THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH

Good intentions, gone awry (George Jonas, National Post, June 15th, 2006)

Simply put, the country's brave new progressive-liberal-socialist mandarins decided on a three-step program for revamping Canada culturally and demographically. It entailed (a) reducing immigration from "traditional" (read: West European) sources; (b) increasing it from non-traditional sources; and then (c) advancing from Conservative prime minister (till 1963) John Diefenbaker's ideal society of unhyphenated Canadians to the Trudeaucratic Liberal ideal of a multicultural Canada.

By encouraging hyphenation, multiculturalism was said to build on an earlier Canadian tradition, the so-called "cultural mosaic." In contrast to the American "melting pot," with its gung-ho patriotism and crude pressures of assimilation, the cultural mosaic had the appearance of a more elegant and decorative model of nationhood. The political fashion of the pre-war period saw it producing a richer royal tapestry for the Crown in Canada than America's republican monochrome. In reality, the notion of a mosaic had less to do with elegance than with British (and French) standoffishness -- the reluctance of the founding nations to share the country with the riff-raff of the world on a completely equal footing. The hint of apartheid built into the concept of a "mosaic" was there to ensure the dominant position of the founding groups.

Multiculturalism aimed for the very opposite: It was to do away not just with the British-French, but the essentially European or First World character of Canada as a nation. Trudeau's ambitious, unannounced, possibly unexamined and merely intuitive design would, within two or three generations, take Canada out of the ambit of Christendom altogether and establish it as an advance pawn of the Third World in the Western Hemisphere.

As an incidental benefit, multiculturalism might also drown the noise of Quebec's demands for cultural distinction in the din of other distinct cultures clamouring for attention.

If this wasn't Trudeau's plan, God alone knows what he thought the natural consequences of his policies would be. In any event, one result was a rapid retreat from the principle that immigration should serve the interests of the host country first. Next came the notion that the host country isn't a legitimate entity with its own culture, but just a political framework for various co-existing cultures. Finally, a new type of immigrant was encouraged to make his entrance. Reincarnated from the era of the Great Migrations -- periods of population shifts during which large groups of people, having despaired of finding a future for themselves in their native lands, invade other countries in massive numbers -- this kind of newcomer no longer sought to merely fit and prosper. A conqueror rather than a settler, his quest was to tailor a new country to suit him, or carve out a congenial niche in it for his own tribe, language, customs or religion.

Trudeau and his acolytes didn't facilitate this because they wished or expected their policies to contribute to alienation, dissension, and terror in the world. Canada's pirouetting bon vivant leader neither desired nor envisaged the 21st century being ushered in by disaffected Muslims shooting Dutch politicians, crashing airliners into Manhattan skyscrapers, blowing themselves up in buses and trains, and allegedly plotting to behead Canadian prime ministers. Trudeau & Co. pursued their policies because, stumbling about in a mixture of psychoactive fumes and what Tom Wolfe called a "quasi-Marxist fog," they came to believe that the ills of the planet were due to Western ways, and the sooner they could replace the crumbling edifice with a '60s-type New Left Utopia, the better.

If they had no real blueprint for it, it didn't matter: Blueprints were for fuddy-duddies, linear thinkers, not for the free spirits of the spontaneous generation. In the prevailing Zeitgeist, they could wing it as they went along.

Intellectual fashions rise like tides, easily overwhelming scholarship, logic and common sense, at least in the short run. In this climate, early warnings, like the British politician Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" speech, could be -- and were -- swept aside as so much reactionary twaddle. In the heady atmosphere of the times no one in authority could -- or perhaps would -- note the potential for trouble in multicultural paradise, namely that a well-meaning attempt to limit cultural dominance by any one group within a country, harmless and equitable on its face, has the capacity of turning a nation-state into a railway station in which passengers mingle, occasionally sharing a destination but no destiny.

Fair enough, as far as it goes, but Mr Jonas’ focus on leftist intellectual dirigistes like Trudeau tends to understate the degree to which multiculturalism was widely and enthusiastically welcomed by the native-born boomer generation and even their parents. Far from being a response to the demands of immigrants (who were often confused by it), it dovetailed perfectly with a worthy rejection of racism and anti-Semitism and melded seamlessly into a postwar zeitgeist hellbent on rejecting traditional notions of family, self-reliance, reverence, patriotism and morality. That project was largely successful, which leaves the modern nativist with the interesting challenge of identifying just what traditions he believes are left for mass immigration to undermine and threaten.

Despite the real, specific and time-sensitive challenge of Islamicism, Mr. Jonas’ not-so-subtle suggestion that European immigrants assimilate more readily and make better Americans or Canadians is simply not born out by the evidence of the past several generations. Do Poles and Greeks somehow absorb The Federalist Papers or the lessons of Antietam faster than Lebanese and East Indians? Do Koreans and Haitians retain any stronger a loyalty to their native lands than Irish and Italians? Is Muslim expression of faith any more threatening to the civil order than Jewish or Catholic? Whatever legitimate concerns there are about modern mass immigration, they should not be pitted against an after-the-fact notional cause of preserving traditions and customs we threw overboard years ago. If our future hinges on family, industry, faith, progress, self-reliance, tolerance and patriotism, an immigrant from just about any country will give the average native-born a run for his money any day, provided nobody tries to dissuade him from fulfilling his dream of assimilating proudly.