Education, stability help keep populism in check
Job losses in oilpatch could change equation
While a populist movement sweeps the globe, Canada has mostly carried on with a conventional conversation in federal politics.
Relatively high wages and a sense of security from resource-based jobs could be the number one thing keeping Canadian politics in equilibrium, according to new analysis from Macdonald-laurier Institute, a public policy think-tank in Ottawa.
That may be good news at the moment, but it also means that the struggling oilpatch is the only thing standing between Justin Trudeau and a populist surge on the right.
“The oil and gas sector has effectively hoovered up a lot of these people who would have been exposed to changes in manufacturing,” said Sean Speer, a Munk senior fellow at the Macdonald-laurier Institute and former senior economic adviser to former prime minister Stephen Harper.
That’s something policy-makers should keep in mind when they are drawing up regulatory rules and laws that could negatively affect the resource industry, said Speer in an interview with the National Post.
Canada has one of the highest level of post-secondary education in the world and the wage differential between degree-holding workers and high school-educated workers has been growing, another factor in growing populist sentiment which is often targeted at “elites.”
A recent Statistics Canada study found that growth in the oil and gas sector from 2000 to 2008 actually reduced the inequality between various education levels for young people in Canada.
Education level is the common factor between populist voters for Donald Trump in 2016 and Brexit voters in the United Kingdom and these voters have good reason to feel more insecure when their industry is under threat.
Speer writes that the recent downturn in Alberta led to job losses for blue collar workers that were five times worse than for white collar workers. Lawyers working for oil companies, for example, can easily transfer their skills to other industries, which often isn’t as easy for blue collar workers.
Recent analysis of populist politics around the world show it is primarily driven by less-educated people who are losing hope about their economic prospects. Seventy-per cent of people who believe they’ve “fallen behind” see the rise of populist politics as a good thing, for example.
THE OIL AND GAS SECTOR HAS HOOVERED UP A LOT OF THESE PEOPLE WHO WOULD HAVE BEEN EXPOSED TO CHANGES IN MANUFACTURING.
Populism is a term that has become a Rorschach test for political observers, at least since Mark Twain declared that it was the idea that “one man is as good as another, or maybe a little better.” But Speer prefers the explanation that it “repoliticizes issues that the commentariat and establishment have colluded to depoliticize.” For example, the benefits of free trade and high levels of immigration have become an ironclad part of the political consensus and it usually takes a populist movement to bubble up a dissenting view in the national debate.
The focus on immigration has led some to argue that the populist movement is driven by cultural factors and racism, instead of economic insecurity. In a recent book, Harper argued it was primarily an economic phenomenon caused by wage stagnation and job losses brought about by automation and outsourcing.
Speer argues that these arguments aren’t mutually exclusive, but leans toward the explanation that people are responding to “feelings of economic precarity.”
Even if these workers have relatively high incomes, they’re acutely aware of a lack of security in their industry and have a pessimistic view of future employment.
If a populist movement bubbled up in Canada, Speer says he expects that the Conservative Party wouldn’t be caught by surprise in the same way the Republican Party was in the United States by the rise of Donald Trump.
“One thing that inoculates the Conservative Party from the disconnect that was exhibited between the GOP and core voters is the fundraising model,” said Speer. In Canada, parties can’t collect massive donations from corporations in the same way American political parties can and have to rely on many small donations and actually reach out to average voters.
“It shortens the distance from the party and its supporters,” he said.
It wouldn’t be one party or the other that would be more vulnerable to a populist movement, but the entire “conventional political program” we currently operate under, said Speer.