Holes in the multicultural quilt

The five-day blockade of one of Toronto’s major north-south thoroughfares and the threatened protest in Toronto by some 100,000 Tamils to stop the Sri Lankan government from definitively ending the Tamil insurrection in Sri Lanka is an example of just how terribly Canada’s official policy of multiculturalism has gone wrong. It seems that every week some rag tag bunch of hyphenated Canadians are marching up and down Toronto’s University Avenue to protest in front of the US consulate about something happening somewhere in the world; as if the US had any power to do anything about anything happening anywhere.

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The problem with this big boarding house we know as Canada is that it is so devoid of any values that define us as a nation, that those who come here to rent rooms for a while wind up defining who we are by the struggles they support and the policies they oppose elsewhere. There is nothing wrong with being an immigrant or with caring for what happens in the old country. But when individuals and groups within Canada define themselves as being “something-Canadian” that “something” precedes the word Canadian and emphasizes the other, rather than the Canadian. One can’t really blame hyphenated Canadians for identifying more with their pre-hyphenated selves than their post hyphenated identities because this country has expressly encouraged them to cling to their ancestral roots, rather than become Canadian by stressing that what happens here is much more important to them than what’s happening in the old country. If it weren’t for the official Canadian government policy of multiculturalism, then it’s very likely that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam would not have been able to raise millions of dollars here in Canada to support a terrorist insurrection in their homeland. In that sense Canada is complicit in prolonging the bloodshed in Sri Lanka. Similarly, the internecine contretemps between various Indian factions might be better left at the border and possibly could have been, had the government of Canada encouraged immigrants of Indian origin to focus on becoming a part of Canada and leaving their disagreements at home. An official policy of adopting a predominant Canadian identity could very likely have prevented the Air India bombing of 1985 and thus spared 329 people a horrifying death. But, as they say, that’s all water under the bridge. What Canada needs to do in order to survive with some semblance of identity is to encourage the assimilation of its immigrants into the community at large. Rather than pushing newcomers to Canada into becoming balkanized among the various ethnic ghettos found in Canada’s urban centers, they should be encouraged in the strongest possible form to learn one of Canada’s official languages and to assimilate into the overall culture. Rather than form their own separate culture, as so many newcomers to Canada are in the habit of doing, immigrants could contribute to Canadian culture, so that it becomes more than American culture 2.1. While the idea that Canada as a vast, inclusive cultural mosaic might have some poetic appeal, the reality is that that the mosaic is rapidly falling asunder. A trip through some of Canada’s “multicultural” urban ghettoes will quickly convince any skeptic looking for more than an exotic lunch that official multiculturalism is a huge, expensive and divisive mistake.