Liberal. Conservative. Green. New Democrat. Bloc Québécois. In recent history, these were the 5 main federal political parties in Canada. Enter the People’s Party of Canada (PPC). This new party was formed by Maxime Bernier in September 2018, a former Conservative member of parliament (MP) who the year previous had run for party leadership. Bernier was the sole MP in the PPC before losing his seat in 2019, with no other PPC candidates winning an MP seat since.
The PPC can be regarded as part of the right-wing populist movement that has seen a rise around the world. With several of the signatory members responsible for founding the PPC being involved with far-right anti-immigration groups like the National Alliance. The party supports the implementation of reduced Immigration to Canada, getting rid of the Canada Multiculturalism act, etc. More recently they have been campaigning against COVID-19 mask mandates, social distancing, lockdowns, and mandatory vaccinations. This alternate stance on COVID-19 protection measures which goes against expert medical opinions has helped the PPC rise in popularity during the recent 2021 federal election. Although the party was unsuccessful in its attempt to elect its candidates, the vote count for their candidates went from 294,092 (1.6%) in the previous federal election to 841,005 (4.9%) in 2021. Effectively leapfrogging the Green party who received a total of 398,021 votes (the party still holds two federal parliament seats) in the 2021 election.
Recently party leader Maxime Bernier received some flak for a tweet he put out about a perceived “offensive request” from several journalists whom he called “far left activists masquerading as journalists.” He followed up this tweet with another where he continued to use strong language when describing the journalists, even providing their email addresses to supporters and telling supporters to let the journalists know what they thought of their work. Using the sentence “They want to play dirty, we will play dirty too in his tweet.” This type of rhetoric aimed at the media is most similar to that of former American President Donald Trump. President Trump would routinely attack the media covering his time in office, with tweets such as this one being very frequent: “The Fake News Media is doing everything possible to make us look bad. Sad!”.
The Canadian Association of Journalists responded to the Bernier tweets outlining the important work done by journalists, stating that “Going after them” was wrong and should be avoided. Generally, I would agree with this sentiment, the Canadian political landscape should be one where attacking journalists is frowned upon. With Bernier mirroring Trump’s playbook in regards to the press, we as a country are also mirroring our American neighbours when we consider the amount of polarization that exists between the left and the right. Whether the PPC is the cause of this polarization or the symptom of said polarization is questionable, but what we can say for sure is that its mere existence does illustrate the increased polarization between people in Canada.
The current state of the PPC raises three key questions we can consider when thinking about their future. Firstly, what will happen to the party once the COVID-19 pandemic ends, will the increase in party popularity seen during the pandemic dissipate, or will new members remain loyal to the PPC? Secondly, what does the long-term future of the PPC look like? Will they grow in size and become a constant in Canadian politics, like a conservative form of the NDP or will they wither away and remain as a party similar to the Greens, on the fringe but always in the conversation. Thirdly, for the PPC to grow substantially in size what would need to happen to the conservative party? What sort of policy shift or scandal would need to occur for a significant vote bleed?
These questions and the future of the PPC in general will very much dictate Canada’s future political landscape, and in fact, be a strong reflection of the issues that divide our nation. The party's growth will illustrate a decisive choice made by Canadians, a decisive choice made by you. Do we as a country want to become more divided and polarized like the United States, or not?
By: Rvaha Afaan
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