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As governments across Europe and the United States have been taken over by far-right parties, it becomes increasingly clear that centrist and progressive politics have failed to address the expanding inequality of the last four decades. This inequality has been effectively documented by scholars, including Thomas Piketty and Mark Blyth.
Here in Canada, the centrist Liberals are struggling in the polls and voters are moving toward the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC). Polls have shown for some time now that the next government in Canada will likely be a Conservative majority.
The Liberal decline reached new levels recently with the resignation of key ministers, including Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. Freeland stated that she and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were ‘at odds about the best path forward’ in relation to the United States President-elect Donald Trump’s ‘aggressive economic nationalism.’
This divide came to the fore after Trudeau quickly flew to Florida to meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, after the President-elect threatened a 25 per cent tariff on all imports from Canada and Mexico. Commentators have suggested such tariffs would rip the Canadian economy apart.
The U.S. 2024 election demonstrated the extent to which centrist and progressive politicians have lost touch with how many and how much working-class voters are struggling. The financial crisis of 2008 was a key turning point for workers and many have never effectively recovered from it.
Here in Canada, the governing Liberals and New Democratic Party continue to tinker around the edges of inequality. This was alluded to by Freeland in her resignation letter. All the while, the Liberal brass fail to recognize what voters really need are new financial approaches that will stem the tide of the movement of wealth upward.
In times of expanding inequality, the impoverished will follow any politician offering change. We saw this coming out of the Great Depression. There was a strong desire to secure the world economy after both World Wars, in part because of the dangers of wealth moving upward.
During the last decade, however, centrists and progressives alike continually fail to grasp that many voters have reached the point of ‘anything must be better than this.’
Here in Canada, Liberals are now pointing to reduced Goods and Services Taxes, rebated cheques, and the Canada Dental Program as proof they understand people’s needs. However, access to publicly funded dental care should not be seen as something to brag about in a G20 country, in 2024.
That program is not saving money for the working class. It’s providing a service that they have been doing without for decades now. Having your teeth cleaned a couple of times a year will do little to address the rage that comes with decades of lost dreams and shrinking social mobility.
While rebate cheques can mean a lot to the working class, they do not come close to addressing the decline in the value of wages during the last four decades.
With all due respect to Trudeau and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, they have been fiddling while Rome burns. Canada is home to some of the worst corporate concentration in the world in the food sector. Little to nothing has been done to address this.
Housing costs have become untenable due to poorly planned immigration policies, designed to give the corporate world access to a cheap army of reserve labour. Voters of all stripes and demographics feel this in their pocketbooks and when they cannot sleep at night.
For almost a decade now, the governing Liberals have relied on identity politics to paint themselves as the true progressives. This ignores the fact that what disadvantaged groups really need is a living wage.
Pretending to care about the marginalized, while failing to address issues of class, is disingenuous at best, and voters sense that lack of authenticity. Despite what politicians may think, voters are not stupid. We know when there is less money in our wallets, and we know when there is not enough.
The far-right is happily engaging in populism. The closest thing we’ve seen to a real left-wing economic populism on the North American continent has been Bernie Sanders. Notably, the Vermont Senator's candidacy was stamped out by the Democratic Party establishment in the United States.
In 2024, American Democrats actually ran on being the party of democracy while failing to hold a real presidential primary. Kamala Harris then proceeded to seek Republican endorsements, rather than address the concerns of the Democrats’ historical working-class base.
Here in Canada, both the Liberals and NDP are also failing to meet the moment. Where is the tax on wealth that has long been recommended by the best-selling economics text of this century? That would be Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century.
The NDP proposed a wealth tax in the House of Commons, while the Liberals worked with the CPC to vote it down.
Where is the windfall tax on oil companies and grocery retailers?
Where is Universal Basic Income? The Employment Insurance program is so problematic that the Canada Emergency Response Benefit program had to be developed on an emergency basis to keep people from losing their homes during a global pandemic.
Where is long-promised pharmacare?
Where is the serious plan to meet Canada’s commitments under the Paris Accord, as Canadian communities are destroyed by fire and flood?
Where is access to affordable post-secondary education?
It is no longer sufficient to blame these problems on global conditions. Frankly, to do so looks weak at a time when voters are looking for bold moves.
Getting there will require politicians who are willing to draw their power from working- and middle-class voters, rather than corporate donors.
It is no longer enough for Liberal politicians to just say they are for Canada’s middle class and those working hard to join it.
It’s time to actually prove it.
Lori Lee Oates is a teaching assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her research and teaching focus on social inequality, resource economics, and climate justice.
Comments
While I agree with the vast majority of the author's points I don't agree that the intelligence of the average Canadian voter is very high when it comes to politics. Most Canadians were shocked when Donald Trump was elected President for a second term and wondered how American voters could be so foolish to elect such a person. Here in Canada, voters are lining up behind Pierre Poilievre, purveyor of lies, throw away 3 word slogans and no policy plans. What this demonstrates is a lack of critical thinking ability, a skill that needs to be taught in order to make informed choices. The media by in large have been giving Poilievre and company a relatively free ride thereby adding credibility to his many falsehoods directed at Trudeau. If Canadians like what they see south of the border then supporting Poilievre is the way to go.
The author isn't claiming that Canadian voters are highly intelligent when it comes to politics. She's saying that we're not stupid when it comes to our income and economic prospects, which for most of us continue to drop even as the wealth gap widens and large corporations reap record-breaking profits, all despite years of supposedly left-leaning government.
She's describing a situation where the voters, on the evidence, see little to choose between this party or that one. And the proof of that pudding is in voter turnouts, which in Canada have become historically low; and in electoral results, where in the US the popular vote was virtually split between Trump and Harris, and where more eligible voters actually stayed home than voted for either. Indeed our next federal election appears likely to result in a similar split, with the lone "right" party finishing only somewhat ahead of the combined "center" to "center-left" parties, and no party winning an outright majority of the popular vote.
The author's point is that when ruling parties of all stripes have more in common with one another than they have with the voters, most of us voters are at least smart enough to know where that leaves us.
Excellent analysis. One error that's important; the housing crisis should be blamed on poor political choices around housing, not on immigration.
Lately, I have been toying with the concept that the globally escalating misogyny, anti-immigrant, anti-POC, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-science, anti-reporting, anti-Indigenous, pro male supremacy, etc. etc. etc. are all founded upon globally escalating wealth inequality. Assigning one reason for a wide range of events is always risky. Thank you Lori Lee for providing substantive support for the concept. Though there may be other reasons, I am now sure that wealth inequality is by far the most important place to start.
The definition of "systemic" is an adjective that means "of or relating to a system."
It is especially used to describe some phenomenon--an illness, a social problem that affects every part of an entire system. Some near synonyms to systemic are "structural, comprehensive, inherent, pervasive, ingrained, and extensive."
You have to pan out enough to encompass the reality that our economic system in the West is CAPITALISM, a system that relies on our natural human propensity to compete with each other (a particularly salient motivator for men actually) in the common "marketplace" to improve the quality of our products and offerings to achieve "the best" version so as to reap the increased financial rewards that accrue accordingly.
The Americans have led the world on this front, so are now in the predictable throes of "end stage capitalism," where the richest man in the world is now poised to fulfill every alpha male's simmering desire to RULE the world in an entirely unprecedented way by "trumping" the whole POLITICAL system of "democracy" BECAUSE he's the richest man in the world.
But what's most important is that as the ultimate winner in the context of the predominating capitalist system, he has found a home on the political RIGHT wing of the standard right-left spectrum BECAUSE that's where the strongest proponents of and true believers in capitalism as the wellspring of the entire economy (the MOST COMPETITIVE guys i.e.) GO, where they VOTE.
They've also managed to very effectively denigrate democratic SOCIALISM as the superior and tempered version of democracy itself by equating it with COMMUNISM, a common negative always.
Their version of a democratic system is a "republic" of course while Canada's is a "parliamentary democracy" but our system is still being gamed by our version of what the political right wing has become BECAUSE more people apparently skew to the political LEFT, given a choice, are more moderate generally, which is shown by the fact that we never talk about a "conservative democracy," only a liberal one.
The internet has speeded all of this up, and way too many of the famous "moderates" have turned away from the chaos since the pandemic, failing to understand that they are thereby enabling a political pandemic threatening ALL OUR SYSTEMS simultaneously, including those that sustain our very species.