Cutthroat politics, government scandals, and attack ads dominating the airwaves. These problems are not unique to the United Kingdom facing Brexit, or the United States with its current partisan split. Indeed, these characteristics are beginning to plague a nation that few would expect: Canada.
On the international stage, Canada has developed a reputation for moderate and tranquil politics. Many emerging nations have looked to Canada’s parliamentary system as a template, seeking to emulate its ability to ensure harmony and cooperation in both the House of Commons and broader society. However, recent developments, such as the popularization of attack ads targeting candidates’ personal traits and the public’s reaction to the SNC-Lavalin scandal, indicate that reality has started to deviate from this ideal. Canadian media tends to overlook this domestic shift, instead focusing on the divisiveness south of the border and allowing political tension to quietly grow in Canada. As a result, political polarization in Canada is rapidly increasing, and this rise poses a fundamental threat to the pillars of Canadian democracy.
Prelude to Polarization
The origin of Canada’s political unity can be traced back to the administrations of Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. Under these two prime ministers in the 1960s and 1970s, values of tolerance and diversity were heavily emphasized, contributing to the rise of the “brokerage” model of politics in Canada. Under this political philosophy, Canadian political parties framed themselves as negotiators, each with the responsibility to consider different perspectives on various issues. In an interview with HPR, Christopher Cochrane, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, emphasized that Canadian politicians have historically focused on cooperation, not competition. “Once upon a time, people were involved in politics not because they hated one side or the other side, but because they felt that they had a civic duty to get involved,” he said. This brokerage system embedded values of acceptance and compromise within the Canadian parliamentary system — and social ethos — during the Pearson and Trudeau years. Voters, in turn, mostly abandoned politically extreme ideologies for more moderate ones, leading the international community to see Canada as a democratic role model for collaborative politics and a calm, stable government.
The warning signs that this delicate equilibrium was in danger appeared at the beginning of the 21st century. During a 2004 debate, Stephen Harper of the Conservative Party explicitly listed a number of suburbs that he claimed had been neglected by the previous government, promising to give them more attention under his administration. At the same time, the left-wing New Democratic Party adopted a platform promising specific benefits for the working class in urban areas, including hiring incentives and pension benefits. In an interview with the HPR, Graham Fox, president and CEO of the non-partisan think tank Institute for Research on Public Policy, likened these strategies to “electoral candy — the micro-policies that you can offer to specific subsets of voters” in order to win key constituencies. This political pandering, aimed at winning more seats, in fact exacerbated a growing divide along undrawn socioeconomic lines in Canada. One study showed that after 1980, the political viewpoints of suburban residents shifted sharply to the right while those of city-dwellers moved to the left. As parties became more polarized through attempts to appease their voter bases, legislative compromises became increasingly difficult for politicians to negotiate.
Trickle-down Tensions
This deviation from the cooperative “brokerage” model led to a greater sense of competition between partisan rivals. As Maxwell Cameron, a professor of comparative politics at the University of British Columbia, noted in an interview with the HPR, “Politics is becoming more adversarial, as we are gradually losing the ability to find common ground between our political parties.” This trend is exemplified by the “Just Not Ready” campaign, a series of attack ads that targeted Canada’s current prime minister, Justin Trudeau, during the 2015 federal election. The minute-long video departed from traditional Canadian political discourse by explicitly criticizing a single politician rather than his party as a whole, and proved highly effective in influencing Canadian voters. With opposition parties now airing similar “Never Ready” advertisements for the 2019 election, campaigns’ increasing focus on discrediting party leaders continues to actively contribute to an atmosphere of animosity, undermining attempts to reach substantive compromises. “It’s not really that Tories and Liberals are farther apart than they once were, but the person who used to be an opponent is increasingly an enemy,” Fox summarized.
In the past, weak party solidarity kept the polarizing tendencies of party leadership in check, as elected officials answered more eagerly to their constituents than to party leaders. In an interview with the HPR, Prasad Panda, a minister in the Alberta Provincial Legislature, explained that “regular citizens just want their leaders to behave in a civil manner, be respectful to each other, listen to each other, and collaborate with each other.” This conventional wisdom incentivized politicians to maintain relatively moderate ideologies, as voters tended to support less extreme representatives who could negotiate and pass legislation in the local community’s interests.
However, party solidarity has grown stronger in recent years. In 2018, NDP M.P. David Christopherson voted against his party’s caucus on an amendment to the Canada Summer Jobs Program. The NDP promptly removed him from his role on the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs as punishment. This was not an anomalous event; rather, it reflected a broader trend of leaders demanding that legislators support the party line. In a report released by the Samara Centre, 54 former members of Parliament — who served from 2011 to 2015 — agreed that the political party that they belonged to had influenced their voting records more than their constituents’ interests. Many also reported that they felt pressure from above as well as peer pressure to stay in line with party policy. As major political parties pandered to their respective demographics and launched personal attack ads on opposition leaders, party solidarity was firmly enforced and the individual voices that attempted to preserve a more centrist stance were gradually stifled.
While this polarization may have originated in the political class, its influence has trickled down into the lives of everyday Canadians. “Supporters of the different parties dislike each other a lot more than they used to, and they have increasingly disliked each other with every election since the late 1960s,” Cochrane highlighted. And in addition to this climate of generalized animosity towards supporters of other parties, Canadians are growing more divided on the issues as well. In a 2019 poll, 40 percent of Canadian citizens stated that they believed that there were too many visible minorities in their country. However, this view was shared by only 15 percent of Liberal Party voters, down from 34 percent in 2013. On the other hand, 69 percent of Conservative Party supporters believed this was an issue, up from 47 percent in 2013. But despite these developments, in general Canadians had initially ignored this widening divide, preferring to continue to believe in the image of a perfectly moderate Canada.
Conflict Erupts
Widespread polarization in Canadian politics erupted, though, with the SNC-Lavalin scandal — startling many Canadians. In early 2019, The Globe and Mail reported that Prime Minister Trudeau’s office had attempted to force the attorney general to drop a case against the Canadian company SNC-Lavalin. The varying reactions of Canada’s political parties and media organizations exposed the country’s growing political divide. Whether it was the publicly owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation or the privately operated CTV, pundits and journalists dominated the airwaves with their one-sided arguments about the SNC-Lavalin affair for the next month. In Parliament, opposition politicians viciously attacked Trudeau and accused him of covering up evidence of collusion with SNC-Lavalin executives. While some politicians may have been genuinely disturbed by the alleged threat to judicial independence, opposition parties’ excessive responses demonstrate the way in which this scandal quickly became exploited for political gain. At the same time, some Liberal members of Parliament hurled insults at the attorney general in an attempt to discredit her testimony, affirming that politicians on both sides were focused on defending and supporting their own parties above all else.
Subsequent controversy surrounding Vice-Admiral Mark Norman shattered illusions that the SNC-Lavalin scandal had been an anomaly, and illuminated longer-term shifts in Canadian politics. In 2018, Norman was charged with breach-of-trust relating to the leaking of confidential naval contract information. In Canada’s newly polarized political atmosphere, the Norman affair, which might have otherwise been considered a standard legal case, was thrust into the political limelight. Shortly after the SNC-Lavalin controversy, Conservative Party members disclosed new evidence related to the Norman case that they claimed had been purposefully hidden from investigators by the Liberal government. The prosecution then stayed its charges against Norman, explaining that the new evidence had undermined its chances of conviction. Opposition politicians reacted by accusing the government of obstruction of justice, spearheading an investigation attempt into the handling of the Norman affair. Liberal M.P.s again vehemently denied the accusations and blamed a number of military officials and civil servants for preventing the disclosure of the evidence. Across the political spectrum, responses to the Norman case underscore each party’s willingness to vilify others for political gain, a trend which threatens to cement Canada’s newly adversarial climate.
The SNC-Lavalin affair may have set a dangerous precedent for the handling of political scandals, the effects of which became clear during the Norman controversy, with both government and opposition politicians attempting to push blame onto rival parties regardless of the facts of the controversy. “Some of the ways that [the recent scandals] have been talked about reflect a lack of basic civility between the leaders of different parties,” Cochrane concluded. “A lot of this visceral anger and incrimination … that we see in politics can be related to polarization.”
Reversing the Breakdown
The political class’s aggressive reactions to this recent set of government scandals threaten to damage voter engagement in Canada. “For the average voter, the partisan tone of politics is a real turnoff,” Cameron said. “The high degree of polarization in political parties suppresses [and] discourages people from voting, because people just don’t identify with the antagonism that they see in politics.” In order to preserve Canadian democracy’s traditional civility and moderate values, this partisan takeover must be reversed.
On an encouraging note, some political leaders do recognize the problems surrounding political animosity and the importance of decreasing polarization. “Political leaders should all practice decorum and civility,” Panda emphasized. “Then the general public will pay attention and contribute to our debates.” It is imperative that Canada’s politicians and citizens attempt to reverse the trend of increasing partisanship and disagreement; in a world where few moderate democracies remain, the reaffirmation of Canada’s democratic values would not only benefit domestic society, but also serve as a symbol against the spread of political extremism for developing democracies worldwide.
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