The populist right is rising around the world. Why not in Canada?

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All over the democratic world, the hard right – nationalist, populist, anti-immigration, contemptuous of democratic norms and cozy with authoritarian regimes – is on the march.

The United States, of course, is the most prominent example: Under Donald Trump it has become a shining city on a hill for right-wing nutters the world over. But look around. In Germany, the militantly nativist, pro-Russia AfD, some of whose leading figures could fairly be described as neo-Nazi, has just won an election for the first time, in the state of Saxony-Anhalt. It is the largest opposition party in the Bundestag and is now in first place in some national polls.

In France, the National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, whose “post-fascist” makeover has not dimmed her anti-immigrant, pro-Russian appeal, would be elected president if an election were held today, notwithstanding her recent conviction for embezzlement. Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, is an erstwhile Trump fan who has moderated some of her stands in office but whose ultranationalist Brothers of Italy party has yet to entirely shake off its fascist roots.

Japan’s Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, though a member of the Liberal Democratic Party that has governed the country for 67 of the last 71 years, comes from its far-right wing, offering a mix of strident nationalism, social conservatism, and revisionist accounts of Japan’s wartime record. And in Britain, Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, though it has lost some support in recent months, is still neck-and-neck with the governing Labour party in the polls.

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And those are only the most prominent examples. Across the OECD, the picture is much the same: in Recep Erdogan’s Turkey and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel, hard-right, nationalist-populist parties are in power, as they are in Chile, Colombia and Costa Rica. In Czechia and Slovakia, Switzerland and Slovenia, Latvia, Finland and New Zealand they are part of the governing coalition.

Elsewhere they are major players, even outside government: in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Norway, Poland, Portugal and Sweden they are among the top two parties, either in terms of seats in the legislature or recent national polls, and have significant support in Denmark, Estonia, Greece, the Netherlands and Spain. Even where they have been expelled from power, as in Hungary or Lithuania, they remain potent politically.

Everywhere, it seems, the far right is ascendant – everywhere, that is, except Canada. Well, there are a few others: Ireland, Mexico, maybe one or two more. But Canada is by far the most significant outlier. Not only are the governing Liberals well ahead in the polls, but the opposition Conservatives would qualify as left-of-centre in many OECD countries. Meanwhile, the party that most fits the description of far-right, the People’s Party, has no seats and is languishing at 1 per cent in the polls.

What accounts for this? Why has Canada so far escaped being sucked into the nationalist-populist vortex? There are several possible explanations. It is hard to mount a virulently anti-immigrant campaign, for starters, when close to 50 per cent of the population are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. (It was 44 per cent as of the 2021 census but has surely grown since then.)

Opposition to immigration tends to be strongest in places with little experience of it.

Even in the face of the Liberals’ acknowledged mishandling of immigration, popular opposition, media predictions to the contrary, was relatively muted. That may be a product of our geography, surrounded as we are by three oceans. Panicky claims that we are about to be “inundated” or “invaded” are hard to sustain.

Neither do appeals to anti-elite sentiment have quite the same ring here as in other countries. Canada has not suffered anything like the same series of traumas as the United States, for example, has – 9/11, Iraq, the financial crisis and housing market collapse, disasters that convinced many Americans that no one in authority knew anything.

We have our divisions, certainly, including the cultural-educational-topographical fissures – snooty, university-educated metropolitans versus hard-working small-town and rural folk – that disfigure most democracies today. But again these have not reached quite such toxic levels – possibly because, as the political scientist Andrew Potter has argued, they are subsumed in the regional and linguistic resentments that have traditionally defined our politics.

These are potent enough, as we see today, but remain largely the preserve of elite accommodation, and as such, manageable. We have a lot of experience in this sort of thing, and while this has come at a cost, and is often infuriating, it has given us a knack for what is sometimes called “mutual accommodation.”

Much credit should also be given to Donald Trump. Mr. Trump has done much to harm the fortunes of nationalist-populist parties everywhere, who have been rushing to dissociate themselves from him: If they have been doing better of late, it is despite, not because of his encouragement.

But in Canada he is not merely a cautionary tale, a horrible example of what happens when far-right lunatics are let loose in the halls of power. He is a clear and present danger. When the most famous populist leader on Earth is attempting to impoverish and annex the country, it does not do your cause any favours to be seen to associate with him, even tonally, as Pierre Poilievre discovered.

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Still, some credit – and I mean this without any irony – should also be given to Mr. Poilievre. It isn’t as if there is no support for Trump-style populism in Canada. There is plenty. But it is almost entirely contained within the Conservative Party. Mr. Trump’s threats on the country have certainly cut into that support, but even today 33 per cent of Canadian Conservatives say they have a favourable view of him (among the other main parties it is 4 per cent).

That section of the Conservative coalition has caused Mr. Poilievre considerable discomfort, and contributed mightily to his current odium. It has made it hard for him to stand squarely against Mr. Trump and Trumpism, and so increased suspicion of him among traditional Conservatives and centrists.

To be sure, he may be fairly accused of having given oxygen to the Trump wing of his party, particularly during his campaign for the leadership. The conspiracy theories, the media-baiting, the flirtations with crypto-currency bros and tirades against the World Economic Forum, all these helped to legitimize the worst elements in the party – as did Mr. Poilievre’s invitation to various far-right “influencers ” to attend the party’s recent convention.

But – he kept them in the party. In early 2022, the People’s Party was running as high as 10 per cent in some polls, driven by the same anti-vaccine, anti-elite fervour that fuelled the occupation of downtown Ottawa, and that, by toppling Erin O’Toole as the Conservative leader, opened the way for Mr. Poilievre to succeed him. But since then, it has been all downhill for the PPC.

He has done so, what is more, while giving them very little in substantive policy terms. Mr. Poilievre was a late entry to the immigration controversy, and however distasteful I might find some of his interventions since then, they can hardly be called outside the mainstream. He has not taken as forthright a stand against Mr. Trump as he might, but he is in no sense an ally.

He has the usual conservative positions on crime, though his professed willingness to invoke the notwithstanding clause puts him to the right of, say, Stephen Harper. But as for the rest, he is pretty much a mainstream, small-government, small-l libertarian conservative. His populism is more performative than real. He snarls at the right people, sneers at “woke” excesses in the correct fashion. As it turns out, for many on the populist right, that’s enough.

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Is that the whole story, then? Canada did not go down the nationalist-populist rabbit hole through a fortuitous combination of demography, geography, and the political calculations of the Conservative leader? Not quite. Any account of Canada as outlier has to contend with the ways in which we ... aren’t. In truth we have gone some way in that direction. We’ve just done it under the Liberals.

The Carney government is nationalist, even fervently so. But whereas European right-wing nationalists rail against a supposed left-wing Eurocracy in Brussels, the Carneyites are lucky enough to have Mr. Trump as their foil. So it comes out sounding a lot nicer: nationalism contra nationalism.

What is more, where nationalism in other countries manifests as opposition to “globalism,” for the Carney nationalists globalism – trading with other countries – is part of the solution, the means of reducing our dependence on the United States, and therefore our exposure to Trumpian blackmail.

Populism? There’s some of that, too. What do you think cancelling the carbon tax, symbol of all that was Laurentian and out of touch, was about? It may have been terrible policy, but it was what the people wanted. It was also a central plank in the Conservative platform – the central plank, in fact – but then, so have been a lot of things the Carney government has done.

Immigration has been slashed, to the point that the country’s population is now, for the first time in our history, actually shrinking. Asylum claimants who have been in the country past an arbitrary deadline have been denied the right to an independent hearing. Pipelines and other infrastructure have been fast-tracked. Environmental safeguards have been dismantled. Had any Conservative leader done even half these, we would be telling ourselves that the dark rightist wave had crashed ashore in Canada. But because it’s the Liberals doing it, no one cares.

Indeed, in some respects Mr. Carney has shown an authoritarian streak that would repel most mainstream conservatives, notably in the powers given police to compel internet providers to provide information on their subscribers. In his treatment of Parliament – his refusal to attend Question Period, his arbitrary limits on debate, his frequent recourse to omnibus bills – he has been as imperious as any populist autocrat. As for cozying up to dictators, while Mr. Carney has been admirably defiant of Vladimir Putin, he has presented a rather friendlier face to Xi Jinping.

I don’t want to say that Canada’s outlier status is entirely false. It’s real, and it’s something to be celebrated. But as always in Canadian politics, part of the story lies in the endless plasticity of the shape-shifters in the Liberal Party.