Chris Selley: Canada’s ‘immigration consensus’ endures, despite Ottawa’s worst efforts

2024/09/12 Leave a comment

Correct interpretation IMO. However, the current government’s approach undermines public trust in government competence in immigration and other areas, even as some corrective action is taking place:

….Environics also inquired as to why the shift occurred. And it’s very obviously for one major reason: The housing crisis. In 2022, 15 per cent of respondents agreed that “immigrants drive up housing prices (and lead to) less housing for other Canadians”; in 2023, 38 per cent agreed.

And they’re right. Add demand for a scarce product and prices go up. Canada absolutely should be able to cope with current or higher levels of immigration, and indeed thrive off of it. We’re not exactly short on land or high on population density. But our politicians have never been more motivated to address housing scarcity, and the results have been utterly dismal. For heaven’s sake there were fewer home starts in June 2024 than in June 2022, according to CMHC data.

On the issues more typically associated with anti-immigration sentiment per se, the Environics data show no alarming spikes at all. Only four per cent of respondents cited “security risk” as a factor influencing their desire for less immigration. One-quarter said “immigrants are a drain on public finances (or) cost too much,” or are “bad for (the) economy (and) take jobs from other Canadians” — up from 23 per cent and 21 per cent, respectively, which is hardly any change at all in the polling world.

In 2022 and 2023 alike, just 19 per cent of respondents told Environics there were “already too many people in Canada” — the strongest suggestion, I submit, that what we’re seeing here isn’t a backlash against immigration, let alone against individual immigrants and immigrant populations, but a call for some restraint until we get our crap together. Just nine per cent of respondents told Environics they thought immigrants make their community worse; 42 per cent said they make it better.

For 30 years, Environics has asked Canadians whether they think “there are too many immigrants coming into this country who are not adopting Canadian values” — something you hear often from people who could fairly be called anti-immigration. In 1993, 72 per cent of Canadians agreed with that proposition. Three decades later, amid this so-called “backlash,” the figure was 48 per cent.

Especially at a time when Canadians seem more angst-ridden about the country’s economic future than I can ever remember — potentially fertile soil for xenophobic sentiments, as history shows — these don’t strike me as alarming numbers at all. That’s especially true considering we’ve been admitting more immigrants per capita than at any time since the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, and watching tens of thousands of people traipse illegally across the Canada-U.S. border claiming asylum, and been lectured about racism and intolerance by a government that has basically conceded all of its opponents’ points on the immigration file.

Wanting less immigration isn’t inherently a “backlash” unless the optimal number of immigrants is infinite, which it obviously is not. We have enough problems to deal with without inventing new ones. The immigration consensus lives, despite the federal government’s worst efforts.

Source: Chris Selley: Canada’s ‘immigration consensus’ endures, despite Ottawa’s worst efforts

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Sam Routley: Canada’s hard-fought immigration consensus is crumbling before our eyes

2024/04/11 Leave a comment

Too much emphasis on the cultural dimension when the concerns and issues have overwhelmingly focussed on the practicalities of housing, healthcare and infrastructure. These practicalities cut across immigrants and non-immigrants alike and reduce the risk of concerns over immigration being driven by cultural issues. And the shift in more consistent long-term polling like Focus Canada over immigration levels have not demonstrated an increase in concern over immigrant values:

One doesn’t have to look too hard to notice how easy it is for immigration to cause persistent political problems across social and economic lines. In Canada, this is most manifest in Quebec where policymakers have sought to strike a balance between the province’s economic needs with their Francophone cultural concerns. Remarkably, though, and nearly uniquely in the developed world, over the past several decades there has been a well-established consensus in English Canada around the value of immigration amongst policymakers and the public alike. 

Where it was to be found, contestation remained relatively plain and technocratic. Most Anglophone political elites appear to agree that mass immigration is necessary for Canada to meet its economic needs. A common—if often quite chauvinistic—narrative around the country’s history of tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism seems to have made explicit anti-immigration stances taboo. Public attitudes have maintained a pattern of modest increase towards ever-increasing support over the last few decades, reaching an all-time high as late as 2022.

But things are changing.

Immigration unhappiness is growing

Since late last year, recent survey findings continue to demonstrate that, while most respondents claim to remain broadly supportive of the contemporary immigration regime, overall support is declining. For instance, a 2023 Nanos poll found that 53 percent of Canadians want to accept fewer immigrants into Canada and 55 percent believe there are too many international students. A growing number of Canadians, it seems, now believe we have reached a tipping point where there is too much immigration for the population to properly integrate. 

This increasing mood of uneasiness among the public has also been echoed by commentators. Many, for example, have argued that—despite the federal government’s plan to increase annual intake levels to 500,000 in 2025—existing numbers are already exacerbating economic pressures and overburdening public infrastructure, most noticeably when it comes to access to housing. Canada’s drastic increase and growing reliance on temporary workers and foreign student visas have also drawn particular criticism: while the latter struggle to find economic security, the former continues to be used as a substitute for Canadian labour. The numbers here are stark. Immigration is now responsible for 90 percent of Canada’s labour force growth, according to Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s (IRCC) 2022 Report on Immigration to Parliament.

While most Canadians focus on the economic consequences of the immigration status quo, many conservatives have also linked these discontents to a deeper state of cultural malaise: the breakdown of a deeper or binding sense of Canadian national identity alongside a delegitimization of history. This is not only responsible for the import of foreign political controversies into domestic politics, but also a lack of confidence in answering the question of exactly what it is that newcomers are becoming a part of. 

Reform is needed

This much is clear: Canada’s contemporary immigration regime needs reform and, sensing the concerned public mood, the Liberal federal government has promised a range of new policies, including caps on foreign student visas and an eventual decline in intake numbers. 

But it is yet to be determined whether Canada’s prior immigration consensus can survive these challenges intact. From one perspective, there are good reasons to believe that the decrease in public support of immigration is a short-term fluctuation of an otherwise steady secular trend. Comparative research into immigration attitudes demonstrates that support for immigration will often drop in response to two main factors: a spike in the number of immigrant intake, and a sociographic assessment of economic precarity and competition. 

Seen this way, Canada follows a relatively conventional pattern, shaped by an initial backlash to a rising immigration rate that, assuming material conditions improve, will be eventually absorbed. This seems to have occurred in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. While many Canadians believe that current immigration rates are too high, they still believe that mass immigration is an overall economic good.1 Similarly, while economic concerns are frequently cited, the number of Canadians that express a more rigid cultural discontent—that immigrants are “failing to culturally integrate”, for example—remains much smaller. 

However, this overlooks the fact that, outside of Canada, the general challenges associated with cultural diversity, specifically but not entirely due to immigration, have themselves come to characterize political competition in most other Western democracies. It has more commonly emerged as a salient expression of both deep-seated cultural and material differences among the population, pitting well-educated, wealthy, urban cosmopolitans who support mass immigration against large segments of the working class who don’t. 

What makes Canada any different? Many would claim that an aspect of the Canadian national identity, as determined by its historical challenges with diversity, makes the country uniquely supportive of immigration and multiculturalism. This is certainly echoed in elite-level discourse, as these challenges are always presented as a matter of means rather than ends. Other than marginal voices like the People’s Party of Canada, no one person or political movement in the country really challenges the overall value or principle of mass immigration.

But, while likely informing the cultural elite’s conception of the national identity, the claim that this then conditions Canadian public attitudes in any unique way has been repeatedly proven false. The portion of the population that consistently supports immigration and multiculturalism as a matter of principle is actually quite small and has not grown much in recent decades: no more than around a third of the population, and generally confined to those who are well-educated, wealthy, working in knowledge or cultural industries, and—increasingly—those who vote for the Liberal or New Democratic parties.

Instead, the remaining two-thirds of the population are what academics Randy Besco and Erin Tolley have aptly called “conditional multiculturalists.” They support immigration—and may even put their more cultural reservations aside—because they believe it to be in the country’s economic interest. Over the last few decades, support for immigration increased because more Canadians came to support current, but not increased, intake levels, indicating not so much an embrace of multiculturalism as a toleration of the status quo. 

This widespread utilitarian support of multiculturalism is perhaps best supported by the fact that refugee policy, a far more altruistic expression of supposed Canadian values, has always been contentious. Unlike economic immigrants, Canadians commonly overestimate refugee intake numbers and express far more cultural anxieties about them. 

Canadian immigration’s past and future

Just as important is the fact that the contemporary popular Canadian immigration consensus is incredibly recent. Despite the official declaration of multiculturalism in 1971 under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, the majority of Canadians opposed the government’s immigration intake levels until the mid-1990s. And rather than a gradual expansion of Canadian pluralism to include non-European newcomers, contemporary support emerged only after a very dramatic shift at the time. 

The Canadian immigration consensus is no more than thirty years old; and, short of expressing a quasi-universal attitude, this abrupt shift shows that it was first and foremost the contingent product of elite persuasion. While it was the Liberal administration of Trudeau the elder that ushered in the fifth and contemporary wave of Canadian immigration, what mattered was the fact that their conservative opponents—as seen in both the Mulroney and Harper administrations—embraced that system, implementing further increases through a convincing case of its economic utility. 

This was then maintained through the careful, but limited, management of a successful policy equilibrium. To put it another way, the Canadian immigration system actually worked and avoided many of the challenges faced by similar states. Given the emphasis on permanent residency, the very selective nature of the point system was successful in not only integrating newcomers but also promoting mutual economic benefits. Common reservations against immigration did not disappear but were instead undercut as a legitimate popular policy movement. 

Today this equilibrium has unraveled, undermining the conventional orthodoxy that the economic utility of the program overrides cultural reservations. It has opened up a hole in which anti-immigration attitudes, long dormant, not only have room to express themselves but to grow as a politically feasible alternative. As we have seen in other advanced democracies, this is set to be driven by two broader developments that will allow it to grow, despite any economic recovery. 

The first is that, even amid rising aggregate support for immigration, Canadian attitudes have become more polarized along partisan, regional, and class-based divides. While support is confined to the wealthy and well-educated, other groups of Canadians are becoming more skeptical. They are also being drawn to different parties: while the latter are much more likely to support the Liberals or New Democrats, those with more resistant attitudes are almost exclusively expressing support for the Conservative Party. 

The second is the changing attitudes of new or minority Canadians. Historically, they have been among the most enthusiastic beneficiaries and supporters of high immigration, which, given their concentration within important vote-rich suburban ridings, has disincentivized parties from challenging immigration in the past. But new citizens also risk following broader public opinion and becoming more skeptical as they integrate. This is likely because while most Canadian immigrants once found quick and lasting economic security they are now much more likely to live in economic precarity and poverty.

All this is not to say that Canada’s more long-standing practice of immigration and multiculturalism will end. It will one day again find its footing, and it is likely to continue to expand with the support of a plurality, but not the majority, of Canadians. The fact, however, is that the widespread, three-decade consensus it has enjoyed is over.

While an insurgent right-wing party—an increase in PPC support, perhaps—is certainly possible, what matters now is the way in which the Conservative Party, as the existing repository of this sentiment, proceeds. Not only will immigration and multiculturalism increase as salient sources of intra-party contention, but the salience of the issue—due in part to Quebec’s continued insistence on cultural preservation—will make it impossible to avoid a clear stance. For the Conservatives that support continued (and possibly expanded) immigration, efforts need to be made to articulate and legitimize the value of the policy in its full economic and cultural dimensions. If the New Right has demonstrated anything, it is that a mere focus on economic utility is no longer enough for a compelling policy agenda. 

Source: Sam Routley: Canada’s hard-fought immigration consensus is crumbling before our eyes

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Raj: Why Canada’s consensus on immigration is fraying

2024/02/26 Leave a comment

The unfortunate all to common mistake of conflating concerns over unbridled temporary migration with overall permanent resident migration, as well as the distinction between concern over the practicalities of housing, healthcare etc to a rapidly increasing population, driven more by temporary immigration. Raj completely misses the point (and I suspect Poilievre understands the distinction).

Abacus in its regular polling also appears to ignore this distinction:

Money quote:

Anti-immigration sentiment used to be politically taboo. Election after election, a majority of voters told party leaders they wanted more immigrants, not fewer. That vision of a Canada welcoming newcomers with open arms, however, is increasingly challenged. Unless governments address a growing perception that unbridled migration is making the country worse off, we may be walking towards a darker, more divisive path, one that makes us less wealthy in the long run.

Source: Why Canada’s consensus on immigration is fraying

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How to Change Minds? A Study Makes the Case for Talking It Out.

2022/09/20 Leave a comment

Interesting study although hard to apply in practice (except ensure that no blowhards!):

Co-workers stuck on a Zoom call, deliberating a new strategy for a crucial project. Roommates at the kitchen table, arguing about how to split utility bills fairly. Neighbors at a city meeting, debating how to pay for street repairs.

We’ve all been there — in a group, trying our best to get everyone on the same page. It’s arguably one of the most important and common undertakings in human societies. But reaching agreement can be excruciating.

“Much of our lives seem to be in this sort of Rashomon situation — people see things in different ways and have different accounts of what’s happening,” Beau Sievers, a social neuroscientist at Dartmouth College, said.

A few years ago, Dr. Sievers devised a study to improve understanding of how exactly a group of people achieves a consensus and how their individual brains change after such discussions. The results, recently published online but not yet peer-reviewed, showed that a robust conversation that results in consensus synchronizes the talkers’ brains — not only when thinking about the topic that was explicitly discussed, but related situations that were not.

The study also revealed at least one factor that makes it harder to reach accord: a group member whose strident opinions drown out everyone else.

“Conversation is our greatest tool to align minds,” said Thalia Wheatley, a social neuroscientist at Dartmouth College who advises Dr. Sievers. “We don’t think in a vacuum, but with other people.”

Dr. Sievers designed the experiment around watching movies because he wanted to create a realistic situation in which participants could show fast and meaningful changes in their opinions. But he said it was surprisingly difficult to find films with scenes that could be viewed in different ways. “Directors of movies are very good at constraining the kinds of interpretations that you might have,” he said.

Reasoning that smash hits typically did not offer much ambiguity, Dr. Sievers focused on films that critics loved but did not bring blockbuster audiences, including “The Master,” “Sexy Beast” and “Birth,” a 2004 drama in which a mysterious young boy shows up at a woman’s engagement party.

None of the study’s volunteers had seen any of the films before. While lying in a brain scanner, they watched scenes from the various movies without sound, including one from “Birth” in which the boy collapses in a hallway after a tense conversation with the elegantly dressed woman and her fiancé.

After watching the clips, the volunteers answered survey questions about what they thought had happened in each scene. Then, in groups of three to six people, they sat around a table and discussed their interpretations, with the goal of reaching a consensus explanation.

All of the participants were students in the same master of business administration program, and many of them knew each other to varying degrees, which made for lively conversations reflecting real-world social dynamics, the researchers said.

After their chats, the students went back into the brain scanners and watched the clips again, as well as new scenes with some of the same characters. The additional “Birth” scene, for example, showed the woman tucking the little boy into bed and crying.

The study found that the group members’ brain activity — in regions related to vision, sound, attention, language and memory, among others — became more aligned after their conversation. Intriguingly, their brains were synchronized while they watched the scenes they had discussed, as well as the novel ones.

Groups of volunteers came up with different interpretations of the same movie clip. Some groups, for example, thought the woman was the boy’s mother and had abandoned him, whereas others thought they were unrelated. Despite having watched the same clips, the brain patterns from one group to another were meaningfully different, but within each group, the activity was far more synchronized.

The results have been submitted for publication in a scientific journal and are under review.

“This is a bold and innovative study,” said Yuan Chang Leong, a cognitive neuroscientist at University of Chicago who was not involved in the work.

The results jibe with previous research showing people who share beliefs tend to share brain responses. For example, a 2017 studypresented volunteers with one of two opposite interpretations of “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes,” a short story by J.D. Salinger. The participants that had received the same interpretation had more aligned brain activity when listening to the story in the brain scanner.

And in 2020, Dr. Leong’s team reported that when watching news footage, brain activity in conservatives looked more like that in other conservatives than that in liberals, and vice versa.

The new study “suggests that the degree of similarity in brain responses depends not only on people’s inherent predispositions, but also the common ground created by having a conversation,” Dr. Leong said.

The experiment also underscored a dynamic familiar to anyone who has been steamrollered in a work meeting: An individual’s behavior can drastically influence a group decision. Some of the volunteers tried to persuade their groupmates of a cinematic interpretation with bluster, by barking orders and talking over their peers. But others — particularly those who were central players in the students’ real-life social networks — acted as mediators, reading the room and trying to find common ground.

The groups with blowhards were less neurally aligned than were those with mediators, the study found. Perhaps more surprising, the mediators drove consensus not by pushing their own interpretations, but by encouraging others to take the stage and then adjusting their own beliefs — and brain patterns — to match the group.

“Being willing to change your own mind, then, seems key to getting everyone on the same page,” Dr. Wheatley said.

Because the volunteers were eagerly trying to collaborate, the researchers said that the study’s results were most relevant to situations, like workplaces or jury rooms, in which people are working toward a common goal.

But what about more adversarial scenarios, in which people have a vested interest in a particular position? The study’s results might not hold for a person negotiating a raise or politicians arguing over the integrity of our elections. And for some situations, like creative brainstorming, groupthink may not be an ideal outcome.

“The topic of conversation in this study was probably pretty ‘safe,’ in that no personally or societally relevant beliefs were at stake,” said Suzanne Dikker, a cognitive neuroscientist and linguist at New York University, who was not involved in the study.

Future studies could zero in on brain activity during consensus-building conversations, she said. This would require a relatively new technique, known as hyperscanning, which can simultaneously measure multiple people’s brains. Dr. Dikker’s work in this arena has shown that personality traits and conversational dynamics like taking turns can affect brain-to-brain synchrony.

Dr. Wheatley agreed. The neuroscientist said she has long been frustrated with her field’s focus on the isolated brain.

“Our brains evolved to be social: We need frequent interaction and conversation to stay sane,” she said. “And yet, neuroscience still putters along mapping out the single brain as if that will achieve a deep understanding of the human mind. This has to, and will, change.”

Source: How to Change Minds? A Study Makes the Case for Talking It Out.

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Adams and Parkin: Having an election that changes nothing is not such a bad outcome after all; Ibbitson: A divided country? Actually, the federal election revealed Canada has never been more united in purpose

2021/09/25 Leave a comment

Contrary narrative, two versions:

What, if anything, has changed?

Immediate media reaction to the federal election result is divided. Those who count the seats won and lost see the status quo. Those concerned with the tone and tenor of our politics fear the election has left the country more divided than ever. Is it possible that the election changed nothing and everything at the same time?

We can hardly be shocked that there are strong differences of opinion among Canadians—we wouldn’t need elections if there weren’t. Can we address climate change and increase oil and gas exports at the same time? Should we make child care more affordable by giving money to care providers or to consumers? Will subsidizing the cost of a mortgage make housing more or less affordable? Arguing over issues like these is not a threat to democracy; it is the point of democracy.

Canadians are divided, then, in the sense that we take different sides in these debates. But in another sense, we are not nearly as divided as many assume. Differences in opinion are scattered throughout the population, and do not separate us dramatically by region, or age, or gender, or race. There are oil-enthusiasts in Quebec and radical ecologists in Alberta. There are men who want $10-a-day national day care and women who would prefer to pocket a tax credit. There are new Canadians who trust the police and “old stock” Canadians who do not. We are not a country that is fracturing into increasingly hostile groups defined by geography or identity.

And only those with short historical memories can claim that our political divisions are greater than ever. Elections in the 1970s and 1980s featured heated exchanges over which party was going to save the country and which was going to put an end to it—whether by handing it over to the separatists or to the Americans. The National Energy Program was hardly less divisive than the carbon tax; Bill 101 was no less controversial than Bill 21. Canadians did not exactly rally together to embrace the introduction of the GST. Keith Spicer told us in June 1991 that the nation was riven by rage.

But all this is besides the point, if the real problem is the emergence of the People’s Party, and the associated rabble-rousers who yelled obscenities and threw rocks at the prime minister, surely this is an indication of a society that is increasingly polarized?

Here, we need to be precise about the meaning of the words we use. Politics becomes polarized when more people move to opposing extremes, with far fewer remaining in the middle. This is what we see happening between Republicans and Democrats in the U.S., or between Leavers and Remainers in the U.K. There is no evidence that this is happening in Canada. Most Canadians remain firmly in the political centre, embracing the politics of pragmatic compromise and incremental progress.

Some Canadians do hold extreme views, but the proportion who do so is not on the rise. Yes, it is sobering to consider that one in 10 Canadians agree that, under some circumstances, an authoritarian government may be preferable to a democratic one. But this proportion has hardly changed over the past decade—if anything, it is slightly lower in 2021 than it was in 2010. Meanwhile, the number of Canadians comfortable with the country’s diversity, and uncomfortable with racism and discrimination, is higher than ever.

While Canadians, as a whole, are not becoming more extremist, the extremists among us might be becoming more organized, and more empowered by social media. They may also be targets for further radicalization by those with the most sinister of political aims. This, and not widespread division or polarization, is the concern. The threat to our democracy does not come from the heated, even acrimonious debates between left and right, or East and West. But it may come from the small, but vocal minority that seeks to undermine the norms of democracy.

This threat should not be dismissed, but rather addressed swiftly by those knowledgeable in how to counter those seeking to infiltrate and radicalize. But this does not need to be accompanied by a generalized lament for the soul of a nation. The election may have been unnecessary; it may have been tedious and uninspired; it may have changed little as far as the composition of the House of Commons is concerned. But it did not leave us more polarized or divided than ever before. In that sense, having an election that changes nothing is not such a bad outcome after all.

Source: https://www.hilltimes.com/2021/09/23/having-an-election-that-changes-nothing-is-not-such-a-bad-outcome-after-all/318706?utm_source=Subscriber+-++Hill+Times+Publishing&utm_campaign=da8d94bfbb-Todays-Headlines-Subscribers&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8edecd9364-da8d94bfbb-90755301&mc_cid=da8d94bfbb&mc_eid=685e94e554

And in a similar vein, John Ibbitson:

Many believe that Monday’s election exposed deep divisions within Canada. Ontario Premier Doug Ford called it “difficult and divisive.”

This is not so. The election revealed that Canada has rarely had fewer divides either between regions or political parties.

There are discontents, yes, and warning signs that should not be ignored. But although this election left many frustrated and annoyed at the status quo anteresult, the level of consensus on national priorities is really quite remarkable.

Consider relations between Canada and Quebec, which have been fraught since before Confederation. The English-language debate confirmed that no national party is willing to challenge the government of Quebec in its relentless push for autonomy.

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh all chastised a moderator who asked Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet how he could possibly defend “discriminatory laws” that restrict the outward display of religious symbols and entrench French as the province’s sole official language.

In fact, no national political party is prepared to challenge legislation that most Quebeckers consider necessary to protect their distinct language and culture, but which would be considered by many to be discriminatory elsewhere.

The Conservatives, had they been elected, would have agreed to give Quebec greater control over immigration in the province. Sooner or later, Quebec will get that power. The social contract between French and English Canada appears to be sealed: The province can go its own way, so long as separation is off the table.

Ardent federalists of past generations, especially Pierre Trudeau, would have fought such devolution. But “Justin Trudeau is not his father,” Daniel Béland, a political scientist at McGill University, said in an interview.

This generation of federalists is inclined to respect the near universal will of Quebeckers for something approaching self-government. “We are still part of Canada,” Prof. Béland explained. “But we have growing policy autonomy to do our thing.”

At least one Western premier believes the election was a divisive waste of time. Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe called Monday’s vote “the most pointless election in Canadian history.”

“The Prime Minister spent $600-million of taxpayers’ dollars and five weeks further dividing the country to arrive at almost the same result as where we started.”

But Mr. Moe’s government recently signed on to the Liberal $10-a-day child-care plan. Alberta and Ontario are expected to likely join as well, at which point Canada will have enacted a major new national social program.

Though Conservatives continue to dominate in the West, the Maverick Party, which hoped to generate a wave of populist protest in the same way Reform did in the 1980s and 90s, made little impression. Western alienation played less of a role in this campaign than in the election of 2019.

On policy, the political parties in this election were more aligned than at any time in recent memory. The Conservatives offered a more progressive agenda; the Liberals were already seriously progressive, and the NDP was the NDP.

How aligned were they? Had Mr. O’Toole won government, he would have scrapped the Liberal child-care program, replacing it with one of his own. He would have scrapped the carbon tax, replacing it with one of his own. He would also have increased funding for health care, with a particular emphasis on mental health, introduced portable pensions for gig workers and banned puppy mills.

Any Liberal government could – and probably will – adopt a large chunk of the Conservative platform.

Yes, the People’s’ Party of Canada increased its share of the popular vote, to 5 per cent. In many countries that use proportional representation, that would entitle Maxime Bernier and other candidates to sit in the House of Commons. And though their views on vaccination, immigration and global warming are anathema to most, including this writer, they deserve a voice. Nonetheless, they remain a fringe within the Canadian political spectrum, one that needs to be confronted with logic, facts and an appeal to common sense.

This country has never been more united in purpose. Federal and provincial governments acted in unison to fight the pandemic, protect workers and businesses and procure and deliver vaccines. Almost every province has or will soon have some form of vaccine passport that residents must show to enter many businesses or entertainment venues. A large majority of Canadians support these passports and other mandates, such as employers requiring workers to be vaccinated before returning to the workplace.

On immigration, Canada is on track to accept more permanent residents this year than at any time in its history, despite travel restrictions. The population becomes more diverse every year. Yet no major national party is calling for cuts to immigration levels.

The Conservatives went from opposing to supporting a price on carbon because polls show most Canadians consider global warming a major issue and want Canada to lower emissions.

While the Supreme Court in the United States appears to be headed toward striking down Roe v. Wade, which protects a woman’s right to have an abortion, every major federal party leader in Canada declared they were pro-choice in this election, which reflects the views of a large majority of Canadians.

When the Conservatives mooted the possibility of removing restrictions on some semi-automatic weapons, on the grounds that the rules were capricious and contradictory, the backlash was so swift that Mr. O’Toole reversed himself within days.

The Conservatives also took heat for proposing greater involvement by the private sector in the delivery of publicly funded health care. Lost in the noise is the truth that every major political party supports medicare, and has now for decades.

Deficits used to be a divisive issue, but they have become less so. Jean Chrétien’s Liberals accepted in the 1990s the conservative arguments that Ottawa had to balance its books. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, with Liberal support, incurred deficits to fight the 2008-09 financial emergency. Deficits were an issue in the 2019 campaign, but this time out the only distinction was that the Liberals have no plan to return to balance, while the Conservatives proposed returning to balance in a decade.

Unfortunately, while both governing parties continue to promise reconciliation with Canada’s Indigenous peoples, neither has succeeded in achieving it, though both are gradually moving toward an implicit recognition of an Indigenous right to a deciding say over major resources projects on lands they claim.

There are differences, of course. Conservatives seek a more confrontational approach toward China. Conservatives are more likely to favour the private sector, though Mr. O’Toole sounded like an editorialist for the Daily Worker when he declared, “too much power is in the hands of corporate and financial elites who have been only too happy to outsource jobs abroad.”

Some within the Conservative Party believe Mr. O’Toole went too far left on some social and environmental issues. But he only went as far as any party must go to line up with public opinion. Once the pandemic ends, Grits and Tories may disagree more sharply on taxation and spending. But that’s down the road.

The United States has become so polarized it threatens to tear itself apart. Parties of the far right have become increasingly powerful in Europe. Canada is nothing like that, as the election proved. Our politicians howl over picayune differences. Elections are fought over the best way to deliver a new government program, rather than on whether such programs should exist. The consensus on everything that matters is deep and profound.

It’s been a very long time since we were this united, if ever.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-a-divided-country-actually-the-federal-election-revealed-canada-has/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Morning%20Update&utm_content=2021-9-24_7&utm_term=Morning%20Update:%20‘Nobody%20knows%20what%20to%20do’:%20Haitian%20migrants%20running%20out%20of%20options%20along%20U.S.-Mexico%20border%20&utm_campaign=newsletter&cu_id=%2BTx9qGuxCF9REU6kNldjGJtpVUGIVB3Y

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