Tewder
Senior Member
Nor does the France of the past, or the USA of the past. On this point I'm recalling a previous comment I made:
I don't believe anybody here is advocating for some dated notion of Canada. We are diverse now, for one thing, and no longer colonial. History and heritage all have their place in our identity because those things have informed how Canada did evolve into what it is today, they are part of our identity but not the sum of it. More importantly, however, is the ongoing dialogue about Canadian identity, what it means to be one and why it is a benefit to have unity across our diversity. IMO this is an important dialogue to have for a large, regional and multicultural nation like Canada, and one that is stymied by a government policy that actively advocates against it.
In addition, I would also suggest the following comment:
Somehow despite our relentless deconstructing of what it is to be Canadian and our seemingly intractable refusal to articulate a Canadian identity it still manages to exist and to communicate itself to immigrants who have been here for many years as well as to newcomers. Being Canadian is not solely about being a displaced person from another homeland. Being Canadian is also about integration into something bigger and something 'other' that transforms one's former cultural identity. This is a good thing.
Again, we're talking about a state-funded and mandated government policy here, only. From this perspective it ceases to be an innocuous 'celebration' of cultural heritages, and crosses over to the level of social engineering policy. Not a bad thing necessarily, there are many good policies of social engineering such as the education system etc., as long as we are aware of what it is and not misinterpreting it as minor cultural funding.
I disagree. Older generations of Canadian immigrants did not simply create cultural replicas of their homelands. They kept some traditions from the homeland, often adapting them; they adopted new ones and integrated them into their lives; and they often turned their backs on many aspects of the homeland, as cultural baggage so to speak, usually the very reasons they left their homelands in the first place. French Canadians, as an abandoned people, did this fairly rapidly. English Canadians, as a colonial people, were slower to do it but have. Again, we cannot view identity in a vacuum as a stagnant and unchanging entity. The 'norms' you mention form the underlying ethos that transcend all the other changes and evolutions. They are extremely important to a society and form its foundational 'mythology', surrounding bigger and deeper issues of how we perceive rights and freedoms, of how we perceive law, order and the duty of citizenship, and other core beliefs that underpin identity while also being a reflection of it. This is what Canada should be educating its citizens on, whether born or immigrant, creating unity across the more superficial aspects of diversity.
I sense in your posts that for you the crux of this issue very much centres on a divide between Canadians born here of traditional backgrounds and newcomers of 'non-traditional' backgrounds? Of course there is always a certain measure of this. Some people don't like change or see the need for it. In general, however, Canadians born of traditional backgrounds have proven themselves to be about the most tolerant and liberal social groups you will ever find, willing and wanting to open their doors and embrace a new and diverse post-colonial reality. One may choose to view them uniformly as uptight intolerant 'Loyalist' wasps who wouldn't deign to mix and mingle with those of less pure pedigree - and those people do exist as a very rarified minority - but the irony here is the different observation that the groups most often the least resistant to change and the least tolerant of other communities and cultures are often immigrant communities themselves. Canadians are accustomed to immigration and living with people with 'funny' names and accents and from all kinds of different backgrounds. It's part of our history, culture and identity to experience this, unlike that of many other more conservative countries that do not. In other words the divide you talk about is not perhaps as one-dimensional as one may think.
Inter-racial couples are a sign of a healthy, integrating post-Multicultural society, and not of the ethnic 'mosaic' approach that the Canadian government officially supports. I'm not here to bash Canada. As others have said here it has been largely successful at diversifying itself, welcoming newcomers and accommodating diversity in all areas including religion, sex and gender, and absolutely there are many people integrating here, mixing and mingling and forming diverse lives, all in spite of any government policy, which makes you wonder just how effective the policy and the funding are. My point though is that we should actually be encouraging this further through other appropriate policies and funding. As you say, immigrants will always have a tendancy to cluster among their own kind and cultural values and traditions from the homeland will always be celebrated within homes and communities to one degree or another. No problem, and this needs little help from a government mandate (as already observed even a 'melting pot' USA is still very multicultural 'on the ground' so to speak). What does need help from a government mandate is the encouraging of unity and integration, and a process of 'assimilation' that helps those immigrants settle and prosper in ways that relying solely on the adopted cultural community cannot.
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