When the Canadian Conservatives Become Lemmings

For the past year or two, the Conservative Party of Canada have been struggling how to deal with populism, Trumpism, and xenophobia.  This is not that new, as the Harper campaign resisted and then embraced xenophobia, which was tricky since Harper had done well appealing to the immigrants of Toronto.  Still, with the rise of Rebel Media, which is kind of like Breitbart and its ilk, the CPC has been tempted and pushed to take stances on immigration.

The CPC has had strains within it playing up the challenge of the "illegal immigration crisis" which is mostly not illegal but irregular (it is not illegal to be a refugee in search of asylum) and not a crisis (the numbers are still quite small, easily absorb-able with the usual burden-sharing wrangling).  A new party may emerge, if Max Bernier is successful, who plays this up and challenges Canada's multiculturalism (acceptance of different peoples). Still, when Bernier started this push, there was pushback, because multiculturalism is a key part of Canadian identity, and going too far would alienate many voters. So, there was some hope that the CPC would avoid Trumpism and xenophobia and racism.

And then this happened:

Scheer defends Tories’ birthright policy, says ending ‘birth tourism’ is objective https://t.co/EUfEhKUEl3

— Globe Politics (@globepolitics) August 27, 2018

The CPC, at its recent convention, decided to take a stance against birthright citizenship--that anyone born is Canada is a citizen. What is the crisis to which the CPC is responding?  How many people are coming to Canada pregnant in hopes that their kid is born Canadian?  If this sounds familiar to you, it is because of the anchor baby debate in the US, where xenophobic politicians, mostly but not entirely Republicans, argued that those in Mexico and the rest of Latin America were coming to the US to establish the fact of citizenship by birthing babies in the US. 

I am not an expert on the history of Canadian immigration policies, but I know "identity politics" and xenophobia when I see it. There is no crisis of "birth tourism"--this is simply a way for the CPC to pander to the racists of Canada (yes, there are racists here).  This may seem more subtle than trashing multiculturalism, but it is not.  It is the first step to the abyss--of the CPC selling its soul and its electability to chase after the far right. Perhaps Rebel media is more influential than we thought.  Making this the big headline, rather than CPC unity against Bernier, seems like a dumb thing to do, like lemmings jumping off a cliff because the first one does.