McDonald may have the last laugh

By Craig Westcott
October 13, 2023 Edition

Spare a thought this week for Avalon MP Ken McDonald, who showed much courage in defying his party’s whip and voting for a Conservative motion to kill the Liberal government’s carbon tax.

McDonald was the only Liberal to do so and likely now finds himself in a very lonely place within the Liberal caucus.

A former Conservative MP from Newfoundland who witnessed that party’s expulsion of Nova Scotian Bill Casey when he had the temerity to vote against a Harper government budget in 2007, was in awe at how roughly Casey was treated.

The MP recalled seeing political staffers and other Conservative MPs literally manhandling Casey into some sort of closet to pressure him into changing his mind. When he refused, staff quickly removed both Casey and his belongings from his Government Members office, casting him, they hoped, into the political wilderness. Casey won in the end though, getting re-elected as an Independent, and some years later, running again, this time as a Liberal, and getting elected yet again.

The same may happen to McDonald, should he choose to run again. The Canadian electorate is growing so fed up with Justin Trudeau that if he leads the Liberals into another election, they could be looking at a Mulroney style wipeout come election night. Many Canadians are so fed up with Trudeau that growing numbers are even turning to Pierre Poilievre, perhaps the most unappealing politician to ever lead a national party in Canada.

When Mulroney stayed too long and brought his party to political ruin, only three Progressive Conservative seats survived. McDonald could well be one of very few Liberals left standing, or in this case sitting, after the next election.

McDonald’s fortitude on the carbon tax vote is the first internal chink in the wall that is about to crumble around Trudeau’s hold on the party’s leadership. If the party wants a fighting chance at staying in power it should remove Trudeau as soon as possible and replace him with a credible leader who can guide the party back to the political centre, such as former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney. The Liberals have moved too far towards the extreme woke left for the great body of moderate Canadians and it is killing the party’s chances of re-election.

Shh… Don’t mention immigration

One of the big stories nationally and internationally this week, besides the obvious one in Israel and Gaza, was that Canada has allowed a Sikh man who housed and fed militants in India for years to now stay in this country.

Canada has an immigration problem. Until recently, immigration was working pretty well in this country, even at the higher levels we maintained than other western countries. The last several years under Trudeau, however, have seen the floodgates thrown open so wide that not even the government has any accurate reckoning of how many people are coming in.

A report on CBC Radio last week about post secondary colleges in Northern Ontario discovered that 80 per cent of the students at the colleges are foreign students from India. That’s not counting foreign students from other countries.

Like the rest of government and many other publicly-funded institutions, colleges and universities have become bloated, overstaffed and wasteful. So, they are turning to tuition from foreign students as a cash source. The latest guesstimate from Ottawa is that some 900,000 foreign students came to Canada this year.

That’s not counting the millions more immigrants coming in under work visas or as relatives of people with work visas. As the rest of the western world is wrestling with ways to limit immigration, there seems to be an unspoken agenda here to overrun the country with immigrants. But whose agenda is it, and to what purpose?

The result of this immigration free for all is a housing crisis and inflation, the latter of which is driving up interest rates for Canadians. The tie between immigration and the housing crisis is obvious. The tie between immigration and inflation should also be obvious. Any time you have too many people chasing too few goods you get inflation. The slowdown of production during Covid was responsible for the initial jump in inflation. Too high a level of immigration has compounded it and lengthened it since then.

Canada has become so woke that there is an unspoken rule that you are not allowed to acknowledge that our exorbitant rate of immigration has become a problem. People who discuss the housing crisis publicly feel compelled to spout the nonsensical apologia that “I know immigration is not causing the housing crisis,” before they go on to search for other causes, most of which are not valid. Face the facts. Without immigration, Canada’s population would be shrinking and there would be an excess of housing available on the market. But with an immigration rate that is many times higher than other countries, there are literally millions more people suddenly looking for houses and apartments, making it unaffordable for many families and their children who have been here for generations.

We need a radical readjustment back to earlier, more sensible and sustainable immigration levels. It is not racist to acknowledge that we have a problem. It is self-defeating, however, to bury your head and let it go on.