Why Canadians Should Fear Project Fear
My article in the National Post this week on the Alberta separatism referendum.
The 10 year anniversary in late June of the British public voting to leave the European Union in the Brexit referendum received considerable coverage in Canada, not least because of the forthcoming Alberta separatism referendum.
Canadians were treated to a stream of reports of apparent regret by the majority of the British public and commentators from the U.K., who never voted for and never accepted leaving the EU, spouting all sorts of nonsense about the apparent economic impacts of Brexit on the U.K. economy.
My gast never fails to be flabbered by just how much commentary on the U.K. overseas is taken from the pages of the left wing Guardian — one of the U.K.’s least well selling newspapers — or by commentators who align with their views.
Leaving aside the fact that the U.K. economy has outperformed those of Germany and France since the Brexit referendum and that some polls continue to show a majority of the U.K. public would prefer relationships with the EU that fall short of rejoining, the lesson of Brexit is not that leaving a Union is bad for the economy or will come to be regretted.
Rather, the lessons of Brexit that are instructive to Canadians who care about Alberta remaining in Confederation, come from the way the losing Remain side fought the referendum campaign, the tactics they deployed and how they lost what many assumed would be a comfortable majority vote to remain in the EU.
The Remain side’s failed campaign became known as Project Fear, a term originally used in the 2014 Scottish referendum campaign where the Remain (No) side in that referendum almost lost, until a pivot later in the campaign to a more positive messaging.
Seemingly not having learned the lessons of that referendum, Remain campaigners in the 2016 Brexit referendum dusted off the Project Leave playbook and put rocket boosters under it.
As someone who was a Remainer in the Scottish referendum but a Leaver in the Brexit referendum, I do see elements of a “Maple Project Fear” forming here in Canada. If not in full bloom, there are shoots of it at the least with some of the things some folks are saying on the issue.
So what was Project Fear? In essence it is largely understood to be the series of dire economic warnings issued by ministers, government agencies, the treasury, business groups, the Mark Carney-headed Bank of England to some extent and others, communicated with some force to the public ahead of the vote.
These warnings included predictions that simply voting to leave the EU, let alone leaving, would cause such an economic shock that there would be an immediate rise in unemployment, the economy would fall into recession, share prices would crash and there would be a meltdown in the financial markets. This culminated a week or so before the referendum with my own party’s Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) warning that voting to leave the EU would cause such an immediate economic shock that the government would be required to cut the NHS, education and public services by 15 billion British pounds (C$28 billion), whilst also slapping an additional 15 billion pounds of tax increases on the public!
Leaving aside the fact that the British public chose to ignore those warnings, voted to leave and that there was no recession, no rise in unemployment, no emergency budget, no emergency tax hikes or cuts to the NHS budget, the bigger question is why didn’t these dire economic warnings work and what are the lessons for Canadians?
Academics can debate this until the cows come home, but I can offer a perspective as someone who was a Conservative MP leading the local campaign to leave the EU in an area of the industrial North that until 2010 had reliably voted Labour, but which returned a two thirds plus majority in favour of Leave.
That area I represented was also in a region with a proud heritage in traditional industries, including energy and steel, with a strong local identity, but which also felt distant from the centre of political power in the country, overlooked, ignored in favour of more populous, more prosperous regions and that felt increasingly that, at best forward progress had halted, and at worse, that we were going backwards as a region and perhaps as a country. Sound familiar at all?
In short, many people in my area had largely lost any faith in those in power, in institutions or otherwise no longer felt they had any investment in the “system.” Consequently, having the very characters you feel represent the system that doesn’t work for you and who you blame for many of the problems in your life, tell you with increasingly verbose and outlandish claims that if you dare to vote a certain way they will have to punish you by cutting your local hospital services and increasing the price of a pint of beer (a rise in alcohol duty was one of the leaked elements of the emergency budget I kid you not), then how do you think that is going to affect your vote?
In the case of my constituents, many of them responded by sticking two figures up at those characters — the middle finger in a North American context — and chose to vote to leave the EU in a very large turnout of voters.
Layer on top of that the general dismissive and patronizing tone many on the Remain side adopted, characterization of those who were Brexit supporters as ill educated, bigots or racists and the cherry on top, bringing then U.S.-President Obama over to deliver another threatened punishment beating if the U.K. voted to leave, then you have all the elements to explain why what many thought should be an easy Remain win, ended up being a fairly clear Leave win.
There were other campaign tactic choices too that contributed and Remainers would counter by saying the Leave campaign used questionable stats too, but that would be to miss the point. At a time when trust in the institutions is at a low, people increasingly feel they have less investment in the system and when the motives of “the establishment” are increasingly being questioned, the rules that apply to insurgents are different to those of the established institutions.
Those who represent “establishment” Canada would do well before opening their mouths to poo poo separatism or to intervene in the forthcoming referendum to learn the lessons of the Remain campaigns in both the Scottish and Brexit referenda, so as to ensure that their contributions don’t fuel those who want to break Alberta off from this fairly good experiment we call Canada!
Andrew Percy is a former British government Minister and Conservative MP from 2010-2024. He now serves as a Vice President at Crestview Strategy in Vancouver.