By Laurent Lafrance and Roger
Jordan
22 August 2018
Canada’s ruling elite is
whipping up anti-refugee xenophobia with the twin aims of turning politics
sharply to the right and diverting attention away from its agenda of austerity
and war.
While the Conservatives are
leading the way with appeals to far-right and outright racist forces, Justin
Trudeau’s federal Liberal government is presiding over the deportation of
desperate asylum-seekers and working closely with the Trump administration to
strengthen security at the Canada-US border.
The most right-wing section of
the Canadian elite, emboldened by the coming to power of Donald Trump in the
US, is portraying Canada as under siege by “illegal aliens.” This chauvinist
campaign has escalated in recent weeks with Ontario’s new provincial
government, led by the right-wing populist Doug Ford, ending cooperation with
the federal government on a program that provides minimal support to
asylum-seekers who have fled the United States for Canada out of fear of
persecution and deportation.
In a thoroughly cynical
manner, Ford and his spokesmen, who lead a government hell bent on eviscerating
what little remains of Ontario’s public and social services, claim that
refugees are a drain on social spending. Employing the language of Trump or the
far-right in Europe, Ford has argued that the influx of refugees is causing a
“housing crisis” and jeopardizes Ontarians’ access to public services.
Ford’s anti-refugee xenophobia
must be taken as a serious warning by working people across Canada. His goal is
to mobilize the most backward sections of the middle class and sow divisions
among working people as he imposes a hard-right agenda of social spending cuts,
tax cuts for big business and the rich, and law-and-order measures.
Ford’s rise parallels the
strengthening of far-right political forces internationally, including Trump in
the US, the Alternative for Germany, France’s National Rally and Italy’s Lega —all
of which scapegoat immigrants for the social crisis produced by capitalism.
These reactionary forces are being cultivated and systematically promoted by
important sections of the ruling elite which view them as a battering ram to be
used against the working class.
Workers disgusted by Ford’s
program of vicious attacks on the working class and anti-immigrant xenophobia
must recognize that their ostensible establishment opponents, the Liberals and
social-democratic NDP, represent no alternative. Like their counterparts
internationally, the so-called “progressive” parties and the pro-capitalist
trade unions have created the conditions for the rise of far-right figures like
Ford and Trump, by their decades-long imposition of capitalist austerity and
embrace of war and reaction.
While posturing as a friend of
refugees, the Trudeau government has deported thousands of desperate
asylum-seekers trying to flee Trump’s vicious crackdown on immigrants. In fact,
as Trump has been carrying out his anti-immigrant witch hunt, the Liberal government
has expanded its border-military cooperation with the US Department of Homeland
Security and the US Customs and Border Protection Agency—the very same bodies
overseeing the mass round-up of immigrants south of the border.
The Liberals’ “pro-refugee”
posturing, which is abetted by the media, serves to obscure the fact that this
big business party maintains a hard line against refugees and is eager to
expand military-security cooperation with a Trump-led US.
According to data provided to
Reuters by Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board, the Trudeau government
granted refugee status to just 53 percent of all claimants in 2017. For
so-called “irregular entrants,” i.e. those entering Canada from the US, the
rejection rate is far higher. Of the thousands of Haitians who came to Canada
last year when Trump ended their “Temporary Protected” status, only 9 percent
received the right to remain.
Moreover, Trudeau’s Liberals
defend the 2004 Safe Third Country Agreement with the United States to the
hilt. It is this reactionary deal that forces significant numbers of refugees
to cross the US-Canada border outside official entry points, often in
life-threatening conditions.
The Safe Third Country
Agreement deprives asylum-seekers who enter Canada from the US at a land-crossing
of the right to make a claim for refugee status in Canada and sanctions their
immediate return to the US. However, under international law, Canada is obliged
to hear the claims of those who arrive outside official entry points.
The Conservatives are urging
the Trudeau government to declare the entire Canada-US border an official entry
point, so as to dramatically expand the application of the Safe Third Country
Agreement and ensure the immediate arrest and deportation of all those fleeing
the anti-immigrant witch hunt south of the border. Thus far the Liberals have
insisted that this is not necessary, because under Canada’s reactionary
immigration laws the vast majority of asylum-seekers will soon be expelled
anyway.
The Liberals reject the claims
promoted by the Conservatives, the Toronto Sun, the Journal de
Montreal, and other right wing media that the spike in refugee claimants
constitutes a “crisis.” But this is entirely hypocritical.
Because they want to
discourage refugee claims, the federal Liberals are doing everything to ensure
that those who cross into Canada face difficult, crisis-type, conditions,
including at one point housing large numbers in tents just inside the border.
In their 2018 budget, the
Liberals set aside $173.2 million over two years to strengthen border security.
The government boasted that part of this money is to be earmarked for
“expediting” the removal of those whose claims for asylum have been rejected on
the spurious grounds they are “economic,” not political, refugees.
To manage an enhanced
crackdown on asylum-seekers, Trudeau announced last month the appointment of
former Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair to a newly-created post of Minister of
Border Security and Organized Crime.
The Liberals’ pro-refugee
posturing is all the more hypocritical given that the Trudeau government and
Canadian imperialism bear responsibility for creating the conditions that have
led tens of millions worldwide to flee their homes. Like its Liberal and
Conservative predecessors, the Trudeau Liberals have ruthlessly pursued
Canadian imperialist interests in US-led wars around the world that have
destroyed entire societies.
This has included deploying
troops to the war in Syria and Iraq, dispatching military forces to Mali, and
supplying weapons to the Saudi regime to wage its near-genocidal war in Yemen.
As tensions between the US and
Canada have flared up over trade, which is but one expression of a broader
breakdown of the global capitalist order, the Liberals have rushed to bang the
drum of Canadian nationalism and impose multi-billion counter-tariffs on
Washington. The nationalist narrative underpinning such policies plays directly
into the hands of the extreme right.
The trade union bureaucracy
plays a critical role in sustaining this foul political atmosphere with its
promotion of virulent Canadian nationalism, including by means of its support
for the Canadian government’s protectionist tariffs and its denunciations of
foreign workers, particularly in Mexico and Asia, as competitors of Canadian
workers. Similarly, the New Democratic Party, which recently raised the demand
for the formation of a corporatist national tariff task force to defend
“Canadian jobs,” is fully on board with peddling this nationalist filth.
The Parti Québécois and the
pro-sovereignty movement in Quebec have long stoked xenophobic sentiments,
presenting immigrants as a threat to “Quebec values,” and seeking to divide
workers along ethnic and linguistic lines. Like Ford, PQ leader Jean-François
Lisée has suggested that refugees are responsible for deteriorating public
services, and he has called for a Trump-style fence to block the principal road
whereby refuge claimants are crossing over from the US into Quebec. For its
part, the right-wing populist Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) is demanding a
reduction in immigrants and advocates that future immigrants to Quebec who fail
a French-language and “Quebec values” test be expelled.
The promotion of such
reactionary nostrums by the ruling elite is laying the groundwork for a
deepening of the assault on the democratic and social rights of the working
class—an assault which can be enforced only by a resort to openly authoritarian
forms of rule. In this context, it is no accident that as in Europe and the
United States, ultra-right groups such as La Meute in Quebec or Storm
Alliance, active across Canada, feel emboldened. Over the past two years, they
have organized protests and other provocations in major cities, often with
direct police support.
Workers cannot oppose these
dangerous developments by allying themselves with any section of the ruling
elite. All are complicit in the attacks on jobs and living standards of working
people and the criminalization of strikes and social opposition. The defence of
refugees and immigrants must be a rallying point for a broader counteroffensive
against the ruling-class agenda of war abroad, and attacks on democratic and
social rights at home that is shared by the entire political establishment,
from the NDP to the Conservatives. To prosecute such a struggle, workers
require their own independent political party opposed to the capitalist profit
system on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program.
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