Poilievre, Stop Worrying and Seize the Immigration Opportunity

Poilievre’s Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) currently has the greatest political opportunity to reform immigration since it started to work against the interests of the people decades ago. With immigration so obviously the cause of the decline in living standards that even 62% of immigrants want to reduce it, Poilievere’s patriotic supporters can only defend his silence on the defining and most disastrous policy of the Trudeau era by claiming he has a forced hand: the retaliatory smear campaign from the media could kill his electoral chances. Even this best-case scenario is not clever Machiavellianism, but a massive and shortsighted blunder stemming from bad information.

It is probably true that Poilievre will be able to win without mentioning immigration, because Trudeau is so unpopular. But he is already frustrating many conservatives by not talking about it, and comes off as dishonest when he criticizes increased crime rates and housing prices without acknowledging what everyone knows to be the root cause. 

Without linking these issues to immigration, Poilievre is also absolving Trudeau of culpability. Housing becomes a failure at the provincial or municipal level, and upticks in crime become a mystery that can be exploited by the Woke to funnel more tax dollars into whatever programs they want and even be used to discredit police. But most importantly, by continuing to ignore immigration, Poilievre is squandering the chance to change public opinion on it for good and ensure the nation never again endures what it has under Trudeau. 

In 2015 the media successfully painted Harper’s tepid pushback against the wave of Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe, asking Muslim women to remove their niqabs during their citizenship ceremonies, as a human rights scandal. You could say that the Woke was ascending that year, as tail end millennials were voting for the first time. But eight years later, Canadians from Vancouver to Halifax now know what ‘demographic change’ actually means for their cities and their lives, and amidst months of Palestine marches and a rapid increase in cost of living caused by migration, they are more likely to be moved by rhetoric calling for repatriation and an immigration moratorium. 

They’ve seen what such stalwart adherence to ‘human rights’ has done to the country. People are sick of hearing about the ‘global migration crisis’ which apparently has been ongoing for nearly a decade. The Globe and Mail is publishing anti-immigration op-eds and even the CBC admits it is a valid topic to debate during a housing crisis. Canada’s subreddit, r/canada, looks like 4chan in 2016. Any potential media backlash to a strong Conservative stance on  immigration is a bogeyman.

The Conservative Party should be adopting an immigration program at least as far right as the one promoted by Bernier’s PPC. They would not take a hit in the polls at all. Bernier is a moderate who is still open to taking in 100k-150k immigrants annually ‘depending on needs’ and says nothing about repatriation. So they could even push it farther than this and still have it fall perfectly in line with their ‘common sense’ slogan. The ads write themselves. “You don’t invite more guests to your dinner party when you don’t have any seats left.” But doing nothing other than throwing Ezra Levant a bone by suggesting you’d support deporting a hypothetical Palestine protestor on a study visa chanting to kill the Jews will not cut it.

Poilievre has a historic opportunity. If he explicitly links immigration to the housing crisis, which represents the impoverishment of at least two generations of Canadians, as well as other issues like low wages and crime, and then solves those problems by closing the borders, he can put an end to the immigration taboo. This taboo has, at least since the 90s, made our country poorer and more dangerous, and destroyed our national identity. 

Everyone will be able to point to the miracle recovery initiated by Poilievre simply closing the borders. It will practically be an irrefutable scientific experiment. Mass immigration can become as unpopular as criticism of it was just a few years ago. 

This may sound optimistic, but many people, and I think especially the CPC strategists, don’t understand how wide open politics is right now across the Western world. Beloved and world-famous figures like Elon Musk and Connor McGregor are on X, now pretty much a free and open platform thanks to Musk’s takeover, linking crime to migration, accusing the mainstream media of being liars, and calling for the borders to be closed. These men were never known to be ‘right wing’ before. 

Discussion on X by intelligent patriots reporting long-suppressed truths trickles to Instagram and Facebook and Tiktok, and suddenly an acquaintance who you always knew to be a Liberal is telling you how upset he is about the plans he heard to resettle ‘refugees’ from Gaza. The assumptions that Trudeau and his predecessors rode on, that immigration is necessary for economic growth and always brings cultural benefits, are no longer taken for granted. Their rhetoric was able to persuade voters during a specific period of Western history that is quite possibly approaching its end. Canadians, just like the Irish, French and Dutch patriots, and Trump-supporting Americans, now know our approach to immigration is not and has not been rational or inexorable.

If Poilievre is not talking about immigration because he is scared of a media reaction, he’s making a political mistake and needs to realign his rhetoric with the will of the people, the self-interest of the nation, and with Reason. If on the other hand he is a ‘true believer’ as his detractors say, a part of that waning breed of conservatives who genuinely think migration is a good policy for the country and compatible with their future electoral success, patriots have the urgent task of persuading him before the election that he’s wrong. 

Failing to do this means Poilievre winning and chipping away at the housing crisis over the years by massively increasing supply. This will gain the ire of many common sense people who care about the aesthetics of their cities and towns, allow environmentalists to portray him as a monster, and make him look foolish as all the other migration-linked issues like crime, wage stagnation, and a decline in social cohesion continue. 

His failure to actually fix the issues with Trudeau’s Canada which are caused by migration alone will jeopardize his chances for re-election once the Liberal party gets a new leader and he can no longer cruise to victory on Trudeau’s unpopularity. He must start openly criticizing immigration now, to avoid long-term disaster to both himself and the country.