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Back to the blog! The last month has been rough, with an over­whelm­ing work­load. But things are eas­ing off.

Cana­da Day, today, and I rode my bike around down­town, aim­less­ly, to enjoy the per­fect weath­er and look at the crowds every­where, pic­nick­ing, lis­ten­ing to con­certs in parks, and gen­er­al­ly enjoy­ing the nation­al hol­i­day. Peo­ple seem to be hap­py. If they are sup­posed to be ter­ri­fied by the dis­cov­ery of a “ter­ror­ist cell” a few weeks ago, they show no sign of it. 

The “ter­ror­ist cell” busi­ness, was seized on by Amer­i­can politi­cians as proof that Cana­da is a “hotbed of ter­ror­ism” because of its “lib­er­al immi­gra­tion laws” (!). But it was tak­en with remark­able calm­ness by the Cana­di­an pub­lic. Most peo­ple could see at a glance that there had nev­er been any sig­nif­i­cant dan­ger. The “cell” con­sist­ed of a hand­ful of extreme­ly stu­pid sub­ur­ban teenagers who would have had dif­fi­cul­ty orga­niz­ing a sur­prise birth­day par­ty, let alone “behead­ing the prime min­is­ter” or blow­ing up sky­scrap­ers in the finan­cial district.

But one of the annoy­ing side-effects was the incred­i­bly stu­pid kind of “jour­nal­ism” that fol­lowed. Was “mul­ti-cul­tur­al­ism” to blame? Did it bring Cana­di­an poli­cies of “mul­ti-cul­tur­al­ism” into ques­tion? What nonsense.

It would be hard to find a lamer con­cept than the “mul­ti-cul­tur­al­ism” idea, as it is inter­pret­ed by the media and bureau­crats. What Cana­da offers to Cana­di­ans ― ALL Cana­di­ans, whether they are descend­ed from mam­moth hunters who fol­lowed the melt­ing glac­i­ers, or from the French and Scot­tish adven­tur­ers and refugees who came lat­er in boats, or they just stepped off an air­plane from Mogadishu last month ― is free­dom. “Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism” is mere­ly an inci­den­tal bi-prod­uct of the much more impor­tant con­cept of indi­vid­ual lib­er­ty. In a free coun­try, inhab­it­ed by free peo­ple, nobody has the right to tell you how to live your life, how to dress, what to eat, what god (or no god) to pray to, what to read, what music to lis­ten to, what dances to dance, what thoughts to think. Peri­od. The most impor­tant human free­dom is the free­dom from the Group, the Mob, the Horde, the Crowd. True civi­la­tion is that which ele­vates us from the most dread­ful of human per­ver­sions, conformity.

Cana­da is not an “eth­nos” and it is not a cult. When you set your foot down on the soil of this vast land, you should be oblig­ed to 1) obey laws that con­form to the prin­ci­ples of uni­ver­sal human rights (e.g., you shouldn’t kill peo­ple steal from them, punch them in the nose, or go around blow­ing up build­ings), and 2) obey nor­ma­tive laws that must exist by neces­si­ty (e.g. dri­ving your car on the right side of the road ― which is no more moral than dri­ving on the left side of the road, but we have to pick one or the oth­er). That’s it. Noth­ing more. Cana­da is not some stu­pid lit­tle trib­al eth­nic­i­ty that per­pet­u­ates itself by forc­ing every­one to wear a fun­ny hat or wear a bone in their nose, or demand­ing that every­one sing the same songs. Cana­di­ans have nev­er even been “unit­ed” by a “com­mon cul­ture”, or even, for that mat­ter, by one offi­cial lan­guage. Cana­da is a much big­ger and more impor­tant idea than that kind of prim­i­tive trib­al­ism. Cana­da is not a “melt­ing pot” that will fuse every­one into one com­mon, pablum-like mush. Immi­grants to Cana­da are not under any oblig­a­tion to con­form to any­thing oth­er than the uni­ver­sal injunc­tions of the law. Nobody has a right to demand that they “assim­i­late” or “fit into” any­thing. Those who expect them to don’t grasp the most ancient, tra­di­tion­al, and sacred of Cana­di­an val­ues, which can be summed up in the holy phrase: “mind your own god damn fuck­ing busi­ness!” , which is the prop­er Cana­di­an response to any­one who tries to tell you what to do with your per­son­al habits, tastes, and beliefs.

Now, in Cana­da, we make a point in our pub­lic ser­vices, cer­e­monies, fes­ti­vals, and so on, of acknowl­edg­ing the pres­ence of many cul­tur­al tra­di­tions and cus­toms. When I go to my neigh­bour­hood pub­lic library, I see walls of books in Tamil, Russ­ian, Taga­log, Chi­nese, etc. The bank machine is equiped to read out in six lan­guages. Both gov­ern­ment and pri­vate busi­ness­es rec­og­nize that an elder­ly grand­moth­er in a Soma­li immi­grant fam­i­ly can’t be expect­ed to mag­i­cal­ly turn her­self into a flu­ent Eng­lish or French speak­er, and there is no sense in mak­ing life hell for her (and thus impose a con­stant irri­ta­tion and bur­den on a fam­i­ly that is try­ing get mov­ing into a future). We do these things with per­fect ease, prac­ti­cal­ly with­out think­ing about them, because we know that our “cul­ture”, the essence of Cana­da, is some­thing much deep­er and more impor­tant than a lan­guage, a man­ner of dress, or a recipe for pirogies.