Jason Kenney's Job Performance Gets Failing Grade

Jason Kenney has been called by some the hardest working MP on the Hill. But the question is, what has he been working at?

Kate Heatfield writes in the Ottawa Citizen: Will the real Jason Kenney please stand up He has grandstanded on big issues for political gain, and appears to be failing at his job.

During the election, a group of Canadian immigration lawyers and academics wrote a letter arguing, among other things, that Kenney has not made much headway cutting red tape, and that the backlogs and processing times for some immigration categories are getting worse.

The argument from those of all political stripes, however, is that his real function is capturing (or some, like me, might say "exploiting") the immigrant vote.

But apparently, he's not even doing that.

Susan Delacourt writes in the Star: The ethnic Conservative myth

... as political scientists have been sifting through the data of May 2, they’re learning that immigrant voters did not flock to the Conservatives in any large way in the election. This was among one of the most surprising revelations last week when Canada’s leading political scientists held their annual conference in the immediate aftermath of the vote.

The professors who’ve been heading up the prestigious Canadian Election Study shared some of their early findings on the final day of the conference at Wilfrid Laurier University. And when it came to the issue of the immigrant vote, it appears that this study is going to be doing some myth-busting.

“Across the board, there doesn’t seem to be anything but a minor shift in terms of the immigrant versus non-immigrant vote where Conservatives are concerned,” said Stuart Soroka of McGill University. “Up to this point, there’s a bit of gain there, but it seems tiny,” said Patrick Fournier, of the Université de Montréal.

I've always wondered why immigrants would back the Conservatives or even Jason Kenney. When he was with the Canadians Taxpayers Federation he fought agaisnt money going to immigrant groups.

And in a 2003 speech to the Institute for Research on Public Policy, Stephen Harper called multiculturalism a "weak nation strategy".

So if he's not good at either job, why has this man been given so much credit?