In the Atlantic this week, Derek Thompson wrote in fairly glowing terms about how Canada has managed to escape the particular illiberal populism that is taking hold in America and in many Western European countries.  And while he's quick to note that Canada isn't without its problems we still have our share of racists and xenophobes, just as many of these other troubled democracies do, but I fear that Thompson may not have delved deeply enough into some of the reasons why the same xenophobic illiberalism hasn't taken root here as it has elsewhere and I do emphasis the xenophobic aspect, because I do think that some of the other aspects of illiberal populism are rearing their heads in Canada in various ways, some of them more subtle than others, but we can't try to pretend that Canada has escaped it because we don't have the same anti-immigrant rhetoric in the mainstream.

Part of where Thompson glosses over things is in his cherry-picking of his data.  While he likes to focus on geography we haven't had mass cross-border migrations because three of our four borders are oceans, and our sparse geography has often cried out for newcomers to fill it (ignoring, of course, the Indigenous peoples who traditionally occupied that space) he doesn't get into some of the more practical realities of electoral boundaries and how those very much effect the political calculations that come with either embracing or rejecting newcomer votes.

Thompson's look at the political history of conservative reaction to immigration glides over the fact that there was a fairly strong anti-immigrant sentiment in the western-based Reform Party in the early nineties, which was at a time where their reach was predominantly in rural ridings, which used to dominate the electoral map of the prairie provinces.  As those maps slowly started to shift their weight federally, and largely white rural ridings lost their outsized electoral influence (and for the longest time, much of this weighting was unequally toward rural over urban votes), the Reform Party and their later descendants of the Canadian Alliance and the Conservative Party of Canada realized that they needed to make inroads with newcomer communities if they hoped to win the increasingly important suburban ridings.

Under Stephen Harper, the Conservatives deputized Jason Kenney as their outreach to immigrant communities and I use the term immigrant very purposefully because it largely excluded refugee communities that had come to Canada.  The goal was to target more socially conservative immigrant communities where they felt they could form natural affinities to band together on policy or more blatantly, where they had similar enmities toward gays and lesbians, marijuana or other drug use, and so on.  By trying to weaponize social conservatism as the way to bring immigrants into their fold while still retaining their small-c conservatism, it was a way of demonstrating that they could be both welcoming to immigrants without diluting their brand too much.

Kenney's outreach role became mythologized in their increasing electoral successes all the way to 2011, but it does need to be stressed that it was largely just that mythology.  Drilling down into electoral data showed that Kenney hadn't really succeeded in turning over the kinds of votes they hoped he would (and that their electoral successes in those ridings largely had to do with established Liberals staying home during the Dion and Ignatieff years), but for too many journalists, the narrative proved too tempting to dissect and they perpetuated it.

When Kenney became immigration minister, there was a general sense that this was about trying to increase the kinds of immigration that the Conservatives could benefit from electorally, but there are a few striking things that happened that go to the heart of what Thompson missed in his piece, was that Kenney's policies as minister very much went to a place of pitting immigrants against refugees, and very familiar narratives from those xenophobic illiberal populists very much crept into the vocabulary of the discussion pitting immigrant communities who worked hard and "followed the rules" against those who came to Canada to claim asylum and were sudden given generous government benefits hence, the very same arguments that American conservatives make about these people being a drain on the country's social services reared its head then (remember that they stripped refugee claimants of health benefits, which the courts later deemed "cruel and unusual"), and does even more today with the current wave of irregular border crossers that we're seeing largely in Quebec.

There were, of course, "good" refugees that came from UNHCR lists, who were predominantly Christians being persecuted in the Middle East, but Kenney also curiously made a big deal about LGBT refugees coming from places like Iran.  This wasn't particular because they were necessarily supportive of LGBT rights, but it gave them a cudgel to bash at Iran with.  The bitter irony is that with Kenney now vying for political power in Alberta, one of the wedge issues has been Gay-Straight Alliances in high schools, where Kenney has advocated a position of outing students to their parents under the rubric of "parental rights."  The implicit message is that they don't want LGBT people to be murdered in Iran, but they won't provide them the supports they need here in Canada to keep from being marginalized and turning to suicide.

Conservatives, particularly under Kenney, also very carefully constructed narratives around "good" versus "bad" immigrants in the way they demonized some in particular, Muslim communities that they could treat with suspicion, whether it was moral panics about Sharia law, the particular language of "barbaric cultural practices" both in their citizenship guide and the snitch line they promoted in the 2015 election, which was also a means of trying to win votes in Quebec, where the integration of Muslims into Quebec society was and continues to be a particular political problem.

I have to wonder how much of this is because they are trying to borrow from the illiberal populist playbook from America and other countries in order to create wedge issues that they feel they can make gains with electorally (which were encouraged especially at that time by outlets like SunTV).  Certainly the language the Conservatives are using around irregular border crossers right now is very much echoing that same fear-mongering, while some of it is being couched in the Canadian conservative-isms of "bad" asylum seekers versus "good" rules-based immigration, and drawing that distinction between the two.  It's trying to walk a fine line of using just enough xenophobia to win angry votes while not poisoning the well of immigrant voters, but those seeds that Thompson thinks we have largely avoided are very much in the rhetoric.  We have managed to avoid it becoming mainstream so far, but how long can it last while Canadian conservatives play footsie with those same sentiments?