OPENING THE DOOR OR PREPARING TO SLAM IT?
Here we all were, primping and strutting, basking in the praise of New York Times columnists and Hollywood celebrities and boasting about how much nicer and friendlier we Canadians are in comparison with the bigoted and beastly Americans. Ever since U. S. President Donald Trump’s crude and chaos-inducing Jan. 27 decree raised the American drawbridge against refugees altogether and barred ordinary visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries, we’ve been besotted with ourselves.
It’s been a blast, and now the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada comes along with an in-depth Ipsos survey within a carefully formulated comparative study designed by University of Toronto political science Michael Donnelly that proves, you could say scientifically, that we’ve been kidding ourselves. We are not nearly so cosmopolitan and uniquely fabulous as we have been lately led, most enthusiastically by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, to believe.
That’s one way of looking at the MISC study, anyway. It turns out we’re pretty squishy on the subjects of immigration, refugee resettlement and even multiculturalism. Not even half the survey’s 1,522 respondents could bring themselves to say they would oppose a total shutdown of immigration to Canada. A little more than a third said they wouldn’t mind either way. Nearly one in five said they’d like to see just that. Bar the doors, lift the drawbridge.
“These results suggest that a serious anti- immigrant movement is not impossible” in Canada, Donnelly concludes. While a great many frenzies are not impossible to imagine erupting in Canada, a close reading of the study would lead a reasonable person to agree with Donnelly’s view.
You can also count on those findings giving satisfaction to dingbats who imagine that Canadians are at last cluing in to Trudeau’s Liberals being willing accomplices in a stealth jihad by refugee policy and the clandestine subversion of Canada by sharia law. Those same findings will similarly satisfy the shouters who insist that Canada should be understood as nothing better than a grimly Islamophobic, racist colonial settler state on stolen indigenous land.
Only last weekend, Toronto rally- goers were admonished by megaphone that Trudeau himself is a “white supremacist terrorist.” But one hyperbolic misery guts can shout just as loudly as another. In any case there is yet a third way to read the MISC study, “Canadian Exceptionalism: Are we good, or are we lucky?” that can just as persuasively lend itself to the proposition that we are both good and lucky, and that Americans, their apparently unhinged president notwithstanding, are perhaps not so atrociously bloody- minded after all. At least compared to Canadians.
And the closer you look at the MISC study data, Europeans, who seem to have been going out of their way lately to prove they’re all still just a gaggle of paranoid national chauvinists underneath all that outwardly Eurozone sophistication, are practically Canadian in their outlook. It’s a small world, after all. Hooray.
There is also some comfort to be taken in another recently published comparative study. The Legatum Institute’s annual prosperity rankings derive from a survey that measures basic legal rights, individual freedoms, and social tolerance in 149 countries around the world. Canada ranks fifth overall, and second only to Luxembourg in the subcategory that measures tolerance of minorities.
In the MISC study, roughly 95 per cent of respondents say they’re proud to be Canadian, and there’s little statistical difference in the professions of pride among nativeborn and immigrant Canadians. That should count for something.
While the MISC study questionnaire used the term “immigrants from poor countries” as a proxy for “unskilled non- white immigrants” in order to keep the comparative analysis going, Canadians are not so much welcoming or hostile as blasé. The overwhelming majority of respondents said Canada should accept “few” or “some” unskilled non- white immigrants, slightly more than 10 per cent want “many,” and fewer than 10 per cent want none.
As for refugees, one in five respondents want a more “suspicious” approach adopted in federal policy — which is unsurprising, given the commonplace freaking- out about the security threats refugees from Arab countries are supposed to present — but nearly half the respondents wanted a generous welcoming on offer. Three in 10 respondents took up a middle ground. You could say we’re like Europeans in this way, or that Europeans are like us. Either way, Canada ranks ninth out of 22 countries in the generosity of its attitude to refugee resettlement.
So what do we Canadians really think about the extraordinary Syrian refugee project our government is always crowing about — but which is now effectively shut down, the effort reduced to mainly handling backlogged private-sponsorship applications? According to the largest category of public opinion in the MISC study: keep them coming.
Canada responded to the Syrian refugee crisis with a far greater generosity than the United States did, taking in 40,000 people over the past 14 months as opposed to the 12,000 or so the United States accepted over roughly the same time period. Now, President Trump’s door-slamming executive order bars Syrian refugees — the world’s largest refugee population — “indefinitely.”
Last week, despite the opportunity taken in Trump’s mayhem to boast about Canada’s open doors, the Liberal government refused Opposition proposals to take in at least some of the Syrian refugees who had been slated for resettlement in the United States, but who Trump has now turned away. The MISC survey was undertaken in the days before Trump’s ban, but its findings indicate that only about one in four respondents support the Liberal government’s withdrawal from Canada’s special Syrian resettlement effort. About 36 per cent don’t particularly care either way, but four in ten respondents are against closing the doors on further Syrian refugees.
Going by the MISC data, more than twice as many Canadians ( roughly 43 per cent) are satisfied with multiculturalism as those who aren’t ( roughly 17 per cent), while about 40 per cent don’t have much of an opinion on the subject at all. This doesn’t fit with the usual claims we make about our happiness with multiculturalism, but it isn’t exactly evidence of a populace on the verge of a recrudescence into white-nationalist idiocy, either.
This brings us back to that one finding that has rightly attracted especially untoward attention: the existence of a strange cohort, fully one in five respondents, who want immigration stopped altogether. One is left to wonder what the hell they’re thinking. Roughly 45 per cent of respondents say they would oppose such a move, but 35 per cent of respondents were sitting on the fence.
On the entire subject of immigration and cultural diversity and refugees, there is quite enough shouting and screaming coming from the United States at the moment, and it won’t stop anytime soon. Americans are starting to notice that terror watchlist characters are showing up in greater numbers heading south from Canada than coming north from Mexico. And suddenly there’s a huge spike in refugees wandering northward through the snow out of the United States into remote border towns in Manitoba.
Canadians need to have their own, careful, grownup conversations about these things. The less language we borrow from the vein-popping, hyper- partisan American lexicon, the better. The fewer cues we take from the American arguments of either side, the better. Not least, the less boasting about how much better and kinder and smarter we are than the Americans, the better, too.