The Conservative leader has left himself open to charges of intolerance in his party. It could be the biggest, ugliest issue in the coming election.
As political oratory goes, the three-minute speech Andrew Scheer delivered on the snow-covered lawn of Parliament back on Feb. 19 wasn’t exactly deathless.
Those salvos weren’t enough to undermine Kenney among those voters primed to revert, after a brief experiment with an NDP government, to their Conservative tradition. The federal landscape, however, poses a tougher test, as the 2015 election proved.
On the asylum-seekers issue—a core preoccupation at the United We Roll rally—Scheer’s Conservatives have, at best, stumbled in their messaging. They circulated an ad on social media last summer that depicted a black man rolling a suitcase up to a hole in a fence. The party quickly withdrew the image after it sparked outrage. As the convoy crossed the country, Scheer had to have heard that it was stoking ugly anti-migrant sentiment.
The danger of being seen as courting noxious supporters is a long-standing worry for right-of-centre politicians. Preston Manning, the former Reform party leader who has attained éminence grise status among Prairie populists, has argued that it is the “Achilles heel” of the conservative movement. “Is not its greatest weakness,” Manning asked in a 2013 speech, “intemperate and ill-considered remarks by those who . . .
In an interview, Immigration Minister Hussen, who came to Canada as a refugee from Somalia, equated Scheer’s take on the pact with the way it has been portrayed by fringe voices on the racist right. “Stuff that you used to read on the most far-right conspiracy websites, he was spouting in front of mainstream media,” Hussen told Maclean’s.
Arguably this year’s most widely discussed Canadian public-opinion finding came out early this spring from veteran pollster Frank Graves, the head of Ekos Research. Graves found that the segment of Canadians who think there are too many non-white newcomers is holding steady at around 40 per cent in recent years. What’s changed, however, is the partisan dimension in that data.
The recent Alberta election served as a laboratory for how all this can play out in contemporary Canadian politics, albeit with a uniquely Albertan twist. The UCP ran on an immigration-friendly platform and Kenney was, as a key figure in Harper’s government, both federal immigration minister and the driving force behind Conservative outreach to ethnic voters. Charges of homophobia were arguably more damaging, since they were easier to connect to the UCP’s campaign pledge to roll back some Notley-approved protections for LGBTQ students.
It turned out that Josh couldn’t catch everything. With Caylan Ford, for instance, there was no way UCP screeners could track her private messages. With Eva Kiryakos, the party believes that the controversial accounts were deleted before she registered to run, although some rival Conservatives snatched the rogue comments earlier and circulated them. As for Mark Smith, his anti-gay commentary was part of a guest sermon. Its existence caught Conservatives by surprise.
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