Leitch points the wrong way
If Kellie Leitch is truly concerned about the rise of intolerance in Canada, she should take a look in the mirror.
Last week, the Tory leadership aspirant floated the idea of screening immigrants for “anti-Canadian values,” an appeal plucked directly from Donald Trump’s nativist playbook. The move caused appropriate controversy, but Leitch didn’t back down.
She now says the proposal isn’t intolerant, as her critics claim, not a dog-whistle to bigots, but rather an attempt to weed out intolerance: “Intolerance towards other religions, cultures and sexual orientations, violent and/or misogynist behaviour and/or a lack of acceptance of our Canadian tradition of personal and economic freedoms.”
If the proposed test is not the crass political ploy it appears to be, it is at the very best a highly impractical solution to an apparently non-existent problem.
Canadians have and always will hold a diversity of values and that will inevitably be true of the immigrants we attract. And it’s not as if no immigration screening currently exists. Prospective citizens are subjected to criminal background checks. They are provided information on Canada’s history and institutions and are tested on their knowledge of these. They are required to take an oath that they will observe our laws and constitution and the duties of citizenship.
But what we don’t do — what we must not do on moral grounds and cannot possibly do on practical ones — is require them to believe anything in particular. Thought-policing is best left in the pages of Orwell. The state demands that Canadians obey the law even if they don’t like it and uphold the constitution even when they disagree. Beyond this, do we really want the government of the day dictating what are so-called Canadian values?
As for the specific test that Leitch proposes, there’s more than a whiff of hypocrisy. It is anti-Canadian, she says, to be homophobic, and yet her own party finally embraced gay marriage only earlier this year, 11 years after Ontario made it legal.
It is anti-Canadian to be intolerant of other religions, yet during the last election campaign Leitch proposed a snitch line for “barbaric practices” and helped her party wage a war on the niqab in a clear effort to sow fear of Islam and reap votes. She says upholding personal freedoms is a fundamentally Canadian value, but what about the niqab thing? What about the values test? She wouldn’t pass her own screening.
While Leitch’s arguably anti-Canadian values thankfully don’t disqualify her from citizenship, they ought to disqualify her from being Conservative leader.
The path she is proposing is the wrong one both for her party and the country, as many of her Tory colleagues seem to recognize. In recent days, interim leader Rona Ambrose and leadership rivals Maxime Bernier and Michael Chong have all spoken out against the idea.
Unlike Leitch, they learned the lessons of the last election. The Tory turn toward fear and division in the dying days of the campaign proved politically disastrous, just as Pauline Marois’ nativist values-charter gambit did for the Parti Québécois in the 2014 Quebec election. There’s not enough hate in this country to sustain Leitch’s brand of politics, try as she might to breed it.
Tory leadership aspirant takes a cue from the Donald Trump playbook