The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - What's the Future of Populism in Canada?

Episode Date: June 11, 2025

In 2022, the Freedom Convoy brought the nation's capital to standstill. In 2025, so-called technocrat Mark Carney and the Liberals triumphed in the federal election. How have populist movements and impulses changed - and in what ways could they shape our politics going forward? To discuss, we're joined by Lawrence?LeDuc, political-science professor at the University of Toronto; Bessma Momani, political-science professor at the University of Waterloo; and Carmen Celestini, full-time lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Waterloo.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Over 19 seasons of the agenda, populism has reared its head in one form or another, from the rise of Donald Trump in 2016 to the Freedom Convoy in 2022 that brought our nation's capital to a standstill. Now, with so-called technocrat Mark Carney and the Liberals triumphing in this year's federal election, how have populist movements and impulses changed, and in what ways could they shape our politics going forward? To discuss, we're joined by, in Gananoque, Ontario, Lawrence Leduc, Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. In Waterloo, Ontario, Besma Momani, Professor of Political Science at the University of

Waterloo and a Senior Fellow at CIGI, the Center for International Governance Innovation. And here in our studio, Carmen Celestini, full-time lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Waterloo, which we've discovered before going on the air, is so big that Besma and Carmen actually don't know each other all that well even though they're at the same institution. So we love bringing people together here on this set virtually and actually. Hello everybody, everybody, and thanks as well to Laurence and Besma for joining us out of town. Let's start with this. Carmen, how do you want to define populism?

Oh, that's a tough one. I think it is a political response to injustice, perceived or real, that can be fueled by anger, by fear, and by emotion. And it is a political response to that to solve or save the nation from these threats or problems. Desma, what would you add to that? Yeah, it's a great definition, although I just add that I think it's also this dichotomy

between what's perceived as the pure people, quote unquote, and the corrupt elite. It's not quite an ideology. Some refer to it as a fin ideology. The definition I like with the way to perceive it is really thinking of it as a form of rhetoric. The narrative that people use, particularly politicians. Lawrence, anything to add to that? Yeah, I like the way Bessman put it. And I would simply add that it's more an attitude or an approach than it is a political philosophy. And because almost all politicians talk

as if they were representatives of the people, at least part of the time, it's hard to isolate it from other elements of politics that occur from time to time in many countries. Bessman, it's often the case that when we hear, you know, 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 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 figured out in terms of what country are we talking about because that may not present itself in a different context, different country, or 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 populous 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. And what gives it its negative connotation is you need a them. And when politicians start to blame the them for everything that's wrong in the society that they live in, that's when it takes on that negative connotation. So let's blame the immigrants, or let's blame big business, as a left part party might might might do or you know and with the means you get that us and them framing depending on who's making the argument and in what context you get

a kind of a populist politics and it might be sporadic I think one of the things we'll get to eventually is that the rise of populism in many places has come very suddenly, including in Canada when social credit popped up in the in the 30s or reform in the 90s. Those really came on us very, very quickly and we didn't see them coming. Nobody saw social credit in Quebec coming in the 1960s. So you got a context and a leader that came together in that particular place and time and made those kinds of arguments. Well, let's do a real life example, Carmen.

How about the Freedom Convoy in the nation's capital? Was that a populist movement? It was a movement that was based on conspiracy theories, on hate, on ideologies. Also, some people just responding to the mandates, but we did see politicians respond to that in different ways. We saw some parties, like the People's Party of Canada, using some of the conspiracy theories as their platform in that federal election. So we see the engagement with politicians with using terms and language that

conspiracy theorists or people who are against the elites can hear and trigger them and think that that politician is their voice at the pulpit of politics. But we also see politicians gainfully involving in this and saying, well, what are the other parts of fears that are a part of this? And how can we justify that or change those sense of injustice in our policies and our platform. So yes there was populism absolutely there and there was a populist response from politicians. Just follow up on that if you would. What do you think, I mean it was quite a toxic brew of things that came together that

caused the convoy to take over the nation's capital for as long as it did. What was in that toxic stew if you like? Well it was an interesting movement that started online and people were talking about their fears and their engagement and that's how they became part of the conversation, right? That's how they socialized. And in that, what we saw was this confluence of all these different groups coming together, expressing different opinions about why it was happening or how it was going to manifest in the end. And so these, all these ideologies came together, but we also had people who wanted to create a coup. We had people who were using this very far-right extremist groups to spread their hate ideology

through conversations and memes and through gifs and things that they were putting online. So we saw this milieu come together that had one thing in common, which was distrust in the government. And that distrust in institutions with media, government, all focused together and brought these groups together in a milieu that tried to find a response to this. And then we started seeing politicians engaging to say, well, how can we best benefit from this to get power. Yeah, let me follow up with Lawrence on that because clearly some politicians, the former prime minister being one of them, were very much against the convoy. They ended up bringing in laws to really make it difficult for the convoy members. But some conservative politicians went down there. Pierre Pollyet was one of them, I think, took some pictures with some members of the convoy.

I guess I want to know, Lawrence, from you, is it OK? I don't know. Should politicians be insinuating themselves in those circumstances when populism gets a little nutty? And by that I meant there were times that the convoy members were suggesting that the police ought to basically go tell the governor general to dismiss the prime minister.

I think you said basically launch a coup. You know, I mean, everybody's for populism when it's sane, but that seemed a little insane at the time. Yeah, I was setting up to give a sort of a typically academic yes and no answer to the way you framed the question because the convoy to me was a kind of a fringe movement. It never had broad popular support.

So it wasn't going to lead anywhere politically in Canada. But and when the People's Party, which sort of grew out of that, tried to politicize it, they didn't have much success with it. So I don't think that every movement of any kind that takes place on the fringe, especially in a context like the COVID, which was an exogenous kind of factor in politics, is necessarily going to lead anywhere. And the politicians who tried to pick up on it and use it, as Bernier did to some extent, didn't have much success.

So that leads us back to the fundamental question of what is the future of populism in Canada? It's not the convoy, but there could well be a future as we see from examples in some of the other countries. Well, Bessma, I'm just wondering, like, what were we supposed to make of this request by convoy members to have the Governor General dismiss the Prime Minister? I wasn't quite sure on what grounds, but but you know you want to take these things seriously because you know the people behind them, behind these requests, are being serious in the way that they approach issues, but that just seemed kind of wacky. I don't know, what do you think?

Yeah, I mean look, I mean I think I agree that it was wacky partly because I don't even think it was constitutional. I'm not an expert I mean, I think I agree that it was wacky, partly because I don't even think it was constitutional. I'm not an expert in the constitution, but I recall that. And certainly, I think this ease of which things can be done is very, very populist-like. I mean, they see things in this very simplistic worldview, absolutely see things in terms of these binaries. Again, you know, looking at the government as, you know, the

source of all ills and problems and also seeing them in terms of, you know, wanting to control again, the conspiracy theory, as Carmen pointed out, it makes this really a bit more wacky. Because as you recall, this was all about this idea that the COVID vaccine was was going to implant something that was going to control their minds and on 5G towers were complicit in it. I mean, it really got pretty nutty once you start to drill down.

But I think the core of this mistrust of government is what stands out to me. And the tools of which politicians today are able to use things like social media. I mean, this is really for us, I think, in analyzing this where you need to look to see how populists kind of find themselves because that's the ease of which a political

mobilization online that's created this like minded, you know, group community almost, thinking of government in a very negative way. And again, we all need to be critical of government. I'm certainly not one that thinks as a political scientist, at least that we should give government a pass on the contrary. But this very core idea that government is trying to control us, control our minds, control our bodies, it's excessive. And I think that really resonates with a lot of populists who really feel that the government is not serving the interests of the

people. It is very much not just corrupted, but also morally bankrupt. Again, not just financially corrupt, you know, for personal gain, which I think we can all agree is prevalent in all societies and systems, but this idea that they're morally corrupt, they're trying to create a morally bankrupt society, which is very prevalent on the right wing currently in the populist movements, it really stands out and kind of makes us a bit wacky. In which case, Carmen, tell me whether you think, what's your sense about whether or not the convoy, which may have been compared to the Canadian population

relatively small in numbers, but did their views represent a bigger chunk of the population than maybe some of us thought? I think that at that point, people were afraid, and it's based on emotions. And when you start engaging with conspiracy theories and these ideas That distrust doesn't dissipate. So whatever distrust in institutions existed during the convoys has expanded as the conversations have continued as conspiracy theories and populism and

response to ideas that are happening around the world. The internet is borderless so the ideas that are being shared about this distrust and elitism and what could potentially be a sense of control or what they're trying to do to the people is not just confined within Canada. So we see those ideas spreading internationally. I think that many of the people who were influencers or part of the engagement of the convoys have changed that narrative to now it's a much larger, broader picture. We see them picking up some of the ideas of distrust in the elections that we just had, right? That it was fake or it was rigged or that the media did these things.

Small, though. Relatively small numbers. Small. But when we actually look at what happened in the election with Poliev's numbers and Trudeau's numbers, I don't think that we can definitely say at this moment, oh, we won, it's fine, and these ideas have dissipated, right? Sorry, you mean Polly and Carney? Oh, sorry, Carney.

Sorry. I have Trudeau in my mind today, obviously. When we think about that, we can't just ignore those ideas. I mean, jumping on something that Lawrence said was that Heritage 2025 and Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation, that is something that has been stemming since the 1940s in America with the Heritage Fund and this movement, meaning people engaged in groups like the John Birch Society,

right? They've been dismissed. So when we dismiss these ideas of wackiness or it's salacious, we're not really looking at the injustice that they're perceiving underneath and engaging with it. And it hurts us in the future when we look at what's happening in 2025. Let's go down memory lane for a second here. I want to, I'm going to ask our director Sheldon Osmond to play a clip from something we did on this program a few years ago. Paul Somerville co-authored a book called Reclaiming Populism, How Economic Fairness Can Win Back Disenchanted Voters. And Paul's take on this is pretty fascinating. He's a former Bay Street economist who ran for the NDP and ran for policy

chair of the federal liberals. So he's got an interesting background for a Bay Street economist. And here's what he had to say about some of what we're discussing right now. Sheldon, if you would. There's a very specific group of people who are anti-BACs, who are anti-mandate, have certain grudges against government.

But our argument would be that once the blockades are dismantled, that this will fade as a memory in Canada. We're not going to see some political realignment that's going to create the kind of political disruption institutional disruption that we've seen in the United States and and in the UK Lawrence three years later in your view. How does that prediction look? That's absolutely right. And that's why going back to something I said earlier I wouldn't pick the convoy as my example of a populist movement but we could get populist movements in Canada nevertheless and the reason the

convoy didn't work in the COVID context and politically that is is essentially that the Canadian public was very supportive of a lot of the COVID restrictions the polling of that time that time shows that pretty clearly. So it's not that you had the people, as we would call it in populist language, moving over to the side of the convoy. They were pretty much aligned the other way. Paul's view though, Besma, was that we hear so much that's pejorative about populism, and he very much wants to take that kind of spirit

of indignation and spirit of reform and channel it towards more constructive means, particularly by the elites who are in charge of many of the levers of power in this country. Do you agree that in principle, that's a good thing for us to try to do? I mean, in principle, the fact that we have an educated,

informed citizenry who wants to change government for the better, yes, absolutely. But I think there are these nefarious things underpinning a lot of populism that I think we need to be really careful about. Certainly, there is a lot of xenophobia, a very strong anti-immigrant perspective. Very gendered.

I mean, we don't talk about this enough, but populism has a really strong gendered undertone. And part of that is, you know, they look at a lot of times that the courts and institutions are the ones that are on a moral agenda to bankrupt society. And part of the simplicity and romanticization of the past, which is prevalent across a lot of populist movements, is kind of the alpha male, going back to the 1950s when things were simple, again, very anti-feminist movement, if you will. I mean, again, connotations of the handmaid's tale is not wrong here, because I think that's the fear of many who sort of watch this kind of dialogue. And that is really troubling. I don't think we can say it's, you know, a movement that is just

raising awareness and political mobilization amongst the people there's something really problematic here. You know, for for racial minorities, for sexual minorities, there's a lot of fear here and what is coming out of this messaging. And I'm afraid again, going back to social media, I'm going to harp on that because I really think it's, you know, the, the way to really discover this is to see what's happening on social media. You know, we we have a medium today that just caters to the simplistic caters to the bombastic, the charismatic, you know, the simplicity of Oh, remember how great things were, you know, the time of our parents,

and you know, grandparents, things were so simple, you know, just that simplification of life and romanticizing of the past, you know, for a lot of people, the past is not necessarily a positive one. I mean, the way we treated our indigenous communities, our black communities, I mean, one can go on and on. It is not a pretty picture when you talk about the past. So again, there's a lot to be unearthed here. And I think looking at how the leaders of today

can take populism to a really dangerous tone through social media and the virality of it is something we can't dismiss. It seems, Carmen, that Bessma's observation that this is a very gendered movement, that the guys are behind this. On the other hand, Tamara Litch, I mean, she was one of the leaders of this thing.

I don't think I'm saying her last name properly. It's probably Litch, but anyway. I mean, she was one of the leaders of this thing. I don't think I'm saying her last name properly. It's probably Litch, but anyway. I mean, she was charged. She went to court. She was clearly one of the faces of the convoy. And she's a woman. So you can't really say this is 100% a male thing. It's not.

I mean, I think when we think about the gendered ideals of this, we have to look at it in a much bigger picture. So there are women, and there have been women who have been on the right who want to. I mean, if we think about Phyllis Schlafly in America, women who want to return to this nostalgic idea of what the 1950s were. The problem about nostalgia is we're not, most of the people asking for it weren't alive.

It is really a critique of our current times. Women engage with this. We see the trad wife movement that we were talking about earlier, where women are trying to do that simplistic sort of be at home, be submissive kind of idea. But what they're sharing with that are populist ideas, which include moral panics that are anti-feminism, that are anti-sexual gender minorities,

that are against xenophobia and racist base. Women can articulate this, but men are definitely the sort of heroes in this idea. What we're looking at now online is this idea of people of this men who have this constructed victimhood idea that they're being oppressed by feminism by sexual gender minorities and that's being articulated through nostalgic ideas, ideas about politics, about controlling women and rights, hurting communities with policies. So women are engaged in this, but predominantly is men, as we saw in the States with the Theo

Bros, who are powering this and the podcasters who engage in this constructed victimhood. Lawrence, let me ask you a direct question about one of the better known politicians in our country today. He garnered a great deal of attention simply by doing an interview with a reporter who was asking about this while he was chomping down on an apple. And some people thought that that was a fantastic moment for him, and other people thought it was him being very dismissive and rude. In your view, Pierre Pauliev, is he a populist rhetoric from time to time, as many politicians do. But an effective populist leader has to come from the outside somewhere. And most of them, like Trump or Bernie for example, came from the business community and they built their political

movement on the theme that they were outsiders who were going to fix a broken system or confront the special interests or were outsiders who were going to fix a broken system or confront the special interests or the politicians who were untrustworthy. Polyem is the opposite, really. He's a career politician who's spent most of his adult life in parliament. So he's not well-placed to be a populist. I think he's ambitious. I think he's kind of realized that. And I could go into a lot more detail about the last election. But he was really trying, now having to confront Carney in the election,

trying to restructure their campaign and reorient it. But he simply didn't have enough time to do that, given the context. But I think if he's able to hang on to the leadership, you're going to see him move in a couple of new directions and a little bit more cautiously toward a more traditional opposition role. And I would make that same point about some other politicians in Canada that have been considered populist. Take a Doug Ford, for example. He came into politics as an outsider,

winning the leadership of his party against an establishment candidate. He came into politics as an outsider, winning the leadership of his party against an establishment candidate. He came from a background with his brother having been mayor of Toronto, that was, had a good, strong populist orientation to it. But he's pretty much set that aside and he's become a pretty conventional conservative premier of Canada's largest province. And he realizes that and he wants to be premier. I think Daniel Smith right now in Alberta is going through a very similar transition.

And if we look further abroad, you'll see leaders like Georgia Maloney in Italy, who ran with her party as a populist candidate, a new party, an outsider was going to fix the longstanding political divisions in Italy. And as soon as she got into power, she made peace with the European Union. And she's become a part of the conservative European establishment. She has very good relationships with Ursula von der Leyen

and other European politicians. So all politicians are not the same. But I would expect to see Poliev follow a route that with Ursula von der Leyen and other European politicians. So all politicians are not the same, but I would expect to see Poliev follow a route more like that. He's not going to get up on the convoy and try to use those people as his ticket to power. Bestment, I suspect if Doug Ford were here, he would be the first to tell you that the kind of radical obnoxious populism he performed in the first year of office, if he'd kept that up there's no way he would have won three majorities in a row. Yes, Lawrence is

quite right, he's kind of figured out a way to bevel his edges, but do you agree with Lawrence that if to be considered a genuine populist politician you've got to be seen to be an outsider and therefore Pierre Poliev is not? I mean I agree with a lot of what Larry said, but there's just, I think, some, if I may just add a bit more flavour, I think what we need to, we need to sort of emphasise here is that these leaders may not necessarily really drink the Kool-Aid and believe, you know, the populist rhetoric, but they use the rhetoric in their, in their, you know, campaigns and in their slogan their sloganeering.

And so that's why, again, we're not psychologists. So we're not going to know whether or not these people really believe it, but they're using it. It's a tool. Political, sorry, populist rhetoric is what really kind of connects all these people. I mean, again, we talked about Maloney, for example. Larry mentioned that. Maloney went on this whole traditional values issue, the Catholic Church, I mean, she's a single mom, right? And she does not necessarily

fit the mold of a traditional family value, yet she was up there on the pulpit, you really actually, you know, professing this. So, you know, these again, look at, look at Trump, I mean, that he talks about being against the swamp. I mean, you can't get more swampy than New York real estate. I mean, there's just something really weird about these leaders, you know, standing outside and suggesting that somehow they're not a part of this system. Again, I think Paul Livier, there are some things that do sound very much like a populist rhetoric. He uses the rhetoric and there's even, dare I say, some of the performative aspects of populism that you can tell in his tone. And I remember Paul

Olivier when he wasn't necessarily a leader or wasn't the leader of the Conservative Party. I mean, some of his views on monetary policy were very odd and did fit that kind of populist view of taking things back from the elite. And yet, I agree with Larry, he's a career politician. I don't think he had another job outside of being a politician, but the fact that he's never been in power is he's able to use the, again, the populist rhetoric that the government is the governing government.

And so therefore he's not a part of that group of elite. Well, of course he was in power for a little while when he was a cabinet minister in Stephen Harper's government. So again, to Lawrence's point, not exactly an outsider when you've been in the cabinet of the government of Canada. I just wonder, Carm, what do you think? I mean, Mark Carney did win the biggest chunk of votes in the last election, but he only got a point and a half more than Pierre Polyav and based on the splits, he was lucky to,

well, not lucky. I mean, that's the system we have. And the numbers fell well for him. Do you think there's anything he can do to build bridges to voters who are more populist in their orientation, and for whom he wants to show that he represents everybody and not just the 43% that voted for him? I think that we do. And this might sound salacious. but I do think that we have to

address some of these ideas that people perceive as being the injustice of what is happening. Although it won't come through being on TVO or being on CBC, you know perhaps engaging in media that is podcast. I'm not saying going on Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson but engaging with that audience about those topics with a little bit of transparency. I think most importantly what we need to do is actually start holding people accountable for what they're saying, what they're doing, and what they're engaging with. I think that when we think about, I'm gonna pick on Poliev here, but when we think about some of his conversation that was part of the

Jordan Peterson ideal, where if you and I were just watching it, we would think that conversation meant nothing. But to the people that I research who are very much in his court in this politician election, were language of almost picturing this idea of a white picket fence and 2.5 children and the typical white parents who are running it, and going back to this idea of is there racism in Canada and talking about this nostalgic idea that might sound idyllic but really feeds into our groups. So when we talk about that we can't just not hold people accountable for those. What exactly did he mean? Ask those questions. When we start name-calling or we start engaging

with things that have a hint of conspiracy theory to it, we should engage with that and ask questions about it. Not just media but also the constituents, people engaging in this. I think it's a much larger picture that has to be involved in this. And I think that distrust is not going to dissipate like that for Carney or for the Liberal Party or the NDP at that matter. So I don't think it's a simple answer that we can have, but I think it's something we have to start engaging with

and start exploring. Well, that tees me up for a good final question for Lawrence here because we're down to our last minute, and that is, we've seen examples of populists get elected. Some like Doug Ford bevel their edges, some like Donald Trump double down and are on steroids. Which is more effective ultimately. Well, if by effective you mean staying in office, obviously the first examples, the Daniel Smiths or the Doug Ford's.

But I would go back to what we were just talking about. I liked what Carmen had to say. Carney is going to have a tough time in this semi-populous world that we live in today. He personifies the political establishment, you know, a former banker, and every time I see him, I just sort of envision how the public is perceiving him, or how they're going to perceive him a year or two down the road. He's made a lot of promises that are going to be very, very difficult to deliver on, at least in the shorter term. Maybe he'll build this fantastic economy that he talks about, but even if he does, that's going to be two or three election cycles from now.

So I can just imagine what it's going to be like with Carney trying to deliver as the new prime minister and Poliak, assuming he remains opposition leader, will have an ideal populist kind of target in his sights. And I think he will begin to use the populist rhetoric again against Carney somewhere down the road. Gotcha. Mr. Director, can I have a three-shot, please, so I can thank all of our guests for appearing on the agenda.

Besmé Moammani from the University of Waterloo, and C.G. Lawrence-Leduc on the other side of the screen from the University of Torontoloo and CG. Lawrence LaDuke on the other side of the screen from the University of Toronto. And in the middle, keeping the peace, is Carmen Celestini, University of Waterloo as well. It's great to have you three with us tonight. Thanks so much. Thank you.