Introduction to Chapter 3
“There is perhaps no area of public policy where the views of Canadians have been more systematically ignored through the undemocratic structuring of political debate than the area of immigration. Despite the cries of 'racism' and the invocation of legal fictions, political change can occur where political will exists and is
articulated. Immigration abuse must be ended, and not just by legalizing it. All Canadians, not just the political and immigration establishment must get a better handle on our long-term immigration goals and needs . . .
Immigration should not be based on race or creed, as it was in the past; nor should it be explicitly designed to radically or suddenly alter the ethnic makeup of Canada, as it increasingly seems to be.”
- Reform Party of Canada Platform and Statement of Principles (1989, 23)
The Conservative Party recognizes Canadian society has been built by successive waves of immigration from all sectors of the globe, and that immigration
tremendously enriches our economy and national life . . . Too often, immigrants find it difficult to use the very skills that earned them admission into Canada in the first place. Too many skilled workers and professionals face trouble having their credentials recognized, even after they have been assessed and vetted during the immigration process. We will not allow special interests to prevent immigrants from contributing their best to Canadian society.
- 2004 Conservative Party Election Platform (2004a, 32)
As discussed in the last chapter with reference to Brodie and Jenson’s work, the rise of the Reform Party was an integral part of the breakdown of “normal politics” and politicization of social questions in the 1980s and 1990s with respect to citizenship, immigration and
multiculturalism in Canada. The Reform Party was instrumental in the re-politicization of
Canadian identity in a manner that challenged what for many had become the common sense and political party consensus around a multicultural and bilingual definition of Canada that had to some extent accepted what Tully has described as the “politics of cultural recognition” (Tully
quoted within and Patten 1999, 28). As can be seen above in the first quote from the party’s 1989
“Statement of Principles,” the Reform Party’s early positions expressed anxiety about the changing demographics of Canadian society, even positing that immigration policy might be
“designed to radically or suddenly alter the ethnic makeup” of an implied white Canada and expressed skepticism about the existence of racism in Canada through the use of scare quotes.
In doing so the party gave voice to right-wing populist and racist anxieties of some of the party’s political base. These were also the types of publicly expressed views that would limit the party’s potential for electoral growth and hegemonic leadership in a settler colonial state that had seen significant levels of immigration from outside of Europe since the end of official white Canada immigration policies in the 1960s.
As will be seen, Reform’s early statements and platforms were overtly hostile to immigration and multiculturalism. These stances, along with fundamentalist “free market” and law and order predilections were part of a less sophisticated authoritarian populist approach by the early Reform Party than those eventually witnessed under the Harper Conservatives, despite Harper’s early involvement in the Reform Party. Employing the conceptual apparatus outlined in the previous chapter -- which employs Gramsci-inspired tools to help to grasp shifts in the exercise of political leadership on Canada’s right on questions of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism -- this chapter begins to trace the evolution of the Reform, Canadian and Alliance Parties’ evolution from an often crude “invasion from the margin” approach towards a politically savvier and hegemonic politics of Kenneyism and neoconservative multiculturalism.
As outlined in the last chapter, amongst the key dynamics of Kenneyism are emotive, flattering appeals to the immigrant experience in Canada as well as the project of a disciplinary
neoconservative multiculturalism enacted through their approach to citizenship and their wider
divisive and militarist ‘civilizational’ nationalism. Both of these took time over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s to take shape and develop, however.
These shifts were necessary for Canada’s right to have a realistic chance to grow enough to graduate from the role of official opposition and to one day achieve a majority government.
The shift towards a more hegemonic form of politics in the Canadian demographic context are evidenced in the 2004 Conservative Party platform recognition cited above, that celebrates how
“immigration tremendously enriches our economy and national life” and acknowledges the economic struggles many immigrants face. Such xenophilic rather than xenophobic statements mark a shift from outright antagonism to attempts at hegemonic leadership over racialized and ethnicized Canadians and an attempt to avoid alienating to those uncomfortable with overt expressions of racism and xenophobia. Coupled with these platitudes, however, was a
disciplinary neoconservative vision of citizenship and multiculturalism that leading Conservative thinkers were also cultivating.
To grasp the party’s evolution and the roots of its approach under the Harper government this chapter will trace two prior stages in the Conservatives’ long term political development since the early Reform Party period. The first, to borrow from Tom Flanagan’s writings is that of 1) “invasion from the margin” (Flanagan 2009b, 208). That invasion saw the disruption and breakdown of Canada’s political party system and the country’s definition of “normal politics”
during a period in which multiculturalism was “under siege,” to a significant extent as a result of Reform’s rhetoric and stances concerning immigration and multiculturalism (Abu-Laban and Stasiulis 1992) . Such an approach, however, had limited potential for growth and was unresponsive to the shifts in demographics that had changed the face of and common sense notions about Canada since the 1960s and the end of white Canada immigration policies. It was an authoritarian populist approach heavy on law and order emphases and committed to the
intensification of neoliberalism, but with little effort devoted by the party’s white
neoconservative base to attempt to exercise hegemonic leadership over new and “ethnic”
Canadians whose electoral support they needed to achieve office. The at times crude and pragmatic calculations of Kenneyism and the project of achieving a “minimum winning coalition” are the focus of the next chapter, however.
The shifts in political approach by Canada’s Conservatives and their predecessors
discussed here are observable through close readings of Reform, Alliance and Conservative party platforms, speeches, as well as the writings of key Conservative Party figures such as Stephen Harper himself (in the late 1990s and early 2000s), Jason Kenney and former Conservative and Reform Party stalwart Tom Flanagan. These sources as well as secondary literatures provide important insights concerning questions of political strategy and the evolution of party discourses and the evolution of their authoritarian populist approaches.
Following that of “invasion from the margin,” the second and third stages I identify stem from an awareness of party elites of the former’s limitations: 2) that of the cleansing of the Reform Party and its successor parties’ discourses concerning questions of citizenship,
immigration and multiculturalism and 3) the party’s attempt to reconfigure Canadian nationalism in neoconservative directions.
This chapter will also consider the limits and openings created by neo(L)iberalism in citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism in Canada that in part left significant political terrain open to neoconservative appeals. Seen in the context of a country considered by some to have a mainstream consensus in favour of multiculturalism and comparatively high levels of immigration (Reitz 2011), the twenty-first century Conservative Party of Canada’s discourses of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism represent a significant advancement in their
political sophistication over those of their Reform predecessors, but a political achievement accompanied by highly regressive policies.
The next two chapters consider how the Conservative Party and their neoconservative predecessors creatively adapted their authoritarian populist recipe to create an innovative form of neoconservative multicultural politics more friendly in tone to Canada’s demographic realities from a political heritage not generally seen as receptive to immigrants and racialized Canadians.
In doing so they invited some “ethic voters” and immigrants to join the Conservative political project as they sought to grow their base and compete more effectively for political power, however in a politically disciplinary manner.
The Road to Kenneyism
It will be seen in subsequent chapters that the significance of the concepts of Kenneyism and authoritarian populism for analyzing the policy fields discussed are their acknowledgment of the attempt to build enough popular support to govern by fusing contradictory constituencies, even if doing so with relatively little respect for democratic institutions, and to invoke conservative populist themes that seek some, or at least sufficient legitimation through the national imaginary.
This is a task that neoconservatives have had to undertake in any Western democracy on the terrain of its particular civil society - including its demographics - if they hope to govern, for they are both subject to and seek to shape hegemonic ideas. For while in general terms the political right favours less equal social relations and is more prone to offering authoritarian models of governing, there is and cannot be a truly universal conservative project (Laycock 2002, 8). One must examine the national project in each social formation. Such lessons and insights are neither gained nor formulated overnight, however. This and the next chapter consider such a process over a period of nearly two decades. This chapter considers how the Reform, Alliance and
ultimately the Conservative Parties have proactively taken the initiative to try to shift popular understandings of Canada towards a terrain of their own making to make it a more hospitable place for neoconservative policies and practice, while balancing what might appear contradictory elements, such as an at times nativist political base and new and/or “ethnic” Canadians. It considers these developments in stages rooted in the concepts and analysis provided by party thinkers such as Tom Flanagan.
Stage 1: “Invasion from the Margin”: Discursive Assaults on Immigration and Multiculturalism