Speaking to fear: why logic and optimism won't ease political polarization

When people are scared, they don't listen. 

That's what Donna Kennedy-Glans takes away from the recent U.S. election.

She saw the fear of American voters while watching the campaign unfold, and she says she's seeing it in her home province of Alberta too. 

She warns that Canadians are wrong to believe there aren't polarizing trends in Canadian culture and politics, and while Kennedy-Glans wants to help get people get past that fear, she says just applying logic and optimism from the other end of the spectrum doesn't work. 

The self-proclaimed "passionate champion for citizen voice and the 'radical centre'" acknowledges it's hard to speak from the middle of the current polarized world, and it even pushed her from the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership race. 

But she's working to try and get people talking — and listening — about the issues that keep them apart, like climate policy.

The following is an excerpt from Jim Brown's interview of Donna Kennedy-Glans. It has been edited for clarity.  

What can we learn about Canadian politics from what just happened in the U.S. election? 

I don't think we can ignore people's fears. And often, when we're talking about issues in Alberta politics, or even federally in the last election, if you assume that someone's fear is not legitimate, or that it can be explained away rationally by what you're going to have to say, I think that can lead to polarity. 

There are a lot of people who are afraid of issues in Alberta right now. We're afraid about our energy future, we're afraid about a carbon reduced world and what that means for our economy and for our kids.

If you assume that someone's fear is not legitimate, or that it can be explained away rationally by what you're going to have to say, I think that can lead to polarity.- Donna Kennedy-Glans

If you're optimistic in that space, and you say "Don't be afraid, we can do this!" people stop listening. Because you haven't actually acknowledged their fears. 

So fear changes the nature of the discussion?

I think that's what Trump did. In the last election in the United States, he actually listened to people's fears. And I don't think that the Democrats did. They actually tried to present a view of the world that was positive and upbeat, and lots of people are like that — pessimistic or optimistic by nature — but I think when you try to logically explain away fears, you actually turn them right off, and they stop listening. 

Now, there is an issue around feeding people's fears, and I think that's an ethical question that was much debated during the Trump campaign, and I think needs to still be something that's asked here in Alberta right now, during the campaigning that's going on.

It's unethical to feed people's fears, but you do have to listen. So, when I'm out in Alberta talking to people about energy strategy, or carbon strategy, and they're worried about competitiveness, they're not going to listen to me, whatever I have to say — rational, fact-based, optimistic — until I hear what they're saying. 

And that's when they'll start to listen. 

Now you talk about the ethics of feeding the public's fear. And that's exactly what people are saying right now, around the Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch and her plan for some sort of Canadian values test for new immigrants. What's your perspective on that? On the one hand, it could be seen as feeding fear, but on the other hand, using the language that you used around Donald Trump, it could be seen as listening to the fears of Canadians. 

And that's where you get into real trouble being a politician, is: what's your motivation? And I think, often, until somebody talks to you one-on-one...you can be just tarred and feathered with motivation that may not be applicable. 

What I see often, and I saw it ten days ago in Red Deer, at the Progressive Conservative convention, are push-button issues. People taking questions like provincial funding for abortion, which hasn't been on the table for a very long time, questions about home-schooling and religious rights of parents, which is a relevant issue to some Albertans. But when you're talking about the biggest issues in education, it is not religious rights of parents, in my opinion it's the very low grade 12 graduation rate that we have. 

When a politician specifically pushes a button to activate a reaction from the public, and to garner emotion, and energy, in the direction of their particular political values or campaign, I think that kind of manipulation should be called out. 

When a politician specifically pushes a button to activate a reaction from the public, and to garner emotion, and energy, in the direction of their particular political values or campaign, I think that kind of manipulation should be called out.- Donna Kennedy-Glans

Well we call them wedge issues for a reason, and if we're talking about polarization, obviously that's caused by a lot of wedges being driven between the two poles. 

Absolutely, absolutely. What lacks energy in that analysis, though, is what happens in the centre. And I think we often, there's a lot of energy - so if we're talking about a political issue, like the one that Kellie Leitch has raised, or we're talking about carbon in Alberta, and energy future, it's easier to activate pro and con, and somebody who's got very heightened emotional relationship to an issue.

What's harder to activate, is the centre. Because the centre, in politics in Alberta, has historically been fiscal conservative and social progressive and the integration of those. It's actually how you bind those two poles together in a way that can be sustainable. Not just environmentally sustainable, but economically sustainable as well. So it's more nuanced, and it's less push-button.

People say it's compromise. I don't think it's compromise, I actually think it's a lot more work to achieve that kind of integration. 

But can you win, by activating the centre? Wasn't that another lesson that we saw last week in the U.S.? We had one candidate that was clearly trying to activate the centre, and the other candidate wasn't. The candidate who won certainly wasn't the candidate who was trying to activate the centre. 

We saw, actually, the centre get activated here in Canada, the last election federally, with the Liberal party actually saying "You know what, the Conservatives have gone too far to the right, the NDP can't perform, and we're not sure about some of their leftist policies, the centre is where Canadians are."

I think the centre is where most Albertans are. It's just harder to get people riled up and on a bus and coming out to vote in support of a single issue, like abortion....

During this last leadership process, I had a lot of millennials around my campaign...who were very optimistic, and wanted to accelerate carbon reduction, do it right now, and I asked them to sit down with people who'd been in the energy sector for a very long time, some science-based people, some economists, some business people, and come up, together, with a plan. 

And they fought, and they yelled at each other, but there was a base of respect, and they got frustrated, and after about a month, we came up with something that I think is pretty sensational. But what then was the challenge, when we rolled it out, is: the poles, the left and the right, all clamoured and started shouting at us because it didn't fit what they wanted...

I wanted them to experience that. I wanted them to actually have to work with people who had a different view of the world, and the impacts of those choices and then I wanted them to have to defend that against the poles.

We learned a lot. But you've always got to figure out what to try and do with the poles. Sometimes, the poles are poles are never going to move, and sometimes you just become a lightning rod, and you hope you become more than that. Because that's the only way we're going to come up with really sustainable, cogent, effective policy.