Liberal deal with Bloc means hate-speech laws will lose exemption for ‘sincerely held’ religious belief

2025/12/02 Leave a comment

This will create considerable debate and will likely lead to court challenges. A good faith or “sincerely held” clause should not be a “get out of jail” card, but in the end, it will depend on context and specifics, and would to extreme religious extremists and positions:

The Liberals have agreed to remove religious exemptions from Canada’s hate-speech laws to secure Bloc Québécois support to help pass its bill targeting hate and terror symbols, National Post has learned through a source close to the talks.

Currently, the law exempts hateful or antisemitic speech if it based in good faith on the interpretation of a religious text, but that immunity is set to be removed. Additionally, the Liberals are expected to back off plans to eliminate the need for a provincial attorney general’s sign-off to pursue a hate-propaganda prosecution.

The removal of the religious exemption is expected to come via an amendment to the Criminal Code in the form of Bill C-9 at the parliamentary justice committee that will be supported by both the Liberals and Bloc, a senior government source confirmed.

The source was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss party negotiations publicly.

“We do have Bloc partnership,” the source said. “The bill is in a place now, even with those Bloc amendments, that everyone is happy,” they added in reference to Liberal and Bloc MPs.

Bill C-9, which fulfilled a campaign promise Prime Minister Mark Carney made during the spring election, was his minority government’s first major justice bill introduced earlier this fall by Justice Minister Sean Fraser.

It seeks multiple changes to the Criminal Code to confront the issue of hate, with the Liberals citing a rise in police-reported incidents in recent years, particularly in the wake of sustained anti-Israel protests over the last two years.

Chief among the proposed changes is creating a new offence for intimidating someone to the point of blocking their access to a place of worship or another centre used by an identifiable group, as well as criminalizing the act of promoting hate by displaying a hate or terror symbol, such as one tied to a listed terrorist organization or a swastika.

The Opposition Conservatives have lambasted the current effort as censorship, saying provisions already exist within criminal law to counter hate, and that the bill’s proposal to remove the requirement for a provincial attorney general’s (AG) consent to lay a hate propaganda charge took away an “important safeguard,” according to the party.

The Liberals are now expected to accept another amendment eliminating that change from the bill entirely. That, too, was a Bloc request.

When the bill was first presented back in September, the Liberals argued that removing the AG requirement would help streamline the process of laying hate propaganda charges, while critics said it was an additional check on a charge with serious implications for free speech.

Once the amendments are passed, the Liberals and Bloc are expected to vote the bill through committee and the House of Commons. However, it is unclear when the justice committee will debate clause-by-clause amendments to the bill.

The House is scheduled to rise on Dec. 12.

The original text of the bill did not contain changes to the existing religious defences for hate speech, but the Bloc has consistently raised the need for it to be addressed.

Currently, Section 319 of the Criminal Code contains an exemption stating no person shall be convicted of promoting hateful or antisemitic speech if they expressed “in good faith” an opinion “based on a belief in a religious text.”…

Source: Liberal deal with Bloc means hate-speech laws will lose exemption for ‘sincerely held’ religious belief

Filed under Hate crimes, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Tasha Kheiriddin: Trudeau frittered away a good immigration policy for the sake of Liberal votes – National Post

2024/01/18 Leave a comment

Discounts the flawed policy rationale of the Barton commission recommendations but of course, political considerations also played a role. And, as we saw during the Kenney years, the liberals cannot take these voters for granted:

Immigrants are also grateful to the party that bring them in. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau learned this from his father. Pierre Elliott Trudeau took credit for the citizenship of millions of Canadians, even though many had come to Canada under previous governments. Why? Because they took their oath under his watch. And when it came to elections, the immigrant communities of the day — Italians, Greeks, Haitians, Vietnamese — tended to vote Liberal.

The implications of Trudeau Jr.’s replication of this policy are dire. Studies show that they are turning Canadians against immigration: even 62 per cent of current immigrants think we’re letting in too many people. They are impoverishing Canadians, both current and newcomer, according to the bank study. And they are also helping fuel Quebec separatism, as francophones look with alarm at rising immigrant populations in the Rest-Of-Canada. By the end of the century, Quebec risks becoming a bit player in Confederation, with only 15 per cent of its population.

This cannot continue. Instead of flooding the country with newcomers, the government needs to boost domestic productivity. That’s a harder fix — and one that won’t give them more votes. But then again, if Canadians can’t afford a decent life, the Liberals may not get their votes either.

Source: Tasha Kheiriddin: Trudeau frittered away a good immigration policy for the sake of Liberal votes – National Post

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

Ibbitson: Liberals trying to play both sides in Gaza conflict

2024/01/16 Leave a comment

Definition of middle of the road: road kill!

The table below highlights the number of ridings with more than 5 percent religious minorities, highlighting just how many more ridings have significant Muslim populations compared to Jewish populations.

The Liberals find themselves caught between an Israel/Conservative rock and a NDP/Palestinian hard place. And they don’t seem to have a solution, other than to placate both sides, which is no solution at all.

Source: Liberals trying to play both sides in Gaza conflict

Filed under foreign policy, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

The Liberals win points on housing policy, but it might not change the politics

2023/10/20 Leave a comment

As I have also argued, “The new Liberal measures to increase building and alleviate the shortage, meanwhile, aren’t likely to have a palpable impact on the supply of housing for years – and not before the scheduled 2025 election.”

Paying a price for their fixation on higher levels of immigration while ignoring the impacts on housing, healthcare and infrastructure:

Don’t look now, but the Liberals are starting to win some policy debates on the housing crisis. It just might be too late for the politics.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals spent much of 2023 getting hammered about the high price of houses, skyrocketing rents and mortgage spikes. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was making hay, and gaining ground, lambasting Mr. Trudeau by channelling the resentment about 30-year-olds living in their parents’ homes and families struggling to afford one.

For most of the year, the Liberals hemmed and hawed and declared that all the things they had already done were the greatest ever – as if they couldn’t see the problem nearly everyone was feeling.

But if you tuned into Question Period on Monday, there was Housing Minister Sean Fraser knocking back Conservative attacks with shots of his own, claiming, albeit apocryphally, that the Tories plan to raise taxes on rental units.

Liberals could, and did, claim that private-sector actors have endorsed some of their new housing measures. Four major developers said they plan to build more than 10,000 rental units between them because of the federal government’s September move to remove the GST on purpose-built rental housing. Mortgage lenders have said the tripling of the Canada Mortgage Bond Program will make a significant difference for builders.

Where the Tories were landing blows at will a few months ago, now Mr. Fraser was jousting gamely, responding to a Peterborough Conservative MP’s arguments that Liberal “inflationary spending” forced interest rates higher by pointing to a multimillion-dollar housing announcement in her riding. Though the Tories kept picking the fight, the Liberals were starting to win some of the rounds.

But if the Liberals are starting to get a grip on the issue in Question Period, it comes at a time when no one is watching. Not many people watch Commons debates, and this week, the public attention paid to Parliament was devoted almost entirely to speeches about events in the Middle East.

It’s not clear, anyway, if the Liberals can still rebuild credibility after letting the housing debate get away from them.

Their late-summer epiphany came when the public outcry was rising high and Liberal poll numbers were falling low. Their biggest new measure – that GST break – was something the Liberals promised to do in 2015 but didn’t.

Even so, the Liberals suddenly boosted housing policy on a bigger scale, with real potential. The deals Mr. Fraser is signing with cities and towns for money from Ottawa’s Housing Accelerator Fund could move the dials, too, if municipalities make rule changes that, for example, allow more triplexes to be built.

Mr. Fraser now likes to point out that the Liberal bill provides more extensive housing tax breaks than a bill Mr. Poilievre tabled in September – hence the minister’s disingenuous claim that the Conservatives would raise taxes on housing.

The Liberals now have better policy that will make a difference. But it might not change the politics for Mr. Trudeau’s government.

For starters, Mr. Poilievre’s Conservatives have had some success in making people believe that government deficit spending – and big Liberal spending, during the pandemic’s peak and now – is the cause of inflation, and therefore the cause of high interest rates.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland can argue that inflation is global and declining, and Canada’s deficits and debt are lower than most industrialized countries. And while the Liberals have been profligate spenders who showed little regard for controlling costs, there’s no reason to believe a Conservative government would take office and bring in spending cuts that would make interest rates rapidly tumble.

But those are arguments. People feel inflation. And they keep feeling it even when the pace of price increases starts to slow. Many felt the struggle of paying a high cost of housing exacerbated by a shortage of supply, and now are feeling the pinch of higher interest rates through mortgage bills or higher rents. The Bank of Canada’s rate increases seemed to park declines in Liberal poll numbers.

The new Liberal measures to increase building and alleviate the shortage, meanwhile, aren’t likely to have a palpable impact on the supply of housing for years – and not before the scheduled 2025 election.

So now the Liberals have regained their footing in the fight over who can address the housing crisis but it is still a government eight years into power hoping to win a political argument over who has the best solutions for years in the future. Mr. Fraser is starting to win debates in the Commons on housing policy, but it might be too late to make Canadians feel things will change.

Source: The Liberals win points on housing policy, but it might not change the politics

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Watt: The Liberals tied immigration to housing: they need to prove it can work

2023/08/21 Leave a comment

But given the time lags involved in building new houses, even assuming the federal government provides funding, most municipal zoning restrictions are relaxed and service fees reduced where appropriate, any concrete results in terms of “shovels in the ground” will take a few years.

In other words, after the election. The federal and provincial (save Quebec) government fixation on increasing immigration, temporary and permanent, while largely ignoring the impact on housing, healthcare and infrastructure, will deservedly come back to haunt the Liberal government if no change occurs to planned permanent immigration levels and unrestricted temporary migration (students and workers):

The revamped Liberal cabinet retreats to Prince Edward Island this week while their party languishes in polling and the Conservatives surge. Underestimate Trudeau at your peril, perhaps, but something seems to have become particularly challenging.

While it is difficult to put your finger on just what that something is, it has become clear that much of that something is Canada’s housing crisis.

Apart from the PM himself, perhaps no one feels the heat on the way to Charlottetown more than Sean Fraser, the new housing minister. Fraser got this job because the Liberals have embarked on a strategy to tie immigration (Fraser previously led this portfolio) inexorably to housing, supposedly using newly arrived skilled labour to build the houses we desperately need.

All well and good, but it doesn’t seem Canadians are having any of it. The problem is, most Canadians aren’t convinced this works — and with house prices swelling, interest rates rising, and immigration continuing exponentially, I fear by combining these issues so closely the Liberals risk sparking a major backlash against their record-setting immigration plans.

Fraser has outlined his answer to the conundrum: add more supply through incentives to local governments and increase immigration rates to, in part, provide the labour required for this.

The new housing minister tackles this after the prime minister bluntly argued, “housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility.” On cleanup duty, Fraser later stated the federal government should be more active in developing and enacting housing policy, as it once was.

This, of course, is the right approach. Nevertheless, Fraser’s major challenge will be convincing Canadians that high immigration levels are good when many can’t afford homes.

This week, videos of Canadians tearily lamenting the cost of living went viral. The narrative that, after eight years in office, this government has left many — the very ones they promised to fight for — behind is beginning to set like cement.

Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has taken the government to task on housing with brutal effectiveness. He has managed to own this rhetorical stance while still supporting immigration — making the disconnect between the Liberal’s immigration policy and inaction on housing even harder to ignore.

Under Fraser’s oversight, immigration increased exponentially but integration remained plagued with accreditation issues and failed to correspond with housing supply: the national housing strategy has only resulted in just over 100,000 homes. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation determined 5.8 million more are needed over the next decade. In 2022, our population grew by over a million.

The Bank of Canada also acknowledged recently that immigration drives up housing demand. As the problem becomes more acute, this is where people will focus — not on the “mirage of economic prosperity” immigration otherwise contributes to.

The Liberals, if they are to have any hope of winning the next election, must convince Canadians immigration is in their near-term interests and that it will result in more houses being built. That’s a tall order when voters are being priced out of even the remotest dream of owning a home. It’s a disconnect that also dissuades immigrants from wanting to come here in the first place.

By failing to acknowledge this and rectify the integration issues in our immigration system so newcomers can positively contribute to the housing supply, the Liberals risk allowing the social cohesion they so value to fray. And when that starts, the uniquely Canadian support for significant levels of immigration will fray with it.

That would be a terrible shame. No one needs a lecture on the fundamental role immigration has played in our past and the crucial role it will play in our future — much less that it is simply right.

What isn’t right is an approach to this issue driven by complacency and inaction rather than by a fundamental commitment — not just to policy statements but to actually building new homes.

Source: The Liberals tied immigration to housing: they need to prove it can work

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , ,

Cabinet, Parliamentary Secretary and CPC critic comparison

2019/12/14 Leave a comment

Now that the parliamentary secretaries have been announced, I prepared this chart that compares representation of women, visible minorities and Indigenous peoples in cabinet, parliamentary secretary appointments and Conservative critic roles. Given the relatively small size of the Bloc and NDP caucuses, have not bothered to do the same as virtually every member of those two parties plays a critic role.

The Liberal commitment to a gender-balanced cabinet means that women are comparatively over-represented compared to their share of caucus. Conversely, and likely to balance caucus representation, women parliamentary secretaries are comparatively under-represented. The Conservatives, on the other hand, have compensated for their relative lack of women MPs by ensure that one-quarter have the higher profile critic roles.

For visible minorities, with the reference population adjusted to visible minorities who are citizens, the Liberals not only elected more visible minority MPs but have ensured that cabinet and parliamentary secretary representation is comparable to their caucus representation. The Conservatives have also chosen to highlight their visible minority MPs in their critic appointments.

For Indigenous peoples, the Liberals have slight under-representation in cabinet and parliamentary secretary appointments compared to the population and caucus.

Filed under Government Tagged with , , , ,

Liberals keeping Cape Breton candidate despite past racist, sexist remarks on social media

2019/10/08 Leave a comment

Hard to defend keeping this candidate apart from the need to save a safe Liberal seat.

In contrast, the Conservative decision to dump their candidate in Burnaby North-Seymour was easier, as the Conservatives ran third, albeit with 28 percent of the vote in 2015:

Justin Trudeau says past racist and sexist social-media posts from a Liberal candidate in Cape Breton were “unacceptable,” but the party is not dropping Jaime Battiste from its election campaign roster.

Sunday marked the first time Mr. Trudeau has publicly commented on Mr. Battiste’s remarks since Friday, when the Toronto Sun revealed past Facebook and Twitter posts in which the Liberal candidate for Sydney-Victoria made offensive remarks about women, Indigenous girls, gay men and Chinese people with accents. Mr. Battiste has since apologized for the posts, which date back as far as 2011, saying he wrote the posts during “difficult times” in his life.

Speaking to reporters in Plainfield, Ont., Sunday, Mr. Trudeau was asked if he felt he was limited in the action he could take against other Liberal candidates because of past photos of him in blackface and brownface, but he didn’t answer the question directly.

“We recognize that Jaime Battiste … took responsibility for his actions and has apologized,” Mr. Trudeau said.

In response to an interview request for Mr. Battiste, the Liberal Party referred to his apology instead.

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer had the day off on Sunday, but his party took to Twitter to ask if Mr. Trudeau needs to “see more before he finally fires him.”

Meanwhile, the Conservatives were dealing with another controversial candidate of their own. The party dropped Heather Leung as its candidate for Burnaby North-Seymour on Friday over offensive comments she made about the LGBTQ community.

However, video posted by CityNews in Vancouver on Saturday showed Ms. Leung’s team still putting up Conservative campaign signs with her name on them.

In a statement on Sunday, Conservative spokesperson Simon Jefferies said Ms. Leung has been told she cannot use the party’s name or logo, or represent herself as the Tory candidate.

All of the major parties have had candidate troubles. Cameron Ogilvie stepped down as Conservative candidate in Winnipeg last month over discriminatory social-media posts.

Source: Liberals keeping Cape Breton candidate despite past racist, sexist remarks on social media

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ANDREW COYNE: Why Conservatives have more at stake than Liberals in Canada’s class war

2019/07/10 Leave a comment

Coyne, as often happens, nails it. A plague on both houses, but more so for Conservatives:

Liberals, it is true, need to find a way to reach out to less educated voters, but not as badly as Conservatives need to make their peace with the eggheads

Democracy, in G. K. Chesterton’s careful definition, means government by the uneducated, “while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.”

The enduring value of this distinction was suggested by the ruckus stirred up over the weekend by Amir Attaran, professor of law at University of Ottawa. Responding to a recent Abacus Data poll finding the Tories leading the Liberals by a wide margin among Canadians with a high school diploma or less, with the Liberals ahead among those with bachelor degrees or higher, the professor tweeted: “The party of the uneducated. Every poll says this.”

In the ensuing furor, Attaran tried to protest that he was just stating a fact, but the disdain in the tweet was clear enough to most. For their part, while some Tories quibbled with the data (just one poll, within the margin of error, misplaced correlation etc), most seemed less offended by the sentiment — every poll does show the less formal education a voter has, the more likely they are to support the Conservatives — than by the suggestion there was something shameful about it.

It was, in short, another skirmish in the continuing class war: class, now defined not by occupation or birth, as in Chesterton’s time, but by education. Conservatives, true to form, professed outrage at this arrogant display of Liberal elitism, while Liberal partisans protested that they were not snobs, it’s just that Conservatives are such ignorant boobs (I paraphrase).

The professor compounded matters by objecting, not only that he is not a Liberal, but that he is not an elite, since his parents were immigrants. And everyone did their best to be as exquisitely sensitive (“let us respect the inherent dignity of labour”) as they could while still being viciously hurtful (“not uneducated, just unintelligent”).

There is, of course, much to object to in Attaran’s remark. Not all or even most wisdom is to be found in higher education. Lots of people who go to university don’t learn a thing, while much of what they do learn is tendentious rubbish. A society that sneers at tradespeople is a society on its way to the poorhouse.

Today’s populist conservative is prone to dismiss the analysis of experts, on everything from sex education to climate change, not in spite of their expertise but because of it.

But Conservative rhetoric too often seems to go beyond attacking snobbery to attacking education itself: expertise, knowledge, the whole notion that people who know more about a subject than the rest of us ought to be listened to with respect.

There is a rich tradition, to be sure, of conservative skepticism of intellectuals — recall William F. Buckley’s crack about preferring to be governed by “the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory” than the faculty of Harvard. But the target then was the hubris of intellectuals, convinced they could plan an entire economy or overturn the accumulated wisdom of centuries of tradition, not intellectualism itself: scientism, not science.

Today’s populist conservative, by contrast, is prone to dismiss the analysis of experts, on everything from sex education to climate change, not in spite of their expertise but because of it. A society that sneers at “so-called experts” is a society on its way to the madhouse.

As in most wars, there is fault on both sides. If Trump and Ford voters brim with resentment at “liberal elites” looking down their noses at them, it is not entirely without cause.

And yet we should beware of drawing the class lines too starkly. Graduates of apprenticeships and community colleges are themselves relative elites — 46 per cent of adult Canadians have no post-secondary education — and earn more accordingly: a premium of 12 and 18 per cent, respectively, over those with only a high school diploma.

At the same time, universities are for the most part glorified trade schools. Only 12 per cent of today’s university students graduate in the humanities, the object of so much (deserved) conservative ridicule. The rest are there to learn a trade — only trades of a tonier kind, like doctoring and lawyering.

It isn’t so much about the level of education, then, as the kind of education. (Trump, as he likes to boast, is a graduate of Wharton.) There is a high degree of overlap between “liberal elites” and “symbolic analysts” (in Robert Reich’s term) — people who make their living manipulating words, numbers, images, code.

It is Conservatives who have played the class card more heavily, and with more destructive results.

What is common to all those doctors and lawyers, academics and bureaucrats, designers, artists, and, yes, media people is that they deal in ideas — with the abstract versus the physical, representation versus reality — and are typically good at communicating these to others. Not for nothing are they sometimes called the “chattering classes.”

The ability to do so earns not only income, but social and cultural “capital,” at least among their fellow class members, clustered in the centres of our major cities. That there should be some degree of estrangement between them and those outside is not surprising, but one wishes political leaders would seek to bridge these divides rather than exacerbate them.

There is fault, as I say, on either side for this; but there is not equal fault. Liberal “virtue-signalling” may flatter the moral vanity of the educated classes, but it is Conservatives who have played the class card more heavily, and with more destructive results. Class wars are always toxic, but class wars organized around “is education a good thing” are suicidal.

And not only for society. Here’s the thing: the numbers of the higher educated are growing. The 2016 census was the first to show more than half the adult population — 54 per cent — with some kind of postsecondary degree, college or university, up from 48 per cent a decade before. And it is only going to continue: younger Canadians are more likely to have a degree than their parents, and their children will be more likely still.

Liberals, it is true, need to find a way to reach out to less educated voters, but not as badly as Conservatives need to make their peace with the eggheads.

Source: ANDREW COYNE: Why Conservatives have more at stake than Liberals in Canada’s class war

Filed under Government Tagged with , , , , ,

The political debate over migrants hasn’t turned ugly yet – but it could

2018/04/28 Leave a comment

Good piece by Aaron Wherry:

The Liberals want the Conservatives to watch their words. The Conservatives want a plan. They’re both right.

The debate over what to do about the asylum seekers crossing our southern border — revived this week after the Quebec government worried aloud about its ability to deal with a possible surge of arrivals this summer — is serious, tawdry and dangerous.

On Wednesday, for instance, Conservatives celebrated when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged in the Commons that crossing the border between official points of entry could be called “illegal.”

(The government typically refers to “irregular” border crossings. The Conservatives insist on calling them “illegal.”)

NDP MP Jenny Kwan later stood on a point of order to argue that, according to a strict reading of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the people crossing the border at places like Roxham Road in Quebec aren’t committing a crime.

Conservative MP Michelle Rempel accused the NDP of quibbling over “semantics,” but the adjective “illegal” is obviously meaningful to the Official Opposition. And when applied to human beings with families and children who might have excellent reasons for fleeing their home country, “illegal” is at least a fraught term.

Playing politics

The Conservatives, who describe the ongoing border crossings as a “crisis,” would like the government to table a plan for resolving the situation. They went as far as tabling a motion in the House this week calling on the Liberals to do so.

But — in the classic style of opposition motions — the request for a plan was buried in text that would have had the government acknowledge its “failure to address the crisis” and “admit the Prime Minister’s irresponsibility of tweeting #WelcometoCanada to those seeking to enter Canada through illegal means.”

 

And so Liberal MPs declined to support the motion in a vote on Tuesday, and so Conservative MP Ted Falk stood in the House on Wednesday and lamented the prime minister’s refusal “to even commit to a plan.”

The Conservatives also charge that the irregular arrivals are “queue jumpers,” a description the government rejects.

The Liberals argue the Conservative and NDP proposals — respectively, to declare the entire border to be an official port of entry, or to unilaterally suspend Canada’s border agreement with the United States — are both irredeemably flawed. And the situation is certainly complicated, legally and practically.

But writing down and publishing a detailed plan could still be useful.

In the meantime, each side is warning the other about where all this might be headed.

‘The flames of fear and division’

“I recommend that my colleague choose his words carefully, because false information and incendiary rhetoric only fan the flames of fear and division,” Transport Minister Marc Garneau said Tuesday, scolding Conservative MP Pierre Paul-Hus.

“I’m worried that the dialogue in Canada is going to switch from ‘how we do immigration’ to ‘if we do immigration,’ ” Rempel told CBC radio’s As It Happens that same day.

On Wednesday, Trudeau said it was “completely irresponsible of the Conservatives to arouse fears and concerns about our immigration system and refugees.”

But Rempel contends that it’s the Liberals who could be inciting division.

“As someone who supports compassionate, planned, orderly migration, and sees it as a key to sustaining the Canadian economy over time when done properly, legally, and safely, I worry that by abdicating the responsibility to do this, it is actually the Liberal Party that is creating divisiveness in the country,” she told the House this week.

More than 6,000 people have crossed the Quebec border seeking asylum so far in 2018 and officials expect the surge to continue with the onset of warmer weather 7:34

Trudeau’s tweet and Trump’s edicts

Canada takes pride these days in not being the sort of place where such divisiveness dominates. But you don’t need to look far here to see how large-scale, unplanned immigration can trigger something ugly and destructive.

In the United States, migration has helped to inspire a nativist litany of grievances that is warping American politics. In Europe, it has helped to birth a new era of nationalism. All sides should be aware of the forces at play here.

However much the prime minister’s tweet on January 28, 2017 acted as a beacon to those seeking refuge, policy decisions in the United States are no doubt giving people good reasons to flee.

But that American approach isn’t likely to change soon. On Thursday, the Trump administration announced that 9,000 Nepalese immigrants will have to leave by June 2019. And even if Trudeau had never hashtagged a message of welcome to the world, the federal government would still bear the responsibility for managing the border.

Liberals can point to the emissaries they have dispatched to dissuade would-be travellers, but such efforts will be discounted if the rate of crossings doesn’t decline. The Trudeau government can point to the funding and resources it has committed to dealing with the new arrivals, but ultimately the Trudeau Liberals may find they have little room now to quibble with the premier of Quebec, or to suggest that it’s the province that should be doing more to accommodate asylum seekers.

If social services in Quebec are noticeably stretched, if immigration procedures bog down, if community tensions rise, Ottawa will be blamed.

Of course, all of this — the number of people crossing the border, the processing and integration of those people while they’re here, the language being used to talk about them — are ripe for political exploitation.

Responsible critics have a duty to avoid overstating the danger here. Responsible governments have a responsibility to limit the grounds for concern.

Source: The political debate over migrants hasn’t turned ugly yet – but it could

Filed under Immigration, Refugees Tagged with , , ,

Forget sovereignty, a new political divide is ready to split Quebecers – Macleans.ca

2017/12/14 Leave a comment

New political fault lines? Or just another variation of identity politics?

The divisions that once defined Quebec are dissolving before the eyes of its oldest political parties. Less than a year before the next election, fear of another referendum—or desire for one—is no longer top of voters’ minds, challenging the raisons d’être of both the ruling federalist Liberals and their rivals, the separatist Parti Québécois. Freed from the old worries, though, Quebecers might soon be following the worldwide trend of right-left polarization, splitting along populist and progressive lines.

The Liberals were elected with a majority in 2014 after the PQ’s attempt to capitalize on Quebec’s decade-long identity debate with the Charter of Quebec Values. It will go down as one of the worst misplays in the province’s political history, says François Pétry, a Université Laval political scientist, because much as they like debating the value of state secularism, Quebecers are disturbed by the idea of fighting with each other.

Now, after three years of focusing on the province’s economy, and pulling it out of deficit, Premier Philippe Couillard is wading into that same territory. Bill 62, a new law banning face coverings while receiving public services, was championed by the Liberals, and is already subject to two court challenges.

 It is drawing ire from all sides. Civil liberties advocates say it unfairly targets a tiny portion of Muslim women, while the nationalist opposition parties, Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) and the PQ, say it doesn’t go far enough. Premiers across the country have denounced it and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said the federal government is studying legal ways it could join the chorus. “It’s not a good initiative, purely on the electoral front,” Pétry says, adding the law figured nowhere in the Liberals’ election platform. “If you start to create conflicts between Quebecers, [you’re] probably going to suffer the consequences.”
It’s one of the few mistakes Couillard has made, according to Pétry, who tracks politicians’ promises and says Couillard has kept more of his than any premier in recent Quebec history. That and the government’s strong fiscal performance makes the Liberals’ recent slump in the polls a paradox. The most recent by Leger, published in October, had the Liberals running second to the four-year-old, right-of-centre CAQ on the question of voting intentions, with 29 per cent support compared to 34 per cent for the CAQ.

Couillard may be paying, says Pétry, for ethics blunders made by the party under its former leader, Jean Charest, which have tainted how voters view the party. What’s more, the Liberals have been in power since 2003, save for a two-year stint by the PQ under Pauline Marois, leaving many antsy for change.

“For the first time in 40 years, a party other than the PQ and the PLQ could be in power, and that’s a real feat,” says Dan Pelletier, a 45-year-old Laval security guard who plans to vote CAQ in the next election. Pelletier says he’s for legislation like Bill 62, as long as it’s done “with respect for the [minority] communities that live with us, without becoming authoritarian.”

Still, the CAQ, which has been criticized for sowing us-versus-them political division, has vowed to enact even further-reaching religious attire legislation, which would put Quebec at greater odds with the rest of the country. It’s a prospect that worries Emilie Nicolas, co-founder of Québec Inclusif and a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Toronto, who says Quebec has seen “a progressive normalization of distrust of Muslim communities” since the early 2000s.

Discussions surrounding religious accommodations have long been placed in the context of Quebec’s separating of church and state in the 1960s. Some say that watershed moment can no longer be used to explain Quebec’s unease with those different from its French settlers. “In this day and age no society is an island,” says Arjun Tremblay, a postdoctoral fellow at the Université du Québec à Montréal who studies the politics of multiculturalism. He doubts any Quebec leader can steer clear of addressing identity for long—it “strikes an emotional chord in a lot of people,” he says, “and can be used to mobilize segments of the electorate.”

Tremblay, like others, points to the Trump administration’s “thinly veiled anti-Muslim” immigration and refugee bans. A far-right movement is gaining ground in the province, especially in Quebec City, where less than a year ago a mass shooting at a mosque left six dead and 19 seriously injured. The suspect, 27-year-old Alexandre Bissonnette, was said to have an affinity for Trump and the white nationalist groups supporting him.

The attack fuelled calls for the Quebec government to launch a formal commission looking into systemic racism in the province. But a month after it launched, Couillard changed its focus and name, ridding it of terms of reference relating to systemic racism in favour of vaguer language on discrimination and integrating immigrants. Nicolas says the move, compounded by Bill 62, shows how out of touch Quebec politicians are with the appetite among young voters to address social justice issues. “Millennials are not that young anymore,” she says, “and it turns out that they can vote if they feel like it makes a difference.”

Case in point: the Nov. 5 election of Valérie Plante, the first woman voted mayor of Montreal, who ran on a platform of progressive politics and on her independence from the political establishment. Her cheery demeanour helped. Plante’s predecessor, Denis Coderre, a former Liberal MP and cabinet minister, was seen as arrogant. Quebec’s main parties may be driven and divided by 1990s politics, Nicolas says, but that’s changing, “actually as we speak.”

Whether the Liberals find a way to renew themselves or dig deeper into old debates will determine how they do come October 2018, she predicts. Either way, the old guard remains in place and has 11 months to pick up the pieces. And if there’s one thing the experts agree on, it’s that 11 months in politics is a long time.

via Forget sovereignty, a new political divide is ready to split Quebecers – Macleans.ca

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