Oh we’re being naughty again. Us grown-ups. We’re bigoted and intolerant. We won’t accept newcomers in our midst. Above all, we won’t accommodate all of their differences. Especially the religious ones. If a white punk wants to carry a knife into junior high school, well, those who know better than we, the politically correct who govern us, have no problem in disarming him. But should someone “of colour” carry a “kirpan”, it is his cultural right. Dress codes also must make way for Islamic headscarves.
We’ve seen this coming for twenty years. Canada died in 1985 when the CN (???) in Ontario was sued for forcing a Sikh to wear a hard hat on the job. But a lot of us are still not reconciled to the death of English Canada.
Tonight on the CBC we learned that French Canada is also dead. The critical mass of immigrants from non-traditional sources allied with those native francophones who hate their culture as much as the chattering classes of English Canada hate theirs has passed the tipping point. A Quebec government commission is giving voice to the defeated and formerly silent majority. The fact that the ruling quisling elite is shocked at the “racism” and “intolerance” of ordinary people making submissions demonstrates how disconnected politically correct people are from public opinion.
They are disconnected because the media has been in their control, and hate speech law has intimidated and constrained public outrage against the runaway scale of immigration, and the cultural complexion of that immigration.
What is remarkable to an observer of my generation is the memory (DO YOU MEAN “AMNESIA”?) of a francophone people in the 1960s and 1970s who were ardently defensive and proud of their culture. Their argument for sovereignty was that it would guarantee the survival of French Quebec culture, then under siege in a North American English sea. The importation of French-speaking Africans or Haitians on a grand scale would not have been seen as helping this enterprise. French language was not to be equated with Quebecois culture.
Parizeau was right. “The ethnics” did the Parti Quebecois in. But in a sense, mass immigration and multiculturalism made Quebec feel even more insecure within Canada. It did not “save’ Canada as the federalists maintain. In the 1960s, they saw themselves as Pierre Valliere’s “White Niggers of America” governed by white Rhodesians in Montreal. Now they are a mere fragment in a cultural mosaic where ordinary people feel not, as was the nationalist promise, “masters in their own house”, but guests in their own house with the new boarders seemingly making the house rules.
French Quebeckers have been scammed by multiculturalism and mass immigration, and by the liberal, progressive, cosmopolitan wing of the Parti Quebecois. Whatever may be said about the parochial obscurantism of Maurice Duplessis and his reactionary regime, his was a made-in-Quebec society.
Not to worry. According to Mark Kelly, there is a new generation being brainwashed in the multicultural schools. The little parrots are saying that we’re not to judge differences. Then at the same time they’re saying we aren’t different. And commissioner Charles Taylor accepts their petition like the meek liberal supplicant that he always was. One day I hope an Imam has him for breakfast.
Tim Murray,
Quadra Island, B.C.
“Multiculturalism is a fatuously stupid belief in belief. It is hard to know which is more evil, these Islamic customs themselves or the craven, cowardly, and above all PATRONIZING ‘respect’ for them which the rest of us are expected to show.” Richard Dawkins
