L to R: Nik Nanos, Jim Leitch (son of the late Merv Leitch, QC) and Dean Paul Paton
As Canada's leading public opinion pollster, Nik Nanos - who has Canada's top record for reliability and famously predicted the results of Canada's 2006 federal election to within one tenth of one percentage point for the four major parties - draws from a wealth of knowledge spanning history, political science, psychology, and business.
UAlberta Law was pleased to host Nanos at the Law Centre on March 27 to deliver the annual Merv Leitch, QC Memorial Lecture. The lecture series - delivered to audiences at the University of Alberta and University of Calgary Faculties of Law - was established in 1991 by Premier Lougheed and other friends and associates in honour of C. Mervin Leitch, BA, LLB, QC, who passed away in 1990.
In his lecture, "Politics in an Age of Voter Rage", Canada's political Nostradamus began by eschewing political science and statistical analysis in favour of a memorable analogy to professional wrestling. Nanos explained how seeing live semi-professional wrestling as a bookish 13-year-old in Belleville, Ontario opened a window in his mind that he would later apply to understanding voter psychology.
"It was eye-opening for me to see respectable grown-ups I knew from around town chanting and yelling 'Kill him!' and so on," he explained.
"I remember thinking at the time that these were smart people who obviously knew that what they were watching was fake. Clearly some other force had to be at work."
Nanos asserts that this very same dynamic has been a common thread through the recent wave of populist demagoguery, and in particular behind the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election.
"There's an important distinction to be made between literal and symbolic messaging," he said.
"In the US election you had two candidates who were operating in two totally different realities. From the beginning many of Trump's supporters were interpreting his words symbolically rather than literally, whereas Hillary Clinton's supporters were more likely to focus on both candidates' words at face value. This allowed Trump to build his base as his audience tuned into the symbolic meaning behind slogans like 'build the wall' and 'make America great again'."
This dichotomy between truth and symbolism is but one of numerous factors behind the rise of Trump and other modern-day populist movements, says Nanos. Other dynamics at play, he asserts, include persistent post-Great Recession economic anxiety, the well-publicized phenomenon of "fake news", the amplification provided by social media, and political fault lines that increasingly have less to do with income than the level of educational attainment.
"In the case of the US election and the Brexit vote, educational attainment was a key dividing line in measuring the anger of voters," he explained.
"This is hardly surprising. We live in a world in which entire job categories are disappearing to forces such as automation and globalization and people are being told they're going to need to retrain. That's a message that's a lot more daunting to somebody with a high school-level education than somebody with a post-secondary background. Even if you're currently making a good living but only have a high school diploma, you're still likely to feel at risk of losing everything and losing control which makes a person susceptible to populist protest messaging."
Nanos concluded the lecture with a discussion of Canada's likely susceptibility to this type of politics.
"It certainly can't be ruled out," he contended, noting that recent surveys show the overall public optimism in Canada has declined since the last federal election.
"It's worth remembering that it was primarily high oil prices that allowed Canada to weather the Great Recession with greater ease than the US and Europe, and that in the manufacturing sector in Ontario and elsewhere, there's still a sense that things are in permanent decline. It's also true that Canadians are far more comfortable with free trade when it's with countries like the US and the European nations, countries that operate much like our own, but when it comes to places like China, there's a far lower level of comfort. The same anxieties are at work here."
Nanos concluded with a plea for an "education society" - wherein upgrading, retraining, and seeking new educational opportunities at all stages of life is normalized - as a cure for this form of political tribalism. And for those with a high level of educational attainment, perhaps there is benefit in attending the occasional wrestling match.
Nik Nanos leads one of Canada's most distinguished research companies and is currently writing a book on the Anger of Nations. In addition to being the Chair of Nanos Research, he is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C., and a research associate professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Mr. Nanos is the official pollster for CTV News, the Globe and Mail, Bloomberg News in Canada, and has recently been named to the Top 100 Most Powerful and Influential People in Government & Politics for Canada by The Hill Times. He is a fellow of the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association and a graduate of Queen's University with degrees in history and politics as well as a Master of Business Administration.
The Merv Leitch QC Memorial Lecture was established in 1991 by Premier Lougheed and other friends and associates in honour of C. Mervin Leitch, BA, LLB, QC, who passed away in 1990. Mr. Leitch served in the Royal Canadian Navy and was a member of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta from 1971 to 1982, during which time he served as Attorney General, Provincial Treasurer, and Minister of Energy & Natural Resources. Outside his political career, Mr. Leitch was a partner with the former Macleod Dixon - now Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP - in Calgary, served as president of the Calgary Bar Association, and as a bencher of the Law Society of Alberta. In addition to acting as a director for several Canadian corporations, he was also on the board of the Canadian Institute of Resources Law at the University of Calgary.