Imagining Canada's 153rd Birthday (Or a reporter showing his true feelings on multiculturalism)

Andrew Cohen | June 30, 2006
[go to the cbc.ca website for the whole article, I'm highlighting sections I want to debate]

Ottawa, July 1, 2020 — [...] In the shadow of the Peace Tower, they watch entertainers of every ethnicity reflecting this diverse society. The show is as inclusive as Canada itself. Everyone must be represented — there was a minor scandal last year when Karen dancers from Burma were overlooked in the festivities — because peoples from around the globe are reserving rooms in Hotel Canada. [...] Recalling national birthdays long past, there are some high-stepping Ukrainians, fiddlers from Quebec and throat-singers from Nunavut. But these are passé today. Now the headliners are drummers from Senegal and acrobats from Brunei. After a half-generation of open immigration, [...] The land that God gave to Cain and Voltaire called "a few acres of snow" now looks like Shangri-la in a beleaguered world. No wonder Canada's birthday party goes on for three days, as if it were a Hindu wedding.

This is the new[?] complexion of Canada: black, tan and yellow. Canadians are proud to call themselves the most moderate of people. Tolerance has become their vocation, a kind of raison d'être, and that seems to be the breadth of their ambition. In a fragmenting world spawning new countries as casually as Arctic glaciers crack and calve, they are happy to have survived as a nation for a century and a half — even if they're not sure what that means anymore.

( rest of article )

For the most part, Canada has taken a laissez-faire view of its new arrivals. Multiculturalism is a kind of narcissism for Canadians. We are in love with it and the image it gives us around the world. We look down at old Europe for its difficulty in integrating immigrants of different cultures, spawning ghettos in lily-white Stockholm, Amsterdam and Oslo.

Still, as immigration has brought Canada prosperity, it has also brought ambiguity. No one has taught these new Canadians much about their new country, its past, its triumphs, its myths. In Canada, where the provinces are responsible for education, no one teaches Canadian history anymore. Captured by the canons of political correctness, schools celebrate multiculturalism as an end in itself, failing to teach the superiority of civic nationalism over ethnic nationalism. In the voiceless country, no one speaks for Canada anymore. East Indians, Pakistanis and Chinese come here and live their lives happily in Hindi, Urdu and Mandarin. Sadly, they import their prejudices and struggles, too, which often find violent expression in grim urban corridors. 

( end of article )