Preserving the status quo on economic globalization has been politically safe throughout Canada’s barely six-week election campaign. Neglecting hard truths to win office, however, could be the first domino in a cascade of Canadians voting farther right than ever before, joining the ranks of their beleaguered allies.

Canada’s middle class is in no different a position than middle-income earners in the United States and Britain. Each country’s middle class has shrunk as a percentage of the population between the 1980s and mid-2010s, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And many Canadians, like residents in both of the other countries, have become poorer. Canadians who have managed to keep their middle-class jobs have largely done so by forgoing wage increases; research I conducted for the nonpartisan Centre for International Governance Innovation shows that real incomes of the middle slice of Canadian households haven’t grown in decades.

A big chunk of these middle-class job losses have occurred in the manufacturing sector. About half a million production jobs in Canada have vanished since the start of 2000, according to Statistics Canada , while about 4 million jobs were lost in the United States over the same time period, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Automation is often blamed for these loses, but Canadians who are out of work point to another culprit. Their wages were too costly to fit into today’s global supply chains, which is built largely on cheap labor.

The auto industry is a prime example. The North American Free Trade Agreement might have been a godsend for auto manufacturers, but it has been a nightmare for Canadians on the assembly line, just as it has been for their American counterparts. The original Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement in 1989 enabled goods to move duty free between two countries with similar wage rates; its 1994 replacement, Nafta, extended that free trade zone into Mexico, where workers’ pay was 12.5 percent to 20 percent of that earned by their American and Canadian counterparts, according to my research.

The evolving trade rules have chased middle-class jobs out of Canada and the United States. Why build an assembly plant in Detroit or Oshawa, Ontario, when a company could pay a fraction of the wages to workers in San Luis Potosi, Mexico? Companies with factories in Mexico have been all too content with exporting vehicles and parts, duty free, back up north. And so many have invested where it was cheap without a quibble, decimating livelihoods to the point where, for example, it changed everything for the 2016 American election.