Identity politics ignores truth that we are all same

We all have identities. We have occupations, ancestry, gender, religion — even hobbies and sports. Our identities are meaningful to us.

And what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s India trip and gender-based budget proved is that politicians who toy with our identities do so with destructive effect.

Trudeau toyed with women’s identity, offering a budget that claimed its central goal was their economic advancement. But the most significant policy to boost women’s economic participation — child care — was nowhere in the budget.

Trudeau’s India trip toyed with Indo-Canadians’ identity, using clothing and symbols. His Liberal MPs even visited survivors of the 1984 anti-Sikh genocide. But there was no comment to PM Narenda Modi about human rights in India.

Now let’s not get this wrong. Canada should have a child care plan that gives women choices about work and redistributes wealth to young working families. We should speak for human rights in India or wherever they’re infringed.

But politicians like Trudeau who toy with identities play a dangerous game.

It’s true enough that the state has no role in telling citizens which identities are acceptable and which are not. But understand how that fact is politically abused.

For Liberals, identity politics is a distraction from economic policies that are very hard on many people. Trudeau won’t increase the federal minimum wage. He sells off public assets through his Infrastructure Bank. Ignores looming personal debts. Weakens private pension plans. Lets Sears default on their promises to workers. Cuts Canadians’ health care funding. Spends billions on tax cuts that give the biggest benefit to incomes over $90,000.

There’s no solution to economic insecurity and inequality — it’s just extend old policies that don’t work and pretend everything’s all right.

So it should be no surprise if Canadians — especially poor and working-class people who are most affected — now reject Trudeau and, with him, the empty identity politics he uses as cover.

In Ontario, we’ve already seen this political process play out. The result is the Wynne Liberals now lead only among upper-class voters, according to a recent EKOS Research poll. Liberal support among self-described working-class Ontarians drops by half ; it’s a third less among poor Ontarians.

The hollowness of liberal identity politics has Trudeau recognizing the wrongs of colonialism, sexism and racism — then letting the people who have all the power and money keep all the power and money. That’s the hijacking of the political left.

But liberal identity politics also empowers the most enduring form of identity politics — conservative identity politics.

If we are all essentially different and stranded on our little islands of identity, then the point of the altright is proven: we are all just tribes in a constant state of war. So every time Trudeau says it’s our differences that make us stronger, he sets the table for the alt-right to feed at. And they gorged.

But it’s all nonsense. In the last century, biology and social sciences proved we are essentially the same, not essentially different. Many differences we believe exist are historic myths and prejudices created by powerful in-groups about less-powerful out-groups. Visit any schoolyard to see this use of power.

Since the last economic recession there’ve been two great games — the economic game of extend and pretend, and the distraction game of identity politics. Both urgently need credible replacements.

Tom Parkin is a former NDP staffer and social-democrat media commentator.