Collective action
Like you probably, I despair of politics today, and don't get me started on “democracy”. And yet some things I have experienced lately have surprised me and started to make me wonder if everything is not lost.
Item 1: Back in February of this year Donald Trump, just getting comfortable in the White House again, began proposing that Canada should become the United States' 51st state. At the time, Canadians were preparing for a federal election where the Conservatives were set to form a majority government [1] displacing Justin Trudeau, whom they had vilified relentlessly for years, in the Prime Minister's office. They were led by one Pierre Poilievre, Canada's answer to Donald Trump.
Two things happened as a consequence of Trump's musings. First, Trudeau was rapidly replaced by Mark Carney, a Canadian expat famous for steering the Bank of England through Brexit, who went on to lead the Liberal Party to victory in the general election in April. Poilievre even lost his seat.
But it was another even more remarkable thing that really caught my attention: Canadians decided to boycott American products. Nobody told us to, we just did. It was spontaneous and unorganized. We started looking at the labels in the supermarket. We stopped going to the States. Stores reacted by putting little Canadian flags on labels for local products and big Canadian flags at the entrance. McDonald's Canada pretended to be a Canadian company.
Item 2: The Canadian province of Alberta where I live had the misfortune of discovering that it sat on an ocean of oil in 1947. For decades the oil industry grew, not only showering riches on remote shareholders, but creating well paid—at times ridiculously well paid—employment and derivative business opportunities in Alberta. Alongside the oil industry the conservative party established itself as its political champion, and it also went uncontested for decades. This made Alberta a bit of a conservative island in Canada, which suited the conservative politicians and voters just fine.
They cultivated an image of rugged individualism, personified by the cowboy, symbolizing a previous era when another industry, cattle ranching, made a few people in Alberta filthy rich. A dispute in the 80s between the government of Alberta led by Conservative Peter Lougheed and the government of Canada led by Liberal Pierre Trudeau, about which corporations would get to extract the oil (the big multinationals won) led to a feeling among those rugged individualists that being in Confederation with the rest of Canada was a bad idea.
The separatists have always been a minority, but you can imagine how they felt when Trump proposed that Alberta should become the 51st. state. The rest of us reacted with horror. When the separatists began talking publicly about organizing a referendum on secession from Canada, one retired politician (a conservative one, but one who would be considered moderate by today's standards) took it upon himself to preempt that by organizing a referendum on the question “Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?”.
Which finally brings me to the point I wish to make. To get the chance to have the question posed to voters in Alberta you have to petition the government and get a minimum number of signatures, which for this petition was about 300,000. And that is a very tall order [2].
To my surprise, and to a lot of other people's also, the response from Albertans was huge. Thousands of volunteers enrolled to collect signatures, leastaction and their spouse among them. We sat at locations strategically chosen to intercept as many people as possible, and boy were they enthusiastic. It turned that our neighbours were fervent members of Confederation and were delighted to find each other and talk about it. Who knew.
Again the success of this citizen initiative was entirely due to the spontaneous collective action of ordinary people, our neighbours and friends. And I will emphasize the word spontaneous. Although the phenomenon was triggered by the individual decision of the applicant, and the whole thing was impeccably organized, it would have amounted to nothing had it not stirred something deep within the souls of hundreds of thousands of people that would otherwise have gone undetected.
So spontaneous collective action, although rare, does happen. Why? I think it has to do with identity. In both cases Canadians reacted strongly against an affront to their Canadian identity. You don't mess with people's sense of who they are.
A sense of shared identity brings people together. You just have to sit at a little table with a couple of Canadian flags and a clipboard and perfect strangers will come up to you and talk your ear off.
A shared identity transcends divisions created by politicians. Collective action requires non-partisan issues.
But beware: a shared identity can be a dangerous thing. If I can convince you that you are something, a Canadian, a Christian, a conservative, a rugged individualist, a law-abiding gun owner, your identity can be weaponized. And they know it.
[1] In a parliamentary system, having a majority of seats allows you to pass any legislation you want.
[2] In fact, we ended up collecting 456,000.