We don’t disagree that much. We just can’t stand each other.
What a new study on polarization in Canada tells us about the state of civic discourse, with special guests Richard Jenkins and Alexander Chipman Koty.
Two-thirds of Canadians say they’re in the political centre. Only about 12% place themselves on the far left or far right. On paper, we’re a moderate country.
So why does it feel like we’re tearing each other apart?
That question sat with me after a conversation I had on this week’s episode of Craft Politics with Richard Jenkins and Alexander Chipman Koty, the two authors of a new report from Digital Public Square and Abacus Data on political polarization in Canada. They surveyed 2,250 Canadians — not just about where they sit on the political spectrum, but about how they feel about people on the other side. The distinction between those two questions turns out to be the whole ballgame.
There’s a concept in political science called affective polarization, which is different than ideological polarization in which people move further apart on actual policy — climate, immigration, taxes. Affective polarization is when people develop strong negative feelings toward the other side regardless of whether they disagree on much. It’s tribal. It’s emotional. And according to this research, it’s where Canada’s real problem lives.
Richard put it in a way that stuck with me: we haven’t become a society where our politics are more divisive. We’ve just become better sorted. The issues stack on top of each other so that conservatives all look alike, liberals all look alike, and the NDP all look alike. There’s less room for overlap because your political tribe now carries a whole bundle of assumptions about who you are, what you watch, what you eat, and who you hang out with.
Alex made a similar point about how political identity has leaked into everything — sports, music, the Super Bowl halftime show. Bad Bunny performs and suddenly it’s a political event with Kid Rock running a counter-broadcast. Every facet of culture can become a proxy war.
That’s the operating environment. And it means that even when Canadians aren’t far apart on the substance, they’ve built these elaborate pictures of the other side based on what the algorithm serves them. You see the worst of the right or the worst of the left, assume it’s representative, and your contempt hardens from there.
The finding that surprised me most — and the one I suspect will surprise listeners — is that the hostility between left and right isn’t symmetrical.
You’d assume the anger is roughly equal on both sides. It’s not.
Canadians who are only slightly left of centre view the right more negatively than slightly right-of-centre Canadians view the left.
The left, as Richard put it with a laugh, does a better job of hating the other side.
His explanation was interesting. The left has been winning the moral argument on social issues for a while now — and that creates a sense that the right is trying to roll back hard-fought progress. It produces a kind of moral certainty that sharpens the contempt. And then, eventually, the right pushes back hard against what it perceives as virtue signalling. Which is part of how you end up with the Trump phenomenon — a rejection of that moral framing dressed up as populism.
Andrew saw the same dynamic from the receiving end. He talked about how even moderate Labour voters would treat him like an anomaly — “oh, you’re one of the good Tories” — as if the default assumption was that anyone on the right must be driven by something sinister. He found that the centre-left was far more likely to assume bad faith about the centre-right than the other way around.
This asymmetry matters for anyone trying to build bridges. If you assume the hostility is equal and you design interventions accordingly, you’re going to miss something.
The report breaks Canadians into six segments based on their attitudes toward democracy, nostalgia, belonging, and polarization itself. The two that stuck with me were on opposite ends.
The Civic Optimists are the Canadians most satisfied with democracy, most proud to be Canadian, most trusting of institutions. They skew heavily 55 and older. They’re the winners — the political system has rewarded their choices and values, and they feel good about it.
The Frustrated Pessimists sit at the other end. Lowest trust in institutions, highest nostalgia for a Canada that used to be, heaviest social media use. They feel the system has let them down. They skew right. And they’re the most frequent daily consumers of the platforms most likely to reinforce that frustration.
What struck me was less the segments themselves and more the generational fault line running underneath them. The civic optimists are a product of a different era — one where the social contract felt more intact, housing was accessible, and the future looked brighter than the past. Younger Canadians don’t have that foundation. They’re more cynical, more right-leaning than previous generations at the same age, and — this is the part that should get your attention — more open to political leaders who bend the rules to get things done.
Alex was careful to add a nuance that I think matters: those same younger Canadians were also the strongest defenders of minority rights. When the survey asked whether it’s acceptable to restrict the rights of minorities in the name of national identity, young people were the most opposed. So it’s not that they’ve abandoned democratic values. It’s that they’ve lost faith in the system’s ability to deliver on those values. That’s a different problem — and arguably a more fixable one.
Richard made a point near the end of the conversation that I’ve been chewing on since. He said Canadians dramatically overestimate how many people are at the extremes. They think there’s a massive group of far-right fascists or far-left radicals out there, when in reality the fringes are small. But that misperception changes everything — because if you believe the other side is full of extremists, you behave accordingly. You disengage. You dehumanize. You stop treating politics as a disagreement between reasonable people and start treating it as a war.
Walter Lippmann wrote about this a century ago — the idea that we don’t see the world as it actually is, we see the world through pictures we’ve constructed in our heads. What’s changed is that we now have tools that validate those pictures 24 hours a day. The algorithm doesn’t show you a representative sample of the other side. It shows you the most outrageous example, because that’s what keeps you scrolling.
Alex described some of Digital Public Square’s work to counter this — gamified platforms that share real survey data with users and let them guess what other Canadians actually think. The punch line, more often than not, is that people discover they have more in common than they assumed. It’s a small intervention, but the experimental evidence suggests it builds empathy. And in a landscape where most of the incentive structures push toward division, small interventions that actually work are worth paying attention to.
We ended the conversation where I think most honest conversations about polarization end — slightly frustrated and without a clean answer. Andrew and Richard had a spirited back-and-forth about electoral reform (Andrew pushing back hard from a UK perspective, Richard arguing for at least some structural changes to reduce the regional polarization that reinforces political polarization in Canada). Alex made the point that no system design can solve this alone if people’s underlying grievances about housing, affordability, and economic security aren’t addressed.
My own takeaway was simpler, and I offered it half-jokingly on the episode, but I mean it: put the phone down and go talk to a neighbour. The affective polarization that this report documents — the contempt, the assumption of bad faith, the in-group/out-group tribalism — thrives in the absence of face-to-face contact. It’s remarkably hard to maintain contempt for someone you’ve actually had a beer with.
The data says we’re not that far apart. The data also says we can’t feel it. And the gap between those two things is where the real danger lives.