Can Trump-style populism take hold in Canada? Here’s what the trucker convoy tells us

Events in Canada over the past couple of weeks certainly look like Bannon’s turmoil fantasies come to life. A Trump-style rally, minus the ex-president, has escalated into a full-fledged emergency in Canada’s capital and its largest province.

It’s not just the style of the so-called “Freedom Convoy,” but the chosen targets of its havoc. Much of the damage that Trump and Bannon threatened to inflict on Canada in their glory days — collapse of cross-border trade and an unravelling of the Canada-U.S. auto industry — has effectively taken place, even though both men were jettisoned long ago from the White House.

Add an infusion of American cash to the convoy and it’s impossible not to see Canada in the midst of a northern migration of Trumpism — with all of Bannon’s foretold turmoil.

“I see absolute cross-pollination between that movement there and what’s happening in the United States,” veteran U.S. journalist Alex Wagner told Ben Rhodes, the host of the “Pod Saves the World” podcast and a former national security aide to Barack Obama.

The revealing parallel is not the anger of the crowds, Wagner observed, but the joy. “That’s part of the whole thing, right? That there are people installing hot tubs,” she said. “There’s like a sort of rowdy carnival-like atmosphere, which is something you see at every Trump rally.”

This is a moment in Canada, maybe a pivotal one, and there’s an existential question at the heart of the chaos: Is Canada undergoing a political earthquake — a shifting of the tectonic plates under our democracy — or a large-scale national security incident, a one-off? In the newsroom, we might ask: Do we put our political reporters on this story, or our war correspondents?

It is both a political and a national-security story, obviously. But on the political side, views are incredibly complicated about what exactly has been unleashed in Canada these past few weeks.

Not everyone sees this as a populist eruption. In their new book “Reclaiming Populism,” Canadian writers Paul Summerville and Eric Protzer attempt to unravel the root causes of the popular discontent that is feeding Trumpism and other similar, related outbursts of that sentiment around the world. It’s getting a lot of attention now because of the convoy, but also among some governments because of what the book has to say about keeping governments from falling into populist discontent.

Good news: their research has shown that Canada, unlike the United States or Britain, doesn’t have the required ingredients for a populist movement to take hold in any real way.

“What we’re seeing in Ottawa, in Canada, is not populism,” says Summerville, a former financial executive who has made some forays into politics over the years, including running as an NDP candidate in Toronto. “It’s a natural political event that comes after two years (of the pandemic) that goes against every way we’ve been living. It’s not the same as the long-brewing populist eruptions.”

Protzer and Summerville have closely analyzed what exactly was brewing in countries such as the United States when populism crashed the gates of power. Populism, they found, requires deep, entrenched economic unfairness — a general sense in a large part of the population that people are trapped in their current economic classes. An absence of “social mobility” is how the experts describe it. That is a much more dire situation in the U.S. than it is in Canada, they argue. In social-mobility terms, Canada and the United States are worlds apart.

Protzer, a research fellow at Harvard University, says frustration with COVID-19 restrictions — the spark for the convoy — is very different from the historic frustrations that gave rise to Trump or even Boris Johnson in the U.K. He describes the latter this way: “Two generations of economic unfairness, where people have felt that success is a product of family origins and elite machinations and not as a result of talent and effort.”

Summerville and Protzer are more upbeat about Canada’s resilience to Trump-style populism. And the recent history of partisan politics in this country would support that view. Attempts to bring something like Trumpism into the mainstream of Canadian politics have largely fallen flat; Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party and the Conservative leadership bids of Kellie Leitch and other far-right-wingers have gained little traction.

Unlike in the U.S., where the Republican Party is now almost entirely Trump’s party, and the U.K., where the far-right UKIP has experienced modest electoral success, Canadians have shown little appetite for far-right populism. Whether the convoy suggests the political climate is becoming more hospitable to such ideas will no doubt be a key question in the coming Conservative leadership race.

The answer, University of Alberta political scientist Jared Wesley believes, is not foregone. Wesley has been keeping an eye on the convoy for the warning signs that are well-studied by seasoned observers of populism. Wesley’s Twitter feed has often resembled a crash course in populism theory over the past couple of weeks, and he was checking off some important boxes as he took note of the convoy participants’ complaints.

“Status threat” was one. Populism feeds off citizens’ frustration that their status in society is being eroded by forces bigger than them and that’s certainly in evidence, says Wesley. “Tribalism” is another: a feeling that the political world is divided sharply into friends and enemies, like in sports or war.

The “f — Trudeau” flags and the hatred for Justin Trudeau on display in the convoy is drawing on this tribalism, Wesley says. Tribal political actors, he says, believe “opponents are not actual legitimate political actors.”

That’s where another concept, “losers’ consent” comes in. In some segments of the protest, especially among the leaders who wanted Trudeau deposed, his election victory last September and right to power are also seen as illegitimate. Populism feeds off notions that the system is “rigged,” Wesley notes. All we need to do is look south to see what Trump has done about his own election defeat in 2020.

“Once you view your opponent as being illegitimate, it doesn’t take you very long to conclude that we won’t recognize their victory,” says Wesley.

What’s struck Wesley, among others, throughout the convoy protest are the ways in which the demonstrators have appropriated symbols of patriotism and Canadian identity, right up to this country’s reputation for being “nice.”

The trucks gained their foothold at the heart of Canada’s capital precisely because Ottawa is a polite, bureaucratic place where demonstrations are tolerated, even enabled. Before three weeks ago, a truck honking its horn and waving the maple leaf would be assumed to be a celebration of a Canadian sports victory.

This too is how populist politics grabs hold — getting its grip on things that make citizens feel comfortable and safe, whether that’s the flag and Canadian courtesy or, if you prefer, a hot tub and a bouncy castle.

Whenever the history of this moment is written, many will focus on how populism reared its head in Canada as something that looked an awful lot like an out-of-control street party.

Whether it turns into a full-fledged political party in the days and weeks ahead will be a measure of Canada’s resilience against the “great turmoils” Bannon predicted.