The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Inequality, Populism and the Great Recession

Episode Date: June 14, 2025

The Agenda's week in review looks at whether inequality has gotten worse since the Great Recession; and what the future of populism might look like in Canada.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This program debuted in 2006. Have we become a more or less equal country since then? I would say less equal since 2006, but in the interim we saw a little bit of improvement in inequality. And the Gini coefficient measures what's happening right in the center of the distribution. The real story is what's happening at the two ends of the distribution. And that's what we should get. That's what we should be talking about. And we shall. Quam, what say you?

I think we've become more unequal. I think we've become more unequal in a number of ways. We've become more unequal from an income and wealth perspective. We've become more unequal with regards to opportunity. We've become more unequal with regards to opportunity, we've become more unequal with regards to health, and we've become more unequal with regards to whether people are living dignity. So I think we've become more unequal in many ways, and it's not an even distribution,

as Armin said. So racialized populations, younger people, so under 35s, and they're the people who've been really taking the brunt of what's happening. Much to pick up on on there. Brian, what do you say? I think in some ways we have. I think the question of inequality is not necessarily the best one to ask. There may be occasions where people are making lots of money or doing very well. LeBron James is one example. But there's no way I'll be equal with him playing basketball.

And I think there are some things that that's fine. I think what we should be concerned about is the prospects and the quality of life for those who are most vulnerable and at the lowest end of the sphere. That's what I'm most interested in, are those who are the poorest and the most vulnerable. Do they have opportunity? And are they being taken care of and more

importantly do we have the structures in place that allow those people to thrive? That's what I'm most concerned about. Well let me follow up. Let me get you to answer those questions. And I think on that we've got lots of work to do. As Quam said I think there are some major challenges between the old and the young, and there's growing inequality there. And I think in Canada, there are some significant challenges with inequality amongst those who have university degrees or college certificates, and those who are working class.

And I think we've seen some major changes there. ["The New York Times"] Bestment, it's often the case that when we hear media personalities or commentators opining about populism, it's often bound up with terms like xenophobia, nativism. It's not meant to be a positive thing. How much, in your view, is populism bound together with all of those other sort of more nefarious elements? So, yes, I think populism generally,

and particularly by academics, is kind of seen in a very derogatory sense. So it does come kind of with a loaded sense. Does it have to be xenophobic? No. Does it have to be nativist? No. But those are many of the characteristics that you would see among populism. And one of the things that's really important about populism

is you have to really understand the context in which it appears. And it's very context dependent. We do see some kind of patterns or commonality currently. And again, it's very much the specific moment. It's mostly on the right wing. And so in the right wing sense, yes, there is quite a lot of alignment on these kind of nativist views, anti-immigrant, xenophobic, certainly even I would say lots of views on an environment, gender,

immigration, a lot of the cultural stuff certainly, but more broadly I think it has to be you know figured out in terms of what country are we talking about because that may not present itself in a different context, different country or a different leader. Well, that's interesting in as much as, Lawrence, when I was a kid, populism was always the thing of the left wing, right? The NDP was very much a populist movement

that emerged from the prairies in Canada. I guess it's not still the case that populism is a left wing thing on this continent, is it? No, no, but again, I think the political science literature on the concept argues that it can come from the right or the left. And that depends a little bit on the context and the timing. And we had the progressives in Canada in the 1920s.

And a number of European countries right now, particularly Spain and Greece, you find populist parties that are on the left, but you also find others that are on the right, as in Austria or the Netherlands. So it's compatible with different ideologies, but the essential core element, I think, which has already been mentioned by everybody along the way here, is the idea of the people versus the establishment. Us versus them.