In House panel - Identity Politics
Whatever you call it — identity politics, dog whistle politics, wedge issues — there are a number of ways to describe how political parties appeal to specific groups of voters.
These tactics in particular appear to be behind the movement in the polls in Quebec, as the debate over the niqab continues.
In House panelists Andrew Coyne, columnist for PostMedia and the National Post, and Rosemary Barton, host of Power & Politics on CBC News Network, discuss the implications of identity politics on the outcome of the election.
What's your take on how political parties use wedge issues and identity politics to stoke a clash over values in this campaign?
AC: They're doing it because it works. The Conservatives are pushing all the buttons, but the Bloc are going several steps beyond them, I would say. It has some legitimate concerns at the heart of it, but it takes these things and amps them up and puts them in the shop window like they're the most important issue for the country. It takes it to some very dark places.
RB: There's a risk when you're talking about these kinds of things — the niqab, revoking citizenship, a hotline for reporting "barbaric" cultural practices — of tipping too far one side or the other. It's very hard to read where Canadians are specifically on these issues.
AC: There's two types of risk. There's the political risk, that you push it too far and people recoil. But there are other risks and other damages — the damage to relations between different ethnic groups, the damage to people who feel themselves, quite rightly, put under the spotlight.
What about the Trans Pacific Partnership — should a government in an election period be negotiating long-term deals?
RB: I know this is an issue for the Liberals and NDP, but I'm not sure what else the government is supposed to do. This is other countries who have decided on this timing. What were we going to do, not show up to the table? I think the government would have been criticized for not being there.
AC: Yes, you don't like seeing governments go off in entirely new directions while in a writ period, but this has been going on for some years now, these negotiations, so it's not exactly new.
With two weeks to go, will campaign politics get nastier?
AC: It can only get more hysterical and nasty. I think you're going to see the temperature start to turn up. It's still a very tight race. I would imagine we will see the NDP turning up the temperature on the TPP, to paint the Liberals as not being sufficiently hardline against it. If you thought the race was slightly crazy to begin with, it's only going to get crazier.
RB: I think it's going to get uglier and nastier, if it's possible. But here's a warning to political parties as they play that game — you better be awfully careful of what you're doing, because that kind of stuff turns people off, when you see the mudslinging. I think Canadians get turned off and cynical about that.