Juno News - Youth increasingly supportive of SOCIALISM？

00:00:00.000 Hi, Juno News. Alexander Brown here back for another episode, host of Not Sorry. I'm a writer,

00:00:07.780 communicator, campaigner, and director of the National Citizens Coalition. And we got a good

00:00:12.220 one for you today, an exclusive report. For all the gains being made in Canada when it comes to

00:00:17.640 young conservatism, a record voter turnout, and even a win for the federal conservatives in the

00:00:22.240 student vote portion of April's election, there remains the allure of socialism, that tired

00:00:27.720 political philosophy that seeks to prey on the naivete of youth, and where those who gain the

00:00:33.560 power to redistribute, you know, have never ever practiced what they preach, and they've never

00:00:38.180 shared in the misery they dish out to others. Socialism, it's the gateway to communism. And

00:00:44.600 in an exclusive policy brief being debuted here today, think tank and advocacy group Second Street,

00:00:50.240 also known for their terrific work on the healthcare file, have found that a significant number of

00:00:54.760 students and youth continue to support socialism. Throughout the survey, attitudes were more

00:00:59.860 negative than positive towards socialism. However, there was still a sizable minority in favor of it,

00:01:05.620 and among university students, a slim majority in favor of it. Those in favor of socialism often cite

00:01:13.240 myths about the ideology, such as the claim that Scandinavian countries are socialist when in fact the

00:01:19.640 Nordic countries feature market-based economies. Other respondents voiced outrageous support for

00:01:27.020 brutal regimes like Cuba, China, and the USSR. These are trend lines to watch, and they're perhaps

00:01:32.820 unsurprising in an era of radicalizing forces on social media and the undeniable lack of upward social

00:01:39.020 mobility being presented to our young people. In some ways, it's no surprise they've leaned either

00:01:44.500 towards conservative reform or an adjacency to communism because Canada's status quo isn't

00:01:50.320 working. Let's dive into this important report from Second Street with Communications Director,

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00:02:37.200 Dom Lucek joins us. He's the Communications Director for Second Street. Dom, thanks for being here.

00:02:41.540 Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Alex. It's a pleasure.

00:02:44.360 Yeah, Dom, this is a robust report. I just spent an hour with it. I wish I had longer because it's

00:02:49.900 pretty fascinating. Second Street has found that a significant number of student and youth continue

00:02:54.820 to support socialism. How significant a number is that? And tell us a little bit about the methodology

00:03:00.160 to uncover it.

00:03:01.860 Yeah, yeah, for sure. So what we did is, you know, you hear all these stories of people who either have

00:03:08.020 friends on campus or they are students themselves, and they say, oh, you know, there's socialism

00:03:12.660 everywhere. And, you know, we hadn't really found any research that had really, you know,

00:03:18.120 sought to put a number to this, right? So basically what I did is I just, I put a survey,

00:03:22.820 I put a survey together with a few questions, and I just advertised it to young folks on social

00:03:30.060 media, Instagram, Facebook. And you can advertise based on people's interests and like their status

00:03:37.500 as a university student and that sort of thing. So kind of the goal was to get university students,

00:03:42.140 and we also got a fair number of young folks in the survey as well. The sample size is a little

00:03:47.580 small, about 350 participants, but still it's an interesting cross section. And so what we're

00:03:54.600 seeing is, you know, I'm not sure whether I was surprised that the numbers weren't higher. Maybe it's

00:04:01.560 just my perspective on what universities seem to be like. But as far as young university students,

00:04:08.260 we had about half of young university students give a positive answer to the question, what does

00:04:14.620 socialism mean to you? That's ages 18 to 24. As far as just university students in general,

00:04:24.560 it was about 53% who gave kind of a positive response about socialism. So, you know, again,

00:04:30.480 that is a little over half, which probably should be concerning considering, you know, just how dangerous

00:04:36.240 of an ideology that socialism is. But to me, just kind of as the numbers came in, I expected it to

00:04:42.300 be a lot higher personally. Maybe I'm just a pessimist. Yeah, well, I just a realist, because

00:04:47.720 this obviously points to campus indoctrination of some kind. I was speaking at UBC recently, and

00:04:54.120 this was a robust, it's also robust, the size of this campus conservative club. And it was a packed

00:05:02.100 room. And when I went to university a million years ago, they were not packed rooms. There was

00:05:06.000 six of us in a, in a lousy sports bar in Halifax. And so, but they'd come up to you and tell you that

00:05:12.360 it's, you know, they're still, they still kind of keep to themselves in lecture halls, and they're

00:05:16.480 still walking on eggshells, and they still have to, to pass the Palestinian protests to go to the

00:05:22.120 mess hall. And so there's obviously an element there, like what, what factors should we attribute

00:05:27.860 to this, this kind of, from looking at the data, you see the, the 53% positive with socialism,

00:05:33.460 but then, you know, non-students, it's lower. So how might common sense Canadians potentially

00:05:40.120 collaborate with these conservative groups? Or how do you get these kids in the tent to counter

00:05:45.700 academic biases?

00:05:48.100 Yeah, it's a good question. I think one of the things that you can really do is just sort of

00:05:52.200 spread the kind of reality of what socialism is, and what socialism looks like. I think,

00:05:59.080 thankfully, a lot of people are sort of becoming aware of that, thanks to recent events in Venezuela.

00:06:05.160 You know, there's a lot of scrutiny on what that regime has been like. And, you know, this report

00:06:09.920 was written before those, those events happened with Maduro being deposed. And we do examine, you

00:06:17.280 know, in the introduction section, just a number of regimes and what socialism means, you know,

00:06:23.840 in Venezuela, there have been reports of people eating raw rats, because they can't get food.

00:06:31.760 Think about that, eating raw rats, right? And so this is, this is not an uncommon thing to see

00:06:38.400 in socialist countries. I mean, that's a very, you know, visceral example, but hunger is very common.

00:06:44.240 You know, authoritarian regimes where people are thrown in prison for speaking their mind,

00:06:49.440 or even just for, not even for doing anything that one would think would be contradictory to the

00:06:54.560 regime. You know, in Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, which is a recount of the Russian

00:07:01.360 prison camps, there are so many stories in there. But one that always jumped out at me

00:07:05.520 is there was a fellow who, he was working in his shop, and he needed some paper. He found a newspaper

00:07:10.800 with, you know, to just scribble a note down on. And it so happened, there was a photo of,

00:07:15.200 I forget if it was Lenin or Stalin on the newspaper, he did 10 years in a prison camp for that.

00:07:21.760 So yeah, I think really just just kind of showing the reality of what these regimes are like,

00:07:26.960 can go towards changing minds. And of course, there are going to be people who are just so

00:07:31.840 in the weeds with this, that no matter what you tell them, they won't change their minds. You know,

00:07:37.040 we shared a lot of, a lot of examples of responses to this survey, where, you know, we asked,

00:07:43.280 what does socialism mean? And people said, you know, a utopia, future hope, the inevitable future,

00:07:49.040 the hopeful triumph at the end of centuries of class struggle, and kind of this very airy language

00:07:55.440 that, again, it doesn't reflect any kind of reality of what socialism actually is philosophically, or

00:08:00.640 what it has worked out like in practice.

00:08:02.560 Speaker 2 No, that just sounds to me a lot like that kind of white liberal progressive gobbledygook,

00:08:08.160 and then the reflexive, well, we've never tried real socialism, or we've never tried real communism.

00:08:13.920 It's like, no, it's, and it's well highlighted in this report. It's like, there's like 100 million

00:08:19.440 deaths on the record here. Like, what are we, you know, what are we doing? You know, we see these

00:08:24.560 results and this useful data set. And, and yet the federal conservatives just won the student vote

00:08:29.760 in last April's election for the first time in the modern era. Polls continue to track well for 18 to

00:08:35.840 55 being seemingly soundly conservative. What can we make of this, this split here between those

00:08:42.080 numbers and and your numbers? Is that incongruous with Second Street's findings? Or is there a case of

00:08:48.400 useful data inside of data? Like by drilling down, can we see that the youth tend to split to the polls

00:08:54.080 because the status quo isn't working for them? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean,

00:08:59.040 there's so many variables here. And again, it is also worth keeping in mind that this is a decently

00:09:03.360 small sample size of data that we have. You know, the first thing that jumps to my mind is maybe

00:09:08.320 it's a sign of just more polarization that there are, you know, the people are just kind of splitting

00:09:15.840 it and getting further and further into their own camps. That could be an explanation for it.

00:09:19.680 Yeah. I think also, you know, it is just important to note that I think you would also have to look

00:09:27.200 at kind of voter turnout based on age would be a variable that would count. So I don't think that

00:09:33.840 it's contradictory. And I think that you can still look and see that, you know, also it's worth noting

00:09:40.480 not every young person goes to university, right? There are people who right out of high school,

00:09:45.840 they open up a business or they go to a trade school, whatever it may be, right?

00:09:51.360 Sounds more valuable at this point, as far as I'm concerned. I don't think my BA in poli

00:09:55.680 sci ended up being worth the paper it's printed on. Yeah, I dropped out in my second year and went

00:10:00.880 to a trade school. You know, and you're a success because of it. I'm in spite of my degree. So, Dom,

00:10:10.000 tell us more about what you think social media, like the role social media plays in this. The legacy

00:10:14.640 media loves to harp on sort of far right influences online. Our algorithms can, you know, have some

00:10:20.800 pretty funny stuff on there, but also some pretty gnarly stuff. What makes you maybe worry about the

00:10:26.880 teens or 20 somethings who are seeing, you know, far left tick tock or Instagrams? And I think of

00:10:33.360 somebody like a Hassan Piker who just seemingly stands for, for the world's great dictators and it's

00:10:40.080 become like completely normalized. Like what's the sort of tick tock or Instagram factor that could

00:10:45.200 be a play here? Yeah, it's, it's a good question, Alex. And I do think it is, it is worrisome because

00:10:50.800 you see, and to be fair, it is not just young people. I think everyone to a degree gets kind of

00:10:55.520 siloed within their, their interests on social media. But you know, there are kind of spaces for

00:11:01.840 these really extreme conversations to kind of exist without scrutiny, right? Because of the way the

00:11:08.720 algorithms work, you and I, if we go on our X or our Instagram pages, we're not getting videos

00:11:17.200 directly from people. Like, as you mentioned, Hassan Piker, you know, folks who are just very,

00:11:21.680 very in favor of socialism. And in that guy's case, you know, violently enforcing it. You know,

00:11:28.320 I think, yeah, it really just allows this kind of extremism to kind of compound and grow upon itself.

00:11:36.160 I mean, if you look at, you know, another recent example, when Charlie Kirk was murdered,

00:11:41.360 if you look at the conversation around that, right, there were, you know, pretty well defined,

00:11:46.160 there were, there were a couple of camps, there were people who, whether or not they agree with him,

00:11:49.920 were, you know, very shocked at this, this tragedy, and were, you know, sending condolences to his

00:11:55.200 family and friends and all that. And then you had, you know, very, very extreme folks who,

00:12:00.880 who were, you know, congratulating the murderer and saying, great, good job, go get more of them.

00:12:07.600 And so you see stuff like this. And again, I do think it is just the nature of kind of being siloed

00:12:14.000 and not receiving any pushback when you have 1000s of people who will kind of back up everything that

00:12:20.880 you say. And no matter how extreme it is, and it just kind of grows and grows.

00:12:25.520 Yeah, no, on in the aftermath of the, you know, the horrible murder of Charlie Kirk,

00:12:32.000 it was like an ice cream social on blue sky, like these echo chambers, they didn't handle it. Well,

00:12:38.160 the left, the left certainly didn't handle it. Well, your report rightly emphasizes historical

00:12:43.520 atrocities and in socialist regimes through survivor anecdotes. I think there's a real role that these,

00:12:51.360 I've been thinking about this recently, and talked to some folks in politics where

00:12:55.600 I think that there's a role that historical societies and new communicators could play here,

00:12:59.520 where you perhaps, maybe you risk being cringe by trying to make like history cool. But you have

00:13:04.720 these, we have these low information influencers who provide lazy, you know, analyses of history's

00:13:10.000 greatest monsters. Could we not be sort of countering, like, I'm not a pro censorship type,

00:13:16.400 but like, could we not be maybe countering these efforts with, like, historical TikToks, Instagrams?

00:13:23.360 Should we not be going to these sort of new right communicators or, or, or influencers and maybe

00:13:30.400 trying to get them to tell Canadian stories, like pro social pro civilizational Canadian stories? We have

00:13:37.920 all these great historical organizations right now. And, and it strikes me that that would be like a good

00:13:42.160 use of their funding to like, go out and get influencers to, to tell positive stories about our

00:13:48.480 democracy and our values, instead of just more of the sort of deconstruction that that these young

00:13:54.720 people might be seeing online. Yeah, I think a group that does really great work on that is the

00:13:59.200 Aristotle Foundation. Yeah, run by my friend Mark Mielke, and my friend David Hunt works there as well.

00:14:05.600 Great folks who I think they do a lot of great work on that. Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right that showing kind of the,

00:14:11.040 the positive side of it, you know, kind of Western civilization, how did it begin, not even necessarily

00:14:16.080 just Canadian society, there are a lot of great stories there. But even, you know, going going

00:14:20.720 deeper to, you know, just just the West in general, Greek and Roman roots and all that sort of thing.

00:14:26.960 Those are really interesting stories to tell. And they do, you know, counter these kind of Marxist

00:14:32.000 narratives, which, you know, again, they're, they're in the, the, the scheme of world history,

00:14:38.240 they're relatively recent, right? You know, Marx was was alive in the 19th century. And, but but

00:14:45.280 yeah, as you know, I think you're right, that's an interesting way to counter it. I also do really

00:14:50.640 think, just kind of showing the visceral, kind of negative aspects of what these socialist regimes,

00:14:57.280 which did exist right there, and to this day, continue to exist, there are nowhere near as many

00:15:02.880 as there used to be. And we'll see how it shapes up with Venezuela moving forward. But Cuba, Vietnam,

00:15:09.840 Laos, some would say China, China is technically still a communist country, though, they have more

00:15:14.960 of a market focused economy these days, still very authoritarian, and, and a dictatorship for sure.

00:15:22.320 But yeah, like, you know, we've, we've done this series in the past called survivors of socialism,

00:15:26.880 where we've talked to people who have come to Canada, from socialist countries, you know, I,

00:15:32.960 one that always really stuck out in my mind was, I interviewed a woman in Vancouver, who had moved

00:15:38.400 from China, and she was from China, like, back when it was, you know, a much stricter communist,

00:15:45.680 socialist regime. And some of the stories she told me, you know, they would have maybe 500 grams of pork

00:15:54.000 in a year would be their their meat allowance. And it would be like this exciting special occasion to

00:15:59.600 get this tiny bit of pork, you know, stories of, of because of China's one child policy of police

00:16:06.880 officers, you know, seeing women who were pregnant on the street, just just abducting them and forcing

00:16:12.720 them to have abortions. And just, you know, some of the most horrific stuff you can hear that you can

00:16:17.600 possibly think of happening in, you know, in human society. So it's, I think, Alex, that you're right,

00:16:25.440 you know, showing the positive side of things is one part of the solution. And also just showing the

00:16:30.080 realities of what socialism looks like, or they kind of play together.

00:16:33.680 Yeah, one thing I've been, I've been somewhat heartened by, and maybe it's just from seeing my own

00:16:38.240 echo chamber, is that in following the Venezuela Maduro raid capture, like, I see a lot of young

00:16:47.040 people online who think it was awesome. And like, maybe, you know, maybe there's some you never

00:16:51.520 know when, like, you know, trends or fervors are good or bad. But it's like, I know, like a lot of

00:16:56.560 based young men, quote unquote, who are like, wow, you can just do things like this. Like, that's, that,

00:17:01.280 that's so cool. And so it's, you want to have these kind of pro social positive balance moments with

00:17:08.080 young people to show them that it's like, no, like, you can depose, you know, scumbags, you can, you can,

00:17:14.880 this is a country whose refugee crisis extended all the way across the world. I mean, a native

00:17:20.640 poly of, you know, part of that, part of that crisis. What I like about this report is that

00:17:25.520 it does highlight the black book of communism's estimate, as we said before, nearly 100 million

00:17:30.720 deaths. It also correctly debunks the myth of Scandinavian countries as socialist, you know,

00:17:38.880 this is their pro market. And so how would you advise, you know, the folks in this audience to

00:17:44.400 respond to, to criticisms that downplay, you know, a figure like $100 million, or who, who go,

00:17:52.160 well, actually, look at European socialism, when they're really not, I mean, ensuring that young

00:17:56.000 Canadians can better understand that socialism has that deadly track record.

00:18:02.080 Yeah, it's, it's a good question. I think just starting with the question of,

00:18:05.520 you know, Nordic Scandinavian, quote unquote, socialism, that is a myth. I think really,

00:18:11.760 to debunk that first, you have to really nail down what socialism actually is. Now, a lot of the time

00:18:18.560 when you get into these conversations, people will just say, well, Canada is a socialist country,

00:18:23.040 because we have government programs. Yeah, you know, and that's, that's, that's not what socialism is.

00:18:28.960 If every time the government doing something was classified as socialism,

00:18:32.880 then every single society on earth for all of human history would have been socialist, right,

00:18:37.440 you wouldn't have needed Marx to come around and, and put a definition to it. So really,

00:18:42.080 if you look at what Marx and what Lenin said, socialism was a step on the road to communism,

00:18:49.040 one of the components of which was state control of enterprise. So no private business. So if you go by

00:18:56.480 that, as your, you know, as your indicator, you look at these Scandinavian countries, that's not

00:19:01.360 how it works. Yes, they have high taxes. Yes, they have very generous social safety nets that are

00:19:06.560 propped up because they have, you know, great resources there. But they are not socialist countries.

00:19:12.960 And actually, you know, there was a president of I believe it was Denmark, and I've got this quote in

00:19:18.960 the in the report, who just got fed up with this, I believe he was responding to Bernie Sanders talking

00:19:25.280 about the Scandinavian socialism. And he said, Denmark is not a socialist economy, we are a market economy.

00:19:33.600 So that that one's pretty easy to debunk if you just know those right quotes. And if you really

00:19:37.920 nail down the definition of what socialism is, as far as the deaths go, yeah, I mean, the Black Book of

00:19:43.360 Communism is a great source. It's also worth keeping in mind that that 100 million figure, that was in

00:19:49.120 the late 90s. So it's been, you know, a couple decades since then. And Venezuelist continued to exist,

00:19:56.720 China, Vietnam, Laos, so that that number has no doubt risen in that time. And yeah, I mean, it's it's just

00:20:03.840 so well documented in for each of these individual regimes, right? The Black Book, I think is great,

00:20:08.720 in that it, you know, combines all these different sources together. But, you know, you can find any

00:20:14.320 any number of historical, you know, historical records on the Soviet Union, on China, those are

00:20:21.360 really the two big ones, where there have just been 10s of millions of, of deaths at the hands of

00:20:26.480 socialism. But, you know, you can look throughout the rest of the former USSR, and some of those African

00:20:33.040 countries that had socialist periods, and so on and so forth. And yeah, I think you really do have

00:20:38.480 to point to the numbers, and then the anecdotes as well, the stories to really just make, put a

00:20:43.920 face to the numbers, because oftentimes, when you hear a big number, it just kind of goes over your

00:20:47.440 head. It's like saying there's a bajillion. Sometimes when you talk to someone, right?

00:20:54.000 What's that quote, where it's like, one death is a tragedy, 1000 is a statistic, that might be like

00:20:58.640 Stalin or Lenin. But it's like, yeah, the way you communicate things to people, if it's too big,

00:21:02.640 it's not relatable, necessarily. Yeah, I'm always, I'm always skeptical when I hear

00:21:08.080 quotes like that, whether I don't know for a fact, whether or not that was Stalin.

00:21:12.000 It's kind of like, you know, it's like every quote online, all an ass. Yeah.

00:21:17.200 Very Stalin. Yeah, I'm not sure. I check into that. But yeah, yeah,

00:21:20.400 I totally look it up. It's always just someone else's aphorism. Yeah. And that's great perspective

00:21:25.600 on the definition of socialism as well for the audience. Dom, to wrap, survey revealed both

00:21:31.600 hopeful and I think concerning statistics regarding young people's views on socialism,

00:21:36.240 because while some respondents may support the idea of, you know, modern political parties that

00:21:41.200 claim to be social democrats, they're clearly confused. They're often misinformed. I don't want,

00:21:47.760 and I think our audience wouldn't want either to just sort of sit around and wait for them to be

00:21:52.240 mugged by reality because it's often what it takes to draw you out of supporting socialism.

00:21:58.400 The report has tons of resources to better, you know, reform, to inform. Where can our audience read

00:22:04.320 it? Yeah, absolutely. You can just head to our website, secondstreet.org, go to the policy briefs

00:22:09.920 section and you'll see it there. Dom, terrific work and thanks for joining us.

00:22:14.160 Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure, Alex.

Juno News - January 09, 2026

Youth increasingly supportive of SOCIALISM？

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