2 days Ago By Kelly McParland
In a contest for which liberal-minded policy project has gone most disastrously wrong, there would have to be big money on immigration. There are rivals, of course. The massive debts racked up to finance heavy spending on well-meaning initiatives is one, but voters don’t care much about debt until it sparks a crisis.
The climate war is another, except most people view it as a worthy goal, they just don’t want to pay for it. Nope, it’s immigration that has most forcefully blown up in liberal faces across the western world. Levels of toleration that varied from middling to strong have eroded into a range from grumbling disfavour to active hostility.
Canada, as a country formerly proud of its public support for an open and tolerant program, stands out for its stark shift in attitude. While much attention has been focused on Donald Trump’s scheme for “sweeping raids, giant camps and mass deportations” (in the words of the liberal New York Times), the president-elect may be particularly crude in his rhetoric, but is hardly alone in his attitude. Great Britain, for instance, recently changed governments from a Conservative regime, hell bent on mass deportations, to a Labour administration just as keen on expulsions but seemingly more efficient at organizing them.
Former prime minister Rishi Sunak put two years of effort — paralleling his entire time in office — promoting a controversial plan to fly thousands of illegal immigrants to Rwanda on charter flights, whether they came from that African country or not. Airfields had been alerted, staff hired, aircraft booked and an army of judges assembled to handle human rights claims, aided by a new law aimed at evading just such claims. Rwanda had already been paid the equivalent of $425 million to take in the deportees when Sunak’s Conservatives lost to Labour in July.
Far from curtailing the project, the new left-wing government promptly announced it intends to set new records in expelling thousands of people who had floated up to British shores in rickety boats from Europe. Yvette Cooper, the new Home Secretary, unveiled “plans for the next six months to achieve the highest rate of removals of those with no right to be here, including failed asylum seekers, for five years.” Her goal was to deport 14,500 people within six months, many of them from newly-established “removal centres.
” Three months into his mandate, Prime Minister Keir Starmer boasted that removals were up 23 per cent over Tory levels. European views on immigration have worsened steadily since turmoil in Syria and crackdowns in other countries sent millions of people to seek better lives in western countries. Germany was much praised when it initially opened its borders to at least a million asylum seekers, but has since seen such a sharp change in feeling that the overtly anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) became the first far right party since Second World War to win an important election when it claimed a hard-fought regional victory in September.
French elections last spring featured a spirited battle over which party had the toughest immigration policies, producing a result that left the country largely adrift with no clear winner. Canada stands out amid the fray, however. For decades, Canadians expressed a pride approaching smugness in the high levels of support for ever-rising immigration quotas and the civility of the welcome offered newcomers.
There was widespread agreement that immigration brought with it growth, energy, new ideas, broad experience and an array of benefits in food, music, style, the arts and other cultural attractions. No more. The Trudeau government now sees electoral advantage — or more likely necessity — in hot-footing it to the front of the deportation parade, as if it weren’t responsible for the policies that produced the parade in the first place.
In a sharp reversal of previous positions, Immigration Minister Marc Miller proclaimed last week in Vancouver that whatever it was Ottawa thought its border policies were achieving was no longer operative. “It’s clear that the age of unlimited supply of cheap foreign labour is over, and I think that is a good thing,” he announced. “Bringing the numbers down, I think, is very important to making sure that we aren’t simply chasing short-term gain for a lot of long-term pain.
” Short-term gain is precisely what the Liberal approach to immigration has been all about. Annual admissions have almost doubled since 2015. The government saw it as a way to secure reliable votes from grateful newcomers, provide abundant low-wage labour, fill schools with foreign students paying high tuitions, and support Liberals’ eagerness to portray themselves as caring, tolerant and good-hearted.
Instead, the rise in population is blamed for a housing crisis, college campuses have become puppy mills for overcharged students, tens of thousands of newcomers have seen their hopes of a permanent new life in Canada dashed, and Canada’s international reputation has been badly sullied. The number of students seeking asylum has grown from about 1,800 in 2018 to more than 12,500 in 2023. In the first nine months of this year, there had already been almost 14,000 requests.
More than 1.2 million people granted temporary residency are being told to leave by next year in what would be an unprecedented outflow. The backlog in refugee claims has reached 260,000, creating a lineup so lengthy it allows claimants to spend additional years in the country awaiting their hearing.
A big problem with well-meaning, but ill-considered, social programs is that they bring the aim itself into disrepute when they go wrong. Eight years ago, when Justin Trudeau was keen on differentiating his views from a bellicose new U.S.
president named Trump, he fired off a message obviously intended to reflect Canada’s superior righteousness. “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith,” he tweeted . The day after Trump was voted back into the White House this month, all that had changed.
“Canadians quite rightly believe that it needs to be a decision of Canada and Canadians who comes to our country and who doesn’t,” asserted Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. “That is something that’s really important, it’s fundamental.” National Post.
