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Where's the Canada I knew?

by Klaus Rohrich

August 25, 2003

I am an immigrant. I immigrated into Canada in July of 1969, and assumed citizenship in the summer of 1975. When I came to this Country, one needed a minimum of 50 out of 100 points to be accepted as an immigrant. In addition, one required a job offer in writing from a Canadian employer. It was desirable that prospective immigrants spoke one of our official languages. Additional points were added to prospective immigrants’ profiles for items such as post-secondary education and having job skills that were deemed to be desirable. Any immigrants caught on welfare were deported.

Having a criminal record, having a communicable or highly contagious illness, belonging to a subversive organization, known criminal group, or being a suspected terrorist were grounds for deportation. I still remember one evening in the fall of 1969, when two RCMP Officers visited me at my home to interview me about my background and history. I was really impressed by how thorough their background check of me had been. They knew stuff about me that I had forgotten.

I lived in Toronto then. I believe the murder rate in the city for that year was one or two. People were outraged. How could Toronto have so many murders in a year?

Now, nearly 35 years later, I wonder what happened? I find myself living in a country that doesn’t even bear a passing resemblance to the one I moved to in 1969. For openers, the concept of a multicultural country is so foreign to me (no pun intended), that I scratch my head in awe at how clever a marketing job was done on an idea that is diametrically opposed to any sense of national unity or cultural coherence. What we have managed to do through this multicultural paean is to balkanize our cities and suburbs into racial and ethnic ghettos. Any cultural coherence that I have seen is in our pusillanimous hatred of the United States. There are fewer defining characteristics in the Canadian psyche today than there were in 1969.

We require legislation to protect us from the cultural imperialism of the Americans. Therefore our radio and television broadcasters are forced to broadcast, and those tuned in are forced to receive materials that would otherwise never see the light of day. Our xenophobia has become so rabid that it has even become necessary to pass laws forbidding us to watch foreign satellite programming. This way we have a choice. Either Bell Expressvu or Star Choice can provide us with comedy shows that are 10-years-old, history programs produced in Britain, or a plethora of left-leaning cable news networks, most of which originate in the U.S.

This negative orientation more and more seems to permeate our entire way of being. During election time, voters line up in droves to vote against Candidates and their parties. Imagine Bob Rae’s surprise when he awoke to find himself the Premier of Ontario because the voters hated both the Conservatives and the Liberals. When I first came to Canada, Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister and John Robarts was Premier of Ontario. No matter what anyone thought about either Trudeau or Robarts, they were elected as a result of the electorate making a choice in favor of them, rather than as a rejection.

Think of the rhetoric used by the NDP, a national political party (admittedly out of touch with the real world, and perhaps because of this more Canadian than anyone) and their spiel to "…make the rich pay". Parsing that sentence reveals everything one needs to know about our attitude toward those better off financially than we. They are rich, therefore morally inferior, and deserving of punitive fiscal consequences. It also speaks volumes about our jealousy of those more fortunate or talented.

Looking at those less fortunate, our attitude toward them is equally negative in our fawning condescension. The way we treat the poor, the disabled, blacks, or aboriginals is a travesty of human dignity. Creating special employment categories that show preferential treatment to the above groups over more qualified others essentially robs them of the ability to rise above their station in life by virtue of their acquired skills. How sad that one would be selected for a job because of one’s skin colour, rather than one’s qualifications. And how sad that one’s qualifications do not matter if someone else of a preferred race or social group happens to show up. This policy fosters racism and racial stereotyping in that it is divisive and creates animosity between the races.

Our welfare state has created a welfare caste system that condemns families, if not dynasties, to eternal poverty. Rather than provide the recipients with the tools to become self-assured, productive, self-sufficient members of society, we encourage them to become entrenched in their squalor by providing them with a subsistence that barely keeps them alive. We encourage single mothers to continue to have more children out of wedlock by increasing welfare payments as soon as a new child arrives, and thus creating more child poverty. In addition to this, we have made getting welfare so easy, that fraud runs rampant. When individuals are caught cheating the system they are seldom punished, and if they are, then the punishment is a mere slap on the wrist. The Canada that I moved to in 1969 had welfare, but it was never intended to be a permanent state of being, nor was it counted in the GDP as an industry.

As I look at our nation today, I try to sort out what has become of the Canada to which I immigrated close to 35 years ago. I know that the process was incremental and I guess, miniscule, slowly morphing from what it was then to what it is today. If I were an immigrant today looking for a new life, chances are I wouldn’t look to Canada.