If the ruling class is surprised by rising populism, it should look in the mirror instead of dismissing those Canadians who are hurting
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Lack of self-awareness and refusal to learn about the opposing side is a disease that can afflict anyone. The effect is, however, most pronounced among the establishment left: following Donald Trump’s 2016 victory in the United States presidential election, or our own Freedom Convoy of 2022, everyone in western politics wants to be on the “right side of history” and continue the fight against a long-passed threat. Admitting there is no crisis is hard if you staked your reputation heavily on there being one.
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Former Canadian and British central bank governor Mark Carney, who may be angling towards a Liberal leadership run, gave a recent example of this. During an April 22 speech at Canada 2020’s economic outlook dinner in Toronto, he relitigated Brexit, using it as a dubious proxy to attack the Conservative Party of Canada and leader Pierre Poilievre. He claimed that “right-wing populists” were using anger to stoke the fires of their deleterious projects in Canada and elsewhere. He said he knew this because of his time as the governor of the Bank of England. He had seen, he said, Brexiteers use the coded language of “take back control,” which he (and one must suppose those enlightened like him) knew meant “tear down your future.”
“Brexiters promised that they were going to create Singapore on the Thames,” Carney said. “The … government actually delivered Argentina on the Channel.”
Carney is unquestionably a smart man. He undoubtedly knows many things and has access to huge amounts of information. But whether about Brexit or the marauding bands of populists he wishes to scare us all with, Carney doesn’t seem able to learn or adapt his preconceived notions to fit current realities.
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As the former Governor of the Bank of England, Carney must know that while many (myself included) predicted Brexit would be a catastrophe, that has not ultimately proven to be the case. Carney also knows that while the British Conservative Party has indeed been tossed into turmoil, the United Kingdom as a country is fine. Since Brexit, the U.K.’s GDP has grown faster than Germany or Italy and at about the same rate as France, for example. Carney must know this. He should also be aware (if he wanted to be) that in the technologies of tomorrow, such as artificial intelligence, the U.K. has attracted double the investment dollars of France, Germany and the rest of Europe combined.
It is true that Brexit is a travel and customs inconvenience, and sometimes a nightmare, but those wrinkles are being ironed out. It is also true that we can’t know what the U.K. would have been had it remained in the European Union. But we do know that none of the most dire predictions came true, and even the most pessimistic current evaluations are consistently overblown.
So why can’t Carney see this and move on? Why can’t the left in the U.S. get past Trump? Why can’t the Liberal Party handle that Poilievre is currently so popular? The reasons may be varied, but they come down to a common theme: the total inability to see the world from a different perspective and a complete lack of self-awareness that they were or are wrong.
This response can be observed in most big issues of the past decade, where being in opposition to allegedly progressive dogmas is not a matter of opinion but a matter of heresy. The left has neatly constructed around them what Greg Lukianoff calls the “rhetorical fortress,” wherein one believes that “only bad people have bad opinions.” Having diminished the worth of the person holding an opposing view, it is easy to dismiss them, shut one’s ears and never learn anything new.
Run this test with any issue you please. Concerned about race-based hiring? Bigot. Don’t think children should get puberty blockers? Trans-exclusionary radical feminist. Support Israel? Supporter of genocide. Don’t want safe supply and rampant drug use in the streets? You want addicts to die. Even the most mundane issues, such as capital gains inclusion rates, can see opponents tarred as hateful for not caring about intergenerational fairness. Demonize and dismiss rather than discuss and debate is now the modus operandi of a self-appointed elect here to save us all.
Currently in Canada, more than six million people don’t have a family doctor. Housing prices have risen completely out of step with salaries. The cost of living has jumped under inflationary pressures. Add to that a general sense that Canadians are being force-fed policies and threatened with cancellation when they question them. All considered, the “anger” that perplexes the Carneys of the world becomes remarkable not for its existence but for its relatively passive nature thus far.
If the ruling class is surprised by the backlash it feels is underway, the answer is to look in the mirror and stop dismissing Canadians who are hurting. Telling citizens that what they’re seeing every day isn’t actually happening is a poor way to admit error. Our leaders may be smart, but they’re bad learners.
National Post
Adam Pankratz is a lecturer at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business.
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