Politicians without values

In the polite, Trump-lite debate the Conservatives are having about Canadian values, an emerging Canadian value seems to be that we mustn’t ever ask would-be immigrants whether they have Canadian values.

In principle, we’re not opposed to intrusive questions. We ask newcomers about lots of things: their education, employment history, spouses or commonlaw partners; whether they have studied law, pharmacy, veterinary medicine or podiatry. (That’s in the test for skilled workers. Podiatry. No kidding.) We ask how well they speak our official languages (and score them on a scale of zero to six). We ask their age, giving them zero points if they’re less than 18, 12 points if they’re 18 to 35, working down to zero points if they’re 47 or older. “After 47 you’re good for nothing” is a revealed Canadian value.

Asking them about their values would be intrusive in a different way. People have the right to their beliefs, don’t they? Certainly, but do they have the right both to any and all beliefs and to come and live in Canada if they decide to? Should we have welcomed young Herr Hitler in 1921, say?

In interviewing people about their beliefs there is the obvious impracticality that once it becomes known certain answers prohibit entry, we will never hear those answers. Among people who don’t share our values, the forthright won’t get in, only liars will make it. Or maybe we’ll ask applicants to take a lie-detector test, in which case only the really good liars will pass, those capable of holding their emotions completely under control, the kind of person who would make a terrific terrorist.

There’s also the problem of who would construct the values questionnaire. I hope it’s not the people who put together the ongoing online consultation on voting theory.

Still, the depth of the animus against asking prospective immigrants about their values suggests the revulsion owes more to principle than impracticality. I wonder if the principle is really so clear as the animus implies.

Not so long ago, values interrogation would have been un-Canadian simply because an essential part of Canadian-ness was not really caring what other Canadians’ values were. Our most important value was complete tolerance. Anyone was welcome here, a militant relativism that was a passive-aggressive manifestation of anti-Americanism, the most enduring Canadian value of all.

Americans have always been very big on American values, which, as the whole world knows, their founding fathers troubled to write down both in a declaration of their independence and a bill of their rights. For our part, we had the British North America Act, which read like the mortgage deed that, in a sense, it was. Also, after 1960, John Diefenbaker’s non-binding bill of rights, and, from 1972 on, Margaret Atwood’s Survival — which told us our characteristic attribute, as of our literature, is that we are survivors. Beyond that we were building a mosaic, not a melting pot, and a mosaic wants tiles of every hue, texture and sharpness.

But all that’s behind us, surely. The last couple of decades have made clear that plenty of people in the world have, not just un-Canadian, but anti-Canadian values. Most of us are therefore now more flexible on the principle of wanting to welcome to Canada only people who do share our core values. We obviously don’t want to splice the mesh so narrowly that many good people don’t get in. But we also don’t want to succumb to the liberal death wish: perishing by principled, good-hearted inaction, which in this context means welcoming people who oppose our values and going after them only when they actually commit crimes. It’s possible to be more, as they say, proactive than that. This is a liberal, democratic, pluralist society. If you want to live here, you’d better be a liberal, a democrat and a pluralist. It’s hard to see what’s wrong with that proposition in principle.

Of course, a core part of liberalism is mistrust of government. And it’s the government that polices our borders. Which gets us back to the practical problems of a values test. How do we tell what’s really in people’s hearts? Consider Kellie Leitch, who only months ago cried on television recalling her role in the Barbaric Practices Call Centre but is now trying to pull a Trump, i.e., standing out in a field of 14 by staking out the most extreme position of all the candidates on immigration. How do we tell what’s truly in her heart?

It is not, in principle, un-Canadian to worry about the beliefs of people seeking to join us. It may be unCanadian, it has been at least since the 1960s, to worry whether the government can do a job right. But worry we should, on both counts.

A PART OF CANADIAN LIBERALISM IS MISTRUSTING THE GOVERNMENT THAT POLICES OUR BORDERS.