Canadian iteration of the political movement known as Trumpism
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The effect of the political and ideological movement, which is known as Trumpism in Canada, has been scrutinized by researchers and the media since 2016 who questioned whether Trumpism could happen in Canada.[1][2][3][4][5] Trumpism refers to the "philosophy and politics espoused by Donald Trump".[6][lower-alpha 1]
In the first month of the presidency of Donald Trump, Canadian pollster and social values researcher, Michael Adams, described in his book, Could It Happen Here? Canada in the Age of Trump and Brexit, how anti-elite populist forces were afflicting the United States, Germany, France, Hungary, Poland, and significantly, the United Kingdom,[7] with the June 23, 2016 Brexit vote.[8][9] Adams, who described Trumpism, as the "storm of angry, isolationist and frequently nativist populism",[7] said it was unlikely that Trumpism could happen in Canada. Communications and political strategist, Peter Donolo, and National Post columnist, Jonathan Kay agree.[2][10] While Adams and others acknowledge that Canada has its own recent history of populism, including populist premiers and other politicians, free speech debates, and rage against the carbon pricing in Canada, referred to as a carbon tax by opponents—Canada's social values differ from those of Americans, and Canada's demographics, economy, and courts and other institutions are not as vulnerable to Trumpism.[1] Whereas immigration restrictionism and anti-immigrant sentiment play a significant role in Trumpism,[11] Canada's pro-immigration policies have been praised as Canadian exceptionalism by The Economist, the New York Times and The Atlantic.[12]
The director of the Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism, Barbara Perry, who described "Trumpism" as a "form of right-wing populism convergent with an emboldened white supremacy", has been studying Far Right Groups (FRG) for over two decades. Perry reported a dramatic increase in active far-right groups in Canada from 100 in 2015 to 300 in 2021.[13] She said that the group "Canadians for Trump" formed in 2015 when Trump began his presidential campaign, and that the January 2021 convoy protest in Toronto in support of Trump, was an extension of that movement.[14] Articles in Canadian Press and The Conversation describe the 2022 Canada convoy protests as a "coming-out party for a Trump-flavoured strain of populism in Canada",[15][16] and an "unwelcome arrival of Trumpism in Canada".[17]
Canadian exceptionalism vs immigration restrictionism
Trudeau and Trump in 2017
Prior to Donald Trump's 2015 presidential campaign, authoritarian populism was on the rise in Western countries,[18] including Canada, as a new brand of populism evolved in the Conservative Party of Canada under Jason Kenney in 2015, from its predecessors in the Reform Party and Canadian Alliance Party.[19] In his June 2011 speech to the CPC convention, by then minister of citizenship, immigration, and multiculturalism under then Prime Minister Steven Harper, Kenney presented what some called, a "creative" form of authoritarian populism and neo-conservatism that would appeal to new Canadians whose votes were needed by the CPC to win federal elections.[20] The CPC won the 2011 election with a majority for the first time following the merger between the establishment CPC, and the populist Reform-Canadian Alliance. In contrast to Reform-Alliance's populism, Kenney's effective outreach to new Canadians was a major contributing factor in the CPC forming a majority government in the 2011 Canadian federal election.[21][22] Politicians, like Kenney, and Ontario premier Doug Ford have been compared to Trump, but those who disagree with this comparison distinguish the Canadian brand of populism from Trump's.[2][23]
The international press, including The Economist, has given Canada positive coverage in the way immigrants are welcomed—in a "depressing [world] of wall-builders, door-slammers and drawbridge-raisers, Canada stands out as a heartening exception".[24] The Economist noted that there were some right-of-centre politicians who used "Trumpian rhetoric" to stoke fears of the "shrinking middle class" and "Islamist terrorism", but this did not dissuade Canadians from being more open to immigration.[24] Both the New York Times and The Atlantic published headlines saying Canada had resisted "the West’s populist wave” and escaped "the liberal doom loop."[12] George Washington University historian, Tyler Anbinder, whose research focusses on anti-immigrant sentiment, said that Trump had "spread more anti-immigrant hatred than any other American in history" and made "public expressions of nativism socially acceptable for the first time in generations."[25]
During a February 2017 conference hosted at McGill University on Canadian exceptionalism, to help Canada avoid the "fate of the U.S. and other faltering states", guest speaker Sarah Kendzior, said that Canada would not fall "prey to Trumpism" because it was uniquely American. She cautioned that no country, including Canada, is immune from autocracy, white supremacy, nationalism and xenophobia that was sweeping across western democracies.[26]
A September 2021 Environics Institute survey found that 80% of Canadians agree that immigration has a positive impact on the economy and 65% do not think that the current immigration levels are too high.[27] The current attitude that Canadians need immigrants to increase the population is a "sea change" since the 1980s and 1990s, when most Canadians firmly rejected the need for more immigrants.[27]
In his February 2022, Macleans article John Geddes—the magazine's Ottawa bureau chief—wrote that the 2022 Ottawa convoy protests should dispel the illusion that Canada is insulated from right-wing populism.[5] He said Canadians are just as susceptible as Americans were to Trump or the British to Brexit, or the French to Marine Le Pen.[5] Geddes wrote that Canada also struggles with "economic anxiety, nativist intolerance, regional resentments" which are exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Geddes credits the strongest elements of Canada's democracy—its electoral system, its immigration policies, and judicial system—among others, with holding the country together, not something in Canada's national character that makes us less likely to "gather for an unruly, unreasonable protest, issue blatantly undemocratic demands, and lay siege to the capital."[5]
Then Immigration Minister Jason Kenney in New Delhi in 2010
While populist politicians, such as premiers Jason Kenney of Alberta and Doug Ford of Ontario, were compared to Trump, Donolo rejected the comparison. Kenney had served as a former senior cabinet minister under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in which capacity he was a very "effective ambassador to Canada's ethno-cultural communities".[2] Likewise, Ford hosted an annual festival with a highly diverse gathering.[2]
Adams says Canada's immigration policy results in "demographic renewal" that had "plausibly become" a "defining feature" as well as the mechanism that "injects values of openness, tolerance and compromise into every sphere of social life."[1]
Kellie Leitch, a cabinet minister in former Prime MinisterStephen Harper's government and a candidate in the 2017 Conservative Party of Canada leadership election, said Trump's victory in the 2016 United States presidential election was an "exciting message and one that we need delivered in Canada as well."[28] Leitch's proposal to screen immigrants for "anti-Canadian values" was compared to Trump's immigration restrictionism, which played a significant role in Trumpism.[11] Among Conservatives, the Trump-like anti-Muslim, anti-immigration" dog-whistle rhetoric" used by Leitch, was flatly rejected as she won only 7% of the vote.[29]
Then PC Tourism Minister Bernier in 2013 with Dr. K. Chiranjeevi in New Delhi
Maxime Bernier, who is the leader of the People's Party of Canada, and is known for supporting strong immigration restrictions, was described in a 2021 Washington Post article, as a "far-right politician who is compared to Trump."[30] In 2019, Bernier ran a campaign calling for the construction of a fence along the Canada-United States border. He lost his own seat in that election.[30]
Concept of Trumpism
In his February 2017 book Could It Happen Here? Canada in the Age of Trump and Brexit, pollster Michael Adams described Trumpism as a "storm of angry, isolationist and frequently nativist populism that has swept through not only the United States, but also the United Kingdom in the Brexit era, Germany, France, Hungary, [and] Poland."[7]
Barbara Perry, director of the Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism, who has been researching hate crimes for over two decades, followed the rise of right-wing populism in Canada. In a 2017 article she co-authored in the Journal of Hate Studies, she developed the concept of "Trumpism" as a "form of right-wing populism convergent with an emboldened white supremacy".[13] She said that the number of far-right groups active in Canada increased by 30% since Trump's presidency, to about 300. In their 2019 book, Right-Wing Extremism in Canada published by Springer, Perry and researcher Ryan Scrivens devoted a section to "Trumping multiculturalism: explaining the trump effect in Canada". They said that there was fertile ground in Canada for Trump's "right-wing populist rhetoric" prior to his presidency.[31] They described how reactionary trends at all levels of governance in Canada provided the "crucial background to the uptake of Trumpism in Canada".[31] The authors said that through the integration of Canadian and American technologies and economies, Canadians receive an "uninterrupted flow of Trumpism and right-wing populism from the United States" and that "Canadians are fed a steady died of Trump's hyperbole."[31]
In a November 2020 interview on The Current, immediately following the US elections, law professor Allan Rock, who served as Canada's attorney general and as Canada's ambassador to the United Nations, described Trumpism and its potential impact on Canada.[4] Rock said that even with Trump losing the election, he had "awakened something that won't go away". He said it was something "we can now refer to as Trumpism"—a force that he has "harnessed". Trump has "given expression to an underlying frustration and anger, that arises from economic inequality, from the implications from globalization."[4] Rock cautioned that Canada must "keep up its guard against the spread of Trumpism"[32] which he described as "destabilizing", "crude", "nationalistic", "ugly", "divisive", "racist", and "angry".[4] Rock added that one measurable impact on Canada of the "overtly racist behaviour" associated with Trumpism is that racists, especially white supremacists, have become emboldened since 2016, resulting in a steep increase in the number of these organizations in Canada and a shockingly high increase in the rate of hate crimes in 2017 and 2018 in Canada.[4]
Mariano Aguirre, an independent analyst on international politics, while not mentioning Canada specifically, described Trumpism as an "ideology for the extreme far-right globally".[33]
Academics and media responses to Trumpism in Canada
Researchers at Ryerson said that Trump was a symptom of American anti-immigration and white nationalism, not the "underlying cause". Ryerson Department of Politics and Public Administration professor, Wayne Petrozzi, said that Trump was not simply an "aberration", but a "culmination of a process that was building inside American politics for decades."[34] Early indications of Trumpism in Canada, included alt-right flyers circulating in Toronto in 2016 during Trump's election campaign asking, "Hey white person, tired of political correctness?"[34]
In his February 2017 book, Adams said that the angry, isolationist populism would not likely infect Canada, as it had the United States, Germany, France, Hungary, Poland, and the United Kingdom, reflected in June 23, 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum—Brexit.[7] Canadian and American media, said that Brexit and Trump's success in the November 8, 2016 2016 United States presidential election reflected a rebuke to Western elites.[8][9] Adams said Canada was in some ways insulated against Trumpism because of its "long history of compromise and accommodation", which lacks both "glamour" and "drama" but has been "quite effective."[1] Based on data on both countries and social values surveys, Adams said that differences Canadian demographics, its economics, and its political institutions, put the country at lower risk in the rise of nativist populism. Canada has its form of populism that is reflected in the election of populist politicians. While there are free speech debates and rage against carbon pricing in Canada—referred to as carbon tax by opponents—Canada's social values differ from those of Americans.[1] Adams cited examples of the way in which Canada bucked international trends, for example, by accepting 25,000 refugees of the Syrian civil war;[35] and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's "diverse and gender-balanced" federal cabinet.[36]
The CBC's The Fifth Estate made the connection between the anger in America over Trump's Immigration Ban and the January 29, 2017 Quebec City mosque shooting, a terrorist attack at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City by a young white university student, who had become consumed with the "far right, mass killers, Donald Trump and Muslims."[37][38][39] When in October 2017, during the premiership of Liberal Philippe Couillard, the Quebec National Assembly passed Bill 62—the anti-niqab" law—, articles in the Toronto Star, Kitchener, Ontario's The Record, and Hamilton, Ontario's The Spectator criticized its introduction as blatant discrimination against Muslims and evidence of Trumpism in Canada.[40]
Jonathan Kay, in his October 2017 article in Foreign Affairs said that both major federal parties in Canada—Liberals and Conservatives—reject Trump's vision of a future where native-born citizens were under attack by Muslims and immigrants, and were disadvantaged because of foreign trade;[29] the official opposition share consensus with the Liberals on issues such as immigration and free trade.[29] Kay added that the only significant Canadian who "practiced Trump's brand of demagogic populism" was Charles Coughlin—a 1930s priest and broadcaster.[29] Kay said that in the first year of Trump's presidency, Trump had helped stabilize Canada's national politics by making Trudeau a more formidable leader.[29]
In his 2019 article describing how misinformation reigned in Canada's 2019 Canadian federal election, New-York-based journalist, Nick Robins-Early, who reports on extremism and disinformation, described a global playbook for misinformation, citing the example of President Trump. Robins-Early described how conspiracy theories and rumors of scandals involving Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had transformed Canada's normal brief and tame political campaigns into a rare "level of dirty politics and divisiveness".[41] It included harassing journalists and attempts by far right groups to "hijack the political conversation".[41] In the run up to the 2019 Canadian federal election, supporters of Conservative Andrew Scheer, then leader of the Conservative Party and leader of the Official Opposition denounced Trudeau with calls to "lock him up", a copy cat of the attack against Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton.[42] Despite MAGA-labelled thousands of Twitter accounts using #TrudeauMustGo and other anti-Trudeau hashtags for months before the election, Trudeau won.[42][41] Claire Wardle, who is the founder of a global elections misinformation monitoring organization, First Draft News, expanded on the playbook for misinformation, saying that "bad actors" had figured out how to amplify their baseless claims by getting the attention of someone with huge followings, such as President Donald Trump. Wardle described how politicians and their strategists learned through Trump that there were no negative repercussions for spreading misinformation or conspiracy theories. There was no public shame or regulation. In the echo chamber of mass followers, fact checkers had no impact, according to Wardle.[41]
Convoy 2022 anti-media messaging
In his August 24, 2019, speech conceding the victory of his successor Erin O'Toole as the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Andrew Scheer cautioned Canadians to not believe the "narrative" from mainstream media outlets but to "challenge" and "double check...what they see on TV on the internet" by consulting "smart, independent, objective organizations like The Post Millennial and True North.[43][44] The Observer said that Jeff Ballingall, who is the founder of the right-wingOntario Proud,[45] is also the chief marketing officer of The Post Millennial.[46] Trump included the media as well as "elitist conspiracies" and Democrats as "objects of his wrath".[47] He accused the mainstream media of being biased, treated journalists as adversaries, and called their work "fake news".[33]
In their June 2020 Canadian Global Affairs Institute journal article, public opinion researcher Frank Graves and Jeff Smith said that Canada was not unscathed by an emerging "authoritarian, or ordered, populism that saw the 2016 election of President Trump and the United Kingdom's Brexit from the European Union.[48] Graves has been studying the rise of populism in Canada for several years. In this report which was partially funded by a partnership between the Government of Canada and Western Economic Diversification, the co-authors described a decrease in trust in the news and in journalists since 2011 in Canada, along with an increase in skepticism which "reflects the emergent fake news convictions so evident in supporters of Trumpian populism."[48] They said that 34% of Canadians held a populist viewpoint—most of whom are in Alberta and Saskatchewan—and tend to be "older, less-educated, and working-class". They are more likely to embrace "ordered populism", and are "more closely aligned" with conservative political parties.[48] This "ordered populism" includes concepts such as a right-wing authoritarianism, obedience, hostility to outsiders, and strongmen who will take back the country from the "corrupt elite" and return it to a perceived better time in history, where there was more law and order.[48] It is xenophobic, does not trust science, has no sympathy for equality issues related to gender and ethnicity, and is not part of a "healthy" democracy.[48] The authors say that this ordered populism had reached a "critical force" in Canada that is causing polarization and "needs to be addressed".[48] Trump's 21st-century brand of narcissism makes him believe that he can solve any problem; this is appealing to people who feel they have lost control of their lives and seek a leader who seems to know what he is doing during troubling times.[49]
In 2020, academics at Ryerson University in Toronto said that Trumpism had already "significantly affected the political discourse in Canada" and that there was clear evidence that it was "influencing our national and political identity, behaviour, economics and society."[34] In both Canada and the United States, Trump's rhetoric served to embolden white nationalists.[34]
Not all Canadians agree that Trumpism is viable in Canada. Canadian communications and political strategist Peter Donolo, who served as Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's Director of Communications from 1993 to 1999, wrote in an article in The Globe and Mail in August 2020 that Canadians feared that "the pathogens of Trumpism—with all its hatred and rage—would "infect the Canadian body politic", but they should not.[2] Donolo said that the more important reason that Canada does not need to fear Trumpism, is "money and economies of scale". The Canadian market is not "big or lucrative enough".[2] While populist politicians, such as premiers Jason Kenney of Alberta and Doug Ford of Ontario, were compared to Trump, Donolo rejected the comparison. The Globe's Justin Giovanetti said that Kenney channelled populism, not Trump.[23]
The president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, Gil McGowan, raised concerns in November 2020, that Alberta Premier Jason Kenney was using the "Trump/Republican playbook on COVID" by accepting the false dichotomy of protecting the economy versus saving lives by managing the pandemic.[50] McGowan said that Kenney's COVID-19-related public health policies were based on "libertarian talking points" and ignored "common sense precautions to protect the public good."[50]
In his January 8, 2021 National Post article, entitled, "The storming of the U.S. Capitol wasn't about white supremacy, whatever Canadian pundits say", Jonathan Kay provided the most strongly worded argument against those who said that white supremacy was the underlying fuel that led to the January 6 United States Capitol attack and that it could infect Canada. In direct response to the question asked on the January 8, 2021 front page of the Toronto Star, "Could it happen in Canada?", Kay said, "If right-wing populism really were going to metastasize northward in a meaningful way, it would have happened by now. But it hasn't."[10] In the January 14, 2021, episode of TVOntario (TVO), Ontario's public broadcaster's flagship show, The Agenda, "Is Trumpism Affecting Canadian Politics?" with a focus on how how Canada could "keep Trumpism at bay", the host, Steve Paikin, asked Barbara Perry to respond to Kay's comment that Trumpism had not migrated north.[14][51] Perry said that there has been a dramatic increase in active right wing extremism (RWG) groups from 100 in 2015 to 300 in 2021.[14] Since 2015, there has been more than twenty homicides associated with far RWG narratives, as well as the July 2, 2020 Rideau Hall attack, that has been described as an attempted assassination of the Prime Minister.[14] Perry said that support for Trump was noticeable in Canada since 2015, with the formation of Canadians for Trump, and that the January 2021 convoy protest in Toronto in support of Trump, was an extension of that movement.[14]
Supriya Dwivedi said that following the January 29, 2017 Quebec City mosque shooting during national debates on whether Islamophobia should be condemned, she noticed an increase in hate mail targeting her specifically as a journalist of colour.[14] Dwivedi said that Canadian main stream media and politicians failed to inform the public about what was happening on social media from as far back as 2014–2015 Gamergate campaign. These journalists and politicians from the establishment were not aware of the existence of online hate groups—for example the radicalization of incels during Gamergate.[14] Main stream media and politicians from the left and right politicians chose to deflect, ignore, or pretend that the 2018 Yellow vests movement in Canada did not happen in spite of the sizeable number of people who attended the protest with "Hang Trudeau" or "Trudeau for Treason" signs.[14] Paikin asked Randy Hillier to comment on last November's Angus Reid poll in which people who voted in Canada's 2019 federal election were asked if they believed that the 2020 United States presidential election was free and fair—50% of those who voted conservative said they did not.[14] In response, Hillier cited Jonathan Haidt on how liberals and conservatives differed in terms of psychological characteristics.[14] Hillier added that we can draw different conclusions from facts, data, and evidence and that we needed freedom of speech so all sides could be heard.[14] Paikin asked John Ibbitson about his Globe and Mail article, in which he said that it was "absurd" for people on the left to "conflate" support for the Conservatives in Canada with the "kind of white nationalism" that supports Trump. Ibbitson said that Liberals and progressives were "characterizing all conservatives", including John A. Macdonald, Mike Harris, and Stephen Harper as "illegitimate".[14] He said while we need to condemn RWG violence, we also need to not believe that all conservatives are "in bed with extremists", or it will be impossible to hold things together.[14] In an accompanying article published as part of joint TVO/Toronto Star "The Democracy Agenda" series, Paikin said that historically Canada often imitated whatever happened in the United States with a junior version within an interval of five to ten years.[51] Paikon noted that Canada did not have any politicians who were as "charismatically dangerous as Trump" or one who could "champion" those who felt "left behind" by "globalization and urbanization".[51] He described how Maclean's magazine had branded five conservative leaders as "the resistance" and portrayed them on the magazine's December 2018 cover as an emerging populist movement—then UCP leader Jason Kenney, then Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, then Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, and Ontario Premier Doug Ford.[51] Of these, Premier Moe has a high approval rate, and three lost positions. Paikin also noted—citing McGill University professor Andrew Potter—that unlike in the United States, polarization in Canada pertains to geographic regions, not "ethnicity or economic status."
American flag on convoy protest supply truck
The 2022 Canada convoy protests, which was called called the "Freedom Convoy" by protest organizers, were a series of protests and blockades initially against COVID-19 vaccine mandates and restrictions. Days before the Canada convoy protest was scheduled to arrive in Ottawa, allegedly to protest the January 15, 2022 federal vaccine mandate for truckers, the National Observer reported that the convoy—riled by the misrepresentation of reality, "false information", and "fake controversies"—"key ingredients in the toxic stew of Trumpism", had reached a "dangerous new level".[52] The protests were described as a "coming-out party for a Trump-flavoured strain of populism in Canada",[15][16] and an "unwelcome arrival of Trumpism in Canada".[17]
Anti-Trudeau messaging during 2022 occupation of Ottawa
In his February 2022, Macleans article John Geddes—the magazine's Ottawa bureau chief—wrote that the 2022 Ottawa convoy protests should dispel any illusion that Canada is insulated from right-wing populism.[5] He said Canadians are just as susceptible as Americans were to Trump, the British to Brexit, or the French to Marine Le Pen.[5] Geddes wrote that Canada also struggles with "economic anxiety, nativist intolerance, regional resentments" which were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Geddes credits the strongest elements of Canada's democracy—its electoral system, its immigration policies, and judicial system—with holding the country together, not something in Canada's national character that makes us less likely to "gather for an unruly, unreasonable protest, issue blatantly undemocratic demands, and lay siege to the capital."[5]
In her August 2022 National Observer article, "Trumpism 2.0 and what it means for Canada", Supriya Dwivedi said that blaming Trumpism for the "unpalatable aspects of [Canada's] own political discourse" is lazy thinking.[53] It deflects attention away from the fact that our political discourse is in decline because of the behaviour of Canadian media and politicians. While distracted by Trumpism, Canadians downplay extremism, and white supremacy within their own borders. Dwivedi cautioned that in the lead up to the 2022 Presidential election, Canadians would be naive to believe that a reinvigorated Trumpism would not impact Canadians.[53]
Trump-style rhetoric
Journalist Max Fawcett, who is a former editor of Alberta Oil magazine, warned that the use of "Trump-style rhetoric" by some of Canada's "key politicians" is "dangerous".[44] O'Toole featured a modified version of Trump's slogan—"Take Back Canada"—in a video released as part of his official leadership candidacy platform. At the end of the video he called on Canadians to "[j]oin our fight, let's take back Canada."[54][44] In a September 8, 2020, CBC interview, when asked if his "Canada First" policy was different from Trump's "America First" policy, O'Toole said, "No, it was not."[55]
In the first year of Trump's presidency, he used "radically transgressive" racist rhetoric that dehumanized its targets and undermined what had been considered to be norms of a democratic society. He used this inflammatory rhetoric to consolidate power over his base who connected with him on an emotional level as he provided them with targets for their resentments. This hate-filled rhetoric succeeded in distracting the attention of the media away from what he was actually quietly and successfully achieving in terms of public policy changes.[56] Trump used "mockery and defamation" to belittle his political opponents.[33] His confrontational rhetoric appeals to people who feel frustrated that the government has let them down.[49]
Ken Boessenkool, a senior research fellow at the C. D. Howe Institute who worked as a Conservative strategist and as Stephen Harper's campaign manager, cautioned Canadians against what he called "casual Trumpism" in the personal and political, in a January 12, 2021, CBC The Current interview.[57][58] He urged party members to "find policy solutions that speak to [voters], as opposed to stoking their anger."[57]
During a session on "Polarization and cynicism in the contemporary media environment" at the annual Canadian Political Science Association conference, Ian Stedman described an emerging outrage porn problem in the Canadian political landscape that threatened debates on government ethics and accountability.[59] He examined how heightened emotional responses via hashtags and memes were overly simplifying complex debates on social issues instead of contributing to thoughtful discourse. Stedman cited examples of the way in which headlines in Canadian media resembled tweets by President Donald Trump that are intended to elicit emotional responses not call for open debate. Trump's "hollow outrage" became normalized as it was a magnet for attracting engagement. It is based on disapproving and not listening to comments reflecting a differing perspective.[59]
In 2016, 57% of Conservative voters approved of Trump.[5] Only 15% of Canadians said they supported Trump in 2020; most condemned him.[60]
Trump supporters were very active for months prior to the 2019 Canadian federal election, "spout[ing] conspiracy-tinged, anti-Trudeau invective". Thousands of MAGA-labelled Twitter trolls posted anti-Trudeau hashtags such as #TrudeauMustGo and #ExpletiveTrudeau other anti-Trudeau hashtags for months before the election.[42][41]
In January 2022, Lawrence Martin wrote in an opinion piece for The Globe and Mail that Trump's main base of support in Canada was in the Prairie provinces for reasons such as his opposition to political correctness, his opposition to climate change mitigation and his support for oil which is a major industry in those provinces, and his general populism. Ekos Research Associates president Frank Graves also stated in an interview for the article that Trump supporters in Canada are under the age of 50, working-class, male, less educated and live mainly outside urban cores, which is similar to Trump's base in America.[61] He also stated that he believed the same forces that produced the Trump presidency in the U.S. are at work in Canada, albeit on a smaller scale. Though he said that it was too difficult to tell if Trump's level of support would grow or decline in Canada, he pointed to the support level for the right-wing People's Party of Canada over the next few years as a possible barometer.[61]
Following the 2020 United States elections, National Post columnist and former newspaper magnate, Conrad Black, who had had a "decades-long" friendship with Trump, and received a presidential pardon in 2019, in his columns, repeated Trump's "unfounded claims of mass voter fraud" suggesting that the election had been stolen.[62][63]
The leader of the opposition, Erin O'Toole seemed to be using Trump's playbook by 2020 with the use of the "Take back Canada" slogan, similar to Trump's MAGA line, during his 2020 Conservative leadership campaign.[64] While O'Toole and Trump were both aggressively against China, unlike Trump, O'Toole favours free trade and is pro-immigration.[64] Trump's anti-China stance may have been accepted by a number of Canadians who otherwise found little common ground with the former US president.[64] According to an October 2020 Léger poll for 338Canada of Canadian voters, the number of "pro-Trump conservatives" has been growing in the Conservative Party of Canada, whose leadership Erin O'Toole had then recently assumed. Maclean's said that this might explain O'Toole's "True Blue" social conservative campaign.[62] The Conservative Party of Canada is a "big tent" party which also includes "centrist" conservatives as well as Red Tories[62]—also described as small-c conservative, centre-right or paternalistic conservatives as per the Tory tradition in the United Kingdom. 338 Canada posted that the Léger poll results indicated that "Trumpism is alive and well on Canada's right".[65]
Doug Ford
The Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, a Conservative "man of the people", has been compared to Trump.[64] Ford had supported Trump for many years including during Trump's 2016 campaign.[66] The Toronto Star compared Ford and his brother Rob Ford's "shtick of using brash and simple slogans to woo working-class voters" to Trump's. Ford "revelled" in the comparison to Trump and suggested the American president had copied the Fords' populist style.[67] Like Trump, Ford has frequently called out the media referring to them as "liars" who want his "blood" in 2018.[66] In 2019, Ford said that back in 2019, Ford said that he was a "big Republican and "God bless the President."[66] By January 2021, Ford's admiration for Trump shifted as Trump's protectionist policies threatened Ontario during the COVID-19 pandemic and during the steel and aluminum trade wars.[67] Ford began to distance himself from Trump after these trade wars and Trump's impeachments.[67]
In August 2020, Peter Downing, who was one of the founders of the separatist Wexit party—now the Maverick Party—and the director of the public action committee called the Alberta USA Foundation, installed billboards in Edmonton, Alberta with a large photo of Donald Trump and the question, "Should Alberta join the U.S.?"[70]
Kevin O'Leary, a major candidate in the 2017 Conservative leadership election until he withdrew mid-race, was prominently compared to Trump. Both were celebrity businessmen and reality television personalities. O'Leary contended that his policies differed from Trump's, but also that with his toughness and business background he could represent Canada in negotiations with Trump.[71]
Pierre Poilievre, who is the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada and the leader of the Official Opposition, has been compared to Trump;[72]The Economist called him Canada's Trump.[73]Globe and Mail journalist John Ibbitson says that "Poilievreism[...] is not Trumpism".[72] Ibbetson said that the fears that Poilievre's election would mean that the "MAGA wars [were] coming to Canada", "Trumpists have arrived among us", and that the "Conservative Party is turning into the Republican Party" are misplaced.[72] Poilievre ran not just for the leadership of the Conservative Party but as the future Prime Minister of Canada. His campaign promises included cut backs to federal bureaucracy, removing a number of regulations and decreasing funding to the media, particularly the bilingual public broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), a federal Crown corporation.[72] A June 2022 article in The Economist said that Poilievre sought to convert Canadian's "unease into anger" and has focused on "riling [...] up", not reassuring them.[73] A Conservative Party organizer expressed concerns that "Poilievre is too Trumpian for most voters".[73]
↑ Wictionary defines Trumpism as the "philosophy and politics espoused by Donald Trump". One of the first descriptions of the term Trumpism, was in Ruth Marcus's August 25, 2015 Washington Post article. Marcus asked if Trump had a "coherent political philosophy underlying his candidacy" that could be called Trumpism. She said that "Reaganism" exists without Ronald Reagan, but that Trumpism cannot exist without Trump, since Trumpism centred around Trump's personality—"Trumpism is not so much a theory of government as a celebration of one individual's claimed capacity to govern". When President Biden narrowly won the election, a November 7, 2020 Washington Post article described "global Trumpism" as the "nation-first, people-dividing style of governance with a hint of authoritarianism". The authors said that could those who support and emulate Trump and Trumpism could become emboldened to believe that Trump' unexpected strong results in the election confirms wide-spread support for his "arch-conservative populist ideals". A November 2020 article in The Economist, "Trump and Trumpism", said that in 2016, Trumpism appeared to refer to a "rallying-call to the economically distressed", a form of populism. By 2020, just before the 2020 United States presidential election, Trumpism had become the umbrella term for whatever Trump said it was—a "mixture of isolationism, cronyism, nativist rhetoric, somewhat performative authoritarianism, corporate tax cuts and personality cult". In his September 2022 reviews of upcoming books on the theme of the durability of Trumpism, American journalist Michael Hirsh wrote that the "ongoing populist appeal of Trumpism", stems from the way in which it revealed deep "flaws" in the American "political system". Hirsch said that "emerging class differences"—as much as race—contributes to "political polarization" in the United States.
The Conservative Party of Canada, colloquially known as the Tories, is a federal political party in Canada. It was formed in 2003 by the merger of the two main right-leaning parties, the Progressive Conservative Party and the Canadian Alliance, the latter being the successor of the Western Canadian-based Reform Party. The party sits at the centre-right to the right of the Canadian political spectrum, with their federal rival, the Liberal Party of Canada, positioned to their left. The Conservatives are defined as a "big tent" party, practising "brokerage politics" and welcoming a broad variety of members, including "Red Tories" and "Blue Tories".
Pierre Marcel Poilievre is a Canadian politician who has served as the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada and the leader of the Official Opposition since 2022. Poilievre has served as a member of Parliament (MP) since 2004.
Right-wing populism, also called national populism and right-wing nationalism, is a political ideology which combines right-wing politics and populist rhetoric and themes. Its rhetoric employs anti-elitist sentiments, opposition to the Establishment, and speaking to and/or for the "common people". Recurring themes of right-wing populists include neo-nationalism, social conservatism, and economic nationalism. Frequently, they aim to defend a national culture, identity, and economy against perceived attacks by outsiders.
Left-wing populism, also called social populism, is a political ideology that combines left-wing politics with populist rhetoric and themes. Its rhetoric often consists of anti-elitism, opposition to the Establishment, and speaking for the "common people". Recurring themes for left-wing populists include economic democracy, social justice, and scepticism of globalization. Socialist theory plays a lesser role than in traditional left-wing ideologies.
Neo-nationalism, or new nationalism, is an ideology and political movement built on the basic characteristics of classical nationalism. It developed to its final form by applying elements with reactionary character generated as a reaction to the political, economic and socio-cultural changes that came with globalization during the second wave of globalization in the 1980s.
Populism in Canada involves the phenomenon of populist political ideology in Canada. Populism has been a particularly strong phenomenon in Western Canada and in Quebec as promoted by the provincial Social Credit parties in the West and in Quebec and by the Social Credit Party of Canada and by the Reform Party of Canada. John Richards (1981) sees elements of populism in the following political movements:
Erin Michael O'Toole is a Canadian politician who currently serves as the member of Parliament (MP) for Durham since 2012. A member of the Conservative Party, O'Toole also served as the party's leader and the leader of the Official Opposition from 2020 to 2022.
In political science, the terms radical right and populist right have been used to refer to the range of European nationalist, far-right parties that have grown in support since the late 1970s. Populist right groups have shared a number of causes, which typically include opposition to globalisation and immigration, criticism of multiculturalism, and opposition to the European Union.
Rachael Thomas is a Canadian politician who was elected to represent the riding of Lethbridge in the House of Commons of Canada in the 2015 federal election. A member of the Conservative Party, she was reelected in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections. Thomas has served as the Official Opposition critic for Youth, Persons with Disabilities, Status of Women, and Digital Government.
Trumpism is a term for the political ideologies, social emotions, style of governance, political movement, and set of mechanisms for acquiring and keeping control of power associated with Donald Trump and his political base. Trumpists and Trumpian are terms used to refer to those exhibiting characteristics of Trumpism, whereas political supporters of Trump are known as Trumpers.
The Ontario Party is a minor social conservative, fiscal conservative and right-wing populist political party in the Canadian province of Ontario, founded in 2018.
The People's Party of Canada is a right-wing populist federal political party in Canada. The party was formed by Maxime Bernier in September 2018, shortly after his resignation from the Conservative Party of Canada. It is placed on the right-wing to far right of the left–right political spectrum.
Reform UK is a right-wing populist political party in the United Kingdom. Founded as the Brexit Party in November 2018, endorsing hard Euroscepticism, it was renamed on 4 January 2021 after Brexit, becoming primarily an anti-lockdown party. The party was founded by Nigel Farage and Catherine Blaiklock with the stated purpose of advocating for Brexit. Before the UK's withdrawal from the European Union (EU), the party had 23 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). Its largest electoral success was winning 29 seats and the largest share of the national vote in the 2019 European Parliament election in the United Kingdom.
Populism exists in Europe.
During the 1990s New Zealand saw a growth in populism, a political trend whose advocates claim to work for "the people" rather than for the "elite". The rise of populism in the country has been attributed to the introduction of the mixed-member proportional electoral system, as well as to the populist nature of election campaigns, such as that of the Labour Party in the lead-up to the 1999 election. The New Zealand First party, which has historically taken a nationalist standpoint, has been described as a populist party.
The 2021 Canadian federal election was held on September 20, 2021, to elect members of the House of Commons to the 44th Canadian Parliament. The writs of election were issued by Governor General Mary Simon on August 15, 2021, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau requested the dissolution of parliament for a snap election.
Populism in the United States is claimed to go back to the Presidency of Andrew Jackson and members of the People's Party in the 19th century. It has made a resurgence in modern-day politics in not only the United States but also democracies around the world. Populism is an approach to politics which views "the people" as being opposed to "the elite" and is often used as a synonym of anti-establishment; as an ideology, it transcends the typical divisions of left and right and has become more prevalent in the US with the rise of disenfranchisement and apathy toward the establishment. The definition of populism is a complex one as due to its mercurial nature; it has been defined by many different scholars with different focuses, including political, economic, social, and discursive features. Populism is often split into two variants in the US, one with a focus on culture and the other that focuses on economics.
Melissa LantsmanMP is a Canadian politician and public relations executive who serves as the Member of Parliament for Thornhill in the House of Commons of Canada. A member of the Conservative Party of Canada, she was elected in the 2021 Canadian federal election. She is the first openly lesbian and first Jewish woman ever to be elected as a Conservative MP. Upon election of Pierre Poilievre as Conservative Leader, Pierre named Melissa one of two deputy leaders along with Edmonton MP Tim Uppal.
A series of protests and blockades in Canada against COVID-19 vaccine mandates and restrictions, called the Freedom Convoy by organizers, began in early 2022. The initial convoy movement was created to protest vaccine mandates for crossing the United States border, but later evolved into a protest about COVID-19 mandates in general. Beginning January 22, hundreds of vehicles formed convoys from several points and traversed Canadian provinces before converging on Ottawa on January 29, 2022, with a rally at Parliament Hill. The convoys were joined by thousands of pedestrian protesters. Several offshoot protests blockaded provincial capitals and border crossings with the United States.
Bonikowski, Bart (2019). "Trump's Populism: The Mobilization of Nationalist Cleavages and the Future of US Democracy". In Weyland, Kurt; Madrid, Raúl L. (eds.). When Democracy Trumps Populism: Lessons from Europe and Latin America. New York: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108692793. ISBN9781108692793.
Steve Paikin (Director), John Ibbitson, Supriya Dwivedi, Randy Hillier, Barbara Perry(Guests) (January 14, 2021). Is Trumpism Affecting Canadian Politics?. Event occurs at 34:35. Retrieved September 30, 2022.
Perry, Barbara; Scrivens, Ryan (August 19, 2019). Right-Wing Extremism in Canada. Springer Nature. ISBN978-3-030-25169-7.
Perry, Barbara; Mirrlees, Tanner; Scrivens, Ryan (2017). "The Dangers of Porous Borders: The "Trump Effect" in Canada". Journal of Hate Studies: 53–75.
Stedman, Ian (2017). The 'Outrage Porn' Problem: How our Never-Ending Fury is leading to Hollowed-out Discussions about Government Ethics and Accountability. Canadian Political Science Association. Victoria, British Columbia. p.17.
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