Canada And The Rise Of Nativism Of Necessity

On Immigration, Housing, And Politics

As someone who first read The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich in Grade 7 and spent a lot of my youth thinking about the politics of “others”, both in a long historical context and in the context of Quebec independence and my Anglo Quebec heritage, I’ve thought a lot about nativism, immigration, and how to avoid a return to the politics of hatred.

Canada has luckily avoided the nativism of our most comparable cousin, the Aussies. In 1988, eventual Prime Minister John Howard endorsed the reduction not of immigration levels in totality, but solely that of Asian immigration. When returned to the leadership 7 years later, Howard had come to apologize for the view, and in office immigration policy was genuinely race blind, but it came at a cost. The rise of One Nation and the nativist right came from the Coalition’s (correct) abandonment of that stance.

The reason this is important is that Canada isn’t Australia, and there isn’t a large constituency for the reduction of immigration on the basis of race. This country’s great success is that we have avoided the usual levels of race based animus that can infect populations, and for a while we’ve been content that that means we don’t have to think about immigration, certainly not in a political context.

The problem is, immigration is becoming a political issue, but it’s becoming one in an almost uniquely Canadian way – far from concerns about it being an ugly import of American culture war, what’s growing is a bespoke concern about capacity. Nativism Of Necessity, you might call it.

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The most notable thing about the increase in doubts about Canadian immigration policy is the hushed tones and veiled language used to describe it. As David Coletto notes in his research on this topic, the rise of “I’m pro-immigration, but” sentiments is what’s driving a lot of this concern. The idea that a Canadian politician could have more to gain than to lose by promising to lower immigration would have been insane to even consider a decade ago, when Jason Kenney was running around to every house of worship and community centre in this country promising that the Canadian Conservatives loved immigrant communities as much as those communities loved Canada. Hell, the Globe – you know, the Laurentian Elite, neoliberal, globalist Globe – has run multiple op-eds calling for lower immigration to lessen strain on our capacity. These calls are not coming from the fringe right.

It will make a lot of people feel better to label those in favour of reducing immigration as bigots, but it won’t reckon with the fundamental truth that there is a middle on this issue that is instinctively pro-immigration but open to changing its mind given the facts at hand. And right now, that middle is being lost in a sea of capacity issues, from classroom size to wait times to housing shortages.

The Liberals have a choice, they can either lower the target, increase capacity to reduce strain, or do nothing and see the trickle of disaffection turn into a full blown attack on the consensus on immigration as a good thing. The likelihood the government lowers the target is non-existent – it goes against both the policy the government has set and the story the government likes to tell about itself, so the only available option is to wildly increase capacity.

If the Liberals want to get on the front foot, explaining in increasingly condescending terms that it’s Doug Ford and Francois Legault’s fault that new graduates in good paying jobs have to move back home is not the right answer, because even if housing is provincial jurisdiction, the Feds are making it worse. If the Federal Government said tomorrow we wouldn’t let in any more immigrants, students, anything – that the only people who could come to live in Canada were pro athletes on Canadian teams – in 3 years the housing market would be in a better shape.

Now that would be a fucking disaster for our country in a lot of ways, but the number of people in this country has a direct effect on the demand for housing, and trying to fit increasingly bigger and bigger populations into comparatively smaller capacity is a recipe for disaster. The number of people in this country compared to the number of units of housing has increased, because of the Federal government. Walking away from that on a flimsy jurisdictional argument is as idiotic as it is heartless.

A January Abacus poll showed that 70% of Canadian thought the Liberals weren’t doing enough on the cost of housing. This is not a population willing to listen to an argument that Doug Ford is to blame for the rise in house prices when the feds, on merit, own a decent chunk of the responsibility for it. But even if they didn’t, the government has to meet the voters where they are not where they want the voters to be.

Politics is not the Oxford debating society; virtue is not solely important. Politics is both about the art of the possible and about changing what is seen to be possible. There is no time when relentless apathy has ever won, and governments that eschew challenges are always replaced by ones that seem up for the fight. The reason dying governments are deemed to be out of time is because lethargy and apathy take hold.

If the government is apathetic to the issue that has one of the biggest cutthroughs, then it deserves to lose. A hands off approach as they bring the people in and leave them to fend for themselves is as inhumane as it is insane. And if the government doesn’t get a handle on this, they’ll invite a much worse reaction.

We have been lucky that we have not seen a rise in nativist sentiment so far, and that those who are questioning our immigration policy are continuing to believe in the value of immigration in a general sense. If we continue to let this status quo go on, we will endanger the cross-partisan consensus that immigration as a concept is good, both amongst elites and voters. We don’t want a future where wide swathes of Canadian voters – and especially the young, who are social liberals and viscerally pro immigration – view nativism as a necessary long term condition.

We can either spend some money now and build some fucking schools, hospitals, and houses, or we will pay for our failures in an energized, actively angry nativist movement. Right now, Canada’s in the beginning of a movement of Nativism Of Necessity – we have to make sure our failures don’t make these people come to the conclusion that there’s no solution other than nativism for the long term.