VARYING DEGREES OF BELONGING
Harper’s remark about ‘old-stock’ Canadians should raise concerns
Stephen Harper was probably hoping to leave viewers of last week’s Globe and Mail federal leaders’ debate on the economy with a few solid one-liners to remember. I’m guessing “old-stock Canadians” wasn’t one of them.
The debate was moderated by Globe editor-in-chief David Walmsley, who asked the three main party leaders — Harper, Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau — for their views on six broad topics related to the economy: jobs, energy and the environment, infrastructure, immigration, housing and taxation.
During the segment on immigration, Trudeau turned the conversation toward the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis, criticizing the Conservative government cuts to refugee health services. Harper countered, saying that his party’s approach was something that both “new and existing and old-stock Canadians” agree with.
So what did he mean? Who counts as old-stock Canadian? When asked to clarify his comments the following day, Harper indicated at a news conference that he was talking about Canadians whose families had been here for one or more generations.
The trouble isn’t that Harper draws a distinction between refugee claimants (who do not hold Canadian citizenship) and Canadian citizens, but rather that he draws a distinction between “new,” “existing” (though, to be honest, I can’t figure out what this one means) and “old-stock” Canadians. It suggests an approach that sees patently different categories of Canadian-ness, and of belonging to Canada.
When set against a backdrop of some of the Conservative government’s recent legislation, Harper’s comments do deserve some scrutiny. Bill C-24 (Strengthening the Canadian Citizenship Act), for example, does effectively draw lines between different classes of citizenship. Under this legislation, the only Canadians who can never lose their citizenship are those born in Canada, who do not have another nationality and are ineligible to apply for another nationality. Canadians with another nationality and those who are eligible to obtain another nationality can have their citizenship stripped. This includes those who were born in Canada.
I’m also interested to see how Harper’s comments play out in Quebec.
Here, the terms “Québécois de souche” or “pure laine” — translated as “old stock” or “pure wool” — are part of the political lexicon, generally used to refer to white, Catholic francophones of French-European origin. They are terms that provoke some social anxiety, partly because one of the main stumbling blocks for Quebec nationalists is that they are often seen — rightly or wrongly — as a group looking to impose the cultural dominance of the so-called “old stock” white, francophone majority onto Quebec’s ethno-cultural minorities.
Canada also has a history of exploiting Quebec’s struggles with identity to bolster its own political objectives. Look no farther than the 1995 referendum campaign and Jacques Parizeau’s infamous “money and ethnic votes” speech. The speech — which came a couple of weeks after Lucien Bouchard’s comments about francophone Quebecers being “one of the white races that has the fewest children” — made it easy for Canadian federalists to paint Quebecers as a closed-minded and intolerant people, where the “nous” referred to by Parizeau clearly meant “old-stock francophone Quebecers” whose right to secede from the Canadian federation had been thwarted by immigrants.
But the Canadian tendency to congratulate ourselves on being a multicultural and diverse nation where immigrants and refugees are unconditionally accepted is not only problematic, it can be condescending. As Eva Mackey reminds us in her book The House of Difference, The Globe and Mail put out an editorial a few days after the Quebec referendum that said: “Ours (Canada) is a modern nationalism: liberal, decent, tolerant and colour blind. … (W)e must show Quebecers … that Canada and Canada alone waves the banner of pluralism and common humanity.”
And yet, here we are in 2015 listening to our prime minister use the term “old-stock Canadians” in a federal leaders’ debate. It pains me to say it, but I’m willing to bet you’ll find many Canadians who aren’t surprised by this at all.