‘Extreme apprehension’: Canada holds its breath as U.S. election enters final stage

As voters across the United States prepare to decide who will become their 47th president on Nov. 5, Canadians politicos and the public alike are waiting to see whether the violence and uncertainty that followed 2020's polls will be repeated. “My contacts, such as they are, lean to the Democratic side of the equation. And I would say extreme apprehension of yet another four years of unmitigated chaos,” said Liberal MP John McKay (Scarborough–Guildwood, Ont.), a co-chair of the Canada-U.S. Interparliamentary Group. “I guess the other part is the importance of this election. I know that every politician everywhere, at all times, says this is the most important election ever. In this particular instance, it might actually be.” Polls during the final weeks of the campaign have shown the race between U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump as a toss-up. Though Harris and the Democratic Party have led in most national polls, the handful of swing states that will decide the final makeup of the electoral college show a much tighter race, in some cases favouring Trump and the Republican Party. Beyond the policy differences between the two candidates, Canadians and Americans alike fear the potential for the election to turn violent, especially in such a tight race. A Leger poll of 1,562 Canadians published late last month showed 65 per cent were worried about violence and uncertainty related to the election outcome. A majority of all age groups, political party supporters, and regions across Canada were worried—women, rural dwellers, NDP voters, and Atlantic Canadians had the highest figures in their respective demographics. In the U.S., an Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research survey of 1,072 Americans found 41 per cent were extremely or very concerned about violent attempts to overturn the Nov. 5 election results, and another 35 per cent were somewhat concerned. The last U.S. presidential election in 2020 was marred both by violence and attempts to overturn the result from the Trump campaign. Trump has repeatedly denied that he lost the election to Joe Biden, and has continued to make baseless allegations about widespread fraud that robbed him of a second term. Those lies about his defeat culminated in a violent mob of Trump supporters storming the U.S. Capitol building as legislators certified the election results on Jan. 6, 2021, forcing politicians to evacuate. A subsequent U.S. Senate report found seven people died. “The events of Jan. 6 a little over three years ago aren't far enough to be a distant memory, and so certainly, there's some concern,” said Andrew Enns, executive vice-president of Leger’s Central Canada operations. He noted that the 65 per cent of respondents concerned about violence and uncertainty was close to the 70 per cent who said they were very or somewhat interested in the election. “The comments by Mr. Trump, worrying about a free election, and repercussions that get reported up here and picked up in the media certainly have created some concern that the results may not be fully accepted,” he said. This year’s campaign has already been marred by both violence and vote tampering. Trump survived an assassination attempt during a July 13 rally in Butler, Penn. In September, Secret Service agents fired at a man pointing a rifle barrel at the Trump International Golf Club in Florida as Trump was golfing. Meanwhile, two drop boxes in Oregon and Washington were set alight on Oct. 28, destroying hundreds of ballots. Trump has already told supporters in Wisconsin that cheating was the “only way they’re going to win,” according to NBC News. McKay said the sowing of doubt or violence after the election is a “virtual certainty.” “Whether it will actually happen on election day, or subsequently, who actually knows?” he said. “ already paving the ground for saying that the election was stolen, but of course, if he wins, that it wasn't stolen… and he's so coarse in the dialogue that it's an expectation of violence rather than an apprehension of violence, and that's not a good development.” McKay said that such normalization of violence had spilled over to an extent into this country where he noted that MPs now have more security than in previous years. “It's not the world that we lived in even two or three years ago,” he said, adding that Canada and the United States are in “effectively one ecosystem, and I like to think that we are immune from that sort of thing, but we're not.” “Trump is not exclusively to blame, but he certainly brought gasoline to the fire,” McKay said. “When you move an apprehension or concern about violence to almost certainty of violence, you have degraded the ability of democracies to cope and, in effect, to invite dictatorial instincts into your democracy.” Beyond a disputed election, if he does win, Trump has promised to use the apparatus of the state against his political enemies, including using the U.S. Department of Justice and military to target those he perceives as being disloyal. Those positions may hold sway over a significant portion of the American voting public, but the Leger poll showed it is incredibly unpopular among Canadians. It showed, if it were up to Canadians, Harris would win in a landslide with 64 per cent support to Trump’s 21 per cent. The Democratic candidate was the most popular choice among all Canadian political party supporters except the Conservative Party and People’s Party—both the Bloc Québécois and NDP voters showed 90 per cent support, Liberals 88 per cent, and Greens 86 per cent. Trump won the backing of a plurality of Conservative supporters—at 45 per cent—ahead of 42 per cent for Harris, though both candidates tied at 42 per cent among Tories on which candidate's election would provide the best outcome for Canada. Conservatives also saw Harris over Trump as the best candidate on climate change and trade relations with China, though they saw the Republican candidate as better placed on the economy, immigration, national security, and conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. “A lot of the policies that the Democrats espouse tend to be more centrist and pragmatic than certainly some of the more prominent policies that often get picked up in the Canadian media that the Republicans put forward,” Enns said. “Take the fixation on abortion among some Republicans. In this country, certainly the extreme side of the small-c conservatives will put that forward, but by and large, it's not really a mainstream policy like it is in the U.S.” Enns said the lessons Canadian political leaders could take from those figures would be to take a balanced approach, especially those aspiring to be prime minister. “Like it or not, whatever the outcome in the United States, it’s going to be very important that Canada has, at a minimum, a good working relationship with that individual, regardless of how your party’s supporters feel about the person,” he said. McKay agreed. He said that, regardless of the result, Canada needs a “continuous upping of its game” in relations with the U.S., whether being present at legislator conferences, improving business ties, or preparing for the coming Canada-United States-Mexico negotiations in July 2025. “Not only should we have figured out the strategy going into that, but we also need to have dealt with whatever irritants that we can unilaterally deal with, so that we're not providing points of irritation, but we should also have our own agenda,” he said. sjeffery@hilltimes.com The Hill Times The latest polls close in each swing state (Ottawa time) 7 P.M. Georgia 7:30 P.M. North Carolina 8 P.M. Pennsylvania 9 P.M. Arizona Michigan Wisconsin 10 P.M. Nevada

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