who wave swastikas. They can stand with people who wave the Confederate flags.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: And I condemn him for when he dressed up in racist costumes so many times he forgot them all. We condemn it, always, Mr. Speaker.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: And it's usually a politician giving a really angry speech toward someone across the aisle. Can you just talk about the role that social media plays in political discourse and polarization in Canada?

JUSTIN LING: Yeah. So it's really kind of du jour to say, oh, you know, social media ruins politics. But we don't often talk about the real specifics of why and how that works. Social media, over the last number-- 10-15 years or so, has increasingly prioritized high-emotion content. In the same way that high-emotion content leads to more fundraising dollars, high-emotion content on social media is what gets the most reactions. And what has kind of risen to meet that trend, is that the House of Commons has given every single member of Parliament and their staffers and the partisans behind them, new tools to clip and share everything that happens in the House of Commons. It used to be, going back to the '70s and the '80s when we first started broadcasting Parliament, maybe one or two clips from the day would make it onto the evening news. Unless you were watching CPAC all day and every day, you wouldn't see the sort of mechanics of the House of Commons in real time, or really at all. And what that meant is that you actually have those sort of frank and honest discussions. It meant that you wouldn't have to constantly be playing the overwrought partisan in every exchange you had across the aisle. As the internet has come along and as the House of Commons has let every member of Parliament take those clips, the performances have become much more dramatic, and you've seen this constant effort to feed Facebook and other platforms. And the results have been that videos like the ones you've seen that are nasty and angry and accusatory, do orders of magnitude better than speeches or interventions or debates that are more about compromise or co-operation or thoughtful policy solutions. Now, the House of Commons is always going to be a partisan and sort of jousting body, but there was always a delicate balance that was maintained. And that balance is now completely and totally out of whack, and we have this sort of social-mediafication of the House of Commons to thank for it.

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TAMARA KHANDAKER: The thing is, even if the partisan rhetoric in Ottawa is polarizing, it doesn't always seem like the actual policy substance is. Like when you look at something as important as housing, I don't really see radically different solutions being presented from our mainstream parties. Everyone in power seems to be suggesting shades of the same thing. So what does it say that the rhetoric is polarized when the policy substance isn't?

JUSTIN LING: Well, I don't think you can divorce the decline in the quality of government services and government action over the last, let's say, ten years, with this rising polarization. I think sometimes we love to talk about polarization as though it stands alone; as though everything else is working and this new polarization is the only problem. But that's not the case. I mean, you can see the decline in the quality of services in this country. You can see the rise in homelessness. You can see the rising death toll of the opioid crisis, right? People can see with their own two eyes that this country is not doing as well as it was, let's say, just before the pandemic. And this is true in every rich nation, right? We as the Western world are going through some tough times right now. And the more that that happens, and the more the government seems indifferent to those realities, the more people are going to go rushing for alternative solutions and explanations. And that's part of the process of polarization. And it's really interesting to look at this government in particular. You know, I spoke to a former cabinet minister who told me really bluntly, we're not good at doing big things, and we're really bad at telling people things are better than they actually are. We're really insistent on managing problems and managing the message as opposed to actually solving them and being honest with people. And you can point to the continuing crisis of clean drinking water on First Nations across the country. You can point to the housing crisis like you talked about. This week, the government sort of threw its hands up and said, well, we're not, you know, the main level of government responsible for the housing crisis.

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JUSTIN TRUDEAU: I'll be blunt as well. Housing isn't a primary federal responsibility.

JUSTIN LING: So, you know, the more people see government taking kind of credit for all the good things it's done, denying all of the crises that are directly before us, the more they get angry and disaffected. And how could we possibly blame them? And this is every level of government. I spoke to a former mayor of a big city who looked me dead in the eye and said, you know, people don't understand just how destroyed cities got during the pandemic and how difficult it's been to rebound. Part of the process of fighting polarization is a) of course, getting better at actually governing and delivering services, but also b) being honest with people. Actually going to them hat-in-hand and saying, 'Listen, we're doing our best, but things are really tough right now.' And the more governments are willing to have those frank and honest conversations, and reach across the aisle and figure out ways in which we can work together to actually fix these solutions, the better off we're going to be. Because the more governments decide to double down and keep playing this sort of divisive wedge politics instead of talking about nation-building again, the more we're going to see people, you know, sort themselves into their political space and just keep marching forward like we're doing right now.

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TAMARA KHANDAKER: So your report shows how this has left a lot of young people, especially, feeling pretty disaffected; ambivalent. What role do you see that hopelessness or frustration playing in the polarization, and what do you think can be done to address that?

JUSTIN LING: I don't think it's hopelessness. It is frustration, there's no doubt. You know, we did some polling of youth across the country -- particularly youth who don't really normally do public polling. My excellent colleagues at the Public Policy Forum put together these roundtables in communities straight across the country, online and in person, and we heard sort of point-blank from a lot of these youth about the realities they're facing. And it was not hopelessness that we heard, but I think there was a frustration and a feeling like they're banging their heads against the wall. We heard them say housing is a real problem. We heard them say the homelessness crisis is top of mind. We heard about the opioid crisis. We heard about all of these problems that they cared deeply about and they want to solve. But they no longer feel like the political process is the route to solve them. And again, how could you possibly blame them? When they turn on the news, or when they see clips on Twitter or Instagram or TikTok or wherever, they see those high-rhetoric, high-emotion, anger-inducing spittle-flying clips of one side accusing the other of being corrupt or out of touch or whatever. And it doesn't feel like that nonsense is leading towards any constructive solution. What we heard was a real desire to put aside this-- these constant accusations and these recriminations and this complete red-faced rage. What we heard was a desire to actually roll your sleeves up and get stuff done, and to hear credible policy solutions to the problems that face us. And I know this sounds sort of optimistic and maybe a little doe-eyed, but it's what we heard. And it's not exactly what we expected to hear either. There is an appetite out there for real serious solutions and I think this extends across age groups. The problem is the partisans who govern these parties, which are a relatively small cohort in this country. Those people have been sort of left to run our political system. Meanwhile, the other, you know, 35 million of us are left kind of throwing our hands up and wondering what the hell happened to our political system. And I think youth are the ones who are putting that in the most kind of direct and pointed terms.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: OK, Justin. Thank you. Maybe you want to tell people where they can read the report?

JUSTIN LING: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. You can find the report on ppforum.ca. And I'll have some little companion stuff to the report on my newsletter, ‘Bug-eyed and Shameless.’ So keep your eyes out for it there.

TAMARA KHANDAKER: Cool. It was great to talk to you. Thanks.

JUSTIN LING: Thanks.

[Music: Theme]

TAMARA KHANDAKER: All right, that's all for today. I'm Tamara Khandaker. Thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you tomorrow.

What's driving polarization in Canadian politics? - Transcript

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