Mark Steyn skewers the "but what about all the great restaurants" "argument" beloved of urban elites everywhere, adding:
"What worries me is when settled nations start to fetishize immigration to almost absurd degrees. In 1997, the government in Ottawa festooned the land with posters marking the 50th anniversary of Canadian citizenship and showing people of many lands holding hands around a globe - ie, Canada's idea of itself is as a great compilation of other people's hits rather than as a concept album in its own right."
"In 1997, the government in Ottawa festooned the land with posters marking the 50th anniversary of Canadian citizenship"
Leave it to the fantasy makers in Ottawa to spin even the the most seminal details of Canadian history into a revisionist myth...oh well, a new "historical dialogue" is part of the "new Canada"...in other words, we must rewrite our past to serve the political purposes of the current dogma preached from the pulpits of transnational progressivism which infects the halls of governnance.....their prime social engineering tool to prepare us for the "global village" engineered anthill society is to propagate the myth we were "multicult" nation/society historically.
As for the BS on the citizenship promo signs, "50 years of citizenship" is revisionist code for: in 1937 we no longer required the signature of a British colonial commissioner on our immigration documents as the statute of Westminster made us a true sovereign governeing nation...that's all...nothing really about multicult diversity is relevant to this historical fact....but if you want to create the illusion Canada is some "global nation" well,...you see the point of the signs now.
Which Quebec ad agency got that contract?
I think that the American people's resounding defeat of the amnesty bill demonstrates the need for Canada to have an elected Senate.
The only reason that the American people were able to defeat the massive combination of politicians, big business, and Mexican lobbyists is because of our ability to threaten the United States Senate with defeat at the polls.
Without that power and our willingness to use it, we probably would have had a good opportunity to stop it in the House. However, as it happened our capacity for threatening re-election possibilities of senators demonstrates that we are, in fact, a true democratic republic.
It's obvious to me that the Canadian people need more clout at the ballot box. I realize that our systems do not work in an identical way, but one simply cannot dismiss the additiona ability to express one's views in the political process that an elected senate would bring.
I'm very proud of the American people today. We didn't simply argue with each other down at some bar. In a massive and concerted effort the conservative movement in the United States rose up and put such pressure on the Untied States Senate that the Senate had to blink.
I think this suggests the power that people can have if they're able to have politicians who are beholden to them for their political status and not an appointment.
As usual, Mark Steyn gets it exactly right. A society is not 'Gate 57 at Heathrow'; that is, a collection of disconnected people,unrelated to each other, non-communicating with each other, and grouped only because they are going through a shared travel gate at the same time.
A society is not a 'moment in common space' and it's not a 'moment in common time'.
A society is a long term, evolving entity, rather like a biological organism, made up of a deep and evolving infrastructure of normative rules of behaviour, common beliefs and standards. This is the deep basic level, which all societies must generate and maintain, in order to enable stability and productive interactions among the population.
A collection of people in current space and time, living as multicultural isolate groups, can't develop this deep infrastructure. Instead, they remain 'hotel guests', each competing with the other for the services of the hotel. That's what we have set up in Canada - and Europe.
What we have done is focused only on the 'superstructure' - a level of immediate beliefs and behaviour that we bring with us when we immigrate or travel to a hotel but which we do not expect to share with the other guests, to develop long term common interactional capacities.
In a robust, non-multicultural society, the people, the citizens, develop this deep, common infrastructure as they live within the society, and therefore, this infrastructure changes to accept some new beliefs, reject others, and change others. The people are the creators, developers and users of this structure.
Multiculturalism rejects this deep structure, rejects and refuses this power of the people to generate a cohesive common, evolving infrastructure and instead - condemns people to the isolation of being guests in a country, defined as such guests by categorizing them by 'origin'.
Categorizing someone by origin is where your identity is based within a group; this group identity is hereditary and defined by its 'origin' - religious, ethnic, linguistic. You aren't allowed to reject this identity and develop a new shared membership with other peoples.
Multiculturalism is finally, slowly, starting to be questioned in Canada and Europe. Its disastrous effects are very visible in Europe. It remains a key component of the Liberals and NDP programs in Canada.
Steyn and ET have expressed it very eloquently. There is a big difference in celebrating your heritage at such events as highland games and becoming a North American Lebanon or Western Bagdad. Even when early immigrants tended to klan up as in Little Italys they were always proud Canadians first. Sadly this is not the case anymore for an increasing number of immigrants.
....and the myth of multicult continues...after the Stanley cup final ( sorry you choked so bad Ottawa) CBC had the news with the wrap-up segment on Canada's "seven wonders".
Front and center escaping elimination after elimination was "pier 21" in Halifax which the multicult judge sated represented "Canada's rich multicultural heritage".
After resisying the reflex to gag, I recalled the father of modern Canada (PET) atating that this nation had 2 founding cultures...which is one of the few things he ever said that was accurate...how modern revionist prgressivism spun this into a diversity issue is a study for mass-marketing students at Harvard.
....and the myth of multicult continues...after the Stanley cup final (sorry you choked so bad Ottawa) CBC had the news with the wrap-up segment on Canada's "seven wonders".
Front and center escaping elimination after elimination was "pier 21" in Halifax which the disciple of diversity judge stated represented "Canada's rich multicultural heritage".
After resisting the reflex to gag, I recalled the father of modern Canada (PET) stating that this nation had "2 founding cultures"...which is one of the few things he ever said that was accurate...how modern revionist prgressivism spun this into a diversity issue is a study for mass-marketing students at Harvard.
Note to Texas Canuck: it would seem that a large majority - 50k or so - of Lebanese-Canadians live in Lebanon.
A "North American Lebanon," at least in Canada, is therefore unlikely, until such time as we actually expect "citizens" to have more of a connection to Canada beyond being a foreigner to whom we easily give a Canadian passport.
Hey, if we are to do the politically correct thing, why doesn't someone point out that there are way too disproporionate a number of lawyers in the House of Commons. Should not there be some commission to study why equal representation is not given to people of other occupations? We all know the low estimate that lawyers have, could there be a correlation with the estimate given to politicans?
The EUROPEAN UNION im sure thats what hitler was wanting to create wehn he took over all those other nations
Someone raised elected Senate in an earlier.
There is no good reason not to have an elected Senate.
I don't see much point in asserting that a society isn't just a collection of people, when the reality is apparent that Canada certainly is nothing more than a collection of people. The age when Canada had, or was capable of having, a "national" identity in any meaningful sense, is simply over. Not liking it is one thing, denying it quite another.
Folks, if it's any comfort, as a Canadian expat in the UK (due to return to the Dominion in August), I've been able to detect a change in Canadian temperament away from daffy multicult ideology and towards something I can't quite put my finger on.
It's a good thing though. Some of it would appear to stem from our new sense of self-assuredness, coming in no small part from showing what we're made of in Afghanistan.
I was in Ottawa two weeks ago and to my complete amazement and delight came across this right by the National War Memorial:
www.valiants.ca/english.html
A statue of de Salaberry? General Currie? Joseph Brant? Frontenac? Laura Secord?
Busts of Brock, Butler, d'Iberville and Canadian VC winners?
Good old-fashioned heroes and heroines from our history? Dedicated by the Governor General no less?
There's hope for us all yet.
ebt said: "the reality is apparent that Canada certainly is nothing more than a collection of people. The age when Canada had, or was capable of having, a "national" identity in any meaningful sense, is simply over."
There is some credibility to that opinion...a culturally centerless collection of people is what you get when identity politcs are such a vast compromise...Canada IS a vast compromise...so compromised that, in fact, all there is no real national charater or uniqut alleged national character (even though the seperatists play this mythological card), is just a vast collection of people asked to make vast compromises in everything from personal security to identity by a government that epitomizes the concept of gross compromise.
As Trudeau once hinted, the nation will die with a wimper...probably because he realized it is so culturally schizophrenic no one noticed or no one cared or because they were told by their government to look the other way when it was happening.
Who really stands on guard? And for what?
The EUROPEAN UNION im sure thats what hitler was wanting to create wehn he took over all those other nations
Posted by: spurwing plover
No, he wanted something much closer to what ET describes in his post of 9:56 am.
Yeah, don't you people get it? People who believe that foreigners who are in the US illegally should go back home to their own countries are just like the Nazis who wanted to kill or enslave anyone who wasn't German, including their own assimilated and patriotic German-born Jews.
Illegal immigrants are in reality illegal LABOURERS who happen to be MUCH more profitable than those who are legitimate citizens.
Illegal "immigration" is what keeps corrupt, rancid, ageing boomers rolling in BMWs and comfortable in high-end, gated, guarded communities.
To boot, their mere presence of illegals in western countires furnishes a captive constituency for bleeding-heart leftists who then defend and *advocate* for them.......at taxpayers expense.
Those on The Left who experience fleeting moments of lucidity, and who then question the practice, run the risk of being tarred racist.
Those on The Right who denounce the scam incur the wrath of inveterate *free-enterprisers* and are then labelled closet, commie pinkos.
Both The Left AND The Right are in cahoots on this, but for entirely different reasons.
We, the little people, pay and pay and pay for the oh-so multicultural privilege of having our wages bid down and our societies destroyed.
Of course, by the time the shit really hits the fan, those ageing boomers will be in gated, guarded cemetaries.