Bernier drops one pretence for another
Rank xenophobia is somehow more tolerable when the people who propagate it don’t pretend they are propagating something else entirely.
Politicians can take away people’s rights and freedoms, but manners dictate they should not call them stupid while they’re at it.
Oh, but they just have innocent security concerns, they insist; innocent jobsloss concerns, they say; or innocent questions about whether abortion is a subversion tactic immigrants deploy to establish whiteminority slave societies, and is it so wrong to ask about that?
Never mind that it has been well-established and widely broadcast that terrorist attacks tend to be committed by homegrown extremists, that immigrants tend to have lower rates of criminality, that immigrants tend to contribute to economies, and that crazy conspiracy theories tend to be crazy.
It is true that people can genuinely, if wrongly, believe otherwise; it is also true that while many politicians have been given plenty of opportunities to get immigration facts straight, they prefer to leave them wrong.
Now a Canadian politician has dropped the pretence; the only trouble is he picked another pretence up.
Maxime Bernier — a man who is better known for leaving top secret documents at the apartment of a biker-gang groupie than for a history of articulating consistent (or sometimes even existent) proposals on immigration issues — is not pretending to worry about solely security or jobs as a cover for his worries about cultural differences. He appears to be pretending to worry about cultural differences as a cover for his worries about being a political reject.
And now that he’s leaving the party that doesn’t want him and throwing his own that few will attend, we’re all wishing for those halcyon days when you needed a phoney excuse for xenophobia more than for blowing a leadership contest.
In the modern Canadian genealogy of hapless ad hoc hucksters, Bernier is not the first; still, he may be among the worst. If you’re going to fake cultural anxiety effectively, you have to really go for it.
At least Chris Alexander, cosmopolitan diplomat turned neighbourhood watch leader, had a xenophobic policy to pretend to believe in, even if it was a “barbaric cultural practices” snitch line; same for Kellie Leitch, the multiple-degree-holderturned-anti-elitist, even if it was presumably a multiple choice test in which respondents would puzzle over whether freedom is: a) great; b) really, really great; or c) abolished by decree of whatever non-jesus god you believe in.
If Bernier did have specific immigration policy proposals, I suppose we’d have to pretend he wasn’t only pretending to believe in them. Luckily he has not given us an occasion to stage such a daunting performance. But as you must pretend to take arguments at face value, let us pretend that Bernier’s culture fears are real: they are still stupid.
Few people move to places they hate so much they want to change them beyond recognition. Or, as someone recently put it: “People who came here, came here to share Canadian values — the rule of law, equality between man and woman, respect and tolerance.”
That’s lifted directly from the songbook of Bernier, the anti-immigration impresario himself, who sang this ode to tolerance on Thursday — right after a week in which he hit high “C” on supposedly intolerable attitudes on multiculturalism.
He has great range, anyway. Not everyone could say that people who come to Canada to share Canadian values don’t share Canadian values.
His motivation as an actor is at least slightly more clear than his improvised lines on immigration.
Right now there is little evidence he cares passionately about some of the Canadian values he seems to endorse, such as tolerance, any more than he cares about some of the un-canadian values he also seems to endorse, such as intolerance.
Perhaps it is Bernier’s sincerely held values we should be worried about, then. Selfish opportunism, say. Singleminded careerism, say.
Or perhaps the bigger worry is those voters who truly hold the beliefs that many politicians only pretend to have.