In the last election Immigration Minister Jason Kenney was front and centre praising the contributions of new Canadians .
It paid off handsomely. Stephen Harper won 11 of the 12 seats Kenney had declared as "ethnic" and the Conservatives got their parliamentary majority. But now the elections are over and forgotten.
Two weeks ago there was an outbreak of violence in a corner of Toronto where there are many young sons and daughters of families who came from the Caribbean.
A shootout broke out at a street party and two people were killed, including a 14 year old girl. Another 23 people were wounded.
Rather than mourn the dead and try to bring comfort to the injured, as a minister of immigration might be expected to do, Jason Kenney used his Twitter account to link the shooting to "foreign gangsters" from the Caribbean.
There is no evidence that they were any "gangsters" involved in the shooting, or even less, any "foreigners."
The Kenney reasoning seemed to be that because two blacks were killed and others were wounded and there were lots of black youths at the street party, it must surely be that blacks did the shooting.
And what evidence is there that there were ‘gangsters?'
Kenney wrote on Twitter that he will deport more "foreign gangsters" even though to date there is no evidence that a single ‘gangster' let alone a ‘gangster' of the "foreign" variety was involved in the shooting.
So who are Kenney's ‘foreign gangsters' and how does he know they were involved?
Is it because there were lots of young blacks at the street party?
Kenney seems to ignore that the young people at the street party were full Canadian citizens just like you, me and Kenney. He labels them foreigners.
Just because they happen to be black doesn't make them foreigners.
Data from Statistics Canada shows that many of the black youth living in that part of Scarborough were born in Canada and are full-status Canadians. Now that's facts.
But we know what the Harper government thinks of Statistics Canada. Better to call those blacks foreigners and threaten to deport them.
For the Liberal leader, Bob Rae, Kenney's rant on Twitter was nothing less than "demagogy".
Two weeks later, and Kenney has still not apologized, and Toronto police still have not found a single "foreign gangster" involved to the shooting.
