January 16, 2011 : Chinese Condo Owners’ Protest Sets Off Firestorm

The Chinese condo owners have objected to a UBC proposal to build a 15-bed hospice for the dying next to their 18 storey high rise. They say the plans are insensitive to the Chinese cultural belief that proximity to death brings bad luck. They also state that their million dollar condos at UBC would face reductions in property value. About 80% of the condo owners in the building are Chinese.

The hospice is being paid for by the Order of St. John. The project’s co-proposer is the UBC Faculty of Medicine which hopes to link with the hospice for academic and research purposes.

The firestorm against the Chinese complaint has been loud and blunt. Most people have said that if Chinese want to live in Canada, they have to adapt to Canada. Even other Chinese have distanced themselves from the condo-owners, saying that the Chinese condo owners’ complaint has brought shame upon all Chinese.

But observers should note that UBC has nurtured the conditions that make these condo owners and other ethnic groups feel they can get away with making such demands.

For example, UBC has cheer-led high immigration to increase its clientele. It is now one of the largest universities in Canada. It has 50,000 students, well over 50% of whom are of Asian background, mostly Chinese. Part of that 50%+ are Canadian-born. However, many are recently-arrived immigrants whose parents have brought them to Canada to avoid the enormous competition for university places in China or other extremely overpopulated Asian countries.

Chinese parents also bring their children here because they know that many university faculties discriminate (through such measures as Employment Equity) against Canada’s mainstream population and in favour of recent immigrants. To justify what they do, UBC and other university faculties, like their counterparts in the private sector, parrot the notion that one of Canada’s most important goals is to achieve “diversity” among its workforce and its students.

For example, in September of 2010, Dr. Joseph Finkler, Associate Dean of Admissions at UBC’s Faculty of Medicine, boasted that UBC’s Medical school was “a virtual United Nations”, implying that a faculty goal to achieve a U.N. had been reached. In contrast, mainstream Canadian pharmacy students complain that UBC’s Faculty of Pharmacy is about 60% Asian. Marks are an important part of being admitted as a student, but race has become important too—-particularly to naive Admissions Committees who have become enamored with “diversity”.

The pursuit of “Diversity” is producing significant negative effects on UBC’s environment. UBC has a Housing Department which is in the private housing business. Like developers in Metro Vancouver, UBC’s Housing department relies on a constant inflow of immigrants to buy a significant number of its new housing units. This has transformed the UBC campus from a spacious green environment of 25 to 35 years ago into a crowded, concrete one. Most Canadians will wonder what expensive high-rise condos are doing on a university campus. In fact, they would be shocked to hear that a significant part of the land given to UBC in 1908 has been converted to high-end housing.

Going further on the housing theme, UBC President Stephen Toope signed an agreement on December 7, 2010 with a Chinese-based company called Modern Green which specializes in “sustainable housing developments”. According to UBC, “Modern Green Development Co., Ltd. has entered into a strategic partnership with UBC and (its) Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS). Modern Green is making an initial contribution of $3.5 million to CIRS for capital and programming, which will link CIRS and Modern Green’s housing development on (the UBC) South Campus.” Even at this early stage, this agreement sounds suspicious.

In spite of the obvious negative consequences of overbuilding on the UBC campus, UBC pretends to promote environmentally friendly policies. For example, UBC boasts of its Institute for Resource Environment and Sustainability. But it fails to recognize that too many people living on its campus, largely the result of immigration, means that the campus will eventually become an environmental disaster. Two years ago, it demonstrated that it was much like the developer-dominated municipal councils in Metro Vancouver. Those councils have taken thousands of acres of farmland out of B.C.’s Agricultural Land Reserve for housing. UBC wanted to do the same with its own UBC Farm which has long been part of UBC’s Faculty of Agriculture. However, a loud protest by students and non-students sent the UBC administration into retreat.

UBC President Stephen Toope has been particularly brazen in transforming UBC. And the Chinese condo owners at UBC have watched as this has happened. In October 2010, Toope authored an OP-ED in The Vancouver Sun titled “Diversity Improves Our University And Our Country”. He argued that because the top 10 universities in the world had an average of 21% foreign students, UBC had to catch up. He said that B.C. students benefited from the contacts they made with international students, implying that the current ethnic cleansing of UBC was insufficient. He stated that, unlike B.C.’s own students, “undergraduate international students pay the total cost of their education”, implying maybe unintentionally that B.C. students were, because of education subsidies, inferior in status and on virtual educational welfare. Finally, he said that international students contributed to “the global increase of knowledge”, insinuating that Canadians are laggards and non-innovators.

If characters like Toope had been present in Tibet when China used its numbers to overwhelm Tibet, or when Germany invaded many European countries
in WW2, would they have told the Tibetans and the invaded Europeans that they should celebrate the “Diversity” that the Chinese and the Germans respectively had created ?!!

Like the CBC, UBC believes that the best way Canada can defend oneself against an invasion is to play the role of sycophant, that is, get on its knees and lick boots. It seems not to understand that those who do this are held in contempt by both the people who receive the sycophancy as well as by most of the people in the invaded country.

As evidence of his lack of understanding of how immigration is affecting Canada, Mr. Toope self-righteously condemned a recent harmless Macleans article. The article was titled “Too Asian” but its content would have been better served by the title “Too Much Immigration”. Toope proclaimed :

“Current economic and pay statistics suggest that we are not doing as well today in integrating immigrants as we have in the past. That reality certainly demands analysis and public discussion.”

Mr. Toope has felt comfort in seeing the City Councils of Vancouver and Toronto and a number of other groups—this century’s version of book burners– pass anti-Macleans resolutions.

But Canadians should not expect Mr. Toope to provide leadership in promoting public discussion. Like the CBC, and the City Councils of Toronto and Vancouver, Toope and a battalion of highly-paid “Yes men and Yes women” seem to believe that their duty is to suppress public discussion. It is also unlikely that he will encourage UBC academics to analyze why immigrants are doing so poorly. If UBC academics were to do this, they would make 2 discoveries that would be very uncomfortable for Toope and others. One is that most post-1990 immigration of over 5 million people has been completely unnecessary. The other is that the 5+ million have caused unnecessary competition for a limited amount of employment.

There are undoubtedly UBC academics who disagree with UBC’s direction, but most have been so completely intimidated by UBC’s stifling intellectual environment on the immigration issue that they “burn” their academic papers and books before they write them. The only academics who will write on the immigration issue are the grovellers who will produce propaganda for Canada’s immigration industry. They are like Canada’s hypocritical CBC which will broadcast any nonsense that the immigration industry throws its way.

Most Canadians would say that both the publicly-subsidized CBC and UBC, in return for taking billions from the public, have a duty to pursue truth for the public. Pursuit of truth would inevitably lead to defending Canadian-born students and their country. But Canadians see little evidence of pursuit of immigration truth at either the CBC or UBC.

Like the CBC which pretends to be a place where journalism is practiced, UBC and other universities pretend to be places where education occurs.

However, on the immigration issue, both are mere propagandists.

Contrary to CBC’s favorite phrase : “Canada Lives Here”, Canada actually dies at the CBC.

Similarly, education and the dreams of unknown numbers of Canadian-born students die at UBC and other universities.