If the gist hasn’t yet smacked you in the teeth, here it is: The Ensign Hour is a show for white nationalists. It is a replacement of sorts for This Hour Has 88 Minutes, which until it went dark last May was the best-known Canadian alt-right podcast.

One of the prevailing narratives as to why Maxime Bernier remains in the Conservative Party caucus despite his xenophobic spleen venting about the alleged ills of “extreme multiculturalism” begins and ends with Andrew Scheer’s fortitude.

Unlike his predecessor Stephen Harper, the current Conservative Party leader has none. Bernier can run roughshod over the Conservative narrative at will as a result, comfortable in the knowledge that his boss is a Cuckservative at heart and in his Twizzler-like backbone. This very well may be true. Certainly, Scheer has pivoted from the Harper diktat days by way of a nice-guy makeover complete with smiles, plaid shirts and friendly waves. Turfing Bernier, a long-serving MP and former cabinet minister, would undo a lot of hard work.

Still, one must suspect there is another thing at play.

Perhaps Bernier remains nestled at the bosom of the Conservative Party because his only offense, according to Scheer, is that Bernier explicitly spelled out what Conservatives have been pushing for the last 18 months. That is to say, the stream of migrants arriving in Canada is nothing short of a “crisis” fomented by the current Liberal government. At the same time, with “unchecked immigration” (Conservative MP Michelle Rempel) or, if you prefer, “uncontrolled, illegal immigration” (Conservative Senator Linda Frum) or even “Trudeau’s broken immigration system” (Andrew Scheer) the Liberal government has been “stoking fear and condoning violence” (Conservative MP Steven Blaney) and otherwise rendering this country unrecognizable to average Canadians.

In both cases, the offending parties are using scare quotes to demonize and scapegoat new arrivals to this country.

“Extreme multiculturalism,” Bernier’s choicest phrase, means exactly nothing more than “multiculturalism” as it has been practiced in this country under successive Conservative and Liberal governments for 47 years. It’s the same one Harper defended to the hilt in 2006 and 2011. It is the identical version that Harper’s own former multiculturalism minister Jason Kenney embraced with near-unprecedented gusto.

Yet in conflating multiculturalism with “cultural balkanisation” and all its associated ills—even attaching the evidence-free contention that Trudeau’s version has attracted people who espouse “anti-western values”—Bernier is speaking to a very specific and enduring strain of conservativism within in his party.

Apparently, these conservatives approve. “We want to dedicate this half to the Tweets from Maxime Bernier,” said one of the co-hosts of the Red Ensign Hour, a nascent alt-right podcast, during a show recorded just after Bernier’s barrage. “I’ve met him a couple of times. He’s a really solid dude. Wonderful guy, head’s on straight.”

The hosts then go on to read Bernier’s six-part tweet storm. When Bernier wrote of how our “diversity should be celebrated”, the hosts said Bernier was using code to refer to “Franco, Anglo, Native, the Welch, the Irish and other European guests.”

“He’s definitely playing lip service” to diversity, says the other host.

If the gist hasn’t yet smacked you in the teeth, here it is: “The Ensign Hour” is a show for white nationalists. It is a replacement of sorts for “This Hour Has 88 Minutes,” which until it went dark last May was the best-known Canadian alt-right podcast. “The Ensign Hour” guys are more genteel by design, both in not invoking Hitler in the show’s title and by avoiding words like “nigger”, “chug”, “shitskin” and other assorted racial epithets bandied about by the erstwhile 88 Minutes hosts. By resorting to code words, the Ensign Hour hosts are trying to broaden the movement’s appeal—much as Bernier himself seems to be doing, come to think of it.

Rempel, Scheer and other Conservatives have distanced themselves from Bernier. Bully for them. But a cursory review of Conservative talking points over the last year suggests they are playing a similar shell game.

First off, it would be difficult to find a better visual depiction of Bernier’s sentiment than the Conservatives’ (since-deleted) advertisement featuring a Black man crossing into Canada through a broken fence, on a road paved with Trudeau’s words. The message is simple: people are wandering into Canada unfettered, they’re brown, it is a crisis, and it’s all Trudeau’s fault.

This month, Conservative Sen. Denise Batters and Conservative MP Blaine Calkins went after Liberal MP Omar Alghabra this month, the former suggesting that Alghabra’s place of birth, Saudi Arabia, influenced his views on the Liberal government’s tussle with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.

Calkins, meanwhile, tweeted out a 2005 article suggesting Alghabra was a radical Islamist—a long-debunked trope that nonetheless remains de rigueur amongst the right’s conspiracy-addled set.

Both Batters and Calkins apologized, which is more than one can say about Michelle Rempel. In a line of questioning about Canada’s citizenship guide last December, Rempel badgered Liberal Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen about his personal views on female genital mutilation—as if to suggest the minister was in favour of the ritual butchering of women.

More recently, Rempel has been steadfast in her contention that the migrants crossing into Canada constitutes nothing short of a “crisis.” Apart from being politically self-serving—no one would like this “crisis” to continue more than the Conservatives, if only until next year’s election—it is patently wrong.

Crises of this nature overwhelm governmental structures and otherwise fundamentally alter the demographic nature of a given country. Lebanon, a poor country with a population of about six million, is dealing with one million migrants. This is a crisis. The 47,000 refugee claims filed last year in Canada, a country of 36 million, isn’t a crisis.

In short, Bernier is only saying out loud what many of his colleagues have long whispered. For Scheer, that’s hardly a firing offence.

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