Keith Gerein: Smith’s immigration distortions may have created a new adversary for the UCP

One evening last week, I attended what you might call a summit of sorts in which 200 people gathered in a Chinatown dining hall to discuss the ongoing issue of inmate drop-offs in their part of Edmonton.

In my experience, generally speaking, this has not been a community keen to stir controversy. Whether that’s due to a naturally reserved demeanour, or a fear of speaking out, or something else entirely, I couldn’t tell you. But whatever the reason, I have not seen a lot of bombast or raw emotion over the years.

As such, it was eye-opening to witness the obvious frustration on display this time. Facing a shortage of self-made solutions, people were upset that not a single representative from the provincial or federal governments — the two orders responsible for corrections — bothered to attend, and that the UCP was refusing to acknowledge the long history of these drop-offs.

Had a minister or two shown up, they might have learned something to take back to their superiors, a notion that the party that promised to have Chinatown’s back may be in danger of having Chinatown turn its back on the UCP.

The thing is, this is hardly the only example of Danielle Smith’s government enraging cultural communities of late. They are doing it on a much broader scale through their referendum on secession and the associated questions focused on immigration.

I got a first-hand look at this last month, when I was called to Mill Woods to observe an invite-only meeting organized by former mayor Amarjeet Sohi and his former staffer Salem Alahmad. About 75 people of diverse backgrounds — Indigenous, South Asian-Canadian, Muslim, African-Canadian, etc. — were in the room, anxious to discuss how to engage their respective communities on the referendum.

The condition of my presence at meeting was a promise that I not identify anyone. So I can’t give you names, unfortunately.

Nor I am going to fill this column with platitudes about how immigration remains vital to our country’s economy, vibrancy and so on, even though it happens to be quantitatively and qualitatively true. If you don’t get that by now, this column is not for you.

What I can do is give you a sense of the sentiments I heard in the room and in subsequent conversations, which boils down to a lot of confusion, anger and fear.

The confusion is to wonder what immigrant communities could have possibly done to suddenly be made the centrepiece of such a divisive experiment in direct democracy.

The anger is about a sense of betrayal, a feeling that that they have been sold out by their own provincial government to the racism of separatist leaders who keep showing us a black hole where their moral compass and grip on reality should be.

And the fear? Well, that exists on several fronts, from how platforming these questions could exacerbate racial hatred, to the possibility of ICE-style deportations if the separatists succeed, to the nervousness about losing provincial funding if people speak out. And unfortunately, none of these concerns is entirely far-fetched.

“How are you dealing with the fear?” one man asked his peers in the room. “(In my community), there is a lot of fear of getting hunted down if we organize. People have stories about having to flee their countries.”

“When I came to Canada, I worked three jobs. I never claimed EI. I was not dependent on the government,” said another.

“These questions are targeted against people who cannot vote,” someone else said. “No matter the result, immigrants lose.”

Many noted the poorly constructed text of the immigration questions, some of which roll off the tongue like a schoolteacher’s nightmare. General sloppiness may explain some of these logic and language horrors, until you remember that this was never designed as a fair exercise.

Smith has admitted from the start that she wants “yes” votes to the nine non-secession questions, and it appears they have been written in a way to help her achieve that, or at least give her wiggle room to interpret the responses any way she wants.

(Some in my circle of friends and family have already fallen prey to it with their mail-in ballots, unsure how to answer questions in which they might agree with the premise but not the rationale, or are unfamiliar with the surrounding context).

Worse is the added insult to immigrant communities of the UCP using their tax dollars to pay for biased campaign materials that support the government’s distortions.

Indeed, a common sentiment was that the questions had been designed to perpetuate insidious myths about immigrant communities that they are, in no particular order, taking up all the jobs, eating up all the social services, voting illegally (and presumably only for lefty candidates), and generally making life more miserable and unaffordable for “real” Albertans.

The truth is, comments from the room that day, and those I gathered from other conversations, revealed no one in favour of unrestrained immigration, and even views that the Trudeau government had gone too far in opening the borders.

In particular, on the social services front, I repeatedly heard how much these cultural communities deeply value avenues of social mobility that are offered through education and health care, because it means they can give their kids an opportunity at a better life.

In other words, these groups are just as opposed to dysfunctional and overcrowded services as anyone else, and have often stood behind that belief with their labour. Imagine what the state of Alberta’s health system would be without people from immigrant and first-generation communities staffing the difficult caregiving jobs the province depends on.

As such, it is doubly wrong to demonize immigrants as the primary cause of capacity issues — ignoring the province’s own failures to properly invest, and its own campaigns to attract newcomers to Alberta — and then to suggest that salvation lies in denying people basic services or charging them extra fees beyond the taxes they already pay.

Seeking support for such ideas is not just cruel, but also sends a bad message that Alberta has become an unwelcoming place.

By the end of the meeting, the leaders seemed far more galvanized to go out and rouse their communities to vote against the referendum questions, creating a movement that may very well carry into next year’s provincial election.

“We have been divided among ourselves. Now it is time to come together,” one participant said.

“They want us fearful so we stay silent. We have to put our petty differences aside to defeat this fearmongering,” another said.

“We need to organize. Not just for the referendum, but for after.”

It seems that in trying to shore up their own fortunes with a divisive referendum, the UCP may have just awoken another political force that is now invested in their defeat.

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