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Monday November 29, 2004 |
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CANADA UNDER ATTACK
"In the beginning the disease is easy to cure but
hard to diagnose; with the passage of time, having gone unrecognized and
unmedicated, it becomes easy to diagnose but hard to cu-re." So said
political master Niccolò Machiavelli in his celebrated book, The Prince.
However, our Canadian federal politicians
like to talk an awful lot about Machiavelli, but, I'm not sure how many have
actually read it.
Canada is known around the world as a country of big
opportunities. That's what our politicians brag about at home and abroad.
And they're right. But what they don't say is that Canada is also a country
of big contradictions.
There are pressing questions that our leaders, who are too
overly concerned about their immediate political futures, are afraid of
answering, like; where is Canada headed culturally and who are Canadians?
Those questions beg urgent answers from our federal public office holders at
a time when technology is crushing our borders from outside and demography
is redesigning the chart of power from within.
The "traditional Canada," a country with two so-called founding
cultures, Anglopho-nes, Francophones, plus aboriginal peoples, then
immigrants, is under attack. Americans are getting, for free, what they
failed to get in 1812 when British general Isaac Brock secured the Canadian
borders at Niagara defeating the Yankees' attempts to conquer Upper Ca-nada.
The annexation war, finished in 1815, is now on through Canada's air-waves.
Meanwhile, Canada's native peoples want back what they owned:
land, power and respect. And, the "immigrants" want what they never had:
power and influence.
Good or bad, this "problem" is not the actual attack, but the
lack of an alternative vi-sion for Canadian culture.
And these requests don't appear to be a concerted effort to make
Canada better country, but look more like a looting of an estate of a fallen
Emperor, or a stage-coach rob-bery.
And Canada is now moving from an artificial cultural balance, to
a genuine cultural mess. Who are we? Take a look at our relationship with
U.S. culture. It's like a relationship between a drug addict and a drug
dealer: you hate the dealer, but you're addicted. We criticize broadcasters
because they give us American shows on prime time.
They answer back "That's what Canadians want." It's true,
conveniently true for them: look at the ratings and look at their
chequebooks! But the question is, do they broadcast American programs
because that's what Canadians want, or is that Canadians like Ame-rican shows
because the broadcasters and cable companies, are giving it to us because
it's cheap to produce and easy to sell? Is this really all about business or
are Canadian heroes trying to emulate General Brock? Or, more likely, are
these big business ventures waving the Canadian flag only when it's
convenient for them? In the middle of all of this there is the CRTC, the
federal regulator, which is starting to appear more and more like a drug
rehabilitation centre selling cocaine, with the excuse that "at least is
pure." And while we're trying to define ourselves, thousands of future
Canadians are knocking at our doors.
We say it's our duty to accept people who need us. That's right.
The question is: are we opening the doors to needy people because we are
"compassionate and tolerant," or are we keeping the doors open only because
there is nobody at the gate? The two most impor-tant departments right now
are Immigration and Heritage.
Immigration chooses who future Canadians will be and Heritage
Canada decides who we're going to be in the years to come.
In the last two weeks, I have interviewed both ministers
responsible for these two important departments; Judy Sgro and Liza Frulla.
I went looking for answers, but,instead, I was confronted by more pressing
questions.
Frulla asked how Canada is going to defend Canadian content and
how Canada will defend the diversity of opinion.
Sgro asked whether it's right to keep "celebrating our
differences instead of cele-brating what we have in common." Both ministers
are facing a Herculean task because there is a lack of regulations and a
lack of financial and political support. The only thing they receive, in
large supply, is rhetoric and, most of the time, hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy from who? Before entertaining some ideas, let's talk
about a few, crude facts.
In order to have a country economically viable, Canada needs a
population of almost 50 million people by the middle of the century; the
alternative is to be absorbed by United States.
First question: do we want that? If the answer is "yes," I
suggest stopping reading this column because we are doing just fine: we are
going soon to be the 51st star in the American flag.
If the answer is no, we move to the second question: where will
the other 20 million people come from? There are two answers: more children
or more immigrants, or both.
Canada's birth rate is close to zero, and that takes care of the
answer: Canada, in order to survive as a country, needs more immigrants.
This statement generates more questions. Four in particular:
what kind of skills must they have? Where will they come from? Once in
Canada, what kind of Canadians are they going to find? And, of course, what
kind of Canadians are they going to be? Before we take a peak into the
future, let's ask ourselves a few questions about the present.
Who is Canada now? Who are the Canadians? Yes, our politicians
tell us that we are a compassionate country with many opportunities for all
citizens, regardless of their origin, religion colour and we are opening our
arms to the needy people from around the world and blah, blah blah.
Yes it's true: we're an open country helping people who need
help. The question is: are we doing it because that is our policy, or,
because we have no policy? Are people coming here because "we are the best
country in the world," or because we are the country with no policy, opening
the doors to whoever knocks and taking six years before we decide what to do
with them? Or maybe, just maybe, aren't we the country with the knack to be
fair but unable to be right? We definitely are a country that needs people,
and there are also people that need Canada: can we work something that can
bring those two needs together? Letting people in for the sake of letting
them in, is only half of the job.
The other half is to provide them a place to live, to give them
work and let them be part of this society.
In order to do that, however, we first must know who we are and
where we want to go.
The debate is mutilated by our obsession to be politically
correct (even at the cost of being factually wrong), the support is
conditional to political and partisan interests that don't reach beyond the
next election, and it prevails over the long term interest of the country.
So, here we go.
Who can fight for Canada? We have a Parliament that has created
a political environment that sent us four times to the polls in the last 10
years and most likely one more time in the next six months. All of it,
compliments of the internal feuds within the Conservative and the Liberal
Party that has nothing to do with the future of this country. They ask
Canadians to give them power but, when they have it, they don't know what to
do with it.
But, if you believe the two major parties are bad, look at the
alternatives.
The Bloc Québécois has made it party policy to tear apart the
country, while the NDP looks like the official opposition party in the
American Congress, with Jack Layton the Representative of the riding of
Washington-South, more than the representative of Toronto-Danforth, Ont.
We have half of the country pissing on all over the American
administration trying to reduce its influence, the other half seeking to
increase trade and the number of U.S. TV channels in our cable system.
We have the policy of letting 250,000 new immigrants every year
(and 700,000 applications in our embassies around the world), but we are not
able to get the people, legally, into the country that houses almost 200.000
illegal immigrants: "We have sectors of our economy a former minister told
me that keep running only because of the presence of illegal workers".
The unions and builders ask for more people able to build
houses, and our policies care only if the new immigrants speak French or
English. We say we want more educated immigrants in the country, and when
they are in we have engineers driving taxis and doctors working at
butcheries.
Two weeks ago the minister of Finance Ralph Goodale told us
that, after years of fiscal mess, now the house is back into financial
order, we don't have a deficit any longer; indeed we have surpluses.
That's good, but now that we have money, what are we going to do
with it? Just splitting evenly at election time to the Provinces so they can
provide us with suppositories for free?
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