A Christmas Reflection: What Exactly Is Multiculturalism?
December 20, 2003
Dear Prime Minister and Fellow MP's:
Christmas is one of the oldest cultural traditions in Canada, yet in recent years Canadians have seen this tradition eroded in the effort to avoid offending new ethnic groups. The Winnipeg incident where the city's Christmas tree was re-named the Multicultural Tree is one of the most glaring symbols of Canada's multiculturalists trying to erase a Canadian cultural tradition.
But there have been many more attempts by the multiculturalists to do something similar to Christmas and other Canadian traditions. All of these things should make Canadians ask, “WHAT EXACTLY IS MULTICULTURALISM?”.
Most Canadians have been conditioned to respond favourably to the word “multicultural”, something that even Pavlov would have marvelled at if he were alive today. The following essay looks beyond the conditioned response and describes what multiculturalism really is.
Best wishes for the Christmas season,
Dan Murray
WHAT EXACTLY IS MULTICULTURALISM?
Let me tell you about a friend of mine. For the sake of privacy, I'll call her Mary. She is a recent immigrant to Canada from the Philippines. There, she was a librarian. A few years ago, she decided she needed a change in her life. After talking with friends who were emigrating to Canada, she decided to pay a visit to Canadian immigration officials to inquire about moving here.
“You're just the kind of person Canada needs–skilled, well-educated,” she was told. “There are lots of jobs for you.” Mary was elated. Within a few months, she had resigned from her job and was on a plane to Vancouver. She found a place to live, and soon made lots of friends in the Filipino groups that she met. Next, she began her search for the job that she had been told would be so easy to find.
This is where Mary's story turns sour. She did manage to find one short-term contract librarian position, but when that ended, she found herself looking all over again. In the last two years, she's managed to find a few things very unrelated to her field, but she's come to realize that the message she was given by Canadian immigration officials was very unrealistic and, to put it more accurately, fraudulent.
Recently, she's been re-training so that she can make herself more qualified for non-librarian employment. I happened to be enrolled in one of the UBC courses she was taking. One day, I gave her a ride to class and we started talking about our instructor, a University of Toronto professor who had grown up in New Brunswick. In talking to us one day, he mentioned that his background was Irish.
As we were driving, she commented on what the instructor had mentioned one day. “He said he was Irish,” Mary declared. When Mary said this, she really meant, “He's like me. He's an immigrant. Canada is a country of immigrants.” She had heard the latter statement many times and, like many new Canadians, had come to believe what she had heard. When I told her that the instructor really meant that he came from Irish ancestry and that his ancestors, like those of many Canadians, had probably come to New Brunswick almost 200 years ago, and that a separate culture had developed in Canada in those intervening years, I could tell from the look on her face that she was shocked and deflated.
Not only had she believed the immigration official but she had believed the messages fanned by Canada's multiculturalists that had implied that Canada was like a blank slate, that it didn't really have a history, that there really was no resident Canadian culture and that Canada was composed of many different ethnic groups—all just recently arrived—and that as a new arrival, she would fit in well and would be no different from the countryful of other recent arrivals.
I felt and continue to feel sympathy for Mary. Like tens of thousands of other immigrants who have arrived in Canada in the last 15 years, she is a victim of the short-term electoral aspirations of a number of people in the Liberal Party of Canada who feel they can use the immigrant vote to win a significant number of seats. But I feel more sympathy for Canadian job-seeking victims of present Liberal immigration policies because Canadians are enduring and will continue to endure undetermined long-term employment losses precisely because of these policies.
What is the connection between Mary's story and multicuralism? As one observer of this subject has said, immigration is the oxygen that feeds the fires of multiculturalism. Without one another, the two would wither—an event that many Canadians would like to see occur soon. But at the moment, the two are in full flame. What have they achieved?
Well, all of us will concede that some spice has been added to Canada. But what has been the price? Mary's case outlines the deceit that has been practised on skilled immigrants. But it also reveals the insult given to Canadians. The multiculturalists have rushed to the aid of people like Mary with affirmative action programmes, trying to get public and private employers to hire immigrants because these immigrants make up a significant percentage of our population now. All Canadians have heard the following illogical statement from a number of public employers: “Well, we want to have our workforce reflect the ethnic composition of our community.” What this statement really means is that these employers want to move recent arrivals to the front of the employment line. Meanwhile, resident Canadians are supposed to go meekly to the back of this line. What Canadians in their right minds would ever want this?
This brings us to the real issue. Most Canadians assume that their government should be serving its own people. It is very clear that Canada's immigration policies are in conflict with the employment aspirations of its own citizens. So, the first definition of multiculturalism I would give is this: it is a flowery-sounding deceit of both the people who have come here and of the people of Canada.
A second definition follows from the first. Multiculturalism is a euphemism for an attempt to intimidate the people of Canada into accepting people that it never really needed. It is non-Canadian-culturalism. It is an attempt to put itself above all other considerations, especially the informed interests of Canadians. Not only does it thwart the job-seeking of Canadians, it crowds and degrades the living space of Canadians -who live in the three major immigrant-receiving areas of Canada: Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. At a time when mostCanadians are aware that the most basic science asserts that global population has to be stabilized and reduced, these three areas of Canada are growing at third-world rates. At a time when the effects of overuse of resources are appearing in the form of climate change here and all over the world, Canada is bringing in unprecedented numbers of people to consume more and more resources.
The government of Canada has never produced any rational evidence to justify its present immigration policies. What should Canada place first: irrational, ill-informed multiculturalist-immigration policies or its precious living spaces? The multiculturalists have had considerable success in bullying Canadians into accepting the idea that multiculturalism should take precedence over the livability of living space. To any sane, informed Canadian, this does not make sense.
In addition to being deceit and intimidation, multiculturalism is resurrected colonialism. The two main source areas of immigrants to Canada are China and India (and neighbours). The populations of these countries make up well over a third of the world's 6 billion. Since the introduction of unprecedented 250,000+ immigration levels in the early 1990's (and plans for 300,000+ in perpetuity), these two groups have quickly become the majority, for example, in several areas of the Lower Mainland of B.C. There is virtually an unlimited number of people in these two countries to continue the flood. Prominent members of these groups have declared that they will do everything they can to make sure that the flood continues.The multiculturalists defend what is happening by using the guilt card: they tell Canadians that we colonized Canada and displaced the aboriginal population, so what is wrong with two large ethnic groups doing the same to us? In other words, they tell Canadians that in order to make up for past guilt, Canadians must meekly accept this resurrected colonialism. Other groups have done the same thing here and in other parts of Canada.
The multiculturalists' attitude, which implies that Canada is some partially-filled, acultural space waiting to be filled with infinite numbers of people, who will make infinite demands for equal ethnic treatment, has to be put into the nearest landfill where it belongs.The most direct way to achieve that goal is to return Canada's immigration policy to the principle of economic and cultural absorptive capacity. In other words, when Canada has an economic need for immigrants, it will look for them. When it needs very few–as is certainly the case now–it will not look for them. As for cultural absorptive capacity, the Canadian government should never permit the inflow of immigrants to overwhelm the culture of resident Canadians. In summary, Canada will continue to admit some immigrants, but those numbers have to be reduced dramatically.
In this way, common sense will be restored to Canada's immigration policies, the frustrations of immigrants like Mary will be reduced dramatically, the ambitions of Canadian job-seekers will be a primary goal of Canada's government, Canadian culture will regain its self-respect and the people of Canada will re-assert their sovereignty over their own country.
Dan Murray
Immigration Watch Canada
