Is Canada More Polarized Than Ever?

Sarmishta Subramanian, The Walrus: Is Canada Broken?

The country seems more polarized than ever. Here's what that means for the next election.

In May, with Brexit chaos and contentious EU elections in the air, more than 5,000 Europeans joined a novel social experiment. In cafés and parks in Poland and Italy, in Belgium and Denmark, they sat down to talk, one on one, with strangers from another country who held opposite views on a slew of divisive issues: Are there too many immigrants? Should Europeans pay higher gas taxes to address climate change? Is the EU good for Europe? This wasn’t debate club or a performative exercise; the aim was simply to have a difficult conversation, to share one’s experience and listen, for a while, to someone else’s.

Europe Talks was a partnership between seventeen European media organizations, including the website Zeit Online, which launched the project in 2017 with 600 such conversations in Germany. A UK version followed, billed by its unlikely cosponsor, the Mirror, as an effort to “bring the nation back together over a nice cup of tea.” In one rather stiff exchange in Yorkshire, captured on video by the Mirror, a third-generation lobster fisherman and a Syrian refugee turned cheesemaker talk about why he voted for Brexit and why she migrated; there’s a moment where he murmurs that she’s “more Yorkshire” than some people who were “born and bred here.”

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WNU Editor: I live in Canada (Montreal, Canada). I have never seen this country as polarized as it is now.

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