Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Multi-ism

The major Toronto local coverage  newspaper this summer did a piece on the shifting ethnic composition of its Greater Toronto Area.  A not untypical online comment:  "Great story about how quickly things can change when we open our doors to people from all over the world. We need them all here, anything to dilute the white bread existence our English/Scottish uptight ancestors imposed on us. It's a much more exciting place than it was 50 years ago, and it's most welcome." As a bona fide 'white-bread' (but the ancestor of only a handful of Canadians), I marvel at how easy it is to dismiss what white-breads 'imposed'.  Law, order and good governance for example. Plus the English language, today's lingua franca

If as is predicted we 'uptights' are soon  to be supplanted as the majority by immigration from currently dysfunctional societies like Somalia, the Arab countries, Haiti and Pakistan or totalitarian China, one cannot but wonder how long those core values that underpin the Shangri-La that multi-culture fans believe we are building will last. We could certainly be living in an 'exciting place' but in the way that say Brazil is exciting  with its pollution, environmental over-exploitation, business and government corruption and crime. Time will tell but our scale of immigration (highest in the Developed World), and the accelerating accompanying integration and acculturation difficulties make me doubt it is going to be an all-fun filled adventure.

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