Canada Dies Here : How The CBC Has Become The Mouthpiece of Colonial Occupation
By Tim Murray
In the annals of media bias, the Friday, October 2/09 edition of CBC Radios The Current should be promoted to the Hall of Shame. The lead-off topic revolved around an incident where Canadian officials in Kenya confiscated the passport of a Canadian citizen, Suuad Hagi Mohamud, whom they suspected of faking her identity after she failed to correctly answer elementary questions about the city and country she had lived in for 10 years. DNA testing subsequently vindicated her contentions.
The issue for the interviewer Jan Wong and the discussion panel was cultural competence “What should a Canadian be expected to know? Or as Wong framed it, Whether it is fair to assume that there is a common set of cultural reference points that Canadians relate to.
As one would expect, the verdict was No—exactly the answer that Ms. Wong had engineered with loaded questions and a loaded panel, all of whom were members of visible minorities, like Wong, and all of whom were foreign-born, excepting Wong. The only missing ingredient in this classic formula for manufactured consent was a sound track for the usual rent-a-crowd that forms the cheer-leading section for politically correct pronouncements.
Jan Wong made no pretence of neutrality or objectivity. Throughout the discussion, she consistently offered excuses for Mohamuds memory lapses. So what if the woman struggled to remember what a T-4 slip was, or that she didnt remember the date of her sons birthday. She was only off by two days, she exclaimed, and besides, not every culture uses the same calendar. And why would anyone have to name the transit stops on their way to work? And how many Canadians know who the Prime Minister is? As for forgetting who her employer was, heck, it was just a courier company after all.
Wong even played her own victim card for emotional impact. She intimated that she too was wrongly detained by customs officials in Toronto after returning home from her assignment at the Atlanta Olympics. She was thrown in a pen with illegal immigrants and felt powerless and fearful. No matter what knowledge she acquired, people would always make assumptions about her from her appearance, not knowing that her familys Canadian roots went back to 1880. Wong didnt reflect that all of us are judged by our appearance in one fashion or another. That is why we dress formally at job interviews, or why those in wheelchairs are assumed to be without capabilities, or seniors are often patronized like children. But not everyone nurses these grievances to score verbal points or angle for sympathy.
Wong made a point of ridiculing the comments of a representative of an immigrant settlement centre who argued that to be successful, immigrants must acquire so-called soft skills like making eye contact and shaking hands upon greeting people, which are common to our culture. She turned to her main witness for the prosecution, Debbie Douglas, the Executive Director of the Ontario Council of Agencies Servicing Immigrants, and remarked sarcastically, Actually, Debbie, with the threat of the H1N1 virus, we are told not to shake hands. What is acceptable culture? Silly question. According to the CBC and their champions, Canada doesnt have a culture, at least not of the home-grown variety.
It is a measure of the CBCs stacked deck strategy of rigging an open debate that it was left to panelist Nick Noorani, editor of the magazine “Canadian Immigrant”, a man not normally known for his objectivity, to defend the importance of learning soft skills. If I moved to Japan , I would learn to bow and leave my shoes outside at the door. But Debbie Douglas interjected that learning soft skills was only necessary within the culture of institutions, but there was no general set of soft skills external to them in this new and wonderfully diverse Canada of ours. All of this lent emphasis to a point that she made a few times during the discussion : Canada is no longer this white, Western, European place—we need to move away from this whole notion of what Canadianism means. It is a mistake, she asserted, to assume that there are basic cultural reference pointswe are as diverse as the rest of the world. And why, Douglas asked, should immigrants have a heavier burden of having this knowledge than Canadians themselves have?
But Mr. Noorani felt moved to draw a line. Is that what we really want, to have immigrants still oblivious to what is going around them even after having lived in the country for 10 years? Ms. Izumi Sakamoto, a Professor of Social Work at the University of Toronto, came to Wong's rescue with another of her excuses. She cited the case of a Greek who had not had a vacation for ten years because like so many immigrants, he was too busy working to put food on the table and hadnt the luxury of taking the time to explore his environment. Debbie Douglas concurredIt is a class issue for everyone. This was her way of absolving immigrants (including Mohamud) from the responsibility of knowing what was happening around them because they were just too busy as working class folks to have the leisure to become aware. Douglas concluded the debate by stating that the conversation should be about How do we get our communities engaged.
Precisely. Should the question also not be If there is in fact no longer a common set of cultural reference points, should we not set about to re-establish them? Can a viable nation function without any cultural cohesion, a shared cultural vocabulary and a common knowledge of a shared history? Or are we to become merely an amalgam of ethnic solitudes more psychologically connected to foreign homelands than to other Canadians? Is Canada, as Debbie Douglas would argue, just a microcosm of the United Nations? Is it already a done deal?
That seems to be the CBC message. Their motto is Canada lives here, but the reality is that on the CBC, Canada dies here. Their advice for traditionalists is to throw in the towel and park their nostalgia. Give it up. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated into the global shopping mall culture. We will never again be the country you yearn for. We are diverse, and getting more diverse with each passing day.
Sorry, CBC Mother Corp. The news of our death is greatly exaggerated. Eighty per cent of Canadians are not immigrants, and 83% are not visible minorities, 60% of whom congregate in just two major cities. Believe it or not, there is a world outside of Toronto, even of Ontario, and Vancouver. A world where the real Canada still is alive and kicking, and not defeatist. You havent heard the last of us yet.
