The People and The Nation: The “Thick” and the “Thin” of Right-Wing Populism in Canada
Chris Erl , McGill University
Objective. While Canada is commonly portrayed as a bastion of political moderation, two influen- tial right-wing populist (RWP) movements appeared in the past decade. This study examines sup- port for the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) and “Ford Nation” of the eponymous Toronto-based political family, comparing each movement’s supporters. Methods. Data from the 2014 Toronto Election Study and 2019 Canadian Election Study were analyzed with logistic regression models to assess differences between supporters of each movement. Results. Populism as a “thin-centered ide- ology” is displayed by the differences between each movement. Ford Nation advanced a suburban- focused neoliberal populism while the PPC blended libertarianism and civilizationist–nationalist rhetoric. Contrary to both movements’ platforms, PPC supporters did not display significant an- imosity toward immigrants, while those of the Ford Nation did. The supporters of Ford Nation were distinct among conventional supporters of RWP movements because they tended to be both immigrants and economically secure. Conclusions. While both the PPC and Ford Nation are RWP movements, each movement is only nominally related, as evidenced by their different underlying “thick” ideologies and the substantial differences among their supporters.
Introduction
The 2010s proved to be a decade of incredible success for right-wing populist (RWP) movements around the globe. Their success in Canada, though, has been more restrained (Budd, 2020; Nanos, 2020). The insulation from widespread electoral success for more extreme forms of populism has been attributed to Canada’s cultural and political charac- teristics, such as the federal government’s promotion of multiculturalism as a Canadian characteristic, cleavages between linguistic and geographically situated groups, and the re- liance of minority governments on informal, moderating governing coalitions (Ambrose and Mudde, 2015; Gordon, Jeram, and van der Linden, 2019; Taub, 2017). Popular me- dia and think-tanks suggest that Canadian voters are not calling for RWP options from the grassroots (Morden and Anderson, 2019). The populist messaging that has appeared in recent Canadian campaigns has been driven by political elites themselves as a political strategy, rather than originating from popular outcry. Recent scholarship classifies populism as a “thin-centered ideology” (Freeden, 1998; Mudde, 2007). This conceptualization—the “ideational approach” to populism—argues that there is little ideological grounding to populism, which is merely appended to existing “thick” ideologies, such as neoliberalism, nativism, or libertarianism. Populism is thus a tool used by leaders to create in-groups and out-groups and situate themselves in opposi- tion to entrenched elites and attempting to evoke strong emotional responses among their
Direct correspondence to Chris Erl, Department of Geography and Centre for the Study of Demo- cratic Citizenship, McGill University, 805 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 0B9, Canada [email protected]