A spectre is haunting Canada, or at least the parts of it susceptible to the allure of populist right-wing thinking. According to the latest theory sweeping these quarters, our borders are about to be erased, our citizenship undermined, our very sovereignty reduced to naught.

The alleged culprit? A document wordily entitled the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, to be adopted next week by Canada and dozens of other countries at a United Nations-sponsored conference in Marrakech, Morocco.

On a plain reading of the 34-page agreement, it’s a list of mostly laudable objectives to deal with the flood of global migration. The basic idea is that, with some 258 million people seeking refuge, it’s better for countries to work together to treat migrants decently and reduce the number of people fleeing their homelands.

It is, the document makes clear, a “non-legally binding cooperative framework.” It explicitly states (see page 2, paragraph 7) that participating nations remain free to set their own immigration policies.

Yet in the fevered world of far-right commentary, the Global Compact has been turned into the latest scheme of power-mad globalists to erase the nation state and flood the west with unwanted migrants.

Rush Limbaugh warns it means “a massive influx of legal migration into our countries.” The loony but popular Infowars site claims there’s a “UN plan to flood America with 600 million migrants.” Closer to home, a columnist in the Toronto Sun calls the compact a “radical global scheme that undermines Canada’s laws and traditions while pushing for mass migration and open borders.”

For Canadians, all that was a noisy sideshow until this week when Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer joined the populist bandwagon.

In the House of Commons, he denounced the Trudeau government’s support for the compact. It will, he warned, “give influence over Canada’s immigration system to foreign entities.” It could, he went on, shape how the media reports on immigration issues (this in response to the most problematic clause in the document, calling for “sensitizing and educating media professionals.”) It would “open the door to foreign bureaucrats telling Canada how to manage our borders.”

It’s not clear how much, if any, of this Scheer actually believes, given the mostly banal nature of the document and its repeated assertions that it won’t bind Canada to actually doing anything.

What is clear is that by signing on to the anti-UN campaign Scheer has made a deliberate choice to stoke fears about the influx of migrants across our border and about immigration in general.

This is nothing new for the Conservatives. They played that card in the dying days of the 2015 election campaign with their promise to root out “barbaric cultural practices.” And the leadership campaign that followed their defeat saw a contest between Conservatives more inclined to talk tough on immigration and those who didn’t want to go near the hot-button issue.

Now Scheer has evidently decided that megaphoning fears about the UN agreement is how he intends to position his party for next October’s federal vote. That narrow issue alone may not mean much. But it sends a clear message that Scheer is listening to the segment of the population attuned to the populist, far-right message.

In part this is a defensive move by Scheer against a perceived threat from Maxime Bernier and his new People’s Party of Canada. Bernier has gone hard on the immigration issue and joined the clamour against the UN Global Compact before Scheer jumped on board.

The Conservatives obviously don’t want Bernier stealing votes from voters who think they’re soft on migrants. And they’re very aware that anti-immigration sentiment is particularly strong in Quebec, whose newly elected small-c conservative government has just cut the province’s annual quota for newcomers by 20 per cent.

But this goes far beyond a mere electoral tactic. Scheer is putting himself in pretty bad company here. Never mind the likes of Limbaugh and Infowars. The Trump administration has refused to have anything to do with the Global Compact, along with the governments of Australia and a growing list of European countries run by right-wing populist parties — including Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Right-wing parties in countries like Belgium are also undermining support for the agreement.

It’s troubling, to say the least, to see the Official Opposition throwing in its hand with such extreme elements. For the most part Canada has maintained an all-party consensus on immigration; it would be dangerous and divisive if a major federal party heads down the road of populism and nativism on this issue.

The Conservatives certainly aren’t there yet, but they are setting the stage for a debate next year over immigration and particularly on the influx of migrants coming over the border from the United States. They’ll try to portray Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as weak on border security and blame his government for the increase in numbers and the rising bill for dealing with them.

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It’s a legitimate debate. But it could easily turn nasty if one of the parties chooses to blow it out of proportion and feed fears for electoral advantage. We’ve seen how easily that can happen in many other countries, and it’s the last thing we need to import into Canada.

Scheer and the Conservatives have a moral responsibility, as well as a political one, to stop the debate in this country from going bad. Their position on the UN migrants compact is a worrisome sign that they’re on the wrong path.

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