This Tory ad has an ugly racial subtext
There is something of the night about this strange political ad, which features an image of a man crossing a bridge. What is happening here? Let’s look for clues.
The man looks a bit grim. Who is he? Is that a MAGA cap? No, just a regular cap. Is he fishing? Why is he alone?
Where is that bridge? Over what river? The river is ink-dark and the current runs fast. The bridge looks more like a long white diving board. Why does it have Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s face on it? The words “faith” and “diversity” can be seen on the bridge, bone-white compared to the dark-skinned man in dark clothing crossing the dark water to pass the dark fence to reach the distant green forest.
I haven’t encountered a stunted, black, chain-link fence like this. They’re usually silver and snaggle-toothed, with a beige plastic Canadian Tire bag stuck in the mesh. The fence is black to emphasize the panel that has been torn away. The dark man didn’t do it because then he’d have had to go back for his large, wheeled suitcase. It must have been done by others. I wonder who.
Ah, I see it is Andrew Scheer’s Conservative Party of Canada that made the ad, (since withdrawn, as presumably was planned) and ran the illustration beneath a big orange quote: “Trudeau’s holier-than-thou tweet causes migrant crisis — now he needs to fix what he started.”
The dark man is walking over Trudeau’s 2017 tweet — “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength. #WelcomeToCanada”— made after U.S. President Donald Trump had banned visitors from seven Muslimmajority countries. Sounds sensible to me. Let people claiming to live in terror and pain tell us their story.
The ad appears to draw from a photo of Haitians leaving Champlain, N.Y. for the Canadian border at St-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Quebec last summer. That scene looks fairly relaxed; the dark man seems to be travelling with his dark wife and dark children.
The Conservatives deleted the other people, invented the river, the fence and everything else. The wide white bridge exists only for the dark man — with explicitly black hands — to trample with his filthy dark feet.
It would have been easy for Scheer’s team to alter the photo. Go to Adobe Photoshop, layer, layer some more, change colour mode, blur to reduce detail, work on your pixels, fiddle with your adjustment layer, take the saturation down, etc.
The Conservatives have created a colouring page for a racist campaign ad as they prep for the 2019 election. They removed anything that looked ordinary and friendly and replaced it with elements that made it look dire, a bit like U.S. political ads that use photos of escaped criminals to scare white people into voting against being raped by dusky murderers on the lam.
Imagine the dark man wearing a yarmulke. Ah, now you see how cruel this is. How awful that the Conservatives are trying this. Scheer always seemed relatively fair-minded. The ad shows him to be malign. I had expected better. Trudeau promised fair treatment for asylum-seekers, but that’s not why they came. They feared Trump, who threatened to send home the Haitians given temporary protected status after a catastrophic 2010 earthquake. Some decided to try Canada instead.
This year, Nigerians were among those crossing the U.S.-Canada border, many having obtained U.S. visas as a means of transit to Canada. We’re a big country with 37 million people. This is not a crisis.
But it didn’t look that way. None of it seemed organized. Ahmed Hussen’s Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship is at fault, not having sent out weekly data, the number of asylum-seekers’ cases being heard and at what speed, how many were being accepted or rejected, and most of all, how many of the rejected were actually leaving.
It would have taken many journalists to explain this story to Canadians. There aren’t a lot of us left.
So the Conservatives are free to divide citizens into groups, the white and the dark, in increasingly terrible times when we need a united voice, a Team Canada. The right deplores the left’s identity politics: gender, disability, race, no-platforming, intersectionality and so on. But the right is doing the same in a simpler way. It’s dark versus light.
I was pleased to see former Toronto police chief Bill Blair named Minister of Border Security and Organized Crime Reduction to police the border and stop the flow of guns. That seems sensible.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives whisper to their base. Dark migrants are coming here because Canada is rich. Migrants may have bent the rules by skipping a legal border crossing. But they still have a right to a hearing.
In their position, you would probably have done the same. I make no moral judgement.