PRESS RELEASE
Australian And Canadian Polls Show That Citizens Feel There Are Limits To Cultural Absorptive Capacity PRESS RELEASE
Two recent polls, one in Australia and one in Canada, reveal that people in both countries feel that each country has limits to its cultural absorptive capacity.
A Globe and Mail report says the Canadian poll reveals that Canadians would prefer to see immigrants of European background and that Canadian attitudes towards immigration (multiculturalism in particular) are hardening.
A recent Australian controversy involving a Law Professor at Macquarie University in Sydney reveals that many Australians believe they are losing their traditional identity because of immigration.
During the Australian controversy, a television poll (in which 35,000 people phoned in) showed that 85% agreed with the Law Professor's views. The Law Professor has refused a university offer to buy out his contract and has been suspended from his job.
Canadians who believe that our federal government has immigration under control and that it is acting in the interests of its own people should take note. Although the education establishment has followed government policy in many immigrant-receiving countries, there is a great difference between the views of the Australian academic establishment and mainstream Australians. Like academia in Canada, Australian academia has been rigidly dogmatic about its pro-immigration/multiculturalism views, says Immigration Watch Canada. Ironically, all of this has occurred in a milieu that is supposed to champion free speech and diversity of opinion.
Immigration Watch Canada does not have sufficient information on the Australian controversy to make judgements. Our organization does not object to people from all backgrounds coming here, but we believe that Canada's long-standing ethnic mix should be preserved. We believe that the current intake is five times as high as it should be. Also, we know that our government has not adequately monitored the qualifications of those who have entered in the past 15 years. The Toronto violence in the last few months is but one example of that.
The recent Canadian poll by the Globe and Mail and CTV found that 45% of Canadians believed that current immigration levels “were about right”. But 69% “are in favour of abandoning the “mosaic” approach to multiculturalism that has long been a defining feature of the nation's identity”. Nearly seven in 10 Canadians say immigrants should be encouraged to integrate and become part of the broader society rather than maintaining their ethnic identity and culture. The survey of 1,000 people was conducted from Aug. 3-7.
As poll critics have already pointed out, the government of Canada has so clouded the immigration issue that many Canadians, even in the primary immigrant-receiving areas of Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, do not know such elementary matters as how many immigrants arrive here annually. Also, many Canadians do not know that their federal government has clearly been dishonest about why Canada is taking so many people.
As critics have said, if most Canadians knew more about what their government was doing, the poll results would probably have been much more strongly against Canada's annual intake of 250,000. Also, the results would have been even more strongly against the multiculturalism policies that feed off that intake. Critics generally agree that the Canadian media has done an extremely imperfect job about informing its people about the immigration issue.
The sponsors of the poll (the Globe and Mail and CTV) would do well to tell Canadians in their next poll exactly what Canada's immigration intake is, the federal government's planned increase in its intake to around 320,000, and some of the negative cultural, economic and environmental effects of that intake. Pollsters will probably find that Australians are not alone in their concerns about their traditional national identity.
The Globe and Mail and CTV might also seriously consider adding a major question which the last poll raises: Do Canadians want to change the current ethnic composition of Canada?
END OF PRESS RELEASE
Note: The Globe and Mail article to which this press release refers is available on the Immigration Watch Canada web site in the News Articles (Canadian) section. We invite you to peruse the web site for other relevant material. The web site's full address is the following: www.ImmigrationWatchCanada.org
