Tim Murray by

Terry Glavin: I consider myself to be a heretic and a tough man because I believe that Canada must become a diverse nation.

S

o journalist Terry Glavin says that Andrew Scheer's Conservatives have a "racist jackass problem" , and despite their assurances of doing something about it, they have failed to make it clear that racists are not welcome in the Conservative Party. But Glavin has it wrong. The real problem is that Conservatives are not welcome in the Conservative Party.Glavin is the jackass here. He uses all the sophistic tricks in the kitbag, including the standard deceitful conflations: Anti-immigration equals anti-immigrant being the most shop-worn of them.Glavin says that if the Conservative Party insists that it is not 'racist' then their signal must be garbled. "Racist jackasses" aren't receiving it. Well, I think that the CP establishment gave a pretty clear signal when they ganged up on Kellie Leitch and went ape-shit over Bernier's tweet that there was "too much diversity", a view that is shared by a vast swath of Canadians, including those "of colour".For example, my nephew, who, like his brother is married to a wonderful Chinese lady, complained that his Vancouver Island community was too diverse. Speaking of the conspicuous foreign born arrivals, he intimated that "I don't have a problem with their colour---it is their customs." He also hates how quickly the city has grown, a common complaint heard from people right across the country about their own towns. He fled the big city to raise a family in a house on acreage, but the big city followed him.Since most newcomers have brown skin, it is natural that many Canadians would tell pollsters that there are "too many non-whites" in the country. In other words, skin colour is just a marker for a set of beliefs and customs which a lot of Canadians believe is incongruous with their own. Or a reminder that their once liveable city is now busting at the seams. Why is that necessarily "racist"? Let’s say that I don't like the fact that my once ethnically homogeneous town has doubled its population in the last 15 years. I wonder how this came to be. Then I notice that a quarter of the town's population is non-white. What conclusion am I supposed to reach? Am I not to think that immigration policy has something to do with this rampant growth?The presence of large numbers of brown people is an indicator that immigration-led growth has made their cities too dense, too congested, too unaffordable, and yes, too unsafe in some areas. If a thermometer indicates that I have a fever, I don't blame the thermometer. I don't hate thermometers, I hate learning that I am that sick. Shall I take no notice of its readings in case some journalist might accuse me of hating thermometers?Glavin observes that the climate-obsessed youth who propelled Trudeau to office are now "...stuck in low-paying temporary jobs, and they’re dealing with out-of-reach housing, high daycare and transportation costs and university degrees that lead nowhere. Holding out higher immigration rates as some sort of magic road map out of this mess is at best a flimsy political strategy. It’s not convincing, for starters. But more importantly, it’s dangerous, because when the formula fails to fix things, it will be immigrants who take the blame, and Canada’s recent immigrants are overwhelmingly people of colour."Here Glavin had the opportunity to critique high immigration rates, and link them to the problems he enumerated (out of reach housing etc.). But he didn't. Instead he chose to play the safe game of framing popular dissatisfaction with immigration-driven problems as "anti-immigrant" scapegoating. He had the chance to make the crucial distinction between attacking bad immigration policy and attacking those who took advantage of it. But that makes sense because you don't earn PC brownie points or attract readers if you pass up on the chance to raise the spectre of immigrant bashing.What is remarkable about Glavin's rant is that he raises alarm bells about racist jackasses in Scheer's party, but not about the politicians in Scheer's party who have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Three of them at least. White racists bad but fascist Muslims not?When MSM mouthpieces like Glavin resort to descriptors like "white nationalist" or "far right" in predictable analyses like this, it makes one think that the article was computer-generated. What does it mean to be "far right"? The evidence suggests that "far right" people in the United States, and I would assume Canada as well, have not really budged from the view they held a decade or more ago. Only at that time their views were regarded as simply "right wing" or "conservative". Leftists, on the other hand, have drifted very much more to the Left during that period, and particularly in the last five years. So from their perspective, and the perspective of the progressive media, the growing distance they perceive the Right to have traveled is in fact a measure of the distance that they have traveled. Einstein could have explained that to them, if they had the intelligence to grasp the concept of relativity. Is the train moving away from the railway platform or is the railway platform moving away from the train?The irony is that Leftists are the people who have long told us that "everything is relative", that there are no moral absolutes, and that what is true for you is not true for me, or vice versa. Yet they can't understand that we haven't gone anywhere but they have drifted well of course into insanity. In my case, I was a left-wing Rip Van Winkle who went to sleep as a socialist in the early 80s and woke up 30 years later to find that I was a right wing extremist. If Tommy Douglas or J.S. Woodsworth were to return from the dead to present day Canada, no doubt they too would have been similarly branded. Douglas believed in balance budgets and Woodsworth believed in cutting back immigration in hard times. And both understood that the law of supply and demand applies to labour markets as well. Workers benefit from tight labour markets and corporations benefit from wide labour markets, made wider by mass immigration. Duh. Oh, BTW, both Douglas and Woodsworth were Christian ministers of the cloth. That alone condemns them. Justin Trudeau's Canada has no room for old white men who preach the medieval gospel of a 'misogynist' and 'patriarchal' religion. Unless they are imams, of course.Glavin evidences an assumption that underlies a lot of the hand wringing that Leftists have engaged in since Brexit, Trump and the migration crisis in Europe came about. They fear populism. The mere sight of a yellow vest evokes fear and loathing. Their concept of democracy does not include the notion that the great unwashed should be able to influence public policy. They believe in 'representative' democracy, not direct democracy, because they know that our 'representatives' can be trusted not to represent us. They believe that we, the people, should be governed by those "who know better". Superior beings like them for example.. They reject the slogan of "no taxation without representation". They may appreciate that bigots and "racist jackasses" pay taxes, but they don't think that entitles them to a voice in decision making , or a political vehicle that would convey and amplify it.In fact, as we have recently witnessed, they are determined that we not be heard at all. For them, when our social media and Paypal accounts are closed down and the books we want to read are banned, it is cause for celebration. Keep in mind that these are the same people who cite the McCarthy era and the blacklisting of the Hollywood Ten as a dark period of history that should never be repeated. They love free speech so much that they want to keep it for themselves. Anything we have to say is "hate speech", a whole different animal from the vile nonsense that issues from their mouths. Who defines hate speech? They do of course.Fundamentally Glavin doesn't want a vast sector of taxpayers to have a lawful political option. He wants all major parties to chase out what he deems to be a 'creepy' fringe into the arms of Bernier whom he expects to be consigned to a footnote in Canadian history. Obviously, Glavin does not study the polls too closely. The Angus Reid poll taken in August of last year clearly indicates that the sentiments he regards as "racist" are held by a decisive majority of Canadians. ( http://angusreid.org/canadian-immigration-trend-data) . Some 49% of Canadians polled that they wanted to see immigration levels reduced, while 31% said that they did not want them to increase. In other words, eight in ten Canada's oppose what the Trudeau government recently did, that is, jack immigration levels even higher. At least four in ten people who voted for each of the three main parties in 2015 said that the federal government should reduce immigration intakes, including NDP voters. In fact, 74% of NDP voters said that they did not want immigration quotas increased. That was their view in August of 2018. What would it be today? It seems reasonable to assume that 74% of NDP voters would say that immigration levels should be decreased. This means that according to Glavin's metric, three in four NDP voters are racist jackasses. That being the case, it seems that Jagmeet Singh needs to tell them that he doesn't want their vote and that they are not welcome in his party. Ditto Trudeau.Gutting Canada’s parties of so called ‘racists’ would be brutal surgery. But there would be an upside to this. It would streamline the political process. Once this 'fringe' is jettisoned, party conventions could be held in motel rooms, and fewer scrutineers would be needed to count the votes on election night, given that most voters would stay home for want of meaningful choices. More than a third of registered voters stay home on election night as it is now, and largely for the same reason. Racist jackasses all of them.Better still, lets spare taxpayers the expense of having elections altogether. Instead, let there be a small electoral college consisting of CBC journalists, Gender Studies professors, "Anti-Hate" watchdogs and immigration lawyers who can sit down and appoint 30 gender-diverse racialized people of colour to run the country, with a token number of white male Canadian-born boot lickers and virtue-signallers thrown in as a gesture of fair play.