What changes a Conservative government might make to Canada’s immigration policies

2023/11/22 Leave a comment

My latest. Speculative but reasoned (IMO):

With the Conservatives leading the polls, it is worth speculating what changes a Conservative government might bring to immigration, citizenship, multiculturalism, and employment equity policies, and the degree to which Tories would be constrained in their policy and program ambitions. Despite talking about change and “common sense,” they will still be constrained by provincial responsibilities and interests, the needs and lobbying of the business community, and an overall limitation of not wanting to appear to be anti-immigration.

Constraints

One fundamental political constraint is that elections are won and lost in ridings with large numbers of visible minorities and immigrants, like in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, and other urban areas as shown in Figure 1. Arguably, the Conservatives learned this lesson in the 2015 election, where citizenship revocation provisions and the Barbaric Cultural Practices Act signalled to many new Canadians they were not welcome.

The demographic of immigrants and minorities across Canadian electoral ridings. Graph courtesy of Andrew Griffith

Given that immigration is a shared jurisdiction with the provinces, any move to restrict the numbers of permanent residents, temporary workers, and foreign students will likely be met with provincial opposition. All provinces—save Quebec—largely buy into the “more is merrier” demographic arguments. Provincial governments and education institutions rely on large numbers of international students to fund higher education, and thus have already signalled concerns with the current government’s trial balloon about capping students from abroad.

Stakeholder pressures are a further constraint. Business groups, large and small, want a larger population to address labour market needs, and that includes international students for low-value-added service jobs. A larger population also means more consumers. Immigration lawyers and consultants, both in Canada and abroad, benefit from more clients. Settlement and refugee groups can continue to press for increased resources even if evaluations question their effectiveness with respect to economic immigrants. Most academics focus on barriers to immigrants and visible minorities rather than questioning their assumptions. Lobby groups like the Century Initiative and others continue to push the narrative that a larger population is needed to address an aging population, a narrative that is supported by all these stakeholders, and federal and provincial governments (except for Quebec).

Few of these stakeholders seriously address the impact of immigration on housing availability and affordability, health care, and infrastructure, despite all the recent attention to the links between housing and immigration. Most stakeholders are either in denial, claim that ramping up housing can be done quickly as many recent op-eds indicate, or argue that raising these issues is inherently xenophobic if not racist.

Global trends that also could shape a possible Conservative government include increased refugee and economic migrant flows, greater global competition for the same highly skilled talent pool and, over time, expanded use of AI and automation as a growing component of the labour market.

Immigration

Given these constraints and the fear of being labelled xenophobic, Conservatives have focused more on service delivery failures than questioning immigration levels, whether it’s permanent resident targets or the rapid increase in uncapped temporary workers and international students. Poilievre has stated that the Conservative focus will be on the “needs of private-sector employers, the degree to which charities plan to support refugees, and the desire for family reunification,” suggesting greater priority on economic and family immigration categories, as was largely the case for the Harper government. The Conservatives’ recent policy convention was largely silent on immigration. They are engaging in considerable outreach to visible minority and immigrant communities, adopting the approach of former Conservative minister Jason Kenney, “the minister for curry in a hurry.”

That being said, it is likely that a Conservative government would likely freeze or decrease slightly the number of permanent residents rather than continuing with the planned increases (the Liberal government recently indicated that it is not “ruling out changes to its ambitious immigration targets.)”

Figure two highlights the growth in permanent and temporary residents since 2015. The extent of public debate on the impact of immigration on housing provides latitude for a freeze at 2023 levels, or a small decrease given that immigrants and non-immigrants alike are affected. Graph courtesy of Andrew Griffith

It is less clear whether a Conservative government would have the courage to impose caps on temporary workers given pressure from employers, including small businesses. However, the previous Conservative government did have the political courage to impose restrictions following considerable abuse of the temporary work program, ironically exposed by the Liberals and NDP. Similarly, imposing caps on international students would run into strong resistance from provincial governments given their dependence on students from abroad to support higher education. Even placing caps on public colleges that subcontract to private colleges—which are more for low-skilled employment than education—would be challenging given employer interest in lower-wage employees. They may, however, reverse the Liberal government’s elimination of working-hour caps for foreign students.

The emphasis on charity support for refugees suggests a renewed focus on privately sponsored refugees compared to government-assisted ones. Expect the usual dynamics at play in terms of which groups have preferential treatment (e.g. Ukraine, Hong Kong) that influence all parties, and greater sensitivity to religious persecution, particularly Christians. They are likely to remember how their callous approach to Syrian refugees and the death of Alan Kurdi contributed to their 2015 defeat, and thus be more cautious in their approach to high-profile refugee flows and cases. Whether they would remove health-care coverage for refugee claimants as the Harper government did in 2012 is unclear, but as that was ruled by the Federal Court as incompatible with the Charter, they may demur. 

Whether a Conservative government would go beyond the usual federal-provincial-territorial process and provide financial support for foreign credential recognition, or be more ambitious and transfer immigrant selection of public sector regulated professions (e.g., health care) to the provinces is unclear. However, given that regulatory bodies are provincial and, for health care, provinces set the budgets, they may explore this option.

While the simplification and streamlining of over 100 immigration pathways is long overdue, given the complexity for applicants to navigate the system, and for governments to manage and automate it, such longer-term “fixing the plumbing” initiatives are less politically rewarding than addressing various stakeholder pressures. 

Given the increased number of asylum claimants, a Conservative government would be likely to restore requirements for claimants to have sufficient funds and an intent to leave, and may consider reimposing a visa requirement on Mexican nationals.

The over $1.3-billion funding for settlement agencies would likely decrease given expected overall fiscal restraint.

Citizenship 

Citizenship is arguably the end point of the immigration journey as it represents full integration into society with all the political rights and responsibilities that entails. This assumption is being challenged by a combination of Canadian economic opportunities being relatively less attractive for source countries such as China and India, along with greater mobility of highly educated and skilled immigrants. As a result, the naturalization rate is declining as shown in figure three.

Figure three depicting naturalization rates between 1996 and 2021. Graph courtesy of Andrew Griffith

The previous Conservative government was more active on citizenship than other recent governments. In 2009, it released a new citizenship study guide, Discover Canada, with a greater focus on history, values and the military. It also required a higher passing score on the citizenship test—up to 75 per cent compared to 60 per cent—and different versions were circulated to reduce cheating. Language requirements were administered more strongly, and adult fees were increased from $100 to $530. A first generation cut-off for transmission of citizenship was implemented as part of addressing “lost Canadians” due to earlier Citizenship Act gaps. C-24 amended the Citizenship Act to increase residency requirements from three to four years, increased testing and language assessment to 18-64 years from 18-54 years, and a revocation provision for citizens convicted of treason or terror.

The Liberal government reversed the changes to residency requirements, the age changes for testing and language assessment, and the revocation provision, and promised to issue a revised citizenship study guide and to eliminate citizenship fees. Subsequently, the Liberals amended the citizenship oath to include reference to Indigenous treaty rights in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

It is unclear the degree to which the Conservatives will consider citizenship a priority in relation to other immigration-related issues. From an administrative perspective, changing residency requirements again would simply complicate program management, make it harder to reduce processing times, and would not provide any substantive benefit. Re-opening citizenship revocation would simply draw attention to the risks that countries would offload their responsibilities, as the example of former U.K. citizen and Canadian citizen by descent Jack Letts illustrates. 

Given that the Liberal government to date has not issued a revised citizenship guide, the Conservatives would likely stick with Discover Canada, issued in 2009. Similar, the existing citizenship test and pass rates, and proof of meeting language requirements would not need to be changed. As the Liberal government never implemented 2019 and 2021 campaign commitments to eliminate citizenship fees, one should not expect any change from the fee increase of 2014.

On the other hand, the pandemic-driven shift to virtual citizenship ceremonies in 99 per cent of all such events would likely to be reversed given strong Conservative opposition in recent discussions at the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, along with the proposed self-affirmation of the citizenship oath (“citizenship on a click”). It is also likely that a Conservative government may wish to revert to paper citizenship certificates, and away from the option of e-certificates. 

The Liberals and the NDP have been trying to weaken the first generation cut-off for transmission of citizenship for those with a “substantial connection” to Canada. Despite the Conservatives opposing this change, largely on process grounds as this was tacked on to a Senate private member’s bill, it is unclear whether they would reverse this change if implemented. However, if some particularly egregious public examples emerge, just as the Lebanese evacuation of 2006 prompted the government to legislate the cut-off given the large numbers of “Canadians of convenience,” they may well decide to act.  

The Conservatives may wish to revisit the issue of birth tourism. In 2012, they pushed hard, but ultimately the small numbers known at the time and provincial opposition to operational and cost considerations made them drop their proposal. Since then, however, health-care data indicated pre-pandemic numbers of birth tourists to be around 2,000, although these dropped dramatically during the pandemic given visa and travel restrictions.

The Conservatives are unlikely to revisit the issue of Canadian expatriate voting limitations given the Supreme Court’s ruling that expatriates have the right to vote no matter how long they have lived outside Canada. 

Part II

In contrast to immigration and citizenship, a Conservative government would face fewer constraints with respect to multiculturalism and employment equity. Their public criticism of wokeism, their policy resolutions stressing merit over “personal immutable characteristics“, their criticism of diversity, equity and inclusion training, and their criticism of Liberal government judicial, Governor in Council, and Senate appointments all point to a likely shift in substance and tone.

Multiculturalism and Inclusion

The Conservative government moved multiculturalism from Canadian Heritage to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) given its refocused the program on the integration of new Canadians. Grants and contributions were similarly refocused, and overall funding to the program declined from about $21-million to $13-million (operations and maintenance), and from about 80 to 34 employees. The Conservatives also implemented a historical recognition program to recognize previous discriminatory measures against Ukrainian, Chinese, Italian, Jewish, and Sikh Canadians.

The Liberal government moved multiculturalism back to Canadian Heritage. Funding increased dramatically, with $95-million for Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy, refocusing the program on anti-racism and systemic barriers to full participation in Canadian society. Additional funding was provided to the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. Greater emphasis was placed on addressing barriers facing Black Canadians such as the Black Canadian Communities Initiative and the Black Entrepreneurship Program. A special representative to combat Islamophobia was appointed. More comparative research by Statistics Canada highlighted differences in visible minority economic outcomes. Heritage months for Canadian Jews and Sikhs were introduced among others. 

It is highly likely that resources would be cut sharply under a Conservative government given their overall approach to government expenditures, their general approach to limit government intervention and their scepticism regarding critical race theory, systemic racism, and diversity, equity, and inclusion training. There would likely also be a return to a more general integration focus between and among all groups. They would, of course, be unlikely to curb any of the recognition months or days, given the importance to communities (and their political outreach). 

The Conservatives would likely be more cautious about using language like “barbaric cultural practices” in their communications given how that eventually backfired in the 2015 election. One can also expect them to be cautious with respect to Quebec debates on secularism or “laïcité,” such as Bill 21.

Just as the Liberal government cancelled the Conservative appointment of an ambassador for religious freedom, a Conservative government would be likely to cancel the representative to combat Islamophobia.

Hopefully, a Conservative government would neither diminish the value of the mandatory census by reverting to the voluntary and less accurate National Household Survey approach, nor dramatically reduce the budget of Statistics Canada given the impact on the quantity and quality of data and related analysis.

A future Conservative government is likely to revisit the guidelines for funding research away from diversity, equity and inclusion priorities, along with Canada Council, Telefilm, and others, based upon party policy resolutions. 

Employment Equity

A Conservative government might reduce the amount and quality of data available regarding visible minority, Indigenous Peoples, persons with disabilities represented in public service, and other government appointments. 

The Liberal government expanded public service data to include disaggregated data by sub-group, allowing for more detailed understanding and analysis of differences within each of the employment equity groups since 2017, along with data on LGBTQ+ people. Previous government reports only covered the overall categories of women, visible minorities, Indigenous Peoples and persons with disabilities. It is uncertain whether these reports under a future Conservative government would revert back to only reporting on overall group representation, hirings, promotions and separations. Given that this concerns public service management, it may well decide to continue current practice or the more sceptical elements may press for change.

On the other hand, political appointments—judges, Governor-in-Council, Senate—are another matter. Appointment processes are likely to be revised given concerns that the processes introduced by the Liberal government unduly favoured candidates more on the centre-left than centre-right. Figure 4 highlights the increased representation of women, visible minorities and Indigenous Peoples in political appointments.

Figure four highlights the increased representation of women, visible minorities and Indigenous Peoples in political appointments. Graph courtesy of Andrew Griffith

At the end of the Conservative government, judicial appointment were 35.6 per cent women, two per cent visible minorities and 0.8 percent Indigenous. The Liberal government introduced a new application process that aimed to—and succeeded in—vastly increasing the diversity among judicial appointments. As of October 2022, they sat at: 55.2 per cent women, 12.5 per cent visible minorities, and four per cent Indigenous.

Similarly, at the end of the last Conservative government, Governor-in-Council appointments to commissions, boards, Crown corporations, agencies, and tribunals were 34.2 per cent women, 6.1 per cent visible minorities, and 2.9 per cent Indigenous. Under the Liberal government, the number of women increased to 51.4 per cent, visible minorities to 11.6 per cent, and 4.2 per cent Indigenous by January 2023.

Senate appointments present a more nuanced picture. Conservative appointment of visible minorities was at 15.8 per cent, representing a conscious effort to address under-represented groups, but women, at 31.6 per cent of appointments, and Indigenous Peoples at 1.8 per cent, were significantly under-represented. The Liberal introduction of a formally independent and non-partisan advisory board resulted in a sharp increase in diversity: 58.8 per cent women, 20.6 per cent visible minorities, and 16.2 per cent Indigenous Peoples.

Along with these process changes, the Liberal government expanded annual reporting to include visible minorities, Indigenous Peoples, persons with disabilities, and judicial appointment reporting also included LGBTQ and ethnic/cultural groups. Should a Conservative government decide to stop these annual breakdowns, it will be harder to track any shifts in representation. 

The current review of the Employment Equity Act, launched in 2021, has not yet resulted in any public report on consultations and recommendations from the Task Force. Given limited parliamentary time and higher priorities during the current mandate, it is unlikely that any revisions to the Act will be approved. However, should any legislation come to pass, it is likely that a future Conservative government might wish to revisit some of the provisions.

Concluding observations

To date, two overarching themes have driven Conservative discourse: Canada is broken, and the need to “remove the gatekeepers.” The Yeates report confirms that the immigration department is broken, reflecting long neglect of organization weaknesses, a lack of client focus, and, I would argue, an excessive multiplicity of programs that make it harder for clients to navigate, and more difficult for IRCC to manage. 

One of the ironies of assessing likely Conservative policies is immigration, citizenship, and related areas all pertain to government being “gatekeepers.” It’s easier to shrink the gate for some policies and programs than others (e.g., government political appointments). Others, such as reducing levels of permanent and temporary residents, are much more challenging given the strength of provincial, business, and other stakeholders opposition. The degree to which a Conservative government is prepared to expend political capital will obviously reflect whether or not it has a majority in Parliament. 

The sharp decrease in public support for immigration, given the impact on housing, health care, and infrastructure, likely provides greater flexibility for any future Conservative government. While there is greater flexibility with respect to multiculturalism and employment equity, a Conservative government could also be ambitious with needed immigration reforms for permanent and temporary immigration.

While some have argued that immigration and related issues have become a third rail in Canadian politics, this need not be the case. The concerns being raised are regarding the impact of large and increasing numbers of permanent and temporary migration on housing, health care, and infrastructure, not the racial, religious or ethnic composition of immigrants. These issues affect immigrants and non-immigrants alike and focus on commonalities, not differences.

Source: What changes a Conservative government might make to Canada’s immigration policies

Filed under Citizenship, Government, Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Immigration is religion’s only hope – UnHerd

2023/09/21 Leave a comment

Of interest (similar trend in Canada):

When my father was going through the process of becoming an Elder in the United Methodist Church, he was required to take courses on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. One course involved a presentation on how white people needed to make room for, and amplify the voices of, “people of colour”. My father is an immigrant from China. He, like other immigrant preachers, was confused about who the term “person of colour” referred to, and why a faith founded on the idea that there is “neither Jew nor Greek” is so obsessed with racial divisions.

Who can blame them? The progressive ideology that in recent years has swept through mainstream American Protestantism is often impenetrable to those from non-Western countries.

And yet, it is just such immigrants who are keeping Christianity alive in our secular world — everywhere from France’s Afro-Caribbean megachurches to London’s Black Majority Churches. In America, the number of citizens identifying as Christians has fallen from 90% to 64% in the last 50 years, while immigrants are becoming more influential: more than two thirds of them are Christians.
American progressives are increasingly stoking fears of an incipient “white Christian nationalism” bringing about a Cromwellian theocracy. But white Americans have actually been secularising at a slightly faster rate than other ethnicities. While black Americans have also experienced secularisation, they are still more likely to go to church and pray than the average American. And African immigrants to the US are more religious than American-born black people. The rise of Latino evangelicals in America has also been receiving mainstream coverage.

“Conservative Christians”, the bogeyman for white progressives, are therefore increasingly likely to be people of colour — the very people whose voices progressives apparently want to amplify. Christians of African origin are far more likely to hold conservative views on sexuality, while Latino evangelicals are quickly becoming a Republican bloc.

White conservatives, meanwhile, have a tendency to bemoan the secularisation of the West and the decline of traditional values, while supporting restrictive immigration processes — perhaps not realising that non-Western immigrants are more likely to be socially conservative than American-born citizens, or perhaps because their economic or tribal instincts trump their religious ones. Both progressives and conservatives are therefore mired in contradiction.

Despite the fact that liberals are secularising faster than conservatives, for the last decade, the leadership of the United Methodist Church has been adopting views on sexuality and gender identity that are in line with those of secular progressives, triggering a slow-motion denominational schism. Some years ago, I attended a UMC conference with my parents at which some attendees wore rainbow armbands in support of a movement to ordain gay clergy. Almost all of them were white. None of the representatives from immigrant congregations, and few from black congregations, wore the armbands. “Before I came to America, I thought this was a nation built on Christian values,” commented one attendee. “Why are these people going against God’s will?”

A progressive Christian might see this as a contradiction: if Jesus came from Heaven to help the marginalised, why do these marginalised Christians antagonise a fellow marginalised group? Liberal white people, who usually preach multicultural ideals, cannot answer this question honestly without making it sound like Western culture has the “correct” view on sexuality — the major irony being that progressives dismiss Western culture for what they see as regressive views.

While progressives blame “the Christian Right” for society’s ills, religious conservatives often complain about “woke Christianity”. They point to examplessuch as Allendale United Methodist Church, which had a “non-binary” drag queen deliver sermons and bills itself as “a church that is committed to anti-racism and radical solidarity with folx on the margins”. They argue that such acts are based on ideology stemming from the secular world rather than theology based on Biblical exegesis.

A similar dynamic can be observed in the UK. Earlier this year, the Church of England floated the idea of using gender-neutral pronouns for God, and allowed prayers of blessing for gay couples. The backlash was swift. Many bishops in Africa and Asia rejected the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury — and criticised the Anglican church’s (largely white) leadership. But even within the UK, there was fierce opposition to progressive Christianity from ethnic minorities, who are keepingBritain’s Christian population from declining.

However, the religious conservatives probably have less to worry about than the progressives, in the long run. If progressive Christian churches align themselves more closely to the values of secular society than to religious ones, they will cease to exist. A similar phenomenon can be seen in American Judaism. Orthodox Jews, who take their faith seriously, and mostly vote Republican, are currently in the minority, but they are estimated to grow to become the dominant branch of American Judaism by 2050. This is partly due to birth rates, but also because non-Orthodox Jews, who mostly vote Democrat, are secularising quickly; they are far more likely to partner with non-Jews, stop observing Jewish traditions, or to cease to identify as Jewish altogether. Christianity, too, looks set to depend on the most orthodox sustaining the faith.

It is ironic that Christianity is now seen as “problematic” by progressives, because the roots of liberalism, which opened the door for progressivism, partially derive from Christianity — or Protestantism, to be specific. It was the Reformation that shifted religious practices away from a central authority to that of individuals. As Tom Holland has pointed out, almost every country that has legalised gay marriage has been shaped by centuries of both liberalism and Protestantism.

It is also ironic that white progressives support multiculturalism over assimilation, because it is the latter that would align the beliefs of immigrant communities with the values of the utopia dreamed of in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion trainings. In other words, though liberalism paved the way for immigration and multiculturalism, immigration and multiculturalism actually weaken liberalism; though Christianity paved the way for liberalism, Christianity could prove liberalism’s downfall.

The tension between a multicultural utopia pushed by secular progressives versus the socially conservative, religious-inflected attitudes many non-white groups hold has led to quite a few awkward skirmishes. While most black people vote for the same party as white liberals, 37% of black Democrats say their religious views influence how they think about transgender topics, compared to only 11% of white Democrats. While 66% of black Democrats say a person’s gender is their sex determined at birth, only 27% of white Democrats say the same.

Conservatives in America are also tying themselves in strange knots. A common refrain is that Islam is incompatible with Western civilisation. And yet, some conservative Christians find themselves allied with Muslims against what they both see as America’s decadent hyper-individualistic secular culture. In a number of American cities, Muslims have joined conservative Christiansto protest the inclusion of explicitly LGBT-themed books in elementary schools, leading to accusations that “some Muslim families” are “on the same side of an issue as White supremacists and outright bigots”. To progressives, a “bigot” is a stereotypical white Christian conservative; to see non-white Muslim families standing beside them in droves caught many off guard. An all-Muslim city council in Michigan was once held up by liberals as a symbol of diversity, until it voted earlier this year to ban Pride flags being flown on city property, to the delight of many social conservatives. Slate has gone so far as to call Muslim voters “the new Republicans” — an unexpected twist after two decades of Republican fear-mongering against Islam.

At the same time, presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, a Hindu, has gone from a virtual unknown to third place in the Republican primary, by picking up the support of many conservative Christian voters. Ramaswamy does not shy away from his faith, but rather emphasises the similarities between certain schools of Hindu and Christian thought. Many conservative Christians, it seems, would rather ally with conservatives from other religions than Christians on the other side of the political divide.

It has taken a cosmic convergence of contradictions to get to this point. White progressives, with their absolute devotion to immigration, have inadvertently championed immigrants from cultures that outrightly reject progressivism. With their just-as-absolute devotion to multiculturalism, those same white progressives have created a trap for themselves where they are unable to criticise a non-white person’s culture, values or beliefs — even when they actively go against sacred progressive views on gender and sexuality. Meanwhile, white conservatives find themselves forging alliances with people they never thought they’d work with — people whose entry into the country they might have objected to. Old alliances are dissolving — and battle lines are drawn anew.

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Conservative author Douglas Murray on immigration, Islam and why he doesn’t want to talk about Trump

2019/11/28 Leave a comment

I think the only points I agree with is the need to read widely, particularly those one disagrees with or who challenge us, and the need to travel outside one’s area:

…This particular Mr. Murray, 40 years old, is both a man who is read (his newly released book is The Madness of the Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity) and one who reads, and so the conversation this late afternoon almost inevitably begins with an inquiry about what is on his night table these days. It turns out that he’s dipping back into The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver (‘’I thought I finished it weeks ago but I hadn’t’’) and is deep into The Faber Book of Utopias(edited by John Carey, the Oxford literary critic and sworn enemy of elitism).

His journalistic inquisitor and tablemate this late afternoon has been making his way through the massive biography of Napoleon by Andrew Roberts, a British historian and – who knew? – a friend of Murray’s. “I pretended to him that I’ve read it, but I haven’t,” he said. “I bluffed.”

Ordinarily Murray is no bluffer, though he prefers not to talk about Donald J. Trump. But like everyone else in Great Britain and Canada, he can’t help himself, and in this case he is talking about why he doesn’t want to talk about Trump.

“I never talk about Trump because everyone does,” he begins. “I never talk about Brexit either. I don’t think they’re as interesting as everybody thinks they are. I’m sad everyone is shouting hopelessly into the wind about these topics. I just don’t think it is useful for everyone to devote themselves to these two subjects. No one’s opinion on either of them is all that interesting, and basically no one can change anyone’s views on either.”

So much for that. Murray – here in Montreal on a flying visit, just two days, in part to promote his latest book, at this moment understated in a cranberry sweater with a metal zipper at the neck – would rather talk about Canada. (You’d perhaps rather hear what he says about that anyway.)

“You’ve become one of those nations where you had one story and are moving to another story,” he says, and his listener (and perhaps you readers) begins to sense that maybe we are onto an interesting riff. “The sense of what Canada was is different from the sense of what Canada is….The interesting way to get through this is to say that Canada [now wants] to be a welcoming, pluralistic, multicultural place, open and tolerant, while you talk up LGBTQ and women and ethnic minorities.”

There’s no way this conversation can go in any direction but…immigration.

So here we go. “People know immigration has different consequences depending on the numbers, the speed and the identity of the immigrants. Any one of these is explosive. All three together is dangerous. Everyone knows this.”

We are not remotely finished with this topic.

“The interesting question is: Who don’t we want,” he goes on. “We’re very bad at this question. We should be able to answer it. The problem with immigration that makes it very difficult – and I’ve gone to a lot more refugee camps than my critics have – is that it is very hard for first-world countries to say why we have such luck and others don’t.”

“Such luck” meaning the bon chance to live in Canada, or America, or any one of the industrial countries with freedoms and prosperity.

Do we dare bring up climate change? Do we dare not? (It’s not his “thing,” as he puts it, which is the thing that could make this so interesting.)

“I have only one thought,” he says, and suddenly his inquisitor breathes a sigh of relief. “It’s the obvious, undisguisable way that it has become clear that this is a replacement in the West for religion for fairly well-off, white, educated people. I don’t know the science, but it has all the manifestations of a new religion.”

What can he possibly mean by that?

“It has every single component of religion – original sin, guilt, the need for atonement. But it also has the mechanism for getting out of the [problem]. The answer is to never drive or fly again, to never buy new clothes and to live your life carefully so that you’ll save this planet, having harmed nothing. Tell your children to seek to be harmless! If it weren’t for them the moss and the trees would be getting on fine!”

Murray is an atheist, though one who did not come by that creed – the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal ruled in 2013 that the term “creed” applies to it – naturally. It was (and here we go) Islam that made him an atheist, not that that was his religion to start with. Now he’s talking a bit about the subject that has put him into perhaps the most trouble: “Canada and America were not founded by Muslims. If they had been, we’d have a better way of understanding where the crazies emerge from. We are less literate in that religion. The second problem is that there are problems in Islam that we haven’t seen in Christianity in a long time: There’s a church/state problem. There’s a problem with extremist groups. …Where exactly is [Islam’s] cutoff line on extremism? Do the fanatics become fanatics from absolutely nowhere? It’s a very lively debate about where it comes from.”

Then this, and likely his critics will agree with at least the first sentence: “My stupidity is to tell what I think on this. I can’t pretend the Koran is a social-justice document.”

Murray has been flayed for saying that Hungarian tyrant Viktor Orban was a better representative of European values than the financier George Soros. He may be the only person outside the cabinet room in Budapest with that view. A New York Times reviewer scorched Mr. Murray’s lament for the Europe of the past for being “as fundamentally incoherent as its late-19th-century originals,” adding, “It never strikes him, or other secondhand vendors of fixed and singular identities, that nowhere in the world have individuals been the exclusive heirs of a single culture or civilization.”

Back to books before we close. What should Canadians be reading?

“My own books, obviously.”’ Well, of course. But what else should be on the Canadian bookshelf?

“People should read as widely as possible in authors they know they will disagree with,” he says, surely hoping to widen his own book sales among readers – you know who you are – who find his views contemptible. “I hate people who read by tribe. In America both political parties have their own libraries. The aim of this is to prove that your political party is always right, to say that your party got anti-Nazism, the Civil War and civil rights correct and the other side had got it wrong. That’s a danger. History is a mess for everyone.”

Just one more. Murray is a persistent and peripatetic traveler. Where should we mere middlebrows visit? “Any place in the world you haven’t visited is interesting,” he says, “even if nothing happens there.” He is not, he wants to assure you, talking about Canada.

Source:                         Conservative author Douglas Murray on immigration, Islam and why he doesn’t want to talk about Trump Subscriber content                                                

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ANDREW COYNE: It’s time for old-school conservatism and liberalism to defend their common values

2019/07/24 Leave a comment

Good column:

Why would anyone describe himself as a conservative? While we’re at it, why describe yourself as a liberal? Or socialist? Or libertarian? The point is not that there is anything wrong with any of these — only that there is something right with all of them. Each of the traditions, that is, has something to teach us. Why limit yourself to just one?

Still, people do. The desire to belong to a tribe – or perhaps, to quarrel with another – is one of the deepest urges of humanity. But tribalism, ideological or other, is not just self-blinding. On occasion it leads to madness. Consider the present state of conservatism, a tribe that has, as the past week has illuminated, lost its way, if not its mind.

If it were just a matter of Donald Trump’s racist attacks on four racial-minority congresswomen – the latest in a long series, but arguably the worst — it might be put down to his own personal depravity. If it were just the chants (“send her home’’) of the people at his rally in Greenville, N.C., it might be written off as the ravings of a lunatic fringe.

But Trump, it is abundantly clear, stands atop a vast infrastructure: the Republican leaders who shrug off his abuses for the sake of party unity; the commentators who look the other way so long as he champions their pet causes; the base who are content with whatever he does so long as it annoys the liberal media; and underpinning all, a set of beliefs – superstitions, prejudices, call them what you will – that predate Trump, but which he has helped to make the credo of the conservative movement.

It was convenient that in the same week as Trump was issuing such crude appeals to hatred and bigotry, a group of academics, journalists and politicians were meeting at a hotel in Washington in an attempt to give a veneer of intellectual credibility to Trumpism. The “National Conservatism” conference underlined how completely conservatism, at least in the United States, has been turned on its head.

The conservatism of the post-war decades, a sometimes uneasy coalition of social conservatives, free marketers and hawkish internationalists, has been replaced by a populist-nationalist conservatism marked by hatred of “globalist” elites, hostility to immigration and fear of foreign trade, and by its enthusiasm for whichever strongman will protect America from these.

Where conservatives were traditionally advocates of limited government, wary of government intervention and worried about deficits, today’s conservatives embrace many of the same limitless-government approaches as the left – “collectivism rebranded for the right,” as the Republican-turned-independent Congressman Justin Amash calls it.

Where conservatives were skeptics of change, pragmatists seeking to reconcile the necessity of reform with the wisdom of tradition, the Trumpians are as reckless as they are reactionary, heedless to the social and institutional harm they have caused in the name of Making America Great Again.

And as the conference highlighted, the civic nationalism that American conservatives used to cherish – the nation to which anyone could belong so long as they subscribed to the basic ideals of the American political system, not least its reverence for the equality of every individual under the Constitution – has been replaced by a more culturally-specific, if not ethnic definition, majoritarian and monocultural rather than liberal and pluralist, that is not easily distinguished from xenophobia or indeed racism: identity politics for white people.

Canadians will be familiar with this from, for example, the Bill 21 debate. Still, few in this country would go so far as the University of Pennsylvania law professor who told the conference that, as people from certain cultures were more likely to fit into a “modern advanced society” like the United States, and as those people came mostly from Europe and the First World, and as those societies are “mostly white for now,” it followed that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.” But not, you know, in a racist way.

This is, as The Economist put it in a recent issue, “not an evolution of conservatism, but a repudiation of it.” The conservatism I grew up with was basically a species of liberalism, part of the same Western liberal inheritance but more alert to liberalism’s potential for overreach. Its mission was, if you like, to save liberalism from the liberals. As such it represented a continuous tradition that, even as it changed with the times, represented certain enduring ideals. How can the very opposite set of ideas also be called conservatism without doing violence to the language?

Perhaps, as others have suggested, this is naive. Maybe there are no permanent or defining principles of conservatism, independent of its practitioners. Perhaps conservatism is whatever self-described conservatives happen to believe at the time. Trump enjoys the approval of 90 per cent of Republicans; even in Canada, according to a recent Abacus Data poll, 46 per cent of Canadian Conservatives have either a positive or neutral impression of him. Maybe it’s time to concede the point.

If so, then perhaps it is time for a more fundamental political realignment. If conservatism is now to mean its opposite, perhaps it is time for conservatives of the old school to make their peace with liberalism – for the two estranged children of the Enlightenment to reunite in defence of its values. The differences between them that once seemed so great look trivial now, compared to what they have in common, and in light of what they both oppose.

Source: ANDREW COYNE: It’s time for old-school conservatism and liberalism …https://www.thechronicleherald.ca/…/andrew-coyne-its-time-for-old-school-conservati…

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