Fringe voices have their place, too

The effects of the Capitol Hill riot in Washington, D.C., continue to reverberate more than two weeks later. They were the backdrop of President Joe Biden's inaugural speech (“violence sought to shake the Capitol's very foundation”) and have since led to growing calls to excommunicate the “far right” from Conservative politics in Canada.

This instinct is understandable. It was impossible to watch the scenes of primal violence at the U.S. Capitol and not feel troubled by the toxic mix of illiberalism and extremism that was on display. There mustn't be tolerance for these forces in mainstream Canadian politics.

But we ought to be careful not to overreach, either. Although we may be able to come to a consensus on the most extreme views, there's a risk that well-intended efforts to isolate the mostly undefined “far right” will end up marginalizing a constellation of ideas and political positions that should be able to find expression in mainstream politics. A much-needed push for more moderation, reason and dispassion cannot become an excuse for a top-down, anti-democratic homogenization of our politics.

This is particularly important in light of the rise of political populism around the world. Cas Mudde, a leading scholar on populist movements, has written about how populism is in part a reaction to the “depoliticization” of important issues from the political agenda by business, cultural and political elites. In its most constructive form, populism amounts to a popular movement to reopen debates on settled questions — it is, in short, a counterbalancing agenda of “repoliticization.”

It would be ironic, therefore, if the reaction to modern populism was a narrowing of political debate and representation. Recent calls from the Liberal party and various media commentators to purge Conservative politics of the so-called extreme right tilt in this direction. The risk, of course, is a further depoliticization of the range of legitimate issues and perspectives permitted in Canadian politics.

Such an anti-populist backlash may inadvertently breed more agitation and resentment among those who are already skeptical about the political establishment. But, more importantly, it can cause our representative democracy to neglect a sizable minority on any given issue. We could end up with a form of elite politics that's increasingly unrepresentative over time.

Take abortion, for instance. Although polling tells us that roughly one-quarter of Canadians (which goes up or down based on the survey question) favour some form of legal restrictions, the Liberal

party has actively excluded pro-life candidates from running under its banner for two election cycles.

This essentially means that as many as six or seven million voting-age Canadians cannot run for office as Liberal candidates, even if they otherwise agree on the broad outlines of the party's policy agenda. The implicit message is that this complicated moral question is settled and their voices are unworthy of political representation.

Immigration policy is another such issue. For all of the political backslapping about Canadians' support for immigration, the data tell us it's more complicated. Polls consistently find that something like 40 per cent of the Canadian population has misgivings about the government's immigration policy, including our annual targets. Yet this perspective is largely excluded from our politics, except for fringe voices like the People's party.

Our political parties have essentially colluded for the past 20 years to depoliticize questions about immigration policy from mainstream debate. This seems neither prudential nor sustainable given that the rise of populism in other countries has been driven in large part by this issue.

The risk is that something happens like a major economic

WE OUGHT TO BE CAREFUL NOT TO OVERREACH.

recession or a sudden influx of migrants and there's a popular backlash that could undermine the whole system. Protecting Canada's immigration policy sweet spot — relatively high levels of public support for relatively high levels of immigration — requires that we take these sentiments seriously.

This isn't a call for our political class to succumb to a politics of the lowest common denominator. We don't want members of Parliament swearing allegiance to QAnon in order to win party nominations or outsourcing their political judgment to the loudest and most radical voices among us.

But it does mean that we need to be more cognizant of the representativeness and responsiveness of our politics. The middle ground between a closed-off technocratic politics and a demagogic populism is what American political scientist Michael Lind has described as “democratic pluralism.” The basic idea is that we must bring expression to the plurality of interests and perspectives represented in our society and ultimately strive for a politics of compromise and settlement.

As Canadian society grows more diverse, our democracy is bound to get messier and more complicated. Democratic pluralism will therefore only become more important. It's the best tool that we have to reconcile genuine political differences and identify and isolate real extremism.