A Few Words on Canadian Identity, Culture, Multiculturalism, Racism & Canada’s Immigration Policies
Well, I woke up this morning, confident in the Canadian Mosaic of misinformation, misrepresentation, and general “hug thy neighbor” because they are “new” philosophies, and what happens while I’m asleep at the wheel with a half full Kokanee between my leg?
Those damn Tories went and whisked away my general feeling of political incorrectness by going and informing the teaming mass’ piling up at the gates of Heaven (you know, Custom’s and Immigration Canada) that we Canuckians aren’t perfect, we don’t always get it right, this isn’t necessarily the best place to live, and oh, by the way, we do occasionally put the Beaver hunting aside and go target practicing for terrorists when we are not consuming huge quantities of pork and beer after our little dip in the icy water.
Imagine my surprise to wake up to the newly released “Discover Canada” guide.
A Federal document extolling the history of our nation, the identity of the Canadian mosaic and it’s purpose, coupled with the expectations and onus of responsibility placed on new Canadians as they make their homes here.
Couldn’t have twisted my mind more if you’d flipped a couple of hits of Acid in my morning coffee and replaced my flip-flops with fuzzy bunny slippers.
For a significant part of my life, and definitely my voting life, I’ve had to watch as the meaning and definition of being Canadian became more and more obscure. I sat back and witnessed Liberal and Conservative Governments alike pervert the meaning of being Canadian for the sake of votes.
I’ll tell you a quick story that I’m not very proud of, but needs to be told because to me it leads to my definition of what a Canadian should strive to achieve.
When I was a lad growing up during the 70’s in Calgary, a city whose growth was exponential during that decade (when I moved here at the ripe age of four in 1970, the population was 165,000 and the tallest building was the International Hotel, by 79’ there was 500,000 people here, and 45 Sky-cranes in the core), I went to a Junior High in 79’ that had exactly one Black student (yes, I know it’s politically correct to say African Canadian, but Black is Black, Red is Red, Green is Green and White is White, and when a dudes family lives in Canada since before Confederation, he isn’t African anymore, he’s a Black Canadian of African origin, just like I’m a White Canadian of European origin), and not a single East Indian or Pakistani, although there were a smattering of Chinese and the odd Japanese kid around. In fact, you could get on a bus, go all over the city, and you’d be lucky if you saw anyone other than a Caucasian person walking up or down the street.
There simply weren’t that many identifiable minorities. That is until the Liberals, under Trudeau in the mid-seventies, discovered that if you open the immigration floodgates up, you get fresh, grateful voters. I’ll get back to this.
Anyway, there I was, little Mr. Unconscious Red-Neck, standing in line for lunch one day in grade 7, beside my very good friend Fraser. He made a snide remark to me, and I looked at him and said with all humor intended, “don’t be a dumb Nigger”.
Well, needless to say my very good friend Fraser (who stood 4 inches taller than me, and 25 pounds heavier) almost instantly had me on the ground and was beating the living shit out of me. It took two other buddies to pull him off, and by the time they dragged him away, I’d earned myself two black-eyes and a broken nose, and everyone around me wondering what the hell set Fraser off.
You see Fraser was the only Black student in my school, and none of us saw him as anything but another student. We weren’t indoctrinated into a society of segregation, we were not taught to think about the fact that people were this color or that creed… we simply were. So when Fraser lit up, neither I nor anyone else around me understood the profound and painful insult I’d rendered him.
This story gets better though. This is the irony of a naïve society manifesting itself to try and correct a situation, and doing it the wrong way. I’ll explain:
I may have been the one to slight another, callously tarnishing his race to his face with a derogatory and denigrating name, but my school took the insult a little farther, by suspending poor Fraser for 3 days for fighting.
I, of course, as the picture of innocence, arrived home looking a tad battered, and of course my Father wanted to know why.
I have to say my old man was a damn fine fellow.
Once having heard my story, he lost it, he was furious, livid, fit to be tied in his anger, and his anger wasn’t at my friend Fraser. He was mad at me, and at the school. My Father, the paradigm of proper, the champion of all things a gentleman should do. The man who daily bemoaned the state of the world and hated all things communist, picked me up by the shoulders, pinned my sorry ass against the wall, and told me in no uncertain terms that if I ever uttered that word again he would beat me to within an inch of my life himself.
He then sat me down, and calmly, explained to me exactly what I had done. He then apologized to me for not having explained this matter beforehand. (Although he did make a comment later that night to my mother that the reason he hadn’t bothered explaining anything to me about race or religion was that he thought I was smart enough to understand, and that he was quite beside himself that his son was an idiot.)
Needless to say, I finished up supper, went over to Fraser’s house, and sat at the table with he and his parents, and began a very long, and very heartfelt apology.
You see, it wasn’t that I wasn’t aware of the Slavery trade, or how Africans had come to be in North America, or the displacement of the Acadians. It wasn’t that I wasn’t sympathetic to the plight of persecuted people, having only to look at my own Scottish history. I was just too young to have put two and two together and realize that Fraser and his family were a result of those history lessons.
I’d never seen Fraser as a persecuted person. I’d never thought of him as someone whose family had gone through so much for the freedoms they had. He was just a buddy I’d been screwing with.
Needless to say Fraser and his family forgave me that night, and even spent some time explaining their Acadian roots to me. By the time I’d left for home, the damage had been repaired, but it left a mark on the school, and the rest of our friends, that had yet to be resolved.
Curtain lifts, and in steps my old man to fix the unfixable.
My father was a very senior person with one of the major banks in Calgary back in the day when that still actually meant something on a societal level, and when he spoke people listened. Particularly the principal and his staff, whom my father on a good day typically treated with the respect one gives a dog as he urinates on your lawn. That is to say, they were all scared shitless of my Dad. He felt very strongly that the school system was highly inadequate, and failing to teach his children anything of relevance.
I suppose in retrospect, given this particular occasion, he was right.
The morning after the incident, he called the School Principal, the School Priest, and Frasers Dad, and asked them to meet him at the school, with special mention to Frasers father to bring his lad. He grabbed me, his smokes, and drove over to the school with a look that even the Devil would have cowered and withered from, and upon arrival at the principals office, deposited me beside Fraser outside the office, took Fraser’s Dad by the arm and stepped out into the hall. I could hear him apologizing to Mr. Fraser for his lack of responsibility in educating his sorry excuse of a son, and promising Mr. Fraser that the oversight had been corrected, and his son suspension would be as well. All this with one hand in his pocket, and his other hand holding a lit cigarette. With that, he and Mr. Fraser walked into the principals office… and proceeded to rewrite the way my Junior High would treat incidences like this for the rest of time.
I vividly remember Fraser and I attempting to lose ourselves in the seat cushions of the couch we sat in, the gathering crowd of students and teachers in the hallway outside the office, and the poor secretaries who looked like they’d rather be anywhere but where they were, as my father proceeded to literally lift the roof of the school off with the level and fury of his voice. For 15 minutes all we could hear was my Father tearing a new asshole in the sides of the heads of the principal and the Priest, and the feeble attempts to defend themselves by saying they were looking out for my fathers son.
This only generated more derision, laughter, and general abuse from my father, at a volume that could easily be heard across the entire school.
After a few minutes and some, shall we say, muted conversation, the principal, and the Priest, came out of his office, and apologized to Fraser and informed him that he was reinstated in school, then looked at me and informed me I was suspended from school for three days, and the look on the principals face was one of embarrassment and contrition. The Priest had always been a bastard, but you could tell he was none to happy either.
The old man took it one step further by making the principal explain the reversal to the entire school, the why and what for. I have no idea to this day exactly what the old man said to that principal, but from that day forward my principal avoided me like I carried the plague.
I tell you this story to make a point.
We allowed our Government to pervert our traditional “welcome” attitude. We castrated our society with propaganda about how evil Western civilization has been, and how we had to provide opportunity for immigration because we had a responsibility to provide succor to displaced peoples, peoples whose homes were ravaged by war or famine, to do the right thing. To some extent that was definitely true, but on the other hand, are we to bear the burden of the follies of our fore-fathers to the detriment of society in the present sense.
I personally do not think so. We have a duty to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, but we must never try to ignore that they occurred.
Not once did our Government in 30 years let people migrate here and become Canadian. Instead, under the banner of “multiculturalism” and the “Mosaic”, the Government let people in with no education about the country, no basic language skills, no sense of duty, or obligation, and no fundamental understanding that when you come to Canada, you leave your shit piles at the doorstep.
Hell, at one point, if you had a $150K, we’d sell you citizenship with no status criteria. Come on in, we don’t care if you’re a war criminal, a terrorist, or whatever, just come on in and join the party, but make sure you stand over in that corner, because you are distinct, you are special.
Not only did we cheat these various peoples of what the meaning of Canadian is, but we assisted them in the act of “self-segregation”, by funding cultural distinction, allowing them to enter the country with no language skills, which in turn forces an individual to congregate into communities where there was nothing but their own peoples, and hang-ups, just to survive.
All this, in the name of favors for votes. We wrap it up in the need to increase our population, because we don’t have enough children, but in the end, it was the votes, and the votes of the future babies, that counted.
The rest has just been sound bites for the media.
I miss the old Canada where we just didn’t give a shit where you came from, as long as you could appreciate a good winter, the maple leaf, the national anthem, didn’t piss on our flag, and generally contributed to the nation, you were okay with the rest of us until such a time as you proved otherwise.
Don’t misunderstand me, we have always as individuals and as a collective, had our prejudices in Canadian Society, but never have these prejudices manifested themselves into the dynamic that our vaunted “Mosaic” has allowed to propagate. We didn’t have individuals living in this section of the city or that section of the city out west. You just lived where you could afford to live.
There’s always been the French/English dynamic, the White/Indian dynamic, and who could ever forget the East/West dynamic, and yes in older cities you have your Italian section, or your Jewish section of a city, or the whatever section, but never such a pronounced segregation of population as we do now.
I personally believe Canada’s immigration policy has left both the nation and the people coming here a lot poorer in the last 30 years, and while I can’t stand Jason Kenny personally, I have to say “good on you” for bringing Canada first and foremost to the center of the immigration policy, and for enunciating the efforts of all Canadians, and our very proud history.
The concept of a Mosaic was to be a blessing, a union, a light in the night sky telling the world there was another path, and if we don’t correct it in the next few decades, it will become the disease that undoes our nation.
How many Canadians know that we are the only nation to successfully invade the US, and burn down the White House?
How many Canadians know who Laura Secord was?
How many Canadians know that Thomas Cook did more than just become a travelers cheque?
I asked a young employee of mine last Friday to explain to a new migrant from the UK about the Beothuk Indians on the east coast, as we do a lot of work with First Nations, and he wanted to know why there were no reserves in NewFoundLand. The employee looked at me like I was from Mars. “What’s a Beothuk?” he asks me… “A principle part of Canadian history you uneducated bum”, I replied. I learned about the Beothuks in grade school. What the hell do they teach children in school today? It sure isn’t about the history of the nation.
So many people have gone into the creation of this country and when you come to Canada, and want to live here, you need to know this, otherwise you can never know what we as Canadians truly cherish.
We fought in 1812 against the Americans, we fought in 1894 in the Boar War, again in 1914, and in 1938, only to face war again in Korea. We stood the line between Israel and Egypt when no other nations would, and marched the walls of Cyprus to keep the Greeks and Turks from each others throats. We screwed up in the 70’s and gave India nuclear power, and spent lives uselessly keeping the Serbs and Croats from doing something they had 1000 years of practice doing before we were even a location on a map. We built the longest bridge in the world, and share the longest undefended border. We have a rotating restaurant in every major city in the country, and most of them serve shitty food. We’ve exported Tim Horton’s and imported Tamil Tigers, and in many respects we are the most irresponsible nation on earth, in others we rank high in responsibility. We have the arrogance to think we are the beacon of social democratic light, yet we bless other nations with our incurable, deficit incurring health and housing programs, creating new dilemma’s that didn’t solve the old ones, all the while allowing our democratic process to slowly erode and fail.
Through it all, we simply seek to live, and we wish nothing more than others being able to do the same.
These are just a few of the many things that make us Canadian, and we should be shouting them to the world, and making sure that when someone gets off a boat or a plane, they learn the principle values of being Canadian, and they learn the inescapable truth of being Canadian, and that’s that we will die to keep our freedom, and we will die so that others keep their freedom.
Nothing else counts, if it isn’t through the freedom we hold, and the fundamental understanding that everyone bleeds red beneath the skin. Canada is a story of great hardship, perseverance, and ingenuity. We have overcome such amazing adversity, and quite frankly, a great deal of it brought on by our own stupidity.
The least we can do for a new immigrant is extolling the virtues of our nation, and the lessons we’ve learned, and why they need to throw away the old and embrace the new. No one will stop you from being who you are, or refuse your personal history, but as Canadians all of us must ask that you hold onto your identity in the context of embracing a new Canadian identity working in lockstep with your cultural one.
Otherwise the long term prospects for this nation are dim at best.
Well, I woke up this morning, confident in the Canadian Mosaic of misinformation, misrepresentation, and general “hug thy neighbor” because they are “new” philosophies, and what happens while I’m asleep at the wheel with a half full Kokanee between my leg?
Those damn Tories went and whisked away my general feeling of political incorrectness by going and informing the teaming mass’ piling up at the gates of Heaven (you know, Custom’s and Immigration Canada) that we Canuckians aren’t perfect, we don’t always get it right, this isn’t necessarily the best place to live, and oh, by the way, we do occasionally put the Beaver hunting aside and go target practicing for terrorists when we are not consuming huge quantities of pork and beer after our little dip in the icy water.
Imagine my surprise to wake up to the newly released “Discover Canada” guide.
A Federal document extolling the history of our nation, the identity of the Canadian mosaic and it’s purpose, coupled with the expectations and onus of responsibility placed on new Canadians as they make their homes here.
Couldn’t have twisted my mind more if you’d flipped a couple of hits of Acid in my morning coffee and replaced my flip-flops with fuzzy bunny slippers.
For a significant part of my life, and definitely my voting life, I’ve had to watch as the meaning and definition of being Canadian became more and more obscure. I sat back and witnessed Liberal and Conservative Governments alike pervert the meaning of being Canadian for the sake of votes.
I’ll tell you a quick story that I’m not very proud of, but needs to be told because to me it leads to my definition of what a Canadian should strive to achieve.
When I was a lad growing up during the 70’s in Calgary, a city whose growth was exponential during that decade (when I moved here at the ripe age of four in 1970, the population was 165,000 and the tallest building was the International Hotel, by 79’ there was 500,000 people here, and 45 Sky-cranes in the core), I went to a Junior High in 79’ that had exactly one Black student (yes, I know it’s politically correct to say African Canadian, but Black is Black, Red is Red, Green is Green and White is White, and when a dudes family lives in Canada since before Confederation, he isn’t African anymore, he’s a Black Canadian of African origin, just like I’m a White Canadian of European origin), and not a single East Indian or Pakistani, although there were a smattering of Chinese and the odd Japanese kid around. In fact, you could get on a bus, go all over the city, and you’d be lucky if you saw anyone other than a Caucasian person walking up or down the street.
There simply weren’t that many identifiable minorities. That is until the Liberals, under Trudeau in the mid-seventies, discovered that if you open the immigration floodgates up, you get fresh, grateful voters. I’ll get back to this.
Anyway, there I was, little Mr. Unconscious Red-Neck, standing in line for lunch one day in grade 7, beside my very good friend Fraser. He made a snide remark to me, and I looked at him and said with all humor intended, “don’t be a dumb Nigger”.
Well, needless to say my very good friend Fraser (who stood 4 inches taller than me, and 25 pounds heavier) almost instantly had me on the ground and was beating the living shit out of me. It took two other buddies to pull him off, and by the time they dragged him away, I’d earned myself two black-eyes and a broken nose, and everyone around me wondering what the hell set Fraser off.
You see Fraser was the only Black student in my school, and none of us saw him as anything but another student. We weren’t indoctrinated into a society of segregation, we were not taught to think about the fact that people were this color or that creed… we simply were. So when Fraser lit up, neither I nor anyone else around me understood the profound and painful insult I’d rendered him.
This story gets better though. This is the irony of a naïve society manifesting itself to try and correct a situation, and doing it the wrong way. I’ll explain:
I may have been the one to slight another, callously tarnishing his race to his face with a derogatory and denigrating name, but my school took the insult a little farther, by suspending poor Fraser for 3 days for fighting.
I, of course, as the picture of innocence, arrived home looking a tad battered, and of course my Father wanted to know why.
I have to say my old man was a damn fine fellow.
Once having heard my story, he lost it, he was furious, livid, fit to be tied in his anger, and his anger wasn’t at my friend Fraser. He was mad at me, and at the school. My Father, the paradigm of proper, the champion of all things a gentleman should do. The man who daily bemoaned the state of the world and hated all things communist, picked me up by the shoulders, pinned my sorry ass against the wall, and told me in no uncertain terms that if I ever uttered that word again he would beat me to within an inch of my life himself.
He then sat me down, and calmly, explained to me exactly what I had done. He then apologized to me for not having explained this matter beforehand. (Although he did make a comment later that night to my mother that the reason he hadn’t bothered explaining anything to me about race or religion was that he thought I was smart enough to understand, and that he was quite beside himself that his son was an idiot.)
Needless to say, I finished up supper, went over to Fraser’s house, and sat at the table with he and his parents, and began a very long, and very heartfelt apology.
You see, it wasn’t that I wasn’t aware of the Slavery trade, or how Africans had come to be in North America, or the displacement of the Acadians. It wasn’t that I wasn’t sympathetic to the plight of persecuted people, having only to look at my own Scottish history. I was just too young to have put two and two together and realize that Fraser and his family were a result of those history lessons.
I’d never seen Fraser as a persecuted person. I’d never thought of him as someone whose family had gone through so much for the freedoms they had. He was just a buddy I’d been screwing with.
Needless to say Fraser and his family forgave me that night, and even spent some time explaining their Acadian roots to me. By the time I’d left for home, the damage had been repaired, but it left a mark on the school, and the rest of our friends, that had yet to be resolved.
Curtain lifts, and in steps my old man to fix the unfixable.
My father was a very senior person with one of the major banks in Calgary back in the day when that still actually meant something on a societal level, and when he spoke people listened. Particularly the principal and his staff, whom my father on a good day typically treated with the respect one gives a dog as he urinates on your lawn. That is to say, they were all scared shitless of my Dad. He felt very strongly that the school system was highly inadequate, and failing to teach his children anything of relevance.
I suppose in retrospect, given this particular occasion, he was right.
The morning after the incident, he called the School Principal, the School Priest, and Frasers Dad, and asked them to meet him at the school, with special mention to Frasers father to bring his lad. He grabbed me, his smokes, and drove over to the school with a look that even the Devil would have cowered and withered from, and upon arrival at the principals office, deposited me beside Fraser outside the office, took Fraser’s Dad by the arm and stepped out into the hall. I could hear him apologizing to Mr. Fraser for his lack of responsibility in educating his sorry excuse of a son, and promising Mr. Fraser that the oversight had been corrected, and his son suspension would be as well. All this with one hand in his pocket, and his other hand holding a lit cigarette. With that, he and Mr. Fraser walked into the principals office… and proceeded to rewrite the way my Junior High would treat incidences like this for the rest of time.
I vividly remember Fraser and I attempting to lose ourselves in the seat cushions of the couch we sat in, the gathering crowd of students and teachers in the hallway outside the office, and the poor secretaries who looked like they’d rather be anywhere but where they were, as my father proceeded to literally lift the roof of the school off with the level and fury of his voice. For 15 minutes all we could hear was my Father tearing a new asshole in the sides of the heads of the principal and the Priest, and the feeble attempts to defend themselves by saying they were looking out for my fathers son.
This only generated more derision, laughter, and general abuse from my father, at a volume that could easily be heard across the entire school.
After a few minutes and some, shall we say, muted conversation, the principal, and the Priest, came out of his office, and apologized to Fraser and informed him that he was reinstated in school, then looked at me and informed me I was suspended from school for three days, and the look on the principals face was one of embarrassment and contrition. The Priest had always been a bastard, but you could tell he was none to happy either.
The old man took it one step further by making the principal explain the reversal to the entire school, the why and what for. I have no idea to this day exactly what the old man said to that principal, but from that day forward my principal avoided me like I carried the plague.
I tell you this story to make a point.
We allowed our Government to pervert our traditional “welcome” attitude. We castrated our society with propaganda about how evil Western civilization has been, and how we had to provide opportunity for immigration because we had a responsibility to provide succor to displaced peoples, peoples whose homes were ravaged by war or famine, to do the right thing. To some extent that was definitely true, but on the other hand, are we to bear the burden of the follies of our fore-fathers to the detriment of society in the present sense.
I personally do not think so. We have a duty to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, but we must never try to ignore that they occurred.
Not once did our Government in 30 years let people migrate here and become Canadian. Instead, under the banner of “multiculturalism” and the “Mosaic”, the Government let people in with no education about the country, no basic language skills, no sense of duty, or obligation, and no fundamental understanding that when you come to Canada, you leave your shit piles at the doorstep.
Hell, at one point, if you had a $150K, we’d sell you citizenship with no status criteria. Come on in, we don’t care if you’re a war criminal, a terrorist, or whatever, just come on in and join the party, but make sure you stand over in that corner, because you are distinct, you are special.
Not only did we cheat these various peoples of what the meaning of Canadian is, but we assisted them in the act of “self-segregation”, by funding cultural distinction, allowing them to enter the country with no language skills, which in turn forces an individual to congregate into communities where there was nothing but their own peoples, and hang-ups, just to survive.
All this, in the name of favors for votes. We wrap it up in the need to increase our population, because we don’t have enough children, but in the end, it was the votes, and the votes of the future babies, that counted.
The rest has just been sound bites for the media.
I miss the old Canada where we just didn’t give a shit where you came from, as long as you could appreciate a good winter, the maple leaf, the national anthem, didn’t piss on our flag, and generally contributed to the nation, you were okay with the rest of us until such a time as you proved otherwise.
Don’t misunderstand me, we have always as individuals and as a collective, had our prejudices in Canadian Society, but never have these prejudices manifested themselves into the dynamic that our vaunted “Mosaic” has allowed to propagate. We didn’t have individuals living in this section of the city or that section of the city out west. You just lived where you could afford to live.
There’s always been the French/English dynamic, the White/Indian dynamic, and who could ever forget the East/West dynamic, and yes in older cities you have your Italian section, or your Jewish section of a city, or the whatever section, but never such a pronounced segregation of population as we do now.
I personally believe Canada’s immigration policy has left both the nation and the people coming here a lot poorer in the last 30 years, and while I can’t stand Jason Kenny personally, I have to say “good on you” for bringing Canada first and foremost to the center of the immigration policy, and for enunciating the efforts of all Canadians, and our very proud history.
The concept of a Mosaic was to be a blessing, a union, a light in the night sky telling the world there was another path, and if we don’t correct it in the next few decades, it will become the disease that undoes our nation.
How many Canadians know that we are the only nation to successfully invade the US, and burn down the White House?
How many Canadians know who Laura Secord was?
How many Canadians know that Thomas Cook did more than just become a travelers cheque?
I asked a young employee of mine last Friday to explain to a new migrant from the UK about the Beothuk Indians on the east coast, as we do a lot of work with First Nations, and he wanted to know why there were no reserves in NewFoundLand. The employee looked at me like I was from Mars. “What’s a Beothuk?” he asks me… “A principle part of Canadian history you uneducated bum”, I replied. I learned about the Beothuks in grade school. What the hell do they teach children in school today? It sure isn’t about the history of the nation.
So many people have gone into the creation of this country and when you come to Canada, and want to live here, you need to know this, otherwise you can never know what we as Canadians truly cherish.
We fought in 1812 against the Americans, we fought in 1894 in the Boar War, again in 1914, and in 1938, only to face war again in Korea. We stood the line between Israel and Egypt when no other nations would, and marched the walls of Cyprus to keep the Greeks and Turks from each others throats. We screwed up in the 70’s and gave India nuclear power, and spent lives uselessly keeping the Serbs and Croats from doing something they had 1000 years of practice doing before we were even a location on a map. We built the longest bridge in the world, and share the longest undefended border. We have a rotating restaurant in every major city in the country, and most of them serve shitty food. We’ve exported Tim Horton’s and imported Tamil Tigers, and in many respects we are the most irresponsible nation on earth, in others we rank high in responsibility. We have the arrogance to think we are the beacon of social democratic light, yet we bless other nations with our incurable, deficit incurring health and housing programs, creating new dilemma’s that didn’t solve the old ones, all the while allowing our democratic process to slowly erode and fail.
Through it all, we simply seek to live, and we wish nothing more than others being able to do the same.
These are just a few of the many things that make us Canadian, and we should be shouting them to the world, and making sure that when someone gets off a boat or a plane, they learn the principle values of being Canadian, and they learn the inescapable truth of being Canadian, and that’s that we will die to keep our freedom, and we will die so that others keep their freedom.
Nothing else counts, if it isn’t through the freedom we hold, and the fundamental understanding that everyone bleeds red beneath the skin. Canada is a story of great hardship, perseverance, and ingenuity. We have overcome such amazing adversity, and quite frankly, a great deal of it brought on by our own stupidity.
The least we can do for a new immigrant is extolling the virtues of our nation, and the lessons we’ve learned, and why they need to throw away the old and embrace the new. No one will stop you from being who you are, or refuse your personal history, but as Canadians all of us must ask that you hold onto your identity in the context of embracing a new Canadian identity working in lockstep with your cultural one.
Otherwise the long term prospects for this nation are dim at best.
最后编辑: 2010-04-24
