In Canada the left is no longer a working-class movement.
The Liberal and NDP parties have been co-opted by elites who deny their privilege. These parties draw their energy from highly educated, top 20% earners with secure professional or government jobs. They dismiss their advantages by pointing to a few ultra-wealthy conservatives, pretending these outliers somehow offset their own privilege.
They claim to be compassionate, but their policies often just shift burdens from one disadvantaged group to another. For instance, they argue it’s wrong to impose expectations on the homeless, so they allow encampments and open drug use to ruin safety in low-income neighbourhoods they don't live in, on public transit lines they don't take, and in liquor stores they don't work at. They love the idea of a safe injection site, because they can be certain one will never be built near their house.
Their go-to solution for every social problem is expanding government jobs—positions they and their peers disproportionately fill. Addressing Indigenous issues? Hire more mostly-white, master’s-educated bureaucrats in Indigenous Affairs. Tackling mental health? Expand the army of PhD therapists. Nevermind that past relentless expansions of this nature haven't produced any meaningful results.
They indulge magical thinking about the economy that reliably serves their own interests at the expense of the working class. Raising the minimum wage improves public-sector union bargaining power but hurts job prospects for the youngest and least-skilled workers. Rent controls benefit established middle-income renters but reduce the availability and quality of housing for low-income tenants and prospective renters.
And their "generous" public spending? It's almost always disproportionately geared towards those who are solidly middle class. And it's always deficit-financed, since they have no policies that actually expand the tax base and they're too cowardly to actually raise taxes.
They put an inordinate focus on issues that barely matter to the working poor. Giving DEI government jobs to the well educated children of affluent Nigerian and Korean immigrants unsurprisingly doesn't feel like a victory for the average working class person of colour. Subsidies for luxury electric vehicles feel more like an upper-middle class handout rather than some big climate win that will help the poor.
Ultimately they don't really care when these policies fail to improve the lot of poor people, because they already gained materially as a class and got to feel like they were being compassionate in the process. Worse still, if poor people notice these policies aren't helping and vote for some other party, the left elite denigrates them as ignoramuses "voting against their own interests". It's gotten so bad that they write off entire swathes of the country as backwards and unenlightened.
