When self-described Conservative Angela Drainville went door knocking during the 2021 territorial elections under the Yukon Party banner, some potential voters on doorsteps made strong presumptions about her views on abortion.
Canadians who supported the "Freedom Convoy" weren’t necessarily “pro-Trump” and didn’t all back the horn honking in downtown Ottawa, Drainville added.
“That's a polarizing assumption,” she said.
As Drainville noted, there can be disagreement within political parties and movements, and agreement across them. She helped co-organize a new group that is bringing people together across the political spectrum — from inside and outside of politics — intended to address polarization.
The group calls itself Grey Matters. Co-organizers Drainville and Mark Nelson spoke with the News in the newsroom on May 6.
Nelson started thinking about and feeling troubled by polarization and how it played out during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the United States.
“There were warning signs and some seeds of that kind of thing happening in Canada,” he said.
“I think part of what the hope is, is that we're going to maybe explore and perhaps deliver some ways in which the everyday Yukoner could combat polarization.”
The group’s organizers didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. There appeared to be papers and discussions happening around the topic at the academic level but no organizations doing the ground-level work in the country, they said. When they couldn’t find anything like it, they put the wheels in motion locally.
They haven’t received government money.
An August 2023 report by investigative journalist Justin Ling aimed to take stock of the rise of polarization in Canada and understand what drives it. He referred to divisions that existed before COVID-19 and the internet. "Indeed, they are the timber out of which the Canadian federation was constructed," Ling wrote.
"If we are to have any hope of reversing these trends, we first need to understand them."
Grey Matters' first gathering brought about 65 people to a conference room at the Gold Rush Inn in downtown Whitehorse to learn and brainstorm about polarization. It was a diverse turnout, according to Nelson and the co-organizers.
“We tried hard to throw the word out to different people of different stripes,” Nelson said.
Nelson made a distinction between being polarized on peoples’ identities versus being polarized on issues like free trade or Sunday shopping.
“That's maybe not so concerning as polarization of identities [which] is when you start to get people grouped into different types of people, different groups that align, that form echo chambers and start to look at each other in negative ways,” he said.
“That kind of group identity effect of polarization, that's something to be really worried about, right? And when that starts to map onto politics, like it has in the states over the past few decades, then you've got problems.”
Drainville suggested the concept of polarization is about having an extreme response to someone because they identify with a group that you oppose.
“When I say I'm Conservative, there are lots of people that would have a really visceral reaction to that, and then from that, they would make a series of assumptions about what my values are,” she said.
“It's very similar for, you know, when someone says they're Liberal to someone who's really, perhaps staunchly, Conservative. That person might have a visceral reaction.”
Some of the divides she pointed to involve rural versus urban and blue collar versus academic and gender.
Drainville worries about the collapse of the federal NDP and the rise of a two-party system limited to the Liberal and Conservative parties of Canada following the recent elections.
“I think that what happened to the NDP is actually because of polarization," she said.
"I think it's fear."
In some cases, polarization leads to what Drainville called “blind-faith partisanship.”
“We need to get to a place where it's okay for us to actually even disagree with the people we're rooting for,” she said.
Nelson used a hockey analogy to show how to have tough talks around polarization.
“Fight really hard for the puck in the corner but keep it clean and then shake hands afterwards,” he said.
“The end goal is that more people see polarization as a real issue that needs attention, just like things like housing or climate change or crime, because if we are polarized and cannot work with each other, we cannot deal with those issues effectively.”
The organizers said to watch their website for blog posts and upcoming events in the near future and keep an ear out for potential podcasts.
Contact Dana Hatherly at dana.hatherly@yukon-news.com
