Week of Dec. 2-6, 2002: CBC Multiculturalism Promoters Vs. Eating Canadian-Man’s Best Friend
December 8, 2002
Ms. Lorna Haeber
Executive Producer
Information Programming
CBC Radio
Vancouver, B.C.
Ms. Haeber:
Here are a few comments about items that appeared on local CBC Radio in the week of Dec. 2 to 6, 2002:
Once again, your local radio programmes bombarded the area with items about multiculturalism. Please note the use of the word “bombard”. In obedience to its “head” (Canada’s Immigration Industry and Canada’s Department of Citizenship and Immigration), local CBC (dutiful “arm”) once again hit local listeners with some “artillery shells” from some of Canada’s more recently-arrived ethnic groups. Like their military counterparts, these “artillery shells” are supposed to soften the local population’s resistance—in this case, to unjustified and unprecedented high immigration levels.
Once again, heaven forbid that local CBC minds should be contaminated with any opposing opinions (especially those from books “banned” by local CBC), but here is one that would have considerable appeal to most Canadians.
Below is a very short passage from a recent book on immigration, “Who Gets In” by Daniel Stoffman. Both the book and the passage make the point that Canada is not a multicultural country, a point that is a great heresy to the local CBC.
—-BEGINNING—–
“Gabriel Yiu, a Vancouver flower merchant and a former columnist for Ming Pao, a daily newspaper, was speaking not long ago with a visiting Chinese scholar.’ Why’, the scholar wanted to know,’ is there no dog on the menu in any of the Chinese restaurants in Vancouver? I thought Canada was a multicultural country.’
“Yiu couldn’t come up with a good answer. Like most Canadians, he’d been taught to think of Canada as a multicultural country. The reality, and the answer to the visitor’s question, is that while Canada has a diverse urban population, it is not multicultural. The absence of dog from the menus ofChinese restaurants is only one example– perhaps too graphic an example for some–of how this is so.
“We learn in school that Canada is a mosaic, not an American-style melting pot. A mosaic consists of tiles, each one separate, that together form a pattern. If each of Canada’s multiple ethnic groups is a part of a mosaic, what happens within that part should not be any business of someone who lives in one of the other parts. The visiting scholar had a point.
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“Canadian dog lovers, if they really believed in multiculturalism, would respect the right of other cultures to be different. They could be faithful to their own culture by steering clear of restaurants with poodles on the menu. So why can’t the Chinese…part of the Canadian mosaic, fully expresstheir culinary culture? Because all hell would break loose. Dog lovers are passionate and uncompromising. Politicians can yak all they want about multiculturalism, they would say, but this is Canada and nobody had better eat any dogs….
“Canadian leaders, from Governor General Adrienne Clarkson on down, use the words “diversity” and “multiculturalism” as if they were synonmous. They’re not, and this linguistic misuse is responsible for much of the confusion over cultural differences among Canadians. Diversity encompasses a broad range of characteristics that differentiate people: religion, language, dress, leisure pursuits, and so forth. Diversity is not divisive in a secular Western democracy that upholds the freedom of the individual. But because there are irreconciliable differences between cultures, multiculturalism is divisive. That’s why Canadians don’t care what people eat—until someone decides to barbecue man’s best friend…….”
——END OF PASSAGE——
Canadian ethnicity will not accept a number of the cultural practices of immigrant groups. Your reporters are wrong in implying that it will.
Have a good day.
