Ontario Provincial Election

    On October 6, there will be an Ontario Provincial election and the Ontario Conservative Party is trying to reprise the federal election outcome by playing the anti immigrant card. Although the Canadian economy has performed much better than the American one in the last couple of years, paradoxically certain sectors of the Ontario economy have been diminished as a consequence of the strongly appreciating Canadian dollar. A little known fact is Ontario manufactures more cars than any other jurisdiction in North America including Michigan and most of these vehicles are shipped to the States. This has lead to a decrease in the workforce especially when you consider that Detroit is replacing middle class $28 an hour salaries with working poor wages of $14 an hour in America thanks to the Obama mediated agreement.   Thus the Ontario PC party wants to attract the angry, white male vote by blaming their problems on scary brown people. This xenophobic nativist attitude seems to be the path of choice for most western right of center groups these days.

   This is not a new agenda for the Ontario PC since a similar approach was presented in 2003. The Toronto Star had an article on this topic yesterday. As the paper commented:

That kind of language divides Ontarians into an “us” and a “them.” Creating divisions between struggling, unemployed workers and newer immigrants is dangerous to our long-term social cohesion. In Toronto, half of us were born outside Canada. There is no us versus them. They are us. And the faster we get newcomers into good jobs in the workforce and paying higher taxes the better for us all…Hudak’s rhetoric and the PC party’s “Ontarians need not apply” ad go too far. It amounts to a thinly veiled attack on immigrants…this is the politics of division. It is angry. It is ugly. And it’s not what Ontarians are about.