Dangerous game
It’s a politically fraught move to pit people against one another by playing on their prejudices. Martin Regg Cohn,
Conservatives have long had a free ride on diversity, immigration and refugees, all while playing politics with their pointed questioning of crossborder asylum-seekers.
Not just dog whistles but people whistles. Not just coded language but crossing a line on Parliament Hill and at Queen’s Park.
Conservatives from every province, not least Ontario’s Doug Ford, convened in Halifax this week to talk policy, and despite their latest divergences over diversity, they were suddenly on their best behaviour. Call it diversity damage control.
But they have been playing with rhetorical fire, for there is no more politically fraught path than pitting people against one another by playing on their prejudices.
It has become open season on refugee claimants, opening the door to attacks on immigration and culminating in the antidiversity rants by maverick MP Maxime Bernier this month. Tories backpedalled furiously when they realized Bernier had gone too far, but it was only a matter of time before the reckoning.
Coming to the Halifax convention as a conquering hero, Ford boasted of defying all critics. “We stayed true to our values and principles because we refused to back down,” he said. “We didn’t listen to the media.”
While Ford had the decency to avoid diversity on this occasion, our premier still makes no apologies for stirring things up. On the same day Justin Trudeau made his first courtesy call at Queen’s Park last month, Ford issued a statement blaming and berating Ottawa for a “crisis” of “illegal border crossers.”
“This mess was 100 per cent the result of the federal government,” according to the premier’s office — a crisis triggered by a Trudeau tweet, the Tories claimed. Notwithstanding Ford’s troll-like taunts, I’m not aware of anyone encouraging anyone to make unauthorized crossings anywhere. While Ford recites his lines, and incites his followers, he ignores the facts.
After an accidental encounter with a Colombian family of refugee claimants this month along the Vermont border, I learned from Canadian and U.S. officials that the current surge isn’t about tweets, but timing. In fact, the flow of migrants is a two-way traffic jam: The Americans told me their border patrols regularly intercept Mexicans trying to enter the U.S. via Canada, after first flying here (visa-free tourism was restored in 2006), then circling back south. Meanwhile, the patrols regularly intercept Latin Americans going in the opposite direction, having already made it into the U.S. from the Mexican border — before heading for Canada (they often tip off their Canadian counterparts, allowing the RCMP to in- tercept asylum claimants across the border for legal processing).
The point is that despite the president’s Twitter-trashing, Mexicans still sneak into America via Canada. U.S. border guards tell me it was American media coverage of Trump’s tweets that had spooked Latin Americans into heading for Canada, not an unnoticed Trudeau tweet about Canadian values.
In truth, we can’t generalize about the motivations of any individual migrant.
The only certainty is that by pressing people’s buttons, resorting to dog whistles, or blaring into political megaphones, our premier is giving people ammunition and permission to think the worst of migrants.
It doesn’t make much to stir things up. Ford knows, and Lord knows, that Canadians and Ontarians are no better than anyone else. Polling data consistently shows we are perfectly capable of prejudice and hostility against refugees and recent immigrants when prodded.
That’s where political leadership comes in. Think of Tory leaders such as former Ontario premier Bill Davis and ex-PM Brian Mulroney, for whom tolerance was a touchstone of our Canadian sensibility, evoked in almost every public speech they gave.
Will Ford’s top ministers, notably Attorney General Caroline Mulroney, remain silent in cabinet as the premier turns legal principles upside down, and turns people against “illegal border crossers.” Or will they remind the premier that asylum claimants deserve — and are in fact entitled to — the full protection of Canadian and international law?
Only the most complacent among us would take our national consensus on diversity for granted, and assume it is embedded in our character. Only the most reckless among us would test the limits of our tolerance. And only the most feckless among us would abide demagoguery over diversity.