What Does the 2025 Election Tell Us about Class in Canada?

Pierre Poilievre, university graduate, career politician and noted suit wearer, stood in front of a lectern reading “Boots, Not Suits” earlier this election cycle, promising to reinstate apprenticeship grants and train 350,000 skilled workers.

Who can find fault in reinstating apprenticeship grants? Not me. What I do take issue with is Poilievre’s need to pit one type of worker against another.

It folds well into his promise to “put an end to the imposition of woke ideology” by, as the Canadian Association of University Teachers puts it, “interfer[ing] in the allocation of federal research funding.”

And his promise to defund the CBC.

Adding it all up, Poilievre’s idea seems to be that the liberal elites, a demographic composed of suit-wearing, cappuccino-swilling university graduates, are holding their oxfords to the neck of the people who actually “build stuff” (that’s a direct quote).

The problem? Statistics Canada data shows that people who work in the “goods-producing sector,” with the exception of farmers, generally outearn most classes of jobs in the “service-producing” sector.

The “goods-producing” sector includes the audience Poilievre is conjuring in his Boots, Not Suits messaging — workers in oil and gas, forestry, construction, manufacturing.

“Service-producing,” which employs a greater number of people across the country, includes a broad swath of Canadians — everyone from, yes, suit-wearing financial managers, to nurses to teachers to journalists to hotel cleaners and people working at A&W or Tim Hortons or the snobbiest coffee shop on the block.

In other words: if my brother the electrician is feeling the sting of the cost-of-living crisis, it’s not because I went to school for a master of fine arts degree — he outearns me. It’s because instead of pursuing policies such as vacancy control for renters and food price caps, successive rounds of provincial and federal governments have chosen neoliberal and neoconservative policies that only serve to further enrich the wealthy.

Still, Poilievre’s messaging seems to be resonating with his Conservative base — and it seems to be resonating along class lines, activating burbling grievances.

To get to the bottom of what’s up with that, The Tyee interviewed Simon Fraser University professor Enda Brophy, who researches the political economy of communication, and labour and collective organizing in the media and communication industries. We touched on what constitutes Canada’s “working class,” how gender and race factor into messaging around class, and what actual class solidarity could achieve for workers in Canada. This interview has been condensed for length and clarity.

The Tyee: The writer Rebecca Solnit asked a series of incisive questions about class last November, amidst the U.S. election: “What is the working class? Many invoke it in this election, but no one defines it. How much is it economic, when a plumber can make 10 times as much as an adjunct professor? How much is it cultural, an identity, or the kind of labour? Why [are there] so many 1930s white-guy versions when so many are women and BIPOC?”

I’m wondering what you make of this. Do the images of “working class” people that are invoked by politicians need to be updated for the 21st century?

Enda Brophy: The simple answer is that the working class includes anyone who has to sell their labour to an employer to make a living. But Solnit’s posts remind us that class is also much more complicated than that — it’s a sociological category, a form of identity, an actor on the political stage and much more, all at the same time.

For decades the dominant neoliberal parties of the centre-left and centre-right did their best to ignore the existence of class. But the populist or neo-fascist right has brought class back, as we saw in the most recent U.S. election and with Trump’s election in 2016. The right knew the working class has been absolutely ravaged by neoliberal policies that deindustrialized cities, crushed unions and made work more precarious, and they acted on it.

Taking up the language of the working class and pointing it straight at the neoliberal parties of the centre-left worked really, really well for Trump.

For one, when he argued that Wall Street-led globalization had victimized the working class, and that the Democrats were the party of the financial elite, he was actually telling the truth.

Secondly, the way Trump and the populist right brought class back into political discourse has been a really effective vehicle for MAGA racial politics. The vision Trump offers of the working class is of a white, male industrial workforce robbed of its livelihood and victimized by equity and inclusion initiatives.

The most recent U.S. election saw Trump double down on this winning tactic, courting the white and male disaffected workers of deindustrialized cities across the U.S. And here in Canada Poilievre has essentially used the same playbook.

But obviously today’s working class is much more diverse than these politicians allow for. The percentage of workers who are represented by a union is small and shrinking. And crucially, class intersects with race and gender in really important ways.

Any understanding of the working class today must see it in all of its diversity, ranging from migrant care and farmworkers to racialized cleaning and food service workers, through people stacking and sorting goods at Amazon warehouses, to gig workers making a tenuous living on ride-share or food delivery platforms, and so on.

This broader, inclusive vision of the working class is the one the left should counter the right with. Yes, auto workers have an important place in labour history and in the economy, but the working class extends far beyond white, male industrial workers.

A couple of weeks ago, Pierre Poilievre stood behind a lectern reading “Boots, Not Suits,” promising to support workers in skilled trades and saying, “Our country was built by those who do the work.” He also promised an “end to the imposition of woke ideology in the federal civil service and in the allocation of federal funds for university research.”

Both of these seem to me to be appeals to class. What do you think Poilievre is communicating with this messaging?

The messaging is intended to appeal to a portion of the working class that is mostly male, leans conservative and is feeling aggrieved by progressive gender politics.

The trades are a stronghold of traditional gender roles, where the culture is male dominated (which is why efforts to diversify this workforce in B.C. are really important).

This is also a group of workers who tend to have a more tenuous association with the working class, in that their income is higher than, say, someone who works in a coffee shop or a worker who cleans an office tower. A sizable number of these workers are self-employed, and a small contractor is more likely to identify as a business owner as opposed to a worker.

And people working in the trades are probably among those who are feeling more aggrieved by equity initiatives, progressive gender politics and the Indigenous cultural resurgence which has unsettled comfortable ideas of what Canada is as a nation.

As in the U.S., this portion of the workforce often sees universities and the public service as dominated by progressive cultural politics, which is why Poilievre targets them.

Like Trump, Poilievre is aiming to divide the working class against itself by presenting an incredibly clichéd image of what the working class is — one that completely ignores the fact that (to take an example from my industry) teaching assistants, sessional lecturers and contracted-out cleaning service workers on university campuses are all part of the working class.

I’ve seen people make a critique that Poilievre’s valuing of trades at the expense of, say, university research is simple anti-intellectualism, a hallmark of right-wing turns towards fascism. Do you think that’s a factor?

There is a deep vein of anti-intellectualism in Poilievre’s class politics. His attacks on the CBC and public universities are an important reminder that class is a cultural thing as well, since a significant portion of the working class sees these institutions as elitist and out of touch. And to be fair, this is one of the reasons why the right-wing populist critique has been successful, because workers at these institutions have often genuinely been out of touch, seeing themselves as something other than working class.

But it’s important to understand why Poilievre and Trump are attacking these public institutions so ferociously: because they are one of the few sectors in the economy where the left has consolidated its power, through unions, academic freedom and practices of self-governance which are at the heart of the way a public university operates.

Universities and the public service are crucial sites for the consolidation of working-class power, and Poilievre doesn’t want progressive politics anywhere near the gears of power or knowledge production.

How do gender and race factor into political messaging around class? Do the anti-trans and anti-diversity, equity and inclusion backlashes have class implications?

They absolutely do. I think of public library workers fearing for their safety because of organizing something as innocuous as drag story time for kids. Or the example of the Carousel Theatre for Young People on Granville Island, where unionized theatre workers organizing a drag camp for teens and children were targeted with threats and intimidation.

Education sector workers from elementary schools through to the university system have also been exposed to hatred and physical attacks because they are teaching diversity, acceptance and inclusion around gender and sexuality issues in the classroom.

Workers, many of whom are LGBTQ2S+ themselves, are standing up against the weaponization of gender politics in education and the populist right’s stoking of hatred and fear.

To their credit, unions like the BCGEU [BC General Employees’ Union], Unifor and others have been a part of resisting these bigoted attacks on education workers and students. The working class is at its best when it acts in solidarity with those experiencing other forms of oppression.

Political messaging from all the parties also often targets the “middle class” — invoking families who want to be able to save for their retirement, buy their first home, send their kids to swimming lessons. But then there’s also the sense that the traditional markers of middle-class life in Canada — home ownership, making ends meet comfortably — have evaporated due to the housing and affordability crises. Do we need a new definition of middle class, too?

The middle class is an increasingly unattainable fantasy that Trump and his Canadian stand-in Poilievre use to their advantage. MAGA is all about restoring an idyllic, middle-class, consumerist existence bolstered by trade barriers and the return of domestic manufacturing.

The irony is that even as Trump and Poilievre lament the disappearance of the middle class, they aim to put the very last nails in its coffin by eliminating public sector bargaining, defunding public education and health care, cutting social services, undermining secure employment and pensions, and leaving housing strategies to be dictated by developers and the market.

All of the progressive policies the working class imposed on governments in the early 20th century, which produced huge improvements in workers’ quality of life, and which were actually beneficial to capitalism as a whole, are the ones which neoliberalism has eroded for decades now. The MAGA movement is so deeply nihilist it’s finishing the job in the most spiteful, chaotic way possible.

As the political theorist Jodi Dean argues, they may well be removing the guardrails which have allowed capitalism to succeed.

It’s also important to remember that workers in the Global North played a big part in rejecting factory work in the 1960s and 1970s, so it’s pretty doubtful as to whether they will embrace electronics assembly or garment manufacturing work again, especially without the union contracts and high wages of the post-World War II era.

The AI-generated memes coming out of China of U.S. factory workers toiling at their production stations brilliantly pointed to the wishful thinking about industrial production at the heart of MAGA as imaginary.

There are so many people in Canada now working a combination of gig work jobs and part-time service jobs to make ends meet. These folks generally don’t get benefits, don’t get parental leave when they have kids and don’t have the same kind of job security someone working in an office or as a plumber might. And yet they don’t get much airtime in political messaging. Why?

This brings us back to the intersection of gender, race and citizenship with class, because (as the Understanding Precarity in BC project is exploring) precarious employment is predominantly experienced by women, racialized workers and those who are newer to Canada.

If you think about platform-based gig work, the barriers to entry are very low, not requiring accreditation of any kind other than a driver’s licence. The hours are flexible, meaning that women caring for children or older relatives, immigrants working more than one job or people with disabilities can do this work. This work is low-wage and generally non-unionized, and so it doesn’t register in public discourse around the election as much as the plight of an auto worker at Stellantis might.

So this part of the working class, the working class which is getting the worst deal in neoliberalism and which will suffer the most under neo-fascism, is mostly invisible in this election.

What do you make of slogans like “Forestry feeds my family”? Why are some jobs, like those in forestry, politically treated by Conservatives as worthy of outcry and protection, while others, like those in arts or education, are not (and instead, for example, we see calls to defund the CBC)?

When it comes to defending resource extraction sectors, Poilievre puts his hard hat back on and appeals to those workers. Again, he’s picking one side of the working class to champion, a side that tends to be more white, male and conservative.

These workers, particularly those in oil and gas, are feeling threatened by talk of their industry being phased out, and their concerns are important to heed. But providing jobs to workers isn’t necessarily good for the working class. It doesn’t give an industry the right to continue to profit off an activity which is clearly destructive to our collective health and well-being, especially for generations to come.

This is why the idea of a just transition is crucial for the working class — we need to find employment for these and future generations of workers in jobs that are going to help us adapt to a warming planet.

The Liberals, Conservatives, NDP and Greens have all promised tax cuts to address the affordability crisis. Do you think, if there were more class solidarity across workers in gig work, service work, trades, journalism, arts — all workers broadly affected by the affordability crisis — we could see better messaging, and better policy? What could that solidarity look like?

One of the most effective ways to address social inequality is to redistribute income by restoring taxation levels. The right has for decades poisoned the well around the idea of taxation as a progressive policy measure, and the working class will need to reclaim its importance in enabling proper health care, public transit, education, social security and all of the other services which the working class relies on and which the centre-left and the centre-right are keen to cut back on.

One of the big concerns around Trump’s effect on our election is that the shock of an economic attack from the U.S. can be used as an excuse by someone like Mark Carney (who, lest we forget, spent over a decade working at Goldman Sachs) to cut taxes, slash budgets and privatize public services in Canada.

In the face of this threat, the working class will need to organize across its many differences and push for a very different vision of how we respond to this existential threat: by promoting an economy based on solidarity, equality and inclusion rather than violence, competition and depredation.

There is a lot of work to do here.