On Monday, Canadians will go to the polls to elect a new Parliament. This election will decide the fate of liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, once called Canada’s “anti-Trump,” who has endured several recent scandals. Many are watching opposition candidate Maxime Bernier, who has been called “Canada’s Donald Trump,” to see whether the far right will step into the gap. As Politico asked, “Can Canada Ward Off a Populist Surge?”
But Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada (PPC) is polling at between 1 and 5 percent of the vote. Even if the PPC wins a few seats in the next Parliament, as some predict, it is more likely to remain a flash party, successful in one or two elections, than to become a strong and stable far-right presence in the Canadian political system.
This is not because Canada is immune to populist or far-right politics. As I argue in my new book “The Far Right Today,” no country is immune to the far right. Since the turn of the century, many countries once deemed immune have seen far-right parties and politicians break through electorally, including Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United States.
But breaking into office does not always build a stable and strong far-right party. Whether such a party grows or fades depends on both political demand and supply. Neither looks particularly strong in Canada.
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Here’s what Bernier’s party is offering
Bernier founded the PPC in September 2018, after he failed to win leadership of the mainstream Conservative Party of Canada (CPC). Upon quitting the CPC, Bernier kept his seat in Parliament, where he has represented French-speaking Quebec’s Beauce district since 2006. The PPC is not much more than Bernier’s personal vehicle; its first party conference, this August, attracted roughly 500 people.
Its party policies resemble those of the traditional U.S. Republican Party more than those of President Trump or European far-right parties like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) in France. The PPC is very pro-market, supporting lower taxes and more privatizations of state companies; it’s skeptical about climate change; and it advocates a non-interventionist foreign policy and phasing out development aid. While its positions on immigration and multiculturalism seem relatively moderate, they all come with a harsh twist. For example, the party wants to limit immigration to a maximum of 150,000 people per year, which is pretty generous compared with other nations’ totals, per capita — but it also wants to build “border fences” at popular ports of entry. And while it claims to support multiculturalism, the PPC wants to “repeal the Multiculturalism Act and eliminate all funding to promote multiculturalism.”
But there’s not much demand for these offerings
As Emma Ambrose and I argued in our 2015 article “Canadian Multiculturalism and the Absence of the Far Right,” Canadians aren’t especially interested in far-right politics. Canada has long had a selective immigration policy, giving it an immigrant population that’s fundamentally different from that of most other Western democracies. Most notably, immigrants in Canada are more highly educated and therefore better employed and paid than immigrants in other countries, which means that “economic anxiety” arguments, i.e., that immigrants are an economic burden upon the host population, are less salient.
The immigrant population is also much more diverse in origin, which means that it is not dominated by one or two groups, such as Turks in Germany or Mexicans in the United States, which can be seen as a growing unified minority “threatening” the decreasing “native” majority. And unlike in most West European countries, Muslims constitute only a minority of the immigrant population, which means that “immigrants” are not conflated with “Muslims” in political and public debate.
As a consequence, few Canadians feel either of the two key motivations for voters of far-right parties: economic anxiety or cultural backlash. In fact, although Canada has one of the highest percentages of foreign-born populations, Canadians have much more positive attitudes toward immigration and immigrants than citizens in other Western democracies. In a recent Pew Research Center poll, 68 percent of Canadians said immigrants make their country stronger — the highest percentage of the 18 countries polled.
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Canada’s official policy promoting multiculturalism goes back 50 years
This is strengthened by the country’s official policy of multiculturalism. Introduced in 1971 by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, the father of the current prime minister, multiculturalism was primarily aimed at lessening tensions between French-speaking Quebec and the English-speaking rest of Canada. Since then, Canadian multiculturalism has been unique in both the comprehensiveness of the policy and the political commitment to the policy.
Part of that commitment is a kind of enforced support that has become increasingly unique, too. Political elites in many Western European countries strictly controlled the immigration issue in the late 20th century, limiting and at times even keeping it from the public debate and excluding or shaming overt negative voices. But Canada is one of the few countries that continues to do so. It has one of the highest scores in terms of promoting and upholding anti-discrimination policy. Consecutive governments have taken an active and hard stance against hate speech and hate crimes.
Some recent cracks have begun to show in Canada’s multiculturalism. The country has a growing right-wing media system that, largely copying its much bigger and more influential brethren in the United States, is pushing out nativist and populist propaganda. This includes prominent columnists in mainstream conservative media like the Toronto Sun as well as openly far-right outlets like the Rebel Media. But Canadian cultural support for welcoming immigrants remains effective and influential, as shown by the recent outrage over an “anti-diversity” opinion piece in the Vancouver Sun, which the paper pulled in response.
Today, Canada’s mainstream parties still dominate politics. Those parties prioritize socioeconomic issues over sociocultural ones. They discuss mitigating climate change rather than far-right issues like crime, identity and immigration. This leaves little space for far-right politics, particularly from a one-man band. So even if the PPC enters Parliament, it’s not likely to be the beginning of a far-right dawn.
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Cas Mudde (@casmudde) is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia and a Professor II at the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) at the University of Oslo. His most recent book is “The Far Right Today” (Polity Press, 2019).
