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Day: May 8, 2018

If I had $50,000 in extra spending money, I'd use it to commission a nation-wide poll which would expose the amazing true secret of climate change.  (Disclaimer: that's just a rhetorical comment, in reality I'd used the money for something fun.)

But since I don't have $50,000 to spend on a poll, I'll just tell you.

The amazing true secret of climate change is that it's a political "MacGuffin."

"MacGuffin," if you're not familiar with the term, describes something in a movie which pushes the plot forward: the Maltese Falcon, the Ark of the Covenant, the Infinity Stones.

As famed film director Alfred Hitchcock put it, the MacGuffin is the thing which the characters care about but the audience doesn't.

This brings us back to the climate change issue; it's a MacGuffin in my view because, while the characters on Canada's political stage might care about it, I believe regular voters don't.

This is why I would commission a poll, just to prove that point.

Mind you, my poll wouldn't ask people something as blunt as, "Do you support fighting climate change?", because such a query likely wouldn't tell us what Canadians were actually thinking on the subject.

After all, no one wants to be perceived as being anti-environment or as anti-science, or as a "climate change denier."

So naturally people faced with the "Do you support fighting climate change?" question would probably give the pollster the "socially acceptable" answer, i.e. "Since I'm a good citizen, of course, I want to fight climate change and save the planet."

And yes, people often want to look good when responding to pollsters, in fact, there's even a term to describe this behaviour — "social desirability bias."

At any rate, to get around this bias, to gauge what a person is truly thinking, a pollster sometimes has to be a little more subtle.

This is why my poll would ask people an open ended question, i.e. "Please tell me what you believe are the most important issues currently facing you and your family?

I can almost guarantee you the top answers to such a question would all be related to the economy.

In other words, people would answer that what most mattered to them are "jobs" or "taxes" or the "cost of living."

Other popular answers would be "crime" or "education" or "heath care" or "garbage removal."

What about "climate change"?  Where it would it rate as a concern among the people?

Well, I'd be totally surprised if in my poll, the issue of "climate change" broke the top twenty of the public's perceived concerns.

And by the way, while all this is just a guess on my part, it's also an educated guess, because I've seen lots of surveys in the past, which asked people to list their concerns and they all more or less, played out the way I just described.

However, it's a different story for Canada's ruling classes, or if you prefer, the "elites"; they're more like the characters in a movie, which is to say, they actually care about the climate change MacGuffin.

They're the ones who favor carbon taxes, who want to phase out fossil fuels, who want to put solar panels on everyone's roof.

Why would there be this split between the public and the ruling classes on climate change?

Well, blame socio-economics.

If you're part of the ruling class, it means you're also economically secure, meaning you can afford the luxury of fretting over the rising water levels on the coast of Greenland.

But if you're just a regular person, worried about making your mortgage payments or wondering if you'll have a job in six months, or concerned about rising crime rates, then the fate of Greenland's coastline isn't exactly high on your priority list.

Anyway, if I'm right about this split on priorities then it means our governments could experience a strong backlash if their attempt to fight climate change imposes any sort of economic pain on Canadians.

Simply put, regular people won't want to sacrifice their standard of living for the sake of a ruling class MacGuffin.

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People ask me, "Josh, why do you write such weird stuff?  Why can't you just write nice columns about carbon taxes and pipelines like everyone else?"

Well, it's because everything that's already been said about the handful of topics that other political writers write about has already been said or written.  It feels like this country is stuck in a permanent Groundhog Day loop where the same arguments keep getting made by the same players ad nauseam.

Someday, I might resign myself to the idea that the same columns written by the same people over and over again is what readers actually WANT to read- and to be sure, I am getting closer to that conclusion- but it is not this day.  This day, I'm going to point out that the clumsy dance between the socially conservative wing of (Insert Conservative Party Or Local Affiliate here) and its more mainstream members is getting a little old.

Here's how it goes: Party Leader X wins the leadership of (Insert Conservative Party Or Local Affiliate here) in a hotly contested leadership race by a disputable margin thanks in part to the efforts of The Terrible So-Cons.  The media, egged on by the Liberals, whip up fear about a Handmaid's Tale-style takeover by religio-nuts in a country where public displays of faith are about as popular as a fart in church.

Believing the hype along with whatever else they're believing, the so-cons let fly with statements that are either prima facie homophobic, transphobic, and generally hateful, or sufficiently adjacent.  This causes the new leader, who may or may not have rebuffed previous calls to deal with the rampaging so-con menace, to make a Very Difficult Decision and throw them under the bus.

After that comes the usual blather about toxic views, freedom of speech, demands for resignation and floor-crossing, and most of all, loyalty (ya dance with the one that brung ya!).

Never ones to miss an opportunity, the same left that called for the new leader to deal with this threat to our cherished Canadian value of infinite tolerance fold their collective arms and harrumph in a theatrical and likely affected manner.  They loudly proclaim that this belated reversal isn't good enough and that they will continue to tell everyone they know that New Conservative Leader X is just the worst for doing exactly what they wanted him or her to do.

I cannot figure out for the life of me why this cycle perpetuates itself, nor why it should.  Nobody comes off looking good, and everyone looks about as equally stupid as everyone else, which might be why it continues to re-occur.

But if anyone (anyone at all?) is interested in a little bit of new thinking about this phenomenon, here goes:

-The Terrible So-Cons exert such influence because, unlike the rest of the talkers and equivocators, they actually care about an issue enough to get off their duffs and work the phones, which is why I can't hate them as much as everyone else does.

-But because the so-cons, like all Canadians, crave the validation of their neurotic hang-ups by the earthly power of government (in lieu of any heavenly power that is otherwise indisposed), they don't bother making this about any principle or intellectual argument, opting instead for the same kind of triggered whining you get from any other group of "ideologues" in this country.  (I am offended by gay marriage, therefore everyone else should be, scream the so-cons.  I hate supply management, so everyone who doesn't is immoral, cry the libertarians.  I am offended by Trump, therefore anyone who isn't as offended is a Nazi, shout too many on the left.)  As such, nobody can support them on intellectual or principled grounds.

-And finally, those Liberals who are chortling about how this is Doug Ford's Faith Based Schools moment should curb their enthusiasm for now.  After months and months of lousy press and own-goals, they're going to need a lot more favourable turns of events than usual.

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Written by Josh Lieblein

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The persistent problem of irregular border crossers has become a particular thorn in the side of the federal government, and it's one that the opposition is certainly looking to exploit to their own ends.  As the numbers have started to grow again as the weather warms up, both the NDP and the Conservatives are demanding easy answers to the problem, deliberately ignoring that this is a problem where there are no easy solutions merely attempts to manage a problem that is not of our making.

If you listen to the Conservatives, this is entirely the fault of Justin Trudeau tweeting #WelcomeToCanada at a time when rhetoric south of the border was heating up, with Donald Trump's attempted Muslim Ban making waves and causing panic among asylum seekers in America.  It was almost certainly an attempt by Trudeau to differentiate himself from the overheated rhetoric in the States, and an attempt to tamp down on any anti-refugee sentiment in Canada, and why I think this is particularly significant is that the day after Trudeau's tweet, the Quebec City mosque shooting happened, fed by a diet of those anti-Muslim sentiments from American commentators and Trump himself.  If they think that Trudeau is going to walk back from those sentiments, they are probably mistaken.

But it really is because of Trump and his administration that we have seen the waves of border crossers.  Every time he announces a new group in the States whose temporary protected status will be revoked previously it was Haitians, and it may soon be Hondurans there is a rush to the northern border because in part, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement has changed their tactics under the Trump administration, creating a very real sense of fear among migrant communities.  And until we have a way to shut Trump out from Twitter, then these waves are likely to continue, despite any measures we may take.

To that end, the NDP have demanded that Canada suspend the Safe Third Country Agreement, while the Conservatives demand that the "loophole" in the Agreement be closed.  The Agreement states that asylum seekers should request asylum in the first safe country that they arrive in, which means that under the agreement, they can't land in the US and then make a claim at the Canadian border.  The "loophole" is that they can make an inland claim in Canada, so if they cross somewhere other than an official border crossing, Canada is obligated to process that claim.  But suspending the agreement will mean a flood of new claims at official border crossings one of the very reasons why the Agreement was made in the first place and there is no interest by the Americans to close that "loophole."  On top of that, the notion that Canada could unilaterally declare the entire stretch of the border to be an "official port of entry" for the purposes of the Agreement is also ludicrous because that would have to be agreed to by the Americans and require that there be officers on both sides of the border to monitor it something that's not going to happen.

Indeed, part of why we're not going to get the Americans to agree is because they are looking to oust asylum seekers and people who cross their own borders illegally, and would not agree to keep them in-country, hence them coming to Canada is seen as not the Americans' problem something that we need to keep in mind as our government is currently trying to get American visa officers to be aware of as the current wave of asylum seekers are coming from Nigeria, who enter in the US on visitors visas and then head to the Canadian border.  Trying to stem the flow requires US cooperation, and we'll see how willing they are to provide it.

Direct engagement with communities has been the government's preferred tactic though they were slow to ramp up to it but it does seem to have worked, especially with the Haitian community.  Liberal MP Emmanuel Dubourg, who is Haitian-born, and speaks Haitian Creole, and was able to communicate directly to those communities that crossing into Canada is not a "free ticket" to Canada, and he was able to counter much of the misinformation floating about in those communities.  That had an effect, and now the number of Haitians crossing into Canada has slowed to a trickle.  Engagement has also slowed the flow of migrants into Manitoba as well, but it remains to be seen if engaging with Nigerians will have the same effect, but even if it is, there is a feeling that this simply becomes a game of whack-a-mole, where one population slows their migration, but another one rises in response to another Trump tweet.

So while the Liberal government tries to manage this, being slow off the mark to allocate more resources and most especially being slow to fill needed members of the Immigration and Refugee Board that would process and oversee intake and appeals (and we hear again that part of the difficulty in staffing some of these positions is that they're seen as temporary), we have seen the Conservatives try to take political advantage of this situation in ways that are a little disconcerting.  They have imported the American rhetoric about "illegals," despite the fact that while it may be illegal to cross the border, there is nothing illegal about making an inland claim.  They have made a regular habit of conflating economic immigration with refugees, using terms like "queue jumping" and decrying the unfairness to those who "play by the rules" an old tactic in pitting immigrants against refugees while deliberating conflating the very separate immigration and refugee intake processes.  And in Quebec in particular, where the province has faced the brunt of the incoming claimants, the Conservatives are applying the torque to appeal to the anti-immigrant sentiments that still pervade much of the province's discourse, apparently convinced that because this issue isn't about niqabs that they're doing things differently than in 2015.

At least the government has been calling out this concerning rhetoric as it happens (unlike so many other communications failures that they've had), but can the message get through?  The worry is now that this crisis around irregular border crossers (which, to put into perspective, is nothing like the refugee crises happening in Europe with the flow coming from Syria or Libya) will make Canadians question our legitimate immigration and refugee policies.  You would think that a party that says it's compassionate and open to immigration wouldn't try to inflame things, but that's politics.  In the meantime, the demands for simple solutions where none exist only serves to needlessly make a bad situation worse, which is why we should demand calm and reason from our MPs.  It's too bad they're more interested in scoring points.

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