Healthy distrust of ‘experts’ good, but don’t dismiss democracy

Canadians have joined people around the world skeptical of governments

Canada has reached a populism tipping point and Canadians can no longer count themselves immune from the upheavals around the world, the global Edelman Trust Barometer revealed last week.

For the first time in the 17 years the Edelman corporation has been measuring public trust in major institutions in 28 countries, Canadians have fallen into the crisis category of “distrusters.”

That was the way Edelman, a communications, marketing and public relations behemoth, highlighted its latest worldwide findings.

Suit yourself, but you might want to hold off for a while before you load up and head for the hills.

Edelman’s survey findings will be especially disturbing if you think distrust of government is always a bad thing, and that such distrust is “populism,” and that populism must inevitably manifest as a retrograde force of the kind that bore Donald Trump into the American presidency. But hold on.

In the months leading up to the 2015 federal election, the Environics Institute and the Institute on Governance (IOG) undertook a survey that showed one in three Canadians distrusted Parliament.

Nearly seven in 10 said they were worried the federal parties would somehow rig 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.

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 recently.

It 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” nations 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 citizens of Westernstyle democracies.

The Edelman effort more or less echoes what the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada revealed in its own survey-based analysis of Canadian public opinion. It says 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 and five want to close the doors altogether.

According to the trust barometer, about half of us believe an “influx” of immigrants would damage “the economy and national culture” of the country.

But when did this “influx” happen? Canada took in about 40,000 Syrian refugees over the past year or so, but 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 in.

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.

The result, says Edelman Canada president Lisa Kimmel, is “an echo chamber effect, which is magnifying the crisis in trust.”

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 ignoring information that challenges your opinions.