Quote:
Originally Posted by eternallyme
So far, they have at least got somewhat along and avoided racism or hard tactics. But as the dense urban society takes more hold (nearly all the growth in Canada outside Alberta has been in those areas), will rural discontent reach the point of nativism? I know economically it is starting to happen in Ontario, but hasn't spread into social issues yet.
|
That's a good point. In the US and Europe, right wing nativist movements have been supported by disenfranchised working class white men, who find themselves to be increasingly irrelevant to those countries' economies.
In Canada, we were given a bit of a reprieve because this same demographic of young, less-than-average educated white men were given a decade of high paying jobs in the oil sands and in a construction boom in most of our major cities. We also have a much more urbanized population (as in, living in large cities, not just "cities" of 10,000 people), so fewer Canadians lived in economic backwaters. Now that the oil boom is over and a lot of the housing-related construction boom might be built on a bubble (or, at least, can't go on at this pace forever), things are looking a little more tenuous.
There are more threats to the working class white male on the horizon; more threats than opportunities, really. Inventions like self-driving cars, and therefore self-driving trucks, buses and delivery vans means that tens of thousands of Canadian men might be thrown out of work, for example.
Whether it will result in a nativist backlash is another thing, but whatever will happen probably won't be pretty.