[kwoldtimer]

Originally Posted by Aylmer

Canada might not voice the kind of nativist ideas we hear in Western Europe or the USA, but I have seen first hand that a large number of people will indeed voice them when they feel that it isn't taboo. I door-knocked in both the 2014 Quebec election and the 2015 Federal where the Charter of Values and the Niqab 'issue' respectively came up in public discourse and I was utterly shocked at the things I heard from people who were educated and causally centre-left (i.e.: not very politically active/thoughtful). Now that the issue has been forgotten and gone away, these same people go about their business, interact quite nicely with their muslim co-workers and extol the virtues of multiculturalism. But god, that experience really unsettled me - if a narrative of us-vs-them were to set in permanently (immigrants taking our jobs/women/money/way of life/whatever), I'm now fairly certain that it would find its constituency.

The saving grace is that people may hold these views and even voice them in very limited contexts, but people don't consider these boogeymen big enough of a threat to vote on that one issue. In both cases I experienced, people ended up voting for the party that was actually in favour of their boogeyman because people care about a whole lot of things (jobs, services, etc. etc.) before they care about the fashion choices of religious minorities.
However, to the people who were susceptible to being affected (mainly middle-class muslim communities, but also other visible minority groups), this was a major issue, if only because it felt targeted. And in both cases, groups mobilized against these policies.

So nativist policies are not completely without constituency. It's just that their constituency doesn't care enough to get mobilized whereas the opposition does. And I think I'll be able to sleep at night so long as that's true.

That would be our "best" recent example, although the "niqab thing" and all that was associated with it during the last election campaign shows that at least part of the population can be riled up. Fortunately, that too ended in electoral defeat for the party responsible ("niqab thing" being only one element of larger reasons).