The upcoming federal election campaign in Canada will pit two major national political parties with very contrasting visions of economic development, social programs, federalism and individual rights in this country against each other: Justin Trudeau’s Liberals and Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives. Visions that are certainly different, but to what extent?
The Liberals have begun to play the Trumpism card against the Conservatives, but the question we must ask ourselves as “rational” voters is this: is this a very basic partisan strategy (and a fortiori devoid of any foundation) or should we see it as a warning of a real danger of a slide by the Conservatives towards populism and authoritarianism once in power? If so, could this go as far as establishing a “Northern Trumpism”?
The accusation comes from Soraya Martinez Ferrada, the co-president of the liberal campaign: “We are using [au Parti conservateur] tactics aimed at polarizing emotions in order to present facts that feed one’s own ideology and infiltrate fear in people’s minds.” Until today, this debate has mainly crystallized around the style of leaders and in the present case, on Pierre Poilievre, as a leader possessing and putting into action, at least in an embryonic way, the classic populist and demagogic characteristics of the leader of such a tendency, at least in the opinion of some.
However, there is another dimension that is often overlooked in the scientific and media worlds: without the many supporters of these leaders, they are nothing. Thus, without the unwavering support of citizens who place absolute trust in their leader, demagogic leaders are no more threatening than “soapbox messiahs” (soapbox Messiahs)in the famous phrase of Winston Churchill. At least until they recruit followers.
Hence the importance of seeking to better understand who the loyal supporters of leaders like Donald Trump are.
It is true, as M.me Martinez Ferrada, that populist leaders who know how to play on emotions (while distancing themselves from the “factual”) can contribute to the “constitutional” slide of certain regimes towards authoritarianism. Researchers Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky have clearly shown the role of these “populist” leaders in the “death of democracies” and their annihilation, which could be described as soft as opposed to the brutality of a coup, for example.
“There is, however, another way to break democracy,” they argue. “A less impressive but equally destructive way. Democracies also die at the hands, not of generals, but of elected leaders, presidents or prime ministers, who corrupt the very process that brought them to power. Some dismantle the regime quickly, as Hitler did after the Reichstag fire in 1933. More often, however, democracy decays slowly, in barely visible increments.”
But let us return our attention to the ideological orientations of the followers of these leaders. Who are they, how do they think, how did they manage to lose all critical sense in their unconditional support for a demagogic political leader with authoritarian tendencies? In 2020, researcher Bob Altemeyer wrote, in collaboration with John W. Dean, a book with a very evocative title: Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers. There are two types of authoritarian personalities, in addition to a group that combines the two, the social dominators who believe in the inequality of groups. It goes without saying that the dimension of religious fundamentalism also has a primordial place in this table of Trump’s followers.
Some Canadian and American survey data
Now, is there in the Canadian and Quebec electorate a fundamentalist authoritarian ideological base comparable to that existing in the United States and on which a populist leader could rely to steer the country towards more populism and eventually more authoritarianism?
The short answer to this complex question is yes, possibly. This answer is based in particular on analyses conducted from the major World Values Survey surveys in Canada, in 2020 (with Justin Trudeau as prime minister), and in our American neighbors, in 2018, when Donald Trump was president. Of course, these very in-depth and highly reliable surveys based on large samples with low margins of error are already a few years old, but we have calculated dimensions and divisions that do not change so quickly, such as religious fundamentalism and non-religious authoritarianism.
According to our analyses, there would be a base of approximately 29% of the Canadian population outside Quebec (24.3% in Quebec) that would be made up of the following two groups: religious fundamentalists and non-religious authoritarians. Now, we can think that these two distinct groups constitute the ideological base on which power would be exercised by potentially populist leaders in Canada. Without this critical mass, it would be difficult for them to implement draconian societal changes on the way to more populism/authoritarianism.
By way of comparison, according to our analyses, the two groups total a little less than a third (31%) of the American voting population in 2018, the year of the survey in the United States; estimates calculated from the same seven variables as in Canada, among religious people of Christian obedience and non-religious people. Two remarks are necessary in view of these statistics.
First, the difference in the size of these two groups between Canada and the United States is not very significant (except for Quebec). Both countries have a significant ideological base that is composed of fundamentalists and authoritarians to support a populist leader at all costs on the ground of his orientations, even if they are radical. To these two groups, we must add the left-behinds who are not necessarily authoritarian or fundamentalist and who have lost all confidence in traditional politicians and who are ready to do anything to try to improve their social and/or economic situation.
Then, one might think that American religious fundamentalism is mainly the work of white evangelicals and that in Canada, such extremism is almost absent given the low representation of this religious group in the country. However, it would seem that the phenomenon is also present in Canada and that no Christian religious denomination is safe from this scourge for Western democracies that religious fundamentalism represents.
Certainly, the statistics of the Canadian survey may seem worrying for true democrats in Canada and Quebec. There is of course the question mark regarding the future behavior of the leader Poilievre in the election campaign, a reality that we will be able to judge with a little more precision once the exercise begins. It will then be necessary to evaluate whether the conservatives actually attract more fundamentalists/authoritarians than the others, as is the case for the Republicans in the United States. For this, in-depth surveys will be necessary.
Poilievre is not Trump. But he could become one. Only time will tell how far he is willing to go to join this very “American” way of doing politics in order to satisfy an electoral base waiting for a leader as “strong” as the Republican candidate, a candidate capable of concretizing their fundamentalist/authoritarian inclinations that have been kept dormant until now.