A very thoughtful column, as usual.

If I put myself in the shoes of the average German, they are equally concerned about their economic fate as people in Britain, United States and (soon to be discovered) France and the Netherlands.

In my opinion, they are all equally fed up with governments in thrall to economic theory that advocates free trade and less social protection, which works in the aggregate (our GDP goes up! Good!) but fails for the average person (my office closed and my job is being done in China now (Sorry, that's economics!).

I think Canada escaped the same fate because we had already had a three-term conservative government that had a standard keep-taxes-low-and-everthing-will-be-better mantra. The Liberal Party explicitly said they needed to invest in Canada, make taxes higher for the wealthy and run a deficit to rebuild - which is fact good economic theory. Canadians understood the problem wasn't Syrian refugees, it was the economists.