EXPRESS ENTRY AND THE LONG GUN REGISTRY

Putting aside any public policy considerations, I would venture that Express Entry will be the political equivalent to this government what the Gun Registry was to the former administration.

Rural Canada and immigrant Canada each control about the same number of electoral ridings.

Rural Canada sees the gun registry as an attack on its core values. Immigrant Canada sees immigration administration as an attack on its core values.

In 2011, Jason Kenney was very effective in grafting immigrant Canada‘s discontent onto core support in rural Canada.

The former administration failed in its attempt to convince rural Canada that the gun registry served the greater public good. They failed because they refused to understand that the administration of the gun registry was perceived in rural Canada as attacking identity and core values. The government of the day was unable to come up with administration that would render acceptable the policy of the gun registry.     

The present administration realizes that immigrant Canada is again on the cusp of revolting against the administration of immigration policies.

The present administration has added up the political cost of:

• Ditching 300,000 skilled work applications
• Ditching over 50,000 investor files
• Wiping out the long term ambitions of thousands of students who had invested time and money
• Removing status and denying status to at least 300,000 GTHA workers, including 60,000 Italians
• Actively denying  the needs of thousands of Ontario employers
• Giving priority to English, Irish and French while imposing “quotas” on other jurisdictions. In some case , the quotas are “zero”  
• Giving priority to Western Canada  
• Placing language restrictions on citizenship
• Attacking the citizenship of dual nationals

This administration is politically more cunning than the former stewards. The present group understands that it makes no sense to either justify or explain the above.

At the same time, the problem cannot be ignored.

The solution to the administrative nightmare generated by the above policies has been to create a new administrative policy: Express Entry 

The administration is rolling the electoral dice with Express Entry. 

The political manipulation behind Express Entry is to spend millions of media dollars before the October 2015 election. The focus of the media attack will be the government’s care, sensitivity and administrative success. 

Starting in March – April, we will be subjected to nonstop coverage of perhaps 20-100 new immigrants receiving their landed papers in under 6 months. The ads will feature the usual cross section of ethnic and gender backgrounds.

Thus, the question:

Will immigrant Canada buy the Express Entry media message?

Maybe.

But I doubt it.

What unites rural and immigrant Canada is the fact that most immigrants come from rural backgrounds.

Rural people are the same the world over. They know when some smooth talking, snake oil salesman is playing a shell game.      

Richard Boraks, 5 January 2015