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Monday Mar.
17, 2008 BACK
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Immigration,
do they
really care?
by Angelo
Persichilli
THE HILL
TIMES
Immigration is definitely one
of the most important public policy issues that future Canadian
governments must address. It is important not only because it will
be will providing the bulk of the Canadian workforce, but also will
shape Canadian culture and influence social priorities.
Basically, immigration is so important that it should be
immune from political exploitation. Of course this is impossible
because the nature of political parties is to do just that,
politics. That's understandable; nonetheless, sometimes a bit of
self-restraint would be highly appreciated.
Immigration has
always been at the centre of deep disputes because there are many
hot buttons available to politicians. Our society, with the help of
some media and some lazy politicians, can be very easily encouraged
to believe that terrorism is tied to the Muslim community, that
laundering money and selling drugs to the Mafia can be tied to the
Italian community, or crime in Toronto to the black community, when
in reality they are Canadian problems.
At the same time, we
must recognize that crime and Mafia, exist, as well as terrorism,
but trying to address these issues is very difficult.
Unfortunately, whenever someone tries to solve the problem,
some media and politicians immediately focus on the ethnic factor,
shutting down the debate and painting some as racist.
Immigration is one dangerous example.
This issue has
been mismanaged in the past by many governments, of all political
stripes, and the debate has been characterized in a very simple but
dangerous way: the Liberals are for immigration and immigrants, and
the Conservatives are against immigration and immigrants. This,
paraphrasing the late and illustrious columnist Dalton Camp, "is a
crock of sheer nonsense."
The difference between
Conservatives and Liberals is that the former are handling
immigration by trying to get results, the latter to get votes.
Just take a look at immigration from Italy. When I arrived
in Canada in 1975 I found a community with an idol, Liberal Prime
Minister Pierre Trudeau, and a "monster," former Conservative prime
minister John Diefenbaker.
Diefenbaker was hated because "he
was against the Italians immigrating in Canada," while Trudeau loved
this community. The Liberals have largely capitalized on those
sentiments, collecting strong electoral support for decades. The
reality is a bit different.
In 1959, Diefenbaker had the
same problem that Prime Minister Stephen Harper (and former Liberal
governments) has now: a huge backlog of applications. Wrongly, he
tried to put a cap on future applications and, eventually, he backed
down. Numbers never lie; the flow of the immigrants from Italy in
Canada was constant in the late 1950s and 1960s, during the
Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson governments. In 1969, from an average
of 50,000 to 60,000 a year, it dropped suddenly to 2,000, in 1970.
It might be a coincidence, but Trudeau was the prime minister at the
time.
There is more: it was during the government of a
Liberal prime minister, Mackenzie King, that Italians were interned
in 1940, and it was a Conservative prime minister, Brian Mulroney,
that apologized in 1990. The list could go on.
In an
interview with The Hill Times last week, Minister of
Immigration Diane Finley said that the problem is not the capping or
the new applications, but the number of new immigrants allowed into
Canada. "The only thing that is outrageous," she said, "is the fact
that people have to wait from four to six years before they have an
answer."
She didn't tell me what exactly she is going to do
to solve this serious and real problem; however, what we don't need
are lectures from the Liberals on this issue because, again,
according to the numbers, not the demagoguery, they too badly
mismanaged this issue for political reasons. In fact, a few years
ago, the only two ministers who were trying to do something to solve
the problem, Judy Sgro and more so Joe Volpe, were stopped not by
the opposition in the House, but by the backroom boys in Paul
Martin's government; they did not have any support in caucus from
the same Liberal MPs who are now trying to blame others for the mess
they helped create.
Just a few numbers: under their watch,
the backlog increased so much as to paralyze the entire sector. From
a little over 50,000 we have now 800,000 people knocking at our
doors without having an answer for years.
Furthermore, the
Liberals were never able to meet the quota they set for themselves
in the famous Red Book to admit 300,000 new immigrants every
year. They never met their promise.
Now they are trying to
avoid the real issue, which is the number that can effectively enter
Canada.
They failed, and this doesn't mean that they cannot
criticize. But definitely, they don't have the qualification to
lecture.
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