Finding Common Ground in Canada

Credit: CBC News Business, 2018

The past couple of weeks in Canada have been polarizing. From escalating action over pipelines in British Columbia and Alberta with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau taking heat in Nanaimo, to racial tensions in Saskatchewan coming to the forefront following the Gerald Stanley acquittal in the shooting of Colten Boushie, one could be forgiven for thinking our country is imploding.

In a Creative Mornings talk given in Vancouver last month, journalist Erin Millar of Discourse talked about the media's role in creating anxiety. She asked the audience to raise their hands in response to their individual levels of anxiety: "Who generally feels like they're not feeling anxiety right now? What is wrong with you? Have you been paying attention?" After briefly describing the threats of global warming, leaders who are "increasingly hate-filled, racist, authoritarian" and the threat of nuclear war, she asked again for another show of hands: "Now, everyone. Are we feeling a reasonable amount of anxiety?"

Screenshot of Erin Millar © Creative Mornings Vancouver, 2018

Spend too much time looking at the news (like me), and it all starts to feel like we are on a fast moving train that has lost control and will leap off the tracks at any given moment, ending in a fiery, bloody crash. How to stop this derailment? How to disembark from this train without disengaging one's self from current affairs entirely?

I've worked professionally in engagement in one way or another for the past decade or so, which has led me to believe that collaboration is always the answer. Engagement is "any process that involves the public in problem solving or decision-making and uses their input to make sustainable decisions" (International Association for Public Engagement (IAP2) Foundations in Public Participation, 2016). Good engagement processes force people to think about the values of others and in what areas common ground is shared. But is there a point at which engagement cannot be successful? After all, as put by Tony Seskus in a recent CBC article about Trans Mountain: "Such polarization makes collaboration hard to accomplish."

True, perhaps. But a recent study suggests that Canadians are really not so polarized when it comes to heavily politicized topics. Research in 2015 by Université de Montréal political science professor Éric Montpetit and co-authors Erick Lachapelle and Simon Kiss was undertaken to combat the perception that "interregional disagreements in Canada are harmful to policy-making and policy acceptance" due to the fact that Canada is one of the most decentralized federations in the world, creating a lack of cohesion when it comes to national and provincial policy decisions. In other words: provinces may be seemingly pitted against one another due to their competing interests and cultures, but the researchers found this is not the case.

The methodological approach to this research encompassed questions related to multiple areas of controversy: immigration, oil pipelines, balanced budget, highway tolls, unions, the gun registry, religious symbols, militaristic foreign policy, oil [tar] sands, policy power, workplace safety and abortion. These areas were then reduced to three primary values held by Canadians:

• Egalitarianism: social justice and equality in society; 
• Traditionalism: traditional organization of society; and 
• Legal rigorism: the rule of law for everyone and respect for authority.

© Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP), 2017

It's among these values that the research suggests that while, on the surface, we appear to be so divided, underneath it all we do share common ground - maybe not in exactly the same ways, but overall on important issues and definitely across all five regions included in the study. When it comes to policy, the researchers contend that, if culture is equal to values, then there is more that unites us than divides us. In their words: "Canadians’ differences over values have a considerably greater effect on their public policy preferences than does the region where they live." Therefore, "policy should be designed, framed and promoted to appeal primarily to values, not to regions."

Isn’t that reassuring? To know that we, as a nation, generally value the same things? I must admit, when I first heard this information I was skeptical. “No way," I thought. "There’s no way this is true.” Sure, there are drawbacks to every methodological approach. But when I think about this research in the context of friends who live in Alberta and Saskatchewan, I obviously know that my friends and I share the same values even though we live in different parts of the country. But then factor in how things are presented in the media, and Erin Millar's observations on how current journalism is designed to keep us in fear in order for news outlets to stay in business, and it becomes less murky as to why we might feel estranged from each other and divided on what's best.

We may be literally spread far apart, which lends itself to thinking that our regional interests keep us far distanced from each other ideologically. But it behooves each of us to remember this research. And to think about these words by author Matt Haig: "Be nice to other people. At the universal level, they are you."

We're all just people. At the universal level, we are all the same. We care about the same things, even though it may not seem like it at particular points in time.

So next time you come across an internet troll, or someone on social media spewing opinions you just cannot agree with, remember this blog post. Remember that we, as humans, do share the same values - even if this can be hard to recognize. I, for one, am grateful for opportunities where we can collectively find common ground. I only hope that we don't give up on ourselves.