Is The People's Party of Canada considered a facist party?

December 2, 2023 3:41 PM

I am a university student of political science, and I had a debate with someone who thinks The People's Party of Canada is considered a fascist with their policies and ideas. Is it considered along the lines of a fascist party? I mean, it is not like Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin's kind of fascism, but it is more right-wing than the Conservative Party of Canada, so it is extremely right-wing. I am a little confused because most fascist parties are very into militarization, aggressive nationalism and very harsh deeper policies. But I think the person I was debating found their policies on conversion therapy, lesser immigrants, and anti-climate change all to be very extreme and fascist in their view.
posted by RearWindow to Law & Government (14 answers total)

I agree more with the person you were debating than not. Bernier hasn’t made any moves to overthrow government but he was a staunch supporter of the Freedom Convoy.

I think fascism requires a lot of control (military and other) and so it’s harder to identify when a person or party wants to end up there during the phase that it’s out of power. I mean, they aren’t going to say that out loud, but also, they don’t have a lot of power to throw around.

What I look for is whether a party is taking about:

1) “true” Canadians or Canadian values in opposition to values around diversity (check)
2) control over people, including gender expression and sexuality (check)
3) encouraging militarization - check, if you consider eliminating the gun registry and creating new “self defense” laws - check
posted by warriorqueen at 5:17 PM on December 2, 2023 [13 favorites]

Fascism is hard to define. Also, few people describe their own movement as fascist in this day and age.

But also I don't see what's wrong with asking about this here. There are plenty of Canadians here. Just because you're studying something doesn't mean you can only get perspectives on that thing in one place.

From this article:

"Blended into Bernier’s rhetoric and the party’s platform are proposals that reflect the ideological tenets of a populist radical right, defined by a commitment to xenophobia."

Xenophobic populist radical right gives strong fascist vibes.
posted by lookoutbelow at 5:21 PM on December 2, 2023 [4 favorites]

I hear a lot of people using the word fascism for things when I think 'authoritarian' or 'totalitarian' is the better fit. I see fascism as a particular flavor of authoritarianism and I think there are distinctions worth preserving.

I have spoken with Canadians who call their COVID regulations and vaccine mandates fascist. To me that is just nonsensical, because the point of those regulations is to protect and center the weak and vulnerable. I also wouldn't call it authoritarian, but at least there is a plausible fit there.

There will likely be some overlap, but I do think you can have a right-wing authoritarian party/state that is very far along the fascist spectrum, or much less far along it.

I don't know enough about this particular party to weigh in on it.
posted by Salamandrous at 5:23 PM on December 2, 2023 [3 favorites]

Am political science prof, but not in Canada or about Canada.

Don't worry about it.

Some things are real qualities of the universe. Electromagnetism is real. Real, actual, measurable physical phenomenon. When we're defining electromagnetism, we're doing our best to home in on what's really, directly physically true about the universe.

Other things are just words that we use to try to make sense out of things. Fascism is one of those things. There is no underlying, real, physical truth of "fascism" for anyone to home in on. It's whatever we point at when we say "fascism," and folks are going to legitimately disagree about that.

The most you can say with any kind of claim of real truth is that a party is or isn't "fascist in the way that Person uses the term" or something like that, and even then there are going to be debatable edge cases.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:24 PM on December 2, 2023 [16 favorites]

Palingenetic , ultra nationalist, populism , is a compact working definition for fascism.
posted by hortense at 5:25 PM on December 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

I like Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism for this. He provides a historical overview, and also a definition:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

But he also provides a caveat: fascism is hard to define because it's not about ideology, it's about power. Fascists can and do change their mere ideas at will, and will look different in different countries.
posted by zompist at 5:30 PM on December 2, 2023 [14 favorites]

Not a Canadian perspective, but I find Umberto Eco's list of characteristics useful when I'm thinking about things like this.

But he also provides a caveat: fascism is hard to define because it's not about ideology, it's about power. Fascists can and do change their mere ideas at will, and will look different in different countries.

This is also a solid observation, and jibes with Sartre's description of "anti-Semites" from 1946 (a group which I assume was, given the historical context, pretty much coterminous with fascists and fascism):

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

In the US, this was a recognizable pattern in the behavior of both the fringe alt-right and the Trump administration itself.
posted by pullayup at 5:49 PM on December 2, 2023 [11 favorites]

One thing to consider is that the term fascism has become quite a bit more popular and more broadly used to describe right wing political beliefs in the past decade or so. So people are operating with very different meanings of the word and I think it would be very hard to get a broad roomful of Canadians to agree if a particular thing is fascistic or not.

That said, I don't think the PPC, according to their official policy positions, would fairly be described as fascists. On paper, their policies aren't all that different from the Conservatives'. However, their official positions and what their members and candidates actually would like to do are quite different. In previous elections, Bernier didn't seem to have a lot of success in getting their candidates not to spout all kinds of terrible opinions that were at odds with their stated policy or values.

Do I have strong suspicions that many of their members and candidates would actually like to implement policies that I would describe as fascist? Yes. Does that make the PPC fascists? Some of them, certainly. As a party? Depends.
posted by ssg at 6:01 PM on December 2, 2023 [3 favorites]

(If you're interested in Eco's full 1995 Ur-Fascism it can be read here)
posted by pullayup at 6:04 PM on December 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

PPC are technically not defined as fascist, but they're on the shit side of the equation. They don't espouse the militaristic aspects, but share some of their values.
posted by ovvl at 6:31 PM on December 2, 2023 [3 favorites]

I tend to think of Bernier as a gilted opportunist and his PPC is mostly just there to put a thumb in the eye of the federal Conservative party who he feels slighted him. At least in the last election, sure they had a platform of a sort but a lot of the candidates I looked at deviated widely from it and were such a mish mash of inconsistent cranks - garden variety racists, freeman on the land, libertarians, white supremacists, anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, new agers, marginal Christians and any other weirdo that was turfed out of a more mainstream party. To be frank, I don't think they have even a coherent ideology as a party to label them fascism. They are just against whatever is precieved as normal.
posted by Ashwagandha at 7:07 PM on December 2, 2023 [3 favorites]

PPC is fringe, and in my view similar to the UCP in Alberta. In general, I'd say it's reactionary and anti-Canadian in perspective. It is likely to rescind established rights, reduce immigration and increase taxes (but not for corporations).
They reject climate change but support oil and gas; want to eliminate multiculturalism, and repeal firearms restrictions.
They attract fundamentalist and anti-abortionist candidates.
Not an open-minded bunch.
posted by Enid Lareg at 9:46 PM on December 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

Mod note: A couple deleted; Please don't tell people not to ask questions on Ask Metafilter. If a question is actually unsuitable for some reason, flag and/or contact mods, otherwise just pass it up.
posted by taz (staff) at 10:11 PM on December 2, 2023 [3 favorites]

Fascists have fallen on hard times. The "success" of the classic historical fascists with their neo-imperial pretensions ironically hastened the end of the major European empires. And, make no mistake, (declining) empire and fascism are related. You don't just become a self-victimizing jingoist in a vacuum. Your idea of innate, irrational superiority has to come from somewhere. Usually it's actual conquests, recent or historical.

Nowadays it's seriously inconvenient to actually conquer big territories, so the trend is to attempt cultural conquest. But it's the same old... stuff.
posted by KMH at 1:37 AM on December 4, 2023