Thursday, April 28, 2011

Canadian Conservatives Resort to Anti-Immigrant Propaganda

This is a commercial for the Conservative party that is being run in Quebec. I found it on Canukistani's blog. The commercial is, obviously, in French but there are English subtitles.



I thought the commercial was bad but then I read some of the comments that people left to this video on YouTube and realized that things were much worse than I could have ever imagined based just on the ad. Here are some highlights:

You really have the wrong idea about foreigners. Wish them well but encourage them to make something of their OWN country. If they don't show the Pioneer Initiative OUR ANCESTORS did, they are not worthwhile as people here.

The illegal immigration problem is so blatant. There was a ship from Fujian full of nothing but teen girls. B.C. had to spend money to make them wards of the state and pay 11x more a month per head than they pay a native for welfare. But the intention is for those girls to become WHORES; their families can be threatened by gangs in China. They phone up a girl (who by now has perfect English diction and education) and say, "Start whoring or we cut your mom's fingers off."

 I'm sure oil-executives want to screw over the environment because it's going to create "a better life" and a fatter stock portfolio for their children. Forget the "better life" rap, it's just greed.  No one comes to Canada to work harder and earn LESS, it's always for more. Crime is so easy in Canada with the fat, helpless pigeons we have here, eager to answer telephone scammers with bad accents calling from a boiler-room. 20% of immigrants come here for crime.

I tired of immigrants walking into Canadian asking for money, a house and medicare and we give it to them and they do SHIT ALL! "Don't ask what Canada can do for you, but ask what you can do for Canada".

their family members who (without a proper background check by the government) possibly will come here without the proper necessary skills to contribute economically and a culture that will make them refuse to integrate. All creating a heavy economic and social burden on Canadian society. *Sigh*

The problem with Canada back then (and even now) is that it accepted a huge amounts of refugees and asylum seekers without identifying who these people are, how they can contribute to the country, and how they can settle them probably. These failures resulted in increasing crime, decrease in personal safety, and quality of life in refugee infested neighborhoods in my case. Canada as a prosperous, free, and democratic country has a humanitarian obligation to accept refugees and asylum seekers....

this commercial is not such a bad thing. It is true that criminals and immigrants take advantage of our weakness. It is funny though that people call harper a racist because he wants to crack down on illegal immigration. People who come here on a boat dont just get the tright to stay, its not fair, they should apply for immigration and not just be able to stay here and waste millions our tax payer dollar because they come over in a boat.

And there is a lot more in the same vein. I really didn't expect such blatant hypocrisy, bigotry and sheer unadulterated stupidity from Canadians. Is this what just a few years of Conservative rule do to people?

7 comments:

Leah Jane said...

As a Canadian immigrant and the daughter of a Canadian immigrant, I am speechless. Utterly, utterly speechless.
Especially considering that I am in the middle of leaving my home country in order to get away from stupidity of this magnitude. How silly of me.

Clarissa said...

This is not the Canada I know and love. I truly hope harper loses big on May 2.

Leah Jane said...

As do I. I am frantically hoping that the likes of him will never darken a doorway in Ottawa ever again.

Anonymous said...

What I find particularly interesting is how the ads running in French and English Canada are coded differently (based on the extraordinarily rigorous and scientific viewing of as many of the vids on the Conservative Party's channel as I could stomach - which was maybe, oh, ten. So I could be totally off base, but has that ever stopped anyone when they're talking about politics?).

There's an English-language vid on immigration too, using some of the same images, but it's emphasizing human trafficking rather than "evil illegals stealing your money", or whatever. This suggests to me that the Conservative Party is appealing to what they see (rightly or wrongly) as a more xenophobic Québecois population. (link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1eoGi5omvU) That nice little bit at the beginning about Canada being happy to welcome immigrants looking for a better future is absent from the French ad, and that's hardly a coincidence. Even if they have the same actual content about what Iggy and Duceppe ostensibly opposed, they frame it quite differently.

The tag-line being used in the French ads is also telling: "Notre Région au Pouvoir" - Our Region in Power. The regional issue isn't being played up as much (or at all that I've seen; maybe there are some running in Alberta) in English TV spots; I'm not disputing that that tactic will probably get more traction in Quebec than it would in the rest of Canada, but coming from someone who has, throughout this campaign, been so staunchly federalist and made such a big deal about the resurgent separatist menace (which, let's be honest, he's grossly exaggerating) it's interesting that he's catering to the same regionalism and decentralization of power he's been criticizing elsewhere.

I do think this sort of racist, anti-immigrant stupidity has been building in Canada and elsewhere over the past little while. I don't know that I'd blame the Conservatives for all of it though (much as I'd like to) - them being in power might be more a symptom of Canada's massive issues than cause, horrifyingly enough.

-Alana

Clarissa said...

I agree completely that this is targeted specifically at the Quebecois in disturbing ways. The French-speaking people of Quebec are supposed to be more anti-immigrant because on the language issue the immigrants are more likely to choose English as their main language in immigration.

I find all of this to be quite shocking. It's true that I haven't lived in Canada since 2007-8, but could things have changed so radically so fast? This is scaring me.

Anonymous said...

I don't know that it's just the language thing that's making Quebec more anti-immigrant. For example, a lot of Muslim immigrants to Quebec come from former French colonies and already speak French fluently. There was a whole bunch of highly publicized anti-Muslim stuff in Quebec a few years ago, and I remember being surprised at how many québecois "pure-laine" were coming out of the woodwork saying all sorts of really racist, xenophobic things.

I think that it's not so much that people's feelings towards immigrants have changed, it's that they're more comfortable voicing them for whatever reason (anti-liberal backlash, maybe? I don't know). A lot of anti-multiculturalism stuff was showing up in the media a few months ago, though that's subsided.

It's not just Quebec - Toronto's recently elected mayor has been coming up with all sorts of racist idiocy. On the other hand, around the same time he was elected, Calgary elected a Muslim as mayor.

-Alana

Clarissa said...

As an immigrant who emigrated to Quebec in 1998, I have to say that the policies for integrating immigrants in our province are non-existent. And that, I believe, is a huge mistake. There should be programs and mechanisms in place helping people integrate. There should also be some kind of mechanisms to explain to people why Canada welcomes immigrants and what the goals are. Too many people believe in the "they are here to live off welfare or steal our jobs" propaganda.

It's a shame about the mayor of Toronto. Toronto is such a gem, nobody wants to see it spoiled.

Nice to have you on the blog, Alana!