Geoff Russ: Communitarianism in the age of asylum fraud

Canada’s bureaucracy enables systemic abuse and subsidises activists to legitimise it.

(An asylum seeker, crossing the US-Canadian border at Roxham Road in Quebec in 2017.)

John Farthing is an oft-forgotten name in Canadian philosophy.

Without Diminishment yesterday, Tyler Brooks outlined Farthing’s ideal of British traditions, the Crown, and older notions of freedom in an organic, communitarian model of society that eschewed abstract ideas of liberty. All of it is succinctly expressed in Farthing’s 1957 magnum opus, Freedom Wears a Crown.

The book is worth reading for those seeking alternatives to the variations of classical liberalism that are upheld as the pinnacle of conservative ideas. Even so, reading Farthing today requires context, an annoying necessity as his prose and ideas are excellent.

Canada’s modern bureaucratic regime makes communitarian ideals non-viable unless that regime is shattered. The federal government has robbed communities of their place as the pillars of society, and abuse of the system, like asylum fraud, is actively incentivised by Ottawa.

Regrettably, the past is a foreign country.

Historian Donald Creighton, born in 1902 and raised in Southern Ontario, was just three years younger than Farthing, and was a contemporary of sorts.

In Canada’s First Century, published in 1970, Creighton described Canada as a thoroughly “British North American” society in the early 20th century. It was, he wrote, a “community of two languages, French and English, rather than a babel of many tongues”.

Creighton described that the order of “constitutional monarchy, parliamentary institutions, and responsible government” established by the Fathers of Confederation was taken for granted.

In his words, that British model was “the best government for free men that had yet been devised”.

More abstract political ideology was largely muted in the early 20th century.

The state provided little in return for a Canada that was largely rural, where large families were central to social security and the economy. Farthing, raised in Canada, died prematurely in 1954, with Freedom Wears a Crown published three years later.

Unlike Creighton, who passed away in 1979, Farthing never lived to see the true extent to which the country was remade by the Liberal Party. Had he lived, Farthing’s writings might have reflected the bitterness and anger that Creighton felt as the country he grew up with was changed so arbitrarily and so rapidly.

In Canada’s First Century, Creighton described the years after World War II, when the cultural, economic, and political power of the U.S. was in full-swing.

Managerial professionals, inspired by the state’s role in the Great Depression and the war, took hold of the economy and bureaucracy. They were confident that they could manage, alter, and reshape everything from symbols, to institutions, and the economy itself. It inspired new generations of power-hungry technocrats around the world.

Britishness, still the basis of English-Canadian nationhood after World War II, suffered a slow decline by a thousand cuts that often passed unnoticed.

In 1949, the Toronto (Daily) Star newspaper, the Liberal Party’s favourite media organ, still urged voters to “Keep Canada British!” by voting against the Conservatives, accusing them of making a pact with Camillien Houde, Montreal’s isolationist wartime mayor.

Nonetheless, the levers of the new managerial state, better described as a bureaucratic state in Canada, were expanding. Canadians were gently frogmarched away from a crumbling Empire by the entrenched Liberal government that treated this transformation as inevitable, and their party as its shepherd.

The Quiet Revolution in Quebec gave this new state an opportunity to cloak itself in the language of national unity and federalism. As Quebec’s left-wing intellectuals and nationalists reshaped their province, and ideas of independence fermented, the Liberal government responded by reshaping the Canadian federation.

Ottawa empowered itself to implement an expanded social safety net, and deliberately redistribute money and benefits as an alternative for a nationalistic Quebec, hoping to secure their loyalty. Money, legislation for the official languages, and modern patronage were used as tools by the bureaucracy and administrators, not only to placate Quebec, but to satisfy the demand of Canada’s entire Baby Boomer generation.

If Farthing’s ideals reflected the Canada he grew up with, it was dismantled with a top-down political, cultural, and economic transformation after his death.

A social and cultural communitarianism that was grassroots, and underpinned by shared heritage, religion, and customs, was replaced by sinecures, secularism, and a new vision of global citizenship. This vision found its first high-water mark through the introduction of official multiculturalism in 1971. Bolstering it was a diversified immigration pool, and a veneer of ideology consisting of rights-based, universal politics, rather than one of a distinct national community.

It reached a zenith in 1982 when Pierre Trudeau’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms became a reality. Progressive visions of the judiciary and a cosmopolitan spirit were enshrined into ironclad Canadian constitutional law, not by parliamentary statute. Rather than mounting a campaign against it, leading Conservatives were enthusiastic about the new document.

Premiers Bill Davis of Ontario and Peter Lougheed of Alberta, upheld as 20th century lions by many conservatives today, endorsed the Charter after their recommendations were implemented. As Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard put it,

“Pierre Elliott Trudeau changed the soul of the country by replacing the British principle of parliamentary sovereignty with an imported form of judicial review that mimics the American system.

“From then on, the Supreme Court went from being a constitutional court that mainly arbitrated disputes over jurisdiction between the federal government and the provinces to something different. It became a higher authority with the power to invalidate any law on the sometimes vague basis of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms”.

The result has been an ever-rising erosion of national sovereignty, such as the blurring of lines between citizens and non-citizens. Alongside this is imported corruption embedding itself in the welfare state.

Those who claim to believe in a neutral state and institutions have always been idealists, liars, or naive.

The modern state is a powerful political machine. Subsidies, transfers, symbolic changes and recognitions are always contingent upon client groups and their relationship to an entrenched bureaucratic class. This class works tirelessly to benefit itself and its allies. They have built a durable system to ensure the survival of this system, which they treat as an ideology that corrodes history, cultural bonds, or even borders.

Farthing’s communitarianism, heartfelt and of the land, has almost no space to maneuver. Farthing insisted that man was a social being, but this is difficult when one becomes a unit in a state welfare system. The obligations of the community have been largely outsourced to Ottawa’s bureaucracy, and paid for in tax dollars.

There is even an element of this bureaucratic ideology in popular culture, such as author Yann Martel calling Canada, “the greatest hotel on Earth”. Another is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s ad campaign declaring “It’s not how Canadian you are. It’s who you are in Canada”.

The recent asylum-claimant case in Quebec was a cartoonishly apt example in the legal realm. For asylum claimants, Quebec’s provincial government had taken the position that accessing the subsidised childcare depended upon the applicant holding an eligible work permit.

In Quebec (Attorney General) v. Kanyinda, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that subsidised childcare, paid for by the taxes of hardworking Quebec families, could not be withheld from refugee claimants.

In the words of Jamie Sarkonak at the National Post,

“Anyone in the world who shows up in Canada and makes an asylum claim is entitled to free subsidised daycare if citizens get it too”.

The list of interveners in the case is a who’s who of leftist legal activists, who are, unsurprisingly, also subsidised by the federal government. They include the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Canadian Council for Refugees, Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers, Refugee Centre, FCJ Refugee Centre, Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund, and the Income Security Advocacy Centre.

Once run by earnest, moderate liberals, the leadership of many of these groups was passed to radical ideologues, who openly deride national borders, symbols, and identity as immoral, “white-supremacist”, and exclusionary.

Millions of dollars are doled out by Ottawa to legal activists through the Court Challenges Program, enabling the Liberals to swamp landmark constitutional cases with left-wing litigation.

Even when decisions are left to Parliament, the Liberal Party doubles down on protecting pathways of abuse, such as birth tourism, and turning thousands of foreigners into citizens as so-called “Lost Canadians” via distant descent.

Defenders of this system will call it the “Canadian Way”, as if the result of more than 60 years of encroaching federal power and intrusion into the social and economic lives of Canadians can be compared to the ideals espoused by John Farthing.

The subsidised facilitation of immigration fraud is another wound in our country’s dignity. Post-secondary schools like Conestoga College rightfully earned a reputation as a quasi-corrupt institution that took full advantage of the international student program to juice their coffers.

No less than 32,500 international students entered Canada through applications to Conestoga College by 2023, eager to transfer their certificates in “Global Hospitality Management” into work permits, with the goal of attaining permanent residency by paying exorbitant fees to allegedly study here. If that failed, play-acting as a refugee was an alternative option.

Government data shows that asylum claims associated with Conestoga’s students went up 1,100 per cent between 2021 and 2024, as approved study permits declined. In the first nine months of 2024, more than 13,600 students in Canada had filed asylum claims, up from 12,000 in 2023, and 1,810 in 2018. This fraud pipeline is not restricted to academics.

An operative of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) can go to an anti-regime protest in downtown Vancouver, ensure they are photographed and put on social media, and then file an asylum claim, stating they will be persecuted if they return to Iran.

Even the voluntary, charitable institutions are being hurt by the influx. The Greater Vancouver Food Bank was forced to exclude first-year international students because their demand for free food had overwhelmed them.

The Guru Nanak Food Bank in British Columbia reported in 2022, that over 1,500 of their 2,200 members were international students. Canadians were rightfully outraged when a social media influencer in Ontario released a viral video urging these foreign students to “save hundreds of bucks every month” by filling their bellies with free food for poor students provided by a university program.

All of this goes back to the point that Farthing would have likely been angry, if not horrified, at the state of modern Canada. There can be no communitarianism without community, and a community needs guardrails.

There is no nation or meaningful citizenship without national borders, or when a nation’s resources are used to reward dishonesty and dysfunction. Fraud and opportunism cannot simply be waved off under the banner of compassion.

Some will say that those who defraud the system are simply desperate for a better life. But, Canadians want a better life too, and that includes honouring what they pay into the state, and not handing it out to bad-faith actors.

To recover something resembling Farthing’s world would be nothing short of a miracle. Getting there means that opponents of the Canadian status quo cannot be modest in their methods.

A powerful state run out of Ottawa is committed in theory, practice and subsidy to remaining in power, while draining the moral authority away from the people who pay their bills. A conservative who wants to merely tweak this system and replace the managers, rather than smash it entirely, is profoundly unserious.

No kingdom will be found in a “the greatest hotel on Earth”, where guests overstay their welcome and break into the kitchen and supply cabinets, with the full support of management.

Geoff Russ is the Editor-at-Large of Without Diminishment. He is a contributor to a number of publications, including the National Post, Modern Age, and The Australian Financial Review.