Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shakes hands with NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh as Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre looks on at an event in Ottawa, on Jan. 30, 2023.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Preston Manning is the former leader of the Reform Party of Canada and a former leader of the opposition in Canada’s Parliament.
Many Canadians, including most Canadian political commentators, continue to view the political landscape through old lenses that no longer provide a clear vision of present-day realities. Those old lenses are aligned along a left-centre-right axis, leading to descriptions and analyses of parties, leaders and policies in those terms – even though the framework was inherited from the French Revolution more than 230 years ago.
If we were to visit the political optometrist, then, how might our new lenses be aligned to enable us to see the country more accurately? I suggest viewing things along the aristocratic-democratic axis, which would frame much of today’s politics as a contest between elitists and populists, instead.
Aristocracy was defined by the Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato as “government by the few” – the system of government they preferred, as long as “the few” were virtuous and competent – whereas the Athenian statesman Pericles defined democracy as government where “the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few.”
In his 19th-century work, Democracy In America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the fundamental differences between U.S. political parties and leaders were not between what would become today’s Republicans and Democrats, but between those animated by the “aristocratic passion” who seek to limit the role of ordinary Americans in their government, and those animated by the “democratic passion” who seek to expand it.
At the leadership level, this conceptualization of politics – as a contest between aristocratic elitists and democratic populists – was illustrated by the contest between the aristocratic John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the U.S., and the populist Andrew Jackson who became the seventh president of the U.S. by defeating Adams in the 1828 presidential elections.
Adams was the consummate aristocrat: He was highly educated, with extensive experience in government, and he held impeccable family credentials, with his father John Adams having been America’s first vice-president and second president. Jackson, on the other hand, was in certain respects the Donald Trump of his day: an outsider with a growing public following largely based on non-political (in his case, military) accomplishments, who gained a reputation for being wild and woolly (he once attended a Washington reception with two revolvers stuck in his belt), and who was contemptuously described by Adams as “a barbarian” who “probably can’t spell his own name.”
Flash forward to today, and in both the U.S. and Canada, politics are now aligned more along the aristocratic/elitist-democratic/populist axis than the old left-centre-right axis.
In the 2010s, Barack Obama rose to become the darling of the American aristocracy, attracting the active support of the media, academic, social and business elites as he supported the causes dearest to their hearts, from social justice and climate change to expanded trade links with China and more. But in the course of doing so, Mr. Obama and the Democrats increasingly lost touch with America’s grassroots and their more prosaic economic and local concerns, alienating enough of them to lead Mr. Trump to win enough votes to become Mr. Obama’s successor.
Here in Canada, both Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, the Prime Minister’s partner in a supply-and-confidence agreement, reek of aristocratic elitism. Mr. Trudeau, like John Quincy Adams, comes from a political family; Mr. Singh was educated in an expensive private high school in the U.S., and leads a party which long ago abandoned its populist roots in the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation of Saskatchewan. Both champion climate change and the causes of minorities selectively defined by “diversity, inclusion, and equity,” courting the support of media, academic and social elites.
But both leaders and their parties appear to be increasingly losing touch with the majority of Canadians, who are more concerned with the surging costs of housing and food, ever-increasing taxes, and the replacement of universal access to health care with universal access to ever-lengthening waiting lines.
Increasingly, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is becoming aligned with this majority. His background helps: He comes from a more humble family background than Mr. Trudeau or Mr. Singh, with political beginnings rooted in the positive populism of Western Canada.
The federal Liberals may yet ditch Mr. Trudeau, but even if they did, the likeliest candidate to replace him would be yet another aristocratic elitist, such as Mark Carney – the Harvard- and Oxford-educated former governor of two money-printing central banks and the chair of two high level investment firms, and a man as distant from the average Canadian as John Quincy Adams and Barack Obama became from ordinary Americans.
Old-school politicians and commentators may continue to view the Canadian political scene through left-centre-right lenses, and continue to mistakenly dismiss Mr. Poilievre and the Conservatives as nothing more than “right-wing conservatives.” But should Canadian voters come to see the next federal election for what it really is – a contest between aristocratic elitism and democratic populism – they’ll ask which of the parties and leaders are most in tune with their aspirations and concerns, and the outcome is most likely to be a rejection of the Liberals and the NDP.