THE CHRISTMAS TREE INDICATOR
In an increasingly polarized world, even festive décor choices say something about inequality.
Christmas tree sales have apparently been brisk in Ottawa’s ByWard Market this season, with an interesting twist on consumer demand.
By last weekend, according to the tree salesman, two types of trees were in danger of selling out: the smallest ones, under a metre tall, and the largest ones, stretching over two metres high.
The Christmas tree market, at least at this particular outlet this year, seems to have fallen into the disappearing-middle trend that we’ve been seeing in politics and the shopping centres.
Just a block from that Christmas tree stall is Ottawa’s major downtown mall, the Rideau Centre, which has also been experiencing this market divide. A little over a year ago, the general manager of the mall was explaining in a CBC interview how shoppers were flocking to either high-end luxury stores, or deep-discount bargain outlets. As for the middle, well, not so much.
“It’s called high-low or consumer fragmentation,” Cindy VanBuskirk said in the 2015 interview. “I think there is definitely an audience and frankly our sales results bear that out.”
Consumer-industry analysts have been linking this trend to the shrinking middle class, which also corresponds to the increasing polarization and fragmentation in politics.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberals believe they’ve bucked the trend with their solid occupation of the middle ground in Canadian politics, tilting left and right, depending on the issue or circumstances. They argue that the middle class can only be revived with a party in the middle.
Whether the Liberals can continue to dominate the political middle will be a big question in 2017 — not just for the government, but for the opposition parties, too.
In fact, this may be the main question of the two big political leadership contests next year: the Conservatives, choosing Stephen Harper’s replacement in May, and the New Democrats, picking a successor to Thomas Mulcair in the fall.
Not so long ago, these two parties had good reason to believe they were going to profit from the polarizing trend that seemed to be creeping into Canadian politics, that the 2015 election was going to boil down to a clear choice between New Democrats on the left and Conser- vatives on the right. The Liberals, with their mushy middle, were supposed to be relegated to the history books.
The 2015 election, we’ll remember, started that way, but ended rather differently.
So now, heading into 2017, both parties are grappling with whether to move farther to the left or right, or whether to hover closer to the middle of the political spectrum.
In the Conservative leadership race, it’s Kellie Leitch who is most vocally playing on partisans’ temptation to dig in on the right — the reactionary right, with all this talk of Canadian-values tests. Donald Trump’s success in the United States is also feeding into some Conservatives’ convictions that the path to victory in 2019 is to embrace the hard right.
Most of the other contenders are veering toward more moderate middleground conservatism. (I’d like to list them all, but there are too many to name. And who knows, someone else may have entered the contest between the time I write this and when it’s published.)
The NDP leadership race has the opposite problem — too few contenders. But it too is trying to reckon with how far it wants to wander to the edges of the political spectrum.
The Leap Manifesto, championed by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein at the convention last spring, is a clear call for the NDP to be more unapologetically left. Others in the NDP argue, with some justification, that major gains have been made in recent history only when the party buffed some of the socialist edge off its policies.
Whenever that NDP race does heat up, expect to hear a lot of this existential debate playing out among the contenders.
Last weekend, as we were buying our decidedly mid-height tree, I asked the salesman how he explained the surging demand for either very small or very large trees this Christmas. This being Ottawa, he of course had a political answer. He said that the Trump victory and an unstable world economy may have made people less willing to travel over the holidays — so apartment-dwellers were staying in their own place with their tiny trees, while wealthier people were choosing to go big at home.
It’s as good an explanation as any, though the travel aversion could also have something to do with the unpredictable weather. In the past week, temperatures in Ontario have been swinging between extremely frigid to unseasonably above zero. Even the weather, it seems, is having a hard time staying in the moderate middle. sdelacourt@bell.net