CHARBONNEAU – Anger, distrust are fueling anti-incumbent mood

CITY-DWELLING CANADIANS have typically voted for progressive parties in the past. But that’s about to change in 2025.

Pollster Greg Lyle, president of Innovative Research Group, finds that some have shifted from identifying climate change or homelessness as a top priority. Instead, they are focused on the cost of living, increased stress about housing prices, food prices, gas prices and public safety.

Voters have grown impatient with Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government.

“People are not willing to support policies they’d supported four or five years ago. And Mr. Trudeau is still thinking it is four or five years ago,” said Lyle.

However, what voters are voting for is new. It’s not conservative. It’s part of a new wave that is sweeping the globe. I call it New Populism.

Vancouver resident David Fine is typical of the new mindset. He has voted for the Liberal Party in every federal election of his entire adult life. But he’ll take a break from that pattern in next year’s election. “This time, I don’t think I can do that,” he says.

Ironically, he’s considering a vote for a party he doesn’t particularly like. Fine doesn’t like the Conservative Party policies and he’s appalled by the promises from party leader Pierre Poilievre to defund the CBC.

But he is looking at the Conservatives’ policies on carbon pricing, the economy and social issues.

David Fine typifies global discontent.

Investigative reporter Doug Sunders of the Globe and Mail has been following global voting in 2024 and found a pattern. Last year was billed as the “year of the vote” since, for the first time in history, half the world’s adults in about 70 countries, would have the chance to cast a ballot in a national vote.

He found, with a few notable exceptions, that voters were generally in anti-incumbent mood:

“That global anti-incumbent mood, and the general spirit of popular anger and distrust behind it, has mystified many analysts and wreaked havoc in formerly stable democracies. In many ways its origins and causes are the central question of our time.”

The rise of New Populism is mysterious.

It seems to have roots in the pandemic when an inevitable, but seemingly unbelievable, global epidemic threatened world order.

Incredible events, like humans landing on the moon or passenger planes crashing into tall buildings, invoke conspiracy theories.

Many lost their jobs as the pandemic shut down the economy. People were forced to stay at home and wear masks when out in public.

They responded in anger to vaccine mandates. They didn’t believe that there was any threat to public health and imagined that the pandemic was conspired by dark cabals to control the world.

In our society that emphasizes the rights of individuals over the public good, they saw the dictates of government as a threat to liberty.

“Government public-health actions saved hundreds of millions of lives but seem to have turned large blocs of citizens, around the world, against whoever was in power,” says Saunders. “And it has been the power-seeking demagogues of the far right, in many countries, who have exploited that worldwide mood.”

David Charbonneau is a retired TRU electronics instructor who hosts a blog at http://www.eyeviewkamloops.wordpress.com.