Transcript: Darrell Bricker

My interview with author and CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs

Now that the dust has settled on the Canadian federal election, we can pause for a moment and assess where we are at as a country. What lessons can we take from the election results? My guest on this week’s program has been polling Canadians for decades — and he says that we are now a divided nation.

Darrell Bricker is the CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs. He’s also the author of six bestselling books, including, with John Ibbitson, The Big Shift: The Seismic Change in Canadian Politics, Business, and Culture and What It Means for Our Future. His recent essay for The Hub is titled “Victory Without Unity.”

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.

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TH: Thanks so much for making the time to come on the show. You have been polling Canadians for more than 30 years, but I understand that in this election, you are seeing some things that are unique to what you’ve seen in the past. So, I wanted to have a conversation about the state of the nation, in the wake of the federal election we just had, and your recent piece for The Hub titled “Victory Without Unity.” Let's start by talking about your overall argument, and then we can drill down on the specifics. You write in the piece that this election represented a reordering, and that “if a realignment is underway, it is driven not by unity, but by fracture.” How so?

DB: If you take a look at what happened in the election, first of all, it was a pretty close election. But the closeness does not suggest that everything is even everywhere. It was an election in many parts. The first big part was a regional part. West of the Manitoba/Ontario border, the Conservatives did very well. East of the Ontario/Manitoba border, the Liberals did very well. In Ontario, the Conservatives actually did better than they have done in any previous election since Stephen Harper won his majority back in 2011. What's interesting is that this version of the Liberal Party is actually more dependent on Quebec than Justin Trudeau was in the last two election campaigns. So, it's really weighted more east for the Liberals and weighted more west for the Conservatives. And the province of Ontario was where the real fight was, and the Liberals won it by a bit. That is one set of divisions.

Then there is another set of divisions, which really relates to generations. Older people were more likely to vote for the Liberal Party than vote for the Conservative Party, which is the complete opposite of what we normally see. And younger people, especially younger men, were more likely to vote for the Conservative Party. The reason for that was the older population was really holding on to the country that they know, the one that they celebrate, the whole “elbows up” thing. It was very 1970s, that type of a Canada. Whereas you have got a new generation who is saying, “You know what? This country is not really working that great for me, and I think I need to have some change.” They weren't as focused on Donald Trump and the United States as the older generation was. The older generation was more likely to have dealing with the U.S. as their number one issue, and most likely to see Carney as being able to deal with that. The younger folks were more likely to see affordability as their number one issue, even though they acknowledged that Carney would do a better job than Poilievre dealing with Donald Trump. It just wasn't as big an issue for them in the election campaign. I could go on, but you get the picture.

TH: So much to unpack. We have spent some time, here at Lean Out, looking at the collapse of the NDP. We knew it was not going to be good for them in this election, but I was still quite surprised by the severity of the outcome. You write that “this is not just an electoral failure, this is an existential crisis.” In your view, and in what you've seen in the polling, what happened to the NDP?

DB: They became irrelevant. What happened was they had an opportunity to create some independence from the Liberals last year when they voted for the budget, and they failed to do that. As a result, people felt that there was no reason for them to vote for them for change.

But this has been going on for a while. There's always two positions that the NDP can take, in terms of election campaigns and the way they govern themselves politically. One of them is the Jack Layton approach, which was quite successful for the NDP — the most successful ever. Layton had a very clear point of view, which was that the NDP represented the progressive champion in the country. Just like Stephen Harper was motivated to get rid of the Liberal Party, so was Jack Layton. He saw Canada moving towards more of a two-party type structure in which the NDP would really bypass the Liberal Party.

Every NDP leader has a choice. Do you want to be Jack Layton or do you want to be Ed Broadbent? Jagmeet Singh chose to be Ed Broadbent. Let me explain the difference. Jack Layton looked at the Liberal Party, looked at the Conservative Party, looked at what had happened in the Conservative Party back in the early 2000s and said, “This country is moving to a two-party type of an election situation, in which there is going to be progressives versus conservatives. We're going to be the progressive champion, which means we have to bypass the Liberals. We have to go past the Liberals.” So, that was always his mission.

Ed Broadbent, his view was, “We're going to be the conscience of Parliament, so we're happy with being third — particularly a minority government, so we can influence the policies of the government from a more progressive perspective.” Jagmeet Singh decided he was going to go with the Ed Broadbent-type strategy. Unfortunately, this isn't 1980. So, what we were left with is a Liberal Party that's really filled in that whole progressive space and has left no room for the NDP. As I said, I think, in the article, they moved from being a political party to being basically a pressure group.

TH: But there is also a class dynamic at play here, as well. In the United States, we have seen the realignment of the working class to the right, behind Donald Trump. This includes, in some cases, the union vote. This is often measured by post-secondary education. How much of a similar realignment is underway here, when it comes to those without degrees?

DB: Totally. If you look at people with university degrees, they were more likely to vote for the Liberal Party — one of the highest voting over-indexing groups — and people who had high school education or less was much lower. One of the things when we talk about younger voters is it wasn't exactly the youngest voters. It was actually their older brothers and sisters. So, it was more Millennials than it was actually Gen Z. Although Gen Z men were more likely to be voting for the Conservative Party.

So, we're talking about people here who have had the experience of becoming an adult, getting into the workforce, and discovering that what they had been promised it was going to be is not what it's going to be. So, an inability to find the type of house that they always aspired to, an inability to get a family started, an inability to get a stable career. Not so much university graduates, but people who are more in that kind of college [group] … By college, I mean Canadian college, or high school-type education. Those folks are struggling.

TH: You mentioned gender. This is also a dynamic that we have seen in the States for some time — this political cleavage between young men and young women. How do you explain that? And why do you think right now it's happening in this country?

DB: Young women are doing a lot better than young men. I think that’s the primary explanation. Young men are not achieving as much in school. They are not earning as much when they start into their early jobs. They are really feeling left out of what the success of Canada has been, and they are really struggling. As a result, they are looking for somebody who is going to provide change. I mean, we can get into the whole sort of “bro” approach to conservatism. But I don't think that that's what we're seeing here in Canada. I think it's more of a legitimate reaction to a desire for change. It's not so much that they buy into the whole conservative message. But on this ballot, the [Conservatives] really did come across as the one party who was prepared to change directions, and that's what they were looking for.

TH: We had Tristin Hopper on the podcast to talk about his recent book — this was before the election — and he characterized the election as a “Let Them Eat Cake election.” We've also seen it described as a “Luxury Concern Election,” in reference to Rob Henderson's concept of luxury beliefs. How much weight would you give that?

DB: Yeah, I've had Sean Speer say the same thing to me — that worrying about Trump was a luxury belief. No, there were a lot of Canadians who were concerned about Trump. And Carney and the Liberals did an amazing job of isolating themselves as the only possible option for dealing with that problem. Even people who voted for the Conservatives actually saw that Carney and the Liberals would be better at doing that job. But for a whole big group of people — 41% of the people who voted — that was not the biggest issue for them. They were focused on other things, and mostly those other things that were focused on were things like affordability, housing, all those things that Conservatives were talking about prior to the Liberals changing their leader.

TH: I'm also curious about the divisions that we saw from the 2021 election and how durable those are. I hear from people who are still upset about how the pandemic was handled, specifically the vaccine mandates, and then afterwards how the trucker convoy was handled and the divisions in society as a result of that. Did you see that in the numbers?

DB: Not really so much. I think that people were really expressing what was going on in their own lives and what they cared about. So, for older people, they have the space to have what those other analysts were calling “luxury beliefs.” They can worry about the existential crises facing Canada, like, for example, Donald Trump insulting the country. Or the country that they had done so well in now being under threat.

Whereas the younger group, the other people who were not feeling that same thing … They may have been feeling it, but there were other issues that were more important to them, and they were more fundamental. They were: “What is going on in my four walls? What does my paycheck looks like this week? Am I going to make it from this week to the next? And whether or not the type of progress that I was promised that I could have in my life, if I did all the right things, would actually come to me. Those material rewards would come to me. That lifestyle would come to me.” And them not feeling that that's what's happening in their lives. That's what it was.

We were doing some election day polling for Global News, and we took a look at 10,000 people who responded to the survey. On the issue of affordability, the Conservatives led the Liberals by four points. I've never seen that before. These are usually numbers that are more associated with the NDP, or the Liberals. That the Conservatives were leading on kitchen table economics is strange, it’s not a usual thing. In fact, on the big, business page economics-type issues, actually the Liberals were beating the Conservatives on that. The economy as geopolitics, going along with foreign policy and Canada's relationship with the United States, those were all things that the Liberals led on. But the day-to-day experience of just getting by, that's where the Conservatives were doing well.

TH: Why do you think that is?

DB: I think that Poilievre had two things going for him. One of them was he was the one who, from an affect perspective — the feeling around the loss of hope that was in the country — when he said that Canada is broken, there was a lot of people who said, “Yeah, that's how I'm feeling.” Very consistently, right from the start of him being the leader of the Conservative Party, that was his message. And for that group of people, it resonated.

It wasn't that they were feeling themselves broken, which was why I think that message went a bit far for Poilievre. It was more that the institutions aren't working. “They are broken. Things that I'm seeing in the street, that doesn't seem to be working.” When Poilievre did his stand-ups that he would do, for example, in front of homeless camps and that kind of thing, that's the kind of thing that they were looking at. They were saying that [and thinking], “How can we be bragging about this? This is not headed in the right direction. And, by the way, I see a lot of these things in my life that just don't seem to be headed in the right direction.” Law and order, and crime — that was a motivator for people who were voting on the Conservative side of the political spectrum.

So, I think that what Poilievre did was he really connected with that feeling, that the country was headed in the wrong direction. And there was only one person on the ballot that was really holding himself out to be able to change the direction of the country, and that was Poilievre. Now, Carney also did okay on that, but it wasn't so much changing the direction of the country or more fundamental changes. It was just, “I'm different from Justin Trudeau, who you didn't like. I'm a new guy.” So, he had that going for him. But on that fundamental change of the direction of the country, Poilievre actually was the person who led on that.

TH: Going forward, what lessons should the Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre take from this election, in terms of their next moves?

DB: The obvious one is not unique to my perspective. It's something that John Ibbitson and I talked about in The Big Shift, when you heard the term “Laurentian elites,” that all came from that book. That was the realignment of what was happening on the right in Canadian politics. I think the lesson from this election is the potential for realignment on the left. And the problem that the Conservatives have is that realigned left is bigger than the realigned right. So, if the Conservatives can't find a way to grow their vote into something that looks like the mid- to higher-40s, they will always lose. If the left is consolidated and not divided, they will lose. So, Poilievre is going to have to find a way to extend that message, or his message, to a wider group of people. Simply doubling down on what they were doing before is not going to do it.

TH: At the same time, you also argue that the Liberal coalition is, in your words, “electorally unstable and unlikely to hold if the conversation shifts.” What do the Liberals need to take away from this?

DB: That they won with the only campaign that they could possibly win with, which was them changing their leader to the right person to deal with one unique specific problem — and that was Donald Trump and the United States. I'm going to use a sports analogy, I apologize. It's like bringing in a relief pitcher in the first inning to strike out one batter and then expecting him to pitch for the other nine innings. So Mark Carney, he had a good day today with Donald Trump. Allegedly, we'll see how it all comes out in the end. But he was brought in to do this. All of those other issues that people were worried about, they have no idea what he's going to deliver on that. He was brought in to do this one thing. So, the reason that they are electorally unstable is because there are so many breaking points in this country right now that we don't know if Mark Carney is the person who is best able to deal with this. The previous Liberal administration certainly wasn't. And let's face it, this government has really only changed one person so far. So, all of those things are still there.

We're seeing it, for example, pop up in terms of national unity and the West. I should say the Wests, plural. There's no such thing as the actual West; there are several Western perspectives, different perspectives. But Alberta is aggrieved and aggressive. Ontario has now put up some expectations for what they want the federal government to do. And, as you see those provinces start to kick off, the potential for Quebec to start to kick off again is definitely there.

So, national unity. One of the two big existential questions that every prime minister is going to face. We don't know what Mark Carney's position really is going to be, as a person to deal with that. He was hired to deal with the other existential question that every prime minister faces, and that is Canada's relationship with the United States.

That is why they are politically unstable. All of the problems that they had before, that got them down to 20%, are still there. They have changed their leader, but it's still the same administration. It’s still the same ideas. I was saying on The Hub the other day that they are like medieval physicians. Their only solution to a dying patient is more bleeding; throw more leeches on it. They just don't seem to really have anything else. Even Mark Carney himself, when you look at what he's proposed, it's basically more spending. As a result of that, you can see that if you can get the Trump thing somewhat under control, okay, well, you'll be acknowledged for that. But then all of these other things are going to start swamping the boat. And we don't know what kind of a leader Mark Carney is under that circumstance. He may be brilliant. I mean, this is an opportunity to create maybe one of the greatest prime ministers we've had in Canadian history. But we just don't know that yet. And the Liberal government, as a result, is unstable. Not to mention they are in a minority situation.

TH: I'm very concerned about the divisions in this country. The fault lines that you have articulated in that piece, and in this interview, are things that track very much with the reporting that I've done. But not everyone sees it that way. Andrew Coyne in The Globe and Mail, responding to your arguments, said the country is not as divided as it seems. I'll read a quote: “It is surely worth noting if we are talking about division and polarization, that at a time of national crisis with the country's very existence under threat from its near neighbor, the people of Canada turned in historic numbers, not to the sorts of extremist parties that have arisen lately in other countries, but to the two most moderate mainstream parties.” He says that when you look at the platforms, both parties converged on the centre. How do you respond to that?

DB: I have a lot of respect for Andrew, and I'm flattered that he read my article and felt that there was a need to respond to it. But I'm looking at the data, and I'm not so sanguine.

TH: What will you be watching for in coming months?

DB: I think the single biggest issue that we're going to be facing is the national unity question. I think that sometimes central Canadian people dismiss Western separatism as an issue of a few cranks out there in a couple of bars in rural Alberta or whatever. I don't think that that's what we're dealing with now. I think when you saw Danielle Smith's presentation yesterday, I mean, this is not nothing. Something is going on here. And by the way, I don't think the real question in Alberta is secession. I think it's more annexation, potentially. Because we're dealing with a person to the south of the border who may make an offer that could be somewhat appealing to people in that province. And when people say, “in the polling right now, people wouldn't vote for that,” it's like, yeah, I remember polling around Brexit. It was a no-win, right from the beginning, as well.

But anyway, just to get back to my point, I think that the people in central Canada and who play in the federal sandbox don't really have an appreciation for what's going on in those places right now. To the extent that they understand national unity, it's always from the Quebec perspective. But there's a new playbook on national unity, and it's going to involve Alberta and Saskatchewan, and there could be an echo effect that has an impact on Quebec and the kind of demands that they make. So, the way that the federation operates, I think, is going to become under a certain amount of pressure. And that is always an existential problem for Canada. So, while I hope Andrew is right, I fear that he's not.

TH: Lastly, I know you're a numbers guy. I want to ask you, just for a moment, to speak on a more emotional level about how you're feeling about where the country is at — and what your hopes are for where we go from here.

DB: Well, I'm a proud Canadian and a proud nationalist. I'm hoping that cooler heads prevail on all of these fronts and that we're able to go into the rest of the 21st Century as the united country that we've always been. But I'm also a student of history and have been around this environment for a long time, and I never take for granted the precariousness of the existence of this nation. We've assumed that we were always going to have a friendly neighbor south of the border. To a certain extent, we've allowed ourselves to become free riders. Donald Trump, when he stands up with that map and says, “What is this line that somebody drew with a ruler a hundred years ago? It doesn't make any sense. Why do we have this?” — I mean, he's not the only American president that's ever said that. And it's generally not led to any place good. So, I'm very concerned about that.

I'm also very concerned that we have a federal government that is so invested in the way that Ottawa looks at things right now — that kind of Laurentian Elite perspective on how the country operates — that they are going to be surprised by what they are dealing with on the national unity front, and they are not going to be ready for it. I don't know how much flexibility they have to be able to negotiate, to be able to deal with some of the concerns that we see in Alberta and Saskatchewan. But I think that they are actually real. I think that whatever we're seeing in terms of support for Alberta and Western or Saskatchewan sovereignty, or whatever you want to call it — support for that kind of unique position in Canada and standing up for that, for whatever it's going to be inside or outside of Canada — I think that what we've got right now is the baseline. I don't think it's what's going to be the final number. So, I'm very concerned about that as well.

I'm very concerned about the number of talented young people that are leaving this country because they feel that they can't get ahead here. That really, really worries me.

I'm really worried about the divergence of difference between how older people who this country has worked so well for — how little understanding they seem to have of the situation that younger people are trying to live with in this country.

I'm really concerned, and I write a lot about this, about the fact that our birth rate has collapsed in this country. Statistics Canada is very likely to announce that it's down to 1.2. I mean, that's Japan numbers. And without immigration — which, by the way, has been very poorly managed over the last few years — we'd be tipping into rapid population aging and eventual contraction in not a very long period of time.

So, we've got all of these things going on in this country, and Donald Trump is just one part of it. But he is holding up a mirror to all these fractures that exist. And his basic point is that a country that can't defend itself, and a country that is totally reliant on another country for its economic prosperity, isn't a country. And while I disagree with him, I don't think that we can dismiss him.