When a politician takes a stand that he knows is counter to a majority of voters, he must have a reason. This is the question we need to ask ourselves when we hear that Maxime Bernier and his new people’s party promoting a policy to drastically reduce Canada’s immigration and apply more rigorous rules as to eligibility to come here. Is Bernier just scratching an itch of right-wing conservatives or is he narrowing down his sights to just a breakthrough in Quebec?
Bernier obviously does not give a damn for the economic harm his suggestions would do to Canada as a whole. What he ignores is that every immigrant is a consumer. Every immigrant adds to our base of consumers. Every immigrant adds to our gross domestic product. Bernier wants to take that economic advantage away from us.
Bernier is playing to what is called ‘Dog Whistle’ politics. He is playing to ignorance. He uses buzz words that people hear but never really bother to understand. He uses studies by the Fraser Institute that is famous for hiring failed academics to provide pseudo statistics and reports to prove the institute’s right-wing bias.
The recent speech he gave to a small crowd of supporters in Mississauga, Ontario was guaranteed to gain him publicity. It is hard to ignore an anti-immigration speech in a city built by immigrants and flourishing with immigration.
While Bernier sees his efforts as a slice of the Donald Trump type populism, it is not getting the attention he needs to build his movement. The real cruelty of his immigration policies is his attitude towards family re-unification. He wants to end Canada’s time-honoured willingness to allow immigrants to bring parents and grandparents to Canada once the new Canadian has established here.
We can probably expect him to soon demand a wall be built along the Canada-U.S. border to keep out the migrants. You can say a lot of things about Maxime Bernier but Donald Trump, he is not.
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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry
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