The Star’s Dated Progressivism

On Border Bills And Banality

Althia Raj has a piece in the Star on the Government’s new border and general public safety bill today built around the premise that the bill’s shit, and that nobody voted for it. There’s a bunch of immigration related provisions - making it harder for students and TFWs to claim refugee status if they’ve been in Canada for a year, which she frames as a bad thing for reasons passing understanding - as well as some longtime asks of the security services and the police on other things.

I’m not going to defend the bill in all of its parts - it’s been out for less than a day and it’s very plausible to likely that the government got the balance of civil liberties to national interest wrong. It’s a reasonable argument to make, and one I’m happy the Star exists to make. But the idea we didn’t vote for this? Yes we did.

The country has made clear it wants less immigrants, tougher crime and justice penalties, and lower housing costs. Those are basically the only things we can definitively say about the election result. We know this from issue polling, what the government has prioritized after the election, what swing voters have said about why they moved, the death of the NDP who opposed the first two, and what the Conservatives tell us were winners for them through what they continue to message. We can as close to sure as we possibly can be that this is what mattered in April.

Now, is that a good thing? Who knows! We live in a democracy and that means other people are allowed to think that letting people come to Canada as an international student and then claim refugee status when their visa expires to stay is a good thing. They’re fucking idiots, but they’re allowed to think that. But the claim that we didn’t vote for this - that this isn’t who we are - is deeply fucking out of touch.

The problem for those who want Canada to still be the country we were a decade ago is that we’re not. The “lived experiences” of Canadians, to use the progressive verbiage, has made a lot of people a lot more right wing on immigration and crime. The prospect of making it harder for people to claim refugee status would have been political death for the Conservatives in 2015. In 2025 it’s a political winner for the Liberals. The reason? Canadians have realized that a few of the progressive tautologies they used to embrace broke like a cheap condom when actually taken to their logical conclusion.

It would be nice if the leading voice in the progressive paper of record in this country would be interested in understanding why this has happened, and it’s pretty bad that some of the most intellectually stimulating work on what Canadian progressivism in the 2020s is happening on this site and not, I don’t know, in the pages of the Star. But many on the Canadian left need to properly internalize the fact that the leftwing Canadian politics they want to push for - call it Karina Gould’s leadership views, preachy leftism without a need for compromise - is about as popular as drinking one’s own piss right now. The NDP and Greens just got a combined 8% of the vote. The appetite for this kind of progressivism doesn’t exist.

What is replacing it is a more muscularly nativist articulation of progressive values. The fact that immigration policy has gone from a policy progressives take because we’re humanitarians to a much more utilitarian approach about Canadian self interest is proof. The fact that the Conservatives ran on maintaining key social supports like dental, pharma, and child care shows that the left has won many economic battles, but we’ve lost many cultural ones. And our job, if we want to look forward, is to find a way to strike a better balance between the current rising nativist tide and the pre-COVID progressive consensus that failed us.

Clearly the crime policies of the last decade haven’t worked, as either a political project or a governance one. Violent crime is up a third since 2015, and that’s a fact that cannot be ignored or handwaved away. So, what is the progressive solution to the dual crises of rising crime rates and police brutality? How do we enact needed reforms to the policing system to ensure we get better outcomes while restoring safety?

On refugee status, a lot of Canadians quite rightly take pride in how we can integrate and give a second chance to some of the poorest and neediest people in the world. But we have an asylum system that isn’t fit for purpose at a time when the overall picture on immigration and population growth is completely different. What reforms can and should we be advocating for that end fraud and abuse in the system from TFWs and international students just trying to overstay expired visas without hurting legitimate refugees? If the two week period for people who crossed into Canada is too restrictive, what’s the right period?

You see, all of these questions are difficult and there aren’t obvious answers. It’s much easier to ask if Canada has suddenly abandoned progressive values by passing something it’s unclear we want, than to reckon with the fact Canadians want this. As someone who came to care about Australian politics at the aborted March 2013 coup against Julia Gillard and therefore at arguably the peak of the political crisis around boats, claimed refugee status, and offshore detention, I was a smug asshole about the fact that in Canada our political consensus was for more immigration not less. But Australia in many ways stands now as a warning sign of progressive failure opening the door to a worse world, where the left has to dance to the right’s beat on the issue or else never again govern.

If Althia Raj wants a government that doesn’t support immigration restrictions and tougher crime policy, she’s free to say so. But the Star should stop pretending it’s 2017 and use its status as the progressive paper of record to forge a new kind of Canadian progressivism in 2025 and beyond, instead of getting lapped to that goal.