º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍø

But there’s no question — in fact, a column in this very newspaper declared it’s already a cliche to say it — that a backsliding in progressivism is under way in the federal post-election world in Canada.

Some may welcome that trend, especially all those who grew weary of a decade of what they saw as progressive lecturing from Liberals during Justin Trudeau’s decade in power. Others, and we are told that even some Liberals are getting restive, worry about backsliding on everything from climate change to immigration, gender equity or Indigenous reconciliation.

The first question, though, has to be: why is this happening? Is this because Carney is taking Liberal politics more to the centre, or is he just getting in step with the popular retreat from progressivism?

David Coletto, the CEO of Abacus Data, which often partners with the Star to map political trends, has been tracking this backsliding closely. We talked at length this week about what’s going on, and how it has become the common perception that progressive politics is not what winning politicians embrace in 2025.

His polling data can pinpoint exactly when the tide started rolling away from progressivism in Canada and Coletto says it started four years ago. That was about the midpoint of the COVID-19 pandemic, when you might have expected Canadians to be rallying to all the things progressive politics holds dear: social assistance, community action and government intervention in disruptive times.

But it wasn’t COVID that drove Canadians backwards from progressive politics, Coletto says, it was inflation. The annual inflation rate stood below one per cent in the year the pandemic broke out, but quickly climbed to 3.4 per cent in 2021 and a whopping 6.8 per cent in 2022.

“Inflation changed the game entirely post-pandemic,â€� Coletto says. It put citizens across all demographics into what he’s written extensively about — as a “scarcityâ€� mindset, or a term he also likes: “precarity.” (As in, a world in which everything feels precarious. Certainly that’s how many progressives are feeling as they watch the Liberal government being hauled to something that looks a bit like progressive conservatism.) 

“If you’re older it’s about feeling insecure about access to health care, or it’s insecure about now, with Donald Trump and the economy, will my retirement savings, if I have any, last me? If you’re middle-aged, you’re thinking about your kids, your ability to pay the mortgage or the rent,â€� he says. “And then if you’re younger, it’s all about this real sense of not a false start, just not a start at all.â€�

Coletto has been doing a lot of reading about how the left lost ground around the world in the past decade and it’s all taken him back to what every student of psychology has been taught on the hierarchy needs. Named for its mid-20th-century author, Abraham Maslow, the hierarchy theory simply states what we all have come to know instinctively: before you start caring about others or the world in general, you first have to have your own, basic needs met.

Put that in the frame of political marching orders, then, it means progressives need to stop telling Canadians to care about others when people are busy with real, more pressing  worries about their own lives. Some Liberals have privately told me they bristle at the idea of this being a pendulum swing, as though important gains on equality and other issues over the past decade were merely a fashion trend to be discarded. 

Coletto says most people still believe in the goals of progressive politics in the abstract, but in the face of their own worries, they’re fine right now with relegating them to the back burner for now. 

“Gender equity, climate, Indigenous reconciliation, all these issues are seeing backsliding in part because the public in many ways, including some women, are saying that’s a less important conversation than: Can I afford to just live my life, or can, are you going to make sure I have a job?â€� 

It is definitely a stark difference from 10 years ago, when Justin Trudeau’s Liberals rode to power on the strength of progressive protest. Liberals watched closely the Occupy movements against rampant income inequality; the Idle No More galvanizing of Indigenous grievance and the Me-Too movement that made women speak up against male power. They also saw Canadians moved by the scenes of Syrian refugees, and it was no accident that Liberals capitalized on that sentiment to portray Conservatives as hostile to immigrants, with their attempted bans on religious wear, hotlines to report “barbaric cultural practices,� and so on.

“Justin Trudeau was the perfect vehicle for that because he represented it so well. I think if you come 10 years later, I think most Canadians are in a very different space,� Coletto says.

Liberals still won the 2025 election, but it wasn’t under any of the banners Trudeau waved a decade ago.

I asked Coletto whether his polling was tracking the difference between backsliding and backlash. In other words, how much of the reversal in progressivism is just a shift back to more pressing, personal needs and how much of it is rooted in outright hostility to all that progressive politics represents, as we see in Trump’s MAGA movement in the U.S.?

So far, Canada doesn’t seem to be willing to elect anyone who is as openly hostile to progressive politics as Trump. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre makes sure to couch his criticisms of immigration with assurances that he’s not against immigrants and while he rails against all things “woke,� he hasn’t set out any plan to reverse what the Trudeau government did on Indigenous reconciliation or government aid to those in need. Poilievre still is being cagey on climate change, but some will argue that Carney is too.

Coletto believes — and I hope he’s right — that Canada isn’t in the midst of a backlash, or at least not yet. Yes, he says, there is a small segment of the population wishing to set the clock back on all the achievements of progressive politics of the Trudeau years, but it’s a small portion of the population.

How to hang on to that progress is the lingering question.

Bruce Anderson, a pollster, respected commentator and someone who’s influential in the Carney circle, about how to keep climate change high on the priority list for politicians. In a piece titled “Canada’s climate consensus isn’t broken, but it’s bending,â€� Anderson cited some interesting — if not disturbing — findings. Anderson says his latest Spark Advocacy survey showed a worrying rise in climate-change denial and general weariness with the topic. But he says people were more open to the idea of dealing with climate change if it can be twinned with economic goals, such as competitiveness.

It’s probably not an accident, then, that Carney and his environment minister, Julie Dabrusin, have been talking about the imminent arrival of what they’re calling a “climate competitiveness strategy.�

Watch for Carney to keep doing this — grafting economic language on to progressive aspirations of the past decade.

None of that is going to be easy. The fragmented communications environment, in which people seek out their own news, where people often have more connection online than in real life, makes it a huge challenge to build any kind of public consensus. And progressive politics needs that, Coletto notes.

“Progressive politics requires collective action to solve shared problems,� he says. If people are living in isolation, and many are even after the pandemic, they’re less likely to be even aware of other people’s issues or concerns.

Maybe this also explains why Carney and his Liberal team are dabbling so much in sports metaphors. It’s a realm of society that can still coax people out of their bubble and get them thinking about collective goals.

Carney has talked in recent days about how he was a goalie and a couple of weeks ago, was spotted taking part in a gruelling trail run in the Haliburton area, north of Toronto. There was no evidence he did any reverse running on that occasion. Some worried progressives might argue his government doing enough of that back in Ottawa. Carney’s supporters, those who say he’s still committed to progressive ideas, would likely say that it’s his goalie experience he needs to draw on right now; deflecting all the shots being taken at the gains made for progressives in happier times for them over the past decade.