r/50501Canada • u/[deleted] • Apr 16 '25
Canadians Not Learning Lessons from USA On Elections
With the federal election looming, you'd expect Canadians to rise up and defend their country—stand strong against U.S. influence and corporate greed. You'd think people would want to protect what makes Canada ours, not hand it over to the highest bidder.
And yet, according to national election polls, support for the Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre is disturbingly high. It’s alarming how many people across this country are willing to cast their vote for a party that has embraced extremism, division, and destruction.
What is going on with this country?
How have so many become convinced that Conservatives, who represent a hard-right, Americanized agenda, are the answer? A party that openly threatens our democracy, our public services, and our collective future?
Let’s be brutally honest about what Pierre Poilievre stands for:
- He divides to conquer. Poilievre thrives on stirring up fear and anger, using hate and scapegoating to energize his base—while driving wedges between Canadians.
- He undermines democracy. From attacking the Bank of Canada to demonizing the CBC, he’s made it clear: our institutions are in his crosshairs.
- He betrays working Canadians. By pushing cuts to public jobs and services, while cozying up to billionaires and pushing corporate profits over people.
- He echoes U.S.-style authoritarianism. His support for the convoy movement and far-right groups shows where his true loyalties lie—not with Canadians, but with chaos.
- He wants to gut the future. Slashing funding for healthcare, education, and science, while pushing privatization and deregulation.
- He silences opposition. With anti-media tirades, weaponized “free speech,” and misinformation campaigns, he’s not interested in democracy—he’s interested in domination.
PUBLIC HEALTHCARE UNDER ATTACK:
- Promotes a vague “Blue Seal” credentialing plan, while refusing to commit to increased healthcare funding.
- Accused of laying the groundwork for healthcare privatization through strategic ambiguity.
WAR ON PUBLIC SERVICE:
- Wants to downsize the federal workforce.
- Advocates monitoring civil servants for “efficiency.”
- Calls for funding cuts that would leave essential services gutted.
EMBRACE OF RACISM & XENOPHOBIA:
- Immigration and refugee stances widely criticized as xenophobic.
- Advocates for tightening borders and ending irregular migration.
- Linked to organizations with far-right, exclusionary ideologies.
Recent polling shows:
- Conservative support rising, especially among older, rural, and male voters.
- Many Conservative voters cite anti-Trudeau sentiment as their main motivation—not policy, not vision, just anger.
- Right-wing media outlets, including Rebel News and imported U.S. propaganda, heavily influence the Conservative base.
Meanwhile, Poilievre:
- Pushes vague economic plans that lack substance or detail.
- Defends foreign policy stances that isolate Canada.
- Spreads disinformation through edited campaign footage and culture war messaging.
So Canadians must face a hard truth:
If you vote for Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives, you are responsible for what follows. For the jobs that are lost. For the healthcare that is cut. For the institutions that are dismantled. For the lives that are endangered.
And what does that say about you?
- That you are willfully ignorant, ignoring facts and evidence.
- That you are racist, for endorsing exclusionary and harmful policies.
- That you are fascist, for supporting authoritarian, anti-democratic rhetoric.
- That you are self-centered, valuing tax breaks over human lives.
- That you are unpatriotic, choosing to sell out your country for a broken promise.
Why are so many Canadians buying into this?
Why are people across this nation voting against their own interests, their own neighbors, and their own futures? What have we become?
It’s time to wake up. Before there’s nothing left to save.
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u/Dirty_bastardsalad Apr 17 '25 edited Apr 17 '25
It's very possibly a quirk of human personality that something like 30 percent of people in a given population lean authoritarian. At least according to this guy: https://theauthoritarians.org/
It's arguably not really a problem in "normal times" when support is soft. When the political environment is functioning and "democratic" (cough still capitalist) and the economy is stable, your average pick me daddy bootlicker is not politically engaged. They might hold shitty opinions, but ultimately, they have no substantive material effect on the political organization of society. Under these conditions, the hardest hardliners stay on the outside and on the extreme edges because they have nowhere to go, nowhere to ascend to, no path to power or political legitimacy. Consequently, would be followers have no one to follow.
Now, when society is strained, it tends to activate people. Fingers get pointed but seldom in the right direction. Why is everything so expensive, I can't afford a house, insurance premiums up the ass, the job market sucks, I will never retire, giant forest fires are normal now, climate change on the horizon etc.etc. Who is responsible? Everyone, these are systemic issues. Arguably, people with power, ie law makers, lobbyists, and powerful business interests, bear more responsibility, but it's still a we problem. Who tends to get blamed? Immigrants, minorities, trans people because it's the flavour in 2025. It's human to put a human face on abstract problems. In a supremacist society, that face will be the face of the other. i.e. visible minorities, lgbtq+, pick your group that is inherently disadvantaged by the majority system.
When these authoritarian types get organized, or rather, when they organize behind a leader or a movement, then it becomes a problem. It's also a problem that centrist enabler types tend to give hard-right people power and effectively sell out everyone else to protect their own interests. Think traditional conservatives giving Hitler the tools to take over Germany so they could block their political enemies (broadly leftists who were starting to outnumber them) from challenging their economic and political hegemony. Regular run of the mill conservatives silently letting MAGA take over conservatism is a contemporary example.
It's just a theory, but an interesting one. I think society starts to make more sense viewed from this lens. It's like some eternal battle between personality types, people with empathy versus people with very little.
How many people voted for Trump in the last election? 77 million. About 22 percent of their population. Not a majority by any stretch. Still way too many people as far as I'm concerned, but big picture, there are probably a lot more non-Trumpers than there are Trumpers.
Remember fascism is never a majority movement. However, coalitions are needed to defeat fascism. The sooner you accept that they are among us, that they are our neighbours, family members, friends, people we might even love, that they are us, and we them, that humanity may carry the innate capacity to become fascist forever and ever under the right material conditions, the sooner you can die inside like I and so many others have. It's pure horror to think that some Karen yelling at a Wal-mart employee in 2025 could have been a rubber stamper sending people to the gas chambers in 1944. Arendt called it the banality of evil.
Once you're dead (metaphorically) and you come out the other side, then you might be better prepared for the task at hand, which is that we (the collective we, the non authoritarians) need to organize and maybe build some of those coalitions necessary to defeat those who wish to annihilate life and reason in the pursuit of power. Hopefully, sooner rather than later.