Leitch’s objectionable, but not unusual, focus on Canadian values
Opening t he l e aders’ debate in the 2007 Ontario election, Dalton McGuinty got straight to the point. “When I travel the world on behalf of Ontarians,” he said, “the first thing they say is why have I not seen on your television screens what I have seen on the streets of London, Germany, Paris, the Netherlands? Why is there not more strife, struggle and controversy?” His answer: “It’s because we bring our kids together in the same classrooms.”
You want dog whistles? That’s how you do a dog whistle.
McGuinty’s opponent in that election, the Conservatives’ John Tory, had proposed to extend public funding to religious schools, much as t he province’s Catholic schools have been funded since Confederation. Sensing an opening, McGuinty had made the issue the emotional centrepiece of his campaign. To hear him speak, it was as if nothing less than the peace of the province was at risk.
And in the fevered post9/ 11 atmosphere he found an echo. McGuinty did not actually say the words “my opponent would fund terrorist training centres,” but he did not need to. Or what do you t hink t hat carefully curated list of trouble spots — London, Germany, Paris and the Netherlands, all of them recent targets of Islamist “strife” — was about?
And in all this disgraceful appeal to fear and intolerance McGuinty had the full support of the province’s progressives.
So spare us, please, the wave of hot indignation at Kellie Leitch. I don’t doubt the Conservative l eadership candidate is playing, as the phrase has it, dogwhistle politics with her asyet- unexplained proposal to screen immigrants for “anti-Canadian values.” But there’s nothing particularly new in this, and though there are lots of reasons to object to it, her critics seem to have fixed on all the wrong ones.
It cannot surely be maintained that there are no such things as Canadian values, or even, as some have claimed, that there should not be (“our value is not to have any values” is self- rebutting). Every community, no matter how liberal, has some sort of shared understandings and beliefs. We express those values formally every time we pass a law. To say that certain values are broadly shared in a society is not to suggest that every person in that society believes in them, or must: only that most people do.
I see nothing wrong, then, with reminding ourselves every now and then of the values we share, the ideals to which we are committed — provided we stick to those on which there is genuine consensus. It is likely to be a short list: freedom, democracy, maybe a couple more. Otherwise we are trying to close debates that ought to be open, as if dissenters were unCanadian.
There is, alas, a long history of this. Leitch is hardly the first to invoke Canadian “values” or “identity” for political advantage. It was the special project of the Canadian Left for half a century, and remains a staple of their rhetoric ( see: “American- style” anything). I have shelves full of books on The Canadian Identity.
Yes, you will reply, but the Left never proposed to subject individuals to a test of their Canadianness. After all, we would never do this to those born here. No, we wouldn’t. Then again, we do lots of things to immigrants we would never do to those born here. We subject them to a “points test,” for starters, to measure their fitness to live and work among us. There follows a citizenship test, after which they are obliged to swear a citizenship oath. All of these have a values component, explicit or implicit.
By contrast, t he only qualification the rest of us can offer is that we had the foresight to be born here. If we really wanted to be fair, we would apply the same rights and conditions of entry to immigrants as the native- born, not just in this matter but across the board.
But as we are not prepared to do that, I see nothing terribly novel or severe in what Leitch has proposed. Whether it is of any effectiveness is another matter. As others have pointed out, it’s a simple matter to tell one’s interviewers what they want to hear. But a regime so easily evaded cannot also be an Orwellian prison.
What makes Leitch’s intervention objectionable, rather, is that she said it: or rather, as with McGuinty, it’s the emphasis.
There’s a context here, of course: Leitch’s earlier appearance as an advocate of the infamous “barbaric cultural practices tip line” Donald Trump’s promise of “extreme vetting” of refugees. But there’s a context any time a politician says anything.
The i ssues politicians focus on tell us about their priorities, but also about their i ntended audience. Like McGuinty, Leitch could have chosen any issue to campaign on. That she chose this particular issue suggests she thinks, or suspects her audience thinks, that this is an issue of some urgency: that in fact a significant number of immigrants are coming to Canada with “anti- Canadian values” that existing measures have proved insufficient to prevent this; that the result is some mortal threat to Canada. If she has evidence of any of this, she should provide it.
Leitch has enough experience in politics to know how inflammatory this stuff can be. That she has chosen to push this button regardless can only be because she sees some advantage in it. She may yet succeed, though her party may have reason not to thank her for it.