In this episode, I sit down with the author of "Populism in Canada" to discuss his piece, "Canadians' aspiring populists aren't all that radical." We talk about what it means to be a "populist" in Canada, why we have a long history of populist movements, and why we are seeing a "bubbling of populism" in Western Canada.
00:00:00.000So I kind of framed it off to start a bit, you know, and you can see it in that title from your piece, you know, Canada's aspiring populists actually aren't all that radical.
00:00:09.040Maybe we'll just kind of start there. Where were you looking to go with that?
00:00:12.300Yeah, well, you know, it was interesting to see some of the responses to the piece.
00:00:17.020The point, I was kind of trying to make a broad kind of overarching point that we, you know, we certainly have people in this country that you could describe as populists.
00:00:24.680And, you know, I don't use the word. I think some people use it as a pejorative, you know, as an insult.
00:00:28.580Some people use it as a, you know, praise. Honestly, I'm just trying to use it as kind of a descriptive word, right?
00:00:33.980I think certain people have that kind of populist streak. Others don't.
00:00:37.760So the kind of broader point I was trying to make in the piece was that, you know, we do have these kind of populistic kind of figures, you know, right?
00:00:43.980Pierre Prolev is obviously kind of the biggest name on the radar right now for a variety of reasons.
00:00:49.400But the kind of the bigger point I was trying to make was that these populists are, they might be populists, but they're not actually, they're not actually that radical in kind of some, you know, grand significant way.
00:00:59.320They're not trying to kind of like, you know, radically overturn kind of Canada's existing constitutional order.
00:01:04.260And then the kind of the more kind of maybe abstract point I was trying to make is that even our populists are kind of, they're broadly speaking kind of liberals in the real grand sense of the term, right?
00:01:13.680That they're small out of liberals and that they're committed to things like freedom, freedom and equality.
00:01:18.260They have different, you know, different understandings of what that means from say kind of progressive or mainstream liberals do.
00:01:24.000But in some sense, there's, you know, there's differences there, but they're not quite as radical as our kind of certain kind of, I won't name names, but certain kind of legacy media, mainstream media voices want to suggest, right?
00:01:33.800That we have these real radical, dangerous populists in the midst.
00:01:36.660And I just, I just don't think that's the case.
00:01:38.340Yeah, well, and I mean, populism can be applied to a lot of movements or politicians historically that have risen and taken, I guess, a public sentiment and perhaps, you know, inspired it a bit and brought it about and led to often big change.
00:02:13.920I, you know, it's not just the NDP, right?
00:02:15.740The current conservative party, the CPC, also has roots in a kind of populist movement, right?
00:02:20.420The reform party, I think, is, it was fair to, I think, again, not an insult.
00:02:23.760I think it was fair to describe reform as a kind of Western populist movement.
00:02:26.780And it's also interesting as well that Canada, you know, Canada does have a long history of populist movements, right?
00:02:32.200I think it's fair to do, like, reform, you know, CCF, what becomes the NDP.
00:02:35.840I think our populist movements, I think even, you know, going back a bit further, things like social credit were probably, in some sense, kind of populist movement.
00:02:42.620So, if anything, the fact that we kind of, you know, we're seeing a bit of a bubbling of populism, especially, you know, in Western Canada again.
00:02:49.040If anything, that's not, you know, that's not some aberration.
00:02:51.320That's, in many ways, kind of a return to the norm, right?
00:02:53.520The things that kind of really have driven Canadian politics for the last, you know, century and a half, nearly.
00:02:58.420So, yeah, in that sense, again, it's really nothing that radical.
00:03:02.900No, and I mean, we've had, looking to Alberta, an example, you look a little young to remember, but with Ralph Klein, sort of, you know, with an internal party rejuvenation movement, almost.
00:03:13.560I mean, the progressive conservatives have been in power in Alberta for decades, but they've been getting stale.
00:03:17.740And he sort of roused up a populist sentiment within the province and rejuvenated his own party through that.
00:03:25.620And again, though, his changes really weren't all that terribly radical, though some would dispute that.
00:03:29.340He wasn't looking to tear down the system.
00:03:31.220He was just looking to get things back in order, I guess you could say.
00:03:35.540And again, I don't think it's, you know, one of my favorite kind of, you know, like you said, it's a bit before my time, but the kind of great reform, like the West wants it, right?
00:03:44.600Like that was a populist, populist movement, but they were, you know, they were, I think, you know, reform was seeking in some sense kind of, you know, certain kind of significant changes back in the day.
00:03:53.860I mean, the one, the most obvious kind of institutional one was that, you know, the changes to the Senate, the elected Senate, having an elected Senate, you know, so that is in some sense a populist movement, right?
00:04:04.120It's an attempt to, and that is a kind of, I think it's probably fair to call something like that radical and that it is attempting to change something.
00:04:10.080But again, you know, radical doesn't necessarily mean bad, good or bad, right?
00:04:14.580You know, there could be bad radical changes.
00:04:18.020So, you know, and when we look at the kind of crop of populists we have today, and again, Polyev is just kind of the, kind of the creme de la creme of them right now, just given his kind of the kind of prominence he's got.
00:04:27.940You know, Polyev's tweaking at the edges on certain things.
00:04:30.900I think maybe his, some of the stuff he said about the Bank of Canada is probably his most kind of, it's called like institutionally challenging stuff.
00:04:38.440But again, if you go and, you know, you don't have to actually, this was a point I tried to make in the piece.
00:04:44.180You don't have to, like, you don't have to agree with what Polyev is saying per se about the Bank.
00:04:48.440Maybe you think he's completely wrong.
00:04:50.200But if you actually go and look at what he's saying about the Bank, he's basically, he's not suggesting that he wants to kind of, you know, destroy the Bank of Canada in the way that if you go and listen to some of the kind of, like, anti-neoliberal left-wing populists in places like Europe, you know, they'll, they're quite often, these people will be quite anti-central banks.
00:05:06.620But what they're anti is very much the idea of kind of, you know, that like money and the money and the supply of money should essentially belong to the people.
00:05:14.380That's not, that's not what Polyev is offering, right?
00:05:16.540He's basically saying that, he's arguing that the Bank of Canada's independence has been undermined by the, you know, mass spending and kind of essentially propping up, you know, government agenda for two years.
00:05:25.640And what he wants to do is to essentially restore the independence.
00:05:28.840So again, you agree or disagree with Polyev, that's kind of, I'll leave that up to, up to, up to the listener to decide.
00:05:34.780But what he's saying there is still not a fundamentally, he's not actually radically trying to, you know, change the Bank of Canada.
00:05:40.760He thinks he's restoring it to what it, you know, what it historically should be, right, which is an independent central bank that's job is to control inflation.
00:06:11.100And again, I really, you know, I think a problem with so much Canadian discourse and politics kind of discussion more broadly is that we really do, I think we get lazy sometimes.
00:06:19.820And we just look for analogies, like to make kind of lazy comparisons elsewhere, right?
00:06:23.540So I think about the people that Polyev's been compared to, right?
00:06:26.960It's just every kind of populist under the sun, right?
00:06:29.780I've seen him compared to Trump, obviously, to Johnson in the UK, to Marine Le Pen in France, which I think is kind of a really silly comparison.
00:06:37.680But, you know, again, populism is a kind of Canadian, it's an old Canadian tradition, right?
00:06:44.420I actually think it's much more interesting to compare Polyev to, you know, the older, you know, maybe something like Preston Manning, right?
00:06:51.100And, you know, I think, and you're right, I don't think, I kind of, I wish people would use populist as kind of just a kind of descriptive label, right?
00:07:00.700I really think populism, I think, might be described as kind of temperamental, right?
00:07:04.960There's a kind of, populists certainly have a kind of tempestuousness about, I wouldn't always call it anger, but, you know, they're tapping into something, right?
00:07:11.540Like real frustrations and grievances.
00:07:14.140So in that sense, I think there's, you know, that's a kind of, people will, people, again, will use that as an insult, as a pejorative.
00:07:21.200I don't, I just think that's, it's just so, you know, people put their cards on the table when they do that.
00:07:26.200And again, so when you, you know, these people will frame, you know, Polyev is this kind of terrifying, terrifying populist.
00:07:31.680It's going to, you know, destroy the Camden we know and love, you know, something, something like something along those lines.
00:07:35.780You know, and I don't, and I don't even mean this, it's funny, I got some of the responses to the article thought I was defending Polyev, some thought I was attacking Polyev.
00:07:44.160I was honestly not trying to do either of those things.
00:07:46.500I was just trying to make the, make the observation that like, look, you might have this, might be fair to describe him as a populist, but it really is.
00:07:52.560Everything he's offering right now is fairly kind of milqueto, certainly within the kind of narrow boundaries of what's acceptable in Canadian discourse, right?
00:08:00.600He really isn't challenging any of the kind of real, you know, the third, the various many third rails or taboos of Canadian politics.
00:08:07.680I don't think it's, I don't think it's, it's hard to say that Polyev is really challenging anything like that, or that any of the kind of popular, well, for the most part, any of the populist movements we have in this country right now, you know, there's people here and there that certainly challenge kind of, you know, these third rails, but there's certainly no major kind of figures or movement, I think, that really do, right?
00:08:23.960So, yeah, I think so much of this discourse is so sloppy and so lazy and that we think more, we think more carefully about these terms and we actually try and have kind of serious discussions and analyses of what, what we're talking about here really kind of changes what your, maybe doesn't change your view of someone like Polyev, but it certainly might temper your, your fears or your expectations, right?
00:08:45.540Yeah, well, if there's any hallmark, I guess you could say of a malignant populism, when a leader or a figure is trying to incite or get the people up against, you know, they like to take advantage of xenophobia and immigration or foreigners is often a tempting target for them.
00:09:03.100And you kind of go into that as well, at least whatever may be going on with Polyev, immigration hasn't been an area where he's been radical or trying to stir up any sort of negative movements of any sort.
00:09:15.900And to be, you know, I should say as a first generation immigrant myself, I am, you know, I'm quite pleased with that, right?
00:09:20.300So, I'm not, you know, I'm not, I'm not the post-immigration.
00:09:22.720I think that we can certainly have debates about, you know, the number of immigrants we have, but it's amazing that even, even in, even, you know, we had a record number of immigrants to count last year, it was about 400,000.
00:09:34.540And, you know, again, we, I don't, we don't necessarily have an argument about specific numbers, right?
00:09:39.420But the idea that that is kind of beyond the pale of public discourse, I've always thought is kind of very strange, right?
00:09:45.140Like these are certainly questions people should be able to ask and not be kind of terrified of, you know, what, what they'll be accused of being if they bring it up.
00:09:53.220But yeah, that was, I tried to make the point in the piece that, you know, Polyev's not challenging that, right?
00:09:57.960If anything, he's, he's trying to appeal to immigrant communities, which, again, I don't think is a bad thing, right?
00:10:03.620I think that's probably a good thing, especially if he wants to win the election.
00:10:07.260But again, you know, he's, you know, he's being, you know, some of the people he's been compared to, right?
00:10:10.420Like people like Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, like the idea that what Polyev is saying there would be kind of, you know, acceptable to the most hardcore, you know, most devoted supporters of someone like Trump, for example.
00:10:21.660Like these are different people and we should stop kind of, we should stop engaging with, we should stop using these kind of lazy, lazy comparisons.
00:10:29.300One other kind of, so the piece, the piece in question was, was fairly long, you know, I won't say it, but short.
00:10:36.680There was actually, and there was actually a separate section that got cut just for space constraints.
00:10:41.260And one of the other kind of, so, you know, immigration is obviously one of the third rails of Canadian, Canadian politics.
00:10:47.420The other, and I think it's going to be, you know, we're going to be having discussions about this in the very near future again, is abortion, right?
00:10:53.400Now, again, it's just kind of an objective, it tends to be a descriptive observation.
00:10:57.820Lewis, I think, is going to be a guest later, right?
00:11:01.480Leslie Lewis is kind of, you know, the social conservative in the conservative leadership race right now.
00:11:06.400She's the pro-life, the pro-life option.
00:11:10.060But again, if you actually go and look at what she's proposing and what she's campaigning on, it's fairly modest stuff in terms of what she's, so there's a ban on sex-selective abortions.
00:11:18.840There's, I think, a ban on, like, overseas funding for abortions.
00:11:21.660But even, like, even Leslie Lewis, you know, the social conservative, the pro-life MP in the race, she would never even think to propose something like, it amazes me when I talk to Canadians and they think that, you know, we have kind of, when you tell them about, you know, like, European, European style, how abortion is generally regulated in Europe versus America.
00:11:41.040You know, most European countries, I think the abortion limit is around 12 weeks.
00:11:44.000It varies a little bit, but that's, you know, that's fairly early on, right?
00:11:47.000And a pregnancy is basically at the end of the first trimester.
00:11:50.960But Leslie Lewis, you know, our radical, scary, social, you know, the one that's going to put us back to theocracy, if you listen to certain people, she's not proposing, you know, like a French style or European style abortion limits.
00:12:03.300What she's proposing are pretty, pretty small, pretty, pretty, you know, unambitious and modest restrictions by comparison.
00:12:10.640And so on all sorts of these topics, right, these third rail topics, these taboos, we really don't have, like, true radical challenges to them.
00:12:18.080Again, there might be voices here and there, but there certainly isn't, like, kind of mainstream organized movement that challenges these things.
00:12:23.980We have this fairly narrow, and I would suggest, you know, for better or for worse, I'd say for worse on many things, it's very narrow and very stable consensus on all sorts of topics.
00:12:32.540Yeah, and as you said, I'm glad you brought it up, you know, Ms. Lewis's position on abortion actually is really where a lot of American Democrats would land.
00:12:43.620I mean, she would be considered pretty moderate compared to some of the more activist Republicans amongst the bunch.
00:12:48.260But to even broach the issue immediately starts getting that pushback.
00:12:55.600And I mean, is that a bit of a cultural thing within Canada, too?
00:12:58.660Although, I mean, are we afraid of substantial change?
00:13:01.800Like, is that why populism is a pejorative is as effective as it can be sometimes when it's used against people?
00:13:07.260Because we don't embrace any large radical changes, or at least we haven't traditionally.
00:13:12.020You know, we talk big, but as you said, even when these people get into power who did it on a populist wave, they don't tend to really change a whole heck of a lot structurally or substantially once they get there.
00:13:22.220Yeah, yeah, that's my kind of, I think this is true not just in Canada, but in other places.
00:13:26.680I think Canada is generally a more maybe kind of temperamentally modest, right, place.
00:13:32.340I don't think Canadians, I think, are much less quick to kind of anger and rage maybe than other places.
00:13:58.220And there's, so in the desire to, you know, it takes real, real, if there is a, if there's some sort of major reform you want to embark on, it's going to take real significant kind of desire and will and kind of motivation to do it.
00:14:10.520So in many ways, kind of just a kind of benign status quo prevails, not so much because it's popular, but just because kind of the effort to undo it or change it would take a lot of work in the other way.
00:14:21.600And, you know, we could go through issue by issue, right?
00:14:26.380There's all sorts of things that, you know, there are things in Canada that I would like to see changed.
00:14:30.740It doesn't mean that's going to happen, right?
00:14:32.260It's just kind of a real, it kind of is just unfortunate or fortunate, depending on your perspective, an unfortunate reality about how this country works.
00:14:40.060I think one kind of major problem we have in Canada is we do have, and this was, again, kind of a broader kind of point about this piece, is we do have a very narrow kind of, you know, I don't want to get too technical, but what people sometimes call the Overton window, right?
00:14:52.500We really do have a kind of narrow window of what is generally considered, generally considered acceptable opinions.
00:14:58.700So plenty of people might hold opinions that are actually kind of, you know, outside that fairly narrow window, but especially in kind of media and kind of discourse, that window is so narrow that people that hold those perspectives might either not express them at all or just kind of very subtly kind of, you know, hint at it here and there, but be kind of worried about kind of the consequences of saying so.
00:15:21.160I mean, if, regardless of whether, you know, even if someone generally likes kind of the status quo in Canada today, I would suggest we'd actually benefit from having a kind of wider discourse, where there's just a wider range of kind of, you know, permitted, acceptable opinion, precisely so that we can actually have more kind of serious, serious engagements and debates over kind of major issues and major topics.
00:15:41.840I don't think Canada's well served at all by having kind of a very narrow, kind of very thin consensus, because it really just allows a lot of kind of complacency and shallow and sloppy thinking, right?
00:15:53.540So again, even if you generally like kind of, you know, broadly speaking, the kind of consensus in Canada, I think we'd benefit from a more open, more open, open culture where we can actually have debates about things that maybe, you know, people don't want to have debates about right now for various reasons.
00:16:07.220Yeah, no, and I appreciate that. We have an opportunity right now with a leadership race where hopefully you get a number of people to talk about some of the individual issues.
00:16:15.520And if we keep playing a, as I like your use of the term, it's just being lazy by dismissing this as populism here or there and not having the conversation.
00:16:23.860It doesn't mean you have to like or dislike whatever a candidate's saying, but we need to open up that discourse rather than keep being so polarized and shutting it down with simplistic terms, I guess you could say.
00:16:33.440So I appreciate you coming on to expand a bit on that. And where can we find more information on what you're writing, what you're doing?
00:16:39.860That piece that caught my eye was in the Hub. You're active elsewhere as well.
00:16:43.920Yeah. Yeah, I generally write for the Hub these days. So the Hub is where you'll see my writing fairly frequently.
00:16:48.920I'm in the National Post fairly frequently. And if you want to just keep track of what I'm doing, I have a Twitter account you can follow, which is my name at Ben Woodfinden.
00:16:57.840And I have a newsletter as well, a Substack that I do. I've kind of, it's not super active, but it's, you know, it's all public stuff.
00:17:04.360So if people want to go back and read some kind of older things I've written, they're, you know, they're welcome to check that out. Yeah.
00:17:10.720Well, great. Well, thank you again for taking some time to talk to us today.
00:17:13.600And I look forward to reading more of your pieces. Perhaps we'll talk again down the road.
00:17:18.040Cheers. Yeah, would love to be on again. Thank you.