Dark times ahead - my quick and dirty interpretation of yesterday's election results

I'm one of the 167 people in Davenport who voted Communist. As hard as it might be to believe, I'm actually not a Marxist. Voting for the local Stalinist was my futile way of protesting a field of bad candidates. I see little good coming out of this election, because all the parties including the Conservatives support an immigration system that is causing tremendous harm to Toronto. The policy of allowing in 250,000 immigrants a year is not sustainable and will have to change if Canadians hope to keep their standard of living and quality of life. This figure of 250,000 a year (it rises and falls somewhat year to year) doesn't include temporary workers, foreign students (many of whom end up staying) or the illegal immigrants who work under the table and take jobs away from Canadians. (Yes, they are illegal and they should be deported!)

Toronto's growing social problems are well-documented. David Hulchanski, David Pecaut (when he was alive), the United Way and other agencies have all written reports that describe the growing gap between rich and poor, the concentration of poverty in specific neighbourhoods and the problem of the working poor struggling to survive on the minimum wage in an ever more expensive city. The problem of gangs and youth violence are also well known. The high drop out rate of black, Portuguese, Somali, Latin American and other youth has also been widely discussed. Toronto is a city in serious trouble and electing people like Andrew Cash will do nothing to change that.

People say Canada has always had immigration and that opposition to the current policy is based at best on ignorance and at worst on bigotry. I beg to differ. While it's true immigration has played a big role in Canadian history, the policy we have now is unprecedented because it is being justified by a multicultural ideology that didn't exist before Pierre Trudeau came to power in 1968. In the past, governments, including Trudeau's, made at least some effort to adjust immigration levels to fit Canada's economic needs, but this is no longer the case.

Trudeau, usually considered a pro-immigration Prime Minister, lowered immigration numbers before he left office in response to a recession, but when the Reform Party put in its platform a proposal to reduce immigration during economic downturns, the party was denounced. This is an example of how a blind faith in diversity for the sake of diversity has made it difficult to think rationally about immigration. I find it disturbing that there are groups like No one is illegal who actually believe there should be no restrictions on immigration at all or newspaper columnists like Doug Saunders who think Canada would benefit from an influx of a million poor Africans.

Today immigration is driven by a combination of social sector actors who have a career interest in maintaining their client base, business interests who want cheap labour, left-wing ideologues who hate whites as a matter of principle and ethnic (mostly non-white) voters who want to bring more of their own group into the country.

While Trudeau is responsible for introducing multiculturalism, the real perversion of immigration policy came in the 1980s under Brian Mulroney. Tired of losing the ethnic vote to Liberals, especially in vote-rich Toronto, the then Progressive Conservatves under Mulroney decided to play the ethnic pandering game. The Conservatives doubled the annual level of immigration from 88,000 to 190,000 a year (the annual intake later rose to 250,000). Just as importantly, Mulroney decided this number would remain the same regardless of economic conditions. This is why immigration levels remain high even though we have 7.7% official unemployment in Canada (a figure that doesn't include the many Canadians who have given up hope of ever finding a job).

NDP supporters want the federal government to pay more attention to Toronto. They want more federal money for public transit, public housing and improvements to urban infrastructure. I don't necessarily disagree but where is the money supposed to come from when the tax base is being eroded by the transfer of manufacturing plants to low-wage countries like China and Mexico? How can all levels of government possibly find the money to meet Toronto's social needs when those needs keep growing due to an immigration policy that doesn't take into account the poor job market for both immigrants and native-born Canadians? If the NDP wants to help Toronto, it should call for a moratorium on immigration, but that's not going to happen because people like Jack Layton, Olivia Chow, Peggy Nash and Andrew Cash are too influenced by multicultural ideology to face up to reality. I am very discouraged by yesterday's election results. Toronto faces a bleak future. There are dark times ahead.