If B.C. Premier Christy Clark is forced into an early resignation in the next couple of days it won't have much to do with "ethnicgate" -- the press' clumsy name for her party's recently-leaked scheme to use "government initiatives and projects" to rally the immigrant vote.
Clark's caucus never liked her. When she ran to lead the B.C. Liberals following the 2010 resignation of despised premier Gordon Campbell, only a single member of the legislature backed her, and he was basically the worst one. Since her ascension, she's been blamed mercilessly by her own tribe for ballooning deficits, embarrassing defections, cabinet resignations, corruption scandals, free-falling poll numbers, and various other things that were already happening under Campbell and would have continued to happen under any of her ideologically interchangeable rivals.
In a way, Clark's sort of the anti-Justin Trudeau: same magical personality, only hers makes the underlying flaws of her doomed party more apparent.
Ethnicgate fits nicely into the narrative that poor Christy is "disingenuous and incompetent," in the words of the National Post's Brian Hutchinson, and it may provide the salivating Brutuses in her party with a fun pretext to finally turf the boss amid much rhetoric of straws and camel spines. But that would be unfortunate, because the true scandal of ethnicgate has little to do with any Clark malfeasance in particular, and an awful lot to do with the disgustingly central role ethnic pandering has come to play at all levels of modern Canadian politics.
Canadian immigration has never been anything other than a nakedly political program. Even now, in the epoch of Jason Kenney and his Common-Sense Reforms™, the vast majority of Canadian immigrants arrive bringing no discernible benefit to taxpayers. A mere 26 per cent of last year's total were considered "economic class" -- the kind that supposedly help grow the GDP, etc -- a number so embarrassingly small the feds have to artificially inflate it by lumping econo-class children, wives, and relatives in the same spreadsheet column.
I tweeted Minister Kennedy about this a while ago, and he admitted his government hasn't even bothered to commission a study on the overall economic impact of our current immigration regime, and instead lazily directed me to a report from the Fraser Institute which claimed his ministry was actually operating at a loss. But the only math that matters in politics is vote counting, and I'll concede that Kenney does at least know how to win a majority government.
The Clark administration's leaked strategy for immigrant outreach wasn't much different from any of Kenney's various initiatives -- patronizing yet exploitative (remember the "very ethnic" ridings?), and unapologetic about using government power for electoral expediency. But does an alternative approach even exist? When immigration is run strictly as a political program, when we import immigrants without regard to economics or culture, but simply as a way to build a loyalty base, it becomes very difficult to determine where neutral government interests end and partisan ones begin.
The cynicism of the ethnicgate memo is striking. Assuming the generals of the Liberal war room know what they're talking about, immigrant voters in B.C. are simple folk obsessed with a handful of ancient racial grievances (a "quick win" can be scored from mourning incidents like the Komagata Maru, says page six) who exclusively consume "ethnic media," (as important as the "so-called mainstream media" we're told), trust only each other (concern is expressed over all the "photos of white people" in Liberal ads), and possess limited ability to function in anything but their impractical birth languages (MLA Dave Hayer is cited as potentially useful because he "apparently speaks some Punjabi"). Heed this advice and you've got their vote.
In the Gangs of New York era, such exploitation of ghettoized immigrants was a hallmark of machine politics, yet in 21st century Canada it's been rebranded as "multiculturalism," a constitutionally-entrenched principle that's so relentlessly propagandized as a foundation of modern Canadian identity (in beer commercials and whatnot) it's easy to forget it hasn't gotten any less self-serving for the politicians. The more integrated -- dare I say, assimilated -- immigrants become, or the more cautiously we select immigrants in the first place, the harder it is for politicians to sponge easy votes from segregated demographics and their predictable minority causes. So none of these things happen.
Ethnicgate is one of those scandals that's scandalous mostly because it involves political operatives saying things out loud that most have the decency to keep quiet. Immigration and multiculturalism of the style currently practised in Canada are programs that brazenly abuse one of the most extreme powers a government has -- the power to chose its own citizens -- for purposes that don't serve any public interest beyond the buying of loyalty and the winning of elections. (And for those who think immigration isn't a provincial jurisdiction, well, clearly you haven't been paying attention).
Though everyone's having a lot of fun pretending ethnicgate exposes some terrible sin of desperation from a government with one foot in the grave, even post-Christy, immigrant pandering will continue to be a staple of B.C. and Canadian politics. Future politicians will continue to waste tax dollars apologizing for last century's racist crimes, celebrating foreign holidays, and recruiting ethnic bagmen in the same fashion they've done since the days of Tammany Hall.
Clark's the easy amputee of an incurably sick political culture.
