“We’ve never been so divided.” I have heard that phrase more times than I can count, recently. It’s bad enough that we hear examples of polarization so often in American news, but it’s much worse that we see so many examples of it here in Canada. It seems that our political rhetoric is increasingly negative, personal, and even violent. And elected officials are seeing the results of that awful rhetoric, in the form of harassment, threats, and even attacks. Many politicians are leaving public service. I myself had to quit federal and provincial politics, for the sake of my mental health. Polarization is undermining our political institutions in numerous ways, wasting time and resources on petty partisan battles even when it isn’t stoking resentment and dispensing disinformation.
But what if I told you that Canadian society isn’t actually divided?
More Divided than Ever?
This past week I attended the Ontario Small Urban Municipalities (OSUM) conference in Orillia, along with Councillor Rowley. We got to spent some quality time with Councillor Mary Catherine O’Neill from Alnwick-Haldimand, and Deputy Mayor Nicole Beatty from Cobourg; and we enjoyed some very informative presentations, including the first Friday session held by Andrew Parkin from the Environics Institute, a polling firm.
Parkin started by sharing some polling results that said, as we so often hear, “we’ve never been more divided.” The twist: that polling data was from 1992, when people were still split over matters of free trade and gay marriage; now both of those issues enjoy more or less a consensus in Canada, with people affiliated with all major parties supporting them in high numbers.
In all of the categories we might be polarized over, the data shows that Canadians are decidedly not polarized. When asked to rate ourselves on a left-right spectrum, well over 50% of us are clustered in the middle. On issues that are considered highly controversial, the vast majority of Canadians share very similar views. Even when broken down by demographics (indigenous/settler/recent immigrant, racial or ethnic categories, gender identity, age, income) the differences are generally quite small.
So if society isn’t actually polarized, why do we think and feel that we are?
Politics is Polarized, Society is Not
It’s the politicians’ fault. Political parties are increasingly polarized and polarizing, and the way that they present this polarization makes it seem like they’re reflecting their society. They’re wrong.
This goes to the heart of the need for political reform in Canada: political parties distort our political processes in ways that degrade our democracy. Parties are supposed to be a way for people to identify candidates who share their values, making it easier to choose who to vote for; but in our competitive political environment, politicians more often find ways to attach certain values or issues to voters, dividing us into categories or segments of society that they can more easily market themselves to. Many hot political issues that galvanized support for one party or another turned out to be minor issues at best, but had been cleverly communicated to make people feel threatened, outraged, or passionate. Those emotions, politicians know, will impact the way that we vote, so they raise the stakes of every issue to the point where it will stir up our emotions in a big way. This tactic pushes political rhetoric toward the extremes, where few Canadians actually identify themselves, giving us the impression that there’s no middle ground to inhabit.
Parkin pointed out that these tactics relate to political campaign strategies, but also fundraising models. He also pointed out that the declining news media makes it easier for politicians to make outrageous claims, pushing those extremist narratives that seem to polarize us without being corrected by journalists. Meanwhile, most of us are struggling to resist this polarizing rhetoric; we shake our heads at the political shenanigans of the major parties, but don’t see any alternative to them.
Case in Point
After Parkin’s presentation about polarization, we saw a presentation from the Association of Municipalities of Ontario about their Healthy Democracy Project, and a new study that finds the barriers that prevent people from running for public office. That’s worth a post on its own, maybe next week. Political polarization played a big role: many people get out of politics, or choose not to participate in the first place, because of the toll it can take on mental health, their careers, and even their own safety.
After that, Bonnie Crombie was given time to speak. Ms Crombie is the new leader of the Liberal Party of Ontario; the day before, we had heard from Marit Styles, leader of the ONDP, and Mike Schreiner, leader of the GPO. All of the major parties are allowed a short speech at these municipal conferences, and I’ve come to expect them to be campaign-style speeches. Nonetheless, Mike and Marit had largely focused their speeches on policies that would affect municipalities; sure, there was some campaign rhetoric, but overall I felt like they had both contributed some policy ideas to our conference, giving us some things to think about. But when Bonnie Crombie took the stage, my impression was that she felt like she was at a campaign rally: she went on at length about her own life story, problems and issues in our society, and perhaps most of all, fiery criticisms of Doug Ford and the Ontario PCs.
It would have been one thing if she had been giving fair criticism of the Ontario PC’s many, many poor decisions over the past six years. There’s enough content there to fill a conference of its own. But her comments were less valid criticisms, more inflammatory attacks. People around our table were looking at each other, sharing a moment of shock at how blatant the political attacks were.
And then we heard from The Honorable Paul Calandra, Minister for Municipal Affairs and Housing.
Like the others, I expected Calandra to engage in a bit of campaigning; but unlike the others, he is directly responsible for provincial-municipal relations, and there’s a LOT to talk about there. He did talk a fair amount about his responsibilities there, but mostly in terms of what has already been accomplished (which at this point is largely a list of things that the province has had to reverse, after implementing laws and regulations that were disastrous for municipalities). But what stood out most in his speech was how much time he spent talking about the federal Liberal government, with rhetoric just as fiery as Bonnie Crombie’s had been; or even poking at the previous Ontario Liberal government of almost a decade ago. Very little of his speech added any value to our experience at the conference; he didn’t talk about policies that could help us move forward on important issues, he didn’t ask us for feedback or ideas, he was just there to campaign against the Liberals.
So it was that on the last day of a conference that had been constructive, engaging, and hopeful, partisan politicians left us feeling discouraged, frustrated, and distracted from the actual issues we’d come together to make progress on. And it was even more obvious than ever, because we had just learned how much more polarized the political parties are than society itself; these two politicians had embodied exactly what Andrew Parkin had explained in his talk.
Resisting Polarization
So what can we do? Turns out, a lot of things:
- Being conscious of this kind of behaviour and what motivates it can help us to resist its effect on us. When you hear a politician speak, remember that they have an incentive to present information in the most polarizing ways possible, because that’s how they can get more donations and votes. Don’t reward this behaviour; resist clicking their links or donating in response to emailed fundraising letters that focus on how bad the other guys are, or that create bogeymen out of other groups of Canadians. They’ll respond to this feedback and adjust their messages to whatever works, so let’s try to send the message that constructive politics works better than divisive politics.
- Let’s shield ourselves from other polarizing voices. Traditional news media are governed by professional ethics and standard practices, and even they often have biases; but more often these days, especially since Meta refused to allow official news sources on Facebook and Instagram, the information we receive about political issues in Canada comes from bloggers and other “new media” who, like political parties, get their money through our clicks, which incentivizes them to rile us up. Avoid those sites and social media in general to reduce that incentive. If we stop clicking on “click-bait”, we will see less of it.
- Reward non-partisan, constructive political conversations. Municipal politics is the most productive and locally engaged form of politics, and that’s largely because we don’t have political parties at this level. Alberta has just introduced political parties to their municipal politics; let’s resist any effort to bring partisanship to municipalities in Ontario, and focus instead on having quality political engagement in our own town, to send the message that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
- Remember that our neighbours and relatives who seem to be the most polarized are often only repeating what they’ve heard politicians talking about. Chances are, if you were to broach the same topic with them without reference to what the politicians were saying, they’d have a more moderate view. At least, that’s what the data says. So let’s remember that we’re not so different from our neighbours as we might think, and that if we can be patient and engage in good faith with them we have plenty of common ground to meet on!