b'CANADAS ERA OF PRECARITYFarmers, food and land could become the certainty Canadians crave in an era of instability. Marc ZienkiewiczCANADA IS DRIFTING through one of the most profound psy- The implications are enormous. Canadians arent chological shifts in its modern history. For years, the nationaljust feeling pinchedtheyre feeling untethered. Life mood was defined by scarcitythe fear of not having enough.events are delayed, career plans are reconsidered, even Scarcity was stressful, but it was manageable. There were rules,once-stable assumptions about institutions and leaders are boundaries, systems that felt stable. eroding.But that era has ended.David Coletto, founder and CEO of Abacus Data, has beenPolitical Whiplashcharting this transition with the precision of a pollster and theThis new psychology explains what Coletto calls the urgency of a cultural diagnostician. In his view, Canada hasmost dramatic mood swing in Canadian political his-entered the age of precarity. And precarity is not about tighttory. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievres message of budgets or difficult trade-offs. It is about a deeper, more cor- disruption and outrage had traction when Canadians were rosive feeling: that nothing will hold. struggling with scarcity. But when the mood shifted to Scarcity is the fear of not having enough, Colettoprecarity, voters suddenly wanted something else: ground-explains. Precarity is the fear that the ground itself is shiftinging, steadiness, a sense that someone had the controls.under your feet. Enter Mark Carney. A decade ago, he might have been Colettos team polls thousands of Canadians every week.dismissed as the archetype of out-of-touch elitean Over the past 18 months, the patterns have been impossibleOxford PhD, a central banker, a global figure more at to ignore. Anxiety levels spiked in late 2024 and acceleratedhome in Davos than in Moose Jaw. Yet in 2025, precisely through 2025. The drivers are everywhere: housing affordabilitythose credentials became his strongest selling point. at crisis levels, food inflation cutting into family budgets, andCanadians wanted the boring technocrat, Coletto says. the unnerving spectacle of Donald Trump returning to theThey wanted someone who could say, Ive got this.White House. The result wasnt just a Liberal win. It was, as Coletto Almost 80% of Canadians say Trumps re-election is caus- jokes, a Men in Black memory wipe of Justin Trudeau ing them stress, Coletto says. Thats a staggering number. Its a wholesale reset of voter psychology in the space of rare to see consensus like that in any democracy. months.30 SEEDWORLD.COM/CANADA NOVEMBER 2025'