Ukrainian Refugees Coming to Canada

 

I read in my parish bulletin, confirmed by the Archdiocese of Toronto website, that there are currently 80,000 Ukrainian refugees in country, with another 500,000 expected “in the coming months.”

Those are big numbers. This swamps Canada’s usual refugee uptake. It even swamps Canada’s usual immigration intake.

I think it is a good thing.

Canada was populated by refugees: the Irish fleeing the potato famine and English oppression; the Scots driven off their land in the Highland Clearances. “Displaced persons” after the Second World War. Eastern European Jews. This is the service Canada can render the world. With conventional immigration, we are skimming off people who might be needed in their home countries: humans being the prime resource. When we accept refugees, we are solving problems for them, and for the lands from which they come.

Refugees make the best Canadians. Having nothing to go back to, they are more likely to make a commitment to in the new country, to integrate and contribute to Canada. Canada’s current immigration policy does the opposite. It favours the rich, connected and well educated. Comfortable where they are, they come only for economic benefits. Their attitude will be, “Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do for you.” After all, they abandoned their home country on this principle. They are only here to get what they can get. If the getting is not good, they can easily go home, or move on. Refugees cannot.

The reason the Third World is poor is because of a corrupt upper class. When we bring in economic immigrants on points, we are importing this class. They will not be the best; and they will bring with them a culture of corruption. Canada would do better with a random selection, as with refugees. 

Ukrainians ought to integrate well for cultural reasons. Most importantly, they are Christians. They share our core cultural values. This is a vital and completely unappreciated issue.

They are Europeans; their culture is similar. There are already a lar4ge number of Ukrainians in Canada, and they have been a part of Canadian culture for a long time. So integration should be relatively seamless.

Moreover, as Eastern Europeans, they have recently experienced communism. They are highly favourably disposed to Western values and the values of liberal democracy, having known their lack. They will not come, as so many immigrants do, with a chip on their shoulder, hostile to the country and the culture.

And they are familiar with winter. They will know how to cope with the Canadian weather.

One possible concern is that they may not stay. At some point, the war in Ukraine will be over, and they may want to return. Perhaps they should return, for the sake of their homeland. The more so since there will be few young men in the group. Men of military age have not been allowed to leave Ukraine. So we are often not going to get intact families.

On the other hand, if many single women choose to stay, and the issue is Canadian underpopulation, women are more valuable as immigrants than men. Women have babies. And inspire men to become fathers.

A Walk in Toronto

Yesterday, out walking, I passed a woman waiting at the bus stop. She gave me a concerned look. I could not tell why.

Buses do not come often on route 70C. Some minutes later, I was walking back the same way, and the same woman was still waiting. This time she addressed me.

“How do you keep it on?”

I could not place it, but she had a foreign accent.

I did not know what she was referring to. “You mean my toque?”

“No, the poppy. I’ve bought three, but they keep falling off.”

I actually had a few suggestions. I have a video on the subject up on this blog.

Try sticking an eraser end on the pin. Try taping it.

“I’ll do that when I get home.”

“Next year. This is the last day we wear them.”

She obviously did not know. But she had seen my poppy, and felt guilty.

Strikes me this was the immediate result of Don Cherry’s complaint on Coach’s Corner.

He may have gotten fired for it, but he made a good point, and some immigrants are listening.

The shame of it is, nobody is telling them about these Canadian traditions, and why Canadians care about them. Nobody is telling them anything about this new culture they have signed on for. They may very well want to know, want to assimilate and contribute. From my own experience, most of them do, and badly. There is a reason why they left their former country; there is a reason why they chose Canada.

But the government is actively discouraging them, and nobody else dares bring the topic up. Because if they do, they will be berated for it. They may even lose their job.

That is our real problem here: multiculturalism.

Poppycock!

Demands are suddenly loud for the CBC to fire Don Cherry, because of the following on-air comment:

“You people … you love our way of life, you love our milk and honey, at least you can pay a couple bucks for a poppy or something like that. These guys paid for your way of life that you enjoy in Canada, these guys paid the biggest price.”

There are also calls for the head of co-host Ron MacLean, for seeming to agree instead of objecting.

MacLean has now publicly apologized and condemned Cherry’s remarks.

If this transcript is accurate, these calls are, in the literal sense, insane. They are out of touch with the reality of what Cherry said. All he said is that not buying and wearing a poppy is ungrateful. It surely is. To top it off, it seems in context as though he might be quoting someone else, not expressing his own sentiments.

He seemed specifically to be referring, when he used the term “you people,” to the people in downtown Toronto.

Cherry is being accused of “racism.” Yet he did not mention any race. If someone wants to read some specific race into the words “you people,” then any racism is clearly in their own minds, not, so far as we know, in Cherry’s.

It is more plausible to infer that Cherry was criticizing immigrants. If he was, “immigrant” is not a race. To make it about race is still a stretch. And even this much is inference. He might plausibly have been referring to young people, who predominate in the Toronto downtown. Or perhaps young immigrants, but disrespectful because they are young, not because they are immigrants. Or perhaps just urbanites, who think it unsophisticated to wear a poppy.

But even if he were thinking of race, should even this matter? Let’s stop and think for a moment. Why is it fine to criticize young people for being disrespectful of traditions, or to criticize Torontonians, but not immigrants, and not racial minorities? If nobody chooses their race, nobody chooses to be young either. People choose to live in Toronto in the same sense immigrants choose to live in Canada. The cases seem parallel. Yet criticisms of the young, and of Torontonians, are commonplace and considered witty and wise. Obviously, this is not equality: this is giving special privileges to immigrants and on the basis of race.

Criticism of anyone, including any group, must be in bounds. If not, we fundamentally lack freedom of speech, and automatically also equality before the law.

On top of this, this furor is all shockingly disrespectful of Don Cherry, a man who has made a significant contribution to our culture, intimately bound up with hockey as it is. He was, after all, a finalist when the CBC ran a popular vote on “the greatest Canadian.”

And the attack on him is an attack on Canadian culture. Surely a deliberate one.

If it is not simply stark raving mad.

Aboriginals and Immigrants

Canadian Governor-General David Johnston

So now I hear our Governor-General, no less, is in trouble for speaking an obvious truth, and one meant to bring Canadians together: that we are all, including the “indigenous” people, immigrants.

I hear that some commentators have since been demanding his resignation.

Even though he is obviously right. Our best science tells us nobody is indigenous to Canada. Some of us simply came before others. What on Earth can be valid grounds for objecting?

In a Tweeted apology, Johnston said “I want to clarify a miscommunication. Our Indigenous peoples are not immigrants. They are the original peoples of this land.”

This makes no sense. The dictionary definition of immigrant does not exclude the “original” inhabitants of a place. Merriam-Webster: “a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence.”

So what can possibly be the problem?

But even if the term did exclude the original inhabitants of a place, it is quite unlikely that any Indian groups qualify as anything but immigrants on these grounds. Just about everyone supplanted somebody else, even, for the most part, during historical times—which is to say, since the first Europeans have been here.

Let’s put that another way, to make it clear: some European groups, notably the French, the English, the Scandinavians, and the Irish, are more genuinely aboriginal to Canada than most “First Nations.”

Some of us, it seems, have become confused by a euphemism. What we really mean, here and elsewhere around the world, when we refer to a specific group as “aboriginal” or “indigenous,” is “primitive.” That is, “aboriginals” are people whose culture has not advanced over time in material or organizational terms, and is well behind those around them technologically.

In about the Sixties, people decided this term sounded pejorative and unpleasantly “judgmental,” as we said then, and so they substituted the nicer-sounding “aboriginal.” The latter term was never literally true, and nobody thought it was.

It still isn’t.