Confronting or incorporating middle-class nation-building? Right-wing responses in the pan-Canadian context

ABSTRACT

Canada is often praised for successfully integrating ethnically diverse immigrants into its multicultural nation, so successful indeed that the country has been considered an exception to the twenty-first-century right-wing populist wave. The recent ascent of political mobilization associated with right-wing populist repertoires across Canada, however, has exposed the need to revisit the exceptionalism thesis. With this goal in mind, our article examines the contemporary right-wing responses to the Liberal Party of Canada’s (LPC) post-2015 discourses and policies on immigration and multiculturalism. Building on existing scholarship, we first characterize the LPC’s approach as a nation-building project with strong middle-class partialities that emphasize high skills and human capital. We then explore how right-wing parties oppose or embrace this ‘middle-class nation-building’. Qualitatively analyzing the platforms of center-right parties and those further to the right at the federal and provincial levels (Alberta and Québec), we observe three prevalent response types: those that follow a cultural logic to prioritize identity and values, an economic logic to underline merit and contribution, or a combination of the two. Besides modulating the Canadian exceptionalism thesis, our findings complicate the assumed dichotomy between market-based and cultural forms of nationalism, as political actors can merge them in various permutations.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• multiculturalism
• Canada
• middle-class
• right-wing politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 An exception is the recent work of Frédéric Boily (2020; 2021), which offers a broader comparison of the Canadian right, though without a specific focus on immigration and multiculturalism.

2 This is not to ignore other prominent cases, such as Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario or the anti-bilingual right in New Brunswick, among others.

3 One the one hand, tendencies such as the expansion of programs for low-skilled temporary foreign workers and international students to transition to permanent residency in a two-step process, or the dilution of criteria in the Comprehensive Ranking System to attract more immigrants, may raise questions about Canada’s commitment to nation-building through immigration (Doyle, Skuterud, and Worswick 2023). On the other, such developments do not undermine the core principles of the PLC’s post-2015 strategy, which consistently prioritizes human-capital rich workers to create skill-based hierarchies within permanent as well as temporary categories (Ellermann and Gorokhovskaia 2020).

4 Québec is the only Canadian province that has decentralization agreement (1991) with the federal government to exercise a wider range of powers on immigration, such as the selection of economic immigrants and the development of integration policies (Beauregard, Gagnon, and Garon 2021).