FELDSTED -- Journalists have consistently failed us by not revealing the truth about issues that matter and hiding the sleazy swamp that Ottawa has become

The Tories insist racists aren’t welcome in their party. What are they doing about it?

Terry Glavin ~~ Maclean’s Magazine ~~ May 7, 2019

There’s no way around it: Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives have a racist jackass problem.

This is not to say that Scheer or any of his MPs have consciously invited the affections of the country’s racist jackasses, and there are far fewer votes in Canada’s racist jackass constituency than you might think. But it’s a problem. And Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives have it, in spades.

The most recent evidence is quite jarring. It comes in Ekos Research Associates’ latest annual findings about Canadian attitudes about immigration. Nothing much has changed in the long-term trends, but for the first time, the proportion of Canadians who say immigration rates are too high has merged with the percentage of Ekos poll respondents who say too many non-white people are coming to Canada. And that bloc is coalescing, for the first time, behind a single political party: Scheer’s Conservatives.

“Mr. Scheer is clear. These types of views are not welcome in the party,” Brock Harrison, Scheer’s communications director, told me. “He’s stated that view many, many times. Sure, there are fringe elements who will tell a pollster they support the Conservative party, but, you know, those fringe elements who hold to these extreme ideologies have no place in the party. That’s clear.”

Fair enough. But if there’s nothing wrong with the Conservative message on immigrants and refugees and visible minorities, there sure is something wrong with the signal.

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The Ekos poll has nothing at all to do with “fringe elements”. The poll was based on two random samples of 1,045 Canadians aged 18 and over who responded to the survey. The margin of error associated with the total sample is +/- 3.0 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

The compilation of figures is interesting: Of about 500 respondents:

• 57% live in B.C. or Ontario;
• 53% were males;
• 74% were age 50 or over
• Of the 80% who claimed a political affiliation only 117 (29%) claimed to be Liberals and 180 (44%) claimed to be Conservatives.

This is not the profile of the “racist jackasses” the author writes about. It is outrageous to use the Ekos poll as evidence that Scheer and the conservatives have a ‘racist jackass’ problem.

There is growing public anger at governments that have created ethnic ghettos in our major cities, immigrants and asylum seekers who refuse to integrate into our society and ethnic criminal gangs that plague our cities large and small.

This attempted smear is a forerunner of the ‘trash talk’ in store for us over the next five months. Journalists have consistently failed us by not revealing the truth about issues that matter and hiding the sleazy swamp that Ottawa has become.

Political parties and strategists must learn to respect us, stick to issues that matter, and tell us how they are going to fix a federation that has exploded into warring factions and is dysfunctional. All political parties are under intense scrutiny as they have contributed to the gridlock that is strangling our parliament.

None of the political parties ... have put forward reasonable changes to the way our government operates.  Changes that will result in the accountability, honesty, openness and transparency they refer to endlessly but ultimately do nothing to address.

None of the political parties ... are prepared to relinquish their control over the elected representatives they endorse and allow them full voice and free votes on issues parliament is dealing with.

Until that change is made, we do not live in a free democracy. As long as anyone can influence how an elected representative of the people must vote, we do not have a voice in our governance. That must end.

The Parliamentary Press Gallery is still a closed ‘old boys’ club of media giant representatives who block the membership of ‘outsiders’. That is a serious affront to our commitment to maintaining a free press.

Fixing this anachronism is under control of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. Make no mistake, this is where government management of our media starts and why we get the same banal pablum from multiple media sources.

John Feldsted

Political Consultant & Strategist

Winnipeg, Manitoba