i just want to clarify a point i keep coming back to about recent immigrants leaning right, because if you're outside of the country you might not have the context. if you're inside of canada, you probably already know this. maybe it's my fault for being a little bit vague.

during the end of stephen harper's reign of terror, the government took on a decidedly anti-muslim tone. but, while it was doing this, it was also strongly courting chinese and indian immigrants. i guess that the government ultimately made a cost-benefit analysis and decided it would be better off trying to work up the xenophobic parts of the christian base than expand it to a broader religious coalition. but, this is obscuring what was going on for the nine years previously.

i at no point meant to suggest that conservatism is an innate ethnic quality or something, and whatever correlation may exist in objective reality shouldn't be enforced on individuals, or taken with much meaning. globally speaking, randomness is the dominant factor in determining whether any person you meet identifies as left or right. but, we're not dealing with global trends or random expressions. what we're actually dealing with is gerrymandering.

now, before i get into this, i want to point out that this isn't an isolated example of this kind of thing in canada. canadian governments have frequently used immigration policy to further their own hold on power. one notorious example was the elder trudeau's attempt to flood quebec with french-speaking africans (and afro-carribeans) to prevent an eventual separatist referendum from succeeding - which, by all objective accounts actually worked. when the second referendum failed by a margin small enough that fraud hasn't ever been entirely ruled out, the separatist leader blamed it on "the ethnic vote". he's been chided for his language, but nobody has ever doubted the correctness of his statement.

and, of course, the colonial project itself has always been about population replacement.

there are less ominous examples. when we needed to bring in immigrants to settle the west, and didn't want to worry about them moving to warmer climates in the south, we specifically targeted ukrainians, poles and scandinavians for the reason that we knew they were used to the climate. there are large communities of these groups scattered across the west - and some of them did move south, into the dakotas and also into minnesota. my grandmother has ancestry in a finnish community in northern manitoba.

so, this isn't unprecedented...

....but this is what the harper government did: realizing that it had long term electoral liabilities in the urban centres, especially in the east, it went out and encouraged two types of immigrants to settle in the city cores, thereby weakening liberal dominance in the urban centres:

1) religious conservatives, mostly from south asia.
2) anti-communists, mostly from east asia.

it may surprise people to learn that stephen harper actually increased immigration very substantially. it was orders of magnitude; through the roof is an accurate expression. and, this is the reason why: he was trying to make the country more conservative, and specifically trying to make the cities more conservative.

so, when i talk about "the immigrant vote" being right-wing and overwhelmingly conservative, it's not a reflection of the ethnicity in any crude sense - it's a consequence of the way they were purposefully screened in a canadian type of gerrymandering.

did it work, though? it's too early to say for sure. this is ultimately what i'm reacting to: the concern that it may have worked, because i obviously don't want it to have worked. the conservatives have certainly done comparably well with ethnic voters in the greater toronto area over the last ten years, notwithstanding the last election which was less about ethnic voting and more about the collapse of the ndp. right now, we just don't know.

one strange ramification of harper's immigration policy was actually rob ford, who actually built his base on immigrant voters. this is well understood by polling agents in the gta, if largely not realized outside of it. some people have suggested that it was the personable nature that connected with people that felt alienated, whereas others have pointed towards the populist anti-elite and just broadly conservative messaging. but, the seemingly obvious deduction that ford built his support on top of white trash is completely wrong - he represented a heavily ethnic district and would not have succeeded were it not for heavy support by south asians, in particular.

i don't know if that's a sign of the future, but it's not really what harper wanted, either. and, that might be why he turned on them in the end.

the architect of this policy - jason kenney - is currently the leader of the provincial conservative party in alberta.