A democracy can survive disagreement. The trick is surviving when a growing number of people feel they don’t even belong in the same society at all.

Read the article in the Toronto Star.

Ana Serrano is president and vice-chancellor of OCAD University and co-founder of the DemocracyXChange Summit. André Côté is executive director, the Dais at Toronto Metropolitan University.

What economists call a K-shaped economy, many Canadians experience more simply as a country pulling apart.

Some people are moving upward into greater security, wealth, and room to manoeuvre. Others are being pulled into a harder world of rising costs, stalled mobility, and chronic stress. These pressures are not only showing up across households and generations. They are also surfacing across regions, where economic grievance can harden into alienation from the federation itself.

Canada now faces two difficult tasks at once. One is economic renewal: building the capacity, resilience, and growth needed for a harsher world. The other is making sure Canadians see themselves in that project and are willing to carry it together.

That is where the deeper danger lies. It is not only that inequality is widening. It is what happens when the basics of life are shared unevenly, while the institutions that once helped hold differences together grow weaker. Security, mobility — even public life itself — start to feel harder to access.

That matters in a country like Canada.

This has always been a country of competing interests, uneven power, and difficult bargains. What has made it workable is not agreement, but the ability to hold those tensions inside a shared democratic project, a sense that, however imperfectly, different people still belong to the same social world.

That bargain was never equally shared. Any honest account of Canada has to reckon with that, especially for Indigenous Peoples. The point is not to romanticize an earlier Canada. It is to recognize that a bargain that was always uneven is being weakened further by an economy that serves too few.

You can see this in housing. When stability depends increasingly on timing, assets, and whether you got in before the door narrowed, people absorb more than financial pressure. They absorb a lesson about how the country works. Economic security starts to feel less shared, and more like something protected for those who got there first.

You can see it in the weakening of the institutions that make public life tangible. Between 2008 and Oct. 1, 2025, 603 local news outlets closed in 388 communities across Canada. When common sources of information disappear, civic life thins out, too.

You can also see it in people’s sense of belonging. By the end of 2024, 54 per cent of Canadians reported a strong sense of belonging to their local community, but only 43 per cent among those aged 25 to 29. These are not soft indicators. They suggest that, for many people, especially younger adults, common life feels thinner than it should.

A democracy can survive disagreement. It has a harder time surviving when a growing number of people feel they don’t belong in the same society at all.

Too much public conversation still treats affordability, democratic distrust, and digital harms as separate. But they are increasingly part of the same pattern.

When an economy gives most power and stability to only a few people, it doesn’t just create inequality, it also weakens how people relate to each other in a democracy. Over time, that makes the country harder to govern, slower to adjust to change and more difficult to keep united.

In a calmer time, that would already be dangerous. In our present moment, as Canada navigates economic transition in a world shaped by war, trade disruption and geopolitical strain, it becomes a national vulnerability.

That is why rebuilding democracy is central to building a strong nation. It begins with recognizing civil society as part of the country’s democratic capacity, because this cannot be left to government alone.

That is the design challenge at the heart of this week’s DemocracyXChange Summit in Toronto where more than 800 participants and expert panelists are discussing everything from civic trust and public AI to digital sovereignty and Canada’s wealth gap.

If Canada is to renew the terms of common life, then much more has to be redesigned than our public debate usually admits, and many more people and institutions have to be part of that work. The challenge is not only economic. It is civic, institutional, and increasingly digital.

What has made Canada workable is not agreement, but the stubborn effort to keep building a country in which differences do not create separate worlds.

If that project is to continue in a harsher time, then rebuilding democracy is not separate from economic policy.

It is one of the main ways we should judge whether that policy is working.

The DemocracyXChange Summit takes place from April 16 to 18 in Toronto and is co-presented by OCAD University, the Dais at Toronto Metropolitan University and the Open Democracy Project. 

Opinion articles are based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events.