"During the August long weekend, a Canadian politician sat in a Smitty's diner, recording a selfie video. He talked about a waitress he met who worked at least sixty hours a week but still finds that her money "vanishes into thin air." This, he noted, is "what I see everywhere. People telling me that they're working harder and harder, and their money just evaporates.""
"Just over a month later, former journalist and left-wing activist Avi Lewis released his own YouTube video, a hype trailer for his bid to lead the federal NDP-a race to replace former leader Jagmeet Singh that will culminate in a vote at the party's conference in March. (Lewis's grandfather, David Lewis, was one of the founders of the party.) Canadians, he said, are living "an everyday emergency of just trying to get by in an impossible economy," and he lamented that "working hard doesn't earn you a living.""
"You see the problem for the NDP. At a time when the rent is devouring paycheques, wealth is pooling at the top, and economic nationalism is resurgent, right wingers are beginning to sound like Canada's leading social democratic party. A closer listen reveals important differences in the solutions they propose-more on that later-but the topline narrative is the same."
A Conservative leader used a diner anecdote about a waitress working long hours whose money "vanishes into thin air" to argue that Canada should be a place "where hard work pays off." A separate left-wing candidate framed the economy as "an everyday emergency" in which "working hard doesn't earn you a living." Right-wing rhetoric is beginning to echo social democratic complaints about rent, wealth concentration, and stagnant wages. The overlap in topline narrative creates a structural semantic challenge for the NDP as shared meanings about economic hardship shift.
Read at The Walrus
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]