Two events took place this weekend - Donald Trump’s trying to make it harder for American companies to bring top talents to the US, and Canada is officially recognizing a State Of Palestine. Seemingly, there’s not a lot of connective tissue between the two issues, but they’re actually best understood together.
The case for recognition is thornier, because it is a bad faith bonanza for all involved. The Conservatives are claiming Mark Carney has recognized Hamas (we haven’t), they’re pointing out that we set out a conditional path to recognition and then never cared about the conditions (true), and people are pretending that we have leverage on Hamas (we don’t). For me, this is pretty simple - the stated position of the Canadian government is Gaza and the West Bank aren’t Israeli territory. If that’s true, then the land has to be considered someone else’s, and denying Palestinians recognition because it’ll piss off Bibi isn’t a good enough answer.
I disagree with the idea that recognition should be a carrot dangled in front of the Palestinian Authority for performative gestures of strength, because we recognize plenty of horrific regimes. We don’t claim Saudi Arabian land isn’t theirs just because they don’t let women or gay people have equal rights. We don’t claim the Republic of China still controls Mainland China because the communists are totalitarian, and in the view of the Canadian Parliament, guilty of genocide. If the new rule is that recognition is contingent on a minimum amount of human rights, that’s fine, but we’ll have to unrecognize a hell of a lot of countries first.
That said, as a pure act of realpolitik, I’m not an idiot. Our hypocrisy on recognition up to now did give us a certain limited amount of leverage, and it’s arguable that we gave it up without extracting enough. What would be enough, given our leverage is over the almost entirely toothless PA and not Hamas, to feel like we got something “worth it”, can be debated by smarter people than me, but I’ll listen to such an argument. But Carney’s critics aren’t making such a reasoned or coherent case.
The other news of the weekend is that America is about to give up their best comparative advantage and potentially allow that flood of the best and brightest to be shared around. It’s objectively great news for Canada that the US is willing to shoot itself in the foot, and we should move heaven and earth to find slots within our immigration allotments to bring in people who would have gone to the US in the past to Canada.
Now, it was apparently an open question to some whether Canadians would accept these immigrants, and I would like to make clear that anyone suggesting that they wouldn’t is a moron. The Canadian people have not rebelled against immigration as a whole or against immigrants, they have changed their minds about a specific set of decisions taken by Justin Trudeau to throw the doors open on TFWs and low skill immigration while allowing the provinces to run diploma mills with foreign students. More bluntly, Canadians are not idiots who cannot tell the difference between bringing in the next generation of professionals to build and grow here and not in America and waves of foreign students working under the table at gas stations, fast food places, and outlet malls.
Canadians deserve to be treated like adults. It shouldn’t be a novel opinion, and yet it seems to be one these days. The Canadian people can be trusted to differentiate complicated, or not even that complicated, situations, and to meet the facts where they deserve to be met. Our politics, and our pundits, often treat us like fools to be handled and not people to be trusted, and that mentality is killing us.
Pierre Poilievre was asked on CTV on Sunday why Canadians should trust him, given he claimed killing the carbon tax would lower food prices. His answer was to take a victory lap, and then say Carney has doubled the deficit and printed money since taking office. Nowhere in his answer or his previous one where he attacked Carney for the worst economy in the G7 did Trump, America, or any of it come up. It’s obvious nonsense, but it’s apparently what plays. I assume it hits great if you’re an idiot, but it’s incredibly stupid - in the same way that people blaming Harper for lower average growth than some other PMs was, given that he had to handle the fucking Global Financial Crisis.
Hell, the Star’s scoop today that Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree told a gun owner that the gun buy back was the result of pressure from Quebec and that if they could go back his position would be to scrap it and restart is another example. His response is that his comments were “misguided” and that he supports the policy - clearly he doesn’t, or he was lying to a constituent of his. Either way, it’s not good enough.
We need to start holding politicians to fucking standards. We need to start expecting people to trust Canadians to be mature adults and not the blithering, drooling idiots that clearly everybody expects us to be. We are clearly capable of making the right decisions, or at least of carefully considering new circumstances when they arise, as the instant change in public opinion when Trudeau resigned and a competent alternative showed up shows.
The reason Poilievre’s lead was on some level built on sand was because he treated Canadians like idiots. He did very good work identifying what Canadians were pissed at Trudeau for, but his solutions were at best simplistic and at worst offensively useless. Poilievre didn’t trust Canadians to hear a complicated answer, so that’s why everything was Verb The Fucking Noun. He’s clearly teeing up to do the same thing against Carney, and we cannot let it be successful. Where he goes simple, Carney has to trust Canadians - and I’m confident he’ll be rewarded.
I don't often comment on articles, but in this case I am because I want to say thank you for recognizing Canadians deserve better from our Politicians, pundits, and I would add, MSM. Canadians are capable of critical thinking and able "to meet the facts where they deserve to be met." I believe MSM has played an out-sized role in the dumbed down discourse. Too often these days I find myself saying "Do they think we're stupid?" after watching a news show, where frankly, Journalists ask too many lazy questions and don't hold Politicians feet to the fire enough.
Poilievre was (again) exposed last weekend in the CTV interview. His supporters declared victory and claimed that he owned the Liberals, the more neutral observer recognized the same Poilievre from before the election campaign.
If I would be advising Poilievre I would recommend to create an advisory panel of serious conservative people. People leaning to right and with serious credentials in economics, law, public safety, finance, defence etc. Sober, not flashy and without agenda to articulate a credible and reasonable alternative to Carney. This would be the only way to counter the clear competence gap between Poilievre and Carney.
The problem however with this approach is that this panel will in some cases say “Carney is right, we should indeed do X. It is the best best way”. Completely expected, after all Carney is not an idiot and will get some things right, even in the eye of sensible Conservatives. And this is a problem for Poilievre who has made a career in claiming that everything, no exceptions, the Liberals do is flawed, corrupt, etc. The guy cannot pivot and is stuck in the only gear that he has.