Scheer’s stance on migration pact a nod to Bernier supporters

By Medicine Hat News Opinon on December 15, 2018.

Conservative Party of Canada Lleader Andrew Scheer appears to be making a hard right pivot in the leadup to the 2019 election.

Scheer is practically shrieking about globalists with his fact-free attacks on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for signing the non-binding UN Pact on Global Migration.

He claims that signing the agreement will limit Canada’s ability to set its own migration policies, which he wants to tighten, but the agreement does nothing of that sort.

The pact has 23 wholly anodyne goals — mitigating the factors that led to people fleeing their country of origin, collecting data to assist signatories in creating evidence-based policies, fighting human trafficking, co-ordinating international efforts to search for missing migrants and eliminating discrimination against migrants, among others.

The notion that the UN, or “foreign entities” as Scheer put it, are conspiring to erode state sovereignty and establish a global government is a theory right out of the Infowars and Rebel Media playbook.

In fact, the agreement explicitly “reaffirms the sovereign right of states to determine their national migration policy” and allows states to take measures to reduce irregular migration. This shouldn’t be controversial.

With competition to his right from Maxime Bernier, Scheer is clearly and shamelessly dogwhistling to potential Bernier supporters to stay in the Tory fold.

And with President Donald Trump south of the border being the first leader to pull out of the agreement, the Tories seem to be seeking an opportunity to ingratiate themselves with his Canadian apologists, rather than risk losing their votes to Bernier’s vanity project.

Former Conservative leadership candidate and Stephen Harper’s immigration minister Chris Alexander slammed his party’s fearmongering.

“Scheer’s statement is factually incorrect,” tweeted Alexander. “This compact is a political deceleration, not a legally binding treaty. It has no impact on our sovereignty.”

Alexander himself has had his dalliances with with hard right.

He stood idly by at a Rebel Media-sponsored rally against the carbon tax, where the audience chanted, “Lock her up” in reference to Premier Rachel Notley. He tried, to no avail, to change the chant to “Vote her out.”

And along with Kellie Leitch, another failed leadership candidate, Alexander spearheaded the ill-advised “barbaric cultural practices hotline” from the 2015 election. While both apologized for their role in blatantly xenophobic rhetoric, Alexander is the only one of the two who appears to have learned the lesson, given Leitch’s full-throated support in the leadership race for screening immigrants for ill-defined “Canadian values.”

Alexander is clearly no left winger, but he sees his party moving in an indefensible and dangerous direction. Is this a case of sour grapes after Alexander placed ninth in the leadership race? Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

We’ve seen demagogues across the world — from Trump to Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro to India’s Nerandra Modi to the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu — stoke fears in recent years of migrants, criminals, environmentalists, Muslims or all of the above.

Scheer, who clearly seeks to join their ranks, is playing with fire, feeding into conspiratorial fantasies in a bid to win votes off the backs of migrants and those who seek to help them.