Raymond J. de Souza: With populism, Canada’s been there, done that, better than others

Why is Canada exceptional? The populist right is rising all over the world. But not here.

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The age of Trump began even before Donald Trump’s first election, with Brexit. Ten years on, the populist right is strong in Britain, with Nigel Farage’s Reform occupying a central place. Indeed, there is yet another populist party, more hardcore: Restore. What’s next? Rewind?

How remarkable is the populist wave? Poland, of all places, has not one, but two, pro-Russian populist parties.

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So why not Canada? Our quondam colleague in these pages, Andrew Coyne, recently offered several reasons in The Globe and Mail. Just as the populist wave was rising, Canada’s customary 10-year cycle of changing prime ministers brought Justin Trudeau in to replace Stephen Harper. By the time Trudeau’s 10 years were up, when conditions would have been favourable for the populist right, the spectre of Trump drove Canadians back to stability, and Mark Carney.

Pierre Poilievre, by nodding toward the Trumpian elements in Canada, absorbed them entirely — the People’s Party of Maxime Bernier was wiped out with his rise. Thus they were kept within a larger mainstream party, the dynamics of which prevent it from becoming utterly extreme.

I might offer a complementary explanation, having grown up in Calgary in the 1980s, when Preston Manning was launching the Reform Party. Forty years ago next month Manning held the first meetings in Calgary that gave rise to the official founding of the Reform Party in 1987.

Canada’s populist rise was 30 years ahead of the age of Trump, and it was a responsible populism, due largely to Manning’s prudence and temperament. Manning came by it honestly — his father, Ernest Manning, was Alberta’s longest-serving premier. Following his father, Manning offered a constructive populism, not the destructive varieties that have flowered in the Trumpian garden.

Manning’s original slogan was “the West wants in” — certainly not separation. He offered a positive agenda, thoughtfully argued, not mere oppositional agitation. He suffered fierce criticism at the time for being radical, but he really wasn’t.

Tom Flanagan’s book on Manning was called “Waiting for the Wave.” Manning’s reading of Alberta and western Canadian history was that there were waves of populism, fuelled by cycles of discontent with the prevailing system. The task of the responsible leader was to see the wave cresting and prepare to ride it, but to direct those powerful energies toward constructive purposes.

The wave Manning spotted was a powerful one, potent enough to obliterate the party of Sir John A. Macdonald in the 1993 election. His arrival in Ottawa had a positive impact on the signature policy achievements of the Chrétien government — balancing the budget, the Clarity Act, and development of Canada’s (Alberta’s) oil and gas sector.

Consider that Manning’s two most influential Reform MPs were Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney, future first ministers both. Both had roots in populist entities that included some elements of the agitated, aggrieved populism that would spread globally in the age of Trump — Harper in the National Citizens Coalition and Kenney in the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Yet both brought those energies into federal politics in a constructive manner that generated significant policy reform. It is enough to note that the Manning-Harper-Kenney populism was about smaller government and fiscal conservativism. Contrast that with Trumpian populism, which is big government, enormous deficits and higher taxes (tariffs).

Harper and Kenney worked hard to communicate effectively in French, and sought to include, not exclude, immigrants from conservative populism. Ten years after the 1993 election, Manning had passed — somewhat reluctantly — the torch, and his followers built two new political parties, the short-lived Canadian Alliance and then the merged Conservative Party of Canada.

Manning, like his father before him, and those he inspired after him, was a builder. The burn-it-all-down anger that infuses great energy into the populist right was harnessed by Manning, Harper and Kenney, but not indulged. They rode the wave. It did not overwhelm them.

Recent events have confirmed what responsible populism looks like. It looks like Kenney becoming the principal voice against the destructive elements in Alberta, who think the satisfaction of threatening separatism is worth the costs in political disruption, family frictions and economic uncertainty. It looks like Harper concluding Carney’s investment summit, standing foursquare behind Carney against Trump, and not undermining Canada in the face of Trump’s belligerence.

Contrariwise, destructive populism looks like the dumpster fire in British Columbia; the bonkers faction of the populist right is driving the clown car.

Recently, in light of the disturbing rise of antisemitism amongst elements of the populist right, Kenney invoked the memory of Ernest Manning — in the presence of his son — on how to keep such prejudices out of responsible populism.

Populism, like other political phenomenon, can be put to good ends, or bad ones. It can be constructive or become corrupted.

Thanks to Manning’s Reform, Canada’s populist wave came early, and significantly reshaped the political currents for the better.

We have been there, done that, and done it better than others. That’s why Canada is exceptional.

National Post

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