The Canadian Cultural Divide

This afternoon, on my favourite talk radio show, the host, David Berner, had an excellent discussion about multiculturalism in Canada.

My feelings about multi-culturalism are EXACTLY the same as his. Like him, I am a white male. He's Jewish and from Winnipeg. I'm a [recovering] Catholic from Vancouver. What we share is an English-Canadian heritage and what I can loosely call "Canadian Values". I think we're both pretty much colour-blind, religious-blind, and sexuality preference-blind. For both of us know that none of these things matter. What does matter is how a person acts and how they treat others.

Unfortunately multiculturalism tends to attract two extreme groups that hijack this issue:

• Narrow minded racists who dislike people who don't look and talk like them. Unfortunately too many of this ilk have associated themselves with the Conservative Party of Canada.
  
• Clever political operatives who consistently and subtlely want to draw distinctions between different ethnic groups and actively encourage so-called minorities to scream "racism" and "human rights violation" whenever they don't get their way. Many of these operatives work for the Liberal Party of Canada.

So what ends up happening is that the political operatives encourage multiculturalism to excess because they know that it will rile up the racists enough to get them to speak up and scare people into voting for a particular party. Guess which one? It's also so simple, yet exceedingly complex. If we could get past this, Canada would be a much greater country for it.