00:01:47.080I mean, going into this report, the idea was not to come up with any big solutions.
00:01:51.020It was not to sort of assign blame necessarily.
00:01:54.660It really was supposed to be a diagnostic, right?
00:01:56.980Like 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.
00:02:05.600Or, 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?
00:02:11.680So from the outset, definitions were really hard.
00:02:14.880So much of the academic literature is about the U.S.
00:02:18.700And in the U.S., it's really easy to measure, right?
00:02:21.740Because you ask people, how do you feel about Donald Trump?
00:02:30.160All 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.
00:02:44.140You know, you actually see Republicans shift significantly when Donald Trump pronounces against a certain issue.
00:02:48.920So on all of those fronts, it's really easy to measure south of the border.
00:02:52.780Here, we don't really have that, right?
00:02:54.640We have that liberal consensus, broadly speaking, on abortion access, on LGBTQ rights, so on and so forth.
00:03:00.940Even if there's a divide, the divide stays pretty static, right?
00:03:04.940So we kind of work to look at a whole bunch of other metrics.
00:03:08.180There's a little bit of academic research.
00:03:10.740Suffice it to say, we are seeing the demonization of political opponents, the appeals to identity over policy or issues.
00:03:19.220We're seeing starker divides when it comes to the actual political sphere.
00:03:25.340We're seeing an inability to talk to each other on major issues.
00:03:28.840And 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.
00:03:45.800So 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.
00:03:53.360And by all the polling data we have, Canadians tend to agree.
00:03:56.260One 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.
00:04:10.960And 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.
00:04:24.260But it actually shows that people do have, whether intentionally or not, kind of a caricaturish version of what the other political group is.
00:04:35.800And so this research comes from Eric Merkley at the University of Toronto.
00:04:39.140He's actually used, there's these surveys that get done, they're kind of like exit polls, after every major federal election.
00:04:44.960It's probably the best trove of data we have about how Canadians feel about the political scene.
00:04:50.900And he's used that data to actually chart the ways in which Canadians are growing increasingly disaffected and alienated towards our political parties.
00:04:59.520And 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.
00:05:11.900Partisans 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.
00:05:26.600And, 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?
00:05:37.780Inside 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?
00:05:49.140The NDP had a pro-gun caucus inside of their party.
00:05:53.500And what that meant was that you could see within your own party elements of your opponents.
00:05:58.840It was a lot easier for Democrats to identify with conservatives because they also had a rural base, right?
00:06:04.000They also had rural voters, hunters and fishers and so on.
00:06:07.500So you could look across the aisle and say, okay, I might not agree with them on things.
00:06:10.980I 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.
00:06:23.720So the decline of that, the kind of collapsing in of our political parties has made this much worse.
00:06:32.060We no longer really have diversity in our parties.
00:06:35.080In fact, identifying with the party across the way is seen as a problem that needs to be kind of rooted out of your party.
00:06:42.920There'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.
00:06:49.820There's no ideological diversity in the Liberal Party.
00:06:51.980There's no real ideological diversity in the NDP.
00:06:55.240And 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.
00:07:07.620And all of this makes any form of cooperation, collaboration, conversation really difficult.
00:07:14.120I agree with what you've just identified there, but there's a contradictory problem I find that also exists,
00:07:19.920which is that you have people on the left and the right that increasingly don't even see distinctions between political parties anymore.
00:07:26.800And I think the pandemic was an example of that.
00:07:29.720I mean, you often hear in the U.S. the term brought up the uniparty, which is the idea that, you know,
00:07:34.340the Democrats and the Republicans are all part of one uniparty.
00:07:37.360And I know that we'll get into, you know, some of the conspiratorial stuff that I know you write a lot about.
00:07:42.200But 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,
00:07:49.480there was actually very little tolerance for distinctions between political parties in the early stage.
00:07:55.500I 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.
00:08:01.380And at that point, it was like opposition, political opposition was stigmatized.
00:08:05.980And you had MPs that even said that, that they were worried of criticizing the government because they didn't want it to feed into,
00:08:12.400you know, something that was adverse to public health measures.
00:08:16.500Yeah. I even include a little bit from a study that was done in Quebec in the early version,
00:08:21.380or 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
00:08:32.160and the media, they extend this so far as to talk about the media as well.
00:08:35.260The lack of criticism of government policies actually fomented distrust amongst many people who were a little skeptical to begin with.
00:08:42.180And then when sort of partisanship returned, it made everything all that much more worse.
00:08:48.500So 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.
00:08:57.020The reality is polarization is happening in different directions at the same time.
00:09:00.880Partisans are one part of the problem.
00:09:03.900People who are kind of outside, maybe alienated from the political game are another part of the problem.
00:09:10.920And when I say problem, I don't mean they are the problem themselves,
00:09:13.280but all these things are contributing to the problem of polarization,
00:09:15.920as are the kind of broad middle of the country who are frankly, I think, a little fed up with the entire process
00:09:24.060and who, to be honest with you, often kind of buy into the idea of the wedges being used in the political sphere.
00:09:33.520And in the report, I certainly chide Justin Trudeau for weaponizing some of those wedges
00:09:38.320as I chide Pierre Poglia for weaponizing wedges in the opposite direction.
00:09:42.700So you're totally right that a perceived or real lack of debate on some of these issues also contributes to this problem.
00:09:52.340And there is a significant class of people who have unplugged from politics in this country
00:09:57.660or who have opted for, frankly, conspiracy theories and misinformation
00:10:01.180to sort of explain this apparent consensus that's happening in our political realm.
00:10:06.880Yeah, and you have a line that I'll quote here where you're talking about the two groups on COVID,
00:10:12.300the COVID narrative, if I can use that in a neutral way here, the trusting and the skeptical.
00:11:59.780Because the thing is, you know, some people were right to be frustrated.
00:12:04.160But I will also say the sort of in-group, out-group thing, you know, the constant need to be with your people, right?
00:12:10.900The people who, let's say, agreed with the convoy or the people who were just angry and furious and, you know,
00:12:16.460wanted 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?
00:12:27.780Like, I always tried to have this conversation with people, whether it was around the Freedom Convoy or whatever.
00:12:36.420Nothing made me angrier through the pandemic than being told by my government that I have to go inside at 8 p.m. every night.
00:12:42.020Like, that made me crazy, made all my friends crazy, made a whole bunch of liberals and progressives and lefties and conservatives and libertarians.
00:12:48.440It made everyone in this province crazy.
00:12:50.300And there was not enough debate about it in the media.
00:12:52.500And sometimes it felt like there was a conspiracy of silence in the media to criticize the total lack of scientific evidence behind that policy.
00:13:00.620And I know when I went to Ottawa to cover the Freedom Convoy, a ton of Quebecers were there protesting the same thing.
00:13:05.840Unfortunately, the thing that ultimately, you know, set the dividing line between us was a feeling, was feelings around the vaccine.
00:13:17.040How 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?
00:13:24.600The fact is, we can't have a real conversation about vaccines.
00:13:27.600There is just too much pollution in the space.
00:13:29.820There's too much misinformation out there.
00:13:31.460I know people might disagree with me, and that's fine.
00:13:35.600Let's focus on the things where at least we can have a reasonable, rational conversation about these policies.
00:13:41.100And I think that's fundamentally the path forward here.
00:13:43.300It'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.
00:13:52.960You 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,
00:14:04.520you 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.
00:14:15.960Because I think this pulling away over these, frankly, now relatively insignificant matters of disagreement is a real problem.
00:14:24.400The convoy has been a year in the rearview mirror.
00:14:27.500Let's stop letting that dictate what news media we listen to or which politicians we trust or don't trust.
00:14:34.380It's going to require a bit of a wiping of the slate clean and trying to kind of rebuild this all over again.
00:14:40.020Because 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.
00:14:49.680And we're going to continue having conversations that have nothing to do with each other.
00:14:52.860And we're going to continue seeing the other side as foreign and alien and different and hostile.
00:14:58.620And it's only through having those conversations that we're going to learn they're not that different.
00:15:02.720They're a lot like us and they agree on many of the important things.
00:15:05.940But I think what you've said there contributes in, not in an intentional way, but contributes here to the problem.
00:15:12.640Because 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.
00:15:22.980Because for them, and you can understand it, I mean, you had people that lost their decades-long careers out of this.
00:15:28.300People that could not spend time with dying family members.
00:15:31.440And I know you know this, and I know you're critical of a lot of the measures, as you just indicated there.
00:15:37.860But the thing is that there's a lot of resistance to this idea of just moving on from one particular group.
00:15:44.720So here's an example of a divide where, you know, Justin Ling says, listen, we can all just agree this was an aberration.
00:15:57.600I want some form of recompense for this.
00:16:00.980How do you square that divide when people may be not able to agree on the severity of what happened?
00:16:07.940I mean, I think that's what a public inquiry gets you.
00:16:10.580I 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.
00:16:17.400It's time the government, the provinces, whoever, get together and have a real conversation about the pandemic.
00:16:23.040And whether or not the measures we put in place were effective or were not effective, I tend to think...
00:16:26.640So you don't think we need to just sort of close the book and not look at it?
00:16:29.440No, no, like I said, I think I put it right there in the report.
00:16:32.480One of the solutions about going forward has to be a public inquiry, right?
00:16:35.180Like 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.
00:16:43.300That has to be the step we do before we move forward.
00:16:45.700That being said, you know, part of living in a democratic society is saying, yeah, I was really unhappy the way this policy affected me.
00:16:52.780I was really unhappy the way in which this government regulation impacted my life, my livelihood or whatever.
00:16:58.680But then going, you know, I have to compromise.
00:17:01.000I have to let stuff go at some time at some points.
00:17:03.280And I appreciate there's still some raw emotions there and I appreciate there's still some people who, you know, do want that recompense.
00:17:15.320We've got to figure out a way to kind of get back to working together.
00:17:18.260Because 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.
00:17:36.540And some of those problems became very clear during the pandemic.
00:17:40.900Some of those problems, I think, fed into a lot of the mental health challenges that people experienced during the pandemic.
00:17:46.100It fed into a lot of the economic problems we faced during the pandemic.
00:17:49.380And 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.
00:18:03.820One 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.
00:18:13.880And that's the direct quote there, a moral imperative to push back against some of the anti-vaccine rhetoric.
00:18:20.540And 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.
00:18:35.060Now, 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.
00:18:50.100People who were unvaccinated were a statistical minority.
00:18:53.100And it seemed like a relatively low stakes game to start winning votes from the 80% at the expense of the 20%.
00:19:00.860And I think the trucker mandate was a great example of that.
00:19:10.700So 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.
00:19:19.020Was 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?
00:19:30.000So, okay, so let me say, I generally agree.
00:19:33.860At 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.
00:19:44.040I don't know how you can come to any other conclusion.
00:19:46.140You 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.
00:19:57.780Put political differences aside and go get this vaccine that all available evidence says is safe.
00:20:03.640And 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.
00:20:13.920And 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.
00:20:20.080And I think that was really deplorable.
00:20:21.520And 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.
00:20:30.600And I don't think it was only the benefit of hindsight that I think I've really appreciated just how terrible they were.
00:20:36.120I 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.
00:20:51.680Maybe you can even say in response to what Trudeau did.
00:20:54.280I don't think there's anyone with totally clean hands here in this whole thing.
00:20:57.860But Justin Trudeau, as the prime minister, had a moral obligation to not play this game.
00:21:03.440He probably had a moral obligation not to call an election in the midst of the pandemic and use that pandemic as a political wedge.
00:21:10.080I don't think we can stress that enough.
00:21:13.700When 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.
00:21:31.260And 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.
00:21:43.340I think we know emphatically, even if their intentions were pure, that doesn't work.
00:21:49.780That actually pushes people in the opposite direction.
00:21:52.200You 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?
00:22:06.420There'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.
00:22:15.520Like, these things we know are not true.
00:22:17.360I don't know what you do with those people.
00:22:18.920But there's a ton of people out there who were ranged from skeptical to hostile.
00:22:24.320Maybe some of them could have been convinced.
00:22:26.160Maybe some of them would never be convinced.
00:22:27.900Regardless, 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.
00:22:38.560And 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.
00:22:48.200And 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.
00:23:04.580And 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.
00:23:10.180I want you to do what I do and get news from a variety of places.
00:23:13.500But we are very siloed, and it's actually fascinating to me.
00:23:17.920You know, I once did a little experiment where I logged into a friend's Facebook account who wasn't political.
00:23:25.820And 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.
00:23:35.280And 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.
00:23:45.640And I'm curious if you think people are choosing these.
00:23:50.680You know, people are saying, I am self-selecting out of the world, and I want my little slice of it.
00:23:56.160Do you think people are ending up in this and don't even know it?
00:23:59.200This is a terrible question because I've been writing my newsletter for tomorrow for the launch of the report on exactly this topic.
00:24:06.720And so I have, you know, 3,000 words in my head that I'm trying not to dispute you.
00:24:12.540The short answer is, yes, people chose it, but they were also pushed into it.
00:24:16.960The 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.
00:24:26.320We're actually very much more complicated creatures.
00:24:29.420We 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.
00:24:37.180And this has been the history of people since the dawn of time.
00:24:39.900I mean, you know, I hosted a podcast about right-wing radio and found myself not being 100% against all of it, right?
00:24:46.980Like, you know, I have to confess, Rush Limbaugh is really fun to listen to.
00:24:51.500And 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.
00:24:59.680We are naturally predisposed to being curious, weird creatures who want to hear the other side.
00:25:06.040Now, 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?
00:25:15.100Facebook consistently tried to give us information that it thought we wanted, information that we agreed with, information that people like us liked.
00:25:23.480And 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.
00:25:32.740The problem is Facebook earned more money and got more engagement by continuing to do it, in some cases by making us angry.
00:25:38.880It 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.
00:25:52.220It convinced political parties and news outlets to make their headlines angrier.
00:25:56.760You 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.
00:26:07.520At 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?
00:26:16.100So Facebook directly contributed to the mainstream press, by the way.
00:26:20.240This is not even the alternative press.
00:26:21.560This is the major news outlets, to them becoming angrier and more oppositional, right?
00:26:26.760So that led to a catalyst of a whole bunch of startups replicating that emotion, right?
00:26:32.920That's where you get a lot of the bright parts.
00:26:35.640It's where you get the press progresses and the Daily Kos and these other outlets that tend to use this high emotion language.
00:26:43.240You know, watch Joe Biden destroy Bernie Sanders.
00:26:48.040You know, this is where you get that language from.
00:26:50.440And 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?
00:28:23.080I 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?
00:28:40.260And he's, you know, all over the leftist causes on everything except one, which is the transgender issue.
00:28:45.660And 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.
00:28:56.900Now, I think that's probably a minority.
00:28:59.180I think, you know, people seem to be enjoying so far the conversation you and I are having.
00:29:05.560And I don't know if that's enough to right this ship because there is a psychological component to this.
00:29:13.500And 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.
00:29:30.660I mean, I think step one is really measuring it and auditing it, which was the point of this report.
00:29:35.380We really don't get into solutions, really.
00:29:37.680Part 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.
00:29:51.180You know, personally, I have a few ideas, right?
00:29:53.640Like I think political party financing is part of the problem.
00:29:57.120The constant demand that parties raise huge amounts of money is part of what's making us crazy.
00:30:02.280I 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?
00:30:10.160You know, we can't keep shaking down all of our supporters for money constantly in order to fight elections.
00:30:36.100Proportional representation, you know, alleviating some of that pressure on the conservatives from the right by letting Maxime Bernier win like seven seats or whatever.
00:30:42.720You know, letting the NDP kind of a little more breathing room on the left.
00:30:45.880All of that might actually help reinvigorate our democracy to some degree.
00:30:51.100I mean, those won't fix polarization overnight.
00:30:53.740It's also going to require a rebuilding of state capacity, which is bigger than any of us can kind of do individually.
00:31:00.160We need to be able to get, you know, the homelessness problem under control.
00:31:03.960We need to be able to build housing again.
00:31:05.380We need to be able to build new transit to get stuff done again.
00:31:08.840And that is a much deeper problem than kind of anyone policy can solve.
00:31:14.360And 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.
00:31:40.760And 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.
00:31:51.500We'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.
00:32:03.120I think it's going to be really important and really necessary going forward.
00:32:08.020And 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.
00:32:21.580But how deplatforming actually drives this further and actually forces people into their own little echo chambers.
00:32:29.200And 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.
00:32:40.940They were almost universally, it seemed like, from what you included, against it.
00:32:46.000I mean, part of the report, we had a particular focus on the experiences of youth.
00:32:50.380We did some polling, particularly amongst youth who don't normally respond to polling.
00:32:55.380But 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.
00:33:05.880And we actually had no questions in there about cancel culture or deplatforming or anything because we really, really didn't.
00:33:11.000We wanted to let the conversation drive itself, but also it really wasn't part of the study.
00:33:13.940It was something all of them volunteered.
00:33:15.320We heard it again and again and again.
00:33:16.680And it was really interesting because, you know, I might disappoint some of your listeners.
00:33:21.940It's not like there was some huge upswell of conservative sentiment amongst these youth.
00:33:26.860A lot of them are progressives, right?
00:33:28.460A lot of them are, you know, talking about homelessness as one of the biggest problems in this country.
00:33:32.560Desperate need for affordable housing.
00:33:34.860You know, racial justice as being one of the top priorities, indigenous reconciliation, all these things.
00:33:38.840But 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?
00:33:54.800Like there was a feeling like cancel culture and deplatforming as a tactic had run contrary to the principles on which it was founded, right?
00:34:04.560The 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.
00:34:19.380But 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?
00:34:33.120We 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.
00:34:39.700One 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.
00:34:49.780And 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?
00:34:59.680So a lot of these people we spoke to basically said, I agree with the principles underpinning it.
00:35:05.800I 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.
00:35:23.360And 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.
00:35:30.900You 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.
00:35:48.120And 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.
00:36:01.460It'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.
00:36:21.660Well, 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.
00:36:51.360Thanks for listening to the Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.