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Populism, Conventional Wisdom, and Doug Ford

Foreign Policy
July 17, 2020
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Populist movements are widely castigated as nativist, racist, and xenophobic. Yet Ontario Premier Doug Ford has crafted a brand of politics which is pragmatic, centrist and, well, popular. Writing in Foreign Policy, Simon Lewsen argues that Ford’s rhetoric scrambles the left-right divide and his electoral success offers lessons for politicians elsewhere.

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Writing in City Journal, Ilya Shapiro considers Canada’s expanding habit of cancelling anyone with unpopular opinions in his review of Collin May’s new book From Cancel Culture to Incarceration Culture: Prosecutorial Democracy and the Future of Cancellation. Shapiro notes the book carries “unusual immediacy” since May knows of what he writes, having lost his position as chair of the Alberta Human Rights Commission due to politically motivated complaints about a C2C Journal essay he wrote 13 years earlier. For more on May’s journey, see this C2C article.

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