Worth the Fee to Read It

Once upon a time, almost all of our family lines weren’t here in North America. Of course, going back far enough — and anthropologists, climatologists and geologists believe we don’t need more than 12,000-14,000 years (17,000 at the outside and only for Alaska) to be able to say none of us were here. Human settlement of the Americas is just not that old.

So we are immigrants, and, granting the First Nations their pride of place (I’m not sure how many years of continued residence are required to make someone autochthonous, but the majority of us are measured in decades to a few centuries, not in millennia, so let’s just call the First Nations “here long enough” and be done with it) as the original peoples of this continent, only the oldest of European lines and settlements have been here long enough to possibly be verging on the “native” by historical terms — a St. John’s, say, or a Québec, or an Annapolis Royal, or, south of the border, a St-Augustine or Jamestown (the only two settlements approaching the same age as the Canadian ones). [Please leave L'Anse-aux-Meadows and Roanoke Island out of the discussion: continuity matters.]

Those of us born here — especially those of us of blood lines that go back a few generations in this land — have nowhere else to call home, of course. This shows up the dreadful ambiguity of the whole “immigrant” versus “native” discussion: it all depends on timescale. To my mind, one key question is the culture which is built. The Québec profond of the pur laine is certainly an indigenous culture now — but when precisely did it become so, as opposed to just a settler colony? So, too, the original culture of Southern Ontario — still seen in its Clear Grit southwestern and hardscrabble Tory eastern forms (alas, as George Grant noted, the Golden Horseshoe in the middle gave that culture up in the 1950s) — once American settlers with a Celtic overlay from UK & Irish immigration, but now a culture (and an accent) found nowhere else. Add the Acadians, the Newfoundlanders, and a host of others to the list … this is the Canada we know.

Since 1966 Canadian immigration policy first changed to be open to the whole world, and not just Europeans, Americans and other British settler colonies, and then, starting first with the Mulroney Government and as extended and modified through the Chrétien, Martin and now Harper years, a means of doing two radically dissimilar things: extended family reunification, and attracting skilled people to this country using a points-based system that is being increasingly copied around the world today. This has changed the face, and culture, of Canada in its major urban centres.

Having grown up in Toronto while it changed from being a pseudo-Victorian outpost of the Orange Order to what UNESCO called “the world’s most multi-cultural city”, and now living in Vancouver, which has cities in its regional fabric that are majority immigrant communities, I must say that I am not only used to the glorious mosaic that this can create, but find places without it a tad on the boring side. (Perhaps this is why, in the United States, I prefer New York, and why in Europe I prefer London, and found Sydney in Australia quite congenial: they “felt like home”.) We are richer for this mix, added to the mosaic of indigenous cultures that were Canada already.

The Harper Government’s latest Immigration changes come with the good and the bad. The good part is that the Ministerial discretion being sought is designed to allow us to capture the specific types of skilled people currently in demand in Canada and accelerate their applications up the queue and into the country. This is a good thing. We do not want to become, as the United States with its Homeland Security attitudes and anti-skilled worker (consider the restrictions on H-1B visas [and the mandated H-4 status for spouses that exclude them from even unpaid volunteer work] currently in effect) approaches has, a country headed into (in the words of The Economist) an “Idiotocracy”. Nor do we want to lose the best available immigrants to other countries: these are a key part of our future prosperity. If you want a comfortable retirement, you should be pro-immigrant.

Which, when it comes to skilled immigrants and immediate family members, I am. I am less so in the other part of the category: extended family reunification. Here’s why.

In the nineteenth century, when immigrants came to this country, landing in either Halifax or Montréal and riding the Intercolonial, the Grand Trunk or the Canadian Pacific to their new homes, it was effectively a one-way trip. Almost none of them would ever go back to their ancestral homes. Other family members — brothers, sisters, parents, cousins, etc. — were accessible by slow and infrequent mailings at best. (In my own grandfather’s case, an infant immigrant in 1912, it was the last time he would have contact with his own elder brother or father or any other extended family member until World War II took him to the UK and he was able to use a leave to go to Scotland and research lost relatives.) The decision to emigrate was the decision to start a new life.

Today, of course, cheap air travel has made the world much smaller. (I have one friend, himself a childhood immigrant to Canada, whose parents make an annual trip back to their ancestral community to visit “the other part of the family”. We are fortunate to live in this brief period when the remaining cheap energy makes it easy to travel in this way.) One needn’t make a one-way trip: it is possible to return for weddings, funerals, even births, and still live in a new land. (As I learned myself last fall, travelling across this country — 4,492 km by road, or a little farther than the distance overland from London, England to Baghdad, Iraq — we can go for the dying and funeral of a family member and think nothing of the distances involved when travelling domestically: Vancouver to Toronto is nothing; London to Baghdad would be a great journey, indeed.)

As a result, extended family reunification ought to be a very secondary goal of our immigration policy, indeed. Often, these extended family members do not end up contributing much to Canada relatively speaking: we end up (a mutual pact of ignorance) putting them in a language and cultural ghetto of compatriots “from the old country”. Yet often this has been the implicit priority of our immigration system. The Harper Government is right to try and change it.

What is just plain awful about the proposed changes, of course, is the further concentration of power in the centre that it brings with it. I can accept that this time for a while, I believe, but I am not happy about it. (I’d much rather an honest accounting of what we need to do on the immigration file.)

Finally, there’s the missing element. The professional and learned societies, and the provincial licensing boards, need to be informed in no uncertain terms that if they are unprepared to move speedily and expeditiously to (a) recognise the credentials an immigrant brings, (b) handle such upgrading in as minimal a manner as is required [i.e. individual requirements, not wholesale credential re-acquisition], (c) license these immigrants to practice their professions, and (d) accept them into the field of practice [i.e. hospital privileges, join the firm, recognise tenure, etc.] then the Government will modify the terms of their Charters to “make it so”. It is perverse in the extreme that we work to acquire the best possible new Canadians only to introduce them to the joys of late night taxi driving and other forms of work that do not allow them to use the credentials and skills that gave them the points to come to Canada in the first place.

We need our immigrants: we need them to augment our own workforce, and to continue to build Canadian prosperity. We should want them to add to the tapestry that is Canadian culture, joining in and enriching it. We don’t need to turn the immigrant into a pauper. We also don’t need to eat into our own social services by creating an immigrant underclass through poor prospects and poor subsequent selections.

Perhaps if the Liberals were talking like that I’d be more inclined to see their huffery and puffery about the Immigration provisions as real, as opposed to simple posturing for votes.

The saliva drools on page after page written by media personalities and bloggers alike. Regardless of faction, the motif is the same: let’s go to the polls, now!

Well, yes, let’s do. But be careful what you wish for. You might get it.

All sides, of course, see an advantage in going now. The Conservatives believe the most recent set of charges laid by the RCMP in the ever-dragging sponsorship matter will remind everyone that the Liberals are not to be trusted — and they’re happy (as the Prime Minister himself noted in a speech) to go to the polls over their planned changes to our Immigration practices. The Liberals believe that this week’s raid by the RCMP on behalf of Elections Canada at Conservative Party headquarters shows the Conservatives to be at least equally corrupt, and that they will have the better of the Immigration issue in any event.

Ah, but is a vote in the NDP’s interest? Or the Bloc’s? For the Conservatives tied their own hands — I do think it would be a suicidal move to plead the need for an election given their legislation mandating a fixed election date (are you regretting this now, Mr. Harper?, because you ought to be) — and the Liberals need support. Despite both the posturing of Stéphane Dion and other Liberal consigiliere of both front bench and back room whisper, the Liberals cannot, on their own, do anything. They will need to bring the other Opposition parties along with them — at least one if the Government fails to whip itself for the vote, and both of them, in force, if the three-line whip is in place.

For the Bloc, of course, the issue is simple. Are they ready to take enough seats? If they are, they can vote as they please; if they are not, they will keep this Parliament running. (Note, please, that I did not say they would topple the Government if they’re ready: they will determine which outcome — maintain current practices or make the proposed changes — better serves their interests (which are expressed as les intérêts du Québec, naturellement. It may well be that they find the proposed changes as something they can make show as “another victory”.)

So ignore the Her Majesty’s Prime Minister and the Leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition. Instead, cast your gaze firmly upon the Hon. Jack Layton, leader of the New Democrats. What is in his interest here?

Recent polling data suggested, for instance, that the Liberals were making gains in two places the NDP needs to have strong three-way races to win seats: British Columbia and Ontario. Going into electoral battle against such a surge (were it to be maintained to voting day) would not serve the NDP well. On the other hand, voting with the Government means the NDP would also be aiding and abetting the implementation of the budget, something they voted against. A difficult situation, indeed!

Frankly, if there’s a party that needs the economy to weaken further, it is probably the NDP. A downturn would take some of the heat off any environmentalist trends — work and money concerns usually override more abstract causes (as any student of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs would know) — and given the lack of clear Liberal policy the NDP would have the opportunity to stake out a “citizens’ economic platform” in contradistinction to both of the larger parties. Just as the Conservatives would like to go into an election now — before tougher and more turbulent times come — even if it meant another minority as the outcome, so, too, the NDP are probably better served by waiting, both on the Green flank and on the “green” flank, so to speak.

Then, too, with both the Conservatives and the Liberals flinging mud and splattered head to toe with it, there will be those voters who are ready to say “a pox on both your houses” and take their custom elsewhere. On the other hand, given the House schedule, there will be few additional opportunities to vote non-confidence in the Spring session. That puts the Government in control of the agenda over the summer, and a gear-up period in the Fall sitting before confidence motions are again on the order paper. So do you go now, or hope you can build momentum quickly come late September?

Layton’s challenge, of course, is the usual one: gaining attention. This is a double-edged sword: to get attention, he generally must be somewhat outrageous (the joys of sound-bite media), yet that makes him seem to be reacting rather than offering a well-thought-out alternative (or just shouting to be heard at worst). It’s why, for instance, you seldom see him in the newspaper or on the news: the bully-bites offered up from both the Conservative and Liberal benches, and the presumption that Dion is master of the House’s fate (something he, alone, is no more capable of controlling than is the Prime Minister) means that Dion’s threats to topple are taken seriously instead of being challenged as reason suggests they should be.

There’s little question but that we are not being well-served by our current Parliament. It is well past its best-before date, and should be, as with Fortunado in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado, bricked up in the dungeon and seen no more. But here is the question, will Layton take up Montressor’s bricks, mortar and trowel and do the deed?

It may serve the NDP better to wait, but the dangers in that course of action say to me that Jack Layton’s moment to risk all has come. When the carnival comes and the vote is pressed, it is time to press the brick home and lead us to the polls.

That is, of course, if the Liberals deign to even show up to vote (in numbers more than a handful).