National Post (National Edition)
Time to get out of your echo chamber — democracy needs you.
Canada has reached a populism tipping point and Canadians can no longer count themselves immune from the upheavals underway around the world, the global Edelman Trust Barometer revealed this week. For the first time in the 17 years that the Edelman corporation has been measuring the public’s trust in major institutions in 28 countries, Canadians have fallen into the crisis category of “distrusters.” The country is in trouble.
That was the way Edelman, a communications, marketing and public relations behemoth, highlighted its latest worldwide findings Tuesday at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, with corporate heavyweights and a panel of worthies on hand: Scott Reid, a former director of communications under prime minister Paul Martin, Jan De Silva, president of the Toronto Region Board of Trade, Saul Klein, a University of Victoria business professor and Steve Ladurantaye, the CBC’s managing editor of digital news.
Suit yourself, but you might want to hold off for a while before you load up the pickup truck with boxes of ammo and canned goods and head for the hills.
True enough, Edelman’s survey findings will be especially disturbing if you take the view that distrust of government is always an inherently bad thing, and that such distrust should be situated in the category of “populism,” and that populism must inevitably manifest as a dark and retrograde force of the kind that bore Donald Trump on its shoulders into the American presidency last November. But hold on.
In the months leading up to the October 2015 federal election, the Environics Institute and the Institute on Governance (IOG) undertook a survey that showed one in three Canadians held a deep distrust of Parliament. Things were so bad that nearly seven in 10 Canadians said they were worried that the contesting federal parties were going to somehow rig the results of the vote. That was a trust “crisis” all right. But it didn’t give us a Canadian version of Donald Trump. It gave us Justin Trudeau and a Liberal majority.
Another thing to notice if you’re worried about Trumpstyle mania engulfing Canada is that in several causes of distrust and disaffection — corruption, globalization, eroding social values, immigration, and the pace of innovation — the Edelman Trust Barometer shows Canadian anxiety levels at data points well below the stress thresholds Americans have been enduring.
The global patterns turned up by the Trust Barometer also mirror the global findings for 2016 in the annual Freedom House report released in Washington, D.C. just a few days ago. The Freedom House roundup notes that 2016 was the 11th year in a row of declines in freedom around the world, and for the first time, the list of countries undergoing setbacks in civil and political rights was dominated by fully functioning democracies. “Free” countries such as the United States, Brazil, Denmark, and France accounted for a larger share of reversals than in any year since 2006. The Trust Barometer, meanwhile, reports a “systemic” loss of faith in government among the citizens of Western-style democracies. The Edelman effort also more or less echoes what the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada revealed last week in its own survey-based analysis of Canadian public opinion.
According to the McGill Institute study, only about 45 per cent of Canadians would roust themselves to oppose a total shutdown of immigration, while a third are neither here nor there on the subject, and one in five would be happy to close the doors altogether. According to the Trust Barometer, about half of us believe that an “influx” of immigrants would be damaging to “the economy and national culture” of the country.
But when did this “influx” happen? The word means inundation. It means flood. Canada took in about 40,000 Syrian refugees over the past year or so, and the project got a lot of attention. But every year since 1979, Canada has taken in more than 27,000 refugees, on average. Over the past 15 years or so, roughly 250,000 immigrants have settled in Canada, on average, each year. The target for 2017 is 300,000.
That’s not much of an “influx,” and this is where some of the most telling data from the Trust Barometer comes into it. It’s not as wide as in the United States, but there’s still a 15-point spread in the “institutional trust” levels separating most Canadians from “well-informed” Canadians. More than half of us say we don’t listen to people or groups we disagree with. We’re 3.5 times as likely to ignore information that challenges our opinions. The result, says Edelman Canada president Lisa Kimmel, is “an echo chamber effect, which is magnifying the crisis in trust.”
Distrust of conventional news media is rising, too. But then, so is distrust of “social” media. As for the “tipping point” that has caused Canada to slip for the first time into the rank of “distrusters,” it turns out to mean that Canada has dropped to a place about halfway along the 28-country scale, between the Netherlands and Sweden.
Roughly 55 per cent of Canadians appear to feel the system isn’t working for them — which is atrocious, but still lower than the proportion in that category you’ll find among the Americans, the Irish, the Australians, the Germans and the British, to cite a few. The French appear to be utterly miserable. Seven in 10 respondents said the system is failing them.
The Trust Barometer might not tell us much more than we already knew, but it confirms the long-term general trend toward a lassitude and ennui that has been enfeebling the world’s democracies for some long while now. Those trends were illustrated most vividly last year in the work of Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk, whose crunching of three decades’ worth of World Values Survey data upturned long-standing assumptions about the solidity of liberal democracies.
Ever since the Baby Boomers took over, fundamental democratic values have been on the decline. Trust in democracy’s political institutions has been plummeting. Conventional political engagement has given way among Millennials to more impromptu, single-issue protests, boycotts, and “grassroots” social activism. The Edelman Trust Barometer bears out the World Values Survey data, but some caution should be taken before leaping to conclusions about what it means for Canada.
About 60 per cent of Canadians have no confidence in the current crop of politicians — but that’s about the same percentage of voters who didn’t cast ballots for Liberal candidates in the 2015 federal election. About half of us say globalization is headed in the wrong direction, but that’s not so different from what the globalization-boosting Liberals say when they warn about globalization’s pitfalls. One in three Canadians say they’d back politicians who can make their lives better even if they tend towards exaggeration — but when has it been otherwise?
A healthy distrust of “experts,” the media, government and the business class is not a bad thing, but democracy is in a shambles the world round, and it’s not going to get better by heading for the hills, or by retreating into some safe space, or by listening only to people you agree with, or by ignoring information that challenges your opinions. You’re a citizen. Act like one. Get out of your echo chamber.
You might be surprised by what you find out there.