Many Canadian Voters are in a Dangerous State of Denial

July 23, 2024 , Brooke Jeffrey , Comments Off on Many Canadian Voters are in a Dangerous State of Denial

In the brilliant 1995 movie “The American President”, actor Michael Douglas plays a progressive president whose new gun control legislation is widely opposed, despite the fact he introduced it shortly after a string of fatal shooting sprees. When presidential aide Lewis Rothschild, (played by Canadian actor Michael Fox) deplores the low level of support the bill has in public opinion polls, the president replies “Lewis, for reasons passing understanding, people do not relate guns to gun-related crime.” [i]

Unfortunately this type of willful blindness had already become increasingly commonplace in many liberal democracies even before the global pandemic struck. In the UK, for example, the success of the 2016 Brexit campaign was due to many Britons eagerly embracing the YES side’s patently false promise that everyone could have their cake and eat it too. Similarly, the 2018-19 Yellow Vests’ violent opposition to French president Macron’s modest reform proposals was driven by their stubborn refusal to recognize the extent of that country’s economic crisis. And here in North America the unquestioning willingness of millions of Americans to believe Donald Trump’s bogus MAGA claims not only secured him the presidency in 2016 but appears poised to do so again in 2024.

Pollsters and academics alike have warned about citizens’ declining faith in democratic institutions, resulting from the economic upheavals and uncertainty of the past two decades. Increasingly this has been accompanied by the outright refusal of a growing number of citizens to accept scientific evidence, or to recognize the link between cause and effect, as policies designed to combat complex issues such as global warming appear to threaten their way of life.[ii] This general malaise is now increasingly common in all liberal democracies in the post-pandemic era, where the enormous costs incurred by governments to protect the health, safety and economic well-being of their citizens during the pandemic have now become evident. Many individuals appear unwilling to recognize the link between the government actions that saved them and the inevitable cost of those efforts, and/or are unwilling to pay any price for them. Like Americans’ refusal to recognize that guns kill people, many citizens in liberal democracies seem unwilling to accept that the extraordinary efforts of governments to protect them during that global disaster will inevitably have consequences down the road. And right wing populist politicians are making the most of this discontent, offering unrealistically simplistic “solutions”.[iii]

This trend is evident in Canada as well, epitomized by the readiness of many citizens to accept the long list of outrageous claims made by Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, despite all factual evidence to the contrary.[iv] Poilievre himself has encouraged this deliberate ignorance, stating bluntly that he has no intention of listening to the views of “so-called experts,” even if there are hundreds of them who agree on an issue. Instead, he plans to listen to “the common sense views of the common people.”[v]

A classic example of this populist ploy is his current “jail not bail” slogan, which he has justified with numerous false and often ridiculously erroneous claims. As one legal scholar put it, Poilievre is “exploiting public safety fears to troll for law-and-order votes” even though there is no public safety crisis[vi]. In fact, the country is currently experiencing one of the safest periods in recent history. Despite the inevitable fluctuations over short periods of time, Canada’s Crime Severity Index has actually decreased 6% in the last decade and fallen by an astonishing 31% since 2000. [vii]

Moreover experts have repeatedly stressed that Poilievre’s argument for denying bail will not result in crime reduction, as he has claimed, but will result in more innocent people being held in jail much longer. As one astonished expert pointed out, “I’m surprised he said that. That wasn’t slightly incorrect, it was flat out untrue –it was irresponsible and misleading at the very least.”[viii]

Even more telling is his misleading attempt to place the blame for his mythical crime wave on the Liberals, NDP and “woke” politicians in urban areas. Yet in reality the crime rates are highest in the conservative heartland of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and among the lowest in NDP-run B.C. Meanwhile the national magazine Canadian Lawyer recently described the Conservative leader’s repeated claim that 40 individuals in Vancouver were arrested 6,000 times in one year as “nonsense” and “total bs”.[ix] But, as Stephen Harper’s former adviser Tom Flanagan once said, “It does not have to be true; it only has to be plausible.”[x]

Then there is the “axe the tax” slogan that Poilievre has succeeded in selling to so many Canadians. In this case, not even the detailed explanation of the benefits of carbon pricing, provided in an open letter by two hundred leading economists, (including several Nobel Prize winners), could make a dent in the Conservative leader’s determination to convince citizens that the Liberals’ system, so widely admired and emulated elsewhere, is anything more than a tax grab that will cost them dearly. This is simply untrue, and he knows it. As the Parliamentary Budget Officer has confirmed, more than 80% of Canadian families will actually be financially better off under this system, which provides significant rebates directly to citizens four times a year. As one prominent expert analyst concluded, thanks to Poilievre’s deliberate disinformation “people are opposing a policy that is putting money in their pockets and is contributing to the kinds of action to address climate change that they say they want.”[xi]

Nor is the Conservative leader prepared to acknowledge the obvious link between climate change and the numerous catastrophic weather events that have raged across the country in recent years, much less provide policy options to address this very real threat. Instead, like many of his followers he has been reluctant to even recognize that climate change exists,[xii] and he continues to be a strong supporter of the oil and gas industry, (the top source of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada), from which so much of his financial backing comes.[xiii]

Another example of this worrisome trend to reject inconvenient facts was seen in January 2021 with Poilievre’s blatant support for the so-called Trucker’s Convoy that illegally occupied downtown Ottawa, disrupting the lives of many residents and terrifying others. Many of the protesters were shown to be members of extreme far right groups. Many others were demonstrably intent on wreaking havoc, including those who actually proposed replacing the duly elected federal government with a bizarre coalition of the governor general, selected senators and members of the convoy itself. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Poilievre persisted in describing convoy participants as proud Canadians who were peacefully protesting, and even had his photo taken with them after bringing them coffee. And, as several analysts have noted, standing with the convoy was actually part of Poilievre’s larger strategy to expand the scope of the truckers’ concerns to include other issues on which his party was focusing, , for example by encouraging unfounded criticism of COVID relief programs and the carbon pricing system, in order to attract more popular support for the Conservatives.[xiv]

More recently we have witnessed the Conservative leader’s astonishing decision to reject the government’s offer to learn the real facts about foreign interference. Instead, he has demonstrated his own version of willful blindness by refusing to read the report of the special parliamentary committee examining the issue. He insists that he does not need to read it, (even though his counterparts in the NDP, the Bloc and the Green Party have all done so), but nevertheless continues to feel free to criticize the actions of the government on this file. Ignorance, it seems, is bliss if you are a right-wing demagogue.

Equally distressing, especially for a Leader of the Official Opposition who presumably hopes one day to become prime minister, is his frequent support of various discredited conspiracy theories (the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Bank of Canada, vaccine mandates, etc)[xv] And, here, too, his populist appeal has been extremely successful at leading his followers down the rabbit hole of ‘alternative facts’ so frequently promoted by Donald Trump and his European counterparts. (More than 50% of Yellow Vest protesters, for example, were also found to believe in a “global Zionist conspiracy.”[xvi] Supporters of the YES Brexit campaign also were found to reject vaccine mandates and other anti-COVID measures.[xvii] And in the United States a staggering 66% of Republicans and 30% of all Americans believe the 2020 election was “stolen”[xviii] ) As Mount Royal University political scientist Duane Bratt noted, there have always been conspiracy theories but in Canada “The big shift that we have seen is that it is now being promoted by someone who could be prime minister.”

Similarly, Poilievre’s willingness to blame all manner of current problems, from housing shortages to the cost of living and the opioid drug crisis on anonymous “woke” progressives, “gatekeepers” and “elites”, rather than to recognize the complex facts surrounding these issues or provide any kind of positive, evidence-based solution, has only made the anger and discontent worse. Citizens are constantly being told who to blame, but not how to fix the problem. In other cases, where Poilievre may appear to be providing some solutions, these same citizens are being led to believe that a painless quick fix is possible when, in fact, experts are decrying his vague proposals as meaningless “nonsense.”[xix].

Aiding and abetting Poilievre and the far-right populists in other western democracies in their efforts to ignore reality are the various social media sources that have largely succeeded in undermining the credibility of the mainstream media. Interestingly, perhaps, this appears to be a much greater problem for North America than for the democracies of western Europe. While the vast majority of British citizens continue to view the national broadcaster, the BBC, as the ultimate source of accurate information, the same cannot be said of either traditional American media sources such as NBC and ABC, or the CBC in Canada. Indeed, those mainstream sources are actually under constant attack by the Trump Republicans in the US and by the Poilievre Conservatives in Canada.

Perhaps not surprisingly, recent polls have found that nearly 70% of Canadians under the age of 34 acquire the bulk of their “news” information through social media outlets such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Even less surprising, then, is the recent revelation that more than half of young Canadians have not heard anything about the contents of the recent federal budget. In particular they are unaware of the new capital gains tax provision, a measure specifically introduced, according to the Trudeau government, to provide additional funds for measures to assist young Canadians and promote generational fairness, making this self-imposed ignorance all the more significant. [xx] (At the same time recent polls also demonstrate that more than 50% of Canadians aged 18-34 agree that the older generations have “rigged the system” against them.)

Perhaps equally significant is the nearly 20% of Canadians who wrongly believe they will be negatively impacted by the capital gains change, despite extensive government messaging stressing the measure will affect only .03% of the wealthiest Canadians. This gap between fact and reality can no doubt be at least partly explained by Poilievre’s deliberately misleading 16-minute video on the measure, which focuses on blue collar workers and the middle class, denouncing the tax change as a “job killer,” and making frequent references to carpenters and plumbers, to say nothing of his inexplicable but obviously inflammatory references to Hitler and Stalin….[xxi]

At the end of the day it is increasingly apparent that liberal democracies are facing an unprecedented challenge to the credibility and legitimacy of their institutions and processes. As national security agencies in many western countries have reported, Increased public resistance to fact-based analysis is now being exacerbated by the growing presence of misinformation and disinformation generated by hostile actors such as Russia and Iran,[xxii] and by the lack of controls on social media sources exacerbated by an emphasis on ‘free speech’ at the expense of truth. When combined with the predicted onslaught of false information through the misuse of AI, a perfect storm threatens to overtake informed public opinion.

In Canada, the recently released annual report of the federal think tank Horizons Canada, titled “Disruptions on the Horizon”, concluded the top threat facing the country is not war, or another pandemic, but the fact that so many of our citizens “cannot tell what is true and what is false.” This threat was rated as both high likelihood and high impact. Looking ahead, the report warned that the combination of mis- and disinformation, whether generated by AI, Russian bots or Iranian proxies, will soon “make it almost impossible to know what is fake or real, and what or who to trust.”[xxiii]

While a number of policy options have been proposed in order for governments to attempt to rein in this potential information crisis, other experts have stressed that the first line of defence must be politicians themselves. Providing credible information in a timely manner is clearly a crucial weapon in the war on ignorance, especially in times of upheaval and unrest. Yet in that war, there are apparently some far-right populist politicians who are determined not to be part of the solution, knowing as they do that their success hinges on their ability to convince enough voters that their alternative reality can be trusted. Like Donald Trump in America, Pierre Poilievre appears to be a classic example of this populist approach in this country, and too many Canadians already appear to be willing to follow this Pied Piper.

[i] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112346/quotes/

[ii] See for more detail https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/12/07/global-public-opinion-in-an-era-of-democratic-anxiety/ ; https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/confidence-democracy-lowest-point-record/605686/ and https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/14/health/trust-in-science-pew-survey/index.html

[iii] https://www.lse.ac.uk/ideas/Assets/Documents/updates/LSE-IDEAS-Understanding-Global-Rise-of-Populism.pdf

[iv] https://www.hilltimes.com/story/2024/07/08/is-populism-popular-in-canada-researchers-say-yes/427766/

[v] https://ottawa.citynews.ca/2024/03/27/conservatives-blast-pro-carbon-price-economists-as-so-called-experts/

[vi] https://www.canadianlawyermag.com/news/opinion/pierre-poilievre-is-exploiting-public-safety-fears-to-troll-for-law-and-order-votes/375350

[vii] https://www.canadianlawyermag.com/news/opinion/pierre-poilievre-is-exploiting-public-safety-fears-to-troll-for-law-and-order-votes/375350

[viii] https://www.nsnews.com/bc-news/poilievres-take-on-current-bail-system-is-wrong-lawyers-say-7684374

[ix] https://www.canadianlawyermag.com/news/opinion/pierre-poilievre-is-exploiting-public-safety-fears-to-troll-for-law-and-order-votes/375350

[x] Globe and Mail. Sept. 8, 2009.

[xi] https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/03/26/analysis/truth-about-carbon-tax

[xii] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/conservative-delegates-reject-climate-change-is-real-1.5957739