New Yukon group hopes bringing people together will help stop political polarization

There might be a better way to do politics than calling your opponent a stupid, evil idiot. 

A new group in Whitehorse called Grey Matters hopes to try out such a radical concept at a time when political polarization seems to be on the march, driven at least in part by a flood of online misinformation.

Grey Matters is holding a launch event in Whitehorse Thursday. The idea is to help people understand the scale and impact of polarization and find ways to "rebuild the muscle of respectful disagreement."

Angela Drainville, an organizer and former Yukon Party candidate, said bringing people of different views together in person is vital. 

"Social media has a downfall," she said. "And that is that we're not face to face. We don't actually have to face our opponent.

"We don't actually have to see the reactions on their faces when we say things to them ... When we make assumptions about people's value system based on where they are on the political spectrum or jumping to conclusions about what they might believe on a certain issue when that might not even be true."

But polarization is neither entirely new, nor only online. Journalist Justin Ling, in a 2023 report for the Public Policy Forum, a Canadian think-tank, cited the alarming rise in hate crimes since 2019, and the now-common practice of organizers trying cancel on-campus speeches, as two in-person examples.

Polarization isn't new

Not only that, Ling writes, binary divisions are baked into who we are as a country.

"Canada is a country riven by numerous long-standing divides: English versus French; east against west; urban and rural; rich and poor; settler and Indigenous; Protestant and Catholic; and so on," reads his report.

"These divides existed before COVID-19 and the internet even entered our lexicon; indeed, they are the timber out of which the Canadian federation was constructed." 

Mark Nelson, another Grey Matters organizer, said Canada hasn't gone as far down the road of polarization as the United States. He described the political spectrum there as a "W" where the centre-left and centre-right have been hollowed out, leaving the political far-left, far-right and centre at odds.

Compare that to Canada, where for now at least, the spectrum looks more like a bell curve with a large mass in the middle and smaller numbers on the fringes.

"I think part of our goal is that people take polarization as seriously as they take other issues like housing or the environment or crime — because if we can't connect with each other, we can't tackle those issues," Nelson said.

Both Drainville and Nelson said they don't want people to shy away from tough conversations, or even disagreements, but simply to hold onto respect to one another.

"Everybody wants what's best for Canada," Drainville said. "It's just we have different ideas about what the pathway is towards that."