By Cillian Zeal
Read the first few paragraphs of this Fox News story and see if you can guess the country we’re talking about here.
“As migrants continue to spill over the porous southern border, many politicians are calling the situation a ‘crisis’ and are urging the government to do more,” Fox reported Thursday.
“Some have even proposed putting up a fence along one of the longest borders in the world.”
Yes, yes, but the $20 billion for the southern border simply isn’t going to make it into the American budget, and we’re a welcoming country, so we ought to … oh, wait, not America?
To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada
— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) January 28, 2017
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Yes, that tweet hasn’t aged profoundly well.
“The border in question, however, is not America’s border with Mexico, but Canada’s with the United States. Some estimate that as many as 400 a day are crossing the 5,525-mile border between Canada and the U.S. through non-official ports of entry and with provincial elections looming, the issue is causing political ramifications,” wrote Fox News’s Benson Cook.
Oh, well. And, it seems that this might cause Canadians to fall out of love with their current prime minister, who is to John F. Kennedy Jr. what Pierre Elliott Trudeau was to John F. Kennedy. JFK Jr., for all of his foibles and intellectual lightweight status, never became a world leader. Justin Trudeau, regrettably, has managed to demonstrate the Peter Principle is a theorem, not a proof.
However, something called the “Safe Third Country Agreement” may be the undoing of that.
“Under a refugee agreement known as the Safe Third Country Agreement that both the U.S. and Canada are party to, a person with protected status in a country that is deemed ‘safe’ for refugees (in this case, the United States) cannot leave the country and apply for asylum in another ‘safe’ country at an official port of entry,” Cook writes. “A loophole in the agreement, however, allows these refugees to apply for asylum in another country if they’re already inside that country.
“This has led to thousands of asylum-seekers crossing into Canada from gaps in the border with the U.S. over the past two years, almost all of them into the province of Québec from upstate New York.
“This situation has created political tension across Canada, with conservatives laying blame for the ‘crisis’ squarely at the feet of Justin Trudeau’s government,” Cook continued. “Shortly after President Trump took office, the Canadian prime minister issued a now-infamous Tweet saying that all refugees would be welcome in his country, with the hashtag #WelcomeToCanada.”
“Diversity” may be a country’s strength. Uncontrolled immigration isn’t, and the Quebecois are about to go to the polls in a few weeks. “The governing Liberal Party led by Premier Philippe Couillard has worked closely with the federal government to accommodate asylum seekers, allowing most of those who want to remain in the province to stay while helping those who do not get settled in Toronto and other locales that can accommodate them.”
This presents a particular problem given the Quebecois have a unique cultural history as a Francophone province in an Anglophone nation. Recognizing this special status has been part of maintaining a unified Canada in spite of several contentious Quebec separatist plebiscites over the years.
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As recently as 1995, the province only voted by a margin of 50.58 percent to 49.42 percent to stay part of the union. Part of maintaining this delicate balance has been acknowledging Quebec’s unique cultural heritage — a heritage voters now feel is under attack due to illegal immigration. It also hasn’t helped that Trudeau’s government hasn’t been seen as terribly interested as trying to mitigate the cultural shift in Quebec.
The likelihood of this sort of thing isn’t particularly farfetched. Until recently, provincial politics were dominated by the Bloc Quebecois, an openly separatist organization. As the likelihood of a major cultural shift diminished over the past decade or two, the New Democratic Party — the more leftist challenger to Trudeau’s Liberal Party, has taken over from the BQ as the dominant political force in the province in national elections. However, the Liberals and NDP are having problems with another political force which may make the BQ look positively quaint.
“The party is trailing in opinion polls to a nationalist opposition party known as the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), which has promised to slash even legal immigration by as much as 20%, and to force all new immigrants to learn French,” Fox News reported.
“Currently, most immigrants are given the option of learning either English or French. In an interview with the Montréal Gazette earlier this year, the party’s immigration spokeswoman Nathalie Roy accused the Liberal government of trying to ‘hide the problem (of immigration) under the carpet.’
“The CAQ, led by former businessman François Legault, has also proposed taking strong action to protect the ‘secular’ nature of the state, by banning overt religious symbols such as hijabs and yarmulkes.” The latter would be an especially controversial measure; virulent antisemitism has been a consistent and dangerous strain of thought among Quebecois separatists for well over a century.
New names aren’t the only problem, either. The Parti Quebecois — a provincial group closely associated with the BQ — has also gotten a lot of press because they want a “big, beautiful wall.”
“In a move that may sound familiar to Americans, another opposition party, the Parti Québécois (PQ) proposed earlier this year to construct a fence along stretches of the province’s border with New York that have seen large numbers of asylum seekers enter the country,” Fox News reported.
“The PQ’s leader, Jean-François Lisée, has since walked back those comments somewhat but the idea sparked a conversation about what can be done to discourage refugees from making the journey.”
But that’s what they’re going to to have to do as long as J.Trizzle maintains power in Canada. After all, there are no externalities to welcoming “those fleeing prosecution, terror & war,” even if most of them are doing nothing of the sort. In fact, they’re kind of backing away from this pretty hardcore — but not quite fast enough to stop Canadians from wanting a wall.
In 1980, Trudeau’s father took a close referendum on Quebec separatism and turned it into a 60-40 victory for unity. What he did was rekindled a spirit of Canadian nationalism in the people of his country — both in Quebec and the other provinces. I know this would make Pierre Elliott spin in his grave in his grave which such torque that his white suit would tear itself to shreds, but he assured Canada he could make it great again — no matter what its divisions might be.
Thirty-eight years later, the suppurating, milksop heir to his father’s legacy could put all of that in jeopardy. And he did all of that because of a feel-good tweet he didn’t even bother to think about. Good work, Justin.
https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/trudeau-welcomes-canada-now-migrant-crisis-top-issue-elections/