National Post (National Edition)
Guess what just became an election issue, like it or not.
GUESS WHAT JUST BECAME AN ELECTION ISSUE, LIKE IT OR NOT
This is a hell of a way to kick off a federal election campaign. You could say it started at a press conference Wednesday morning in Ottawa, with Opposition immigration critic Michelle Rempel and her fellow Conservative, Treasury Board critic Gérard Deltell, where failed Conservative leadership candidate Maxime Bernier was traduced almost as vigorously as Justin Trudeau’s Liberals were. The eccentric libertarian has lately mounted a kind of jihad against what he calls “too much diversity,” or otherwise the Liberals’ “cult of diversity.”
Then again, you could say it was launched at a corn roast with South Shore Liberals, as the event was billed — a summer evening with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and area Liberal MPS and volunteers last Thursday in the sleepy parish of Sainte-Anne-de-sabrevois. A happy moment in the Liberals’ Summer of Action, a way to celebrate the recruitment of 30,000 new party members in Quebec over the past two years. What could possibly go wrong at something like that?
Quite a lot, if your partisan disposition leads you to apprehend the incident as a matter of Trudeau being surreptitiously exposed on video, arrogantly lashing out at an elderly woman in the crowd. The poor dear had merely asked Trudeau whether his government intends to repay Quebec for the $146 million in costs associated with accommodating the thousands of migrants Trudeau himself had more or less invited to illegally cross the U.s.-canada border into Quebec over the past couple of years.
Or, if you are otherwise disposed, the event was a serendipitous triumph. For all to see, Trudeau refused to be browbeaten by a racist crank with shadowy affiliations to a semi-subterranean network of white-supremacist groupuscules that one can be invited to associate, however circuitously, with senior figures in Andrew Scheer’s Conservative Party. And thus, abracadabra, Trudeau’s response to the corn roast heckler was an eloquent and passionate disquisition on the politics of positiveness and diversity and sunny ways and inclusiveness, to huzzahs all round.
Just as there are enough kernels of truth in both iterations of last Thursday’s incident in Sabrevois, two competing views of the reality surrounding immigration and refugee policy will now guide or obscure the path all the way to election day, Oct. 21, 2019.
Last Sunday afternoon in Montreal, where he was re-nominated to run in Papineau, Trudeau presented the general outline of the script the Liberals intend to read in hopes of securing a return to government. It will be all about building “the economy of tomorrow,” gender equality, the environment, and all those other uplifting things that powered Trudeau’s majority-government victory back in 2015.
“Despite the polarization we see going on in the world around us — the populism, the politics of fear and division — staying positive, pulling people together, looking for ways to emphasize our common ground, our shared values among our differences, is the only way to build a stronger country, a stronger world. … Together, let’s continue what we started.” In other words, it worked last time against Stephen Harper so let’s give it another shot in 2019 against Scheer.
During the 2015 election, Harper’s Conservatives, already on the back leg after a decade in office, just couldn’t shake the bad smell they kept giving off whenever they were confronted with questions related to ethnic diversity, multiculturalism, immigration or refugees. Scheer’s big problem is the persistent impression that his party and his caucus are riven with xenophobes. On Wednesday, Rempel and Deltell set out to bury that caricature for good.
“First and foremost, Canada’s Conservatives recognize that Canada is a country that has been built by immigrants and First Nations alike who have worked hard to build Canada and its pluralism. Canada is and should remain … a country that welcomes newcomers,” Rempel said. “The question is under what principles and what policies. The question is how, not if.”
Rempel ripped into the Trudeau government’s haphazard and heavily politicized approach to immigration and refugees, promising that a government led by Scheer would oversee an immigration system that is “fair, orderly and compassionate.” Its focus would be on integration and encouraging selfsufficiency in newcomers, along with the development of a humanitarian system that prioritizes “the world’s most vulnerable,” specifically victims of crimes against humanity, genocide, war crimes and crimes of aggression. A Conservative government would encourage greater use of the Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program as well.
Fleshing it all out will require broad consultations across the country, a “Pathway to Canada Tour” that will begin this fall. But this much is decided: “Dissembling the permanency of Trudeau’s new immigration program at Roxham Road (a major “irregular” border crossing in Quebec) by closing the loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement.” On top of that, a Conservative government would enter discussions with G7 countries for “a global safe third country system.”
If nothing else, the Conservatives’ move should get them past the immediate awkwardness that arose after several Conservative MPS expressed sympathy with the heckler in the corn roast video, Diane Blain, who turned out to be the same woman who made the news three years ago for loudly complaining that a veiled Muslim woman had attended to her at a University of Montreal dental clinic. And Blain is indeed associated with the far-right Quebec ethnonationalist Storm Alliance, as well as with the Front Patriotique du Québec. At least a dozen similarly affiliated characters had insinuated themselves into the Sabrevois event, besides.
As sordid as his loudest detractors may be, Trudeau is going to have a hard time sustaining the proposition that it’s only Conservatives who are resorting to the “politics of division” in all this. The ground Trudeau seems most eager to fight the Conservatives on, right through to next October’s polls, is as divisive as it gets.
“By sweeping away legitimate questions on his failed border policy with vile personal insults, it is Trudeau himself who is guilty of polarizing the debate,” Scheer says. “No one has done more to divide Canadians than he has.” That’s lathering it on quite a bit. But it’s gotten so that it’s near to impossible just to establish the basis of a decent disagreement.
Is it really indulging in what Trudeau calls “the politics of fear” to simply notice that since February, 2017, nearly 30,000 people have applied for refugee status by purposely evading the terms of the Canada-u.s. Safe Third Country Agreement and crossing the border “illegally” — however imprecise or unhelpful that term may be? It’s getting harder for provincial and municipal governments to find places for those “irregular” claimants to live while they wait for their cases to be heard. Fewer than 5,000 of these claims have been processed so far, and fewer than half of them have been accepted as valid.
This may not constitute a “crisis” from a bureaucratic standpoint, but most Canadians seem to think “crisis” describes the situation quite adequately. Three weeks ago, an Angus Reid Institute poll found that two-thirds of Canadians were content to call the illegal or irregular border-crossing situation a “crisis,” and about the same proportion of respondents reckoned the number of border-crossers was too high for Canadian authorities to handle. More than half of Liberal voters thought so, too.
More worrisome for Trudeau’s Liberals is an Angus Reid Institute trend analysis released Tuesday that suggests Canadians are suddenly souring on immigration altogether. Nearly half of Canadians polled — the highest proportion since 1975 — want Ottawa to scale back on Canada’s immigration targets. The immigration and refugee file “has been a source of division for more than 40 years,” the report concludes. The difference now is the turnaround in public opinion since the Liberals were elected.
In 2014, the last full year that the Conservatives were in power, 36 per cent of respondents said there should be fewer immigrants allowed in every year. Now it’s 49 per cent who say so. The Conservatives are headed into their national convention in Halifax this week, “to set the course to 2019.” They will be acutely aware of these poll numbers.
It’s a good bet that the disorienting jumble of competing narratives around immigration, refugees and the Safe Third Country Agreement will be generating a great deal of smoke and fire in the lead-up to next October’s federal election, whether Canadians want this to be so or not.