In 2025, society is grappling with a handful of competing crises: the ripple effects of a global pandemic, record-high wealth concentration, middle-class collapse and distrust in institutions. It’s all ominously reminiscent of the world a century ago. At the time, these calamities produced dramatically different populist outcomes. America embraced the New Deal, ushering in union rights, welfare programs and progressive taxation. Large swaths of Europe, by contrast, slid into fascism and ultimately lost the deadliest war in history.

This time, many advanced Western democracies are going the way of 1930s Europe and descending into right-wing populism. In the last few years, the U.K. voted for Brexit, Trump’s America enacted protectionist economic and anti-immigration policies, and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party has curtailed LGBTQ rights and criminalized rescue missions for migrants at sea. Hungary is no longer a democracy under Viktor Orbán, who rewrote the constitution, weakened judicial independence and marginalized media outlets. And for most of the last two years, it seemed Canada might well be headed down the same road.

That fate is less certain now. In less than three weeks, Canadians will head to the polls to determine who forms the next government. But at stake is something much bigger. It’s about whether Canada can survive as a viable country in a world lurching toward chaos—and what our future might look like if it does. For now, it appears we’re sidestepping the slide into authoritarian populism. Donald Trump has scared us away from that prospect. Many Canadians looked to our neighbours to the south, saw what populism really looked like and decided they wanted no part of it.

As the founder of EKOS Research........

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