Tag: immigration

America: Why?

Yesterday, Americans re-elected Donald Trump to be their President. This, despite his thirty four felony convictions, his being found liable for sexual assault, his pending trials for attempting to overthrow the 2020 election and taking secret government documents, his role in the January 6 insurrection, and his campaign of darkness, chaos, revenge and violence. In fact, they not only re-elected him, they gave him a majority of the popular vote and a commanding lead in the Electoral College count. And while I say “despite”, I think it worth acknowledging that millions of Americans voted for him not “despite” these things, but because of them.

For many of us who grew up under the unbrella of the post Second World War consensus led by the United States, this seems incomprehensible and yet, when you dig deeper, is it really? America has a long history of isolationism, racism and even flirting with fascism but, somehow, has always managed to hold those forces at bay. Winston Churchill famously said “Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else” and there was a kind of comfort in that thought as history showed time and again it to be true. Until now perhaps.

So, why have Americans so completely upended their, and likely the world’s order, in this election? The coming weeks and months will see scholars parsing the election results and offering their views on what happened. They will show that this or that issue, this or that choice or word, had some effect on the margins, that certain big issues like the economy weighed heavily on the outcome but few of them will give us a really satisfying result. I’m no expert, but I have my own theories.

What has happened in America is neither unique nor particularly mysterious. We have been witnessing serious internal challenges to the western dominated international order since at least the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom when what seemed manifestly against the interests of the vast majority of its citizens was, never-the-less, supported by a majority of them. This has been followed by the rise of extreme right wing parties across Europe, including in countries long considered the very model of moderation. In Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, parties rooted in the notion of “blood and soil” have been on the rise. That America has now joined this group should surprise no one although, given its prominence in the western democratic alliances, its shift will have an outsized effect upon us all.

And so I return to the question of “why?”. Of course there are local, grievances and issues and they drive some votes some of the time but I also believe they only gain traction against the backdrop of other, nation wide feelings and grievances. I believe there are three such areas in western liberal societies: the economy; immigration and the attempt to reshape some of the most fundamental beliefs of those societies to achieve a kind of post modern nation.

On the surface, the American economy should be the last thing on Americans list of concerns. By almost any standard, it’s humming with low unemployment, good wage growth, low inflation and year over year gains in GDP. Despite all this, many, if not most, Americans are still suffering from “sticker shock” which is the result of the COVID induced spike in inflation causing everything to be much more expensive than it was even a few years ago. And while on the topic of COVID, although I don’t list it as a major factor in the election outcomes, it was none the less, a profound shock to all societies, including the United States, a shock that seriously undermined peoples’ view of who they were and what their rights were. And that shock certainly caused further fragmenting in society.

The one issue that is consistent across all the nations experiencing radical political change is immigration. Whether it’s because of political instability, climate change or something else, vast numbers of people have moved from the relatively undeveloped global south to the more affluent and stable north and west. And in America this is a particularly fraught issue as millions of undocumented immigrants have flowed across its southern border. Aside from the most obvious effects of this such as homeless encampments and other types of disorder, it also feeds into what is known as “the great replacement theory” where the current inhabitants of America fear their way of life and their values will be replaced by immigrants from countries with very different historical experiences or values. And this is not just a fear in America. It is acutely so in parts of Europe that have experienced mass immigration over the last few decades and, even in Canada, where the fantasy of an harmonious multi cultural society is challenged by shocking outbursts of anti semitism and homophobia, often at the hands of relatively recent immigrants from countries and societies with cultural and religious views completely at odds with core Canadian values. Instead of dismissing this fear out of hand, it deserves a closer and more sympthetic hearing than it usually gets. In fact, and this is heresy in countries like Canada, mixing such diverse people and expecting a benign outcome may not be possible. That doesn’t mean ending immigration but it may mean being much more selective about who can joint these national families.

The third issue is the hardest to pin down but likely the one to spark the most intense debate: trying to reshape people and societies into a form that is radically different from what is core to their historical being. Whether it involves the rights of gays and lesbians or transexuals, what is acceptable in the public discourse, particularly between men and women, what place religion should have in shaping a society, what values should be the bedrock of a community and how they relate to historical values and, finally, what we should honour and respect in our past. It’s no exaggeration to say there has been a deliberate and aggressive attempt to reshape many of these by, for lack of a better word, “elites”, whether academic, political or economic and, not surprisingly, that has led to resentment amongst many people and political pushback. At the least, this needs to be dialed down and we need to find a way to better accommodate the competing voices.

And so here we are on the verge of another Trump presidency. I have no idea whether it will be as terrible as some are predicting but I suspect we’ll emerge whole on the other side, perhaps a bit chastened and that might be a good thing.

Just sayin

GH

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Where Did Canada Go?

My paternal grandparents immigrated to Canada at the end of the nineteenth century, one from Scotland, the other from Norway via the United States. They met in Edmonton and homesteaded on a quarter section of land provided by the federal government about a hundred miles southeast of that city. They spent their first winter in a one room shack created by my grandfather pulling two graineries together and covering the roof with sod. That’s the home my father and his twin sister came to after they were born in Edmonton.

They struggled, they persevered and they worked very, very hard. And in the end they prospered, at least by the standards of that time and place. Both their children went to university, a first in our family. They believed in Canada, fully embracing the ideas that shaped this nation, including that, with hard work and perseverance, the future would belong to it. They participated as active and full citizens of what was then The Dominion of Canada. And when duty called, their only son, my father, went off to war, fighting for freedom and the ideas that animated this new nation.

The Canada I was born into in 1949 was still bathing in the afterglow of its heroic participation in the Second World War. It was also a country on the verge. Most of the ties to imperial Britain had been severed and Canada faced the world as a modern, liberal democracy, one that, as the years passed, expanded on that idea , particularly with respect to human rights, civil society and freedom, both at home and in the world. We were taught to be proud of our place in the world, to understand we were a new kind of nation, one that was free of the tribal hatreds of Europe and yet separate from our avaricious and noisy American cousins.

The idea of multiculturalism was formally presented to us by the governments of Pierre Trudeau in the 1960’s and 70’s and, with remarkably little conflict, Canada’s demography began shifting away from British/French/Western European to something else, something that to an increasing degree reflected the second and third worlds. Although many said this experiment would not work, it did to a remarkable and historically unprecedented degree.

I am not ignoring the failures that existed in the emerging Canada, particularly its treatment of its native population and other, under-represented peoples. Nor am I saying there weren’t frictions and eruptions of racism, homophobia and other forms of prejudice. But, as a country, we always aspired to do better, to honour the hopes and plans of our founders and, by and large, we stayed on that track, looking forward with optimism.

But something has changed. At first it was imperceptible to people like me but then, slowly but surely, it intruded into our discourse and our sense of ourselves. Its earliest expression concerned Canada’s native population and its treatment of them. What began as a healthy acknowledgement of past failings and the belief we would do better in the future has metastasized into an endless litany of mea culpas with a stifling drive to devalue the contributions of the very people who created and built modern Canada. In fact, in many circles, it is now a given that Canada was founded and built by genocidal racists, something we should be deeply ashamed of. Statues of the Fathers of Confederation are vandalized and destroyed or, if not destroyed, removed by public officials not wanting to offend the tender sensibilities of complaining constituents. Street names are changed, as are names attached to universities, hospitals, galleries, museums and other public spaces, all in an attempt to erase the history of European and subsequent Asian immigration and its vast contribution to what, to this point, was one of the most successful nations in all of human history. And god help anyone who attempts to apply some context to past government policies and practices that are now reviled.

The native population of Canada is approximately 5% of the total population. I agree there are many failures in Canada’s past approach to this community and future policies should be informed by those experiences. But I do not agree that all discourse should be warped by the sense of victim-hood that is so intensely cultivated by today’s native Canadians and their enablers. The so called “inter-generational trauma” experienced by survivors of residential schools is only the most obvious “get out of jail free card” that resonates across the interactions between native and non native Canadians and, inevitably, builds resentment amongst non natives and passivity amongst natives. It’s a path that leads neither to reconciliation nor to a bright and optimistic future for all Canadians and it needs to be confronted.

Of course part of the challenge is that most elected leaders in Canada, starting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet, have so wholeheartedly embraced the mantra of shame about this country’s past that has poisoned most areas of Canadian society. It has only become clear to me recently that that idea has a much broader political ideology behind it, the ideology that views the world solely through the eyes of those who identify as, or with, the victims of colonialism or, to use the more de trop phrase of university podiums, victims of “settler/occupiers”. And lest you think this really doesn’t apply to Canada, listen carefully to the various native leaders and their supporters as they describe Canada as “Turtle Island” or as “so-called Canada”. In other words, not a legitimate country and, in their wildest of dreams, one that will someday be returned to its native inhabitants.

Given the size of Canada’s population and the fact that 95% of it is non native, the logistics of returning Canada to its pre-European inhabitants, even if that were desirable, are probably insurmountable except for the wildest fantasist, so we revert to a steady drum beat of shaming and demanding whatever the ransom du jour is. It’s not surprising that a negative reaction is growing, just as it is in many other western countries where some other version of this tale is unfolding. In fact, the rise of ugly populism in recent years is at least partly a reaction to the narrowing and cancelling of public discourse on a range of topics including the claims of people who believe they were disadvantaged by colonialism. That said, Canada seems unique in its self flagellation over real and imagined historical wrongs committed by its founders and earliest European settlers.

One especially troubling example of how warped Canadian society has become in response to the settler/occupier narrative is the reaction of large parts of Canadian society to the terrorist attack by Hamas on Israelis on October 7 and the consequent war in Gaza. Instead of placing much of the blame where it clearly belongs with the terrorist organization, Hamas, large segments of Canada’s population have hijacked the narrative by blaming Israel as they chant “from the river to the sea”, a not so coded call for the genocide of non Muslim Israeli citizens. Examples of antisemitism crop up seemingly every day. This would never have been tolerated in the Canada I grew up in and cherished and, yet, in the face of such outrages, our political leaders tip toe around, hoping not to offend Muslim Canadians, and implying, if not outright saying, Hamas’ actions are understandable, if regrettable. I understand there is now a much larger Muslim population in Canada than there was even a decade ago, mostly a result of mass immigration from Muslim countries and that has political consequences. It grieves me, who has supported immigration to Canada all my adult life and who lives in one of the most multi cultural neighbourhoods in the world, to have to say core Canadian values are at risk because of some of that immigration. As a gay man I remember vividly the image a year or so ago of Muslim mothers encouraging their children to stomp gleefully on Pride flags. We like to say there is no place for homophobia in Canada, just as there is no place for antisemitism, but, increasingly, the changing face of our population is putting the lie to those assertions.

I have no idea how we turn this Titanic around but I am sure it begins with recognizing the dangers before it is to late. If we don’t, the future will certainly not belong to Canada.

Just sayin

GH

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