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David Coletto: I think for me it was a reminder that things can change really quickly.  We went from us describing, after the Ontario election, an electorate that was completely not engaged, and turnout was near record low, and then, only a few months later, an election engaged much of the country at a level that we had not seen in a very long time, in terms of both turnout and interest and and conversations that that were associated with it. So I think the learning for me, is another reminder that, like for any organization, for any leader trying to make sense of the world: if you thought you knew what people were thinking a year ago, odds are that that you can’t count on that anymore. You’ve got to be constantly reading the pulse of people, because that pulse can change rapidly. All you need is a subtle but important shift in something basic that causes them to look at the world and filter it in a very different way, and that reality is now normal.

AG: I’ve been watching the federal elections for decades and this was one of the most interesting ones. On one hand, it was a complete aberration ... (caused) by three things: Donald Trump’s attacks; Justin Trudeau’s resignation; Mark Carney’s resume. Without those three in combination, we never would have seen that result. Normally, you never learn anything from an aberration, but here we saw something. I think a lot of the work that you did was very important in this, in terms of the shift from scarcity to precarity, but also the two mindsets that were out there. We assume divisions in Canada, political divisions, are rooted in region and language, which they always have been. But what you’re seeing now is that polarization and divisions aren’t rooted so much in political ideology, but in lived experience . What we had in this election is two groups who were focusing on very different things: one on future uncertainties as a consequence of an external threat, and another on their past grievances and their current circumstances, which they were very unhappy with.

¶Ù°ä:Ìý That’s the psychographic divide that I think you described. Oftentimes those two groups are living in two different worlds. I watched this election like most observers, through the mainstream media. But if you didn’t do that — and it showed up in the data — you don’t believe this election was about Trump. You weren’t as obsessed and overwhelmed with the conversation, because you just weren’t paying as much attention to it. So that lived experience you described is also the perceived lived experience and what you’re exposed to because you don’t watch the news, or you don’t read The Star, or you rely heavily on YouTube or Tik Tok or Instagram, whatever your source of information is. (It) is likely also creating the context by which you’re judging the risks in your life, right? And so to a male under the age of 30, Donald Trump was not a risk in a world that you already thought was not there for you, not going to serve you well. In fact, you would you like the idea that he was coming around and disrupting all of these things, even if that disruption wasn’t going to lead to a better place.

AG:   I am at least a little bit stuck in that old mold that the real divisions are things like, ‘Do you believe in equality or hierarchy?’ ‘Do you believe in change or tradition?’ ‘Do you believe in collectivism or individualism?” These are the traditional ways that we’ve evaluated sociopolitical culture. Now you’re getting all kinds of new things out there, things as fundamental as optimism. There was a time when no one in Canada was pessimistic because tomorrow was always going to be better than today. That is not the case right now. We talk about Generation Z and there’s something going on there that is completely different. David Shor, the Democratic pollster in the States, is claiming that this is the most conservative generation in 60 years. Digging down further into that, and understanding that mindset, I think, is going to be one of our big challenges as researchers going forward. 

¶Ù°ä:ÌýLet me throw an idea at you that just came to me the other day when I was having conversations with folks at an event. In 1964 ,Barry Goldwater, 1964 was the Republican nominee for president, up against LBJ. It was coming after the Civil Rights Movement had really taken place. The Civil Rights Act passed in Congress, a whole bunch of stuff happened that created this backlash. I don’t have the data, and I’ve been meaning to go back and look at the data set in 1964, but my hypothesis would be that young men, young white men, were the drivers of that Goldwater revolution. That then led to Reagan and that realignment that we saw in the South, in the U.S., which was largely driven by race, but was a backlash to the cultural changes that were happening in the United States at the time. Today, feels like very much like that. You’re seeing young men move in a vastly different direction than young women. 

´¡³Ò:ÌýVery interesting analogy. Back to the point about lived experience — yes, there were young men feeling that way that caused Barry Goldwater. But there also was the counterculture. In the hippies, these kids are almost all in university. Their lived experience was very different than the kid who was on the farm, you know, who was trying to get his apprenticeship as a welder. And so you had very, very different outlooks on the world and people viewing politics through a lens that reflected their lived experience. The other thing too, that I’m really interested in, you could see when Trudeau won his three elections and when Doug Ford won his three elections, both of them were able to attract new Canadians and blue collar workers; young people, not so much. That continues to be a real curiosity for for me, but the shifting of those two groups, blue collar workers and new Canadians, I think, is something again, that we have to explore in more depth than we probably have right now. And given the amount of data that you’re generating, David, I’m counting on you to be providing some of that for me. 

DC: A question that I have is, is it a cultural response? Is it driven by a fear, again, of change in how we work? I look at this election as the appetizer for the coming reckoning around AI and automation. 

´¡³Ò:ÌýAbsolutely right. This is a transformation that we’re going through, fourth or fifth industrial revolution. 

DC: (If we look to) the late 1800s and the ... and then the expansion of (voting rights) which created the demand for labour parties. What I always think about (is) what’s the political response to that demand today? So the NDP emerged in Canada, later than a lot of other labour parties around the world, in response to the demand for workers to be represented in the political system. And Canada, for various reasons, didn’t see the same kind of concentration that we saw in the UK or in Australia and or other places where that happened. How does our political system serve a working class that is being disrupted by this vast technological change? So you talk about that shift in where blue collar workers were going, I think we saw it over the last two years, in terms of how unionized workers were rejecting contracts that their union leaders were giving them in negotiations, that they were demanding protections. Think of the port strikes at Vancouver; (they) were as much about preventing automation from entering that port than it was about (wages).

´¡³Ò:Ìý You’ve got these blue collar workers who, 20 years ago, said, ‘Well, you know, I’m a blue collar worker, but I’ve got a Ford F150, and Jimmy is going to go to university.’ (Now) they’re saying, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen to poor Jim. He’s living in the basement. He’s 35 years old, and I’m angry the system’s not working for for me anymore.’ That trust in the system is another one of these variables at the root of a lot of this different mindset and different outlook on the world, and will manifest itself in actual changes in voting behavior and patterns that we’ve never seen before in our lives.

¶Ù°ä:ÌýTo your point, you didn’t hear a lot of aspiration in this election from our leaders. It was very much about protecting entrenchment, right? You own a home and you have more equity in that home. I’m going to protect that equity for you.

´¡³Ò:ÌýOne of the old proxies that we always used to use for assessment of political leadership is which one of these three would you most like to have a beer with? This relatability was considered very, very important. People use their own assessment of their self image — are they like me? We saw your tracking show right from the very start and right to the very end on questions like, shares my values and understands what people like me are going through — he never had big lead. He wasn’t particularly relatable. He wasn’t disliked at all. All of a sudden we saw competence overarch all of those relatability factors. And again, you see that sometimes when there is an external threat, but it’s not the usual criteria people use to judge their leaders. 

¶Ù°ä:ÌýI wrote about what I thought we were entering this Age of Reassurance. And that’s a Trump effect, because  ... Trump was the result of the scarcity mindset. I’m not sure he would have been the response that Americans would have chosen in the position they are in today, which is that broader precarity sense, on things like, ‘Who do you think would be best to manage your household finances.’ That was never going to be a predictor of how you vote. It was a strong predictor of both your likability of Mark Carney and your willingness to think he should be the prime minister who’s going to Captain a ship through a storm, who’s going to stand up to a bully. All of these were powerful predictors. And who do you want to sit beside on an airplane didn’t matter. And that’s interesting, because a year ago, Justin Trudeau was still beating Pierre Poilievre on those likability things. And that didn’t matter to Poilievre at the time because relatability wasn’t even a factor. People were mad. They just wanted somebody to break the system, put the fire out. You could have a political leader in Canada say, ‘I don’t do my own groceries’  and it did not dent his reputation at all. 

´¡³Ò:Ìý If Donald Trump starts being less threatening, is that a risk?

¶Ù°ä:Ìý Predicting the future is impossible, but let’s say six months from now, they got trade deals all around, that threat of tariffs disappears. I do think that Mark Carney is going to be wondering, ‘How then do I solve for all the other things that are going to bubble right back up?’: building more homes, the cost of living, that lack of optimism about the future. (That) might start to splinter that coalition he’s created and put him in the same place that Poilievre found himself when this election started, which was the original motive that brought voters together. 

AG: Canadians have never really seen themselves that much on the global stage. We know that we’re not going to be military leaders. We’re not going to be economically as (strong). We see ourselves as moral leaders to the extent that we’re good people. Mark Carney can pick up the phone and talk to his buddies from the Davos forum ... to any world leader. And what we’re seeing right now, I think, is a real appetite in the Western world to see some leadership. It’s gonna be very interesting whether he assumes that mantle, whether he actually tries to be a rallying point for the Western world in forming new alliances, new trade patterns and/or opposition to Donald Trump. That’s obviously much more dangerous, but it’ll be interesting to watch.

¶Ù°ä:ÌýI think we are about to embark on another unprecedented moment; we have a political leader in this country unlike anyone that we’ve had, who is not, by nature, a politician. I don’t know him at all, but I suspect he’s not driven by the same things, and so does he see this as a moment in which to actually lead people, bring them with him? I think he could be transformational he wants to be, because I think people will follow.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.