The idea that Canada is anything other than a country with an abundant future and the promise of an ever greater population and level of prosperity is a shocking one to most Canadians. Everyone in this country has been encouraged to believe that the future is vastly greater than the past. Recent setbacks in our competitive economic performance and the fact that we have been passed by a number of older countries with much inferior natural resources in calculations of prosperity, especially GDP per capita, has raised some doubts. The animated discussion in the United States and by observers of the United States in foreign countries that that country has entered a period of inexorable decline has also influenced Canadian thinking about the promise and security of our future. But the prospects for the U.S. and Canada are not identical and the differences between these countries are much greater than is readily apparent.

In The Weekly Wrap Sean Speer, our editor-at-large, analyses for Hub subscribers the big stories shaping politics, policy, and the economy in the week that was. 

Can the Conservatives capitalize on the political realignment?

I talk and write a lot these days about the political realignment. It refers to a major trend occurring in Canada and other Anglo-American democracies in which traditional political coalitions are being reshaped along educational and occupational lines. Voters with university credentials who work in the knowledge or service economy are increasingly concentrating themselves on the political Left. Those without university degrees who typically work in the goods-producing economy are migrating to the political Right.

As I’ve learned more about the theory and evidence in favour of the political realignment, it’s increasingly come to shape how I think about politics. I now see it everywhere.

This week I saw it on Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre’s X page where he’s been posting photos and videos from his cross-country summer tour. Thus far it hasn’t been a typical summer tour for the Conservative leader. In the seven days between August 7 and August 14 alone, Poilievre visited 14 different shop floors from a bearings manufacturer in Burlington to a seal meat processor in Bonavista. He also spoke at the national conference of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in St. John’s.

This dedicated focus on blue-collar workers—particularly those who “make things”—is a sign that Poilievre and the Conservatives are committed to the realignment. They’re aiming to build a multi-class, multi-racial conservative coalition that’s capable of producing a significant parliamentary majority.

Polls suggest that it is working. Not only are the Conservatives up by roughly twenty points overall, but they’re leading among unconventional voter groups, including unionized workers.