Maple-Glazed Populism: Political Opportunity Structures and Right-Wing Populist Ideology in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While initially immune to the outbreak of right-wing populism observed in other established Western democracies, recent elections and political developments at the provincial and federal levels of politics demonstrate that populism has entered the political mainstream in Canada. This article examines these developments in a broader historical context by charting the evolution of right-wing populist ideology in Canadian federal politics. Using existing genealogical frameworks of right-wing populist ideologies, the argument is advanced that contemporary populist leadership in Canada has largely developed to adopt the discursive and ideological tenets of what scholars have defined conceptually as neoliberal populism. The article positions this trend of ideological moderation as the outcome of institutional and medium-term opportunity structures inherent to Canada’s electoral and party systems. This relationship is demonstrated through an examination of the ideological evolution of contemporary Canadian right-wing populism beginning with the Reform Party in the late 1980s through to the People’s Party of Canada in the 2019 federal election. The analysis shows that, while initially championing exclusionary positions on multicultural accommodation and immigration, Canadian right-wing populists gradually revised their programmatical appeals through an embrace of neoliberalism as part of a purposeful strategy to try and extend their national electoral viability under Canada’s single-member-plurality electoral system. The article concludes by offering an analysis of the People’s Party of Canada and its promotion of radical right-wing populist ideology in the 2019 federal election. The argument is advanced that, rather than attributable solely to the transnational diffusion of far right ideologies, the emergence of the People’s Party is evocative of a domestic shift in medium-term opportunity structures that has helped to create ideological space for the mainstreaming of radical positions on immigration and multiculturalism in Canada.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".