Happy Dominion Day

. . . no, not Canada Day, but Dominion Day, the true name of the day that commemorates Confederation, the founding of our country, whose full, legal name is the Dominion of Canada. Its ersatz replacement, “Canada Day” or “Jour Fete du Canada”, was passed one late Friday after noon in Parliament but less than the thirteen member legal quorum by Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals.

It will never be “Canada Day,” at least not in my heart, damn it!

And that’s not the worst of it. Beginning with his predecessor, Lester Pearson, Canada’s traditions have been destroyed, one by one, by the Liberals, starting with the flag. Canada’s true historical flag is the Red Ensign, with a Union Jack in the upper right, for the simple reason that Canada was and is a British product, but all traces of our British heritage are being removed, starting with the flag, now replaced by that insipid red maple leaf.

And why attack our British heritage? Supposedly because it offended French Canadians, and subsequently because it was deemed not inclusive enough for newer, non-British immigrants.

It is beyond ironic that, in the name of multiculturalism, which is supposedly so inclusive and respective of people’s heritage, the Left is working so hard to exclude the British component our national heritage?

Can you say “hypocrisy”?

A full catalogue of the process is simply too painful to type out, so here is a summary:

• replacing the flag
• changing the national anthem (can’t mention the Queen, now, can we . .  . ?)
• changing our system of weights and measures (from British to – drum roll, please! – French)
• changing the name of the country (from the “Dominion of Canada” to plain old “Canada” because “Dominion” was thought to sound too British – it’s not; “Dominion” is a Canadian invention)
• changed the name of the national holiday (can’t have that pesky old Dominion, now, can we . . . ?)
• erased symbols of the Monarchy wherever possible (stamps, money, the names of the armed forces and Crown corporations . . . Papa Trudeau even tried to get rid of the “Royal” in “Royal Canadian Mounted Police”)
• And yes, I could go on . . .

And where does it all lead? To the Republic of Canada, sans (French chosen to make a point) all traces of our British heritage in order to fully realize Trudeau the Lesser’s Brave New World of the New Multicultural World Order. Little Justin has already gone on record as saying that “Canada has no core traditions” and so is destined to be “the world’s first post national state”.

And so, what is there to celebrate for a traditional Canadian?

Not much.

Read Full Post »

Big Lie #1 – Immigration

The big lie about immigration is that it’s good for Canada. It’s not. We are told that we need immigrants; we don’t. We are told that our immigration policy is a success; it’s a disaster.

Let’s look at the lies that, taken together, make up one big composite lie, one by one:

1. Canada is underpopulated. No, it’s not. Given our northerly location, the most habitable portions of Canada lie close to our southern border – think of Chile running East-West. And that’s part of the reason why immigrants want to settle in our most already populated areas. And those heavily populated areas are, in fact, over-populated.
2. We need more immigrants because of our aging population. That’s another lie. Given the age of our immigrants, this influx is doing little to change our age demographic. Besides, who says that we have to change it? While we have more seniors (who cost us more money for things like healthcare) we have fewer children (for whom we are paying less – for things like education).
3. We need immigrants to boost our economic growth and raise our standard of living. In the first place, why does our economy always need to grow? There is nothing wrong with a stable, healthy economy. It does not need to keep growing. Someone said, “Growth for the sake of growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell.” Besides, even with a growing economy, the net effect of immigration is to cause our standard of living to fall. Sure, corporations may (or may not) be making more money, but certain essential goods and services are becoming more and more expensive – like housing, especially in the major urban centers which immigrants favor, like Toronto and Vancouver. Let me give you a cobbled together example: My father owned a house, a three bedroom bungalow, in York Mills, with two cars in the garage, while supporting a stay-at-home wife and two children. He made $10,000 (equivalent to the highest paid teachers) a year and the house cost $36,000 or 3.6 years income. Last year, I made $94,000 a year (as a teacher at the top of the salary grid), but my house (a two bedroom bungalow in a much poorer neighborhood) is worth well over $500,000 or over five years of my income. As close as I can figure, given those differences, an equivalent house to my father’s would cost close to ten years income, making it three times as expensive, in real terms, excluding inflation. When that’s happening to housing, people’s income is, again in real terms, actually falling. And it’s happening because of the pressure on the real estate market that comes from the influx of 100,000 people a year in this city. (A “by the way”: I bought my house for $208,000 fifteen years ago, and it has gone up so much that, today, I would not even qualify for the mortgage. And I haven’t made any money because buying another house would cost me just as much.)
4. Defenders of high immigration will also say that opposition is from racists – a huge lie. Have I said one word about race? I haven’t. It’s not about race; it’s about numbers. The people can be white, black, polka dot or have antlers – there’s just too many of them. Right now, we’re drowning in immigrants. I’ve heard immigrants said that Canada is letting in too many immigrants, and we are. Japanese-Canadian David Suzuki says so, too – finally, I agree with him about something – and I doubt that he’s a racist.

Now, let’s look at some pure negatives of our wrong-headed immigration policy:

1. We are losing prime agricultural land, gobbled up by new subdivisions that are needed to house our growing population. And it’s not just around the major urban centers; it’s metastasizing – that’s an intentional cancer reference – to mid-size and even small towns. The latest figures I saw indicated that in Ontario, seventeen acres of agricultural farmland disappear every day. That strikes me as a foolish policy in an increasingly hungry world. Have you noticed that food prices have been going up? That’s another way that our standard of living has been falling. And policies to curb urban sprawl are no answer: they just result in higher urban densities, which lead to a host of other problems – think New York. Some analysts have written about “the Manhattanization of Toronto” due to increased immigration. More about that further on . . .
2. Back in the 1960s, the Club of Rome published a book titled The Limits of Growth. Since then the world’s population has doubled and, thanks to our misguided immigration policy, it’s coming here, too. Among the problems it’s causing is increased pollution. And “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” are of limited effectiveness. If per capita waste decreases by, say, 30%, and population grows by 100%, the world becomes a dirtier place, and so does Canada whose population has gone from around twenty million to close to forty million in my lifetime.
3. There are battles of Biblical proportions being fought over transit in Toronto these days. They’re expensive as Hell, but traffic congestion is becoming serious. And where does that congestion come from? More people driving. And where do they come from? Drum roll, please . . . immigration. We don’t have a shortage of subways; we have an excess of people. And subways make our taxes go up, which takes money out of our pockets, which is another way of saying that immigration is, in yet another way, decreasing our standard of living.
4. Crime has been increasing for decades. True, Statistics Canada says that it’s been going down for a while, but it’s still higher than it was in the 1960s, and there is an increasing amount of unreported crime. Some people, apparently, feel that it is futile, and then there is the “Don’t snitch” hip-hop philosophy to take into account. Crime rises when urban density increases and people’s standard of living falls (see above). Also, we’re letting in a lot of people from countries where crime rates are much higher than ours, and some of them bring that with them. Toronto has fewer than 50 murders a year whereas Kingston, Jamaica has over 600 (with half the population)!.
5. And it’s not just the numbers of people we are admitting that is causing us problems; it is where they are coming from – please notice that I am still not talking about race. Some people are coming here from places with high crime rates (see 4, above). Others are coming from countries whose cultures are alien to ours. This is still a Western democracy, and we do not appreciate things like oppressing women and homosexuals, so-called “honor” killings, Sharia law, and other human rights abuses that are considered normal and desirable in many countries of the world – their supporters are not a good influence in Canadian society.
6. Concurrent and to some extent arising from our immigration policy is “multiculturalism” which is not being added to our culture so much as it is replacing it. And “British” has become the “B” word in education and politics. Why should we be celebrating every culture but our own? It’s hardly the way to build a society; it is, however, a marvelous way to fracture one. Increasingly, we are becoming not so much a mosaic (which implies some sense of overall unity) as a collection of unrelated shards – something which is simply broken.
7. Bilingualism is expensive when so many documents and other sources of information need to be translated, but what about in Toronto where a hundred languages are spoken? And the huge increase in ESL students has resulted in decreasing literacy rates. I could mention the Tower of Babel . . .
8. And how are immigrants adapting to life in Canada? It varies. A friend of mine did her PhD thesis on how Cambodian refugees were adapting to life in Canada. According to her, it could be summarized in two words: they don’t. And many simply don’t want to.

So what would a sensible immigration policy look like? A policy that favored:

1. a stable population
2. English speaking people
3. people with skills that are needed in our workplace
4. those who come from Western-style democracies
5. European and, especially, British emigres, including Commonwealth nations
6. barring criminals (and deporting those who committed crimes as landed immigrants)

Combined with that, we need to deal with potential refugees in a timely and effective fashion, including sending back those who arrive from safe haven countries and accepting only those who face genuine, demonstrated dangers if they are returned to their countries of origin.

These policies would make the politically correct scream with outrage, and the first word out of their mouths would be “racist” – but I still haven’t mentioned race as a criteria – but that wouldn’t stop them.

Read Full Post »