Episode 13: The Senator- Paula Simons

Outside the current home of the Senate of Canada with Senator Paula Simons.

Want to wreck a dinner party? Start talking politics. It’s one of those taboo subjects at Thanksgiving, up there with religion, who’s dating whom, and if the vegetables are over-cooked. It’s almost guaranteed to start an argument. But are Canadians really that divided along political lines? Or to put it more succinctly, are we really as messed up as our neighbours south of our border?

Recent polling says no. In fact, the reality is very different from the dominant media discourse in our country. The truth is we get polarization wrong. Actual polling data reveals Canadians generally are not more extreme in our views, and the divisions that do exist are better viewed as a feature of democracy rather than as a threat to political stability. But this perspective is often drowned out by what a recent Munk School of Global Affairs discussion described as a tendency for media pundits and political parties to whittle down complex policy debates into binary contests: left versus right, government versus opposition; the elite versus the people.

So what feeds this narrative of a binary political world? Well, our politicians are partly to blame. The nastiness in the House of Commons these days is reprehensible. Question period is an embarrassment. And the campaigning while in office is currently beyond the pale. On the hustings, complex values such as fluctuating social identity and tolerance of cultural change are substituted for easy binary stand-ins like rural versus urban, or old versus young.

That narrative is also fed by “the noisy few”; single-issue protesters and F*** Trudeau flag wavers who haunt our highways and harass our elected politicians both at home and on Parliament Hill. They are the spoiled children of democracy, unaware of their privilege, getting too much of the attention they crave.

In other words, to put it nicely, our political discourse today does not capture the totality of values and preferences among Canadians.

So, where do you go for a nuanced view? I went to Ottawa, to find out what’s behind all the fuss. And I went for a walk with Alberta Senator Paula Simons, a former well-regarded newspaper columnist who, for six years now, has served in the Red Chamber, the“house of sober second thought”. Click below to hear our conversation.