The anger which overtook the United States four years ago is drifting north. Susan Delacourt writes:
Large-scale rail shutdowns, Indigenous blockades, a new flutter of Western separatism from elected MPs in the House of Commons — a running theme throughout is the idea of governance itself as optional.
Grievances and strikes aren’t new in this country; neither are air crashes or disease outbreaks — just a couple of the other issues on which Trudeau offered updates at his “that’s enough” news conference on Friday.
What’s new in the array of issues confronting Trudeau in this early part of 2020 is an emerging set of doubts about whether government can broker differences and come to any kind of middle ground.
And we now have numbers behind the burgeoning grievances:
Ekos pollster Frank Graves has been doing some major research into populism and whether it exists in Canada in 2020. He told me on Friday, as we were waiting to see what Trudeau would say at his news conference, that some of the indicators he’s seeing are disturbing.
Canadians are increasingly settling into polarized views around education, science, climate change and immigration, for instance. The poles have deepened and grown farther apart in just four years too, between Trudeau’s first election and his recent re-election. But Graves doesn’t think this is a Trudeau problem as much as it is a potential crisis for the very idea of governance.
“We are approaching fundamental legitimacy crisis points on some of these issues,” Graves said.
Yesterday, I wrote about the legitimacy crisis in the United States. We appear to be headed in the same direction. We are, in short, in dangerous territory.
Image: World Nomads Journal
