The polarization that has upended American politics has seeped across the border. Susan Delacourt writes:
The Steam Whistle brewery in Toronto is not a politics-free zone.
Back in 2013, a guy named Justin Trudeau held one of his final big social events there before he became Liberal leader. A decade earlier, Conservative leadership candidate Peter MacKay held an event for his supporters at Steam Whistle too. In 2014, new Liberal MP Adam Vaughan celebrated his byelection victory at the brewery — with Trudeau at his side.
But, this week, things changed:
It wasn’t until this week that Steam Whistle’s management felt it had to draw a line between the brewery and the political company it was keeping. In this case, it was Conservative leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre and one of the large rallies that is quickly becoming his trademark.
“Steam Whistle is in no way affiliated with Pierre Poilievre, does not endorse his political views, nor did the brewery sponsor the event,” read the statement handed out to event attendees on Tuesday night.
Predictably, Poilievre and his supporters went ballistic:
Poilievre’s supporters were bristling at Steam Whistle’s disclaimer on Tuesday night, eager to see it as another example of “cancel culture” and Conservatives being punished once again for being politically incorrect. But Poilievre has been whipping up the polarizing rhetoric himself at his big rallies, presenting Canadian politics as a simple battleground between the “gatekeepers” and those who want to storm the gates.
Things are getting nasty:
This is how polarization creeps out of politics and starts infiltrating the ordinary lives of citizens. It stretches beyond mere ideological differences and starts influencing how people organize their social and business contacts. Hanging around with the wrong political crowd, whether that’s at a brewery or an ice cream shop, can be damaging to one’s livelihood.
In the United States, where polarization is rampant and much tracked in recent decades, political differences have fused with identity and community to an extent where Republicans and Democrats increasingly form their own insular worlds among the like-minded. Red and blue sides consume their own media — Fox for Republicans, CNN and MSNBC for the Democrats — and build friendships and business contacts among those who share their own view of the world. The danger isn’t just that they don’t mingle with diverse views; it’s that they see the other side as a sworn enemy.
In a Pew Research Center report on America’s “exceptional” state of polarization in late 2020, authors Michael Dimock and Richard Wike wrote: “What’s unique about this moment — and particularly acute in America — is that these divisions have collapsed onto a singular axis where we find no toehold for common cause or collective national identity.”
When political parties become tribes, politics becomes war.
Image: The Toronto Star
