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.
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Tags: canadian identity, culture, immigration policies, multiculturalism, racism
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November 17th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
To all who tweet… thanks, except I’ve not a clue how it works.
Cheers,
Am.
November 18th, 2009 at 10:11 am
Firstly let me point out that the guide is newly revised a rather major fact that you missed (ignored?) is that it was first introduced in 1995.
New Guide: http://www.scribd.com/doc/22475907/Discover-Canada
Old Guide: http://www.cic.gc.ca/EnGLIsh/pdf/pub/look.pdf
That’s a lovely short story, I’m glad you have opinions. Do you have any backing for them aside from anecdotal evidence?
For example your claims about segregated cities are suspect (you pretty much contradict yourself), first year urban planning and sociology courses being the sources of my limited knowledge I’d appreciate you citing something. Produce some facts, or recognize that your claims have no value. ie. my comment here has no value in regards to anything but the fact that your claims on this issue are not substaniated. Substantiate or retract.
Pretty cliches like “we will die to keep our freedom, and we will die so that others keep their freedom” don’t really justify a testing of new immigrants’ ability to memorize facts which as you point out yourself are not common knowledge for current Canadian citizens (3/4 couldn’t identify our head of state http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/12/14/canada-survey.html).
“throw away the old and embrace the new” and “I miss the old Canada where we just didn’t give a shit where you came from” undercut the fact that “where you could afford to live” was and is often determined by the prejudices of our society manifesting in its socio-economic structure. Your personal antecdote is hardly proof that a “Canada where we just didn’t give a shit where you came from” ever eixisted. Take our racially motivated drug policies, the persecution of Japanese Canadians during and after WW2 the general mistreatment (deliberate destruction of the cultural groups) of the First Nations population and numerous other historical facts, some cited (if understated) in the very document your are championing, as examples.
It’s hard to wrap my head around the thought that people trying to get into the country need to have (more) useless facts about it drilled into their brains; they want to live here they probably think well of it.
I am not an expert in this area. This issue strikes me as another photo op, this time at the expense of possible immigrants.
Certainly immigrants are and have always been proud of their Canadian citizenship, regardless of how hard the test to get it is. Claims that this increases the value of the citizenship are ludicrous. A lower percentage of people who want to may not get in, but that won’t make more people want citizenship. We don’t sell citizenships anyway.
Assimilation is not an act in support of freedom.
Your accusations regarding the Liberal’s vote hungry motivations (which I think are fair accusations) can just as easily be seen to apply to a Conservative Party now cutting back on immigration in order cut back votes for other parties. Here’s a good cliche: Politicking with lives is bad.
Okay last thing, example of how obvious a propagandist move this whole thing is:
Spousal abuse was criminalized in the 80s in Canada (before that husbands weren’t breaking the law when raping their wives)… Now we refer to it as “barbaric” (P9 of the Guide).
What this guide and the above article do best is demonstrate hypocrisy. Which is nothing to be proud of but important to identify.
November 18th, 2009 at 10:18 am
I should add that I agree that spousal abuse is horrific, I would even point out that 5 times as many women die in domestic violence incidents each year than people die in both police and army uniform (I’ll present the citation in an upcoming article my time here runs short, apologies for a bit of my own hypocrisy). But yeah, way to protect our interests and lives oh great government of ours.
November 18th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Well, we can all be hypocritical at times eh? So no need to apologize as I wouldn’t.
I did point out that it is both a failing of Liberals and Conservatives to use immigration as a tool to gain more votership.
Secondly, while I don’t have a great deal of time right now, I can easily point to the Italian, Jewish, Irish, Haitian, Jamaican and English enclaves in Montreal, or Scarbourough in Toronto, with its dense enclaves of populations from all over the world, who individually, because of the need to survive, fall back on their cultural ties to work within the Canadian system due to a lack of understanding of the Canadian System.
Many of whom end up being taken advantage of by individuals within their own community who are better educated within the system.
Perhaps you like to visit the North East quarter of Calgary which has an overwhelming population of Southern Asian and Indian populations, built up over a period of 2 decades as a result of the immigration structure and the veritable flood of people those very lax laws allowed in…
Perhaps you mean the 16,000 refugees let in last year that have absolutely no paperwork, no history, and no way to vouch for themselves?
While many are fervent Canadians, many are just as persecuted by their own cultural heritage here in Canada as much as they were in their former lives, and here and there is the odd terrorist. Air India comes to mind.
Not to mention Federally funded Community Associations vs privately funded ones, Immigration consultants paid by people trying to get into the country, or people who simply pay to get in.
In the 80′s many, many Citizens of Hong Kong paid $150K to $250K for outright citizenship to Canada before the 88′ deadline for the colony to be turned over to China. They didn’t necessarily read English or French, they also didn’t speak English or French, but they had lots of money, and a friendly Conservative government holding their arms open.
Up until the early 90′s, you could, if you were an Asian Immigrant to Calgary or Edmonton, go to various driving schools where $5K and a handshake would get you a drivers license from the driving school… I recall one being named “Happy’s School of Driving”. People were certainly happy to pay the $5K, because they were unable to take the tests in either English or French.
I’ll point to the sheer number of people who hold Canadian Citizenship while holding another as well, mainly for financial reasons, not patriotic ones… Lebanese Canadians come to mind immediately. How many Lebanese in the last dust up hold undeclared property in Lebanon, what would that value be, and how much do you want to bet Revenue Canada asks the same question? Yet they sure screamed for a ride in a hurry and demanded help when the shit hit the fan in Lebanon, despite posted warnings by our foreign service about the tensions and dangers of going to Lebanon. These “patriotic Canadians” felt zero remorse about embarassing our nation into risking other Canadian lives to save theirs, when they are the ones who put themselves in harms way to begin with.
Part of being a good Canadian is paying taxes, and putting back into our society. Yet people like Ms. Ruby Dhalla sponsor bills designed to benefit an immigrant family by polling even more money from the social support system, on the heads of the people who’ve actually contributed to it.
While I personally don’t care, I can point to the Judgment of Discrimination rendered against the RCMP in not allowing a police officer of Pakistani origin to wear his Turban on duty, despite the tradition of the force spanning over 100 years, and another 50 or 60 years of NWMP… while it took the First Nations several more years, despite their firm foothold in the Canadian tapestry, to gain the right not to cut their hair in the same force.
Let me tell you, it was not a popular decision amongst the mass’, but supported by Government for the sake of appeasement of the community. Possibly an exact example of where the “not withstanding” clause should be utilized.
Our Charter of Rights and Freedoms is a joke that has left the nation open to complete interpretation, with no definable identity as a result.
How about the efforts of Sikh’s in Vancouver to be exempted from wearing motorcycle helmets because they interfere with a Turban. Perhaps you’d call it uniformity when a Sikh Child seeks to wear a knife to school as part of his religious freedom?
In relation to dying for ones nation, perhaps your referring to the wave of Somalian protests in Ottawa, and Toronto, condemning the country which gave these same people succor for not sending in troops to stop the carnage in their former home? Funny, but I didn’t see too many of the thousands of protesters lining up at a recruiting office instead to help form a “Somalian Relief Brigade”, did you? None of the expats from Somalia asked to be sent over to help, they felt it more prudent to demand that the rest of Canada help instead. Glad to be free, but not glad enough to go free others.
Maybe you mean the Tamil immigrants, who quietly go about their business both within their community and outside it, right up until a Tamil Tiger agent shows up on their doorstep and threatens their family for money.
Without proper education and linguistic skill sets, an Immigrant suffers from lack of access in this country. It places them at a disadvantage, and leaves them open to abuse and discrimination by people from their own culture.
Do you know why people in these situations don’t go to the police? In their previous homeland, going to the police got you in more trouble than just shutting your mouth, and they bring that attitude to Canada.
That’s a primary example of the very reason history and education about the country are so important for immigrants, and why they need linguistic skill sets to cope.
The history of a country creates a bonding agent, institutions become roads to a certain given, tradition can give security, because it’s a constant. Behavioral examples allow others to take solace and see another path.
Reading about Socio-Economic planning, development etc… is all fine and dandy Mr. Neufeld, but try taking a walk instead. Books are driven by the slant of the author, and if you want the truth, you need to look out a window once in a while.
When I was a lad, I’d read Pravda and Time every month just so I could weed out the bullshit from the truth… I seriously doubt the motivations of any political party, but by placing more emphasis on Canada, and less on where a person came from to get here, we place more onus on the immigrant to fit into a Canadian model. It’s not absolute, and we are certainly not a perfect society, but we do deserve to expect newcomers to adapt to a certain level.
Trudeau got one thing right… “what people do in their bedrooms is none of my concern”… or something along that lines. What a person does behind closed doors is their business. What they do on the street is everyone’s business.
You must have structure to make a society work. The greater the traditions, the greater the education about expectations and working examples of those expectations, the easier it is for a society to form structure. By not making certain that some indoctrination occurs in the immigration process, we leave the immigrant weaker upon entry, and the nation weaker as a result of an erosion of our manner of living. If we don’t care enough to tell the immigrant our history, our institutions, our pro’s and con’s, why would the immigrant see a need to care about them, or conversely identify ways to enhance them?
Oh, and yes, I am aware of the 95′ version, and the point of this excercise is to rejoice a little at Mr. Chretiens little booklet being revised.
So, sorry, no retraction.
November 18th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Putting the “onus on the immigrant to fit into a Canadian model” means someone has to decide what the Canadian model is. Clearly problematic. Our own laws and police forces have a long history of racial discrimination, why isn’t that in the guide (ironic tone intended, it is the guide)? The “certain level” to which we can expect newcomers to adapt is obeying the law (when it is fair). That’s it, it is the one thing I am glad to see emphasized in the Guide, it is one thing I am sure we agree upon. No forced cultural indoctination please.
what do you mean by “people like Ms. Ruby Dhalla”?
Yet again I will point out that you cite nothing. Strength of belief does not make something right. You answered my arguments with anecdotal garbage, most of it based in attacks on minorities standing up for their rights as Canadian citizens; “the ‘not withstanding’ clause should be utilized”, and the assertion that tradition is strength.
“Books are driven by the slant of the author, and if you want the truth, you need to look out a window once in a while”= a populist attack on an appeal for intellectual discussion, or at least it does by popular definition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiintellectualism.
The slant you mention is why, for an argument to mean anything, people have to cite their sources.
You need to look in a mirror then read a book and only then should you be allowed anywhere near a window.
November 18th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Mine is to write, yours is to cite…
If you feel my comments specious then disprove my points. I’m not writing a book or essay my friend, merely a blog post. If it doesn’t suit your sensiblilty, bash away, if you feel like calling me on something, then you are welcome to get off your ass and refute it with all the citations you’d like.
Accusing me of fluff when you haven’t “cited” anything yourself is, as you say, hypocritical no?
Anyway, nothing mentioned in my post or my comments is anything that is a great secret. I’m sure with a little sleuthing you can prove or disprove any point I’ve made, but don’t expect me to do the work… I have the luxury and benefit of memory, experience, and having obviously lived longer than you, and as a result I share my perspective based on that, in effect my having born witness to the last 40 years, and having literally been to every corner of Canada at least twice, is my source data.
If not directly referencing source data is a problem for you, don’t read what I post. If you have a hard time accepting my perspective, then get one of your own.
Anyway, I’ve spent enough time on this, so thanks for reading my post, and thanks for commenting, and if you really want to get into specifics, and would like a professional opinion with empirical data, I’ll be happy to provide one. My rate is about $500.00 per day, and I don’t edit… as evidenced by my post.
November 18th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Ambrose – good article. Don’t mind Mr Neland, he demands citations only where he himself is generally both lazy and ignorant and while aspiring to be a critical thinker actually has poor skills at criticism and even weaker (I dare say tenuous) abilities in rational thought. Nothing you said actually needs to be cited, in my opinion, as anyone who knows anyone over the generous age of fifty-five and can also use a search engine can easily verify what you have said. This trait of course, as I have labeled”laziness”, is apparent in that he didn’t bother to fact-check the very obvious statements that you did make using the above stated means and dove forth willy-nilly into accusations of your credibility. Perhaps someone let him mark student papers once and it got to his head. Indeed, even if you did cite he may be prone to bitching about whether it was proper to use APA, MLA, or Chicago style, and then digress further on the merits versus demerits of footnoting! I am always annoyed when people seek perfection on blogs and at that it seems to me that 500 dollars per day is a little low for professional writing. Still, on a volunteer blog some may never be satisfied. A man I admire, Christopher Hitchens is known to spend three or four days on a piece, and of course who could forget Oscar Wilde’s statement” I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” Anyway there are people who understand what blogs really are and then there are those who wish to become maestros of literature while at the same time do not afford themselves the luxury of reading, mediation, and thought. Irony, tragedy, and solipsism all in one.
November 18th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
…oh my god I misplaced a quotation-mark in sentence seven!. The wrath of Neland shall be upon me!
November 19th, 2009 at 10:42 am
Hah… thank-you Travis, but no worries. I meet people like Mr. Neland all the time, and they have their place.
November 28th, 2009 at 12:26 am
good job travis martin, AM likes you now and will let you kiss his @ss.
theres nothing wrong with your article, you have your opinions that have positives and negatives.. just that lame boring story you gave sounded like complete bs and really pointless. as if you were trying to prove that you were not racist or prejudiced.
if you could only give us proof that that actually happened.
May 20th, 2010 at 6:52 pm
“as if you were trying to prove that you were not racist or prejudiced.”
Oh boy…there it is.
This is the problem with the robotic conditioning in western society. Anytime and issue is brought up regarding immigration…it`s racist.
Bu.Letty and Fraser…there USED to be a well-known, Canadian identity. My great, great, great grandfather would tell you this also. It is not a history of “oppressing Japanese” or “racially” motivated policies against ANYONE. It was a WORLD WAR!!!! We were protecting our homeland!!! It is unfortunate that we have grown up believing (well…you do anyway) that we were such BAD, RACIST people and now we should allow others to flood int Canada and set up miniature (and growing fast) countries. You want proof there Fraser? I live in Vancouver. Richmond=China….Surrey=India. Don`t give us your brainwashed, skewed, politically influenced views on how Canada IS and how it should be. I love when I speak of Canadian heritage and hearing people say to me…”Oh, and what heritage is THAT?” ….as if we don`t have one!!
Well…we do have one, but our government, in it`s quest for votes (starting with the Liberals and matched by all others) is single handedly watering down Canadian society with this unrealistic mosaic of multiculturalism that IS slowly tearing apart he fabric of our society. What do you REALLY see in our future?! Do you REALLY see this perfect blend of colour and unified race?!! I see a MASSIVE Sikh and Chinese communities of people (many of them “sponsored” by family members entering the country, who have NO desire to integrate, but only to grow, practice their beliefs, and push aside CANADIAN beliefs, values and heritage, all of which were mentioned above by Ambrose Macdonell. It is only NOW that gentlemen such as Mr. Kenney are starting to do something about it. I KNOW of these values…I KNOW of these beliefs….and I KNOW of this heritage, because my family helped to create it. You two simpletons obviously have no education on anything Canadian whatever , and therefore should be ashamed of your Liberal-minded, culture-destroying selves.