The election issue leaders do not want to talk about
Within minutes of the formal start Wednesday of the federal election period, all party leaders launched their official campaigns with promises to tackle what they see as the major issues facing Canada.
Their lists include housing affordability, help for the middle class, carbon tax, pipelines, immigration, the economy, jobs, Indigenous reconciliation, religious diversity and much more.
Over the next five weeks, Canadians will be inundated with detailed policy platforms on all these key issues.
But missing will be plans on how to address what is arguably the most critical issue of all — our increasingly fractured nation. It’s the big election issue that no one is talking about.
Indeed, this election is actually about fractures between urban and rural, highly educated and moderately educated, elites and ordinary folks. It’s an election about solitudes — West versus East, the rich versus the middle class versus the poor.
While the leaders may talk a little about these divides, none will likely say anything truly unique. Instead, they will simplistically say “vote for me and I will resolve these issues.”
What is more likely to happen is that the leaders will play off of these divides, using “wedge issues” to pit one region against another, one voting bloc against another in their desperate drive to win as many seats as possible in what is shaping up to be an extremely close election.
Sadly, this election could easily see Canada become more polarized than ever, mirroring more and more what’s happening in U.S. politics under Donald Trump.
“Whatever the outcome, I fear a deeply fractured Canada,” pollster Frank Graves tweeted on the eve of the election call. Graves, who is president of EKOS Research, has spent decades studying the growing divides in Canada.
“East-West, social class and gender division are acute and unhealthy. There are two Canadas, riven apart on the new open-ordered axis. Best start thinking soon about how to mend these new fault lines,” he tweeted.
True, Canada has always been a divided nation, spanning vast distances, with serious language and regional divides.
For example, in P.E.I., it used to be well known that some ridings were heavily Catholic and therefore foregone Liberal seats and other ridings were heavily Protestant and therefore foregone Conservative seats.
And in the 1980s, the East-West divide was so great under former prime minister Pierre Trudeau that bumper stickers appeared in Alberta with the words, “Let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark.”
But it is becoming worse. Today, 62 per cent of us believe the country is divided and 51 per cent feel it has worsened over the past 10 years, according to a recent Ipsos poll.
On the urban-rural divide, the split is huge and growing, especially on issues such as the carbon tax and gun controls. In Tuesday’s election in Manitoba, for example, outside of Greater Winnipeg the NDP won only two ridings and the Liberals none.
Many politicians, notably Ontario Premier Doug Ford, have made careers of pitting suburban and rural voters against those living in cities. In trying to appeal to non-urban voters, Ford last year branded downtown voters as “people who look down on the common folk, the people who think they are smarter than other people.”
At the same time, the rich-poor gap has grown so wide that the poor have given up on most politicians working to achieve income equality. In fact, they believe — rightly in many cases — that no politician will save them soon and that few will even try.
What the poor do see too often are politicians bowing to the rich and ultrarich, that 1-per-cent crowd that fights against their taxes going up, money that could be spent to repair decaying schools or fixing playgrounds in poverty-ridden areas.
Ultimately, this election offers party leaders an opportunity to step beyond the polarized way that politics has taken shape in recent years. It’s past the time of fighting the same fights of the 1970s and ’80s. It’s past the time of pitting East against West, rich against poor, rural voters and urban voters.
It’s time our leaders offered Canadians a plan — and some hope — for a truly united Canada.
This election offers party leaders an opportunity to step beyond the polarized way that politics has taken shape in recent years