The Past Speaks

Rocco Rossi has dropped out of Toronto’s mayoral race, conceding his ideas are failing to gain traction in a mayoral campaign that’s become a battle between two candidates tussling over an angry, polarized electorate…. The announcement comes hours after an Ipsos-Reid poll placed him at 4 per cent – far behind frontrunners Rob Ford and George Smitherman, who appear to be in a dead heat. See here.

Rocco Rossi

Rocco Rossi’s departure from the race has implications for both Toronto and Canada as a whole. Municipal elections in Ontario are not fought on party lines: all candidates stand as independents, but people have a rough idea of where they sit on the ideological spectrum. Rossi was, if anything, somewhat to the right of front-runner Rob Ford on economic issues: both men are centre-right politicians, but Rossi proposed privatizing Toronto Hydro, something Ford opposes.

Rocco Rossi’s CV is rather more impressive than that of Rob Ford, as it includes merit scholarships to UCC, McGill, and Princeton, stints at Boston Consulting, Labatt/Inbev, and service on the board of the United Way. To date, Mr. Rossi has not had dealings with the police in Florida or elsewhere. This raises the question of why Ford was able to gain more support than Rossi.

One suspects that the major reason why Ford proved much more popular than Rossi or any of the other centre-right candidates is that he was willing to challenge the Canadian consensus in favour of open immigration. It is his stance on the issue and on no other that differentiates himself from all of the other candidates.  His views appear to have resonated with voters in a city that still attracts the lion’s share of immigrants to Canada.

Here are some of Ford’s comments on immigration:

Ford’s comments have resonated with the public for several reasons.

First, many people in Toronto have legitimate concerns about the level of immigration because of the challenges population growth imposes on infrastructure: city streets are much more crowded than they were a generation ago largely due to immigration rather than natural increase (the fertility rate among old stock Canadians is quite low). Immigration has driven up the cost of housing, which benefits existing home-owners but which also victimizes young people looking to buy.

Other Torontians oppose immigration because of simple racism.  We would like to think that there is no racism or xenophobia in Canada, but that sadly isn’t the case.  International studies have found that the level of xenophobia in Canada is lower than in other countries, but they have also demonstrated the persistence of anti-immigrant/anti-foreigner sentiment in Canada.  See this study by the Conference Board of Canada.

It is almost certain that Rob Ford’s popularity has something to do with his anti-immigration stand, since on most of other issues, Ford’s policies are identical to those of the other candidates.

Since the 1960s, when Canada developed non-racial immigration policies,  all of the major political parties at the national and provincial levels have supported the idea of a relatively open policy towards newcomers. They might have differed on other issues, but Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney, Bill Davis, and Bob Rae were all in favour of maintaining a high net immigration rate of roughly 1% of Canada’s population per annum.

The fact there is a consensus within the political class and the business and academic communities in favour of this immigration policy has prompted some Canadians to develop a very self-congratulatory attitude when it comes to assessing Canada’s great experiment in mass immigration.

Rob Ford’s popularity is a sobering reminder that there is indeed still a bit of xenophobia in some quarters of Canadian society, even and perhaps especially, in its largest city.