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Amy Hamm: Poilievre's immigration plan a political winner

Targeting failed asylum claimants, and foreign criminals is an obvious moved for the Conservatives

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“We have the immigration system under control!” Prime Minister Mark Carney shouted during Question Period Tuesday.

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Conservative Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre could not disagree more. (Nor should the millions of Canadians without family doctors, or the thousands sitting on health-care waitlists.) Poilievre is on a tear against Liberal immigration policy and what he alleges is its detrimental impact on Canadians’ access to healthcare.

Amy Hamm: Poilievre's immigration plan a political winner Back to video

His new initiative, “Healthcare Benefits for Canadians First,” announced via a social media video earlier this week, seeks to strip health benefits from failed asylum claimants in Canada. The Conservatives introduced a motion on Tuesday asking the government to support their plan.

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Walking under Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway, towards a moving camera, Poilievre’s brisk pace matched his brusque words. “Fact: while you can’t get health care, Liberals force you to pay higher taxes to fund deluxe, supplementary health-care benefits for asylum claimants who’ve been rejected, who are non-Canadians, non permanent residents, and have never paid taxes in this country,” he said.

The Conservative party’s online petition asks Canadians to join them and “call on the Liberal government to review federal benefits provided to asylum claimants in order to find savings for taxpayers, restrict health benefits for rejected asylum claimants to emergency life-saving care only, and immediately remove non-citizens convicted of serious crimes.”

The petition is a risky political move that Poilievre needed to make in order to divorce himself — and his party — from their dogged reputation as being “Liberal Lite.” It will come at a predictable price, at least in the House.

Liberal House Leader Steven MacKinnon lobbed accusations of bigotry towards Conservatives over their initiative. “The Conservatives need to stop punching down at the world’s most vulnerable people… they should be ashamed of themselves for picking on some of the most vulnerable people on the planet,“ MacKinnon said, referring to asylum claimants, in the House Tuesday.

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It was a ridiculous and unfounded attack. No matter: Poilievre’s initiative might just pay dividends by widening the Conservative base — something his political future, and the future of the party, depend upon.

Prime Minister Carney surely knows this (even if Minister MacKinnon does not), as evidenced by his somewhat more measured reaction in the House. Carney did not succumb to the commonplace impulse to accuse Poilievre of being broadly anti-immigration, or a mere bigot. He acknowledged that our country’s asylum system is being abused — his words, not mine — and argued that Bills C-2 (the Strong Borders Act) and C-12 (the Strengthening Canada’s Immigration System and Borders Act) will allow for “an ability to end the abuse of the asylum system.”

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Carney agrees that Canada has an immigration problem — he simply insists that he has already done what needs to be done to fix it, and that we have no need for Poilievre or his new initiative. But have the Liberals under Carney really done enough?

The prime minister employs many of the same Trudeau-era Liberal ministers who led Canada into its current state, such as Sean Fraser. Fraser was Trudeau’s minister of immigration and minister of housing, and now serves as Carney’s minister of justice and attorney general. Is this a man that we can trust to give a damn about the fact that Canada repeatedly fails to deport foreign criminals by giving them lighter sentences so removal is not triggered? It doesn’t seem so.

It is a longstanding Liberal pastime, at this point, to attempt to thwart the Conservatives by swooping in, last minute, to offer some semblance of the policies or promises offered by their rivals. (A case in point: Carney’s ending of the consumer carbon tax.) Some might refer to it as the Liberals “shifting right,” rather than what it truly is: desperate and insincere bids to cling to power.

Poilievre is right to demand that we examine the cost of the Interim Federal Health Program, which he notes is only expected to become more costly in the next four years. Nobody should take Carney’s insistence that he has already done enough seriously.

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