A presentation at Neoliberalism and Its Discontents, Parkland Institute's 23rd Annual Conference (November 15-17, 2019).

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The State of Contemporary Populist Discourse in Canada – Kelly Gordon

With a string of anti-establishment leaders and parties emerging across the world, most agree that we are living a populist moment. While the particularities of populist forces depend on the national context in which they are mobilized, much of contemporary global populism appeals to a combination of anti-elitist and nativist arguments.

This presentation examines whether this is true in Canada. Drawing on a mixed-method analysis of conservative party and activist politics, I argue that rather than being centered on ethnonational populism, Canadian populist discourse has been shaped by its own unique national debates and colonial legacy. In particular, I examine two increasingly salient sites of conservative populism in Canada: Western regionalist populism and penal populism.

Kelly Gordon is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University. Her research interests engage primarily with North American politics of gender and political persuasion, with a focus on the role of conceptions and ideals of gender in conservative political movements in Canada and the United States. Her 2015 book The Changing Voice of the Changing Voice of the Anti-Abortion Movement: The Rise of Pro-Woman Rhetoric in Canada and the United States (co-authored with Paul Saurette) examines the growing importance of female activists and the rise of “pro-woman” arguments in the movement’s organization and strategies of persuasion. The book argues that the contemporary anti-abortion movement has undergone a considerable transformation in its strategic approaches over the past decade—a shift that has made the movement’s approach to gender quite distinct from that of earlier Canadian and American anti-abortion activists.

Kelly’s current research examines contemporary gendered and racialized contours of conservatism in Canada and the United States. Her new book project, tentatively titled Mobilizing Victimhood: Blaming and Claiming the Victim in Contemporary Canadian Conservatism, focuses on the relationship between the politics of victimhood and conservative activist and party politics in Canada. Kelly’s research on the anti-abortion movement has been awarded the 2014 McMenemy Prize for the best article in the Canadian Journal of Political Science and the 2016 Donald Smiley Prize for the best book published in the field of Canadian politics. In 2019, she was awarded the Governor General Gold Medal.

Conference Video sponsored by:
Health Sciences Association of Alberta
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Conference Video produced by:
KTNEXUS
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