Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

First of all, I want to apologize for not being able to be in Ottawa in person today. I hope to do so on another occasion.

I want to talk about three main points. The first is to just point out that populism is no longer a marginal political force in Europe. It's actually the defining force, and that is the main source of the fracture of liberal democracy at this point. The second is to explain how and why it is that populism is dangerous to liberal democracy, and the third is to speak a little bit about what I see as a potential impact on Canada in particular.

The first thing to point out is that, around the world, the four largest democracies are now arguably ruled by authoritarian populists, not just your neighbour to the south here in Washington, D.C., but also in Brazil, India and arguably Indonesia.

In Europe, the number of populist governments has shot up from about seven in the year 2000 to around 15 or 16 at this point. The average vote share that populist parties gain in national elections has increased from about 8% in 2000 to over 26% now, and the trend continues to rise. We're likely to see a record result for populist parties in upcoming elections for the European Parliament.

One really striking thing when you think of the famous phrase by Winston Churchill, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the [heart of Europe],” is that it's now actually possible to drive along the line of that iron curtain through countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Austria and Italy, and never leave a country ruled by populists.

That is the first point. We need to stop thinking of these as insurgent political movements. We need to stop thinking of them as marginal political movements. They are now in many ways the dominant political force in large swaths of Europe.

The question is why that is dangerous to democracy. Why should we be talking about authoritarian populism in a hearing on threats to democracy? To understand that, I think it's helpful to think about the nature of populism, which Cas Mudde and others who are present here have researched a lot as well.

In my understanding, it is at first puzzling why we should think of some of the figures I've mentioned as being related at all. At first sight, it's not obvious why we should class people like Donald Trump in the United States, people like Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, people like Viktor Orbán in Hungary and people like Hugo Chávez and now Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela as part of the same kind of political movement. After all, they have deep ideological differences, especially when it comes to economic policy, where some of them would be classified more as left wing and others more as right wing.

They also have very different enemies. Some of them, for example, tend to victimize and vilify Muslims. Others, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, for example, tend to victimize and vilify anybody who's not a Muslim. They don't have a set of common enemies.

The way to understand what does connect them, I think, is a rhetorical style, a way of thinking about politics and understanding the nature of politics. What they have in common is the claim that the real reason we have political problems is because of a political leader who is corrupt and self-serving and who cares more about various minority groups than about people who are “like you and me”.

Therefore, they conclude that the only way to deal with this problem is for somebody who truly represents the people to come along, throw out all of the current power structures and stand up for ordinary folk.

The distinctive move here is not just a claim that there are problems with the current government or the current set of politicians and that the opposition can do better or that politics needs some new faces and perhaps even new parties. All of that is a perfectly legitimate part of democratic politics. The distinctive element of these populist claims is to say that they and they alone can represent the people and that anybody who disagrees with them is, by nature of that fact, illegitimate.

That helps to explain why it is that, for a time, populists tend to do so much damage once they enter the government.

The things that we observe in a lot of these countries are that as soon as they get in, they start to delegitimize the opposition as traitors, rather than Her Majesty's loyal opposition. They start to talk about independent institutions that would limit their power and that might stand up to executive overreach, in the form of courts, for example, as “enemies of the people” or as “so-called judges”. They tend very strongly to attack the press, saying that it is working against the people if it is working against the government or criticizing the government.

If the way to understand our political systems is as liberal democracies that are committed both to individual freedom and to collective self-government, the first set of damages tends to be to the liberal element of the political system. It tends to undermine individual rights, in particular minority rights. It tends to run counter to the rule of law and the separation of powers.

But the damage isn't contained to that, because once these governments have managed to make the judiciary dependent on their will and their whim, once they have managed to limit the free press, once they have managed to vilify the opposition and change electoral rules in many countries, the democratic element itself comes under attack. We've seen that happen in countries, like Hungary, which are member states of the European Union, member states of NATO, which have had a long-standing democratic history for over the last 25 years, which political scientists believed to be safe from democratic backsliding. Viktor Orbán, a democratically elected prime minister, is no longer somebody who can be removed through free and fair elections at this point, in my opinion.

What kinds of impacts might this potentially have on Canada? I want to point out three primary things that I think you should worry about.

The first is about business and trade. Canadian companies working in Europe and other countries around the world rely on the rule of law. They assume that their investments will be safe for decades to come and that the success of their investments depends on the quality of their products rather than on political connections. Where populists come into power and undermine the rule of law, that can no longer be assured. You can have threats to private property, but more importantly you can have informal ways in which companies that don't toe a political line, companies that don't have allies among the increasingly powerful ruler, are going to be disadvantaged.

The second threat that is very important is to trade. You see a form of politics that is often not fact-based and that tends to incite irrational fears rather than scientific evidence. As we've seen in the ongoing process of ratification for the free trade agreement between Canada and the European Union, that can lead to all kinds of misinformation, which makes it much harder to persuade people to agree to important trade agreements.

The third point is, obviously, military. We've seen the rise, over time, of populists, and in some cases outright dictators in NATO member states. This has put an obvious strain on this very important military alliance. Populists often have sympathy for other dictatorial regimes so that we see a real rapprochement of many countries ruled by populists across Europe, or governments that have a strong populist element, with Russia and to some extent with China and other adversaries of liberal democracies such as Canada and the United States.

The last point I want to make encompasses all of that. One way of thinking about the threat to liberal democracy, and the threat, especially to the interests of Canada, is simply from existing populist governments, but I think even there there is a deeper strategic threat, which is uncertainty. It is very hard to sustain a military alliance and it is very hard to rely on free trade agreements when you don't know which country will fall next to authoritarian populism and may, therefore, cease to be a reliable partner in the military and the economic scenes.

The threat of populism comes not only through existing populist governments but also through making it much harder for nations like Canada to know what kind of relationship they will be able to enjoy with countries like Italy, France or even Germany, in five or 10 years.

Thank you very much.

Transcript

Discussions (0)