In my role as executive director of the Broadbent Institute, I help working-class people get ready to assume leadership roles — whether it’s getting active in their municipality or organizing for community change.
Ed Broadbent Announces the 2023 Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize Recipient
On behalf of the board of directors, I am pleased to announce that economist and former Progress Summit speaker Armine Yalnizyan is the recipient of the 2023 Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize.
The Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize recognizes outstanding academic contributions in political theory, social or economic history, human rights, and sociology. It acknowledges Ellen’s legacy of work on the history of political thought and her deep commitment to democracy. Ellen was an internationally renowned scholar, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and author of eight books published in a dozen languages. One of the most influential political theorists of her generation, Ellen was also passionately committed to making progress in the here and now. For her, in the deepest sense, democracy means “nothing more nor less than people’s power, or even the power of the common people or the poor.”
We chose to recognize Armine for her outstanding contributions to energizing young people’s democratic participation, her efforts to bring a progressive vision for society to the forefront, and her ability to parse and analyse economics and the economy for everyday Canadians. Armine’s leadership is historic. She is one of Canada’s most important economists, playing a vital role for progressive social change across the country. The work she has done, especially on inequality, deeply reflects Ellen’s values.
The Prize includes the opportunity to deliver the Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture, which will be delivered at Toronto Metropolitan University in the spring.
Please join me in congratulating Armine on her award.
About Armine Yalnizyan
Armine Yalnizyan is the Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers and a leading voice on economics in Canada. Much of her work examines the social and economic factors that determine our health and well being, including affordable housing, poverty, minimum wage, and basic services. Yalnizyan was active during the beginning of the pandemic in calling attention to the catastrophic effect COVID-19 had on women’s livelihoods, coining the term “she-cession”. She has served in a variety of senior roles in the Federal government, including on a task group on women in the economy and as a senior economic policy advisor to the federal Deputy Minister of Employment and Social Development Canada. She was senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ Inequality Project.
About the Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize
Established by the Broadbent Institute in 2017 in honour of distinguished author and academic Professor Ellen Meiksins Wood. Recipients are chosen for work that is emblematic of Ellen’s two-fold belief that democracy is always fought for and secured from below, not conferred from above; and, that the egalitarian values of democracy are in ongoing conflict with the unequal outcomes of capitalism. Previous recipients include UK author and activist Paul Mason, US thinker Barbara Ehrenreich and legendary trade union leader Leo Gerard.
Sunny times are over — it’s time for progressive Canadians to own this angry era
Progressives love a happy warrior.
Can you blame us? Progressive politics is, ultimately, an act of hope. It’s founded on the idea that more unites people than divides them — the idea that if everyday people work together, we can build a better and fairer world.
But in 2023, one thing is clear: we don’t live in sunny times anymore.
In a recent poll, only 30 per cent of Canadians felt like the country was headed in the “right direction.” This is more than just pessimism: it indicates distrust of institutions, divisions in society, and a reduced sense of unity and collective purpose.
Inflation continues to squeeze working people’s pocketbooks. Rate increases by the Bank of Canada try to resolve inflation on the backs of workers in the form of monetary austerity. Despite this tightening, rent continues to soar, with the nation’s average rent increasing more than 12 per cent since December 2021.
And if that wasn’t enough, many economic forecasters predict Canada will enter a recession this year.
Canadians are getting angry. And they should be.
The tenor of these conversations has changed. Gone are the days when people believe the system works in their best interests. Today, people tell me our systems are corrupt and must be fought.
We can see this play out in the success of Pierre Poilievre. The leader of the Conservative Party of Canada has consistently sought to channel the sense of despair and anger that Canadians feel, saying that “everything feels broken” and, echoing the slogan of the Brexiteers, consistently promising to help Canadians take back control of their lives.
It’s an attack that has emotional resonance. It’s also an excellent contrast with the Liberals, who, despite coming to power on their leader’s empathy, are likelier today to suggest that working people cope with inflation by cancelling Disney+, a suggestion made by Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland that she later walked back.
Poilievre won’t do anything to fix these problems, of course. It is one thing to know the issues, but it is quite another to solve them.
For example, he correctly identifies “gatekeepers” in local government as his nemesis — but his proposed reforms only target big cities while leaving housing-laggard suburbs in the 905 and Lower Mainland untouched and making no movement to reverse the Chrétien and Martin-era Liberals’ draconian cuts to non-market housing funding. His attacks on British Columbia’s safe supply pilot endanger efforts to end the province’s toxic drug crisis.
But we cannot ignore the simple fact: he is channelling Canadians’ anger. And it works.
Progressives, we need to take a page out of his communications playbook. In an angry era, we need to get mad.
Here’s the good news. Although the right is angrier today, anger is historically progressive territory. The left was founded on one simple truth: Working people are getting ripped off.
It’s this discontent that is at the foundation of the labour movement, which channels workers’ anger to fight exploitative bosses. We can look to labour for clues on how to channel people’s anger today.
The Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) launched a new campaign last month called Enough is Enough. In the face of an economy where workers pay the price for a crisis they didn’t create, the OFL demands real wage increases and an affordable cost of living.
The Canadian Labour Congress has given Poilievre competition when objecting to the Bank of Canada’s screw-tightening, as companies like Loblaws see soaring profits during inflation while workers’ wages continue to fall behind.
Federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh seems to have taken this lesson to heart, building awareness of ‘greedflation’ — a way for Canadians to remember that the cost of groceries and other products is up due to corporate profiteering.
Here’s what these campaigns have in common.
They are angry.
They identify a villain.
Their solutions are market interventions that Poilievre could never co-opt.
And they focus on what brings normal people together — a desire for a better life — not what drives them apart.
For too long, progressive politics — in this country and elsewhere — has been built on the foundation of culture wars to create a cross-class majority.
In 2023, that strategy has run its course.
In its place must be a new strategy: building a multi-racial, working-class coalition for progressive change dedicated to real, measurable, material improvement in the lives of ordinary people.
That’s the mission of the Broadbent Institute. That’s what we’re discussing at the Progress Summit this March in Ottawa.
And in an angry era where trust is declining and people look to charlatans for solutions, it’s how we’ll win back trust — and win a better deal for everyone in this country.
Jen Hassum is the Executive Director of the Broadbent Institute.
This article originally appeared in the National Observer on February 7, 2023.
Shortlist for the 2023 Jack Layton Prize and Charles Taylor Prize
The Broadbent Institute is proud to announce our shortlist of nominations for the 2023 Jack Layton Progress Prize and the 2023 Charles Taylor Prize for Excellence in Policy Research. The winners of the Layton and Taylor Prizes will be announced at the 2023 Progress Summit, hosted by the Broadbent Institute, taking place March 8–10 in Ottawa.
The 2023 Charles Taylor Prize for Excellence in Policy Research shortlist
- Dr. Grace Barakat
- Dr. John Borrows
- Angela Lee (Canadian Race Relations Foundation)
- Dr. Valerie Tarasuk
- Dr. Carolyn Whitzman
The 2023 Jack Layton Progress Prize shortlist
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Register to attend the 2023 Progress Summit today to join us in celebrating the progressive movement and its champions.
Pierre Poilievre is filling a void the left should occupy
The Tory leader is building a new kind of diverse Conservative coalition: one that is younger and angrier and more distrustful of institutions — with a wink to the protest convoy.
It’s a commonplace notion that Canadian politics mirror American politics — just 10 years behind. It should be no surprise, then, that many Canadian progressives think we see Donald Trump reflected in federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre.
But sorry, folks. Despite throwing his arms around the protest convoy, and his efforts to woo low-trust and alienated voters, Poilievre just isn’t Trump. And if progressives treat him like he’s Trump, we’re going to lose.
In poll after poll, Poilievre shows outsized strength among younger voters — contrary to long-held Ottawa assumptions.
In Canada, we younger people have less reason to trust our institutions than most. That’s why, if you’re under 40, you understand who Poilievre is trying to appeal to immediately — because you’ve seen these posts before, on your Instagram feed or on online chat platforms such as Discord. Many millennials love the idea of cryptocurrency, have cheered on attacks on the Bank of Canada, and embraced the convoy’s anti-establishment esthetic.
Poilievre got his start with an embrace of the convoy — prior to, and during, the Conservative leadership race. Ever since, he has catered to this segment of the population. With relish.
Poilievre has also visibly reached out to others who have found themselves with reason to distrust Canada and its institutions. Despite outreach to traditional reactionary voters by appearing at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, whose views on residential schools are highly controversial, he also has a long pattern of appealing to Indigenous voters, appearing with B.C. Liberal MLA Ellis Ross in support of LNG Canada, calling it “economic reconciliation,” and indicating in other videos that he hears from First Nations regularly about the need to “remove the gatekeepers in Ottawa.”
It’s not limited to young voters or Indigenous voters, of course. Poilievre has, at every turn, reached out to racialized voters, and highlighted racialized validators such as “Mustafa from Calgary” or the owners of ARZ Fine Foods. He promises to remove the gatekeepers that prevent them from succeeding.
The Canadian conservative movement’s ability to attract diverse voters has long been noted by Ottawa observers. But those same observers assumed that winning those voters meant tacking to the centre.
What, then, are we to make of Pierre Poilievre?
It is, frankly, a coalition that includes many of the voters progressives need to win.
Poilievre built this coalition not just by winking at radical anti-establishment movements like the protest convoy. He’s also spoken to that coalition’s very real economic and material concerns. He’s successfully paired snappy solutions with attacks on Canadian institutions. Consider housing — alongside health care, the issue dominating young people’s minds and pocketbooks. Liberal politicians may deliver bromides about affordable housing, but they refuse to identify a villain, preferring to make transfer payments to cities (which they are late on delivering). Poilievre, by contrast, correctly identifies “gatekeepers” in local government as his nemesis. He pairs this attack with an attack on the Bank of Canada.
It’s clear that he is building a new kind of diverse Conservative coalition: one that is younger and angrier and more distrustful of media and institutions than the coalition that it has replaced.
It’s an attack that has much more emotional resonance. Because along with anger, it offers hope.
Poilievre and Trump are both practitioners of grievance politics, and channellers of anger. But where Trump sought to channel his voters’ cultural grievances, Poilievre seeks to channel — in part, if not in whole — their material grievances, and build a new Conservative coalition.
Younger voters, diverse voters and marginalized voters — the kind of voter that progressive parties like to imagine make up their base — have material grievances to spare.
Those grievances are justified. And that’s why Poilievre is dangerous.
For too long, left-wing political parties have abandoned working-class, materialist politics in the pursuit of a cross-class majority that unites along false culture wars. This strategy has run its course. That’s why reclaiming real politics, and creating a multi-racial, working-class coalition is the central mission of the Broadbent Institute — and the theme of our upcoming Progress Summit in Ottawa.
The left must recommit itself to the material politics of the better deal, and a more comfortable life. Because if it does not, the right will continue to fill that void, and we’ll all suffer the consequences.
Jen Hassum is the Executive Director of the Broadbent Institute.
This article originally appeared in the Ottawa Citizen on January 30, 2023.
