Poilievre, "Authoritarianism", And The Culture War Ending

The Left Won, And The Right's Mad

This week, Stephen Maher and Frank Graves have a piece out on Pierre Poilievre and a rising tide of “authoritarianism” amongst his supporters. It’s a fine piece, in a sense – it’s a well written piece that does something I wish more pieces did, which is makes a case and argues it well. The basic thesis is that Canada is not inoculated from the rising authoritarian tide, and that the Canadian Conservatives in general, and Poilievre in particular, are benefitting from it.

The problem with it, frankly, is that it’s getting the right correlations, but it’s missing what is actually causing the change. “Radicalized into toxic views by vaccine mandates, they are far more economically insecure and display higher levels of institutional mistrust than other voters”, the piece argues these voters are, but there’s no evidence that COVID was the start of the process.

In fact, I’m gonna say that all of this started a long time ago – June 28th, 2005.

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That day, for those who don’t remember it, was when 3 Conservative MPs joined the majorities of the NDP, the Bloc, and the Liberals to pass the Civil Marriage Act, also known as the bill that legalized gay marriage in Canada.

The bill was a transformational change in Canada, and obviously as one of those whose right to marry was extended that day, it’s a moment that looms large in my personal politics. But it’s massively understated in the lineage of this country, and the politics of the current moment, because fundamentally, the cultural divide that Graves and Maher are picking up on started then.

The reason that moment isn’t mentioned is simple – the issue went away from frontline politics at the time. Harper brought it back for a free vote when he won in 2006, but he did so knowing he didn’t have the votes to ban it and after promising that even if it did pass, he’d obey the wishes of the Supreme Court, which everyone and their mothers knew would interpret a ban on gay marriage as a Section 15 violation if they ever had to explicitly rule on it. The vote lost, and then the Conservatives dropped the issue.

Gay rights came back onto the political agenda in 2021, when the Liberals tried to pass their law banning conversion therapy, but in the intervening 15 years, the issue just went away. The reason for it was simple – the Conservative Party “elites”, both in Harper’s cabinet and at the staffing level, were either pro gay rights or pragmatists such that they knew a CPC that went to an election trying to repeal gay marriage would get destroyed. And so, the issue laid dormant.

But what it didn’t do was lay dormant for the voters in places where gay marriage and gay rights weren’t necessarily popular. We know from Australia that when the right went from an anti-marriage equality bigot in Tony Abbott to a pro-marriage equality leader in Malcolm Turnbull that the right outperformed in the suburbs and got smashed in working class areas, and then when Turnbull was replaced with another bigot, the gains in the suburbs reversed and the losses in the working class areas did as well.

The 2021 effort to pass a ban on conversion therapy confirmed what we already knew, which is that conservative activists and Conservative MPs were, on the whole, more homophobic than not, and then, at the election, we got a result where the left, in whatever form is dominant in these areas, saw their votes decline in areas where social liberalism in general and gay rights in specific would be difficult topics.

Now, it’s not incorrect to say, as Maher and Graves do, that these people are also anti-vaccination and/or anti-vaccine mandates, but it is incorrect to say that that was the radicalizing moment. I’m sure for some of them it was – and for others, it might have been the moment they went from silent to vocal – but the idea that they were otherwise trusting members of society to nutters over COVID is lunacy. The people who have had the most doubts over COVID were in many cases the same people who would go on rants about “the gays” as late as March 2020 (yes, I’m speaking from an unspeakably awkward personal experience), because the things that made cultural conservatives distrustful didn’t start in 2020.

Any reason the cultural right – be it in areas of conservative strength or in places like rural Newfoundland and Northern Ontario – distrusts the government and modern society has to start with a conversation about where the cultural mainstream was the day I was born. Through an act of luck, I was born the day Bill Clinton started his second term in office, and that was the Congressional term in which DOMA passed with a veto-proof majority. Now, a law enshrining gay marriage just had the votes to pass through a Senate where the GOP had to give 10 votes.

To deny how far we’ve come is to deny just how divorced from the present day the 90s and early 00s were, culturally. Gay rights has been the lynchpin, and in the US there’s absolutely the politics of race that play a role too, but it is the case that the places where gay rights is not popular the GOP have done substantially better since 2008 or 2012, and in the places where gay rights is a fairly uncontroversial view the GOP is in freefall.

In the same way, the next Conservative government will look radically different than the last one, because the last one did come through the suburbs, and right now it doesn’t look like the Tories are going to be making a suburban breakthrough any time soon. It’s clear that the next Tory government won’t go through Burlington and Brampton but Skeena and the Soo, and that the reason for it is that the latter are places where cultural conservatism is the order of the day.

It is an undeniable fact except to people who seem to live in delusion that the average distance on social issues between a Tory voter in Mississauga and a Liberal is functionally non-existent. The reason Scott Reid and David Herle could be friends with Jenni Byrne is that the three of them fundamentally agree on the big things. Put more bluntly, I do not believe that Herle and Reid could be friends with an ardent homophobe. That’s fine, and that’s their right to be friends with whoever they want. But it is the case that geography means more in terms of social values than vote intentions.

Just as there are a ton of socially liberal Conservatives in the Toronto suburbs and the Greater Vancouver Area, there are a ton of culturally conservative Liberals and New Democrats north of Muskoka and the further north on Vancouver Island you go. The reason the socially liberal Tories in the south of Ontario and the culturally conservative Liberals/NDPers vote the way they do is out of a sense of economic priority. As the parties get further apart on cultural issues, the number of people voting for the party they agree with economically and disagree with culturally is falling.

The idea that it’s all, or even mostly, COVID is bullshit, because if it was, why did One Nation come roaring back in recent years in Australia pre-COVID? Why did they get 14% of the vote in Queensland’s 2017 election despite not even standing in every seat? And why did their support come mostly in the north of the state and not at all from the socially liberal southeast?

What’s happening in Canada is the product of a group of people not feeling seen anymore, but the thing is, it didn’t start with COVID and it’s not going to end with it. It’s about a hell of a lot more than that and it’s fundamentally about the fact that these people have lost the cultural argument. On gay rights, on race, on the roles of women, these people lost. Shocker, they’re mad about it, as if groups who lose the cultural argument aren’t always mad about it. Racists didn’t just move on and make brunch with Black Americans once the Civil Rights movement won their legal battles, and the idea that the cultural minority here – which, to be exceedingly clear, is what these people are – would just give up gracefully is a Canadian delusion.

The left won the cultural war, and now the reactionaries are holding their last stand. That’s what all of this – Poilievre’s support, the Convoy, the anti-vax and anti-mandate movement, the PPC’s support at the last election – is about. It’s a losing hand, but it’s all they have left.

Don’t make it seem like some wild phenomenon – it’s just what was always going to happen.