Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by PJ Media on September 17, 2024, and is cross-posted here with permission.
Canada is officially a multicultural society, thanks to Trudeau pere et fils. According to PM Justin Trudeau, Canada has no cultural core, and is a post-national society. This framing ignores the relevant evidence: Canada has two official languages, English and French, not dozens or hundreds. Canada has two official legal systems, English Common Law and French Civil Law. Canada, until Justin Trudeau, historically has been allied with the other Commonwealth anglophone countries, and not China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, South Africa, Vietnam, Palestine, or Russia.
Canadians have responded with enthusiasm to multiculturalism, endorsing the idea of multiculturalism in every public opinion poll on the subject. But, and it is a large but, by multiculturalism what they mean, again according to the opinion polls, is people coming from many different countries to become Canadians, to adopt Canadian ways. What they do not mean, and do not approve of, according to the polls, is immigrants expecting to keep their language, culture, and traditional practices.
In other words, Canadians expect immigrants to assimilate to Canadian life and culture. This is a divergence from the vision of the Trudeau Liberal government, which stresses that “diversity is our strength.” The government has no initiatives and no plans and no desire to assimilate immigrants. On the contrary, it appears to be happy with separate enclaves of outward looking immigrant groupings which it can treat as voting blocs and pander to for votes. As well, the government has decided to inundate the existing Canadian population with a flood of foreigners, through open door immigration, legal and illegal, plus apparently unlimited numbers of temporary workers, asylum seekers, and foreign (alleged) students from around the world. This will apparently “multicultural us” nicely.
How has multiculturalism worked out for us? Canadians have lived through long periods of its own, homegrown cultural divide and divisiveness between French and English, including historical wars and conquests, and more recent attempts by Quebec to separate from Canada. Canadians are not enthusiastic about new social divides, whether indigenous or imported. Yet that is what we now have.
The Trudeau government has championed the designation of the First Nation indigenous population as independent and equal to Canada, through nation-to-nation relations (even though –don’t forget—Canada is not a nation, but “post-national”). Non-indigenous Canadians are now widely referred to as “colonial settlers,” the implication being that they have no right to be in Canada, and perhaps should return to Scotland, Ireland, and the more recent arrivals back to India and China, etc. etc. Our educational system and especially our universities now no longer prioritize the teaching of Canadian culture and its antecedents, but “decolonialization” and the erasure of Imperialist British and French cultures. The NDP government of British Columbia is doing all it can to turn over all provincial land to the First Nations, and to make any provincial initiatives contingent on First Nations permission.
Government mandate now requires the teaching of First Nations culture and practice in all university fields. “Indigenous science” is now mandatory, and all science departments have been pushed to hire indigenous individuals to teach it as equivalent or superior to our knowledge in our physics, chemistry, biology, geology, mathematics, engineering, and other technology departments. This is called “indigenization,” and is now obligatory.
Added to all this are the relentless attacks on Canadians with European backgrounds, encouraged and authorized by the government for Canadians’ alleged treatment of the First Nations, up to the outrageous and shameful Parliamentary motion affirming that Canada had committed “genocide” against the First Nations. With every new First Nations initiative to attack and blame Canadians, the Canadian government responds with official endorsements and a waterfall of cash for the First Nations. Is it any wonder that more and more fantastic and hysterical accusations arise every day? This is called “reconciliation,” and requires that we accept anything that First Nations say, no evidence required.
If that were not enough, we have to contend with the fight for Khalistan. Khalistan? Where’s that? It is a hoped-for independent nation on the part of Sikh nationalists who wish to break off from India. Not really Canada’s business. Except it is, because the struggle has been brought to Canada by Sikh immigrants. We have seen within the Sikh community intimidation, assassination, even the blowing up of a commercial airliner, because someone thought that murdering hundreds of people, many of whom were Canadians, would somehow bring Khalistan closer to reality. But don’t forget: diversity is our strength.
The latest foreign disruption to Canadian life is more widespread and directly aimed at taking over a key Canadian institution: education. While schools have been peripherally affected, universities have been taken over by Hamas supporters who have done their best to turn those institutions into tools for the destruction of a foreign country, Israel, once regarded as an ally of Canada, and for the banning of Jewish students and professors.
Foreign students from the Arab and Muslim world have played a significant part in these riots and encampments, but Canadians originating from that region have been prominent, plus their sympathizers. But we must not forget to credit the many far left intersectional professors and their supporters in the administrations, especially the notorious antisemitic DEI officers. (Diversity, equity, and inclusion are words used to mean something quite different from and opposite to their common meaning.) Under the DEI regime, some populations are favored, while others are disfavored. In “progressive” thought, Jews are disfavored. So Jews living autonomously in their ancestral homeland, finally, after 2000 years, with an army of their own to defend themselves, must be destroyed, “from the river to the sea.”
Most Canadian university administrations have been unwilling to act against the Hamas revolution. Even when they wanted it, Canadian municipal officials were loath to act against Hamas, and refused police intervention. Many administrations search for compromising with the vandals, offering to open their investment books and to stop investing in companies involved in Israel, and offering to hire Arab, Muslim, and Hamas professors, and to provide more places and funding for Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian students. The Canadian government official in charge of checking “Islamophobia” recommended the same remedy. Most all of institutional Canada seems to agree: appeasement is the best policy. It worked so well with Hamas in Israel, and for the U.S. in Iran. And it works so well for Canada, that we are about to have a resurgence of Hamas demonstrations, encampments, vandalism, and Jew-hatred.
Of course, our universities were already ideologically compromised long before the Hamas pogrom and its massive atrocities in Israel. The Enlightenment vision of a search for truth based on evidence and debate has long been replaced by a Marxist “truth” of the struggle between oppressors and victims, and the shift from research and scholarship to activism. The was spurred on by the Prime Minister’s office’s explicit dictates to universities and all academic organizations that multiculturalism was to be enforced by DEI, which selected, supported, and celebrated people, no longer on the basis of achievement and merit, but on the basis of race, sex, sexuality, religion, and disability.
Our Enlightenment heritage is thus destroyed. And just to make it clear, Western culture also has to be destroyed, by teaching our children that it was the source of all evil in the world. The Greeks can no longer be taught, because they were too white. Western literature and art cannot be taught, because they were almost all the work of men. According to the teaching at our universities, all you need to know about Western culture is that it was and is imperialistic, and thus brought and brings violence and poverty to the rest of the world that (allegedly) had previously only known peace, prosperity, environmental justice, and wisdom. To save the world (we now teach) everything Western must be destroyed, especially knowledge.
Yes, multiculturalism has brought us a humanistic utopia! Congratulations, Canada.
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