Stumbling Out Of The Starting Block

In which the road to electoral Hell is paved with well intended but underdeveloped policy proposals. Oh, and xenophobia.

The Ontario provincial election is off to a roaring (well, by the standards of provincial politics) start, with a Liberal proposal to provide a $10,000 tax credit to Ontario employers that hire immigrants in professional fields dominating the first day on the hustings. The Globe and Mail's editorialists call it a “well-meaning, but ... ultimately an inefficient and divisive policy,” because it gives new Canadians an advantage over less-new and native-born Canadians who are also looking for jobs. The intent of the policy is to get more immigrants working in the professions they did before coming to the country, as only a quarter of immigrants in Canada work in the fields of their training, but the Globe is right in saying that this is hardly the best way to achieve that aim. They're also right in criticizing the Tories' response to the proposal, slamming it as "fear-mongering – calling beneficiaries of their plan 'newcomers' but labelling beneficiaries of the Liberal plan 'foreigners' – [that] is unbecoming and similarly divisive.” What a great, uplifting start to the campaign it's been!

The National Post's Lorne Gunter has a field day with the tax credit, calling it “pandering to voters based on their race, ethnicity or immigration status,” even if race and ethnicity don't really have anything to do with it. Gunter envisions the policy leading to human rights complaints should employers choose to overlook the tax credit and hire native Ontarians instead. As as he sees it, the only reason that the employer wouldn't hire an immigrant, provided that two prospective employees have the same skills, training, and experience but different lengths of time spent in Canada, would be because of where they come from. We're not so sure that's the case, as that essentially is what happens every day in the province when an employer doesn't hire an immigrant, so we don't see why that ought to change now. What it does do, just like every other tax credit, is create an entrenched special interest group where there wasn't one before.

According to the Toronto Star's Thomas Walkom, all the hubbub surrounding the tax credit – and to a lesser extent, the Liberals' proposal to cut tuition fees by 30 per cent – is a sign that “middle-class angst” will be the undercurrent of this election. “The Conservatives may be monstrously hypocritical,” writes Walkom, noting that they have a very similar tax credit in their platform for employers who provide language training for newcomers. “With their attacks on foreigners, they may be dabbling in xenophobia. But they get it.” By this measure, “getting it” means tapping in to anti-immigrant sentiment for electoral gain, a sentiment that Canadian politics has uniquely been able to gloss over for decades. It's also one of the baser ways of drumming up support for a party, but how this proposal made it out of Liberal war room and into the platform shows a stunning lack of foresight from one of the slicker political machines around. Where the Liberals do seem to be “getting it” is with their sensible tuition proposal, although coming from a party that oversaw tuition in this province rise to the highest in the country, it might be a matter of too little, too late.