For eight months, opinion surveys have told Canadians their enthusiasm for their two main national political parties has all the liveliness of a dead cod. Then a few days ago, without anything having happened, a poll placed Stephen Harper and his Conservatives 11 points in the lead.
The Conservatives themselves doubt its accuracy. The pollster, Darrell Bricker of Ipsos-Reid, defends the findings, saying they show the Liberals have no momentum and their Leader, Michael Ignatieff, is a “cipher” whom Canadians do not know.
That presupposes sufficient numbers of Canadians are accessing media where Mr. Harper and Mr. Ignatieff might be expected to appear. It pre-supposes that enough Canadians have sufficient knowledge of national affairs to pass meaningful judgment on what the two parties are doing.
It assumes that out of the fractures – the eroding social cohesion – of Canadian society, the poll bears a message that would actually serve to guide the two parties on how they should serve Canadians' democratic interests.
In True Patriot Love: Four Generations in Search of Canada – Mr. Ignatieff's new book that, like all his books, reads significantly better than his speeches – the Liberal Leader touches eloquently on the need for social cohesion.
“We need a public life in common,” he writes, “some set of reference points and allegiances to give us a way to relate to the strangers among whom we live. Without this feeling of belonging, even if only imagined, we would live in fear and dread of each other. When we can call the strangers citizens, we can feel at home with them and with ourselves.”
And reaching for a codicil from his intellectual hero, he adds: “Isaiah Berlin described this sense of belonging well. He said that to feel at home is to feel that people understand not only what you say, but also what you mean.”
A glorious objective.
Since his book was published in late spring, Mr. Ignatieff has been indicted by media commentators for offering a dearth of glue to bind his fellow citizens together. That should not tarnish the importance of his thesis.
Canadians have a conundrum of a country whose inhabitants, particularly anglophones, demonstrate a higher attachment to their nation than the inhabitants of any other advanced Western nation – says the Ottawa-based Ekos Research – but whose sense of common purpose and belonging together is disintegrating.
According to social scientists who study the issue, Canada is developing a social-cohesion deficit. Too little holds us together, and the potential threat to the democratic conduct of our affairs is cause for concern.
Canadians collectively have not thought seriously about nation-building since the Trudeau just-society era of the 1970s. The politics of consensus once so strongly imprinted on Canadian society have vanished.
At a time when historians are re-interesting themselves in the nation as a cultural notion, as a frame for identity – after a long hiatus when they sought to escape the dead-white-man narratives of political and economic nation-building – Canadian culture shows up with cleavages deep enough to be indecent.
The demographic bloat of baby boomers, more pronounced in Canada than anywhere except Australia, has dragged the country from Yuppiedom to Grumpydom – from young urban professionals to grown-up mature professionals – shifting the public-policy agenda along the way from social equality, human rights and statism to crime worries, security and fiscal retrenchment.
The Canadian median age in 1967 was 26, when Pierre Trudeau was getting ready to lead the country. It is now 43. Thus, not surprisingly, for the first time since Ekos began asking Canadians 15 years ago how they self-identify, a slightly larger number label themselves small-c conservative rather than small-l liberal, reinforcing policy indicators such as declining support for pacifism and a single-payer public health-care system.
The boomers eventually will totter off stage, but the people behind them are cleaved into two significant age-related groups, what Ekos president Frank Graves calls “open cosmopolitans” and “continental conservatives.”
The open cosmopolitans, with an over-representation of Generation X, are extremely receptive to diversity, immigration and the outside world and hold generally progressive views on issues such as foreign policy. The continental conservatives, with an overrepresentation from Generation Y (the under-30s), are comfortable with current government directions and see Canada being more closely drawn into a North American partnership.
There is no identifiable successor group on the radar screen to the vanishing supporters of Pearson-Trudeau progressive statism, in case anyone was hoping.
A DEEP SPLIT
But there is a deep split between megalopolitan Canada and everywhere else. (Think of a Conservative government with no elected members in Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal.)
There is a deep split between those with postsecondary education and those without. Canada has the world's highest proportion of people with postsecondary education.
And there is a marked split between genders. Among current voters, for example, women tend significantly to dislike both Stephen Harper and Mr. Ignatieff. Actually, for the past three years, Canadians as a whole have rarely got beyond mustering tepid interest in the two major parties, a favour the Conservatives and Liberals have returned by offering nothing approximating a national vision.
No mind-map, no soul-map, of Canada.
A nation is an imagined community, wrote the U.S. political scientist Benedict Anderson.
Thought is not private, contrary to what Rodin's statue of The Thinker implies. Thought is predominantly public and social, and therefore a nation is a community of people who understand that those with whom they shop, ride public transit and share the roads and the sidewalks also share values, community knowledge and mythologies.
It is what enables us to talk to one another with some confidence of being not only heard but, as Isaiah Berlin would have it, being understood. It is what enables Canadians to live together with sufficient levels of trust and security and to conduct their democracy more or less under the rubric of having a common purpose and serving the common good.
It is that facility which is in danger of unravelling – without, it should be noted, any rescue being offered by polling, the shotgun substitute for public consultation that politicians and governments have so heavily relied upon.
Polling methodology is breaking up on the rocks. People's increased unwillingness to respond to surveys is making it harder to assemble demographically representative samples and thus meaningful results.
Public cleavage is contributing to polls' debased value as an expression of public will: What public, or how many publics, are we talking about?
And the erosion of shared knowledge is undermining polls – not to mention social cohesion: that fundamental element of Benedict Anderson's imagined community, the information and knowledge that enable citizens to engage in debates and have opinions about what they should be doing together as a society, whether it is university education, health care or garbage pickup.
The central instruments of social cohesion have been the mass media, now being gnawed away at by specialty channels and the Internet, and by new generations who do not feel affiliated (the word communications theorists use) with TV networks or CBC radio or newspapers.
And what appears to be the greatest single impact of digital media is the disappearance of what political scientists call the public space – the very public space that, two centuries ago, newspapers created in Canada.
Prof. Gene Allen of Ryerson University's school of journalism cautions against assuming that mass media created some monolithic national consciousness in the past. “The fact you give someone a message,” he points out, “really doesn't tell you what they're going to do about it.”
Rather, he says, the significance of shared knowledge and its importance to social cohesion is more complex.
Shared knowledge means that equally important to what is said on the nightly newscasts, or what newspapers say, is that so many Canadians can assume that so many other Canadians are watching the same newscasts or reading the same newspapers.
As the U.S. media sociologist James Carey once said, reading a newspaper is like attending mass.
NEW GLUE
With network ratings and circulations falling farther and farther behind population growth, there remains, says Prof. Allen, “a strong desire among people to know what is socially known … [but] the cohesive core of common information is shrinking.”
The nature of the glue being provided by the new social networking instruments like Facebook and Twitter at this stage isn't known, he says. What may be immediately at peril is the mass-media serendipity of being intellectually challenged and engaged.
“The thing about newspapers is that you always find things you didn't know you were looking for. You come across views that you don't agree with or don't like,” says Christopher Waddell, director of Carleton University's school of journalism. “When you're searching for things on the Internet, I think it's much less likely that you're searching for things that challenge you. You're much more likely to be searching for positive reinforcement.”
The resulting risk, he says, is a polarization of attitudes. People will be less likely to expose themselves to opposing legitimate views.
“Society is always better when someone is trying to undermine your views. And particularly, social cohesion is better, because being challenged forces you to think through why you believe what you believe. It's the stimulus for debate and discussion and a recognition of multiple others.”
Pierre Trudeau once declared that if Canada broke apart, it would be a crime against humanity. What would he say if its citizens become strangers to themselves?
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Michael Valpy