Conservative leadership hopeful Kellie Leitch has ignited a bit of a firestorm with her suggestion that perhaps the country should screen potential immigrants and refugees for "anti-Canadian values," and rather than walking away from that suggestion and claiming it was all one big misunderstanding, she has doubled down and said that we should expect to hear more about this as her campaign progresses. To date, two other leadership hopefuls Michael Chong and Maxime Bernier have disavowed this position, as has the party's interim leader, Rona Ambrose, but if you delve a little deeper into the message that Leitch is trying to send, it's all deeply curious where her thought process lies, and what vision of the party she is laying out.
To say that there is a list of unified "Canadian values" is one of those kinds of exercises that politicians like to engage in, but tend to ultimately serve partisan ends. A Liberal's version of what Canadian values are will align more closely with their party's values, as would a Conservative's version, and these are the kinds of fights that start showing up in issues like the citizenship guides, and the overwrought wars over just how much they mention the War of 1812 and Canada's military history, or how much they are about UN peacekeeping missions and humanitarian works. Even the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is not a wholly inclusive document or an exhaustive list, and there are places where values have needed to be read into the text, such as with LGBT rights. Where Leitch's problem is that her vision of Canadian values is one that is at odds with much of her own party, and that many Canadians wouldn't pass either.
In her list of values, Leitch proposes screening out "intolerance towards other religions, cultures and sexual orientations, violent and/or misogynist behaviour and/or a lack of acceptance of our Canadian tradition of personal and economic freedoms." Now, suspending our disbelief and assuming that Leitch has found a fool-proof method of testing these values (whether by polygraph or telepath), how many people born in Canada would pass the tests related to tolerance toward religions, cultures and sexual orientations? You'll find that there is no universal acceptance at work in this country, particularly among those who are taking up Leitch's call and agitating about the "creeping Sharia" in this country. Right-wing trolls on social media are deriding Leitch's critics as being willing to accept "refugee rapists" into this country, as though rapists are endemic only to foreigners and are alien to the Canadian-born population.
That Leitch is looking to protect tolerance toward sexual orientations is not a surprise for anyone who knows her I've met many a gay Conservative who will sing Leitch's praises, and many who've worked for her or on her campaigns. This certainly isn't a universal feeling in her party, however, and you have two declared leadership candidates (Brad Trost and Pierre Lemieux) who are using their platforms to rail against same-sex marriage. That they were soundly defeated in the party's last policy convention is of no matter to them they have socially conservative values that they wish to promote and find a base within the party to rally around them with. It's also one of those topics that the party itself used to use as a gateway to attracting votes in different ethno-cultural minority communities, with Jason Kenney touring every cultural buffet around the country to talk about how they had shared social conservative values, and same-sex marriage was one of those wedge issues that the party used to bring some of those communities on board. That makes the inclusion on Leitch's list to be curious indeed, and seems to turn the leadership contest into one of selecting which intolerance to run on.
Violent and misogynistic behaviour is another one of those fraught issues that Leitch is wading in. It's not even dog-whistle politics because there are no coded messages here, and it goes directly to Leitch's promotion of the "Barbaric Cultural Practices" tip line during the last election the notion that so-called "honour killings" are somehow inherently worse than the run-of-the-mill domestic homicide that happens in Canada, where the statistic that gets thrown around is that one woman is murdered by her domestic partner every six days in this country. That they are considered as a separate and worse practice because they are couched in terms about culture is appealing to intolerance toward other religions and cultures kind of like her insistence that it's a Canadian value not to do so.
That Leitch went on TV and shed tears about how her "tip line" proposal was badly handled, and even recently insisting that it was a good idea that was poorly communicated, because as she repeated ad nauseum that this was about women and children needing to know that there was someone at the other end of the line (as though 911 is a business-hours only service), it does make one wonder about Leitch's capacity in a leadership position. Her concern for these women and children may very well be genuine, and I'm sure it is, but she seems to lack the ability not only to communicate that these concerns should be universal and not strictly limited to calling out specific cultures that she disagrees with (because really, I'm sure that everyone would accept that domestic violence is barbaric regardless of what culture it is wrapped up in).
Leitch has demonstrated a complete lack of self-awareness for her words and actions, which is what should be concerning to her campaign. It's not just about adopting this cynical Donald Trump-esque talking point about "extreme vetting" as though our problems with domestic terrorism or domestic violence is coming from an outside source it's about the fact that she has a demonstrated lack of emotional quotient when it comes to communicating any kind of issues. Does any party want a leader who is that tone-deaf? I sincerely doubt it.
