Could Consumer Rage Shape the Next Election?

Monday, October 21, 2024

This week from The Walrus:

The $20 Sandwich That Could Topple Trudeau

Consumer rage is real—and it’s shaping the next election

BY IRA WELLS

A sandwich filled with various Canadian bills.

Grumbling about rising costs is a universal fact of life. Perhaps you, too, grew up with grandparents fond of recalling how, in the olden days, you could get a jug of milk for “two bits.” (Just what a “bit” was, I never knew.) But today’s dissatisfaction feels new. The anger is taking a political shape. Simmering frustrations are erupting into boycotts, era‐defining political slogans, and a generalized “affordability crisis” that may deliver the Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre a decisive electoral victory.

What’s more, all of this appears to be happening at a time in which specific financial indicators, such as our current interest rate, labour market, and economic growth, are “outperforming expectations,” which is, in a way, doubly alarming. Whether the federal government can alleviate the situation may now be beside the point as public perception takes on a life of its own. We may be living through a new age of consumer rage, and its consequences are anything but certain.

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A photo illustration of a brick wall covered in the remnants of posters. There's a peeling black-and-white poster with Alice Munro's face and part of her name that has a spraypainted red X across it.

Undoing the Fairy Tale of Alice Munro

For years, I helped spread a glowing narrative about one of Canada’s most famous authors

BY JUSTINA ELIAS

A silhouetted woman standing in a hallway.

To Get into Medical School, I Thought I’d Have to Hide Parts of My Blackness

But then came a question I wasn’t prepared for

BY CHIKA STACY ORIUWA

Two middle-age women are seen from behind, jumping into the ocean. Three men are seen already in the water.

Menopause Is a Pretty Damn Fine Stage of Life

The joy of aging like a “space crone”

BY SUSAN GLICKMAN

A young woman, wearing glasses and a coat, looks down, her hands folded in front of her mouth.

Seven Years after #MeToo: What Is the Cost of Speaking Up?

NDAs are silencing whistleblowers and sexual assault victims

BY ELIZABETH RENZETTI

An illustration of a flames surrounding black vines and dark grapes. At the centre is a window with the shade pulled down.

FICTION: Smokehouse

It was as if I’d swallowed the forest fire itself, all of it burning and alive inside of me

BY NOUR ABI-NAKHOUL

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This week on What Happened Next, host Nathan Whitlock is joined by author, epidemiologist, policy analyst, and musician Dan Werb. They talk about how his musical career does, and doesn’t, connect with his scientific one, about the challenge of misinformation that COVID‐19 exposed and accelerated, and about why the joy of winning the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for his 2022 book, The Invisible Siege: The Rise of Coronaviruses and the Search for a Cure, lasted about a day and a half.

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