Tewder
Senior Member
^ That's an interesting viewpoint, because from what I've seen, Multiculturalism itself has become one of the major pillars of the Canadian identity. If anything, I say it strengthens it. Look at Toronto in the 60's: Blue Collar and Whitebread, hoping to become the next Buffalo, NY. You must admit, things have improved, not gotten worse.
The reality is that western nations can be multicultural (as in have world immigration) or they can go the way of Japan and go down kicking and screaming as not to damage their "unity". It will lead to their decline: people just aren't interested in having babies like they used to.
Oh I'm in no way suggesting that we shouldn't have pursued immigration or that we shouldn't have diversified, those are good things to be sure and they are a core part of our history. All western democracies have done this.
My concern is with the official government policy of Multiculturalism as has been practiced in Canada - in the English speaking parts of it at least - and that has bulldozed over the centuries of culture and tradition that founded the nation and its institutions, and that inform who we are today. It essentially destroys an understanding, celebration and teaching/assimilation (to newcommers) of that which forms our collective identity, shared experience and mythology, and which makes Canada 'unique' and recognizeable on the world stage in a way that the more general global reality of multiculturalism doesn't. In other words in becoming everything - and again this is our very government stance here - we in fact become nothing.
Interestingly, your very discounting of all of this by reducing a pre-Multicultural Toronto to merely 'blue collar and whitebread, hoping to become the next Buffalo' sort of illustrates the very point. Multiculturalism has brainwashed us, even coerced us somewhat through often implacable and ridiculous political correctness, to turn our back on the real richness of our past, and the very core beliefs/values that define the process of evolution towards Canadian tolerance, liberalism and diversity as we know it today. These things did not incongruously appear overnight. Not even because of Trudeau.
Diversity and the experience of the immigrant are indeed the sort of cultural 'pillars' you speak of, but Multiculturalism is not.
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