My Canada Includes Accordian Guy
After reading both articles, Joey's and Mark Wegierski's I have to say I'm torn: Some of the things Wegierski says should be discussed - and on some I agree with Joey's "F you!"
With what is probably the most extensive system of bureaucracy and inverted preferment in world-history, any talk of "competitiveness" in Canada is plainly comical. For the past three decades, Canadians have been utterly content in selling primary products and non-renewable natural resources to maintain, for the vast majority of the population, what -- in the context of the planet today, and the rest of human history -- is a grotesquely inflated lifestyle. Indeed, there seems to be nothing to Canada today but the continued maintenance of a high standard of living and the vaunted social programs (especially the healthcare system); and the proclaimed right of anyone living or arriving here to enjoy all these benefits without one iota of responsibilities.
A lot of that I can't argue with and I do believe that a lot of our history has been wrung through the "PC filter." I remember being in Vancouver in 1992, the 200th anniversary of George Vancouver's surveying expedition to the Strait of Georgia, and being struck by how Captain Vancouver's acheivements were downplayed (fer Christsake's they named the city after him after all!) with several groups calling him an Imperialist or Nazi etc. etc. This historic anniversary died without much celebration in the city named after him.
The English-Canadians of those days certainly did not fight with the image of a multicultural Toronto of the 1990s -- where their male descendants would be subject to formal discrimination in employment, and be the victims of constant jibes in the mass-culture -- in their hearts and minds. Nor, one doubts, even today, would Canadian troops (the overwhelming majority of whom are either English or French) be willing to die for the sake of all of Canada becoming another region of the Third World.
Well that's a bit of a stretch! Official multiculturalism as practised by the Federal Government, warts and all, does not drag us down into Third World status. It could stand some improving, but just because an immigrant here isn't British doesn't mean the whole country is going to hell. It might go to hell for many other reasons but pining for "Old Canada" isn't the way to solve many of them.
For the record, I'm first generation Canadian, born of Central European parents.
When my parents immigrated in the 50's they were called the "trash of Europe" and were asked why they didn't just stay "over there where they belonged." One such opinioner was a beauracrat that assigned my mother to work washing up in a TB hospital in Montreal where she caught - ding! - Tuberculosis. My dad they sent into the deepest woods in Quebec to chop them down.
Both of them loved this country more than any other and would die for it.
And neither of them were British. And neither am I. But I am Canadian.
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