Juno News - Why are Canadians so polarized？ (feat. Justin Ling)

00:00:00.000 You're tuned in to the Andrew Lawton Show.

00:00:08.580 Freelance journalist Justin Ling set out in a new report called Far and Widening,

00:00:14.200 the Rise of Polarization in Canada, which you can see there,

00:00:18.320 and it comes out tomorrow to identify some of the root causes of this.

00:00:22.580 And he actually does quite a formidable job with this.

00:00:24.980 He talks about partisan sorting, which we'll get into in a moment.

00:00:28.360 He talks about the online ecosystem.

00:00:31.060 He mentions True North, not entirely in a favorable way.

00:00:33.880 So we'll talk about that as well.

00:00:35.500 And he also talks, of course, about the pandemic,

00:00:37.580 which has inflamed many of these polarizations and polar tensions in Canadian politics.

00:00:44.080 Now, I should say, Justin Ling is a guy with whom I've had several disagreements,

00:00:48.260 but I've always, always had, whenever I've interacted with him,

00:00:51.940 very civil and positive exchanges.

00:00:53.840 And he was the only journalist outside of conservative media to actually interview me

00:01:00.760 about my book on his podcast when it came out, which I was and remain very appreciative of.

00:01:05.920 And I wanted to return the favor now that Justin has put out this report.

00:01:09.500 Justin Ling joins me now.

00:01:11.680 Justin, it's good to talk to you.

00:01:13.020 And I will say congratulations on doing this.

00:01:14.900 I know it's quite a lengthy piece, and I know it was something you worked on for many months.

00:01:18.980 So thanks very much, and well done.

00:01:21.380 Thank you.

00:01:22.140 Thank you for having me.

00:01:23.700 There was a reason why I picked your show as one of the first interviews we were going to do about this thing.

00:01:29.560 So I'm excited to get into it.

00:01:31.220 Let's, before we get into the meat of this, explain what your research question is,

00:01:35.780 and also what your definition of polarization is.

00:01:38.520 Because I know it's one of those things that even in academic literature on political polarization can have a number of meanings.

00:01:45.620 Yeah, and that's exactly it.

00:01:47.080 I mean, going into this report, the idea was not to come up with any big solutions.

00:01:51.020 It was not to sort of assign blame necessarily.

00:01:54.660 It really was supposed to be a diagnostic, right?

00:01:56.980 Like an audit of the state of polarization in Canada to understand the drivers, the variables, and the factors that was contributing to our sense of polarization.

00:02:05.600 Or, I mean, maybe we went into it kind of wondering, are we going to find out that polarization is really not as bad as we all kind of think it is?

00:02:11.680 So from the outset, definitions were really hard.

00:02:14.880 So much of the academic literature is about the U.S.

00:02:18.700 And in the U.S., it's really easy to measure, right?

00:02:21.740 Because you ask people, how do you feel about Donald Trump?

00:02:24.780 How do you feel about January 6th?

00:02:26.260 How do you feel about the COVID vaccines?

00:02:28.220 How do you feel about abortion access?

00:02:29.700 Whatever, right?

00:02:30.160 All of those policy issues, you can actually watch not just the divide between the two polls, but the movement that occurs when, say, Donald Trump comes out pro or against something or Joe Biden comes out pro or against something.

00:02:44.140 You know, you actually see Republicans shift significantly when Donald Trump pronounces against a certain issue.

00:02:48.920 So on all of those fronts, it's really easy to measure south of the border.

00:02:52.780 Here, we don't really have that, right?

00:02:54.640 We have that liberal consensus, broadly speaking, on abortion access, on LGBTQ rights, so on and so forth.

00:03:00.940 Even if there's a divide, the divide stays pretty static, right?

00:03:04.940 So we kind of work to look at a whole bunch of other metrics.

00:03:08.180 There's a little bit of academic research.

00:03:09.520 I won't go too far into it.

00:03:10.740 Suffice it to say, we are seeing the demonization of political opponents, the appeals to identity over policy or issues.

00:03:19.220 We're seeing starker divides when it comes to the actual political sphere.

00:03:25.340 We're seeing an inability to talk to each other on major issues.

00:03:28.840 And we're seeing instances of mass civil demonstration that gets sort of unruly, and that goes everywhere from the Freedom Convoy right down the line to basically the violence that's occurred in Nova Scotia around the livelihood fishery for Mi'kmaq fishers.

00:03:45.800 So we're seeing all of the symptoms of polarization, and I'm feeling really comfortable saying that it's here and it's quite bad.

00:03:53.360 And by all the polling data we have, Canadians tend to agree.

00:03:56.260 One of the interesting bits of research that you shared that I find is a useful reflection of this problem was how people define their political opponents and how people think the political outgroup is comprised.

00:04:10.960 And the one that I think the examples you gave from the research you cited was that conservatives tend to think there are a lot more gays in the Liberal Party, and liberals think there are a lot more unvaccinated people in the Conservative Party, and both are overinflations.

00:04:24.260 But it actually shows that people do have, whether intentionally or not, kind of a caricaturish version of what the other political group is.

00:04:34.980 Yeah, absolutely.

00:04:35.800 And so this research comes from Eric Merkley at the University of Toronto.

00:04:39.140 He's actually used, there's these surveys that get done, they're kind of like exit polls, after every major federal election.

00:04:44.960 It's probably the best trove of data we have about how Canadians feel about the political scene.

00:04:50.900 And he's used that data to actually chart the ways in which Canadians are growing increasingly disaffected and alienated towards our political parties.

00:04:59.520 And he's basically said, the data shows that we are trending towards the current state of politics in the US, the animosity Democrats feel for Republicans and vice versa.

00:05:10.520 So you're totally right.

00:05:11.900 Partisans in this country increasingly see partisans of the other stripe as alien or foreign, in some cases as working against the best interests of the country, and seeing them as sort of laboring under a moral defect in many ways.

00:05:26.600 And, you know, it's not hard to figure out why this is, you go back 20, 30 years, and you had real competition and diversity inside political parties, right?

00:05:37.780 Inside the Progressive Conservative Party, there was a pro-free trade side, there was an anti-free trade side, did it for the Liberal Party, you know, going back to the early 2000s, the Liberals had a social conservative caucus, right?

00:05:49.140 The NDP had a pro-gun caucus inside of their party.

00:05:53.500 And what that meant was that you could see within your own party elements of your opponents.

00:05:58.840 It was a lot easier for Democrats to identify with conservatives because they also had a rural base, right?

00:06:04.000 They also had rural voters, hunters and fishers and so on.

00:06:07.500 So you could look across the aisle and say, okay, I might not agree with them on things.

00:06:10.980 I might think their vision for the country is bad, but at the very least, I understand where they're coming from because the guy sitting next to me or, you know, the guy who has the conservative sign down the street thinks a lot like they do or thinks a lot like I do.

00:06:23.720 So the decline of that, the kind of collapsing in of our political parties has made this much worse.

00:06:32.060 We no longer really have diversity in our parties.

00:06:35.080 In fact, identifying with the party across the way is seen as a problem that needs to be kind of rooted out of your party.

00:06:42.920 There's no longer really, I mean, maybe the Conservative Party might be the last kind of biggish tent, but even still, it's gotten a lot smaller. 0.96

00:06:49.820 There's no ideological diversity in the Liberal Party.

00:06:51.980 There's no real ideological diversity in the NDP.

00:06:55.240 And even the Conservatives, you know, identifying or agreeing with the Liberals or NDP on anything is seen as a huge problem and sort of a surrendering of the Conservative ideals.

00:07:07.620 And all of this makes any form of cooperation, collaboration, conversation really difficult.

00:07:14.120 I agree with what you've just identified there, but there's a contradictory problem I find that also exists,

00:07:19.920 which is that you have people on the left and the right that increasingly don't even see distinctions between political parties anymore.

00:07:26.800 And I think the pandemic was an example of that.

00:07:29.720 I mean, you often hear in the U.S. the term brought up the uniparty, which is the idea that, you know,

00:07:34.340 the Democrats and the Republicans are all part of one uniparty.

00:07:37.360 And I know that we'll get into, you know, some of the conspiratorial stuff that I know you write a lot about.

00:07:42.200 But I'm wondering how that factors in, because in the COVID era, as you've talked about in your report and as I've discussed on my show,

00:07:49.480 there was actually very little tolerance for distinctions between political parties in the early stage.

00:07:55.500 I mean, we even heard Aaron O'Toole talk all about the so-called Team Canada approach and Andrew Scheer at the time when he was the leader.

00:08:01.380 And at that point, it was like opposition, political opposition was stigmatized.

00:08:05.980 And you had MPs that even said that, that they were worried of criticizing the government because they didn't want it to feed into,

00:08:12.400 you know, something that was adverse to public health measures.

00:08:16.500 Yeah. I even include a little bit from a study that was done in Quebec in the early version,

00:08:21.380 or the early part of the pandemic where they observed exactly this phenomenon where a total lack of criticism and lack of competition really in the political sphere

00:08:32.160 and the media, they extend this so far as to talk about the media as well.

00:08:35.260 The lack of criticism of government policies actually fomented distrust amongst many people who were a little skeptical to begin with.

00:08:42.180 And then when sort of partisanship returned, it made everything all that much more worse.

00:08:48.500 So you're right that sometimes a lack of competition or kind of a view that all the parties are the same also foments this problem.

00:08:57.020 The reality is polarization is happening in different directions at the same time.

00:09:00.880 Partisans are one part of the problem. 1.00

00:09:03.900 People who are kind of outside, maybe alienated from the political game are another part of the problem.

00:09:10.920 And when I say problem, I don't mean they are the problem themselves,

00:09:13.280 but all these things are contributing to the problem of polarization,

00:09:15.920 as are the kind of broad middle of the country who are frankly, I think, a little fed up with the entire process

00:09:24.060 and who, to be honest with you, often kind of buy into the idea of the wedges being used in the political sphere.

00:09:33.520 And in the report, I certainly chide Justin Trudeau for weaponizing some of those wedges

00:09:38.320 as I chide Pierre Poglia for weaponizing wedges in the opposite direction.

00:09:42.700 So you're totally right that a perceived or real lack of debate on some of these issues also contributes to this problem.

00:09:52.340 And there is a significant class of people who have unplugged from politics in this country

00:09:57.660 or who have opted for, frankly, conspiracy theories and misinformation

00:10:01.180 to sort of explain this apparent consensus that's happening in our political realm.

00:10:06.880 Yeah, and you have a line that I'll quote here where you're talking about the two groups on COVID,

00:10:12.300 the COVID narrative, if I can use that in a neutral way here, the trusting and the skeptical.

00:10:17.100 You say,

00:10:17.320 Of course, you're talking about the Freedom Convoy.

00:10:35.280 You and I, I think we're seeing very different things when we were looking at the convoy.

00:10:40.200 And I think we should have a discussion about that at some point.

00:10:42.880 But I would be interested in hearing if you think that what happened from that point on only furthered that.

00:10:50.660 Because I saw people that were consumers of convoy coverage in the media

00:10:56.180 that for the first time in their lives were saying,

00:10:58.760 You know what?

00:10:59.400 I'm swearing off the CBC.

00:11:01.240 I'm swearing off the Globe and Mail because I don't trust them anymore.

00:11:04.300 So if there had been up until January of 2022, a growing frustration or a growing level of disenfranchisement

00:11:13.340 when the convoy came, it was really as though a flip switch for a lot of people.

00:11:18.000 And they said,

00:11:18.400 I no longer trust anything that's happening in that establishment realm, be it from politics or media.

00:11:25.900 Yeah, I mean, I think that's 100% the case.

00:11:28.360 I think it's really too bad for a variety of reasons.

00:11:32.620 And the mainstream media is not entirely without blame either, right?

00:11:37.420 So there was some bad coverage of the Freedom Convoy.

00:11:39.900 And I won't pretend like all my coverage was 100% spot on either.

00:11:43.280 I think I've raised something.

00:11:43.740 I'll just interrupt there and say that a lot of the issues that my audience will have,

00:11:47.380 we dealt with on Justin's podcast.

00:11:49.120 Yeah, that's right.

00:11:49.740 You can only read that at his sub stack.

00:11:51.320 So if you're like,

00:11:51.680 Why are you talking?

00:11:52.360 Because we've already dealt, we've already done that part.

00:11:54.240 So we can move on now, but carry on.

00:11:56.080 I just wanted to put that on there for people to look up.

00:11:57.920 No, I appreciate it.

00:11:59.780 Because the thing is, you know, some people were right to be frustrated.

00:12:04.160 But I will also say the sort of in-group, out-group thing, you know, the constant need to be with your people, right?

00:12:10.900 The people who, let's say, agreed with the convoy or the people who were just angry and furious and, you know,

00:12:16.460 wanted to crack down on even harder, the sort of divide that occurred between those sides made it really hard to see on the multiple fronts on which both sides actually probably agreed on a ton of things, right?

00:12:27.780 Like, I always tried to have this conversation with people, whether it was around the Freedom Convoy or whatever.

00:12:32.240 I was against lockdowns, right?

00:12:33.780 Like, I was against, I live in Quebec.

00:12:35.460 We had a curfew.

00:12:36.420 Nothing made me angrier through the pandemic than being told by my government that I have to go inside at 8 p.m. every night.

00:12:42.020 Like, that made me crazy, made all my friends crazy, made a whole bunch of liberals and progressives and lefties and conservatives and libertarians.

00:12:48.440 It made everyone in this province crazy.

00:12:50.300 And there was not enough debate about it in the media.

00:12:52.500 And sometimes it felt like there was a conspiracy of silence in the media to criticize the total lack of scientific evidence behind that policy.

00:13:00.620 And I know when I went to Ottawa to cover the Freedom Convoy, a ton of Quebecers were there protesting the same thing.

00:13:05.840 Unfortunately, the thing that ultimately, you know, set the dividing line between us was a feeling, was feelings around the vaccine.

00:13:13.060 You know, I'm aggressively pro-vaccine.

00:13:14.560 I think the science supports them.

00:13:15.740 Other people disagree.

00:13:17.040 How do we figure out a way in which we can put aside some of those big things we disagree on and focus more on the things that we can actually have a conversation on?

00:13:24.600 The fact is, we can't have a real conversation about vaccines.

00:13:27.600 There is just too much pollution in the space.

00:13:29.820 There's too much misinformation out there.

00:13:31.460 I know people might disagree with me, and that's fine.

00:13:33.620 But it's also over now.

00:13:34.860 We're past that.

00:13:35.600 Let's focus on the things where at least we can have a reasonable, rational conversation about these policies.

00:13:41.100 And I think that's fundamentally the path forward here.

00:13:43.300 It's going to require, you know, it's going to require us to have a conversation about all of this, ideally in the form of a real public inquiry where we all get to come out and kind of air these grievances.

00:13:52.960 You know, have, you know, that moment, that difficult conversation, then move on and figure out the bridges that we can find that allow us to have those conversations again that also allow us to hopefully,

00:14:04.520 you know, reopen those channels between people who don't trust the CBC anymore, but also between the CBC and the mainstream press and maybe things like True North or other alternative conservative minded outlets.

00:14:15.960 Because I think this pulling away over these, frankly, now relatively insignificant matters of disagreement is a real problem.

00:14:24.400 The convoy has been a year in the rearview mirror.

00:14:27.500 Let's stop letting that dictate what news media we listen to or which politicians we trust or don't trust.

00:14:34.380 It's going to require a bit of a wiping of the slate clean and trying to kind of rebuild this all over again.

00:14:40.020 Because if we keep letting those divides grow, I know this sounds a little bit, you know, Rose Glass is optimistic, but if we keep letting those divides grow, things are going to get worse.

00:14:49.680 And we're going to continue having conversations that have nothing to do with each other.

00:14:52.860 And we're going to continue seeing the other side as foreign and alien and different and hostile. 0.98

00:14:58.620 And it's only through having those conversations that we're going to learn they're not that different.

00:15:02.720 They're a lot like us and they agree on many of the important things.

00:15:05.940 But I think what you've said there contributes in, not in an intentional way, but contributes here to the problem.

00:15:12.640 Because the people that felt most aggrieved by lockdowns and vaccine mandates and all of these things are not really willing to move on from it.

00:15:22.980 Because for them, and you can understand it, I mean, you had people that lost their decades-long careers out of this.

00:15:28.300 People that could not spend time with dying family members.

00:15:31.440 And I know you know this, and I know you're critical of a lot of the measures, as you just indicated there.

00:15:37.860 But the thing is that there's a lot of resistance to this idea of just moving on from one particular group.

00:15:44.720 So here's an example of a divide where, you know, Justin Ling says, listen, we can all just agree this was an aberration.

00:15:51.520 Let's move on.

00:15:52.240 You've got someone else that for whatever reason says, no, I can't move on.

00:15:55.760 I want accountability.

00:15:56.760 I want justice.

00:15:57.600 I want some form of recompense for this.

00:16:00.980 How do you square that divide when people may be not able to agree on the severity of what happened?

00:16:07.940 I mean, I think that's what a public inquiry gets you.

00:16:10.580 I know there's a citizen's inquiry going on, I think still going on right now, that I frankly don't think is the best avenue for this.

00:16:17.400 It's time the government, the provinces, whoever, get together and have a real conversation about the pandemic.

00:16:23.040 And whether or not the measures we put in place were effective or were not effective, I tend to think...

00:16:26.640 So you don't think we need to just sort of close the book and not look at it?

00:16:29.440 No, no, like I said, I think I put it right there in the report.

00:16:32.480 One of the solutions about going forward has to be a public inquiry, right?

00:16:35.180 Like it has to be a chance for everybody to get in the same room or on the same Zoom or whatever it is and kind of air those grievances so that we can move forward.

00:16:43.300 That has to be the step we do before we move forward.

00:16:45.700 That being said, you know, part of living in a democratic society is saying, yeah, I was really unhappy the way this policy affected me.

00:16:52.780 I was really unhappy the way in which this government regulation impacted my life, my livelihood or whatever.

00:16:58.680 But then going, you know, I have to compromise.

00:17:01.000 I have to let stuff go at some time at some points.

00:17:03.280 And I appreciate there's still some raw emotions there and I appreciate there's still some people who, you know, do want that recompense.

00:17:12.740 But also we've got to move on.

00:17:15.320 We've got to figure out a way to kind of get back to working together.

00:17:18.260 Because the other part of all of this, you know, sometimes we talk about polarization as though it's just some sort of ephemeral problem that we just have to kind of clean out of the air.

00:17:26.200 We'll all be fine.

00:17:27.120 Part of the thing driving polarization is that we have a real problem of state capacity.

00:17:31.760 There are things in this country that are falling apart.

00:17:33.800 There are huge problems facing us.

00:17:36.540 And some of those problems became very clear during the pandemic.

00:17:40.900 Some of those problems, I think, fed into a lot of the mental health challenges that people experienced during the pandemic.

00:17:46.100 It fed into a lot of the economic problems we faced during the pandemic.

00:17:49.380 And I think if we're still bickering about things that happened two years ago, we're going to have a really hard time figuring out any sort of consensus or cooperation that lets us fix those very real problems that are still hurting our cities and our country and our livelihood and our families and so on.

00:18:03.820 One of the most interesting quotes that you included in your report here came from a Trudeau government official who said they saw a moral imperative.

00:18:13.880 And that's the direct quote there, a moral imperative to push back against some of the anti-vaccine rhetoric.

00:18:20.540 And you actually take from that a quote that I'll read here where you say that in practice, this meant turning vaccine status into a moral electoral wedge issue during a snap election in the midst of a pandemic.

00:18:35.060 Now, I would say, and I'm curious if you agree or disagree, that the liberals weaponized the vaccine issue far more than the conservatives did, far more than the media did, because I really feel that, look, Trudeau looked and saw that 80% of the country was vaccinated.

00:18:50.100 People who were unvaccinated were a statistical minority.

00:18:53.100 And it seemed like a relatively low stakes game to start winning votes from the 80% at the expense of the 20%.

00:19:00.860 And I think the trucker mandate was a great example of that.

00:19:04.340 It served no public health benefit.

00:19:06.600 It really seemed to be adding insult to injury.

00:19:09.400 But I'm curious.

00:19:10.700 So first off, I'm curious for your thoughts on that, but also that moral imperative, because I don't know if this was, I don't know the tone in which this was said to you.

00:19:19.020 Was this a liberal staffer kind of talking about, you know, we really wanted to stick the knife in, or was it just a crusade that really existed outside of science in their view?

00:19:30.000 So, okay, so let me say, I generally agree.

00:19:33.860 At least for the, you know, first year and a half or so, you know, coming up to the end of the 2021 election, yes, the liberals were the ones who were weaponizing the pandemic for political end.

00:19:44.040 I don't know how you can come to any other conclusion.

00:19:46.140 You know, Aaron O'Toole and Jagmeet Singh and Yves-François Blanchet did their part of all standing together and trying to be those cooperative political figures to say, yes, please go get vaccinated.

00:19:57.280 They're safe.

00:19:57.780 Put political differences aside and go get this vaccine that all available evidence says is safe.

00:20:03.640 And it was Justin Trudeau who decided to go on TV and say anti-vaxxers, not all of them, he does a little not all of them caveat, but tend to be misogynists and white supremacists and so on and so forth.

00:20:13.920 And he even goes so far as to say Aaron O'Toole is not as strong on vaccines, Yves-François Blanchet is not as strong on vaccines.

00:20:20.080 And I think that was really deplorable.

00:20:21.520 And I don't think we've ever, we haven't had enough, at least in I'll say the mainstream press, the liberal press, whatever you want to call it, enough of a conversation about how dangerous those comments were and how bad they were.

00:20:30.600 And I don't think it was only the benefit of hindsight that I think I've really appreciated just how terrible they were.

00:20:36.120 I think when you get into 2020, when the Freedom Convoy shows up and Pierre Polyev launched his leadership bid, I think you can absolutely say that Pierre Polyev and the Conservative Party weaponized, in many cases, misinformation or distrust around the vaccines for their own political ends.

00:20:51.680 Maybe you can even say in response to what Trudeau did.

00:20:54.280 I don't think there's anyone with totally clean hands here in this whole thing.

00:20:57.860 But Justin Trudeau, as the prime minister, had a moral obligation to not play this game.

00:21:03.440 He probably had a moral obligation not to call an election in the midst of the pandemic and use that pandemic as a political wedge.

00:21:10.080 I don't think we can stress that enough.

00:21:11.680 So absolutely.

00:21:13.700 When it comes to their moral imperative to highlight the anti-vaxxers, it was very much set in the tone, and I genuinely think they believe it, that it was the prime minister's job to be forceful in recommending people take the vaccine.

00:21:31.260 And by that, I mean, you know, really underscoring the possible dangers of not doing it, underscoring the safety of taking it, and admonishing anybody who would contradict that.

00:21:43.340 I think we know emphatically, even if their intentions were pure, that doesn't work.

00:21:48.500 People don't like that.

00:21:49.780 That actually pushes people in the opposite direction.

00:21:52.200 You get people who are skeptical to do something that they're skeptical of by addressing their concerns directly and talking to them about it, not by going on TV and calling them a bunch of lunatics, right?

00:22:06.420 There's no doubt there's people out there who are spreading wild lies, like, you know, COVID vaccine is full of snake venom, or it's rearranging your DNA.

00:22:15.520 Like, these things we know are not true.

00:22:17.360 I don't know what you do with those people.

00:22:18.920 But there's a ton of people out there who were ranged from skeptical to hostile.

00:22:24.320 Maybe some of them could have been convinced.

00:22:26.160 Maybe some of them would never be convinced. 1.00

00:22:27.900 Regardless, you do better by having genuine conversations with them and not calling them idiots than you do by going on TV and calling them a bunch of angry women hating nutjobs. 0.99

00:22:38.560 And this gets back into what I think is the most crucial point of your report, which is the idea of echo chambers and how it's increasingly comfortable to be in one. 0.98

00:22:48.200 And I'm fully aware of this, and this is actually, I don't want to say an uncomfortable topic, but it's a challenging one for me because I realize that independent media that takes a particular political stand will naturally gravitate towards people that like echo chambers.

00:23:04.580 And I always try to do my best to push back against that by saying, I don't want you to just listen to me and only me.

00:23:10.180 I want you to do what I do and get news from a variety of places.

00:23:13.500 But we are very siloed, and it's actually fascinating to me.

00:23:17.920 You know, I once did a little experiment where I logged into a friend's Facebook account who wasn't political.

00:23:24.060 This was back when Facebook had news.

00:23:25.820 And I just wanted to see, you know, your homepage, my homepage, just how different is what we're getting and wildly different, just so wildly different.

00:23:35.280 And if you were someone that didn't quite know how these programs worked, you wouldn't realize that you're only getting a narrow subset of the world whenever you go online.

00:23:45.640 And I'm curious if you think people are choosing these.

00:23:50.680 You know, people are saying, I am self-selecting out of the world, and I want my little slice of it.

00:23:56.160 Do you think people are ending up in this and don't even know it?

00:23:59.200 This is a terrible question because I've been writing my newsletter for tomorrow for the launch of the report on exactly this topic.

00:24:06.720 And so I have, you know, 3,000 words in my head that I'm trying not to dispute you.

00:24:12.540 The short answer is, yes, people chose it, but they were also pushed into it.

00:24:16.960 The reality is we actually know from a bunch of really good social science, people are not naturally inclined to just consume things that they agree with from people they agree with.

00:24:26.320 We're actually very much more complicated creatures.

00:24:29.420 We tend to go out of our way to get information that contradicts our worldview or at the very least tends to be a little bit oppositional to it.

00:24:37.180 And this has been the history of people since the dawn of time.

00:24:39.900 I mean, you know, I hosted a podcast about right-wing radio and found myself not being 100% against all of it, right?

00:24:46.980 Like, you know, I have to confess, Rush Limbaugh is really fun to listen to.

00:24:51.500 And through doing this show, I talked to a bunch of people who are generally liberals who would say the same thing, would turn on Rush Limbaugh because they wanted to hear the other side, even though they disagreed with it.

00:24:59.680 We are naturally predisposed to being curious, weird creatures who want to hear the other side.

00:25:06.040 Now, Facebook, and Facebook was the instigator but not the only culprit for this, Facebook consistently tried to convince us that we didn't want that, right?

00:25:15.100 Facebook consistently tried to give us information that it thought we wanted, information that we agreed with, information that people like us liked.

00:25:23.480 And consistently, we actually have a bunch of internal Facebook memos that were leaked last year to Congress that show that people don't like it.

00:25:30.880 People were unhappy with it.

00:25:32.740 The problem is Facebook earned more money and got more engagement by continuing to do it, in some cases by making us angry.

00:25:38.880 It actually convinced publishers and political parties by, you know, using Facebook, sorry, using anger as the most powerful metric to share information on that news feed by juicing it up in the algorithm.

00:25:52.220 It convinced political parties and news outlets to make their headlines angrier.

00:25:56.760 You can see, I mentioned this in my report, but you can see a 300% increase in the number of headlines that use anger and fear and anxiety in their headlines.

00:26:07.520 At the same time, you see a massive decline in headlines and news articles that generally employ, you know, happiness and joy and positive emotions, right?

00:26:16.100 So Facebook directly contributed to the mainstream press, by the way.

00:26:20.240 This is not even the alternative press.

00:26:21.560 This is the major news outlets, to them becoming angrier and more oppositional, right?

00:26:26.760 So that led to a catalyst of a whole bunch of startups replicating that emotion, right?

00:26:32.920 That's where you get a lot of the bright parts.

00:26:35.640 It's where you get the press progresses and the Daily Kos and these other outlets that tend to use this high emotion language.

00:26:43.240 You know, watch Joe Biden destroy Bernie Sanders.

00:26:46.300 Watch Donald Trump eviscerate Ronda.

00:26:48.040 You know, this is where you get that language from.

00:26:50.440 And even if we're not naturally predisposed towards that kind of stuff, if you keep pushing it in people's faces, they will consume it, right?

00:26:59.680 Because it sounds exciting.

00:27:00.840 And if you're in this rage arms race to make everything this high emotion competition, people will engage with it.

00:27:09.140 And the problem is we've done this now for so long.

00:27:12.260 We have not tried anything different.

00:27:14.500 We've baked in this angry, rage-inducing media culture.

00:27:20.300 And now we don't know how to get out of it, right?

00:27:22.240 The old publishers are dying.

00:27:24.200 They're now facing a huge distribution problem because social media is discouraging them.

00:27:29.260 They're having a hard time recruiting subscribers.

00:27:31.680 They're losing their print subscribers, so on and so forth.

00:27:34.420 And C18 is making everything so much worse.

00:27:36.160 Meanwhile, alternative media outlets like yours, like The National Observer, like The Rebel, you name it, are speaking to their own crowd.

00:27:45.020 And no one's quite sure how to do that cross-cutting conversation like we used to have.

00:27:50.080 No one's quite sure how to get someone to buy a copy of The New York Times and then go listen to Rush Limbaugh in their car.

00:27:55.520 We are at a real problematic point right now.

00:27:58.680 And it's only going to be through people kind of waking up to this and going, oh, God, you're right.

00:28:04.020 I have to find something to listen to that isn't what I always listen to.

00:28:08.140 And that's going to be part of the solution.

00:28:10.780 But it's going to be a tough slog for the next little while.

00:28:14.820 And it is interesting because I like, in theory, what you're saying that we're not as inherently tribal on these things.

00:28:21.720 I'm a bit skeptical.

00:28:23.080 I mean, I remember when you had me on your podcast, you were very kind enough to withstand the deluge of, oh, how are you dignifying this guy?

00:28:31.020 Why are you having him on?

00:28:31.800 And I'm sure my commenters may return the favor.

00:28:34.180 But, I mean, even last week, I had a self-professed Marxist on the show named Stuart Parker.

00:28:38.800 And we had a nice chat.

00:28:40.260 And he's, you know, all over the leftist causes on everything except one, which is the transgender issue.

00:28:45.660 And I even, with that, had people that were commenting, being like, I won't hear anything this Marxist has to say because there is sort of that natural instinct of I just want to hive off these perspectives.

00:28:56.900 Now, I think that's probably a minority.

00:28:59.180 I think, you know, people seem to be enjoying so far the conversation you and I are having.

00:29:04.240 I'm glad we're having it.

00:29:05.560 And I don't know if that's enough to right this ship because there is a psychological component to this.

00:29:13.500 And that's the worst thing is that you're talking about things that have very real effects on people's brains in what they choose to click on and what they choose to engage with.

00:29:22.720 And I don't know.

00:29:23.940 And it's bigger than your report here.

00:29:26.100 But I don't know what you need to unwire that.

00:29:28.980 No, I don't 100% know either.

00:29:30.660 I mean, I think step one is really measuring it and auditing it, which was the point of this report.

00:29:35.380 We really don't get into solutions, really.

00:29:37.680 Part of the point of this report is to grab it, look at it, recognize it, how it's happening in your life, maybe see some of it in some of your own behavior and to start thinking about it and then be receptive to solutions or be thoughtful about them.

00:29:51.180 You know, personally, I have a few ideas, right?

00:29:53.640 Like I think political party financing is part of the problem.

00:29:57.120 The constant demand that parties raise huge amounts of money is part of what's making us crazy.

00:30:02.280 I heard conservative MPs who were shocked to hear the words come out of their mouth, who said, I think it's time to bring back the per vote subsidy, right?

00:30:10.160 You know, we can't keep shaking down all of our supporters for money constantly in order to fight elections.

00:30:16.160 Ditto.

00:30:16.720 I heard those conservative MPs say, you know, God, it might be time for proportional representation.

00:30:21.680 You know, first past the post is, you know, Justin Trudeau has mastered first past the post.

00:30:26.940 He has perfected the way in which to squeeze the NDP, stoke up fears about the conservatives and kind of balance in the middle, right?

00:30:33.980 Like he's really good at it.

00:30:36.100 Proportional representation, you know, alleviating some of that pressure on the conservatives from the right by letting Maxime Bernier win like seven seats or whatever.

00:30:42.720 You know, letting the NDP kind of a little more breathing room on the left.

00:30:45.880 All of that might actually help reinvigorate our democracy to some degree.

00:30:49.620 But those aren't solutions either.

00:30:51.100 I mean, those won't fix polarization overnight.

00:30:53.740 It's also going to require a rebuilding of state capacity, which is bigger than any of us can kind of do individually.

00:31:00.160 We need to be able to get, you know, the homelessness problem under control.

00:31:03.960 We need to be able to build housing again.

00:31:05.380 We need to be able to build new transit to get stuff done again.

00:31:08.840 And that is a much deeper problem than kind of anyone policy can solve.

00:31:14.360 And I think once you see things kind of rebounding properly, people will get less anxious and more inclined to having kind of real conversations with people.

00:31:21.840 So you're totally right.

00:31:22.680 I mean, this is a much, much bigger problem.

00:31:25.540 But, you know, I think it's also going to be a feature of the Internet thing, right?

00:31:31.320 Like where we're at right now, we don't have a platform for conversations anymore.

00:31:36.520 Twitter has, not that it was great before.

00:31:39.320 Frankly, I think it's even worse now.

00:31:40.760 And people decamping to their various kind of preferred social media platforms is not really enabling us a space to sit in the middle and talk anymore.

00:31:49.500 So I don't know where that is.

00:31:51.500 We're going to have to figure it out because, you know, unless we can actually talk to each other again, get used to hearing people who disagree with kind of actually explain themselves in real terms.

00:32:03.120 I think it's going to be really important and really necessary going forward.

00:32:07.480 Yeah.

00:32:08.020 And just on that, I mean, your report identifies how deplatforming, which is often, in my experience, been viewed as a predominantly left wing phenomenon that's used against right wingers, although I know that I'm simplifying it.

00:32:21.580 But how deplatforming actually drives this further and actually forces people into their own little echo chambers.

00:32:29.200 And I was actually, just on a related note, kind of encouraged that some of the people you spoke to had a very, I would say, enlightened view of cancel culture that isn't what I expected from the under 35s.

00:32:40.940 They were almost universally, it seemed like, from what you included, against it.

00:32:45.440 Yeah.

00:32:46.000 I mean, part of the report, we had a particular focus on the experiences of youth.

00:32:50.380 We did some polling, particularly amongst youth who don't normally respond to polling.

00:32:55.380 But we also had these kind of long form roundtables where the kind of focus groups where we talked to under 35 year olds about their experiences with polarization and politics more generally.

00:33:05.880 And we actually had no questions in there about cancel culture or deplatforming or anything because we really, really didn't.

00:33:11.000 We wanted to let the conversation drive itself, but also it really wasn't part of the study.

00:33:13.940 It was something all of them volunteered.

00:33:15.320 We heard it again and again and again.

00:33:16.680 And it was really interesting because, you know, I might disappoint some of your listeners.

00:33:21.940 It's not like there was some huge upswell of conservative sentiment amongst these youth.

00:33:26.860 A lot of them are progressives, right?

00:33:28.460 A lot of them are, you know, talking about homelessness as one of the biggest problems in this country.

00:33:32.560 Desperate need for affordable housing.

00:33:34.860 You know, racial justice as being one of the top priorities, indigenous reconciliation, all these things.

00:33:38.840 But what they told us was that the constant demands from their peer groups around kind of being ideologically perfect, around denouncing the right people, around never kind of questioning orthodoxy, was making them anxious and slightly crazy, right?

00:33:54.800 Like there was a feeling like cancel culture and deplatforming as a tactic had run contrary to the principles on which it was founded, right?

00:34:04.560 The hope of cancel culture and deplatforming was supposed to respond to inadequacies of the state and the media to deal with, you know, sexual predators and abusers and all this, you know, the Harvey Weinsteins of the world or the Jeffrey Epsteins or whatever.

00:34:19.380 But what they found was that it was increasingly targeting either, you know, middling celebrities or public figures or whoever for whom the punishment was much worse than the crime or in even worse cases, people in their community, right?

00:34:33.120 We always talk about cancel culture as being this kind of big national thing, but where it actually happens more often than not is in small communities.

00:34:39.700 One person says something slightly untoward, makes kind of an ignorant comment or gets accused of something and it spirals out of control and suddenly their lives are ruined.

00:34:49.780 And not only that, everybody else in the community is sort of pressured upon to stand up and denounce that figure or else be kind of labeled a traitor to the revolution to some degree, right?

00:34:59.680 So a lot of these people we spoke to basically said, I agree with the principles underpinning it.

00:35:05.800 I do want to call out, you know, guys who are sexually harassing people on the job or whatever, but I feel like we've wasted a lot of time and energy destroying people who didn't necessarily need to be destroyed and not, most importantly, giving them a path to sort of rehabilitation and for reform and apology and penance and reconciliation.

00:35:23.360 And I think that was really interesting. And I, you know, and I kind of extend this out in another part of the report to talk about de-platforming more broadly.

00:35:30.900 You know, when you take a class of people who agree with something that might be wrong or, you know, might be based on misinformation or might just be sort of contrary to where the conversation is, when you kick them off a platform, they're going to go somewhere else and they're going to keep having that conversation.

00:35:48.120 And in some cases that conversation might, might get much more intense. It might be much more driven by animosity. It might be angrier. And fundamentally it makes some of these topics taboo. If they're really wrong, well, let's, let's hash it out.

00:36:01.460 It's not to say that we have to, you know, put every January six participants on the debate stage so they can air their views, but it does sort of mean that you kind of have to let them talk. There's, there's no benefit we get really from, from sort of kicking people out of the public square and hoping that it's kind of shut up about it. It just doesn't work that way.

00:36:21.660 Well, look, it's a fascinating report. And I think that, you know, why can't we all get along might be a bit too ambitious and trite, but why can't we all have it out and talk about it as adults? I think should certainly be the goal here. The report, which has been commissioned for by the Public Policy Forum comes out tomorrow. You can read it. It's called Far and Widening the Rise of Polarization in Canada, written by freelance journalist, Justin Ling. Justin, this was an absolute delight. Thanks so much for coming on today. Thanks for having me.

00:36:51.360 Thanks for listening to the Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - August 02, 2023

Why are Canadians so polarized？ (feat. Justin Ling)

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