The People and the Nation: the “Thick” and the “Thin” of Right-Wing Populism in Canada

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 support 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 ideology” 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 media 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 opposition 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]. The author would like to thank Benjamin Forest (Department of Geog- raphy and Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, McGill University) and the paper’s reviewers for their comments and guidance. SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY C 2020 by the Southwestern Social Science Association DOI: 10.1111/ssqu.12889 2 Social Science Quarterly followers (Kissas, 2020; Peetz, 2019). The adoption of “thin populism” can serve as a way for those with elite backgrounds to lead movements seemingly against their own interests (Jagers and Walgrave, 2007; Oliver and Rahn, 2016). The two major RWP movements that disrupted the Canadian political scene in the past decade—Ford Nation and the Peo- ple’s Party of Canada (PPC)—provide an opportunity for a comparative analysis between how two RWP movements can espouse differing core ideologies and appeal to distinct electoral bases. Ford Nation is a self-bestowed moniker referring to the Ford family and their supporters. Beginning in the mid-1990s from their base in suburban Toronto, the Fords have campaigned on what they call a customer-service-oriented, small government, and populist platform (Ford and Ford, 2016). While finding early success at the municipal level in Toronto, Ford Nation has become a fixture in Ontario’s provincial politics, with the movement’s de facto leader, Doug Ford, becoming the Progressive Conservative (PC) Premier of Ontario in June 2018. The success of Ford Nation has come, in large part, by drawing on the support of working-class suburbanites in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA), many of whom are recent immigrants (Doolittle, 2014). The PPC is an electoral project begun by former Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) cabinet minister Maxime Bernier. Established in the lead-up to the 2019 Canadian Fed- eral Election, the party garnered considerable media attention and ran candidates in 315 of Canada’s 338 electoral constituencies. Despite this, the PPC earned only slightly over 1.6 percent of total votes cast and failed to secure any seats in Parliament. After the election, the Canadian media derided the PPC as a ‘vanity project’ that failed because “Bernier’s brand of populism was just too extreme, particularly when it came to his views on immi- gration” (Quan, 2019: no page numbers). From a classical political geographic perspective, the two movements appear to share a common space on the electoral map. As shown in Figure 1, the two movements did well in the same areas, specifically the working-class, postwar suburbs of Toronto. Nonetheless, analyses of survey data show that they have distinct bases of support. Moreover, their leaders advance distinct brands of populism. While Bernier draws heavily on a blend of libertarian, nativist, and antimigrant rhetoric, the Fords rely on a neoliberal, “common sense politics” message. Ford Nation attempts to exploit Canada’s rural/suburban/urban divide, highlighting the geographic cleavages in the GTHA while enthusiastically soliciting the votes of recent immigrants (Silver, Taylor, and Calderón-Figueroa, 2020). In contrast, Bernier’s PPC focuses libertarian economics while simultaneously making passionate defenses of settler colonial heritage and the preservation of “Western civilization,” borrowing rhetoric from the “civilizationist–nationalist” RWP parties of northern and western Europe (Brubaker, 2017a). This leads to a natural question: who are the supporters behind each movement? While scholars have examined the electorate supporting Ford Nation, particularly those who el- evated Rob Ford to the office of Mayor of Toronto (see Kipfer and Saberi, 2014; Kiss, Perrella, and Spicer, 2019; Silver, Taylor, and Calderón-Figueroa, 2020; Walks, 2015), the relative recent origin of the PPC has not allowed for any analyses of its supporters. Using the conceptualization of populism as a thin ideology to which distinct economic and social policy specifics can be added, I posit that the bases of support for the two movements and their leaders—Maxime Bernier as the leader of the PPC and Doug Ford as the de facto leader of Ford Nation—are, while sharing some commonalities, demographi- cally and ideologically distinct. Framing populism as a thin ideology helps to explain why movements of an ostensibly similar ideological outlook can sound so different and appeal to such distinct electorates. The “Thick” and the “Thin” of Right-Wing Populism in Canada 3 FIGURE 1 Doug Ford’s 2014 Mayoral Vote and the PPC’s 2019 Toronto-Based Vote Aggregated to the City’s Forward Sortation Areas. 4 Social Science Quarterly I draw on data from two surveys of potential voters: the 2014 Toronto Election Study, focused on the city’s municipal election in which Doug Ford was a mayoral candidate, and the 2019 Canadian Election Study, which marked the first appearance of PPC candidates on a general election ballot (McGregor, Moore, and Stephenson, 2014; Stephen- son et al., 2020). I find that, while the PPC and Ford Nation share ideological common ground, there are differences in the demographic composition of their supporters. Those indicating support of the PPC are decidedly more male, less wealthy, are dissatisfied with Canadian democracy, pessimistic about the economy, and maintain a dislike of feminists. Ford Nation supporters, alternatively, are less educated, foreign-born, living in less dense neighborhoods, and have a negative perspective toward immigrants. On issues-based ques- tions, PPC supporters and those behind Ford Nation defy expectations, warranting further analysis. Thin Right-Wing Populism and Its Supporters RWP has seen a global resurgence in the last decade, from the 2010 election of Viktor Orban’s Fidez in Hungary to Jair Bolsonaro’s assumption of the Brazilian presidency in 2019. In the year 2016 alone, the success of the Brexit Referendum, the election of Ro- drigo Duterte as President of the Philippines, and the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency of the United States helped to fundamentally reshape the global order and show a tangible result of the global electorate’s fascination with populist campaigns (Norris and Inglehart, 2019). Recent scholarship asserts that populism is a “thin-centred ideology” consisting primarily of opposition to institutionalism and the promotion of the “will of the people” (Guderjan and Wilding, 2018; Mudde, 2007; Stanley, 2008). Consequently, populist movements

Load more