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Most Canadians agree and want less immigration and more integration for the country

Why Multiculturalism Has To Be Made An Issue This Election



Why Multiculturalism Has To Be Made An Issue This ElectionMulticulturalism has gone well ahead of the assimilation process in Canada and it has to be made an issue this election. Public opinion polls—see here, here, and here—show most Canadians agree and want less immigration and more integration for the country. This includes many immigrants like myself. Neil Bissoondath, Salim Mansur and former B.C. Liberal premier Ujjal Dosanjh, for instance, have for years chastised Ottawa’s elevation of multiculturalism above integration. As Dosanjh put it recently, official multiculturalism has enabled many immigrants today to act like “colonisers” who, instead of integrating into the common culture, try to “remake Canada in their own image.” In the long term, he concludes, this will be “extremely dangerous” for Canadian society. Having come from a country born out of ethnic secession (Malaysia, which lost Singapore in 1965) and which is still fraught with ethnic strife, I couldn’t agree more.
The problem of multiculturalism is in the division it promotes. Writing in his 1991 book, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, the late former JFK-advisor Arthur Schlesinger warned that “[c]ountries break up when they fail to give ethnically diverse peoples compelling reasons to see themselves as part of the same nation.” Having witnessed the effects of two decades of mass immigration (just like Canada, the US had basically shut off immigration between the 1920s and 1960s) and the country’s abandonment of its melting-pot principles, he concluded that “[t]he cult of ethnicity exaggerates differences, intensifies resentments and antagonisms, drives ever deeper the awful wedges between races and nationalities…[t]he endgame is self-pity and self-ghettoization.” A strongly worded, but very fair analysis. In the same year of Schlesinger’s book, however, Ottawa created the Department of Multiculturalism and Citizenship: a sprawling federal agency mandated to promote minorities’ “cultures, languages and ethnocultural group identities.” (my emphasis). Schlesinger’s “cult of ethnicity” had become entrenched Canadian policy. With multiculturalism, everything must be multiculturalized, and that means bigger government: from taxpayer-funded translators and signage; to cultural-sensitivity training for judges, police, and bureaucrats; to jobs, social services and housing programs for those who can’t assimilate into the workforce. And overlooking it all is an army of government watchdogs, including the anti-discrimination agencies and the human rights commissions and tribunals. Further, under multiculturalism, the traditional, majority culture has to take a backseat or is avoided completely. Hence Prime Minister Trudeau’s claim that Canada has “no core identity”—Polls show over three-quarters of Canadians disagreed with this. This ‘no-culture’ argument, says Dosanjh, is central to the multiculturalism project. As he writes, claiming the host nation has no culture provides a “shield” for those immigrants “bent on creating cultural and ethnic ghettos in the country.”

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Reducing the velocity of immigration so integration can take root

In order to function, however, nations require unity, not cultural diversity. By emphasizing ethnic self-assertion, all the features typical of national cohesion, like collective memory, shared positive experiences, or unifying cultural practices, must go. As a result, the once-unified nation dissolves into a ‘nation of nations.’ But how can patriotism, the glue which keeps a nation together, thrive in the latter? As Inventing Freedom author Daniel Hannan has stated, “patriotism is what makes us behave unselfishly… it is why we pay taxes to support strangers, why we accept election results when we voted for the loser, why we obey laws with which we disagree.” Take that away, he says, and you get Syria or Iraq. National unity is linked to the majority (in Canada’s case, bicultural) identity which all others should assimilate into. This is required in order to have a viable and peaceful nation going forward. For Canada, this means reducing the velocity of immigration so integration can take root. We did this in the past when the economy was bad and jobs were scare. Today, in order to help Canada, the Canadian people, and the Canadian culture cohere and endure, we must do it again.

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Sarah Chung -- Bio and Archives

Sarah Chung is a former immigration and foreign service officer, economist, teacher, Olympian, and PhD candidate, Sarah is currently running this election in Ontario’s Markham-Unionville riding for the People’s Party of Canada.


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