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The ground Trudeau seems most eager to fight the Conservatives on … is as divisive as it gets

“By sweeping away legitimate questions on his failed border policy with vile personal insults, it is Trudeau himself who is guilty of polarizing the debate,” Scheer says. “No one has done more to divide Canadians than he has.” That’s lathering it on quite a bit. But it’s gotten so that it’s near to impossible just to establish the basis of a decent disagreement.

Is it really indulging in what Trudeau calls “the politics of fear” to simply notice that since February, 2017, nearly 30,000 people have applied for refugee status by purposely evading the terms of the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement and crossing the border “illegally” — however imprecise or unhelpful that term may be? It’s getting harder for provincial and municipal governments to find places for those “irregular” claimants to live while they wait for their cases to be heard. Fewer than 5,000 of these claims have been processed so far, and fewer than half of them have been accepted as valid.

This may not constitute a “crisis” from a bureaucratic standpoint, but most Canadians seem to think “crisis” describes the situation quite adequately. Three weeks ago, an Angus Reid Institute poll found that two-thirds of Canadians were content to call the illegal or irregular border-crossing situation a “crisis,” and about the same proportion of respondents reckoned the number of border-crossers was too high for Canadian authorities to handle. More than half of Liberal voters thought so, too.

Photo by Paul Chiasson/CP

More worrisome for Trudeau’s Liberals is an Angus Reid Institute trend analysis released Tuesday that suggests Canadians are suddenly souring on immigration altogether. Nearly half of Canadians polled — the highest proportion since 1975 — want Ottawa to scale back on Canada’s immigration targets. The immigration and refugee file “has been a source of division for more than 40 years,” the report concludes. The difference now is the turnaround in public opinion since the Liberals were elected.

In 2014, the last full year that the Conservatives were on power, 36 per cent of respondents said there should be fewer immigrants allowed in every year. Now it’s 49 per cent who say so. The Conservatives are headed into their national convention in Halifax this week, “to set the course to 2019.” They will be acutely aware of these poll numbers.

It’s a good bet that the disorienting jumble of competing narratives around immigration, refugees and the Safe Third Country Agreement will be generating a great deal of smoke and fire in the lead-up to next October’s federal election, whether Canadians want this to be so or not.