Andrew Potter: Trudeau is risking our pro-immigration consensus

2022/12/17 Leave a comment

Indeed. Encouraging to see more articles focusses on the impact (my first article questioning the government’s approach and Canada’s ability to address these and other externalities dates from May 2021):

Justin Trudeau’s strong desire to push his unique brand of progressive cosmopolitanism onto audiences domestic and foreign has always stood uneasily beside his equally strong obsession with keeping the peace with Quebec, which is led by the increasingly nationalistic François Legault. Indeed, when these two goals have come in conflict, his tendency has been to either take Quebec’s side (such as the application of Bill 101 to companies under federal jurisdiction) or largely ignore it (Bill 21). But things are coming to a head now over immigration, and this is one area where it is hard not to think that Legault has a point. 

Last month, the federal government announced that Canada would be trying to bring in 500,000 immigrants a year by 2025, an almost 25 per cent increase over last year’s target. Thanks to current immigration levels, Canada’s population growth rate is already considerably higher than that of the U.S., the U.K., and Australia. As Statistics Canada reported this fall, immigrants currently make up almost a quarter of the population, the highest level since Confederation, and one of the highest levels in the world. 

Quebec seems to think things have gone just about far enough. The recent provincial election, which saw Legault’s CAQ re-elected in a landslide, was fought largely over questions of Quebec identity and the status of the French language, with the debate over appropriate levels of immigration serving as a flashpoint. The Liberals bid highest,  suggesting the province could accommodate 70,000 newcomers a year, while the PQ came in with a lowball pledge of a maximum of 35,000. The governing CAQ set the limit at 50,000, with Legault saying anything higher would be “suicidal” for the province. 

Given this all-party Quebec consensus around relatively low levels of immigration, it was surprising to see Trudeau assert in a year-end interview that Quebec has “all the tools” it needs to bring in as many as 112 000 immigrants a year, which would be its per-capita share of the 500,000 national target. In response, Legault’s immigration minister Christine Fréchette called Trudeau “insensitive” and said that Canada could bring in as many people as it likes but no more than 50,000 are coming to Quebec. 

The fact is, Quebec’s concerns over its ability to successfully integrate tens of thousands of newcomers are not frivolous, and it would be helpful if the federal government would recognize that these concerns apply as much in the rest of the country as they do in Quebec, if for different reasons. 

Ottawa’s rationale for ever-increasing levels of immigration is overwhelmingly economic. We are told that immigration leads to higher economic growth, will help alleviate labour shortages, and will mitigate the effects of an aging population. But even if this were true (the evidence is mixed on all of these), it is striking how little attention is paid to our capacity to successfully integrate a steadily increasing number of new Canadians. 

For starters, where are they all going to live? Housing in Canada is notoriously expensive, especially in the major cities where the majority of newcomers tend to settle. And we’re not adding anywhere close to the number of new houses that we need; as a recent Globe and Mail featureabout the challenges of immigration noted, the basic mismatch between the demand for housing and its supply is getting worse, not better. 

Then there is health care. The system, as anyone paying attention can see, is in a major crisis. There is a widespread shortage of nurses, and somewhere around six million Canadians can’t even find a family doctor. Ottawa will argue that the solution is to bring in more foreign-trained medical professionals, but the problems they have getting their credentials recognized in Canada are long-standing. 

And all of this assumes the prospective immigrants can even get into the country in the first place: The federal government is currently facing a surge of lawsuits over the backlog of 1.2 million unprocessed immigration applications, with some applicants waiting years for a decision. 

In short: We make people wait an unconscionable long time while we decide if we will admit them; once they are here we have no plan for providing them with affordable housing or accessible health care; and then we make it exceedingly difficult for them to practice the professions for which they are trained. And all of this comes at a time when the wave of right-wing populism that has swept across the West over the past half decade has made itself at home in Canada. 

It is easy to forget just how recent it was that Canadians became comfortable with high levels of immigration. When Brian Mulroney basically doubled Canada’s immigration targets overnight in the late 1980s, it sparked a substantial backlash, and was in part responsible for the rise of the Reform Party. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a great deal of national anxiety over immigration, with many critics worried that growing numbers of “hyphenated Canadians” would lead to cultural balkanization and social disintegration. It was only at the end of the 1990s that popular opinion switched from being predominantly anti-immigration to generally in favour. 

Canada’s great multicultural experiment over the past quarter century is largely a success story, with a healthy majority of Canadians continuing to support current levels of immigration. Most of us probably have personal stories about how and why immigration has made our lives better, and, thankfully, there aren’t yet loud calls for less immigration. 

But it wasn’t always this way, and it is important to remember that the current consensus around immigration (and multiculturalism more generally) was a hard-won achievement. With what appears to be a single-minded push to get immigration levels up to half a million a year, with no plan for dealing with the increasing number of obstacles to successfully integrating them, one worries if the Liberals are taking that achievement for granted.

Source: Andrew Potter: Trudeau is risking our pro-immigration consensus

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Could populism take root in Canada? Too late – it already has

2019/07/22 Leave a comment

Two slightly different takes on populism in Canada, starting with Andrew Potter who notes that the Canadian variant as seen in the provinces is largely not anti-immigration (save for Quebec with its Bill 21):

Ever since Donald Trump won the American presidency in 2016 with a toxic combination of sexism, vulgarity and the brazen courting of white nationalists, Canadian academics, pundits and pollsters have been obsessed with the question: “Could it happen here?”

By “it,” they mean the rumblings of discontent that have propelled right-wing populists to power across the West. Mr. Trump and Brexit are the most widely cited examples of the phenomenon, but almost every country has been implicated to some extent. Except, apparently, Canada, where the answer to the question of whether it could happen here is typically “yes, but.…”

That is, what we get is some dire reading of the tea leaves (it could happen here!) countered by a renewed faith in Canada’s continuing exceptionalism, thanks in large part to our healthier institutions and superior values.

But the truth is, not only can populism happen here – it already has. The reason most observers miss this is that they are working with a conception of populism that doesn’t really apply to the Canadian context.

The standard academic take is that populism is an ideological empty vessel, capable of taking left-wing or right-wing forms depending on the particular national context. But regardless of its shape, at the core of the populist instinct is the idea of a pure or authentic people being exploited or humiliated by a corrupt elite. As a consequence, populists typically deny the legitimacy of mainstream political and legal institutions, reject the value of experts such as academics and scientists, and demonize immigrants and refugees.

This last characteristic is the one most people have in mind when they worry about populism. And there are good reasons to be worried, especially in an immigrant-heavy country such as Canada. But while it is worth keeping an eye on changes in our usual welcoming approach, when it comes to populism, it’s not clear how relevant it is to the Canadian context.

That’s because populism in Canada isn’t, and probably never will be, about an authentic original people being diluted by an immigrant tide or debased by a class of globalist elites. Yes, there’s some of that to be found here, but it will never go anywhere, precisely because there never has been a single overriding dominant settler culture. From Canada’s earliest days there were always two or three distinct cultures striving for control. There simply is no “authentic” Canadian identity to serve as the focus for resentful nostalgists.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no populism here. There’s plenty of it – in many ways, Canada is the most populist-ridden country going. It just takes a form where we don’t recognize it as populism. Instead, we call it regionalism.

We usually talk about Canada’s regional identities as a point of pride, the sort of thing that spurs singalong tunes by Stompin’ Tom Connors or the Tragically Hip. But there is a dark side to it, part of which was brought to light earlier this year in a major survey done by Angus Reid on Western alienation and the state of the federation.

The striking thing the survey revealed is how much Canadians don’t particularly like one another, with British Columbia and Quebec particularly isolated. To the extent that there is any interprovincial amity, it’s completely local. Saskatchewan and Alberta currently have a little bromance going, and the people in the Maritimes all seem to like one another well enough. But after that, it’s pretty much either resentment or indifference across the board, and a sharp reminder of how weak Canadian nationalism is. Forget the two solitudes – we’ve got like seven of them.

What motivates this regionalism is a complicated mix of history, demographic shifts and economic fortunes. What is remarkable, though, is how often it manifests as a hatred of elites, especially the “Laurentian elite” in the Toronto/Ottawa/Montreal triangle and the institutions they control. On this view, the “authentic” Canadians are the regional peoples – the Québécois or the Maritimers or the Albertans or the Cascadians, all of whom are lorded over in their own way by the cosmopolitan elites in Ottawa.

This is populism of a highly regionalist sort. But whereas the current Quebec version, as practised by François Legault and his Coalition Avenir Québec, is strongly anti-immigrant, in general regionalist populism is highly congenial to being on good terms with newcomers. This is something that Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford have proven more than willing to exploit, with a considerable amount of success.

The upshot is that all the worrying over whether the right-wing populists will take power in Canada misses the fact that they already have. They’ve merely taken to the provincial level of politics to air their grievances and accomplish their goals.

Source: Could populism take root in Canada? Too late – it already has: Andrew Potter
And to date, it appears that Bernier’s party, clearly playing to these concerns through its language and candidate recruitment, is not getting much traction:

Canada has so far managed to avoid the populist disruptions seen in other Western democracies, but the social fabric tying the country together may be starting to fray, a leading expert on the issue said.

In his book Whiteshift, political scientist Eric Kaufmann described Canada as a possible exception to the populist wave in the West, but in a recent interview with economist Tyler Cowen, Kaufmann said the precarious status quo is now under threat.

“The idea that English Canada is immune to this is actually wrong and I do think we’re going to see more of it going forward,” Kaufmann said. “The electorate is now more polarized on cultural issues than it’s ever been in Canada. We’ll have to see where that goes, but I don’t think Canada will be the great exception that it has been for much longer.”

As evidence of this, Kaufmann pointed to the newly founded People’s Party of Canada, which advocates for reduced immigration levels; and Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government in Ontario, which he said “has elements of this populism.” Ford’s government, though, has mainly steered clear of the immigration issue, except for a brief spat with the federal government over funding for resettling asylum seekers who had crossed the border illegally.

Neither the federal Conservatives or Ford’s PC government have called for a reduction in the amount of legal immigrants that Canada accepts each year. Maxime Bernier, the leader of the People’s Party of Canada, has called for a reduction in the number of immigrants allowed into Canada from 310,000 to 250,000. The current Liberal government hopes to boost the number to 350,000 by 2021.

On Cowen’s podcast, Kaufmann said he’d also noticed recent polling that shows support for immigration isn’t changing much in Canada, but that it is hardening along partisan lines.

“Immigration attitudes are now very different depending if you’re a Conservative or Liberal voter. That didn’t used to be the case even five years ago, so there’s more of a politicization of that issue now,” he said.

A recent poll by EKOS found that nearly 70 per cent of Conservatives surveyed believed that there are too many visible minorities among immigrants, while only 15 per cent of Liberals agreed with that sentiment. Just five years ago, the same poll showed 47 per cent of Conservatives in agreement, alongside 34 per cent of Liberals.

In his book, which grapples with the end of white majorities in Western societies, Kaufmann devotes a chapter to “Canadian exceptionalism,” trying to explain why the country has managed to avoid a populist backlash despite high levels of immigration.

Kaufmann argues that there is an elite consensus in Canada about multiculturalism and anti-racism that makes many populist ideas taboo. For example, when Kellie Leitch ran for leader of the Conservative Party on a plan to screen immigrants for “Canadian values,” she was overtly branded a racist by pundits and rivals.

People will start to resent this suppression “only when there is a breach of etiquette by a successful populist politician, which pulls the centre-right across a norm boundary,” wrote Kaufmann.

In English Canada, the poll by EKOS found about 40 per cent of people think there are too many visible minorities in their communities but “the difference is there are no political vehicles channeling this at the federal level,” Kaufmann wrote.

Taboos are particularly effective at enforcing moral norms because “people act not only on their own beliefs, but from perceptions of what others think is correct,” he wrote. That helps explain why anonymous polling on immigration tends to show more negative results and why norm-breaking politicians like Donald Trump can sometimes inspire what seems like a spontaneous wave of support.

Kaufmann takes care to differentiate between Quebec and English Canada and argues that François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec, which was elected on an immigration reduction platform, fits the profile of a populist-right party. The difference, Kaufmann argues, is that English Canada’s historical lack of identity has been replaced with multiculturalism, while Quebec has always maintained a distinct culture.

“Where Quebec identity is territorial, historical and cultural, the contemporary Anglo-defined Canadian identity is futuristic: a missionary nationalism centred on the left-modernist ideology of multiculturalism,” wrote Kaufmann.

Although English-speaking Canadians and Quebecers share similar sentiments on issues that have traditionally been embraced by populist parties — for example, on banning the burka — Kaufmann argued that “the distinct elite norms of English Canada” account for the difference in mainstream support.

“As long as there is no system breach, English Canada may be able to repress criticism of multiculturalism and mass immigration indefinitely,” Kaufmann wrote in his book, published in late 2018. Since then, he fears the system may already have been breached.

Source: ‘I don’t think Canada will be the great exception’ to populist disruption, expert says

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Andrew Potter: Don’t be so free to set limits on your right to hear

2017/09/07 Leave a comment

The first part of the article provides a useful account of the rationale for free speech along with its purpose, and why some free speech is subject to less protections than free speech that meets these core principles: “search for truth, the quest for self-development and the fostering of democracy.”

But then, when Potter turns to the right to hear, he seems to ignore the question of whether the right to hear should also be subject to the same test of core principles or not. Perhaps his next column?:

After a few hundred years of working on it you’d think by now we’d have a handle on this freedom of expression thing. But it’s 2017 and here we are, still arguing about who has the right to speak, on what platforms, to which audiences and in what contexts. We don’t agree on much, except that free speech is a good thing except when it isn’t. And increasingly, it isn’t more often than it is.

This failure to take free speech seriously is a thoroughly bipartisan affliction. The monkey-king leaders of the alt-right and their talking muppet servants like Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos have effectively turned hate speech into performance art, with no real interest in either the consequences of the hate or in the value sincere debate can contribute to democracy.

And the ctrl-left, from campus snowflakes to the just-in-it-for-the-riot forces of antifa, happily play into their hands, from whining about safe spaces to forcibly and violently preventing people from exercising their legitimate civil liberties.

But there’s a bigger problem at work, which is that this sort of behaviour from both sides is not actually at odds with the most common understandings of free expression and its rationale. In fact, just the opposite is the case: most of the current attempts to restrict free speech are natural extensions of the justifications for it.

If you ask most people why free speech is a good thing, they’ll point out that it’s in the constitution. But why is it in the constitution? Well, maybe because it’s good for democracy, for artistic ennoblement, or self-discovery, or because it is the foundation of scientific inquiry or for the search for truth more generally.

What all of these justifications for a right to free expression have in common is that they are consequentialist in nature. That is, they ground the defence of freedom of speech in the effects speech has. On the whole, we believe that allowing broad protections for freedom of expression results in good things for society.

Actually, the court goes even further. It has identified what it calls the “core principles” that are served by free expression, which include the search for truth, the quest for self-development and the fostering of democracy. As the court sees it, speech that doesn’t serve these goals is not necessarily entitled to the same constitutional protections.

Lots of people have pointed out that this amounts to a reverse-onus clause. In theory, it should be up to the state to explain why it should have the right to limit speech, but in Canada we are well down the road to a place where people have to justify to the courts why their speech should be permitted. It’s not a long toss from there to the bizarro-land conclusion that entire groups can be silenced on the grounds that this silencing is an effective way of serving the goals that free speech serves more generally.

We got here because the problem is with the way we framed the question in the first place, as a debate over the benefits of free speech and the consequences we are willing to tolerate. Instead, what we should be focused on is the right of people to hear what others have to say, and how this fits into a broader account of individual freedom.

What’s the difference? If you turn the free speech debate on its head and treat it as a right to hear what someone has to say, the constitutional rationale for it becomes a lot clearer: The right to hear or read something and judge its worth or merit for yourself is the basis for being treated as an equal, rational and autonomous agent. We shield things from children precisely because we don’t think their rational faculties are sufficiently well developed. They don’t know how to evaluate something by their own lights. That’s why a big part of parenting is bringing kids along the path to autonomy, teaching them to judge and think for themselves.

Hearing what people have to say and judging its merits for yourself is the mark of being an adult. And part of being an adult is having the right to make mistakes, to make bad judgments or decisions, and take responsibility for what follows.

It just so happens that a society made up of autonomous individuals making independent rational judgments about what others have to say is the basic condition for the possibility of a liberal democracy. The fact that so many people, on the right and the left, are willing to have their right to hear limited by governments, universities or even social media mobs, is a further sign of the relentless infantilization of our culture — and goes a long way toward explaining the current crisis of liberalism

This line of defence has a solid philosophical and legal pedigree. Probably the best-known version is found in John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty, where he argued that the right to speak was limited by the harms that result. But this focus on the consequences of speech is firmly embedded in the Supreme Court’s interpretations of the freedoms outlined in section 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The court’s take, through various rulings from Taylor to Keegstra to Whatcott, has been relentlessly consequentialist, always taking care to weigh the guaranteed right to free expression against the harms — both actual and hypothetical — that might come from hate speech.

Actually, the court goes even further. It has identified what it calls the “core principles” that are served by free expression, which include the search for truth, the quest for self-development and the fostering of democracy. As the court sees it, speech that doesn’t serve these goals is not necessarily entitled to the same constitutional protections.

Lots of people have pointed out that this amounts to a reverse-onus clause. In theory, it should be up to the state to explain why it should have the right to limit speech, but in Canada we are well down the road to a place where people have to justify to the courts why their speech should be permitted. It’s not a long toss from there to the bizarro-land conclusion that entire groups can be silenced on the grounds that this silencing is an effective way of serving the goals that free speech serves more generally.

We got here because the problem is with the way we framed the question in the first place, as a debate over the benefits of free speech and the consequences we are willing to tolerate. Instead, what we should be focused on is the right of people to hear what others have to say, and how this fits into a broader account of individual freedom.

What’s the difference? If you turn the free speech debate on its head and treat it as a right to hear what someone has to say, the constitutional rationale for it becomes a lot clearer: The right to hear or read something and judge its worth or merit for yourself is the basis for being treated as an equal, rational and autonomous agent. We shield things from children precisely because we don’t think their rational faculties are sufficiently well developed. They don’t know how to evaluate something by their own lights. That’s why a big part of parenting is bringing kids along the path to autonomy, teaching them to judge and think for themselves.

Hearing what people have to say and judging its merits for yourself is the mark of being an adult. And part of being an adult is having the right to make mistakes, to make bad judgments or decisions, and take responsibility for what follows.

It just so happens that a society made up of autonomous individuals making independent rational judgments about what others have to say is the basic condition for the possibility of a liberal democracy. The fact that so many people, on the right and the left, are willing to have their right to hear limited by governments, universities or even social media mobs, is a further sign of the relentless infantilization of our culture — and goes a long way toward explaining the current crisis of liberalism.

Source: Andrew Potter: Don’t be so free to set limits on your right to hear | National Post

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Threats to academic freedom aren’t just a white-guy problem

2017/03/30 Leave a comment

One of the more thoughtful commentaries on the Potter controversy from a different angle by Amanda Bittner, Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant and Erin Tolley (disclosure: Erin is a former colleague):

Look at the demographics of any large organization, and you’ll find that most positions of power are occupied by white men. That’s true, too, of academia. In Canadian universities, there are almost no Indigenous administrators or administrators of colour; tenured positions, particularly at the highest levels, belong disproportionately to white men. Women, people of colour, and Indigenous peoples typically don’t have the opportunity to lose their prestigious positions amid controversy because they don’t even get those positions to begin with.

Adjunct and contract positions—the most precarious academic work of all—are often carried out by women, Indigenous scholars, and scholars of colour.As one U.S. study notes, just as under-represented groups began to gain a toehold in the professoriate, the academic job market contracted. Permanent positions have been replaced by those with almost no job protection, as well as long hours and little institutional support. Even if scholars in these roles had time to pen op-eds on controversial topics, seeing a person of privilege be so easily cut loose would almost certainly only heighten the instinct for women, Indigenous scholars and scholars of colour to stay quiet. And yet these are the voices we need.

We know we also write from a position of privilege: we are white women (two with tenure, one without) who work in academic institutions and have the luxury to follow these debates on social media. And yet, whenever we comment publicly on an issue, we look over our shoulders and wonder about the potential effect that public engagement might have on our careers. We debated the wisdom of even commenting on this case, concerned as we are about the blowback it might elicit, but we are intervening because we believe that the burden of exposing problematic institutional practices shouldn’t fall only on the shoulders of the most marginalized.

This isn’t just a white-guy problem. The incident sends a signal to our colleagues who have important things to say, who don’t have a platform of privilege from which to say it, and who don’t have a safety net to fall back on if things go south—or a coterie of well-connected commenters who mount a forceful defence. When voices are silenced by universities, there is a real risk to those who dare make controversial observations based in rigorous empirical research, or conclusions that point to systemic discrimination, injustice, and current and past wrongs. These are things that might “bother” or “offend” the public, and which have the potential to place even greater pressure on institutions.

Indeed, McGill’s principal, Suzanne Fortier, suggests that the Institute’s role is not “to provoke, but to promote good discussion.” This is a prescription for tepid public discourse. We have brilliant colleagues whose provocative voices need to be made louder, not silenced. And if universities can’t stand up to this pressure and defend their researchers on the “easy” cases—like ones involving a privileged white man—they most certainly won’t have the courage to do so when confronted with the “difficult” ones.

Source: Threats to academic freedom aren’t just a white-guy problem – Macleans.ca

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Liberals will find key to undoing Harper’s agenda in his infamous ‘firewall’ letter | Ottawa Citizen

2015/11/23 Leave a comment

A good in-depth and must read piece by Andrew Potter on how the ‘firewall’ letter was implemented from Ottawa, and the tactics behind implementation of the ideology:

Data: It wasn’t privacy, as Tony Clement said, or freedom, as Max Bernier argued, that was the real rationale for killing the mandatory long-form census. It was to throw a whole lot of noise into the demographic signal that the census had been giving for decades. That is also why Statistics Canada as a whole was gutted over the course of the Harper years. Without accurate data, social planners are flying blind.

Expertise: No government in living memory has been as hostile to experts and to evidence as the Harper government. But as Laval economist Stephen Gordon recently argued, it wasn’t all forms of expertise and evidence that gave the Tories hives – plenty of their economic initiatives were rooted in the best available evidence. What the Tories were allergic to was expertise that steered the evidence in directions they didn’t want to go – “committing sociology,” in Harper’s wonderful turn of phrase. That is why scientists were muzzled, policy shops were shuttered and bureaucrats were ignored.

Money: Here is the meat in the sandwich. When it comes to social planning, the ultimate source of Ottawa’s power is the spending power. And this is where Harper had his greatest success. By the end of his tenure as prime minister, Ottawa’s spending, as a share of GDP, had fallen to levels not seen since the middle of the 20th century. And the spending that does remain is overwhelmingly devoted to either just keeping the lights on or takes the form of transfers to the provinces and individuals.

Harper’s policy genius here was the two-point cut in the GST, which currently costs the federal treasury about $12 billion a year. Harper’s political genius was the creation of an all-party and pan-Canadian consensus around the virtues of a balanced budget at that historically low-level of federal spending.

No data, no experts and no money. Starve the beast, but make it blind and deaf at the same time. This is Harper’s “Ottawa Firewall” in a nutshell.

‘Flat-tire federalism’

As long as Harper was in power, this firewall against centralized social planning was bound to be highly effective. The question is, what remains of this agenda with a Liberal majority in power in Ottawa?

The long-form mandatory census is back, just under the wire. Another missed census in 2016 would have gummed up the data for generations, but as it stands, it looks like the 2011 asterisk will remain just that.

The scientists have already been unmuzzled. The public servants have been asked for their advice. The policy shops are staffing up and stocking the shelves and will be open for business soon.

But what about the money? This is where things get tricky for the Liberals. Their commitment to running three relatively small deficits to build infrastructure and kick-start growth caught everyone in the chattering classes off guard, and turned out to be a political winner.

But the promise was to return to balance by the last year of their mandate. That is, they accepted the basic premise of balanced budgets at more or less current levels of federal revenues (their tax plan calls for additional revenues of just $3 billion). This isn’t nearly enough, and there is not enough economic good weather in the offing for Ottawa to grow its way to good times.

An Ottawa with lots of data and lots of policy ambitions but no money is going to be pretty ineffectual.  At some point, the Liberals are going to have to tackle the revenue problem. Without money, without the fiscal capacity to get things done, all the data and expertise and policy advice is just squiggles on a page and vibrations of air molecules.

A federal government that is nicer, less controlling, more transparent but still broke is not one that has much capacity to bother the provinces with socialist schemes. And if that’s where things remain, then Harper’s long-term victory will be cemented, regardless of who is in power.

Source: Liberals will find key to undoing Harper’s agenda in his infamous ‘firewall’ letter | Ottawa Citizen

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