The Great ‘White’ North

In June of 1990, the city council of Toronto voted 12-7 to change the words of the Canadian national anthem, “O Canada,” because they thought the words were offensive to immigrants. They voted to change “our home and native land,” to “our home and cherished land,” on the theory that this would please foreign-born Chinese, Haitians, and Sikhs. The Toronto city council cannot, on its own authority, change the words of the national anthem, so “O Canada” still has its “nativist” lyrics. All the same, this little incident is an edifying portrait in miniature of a nation that is losing its grip on its heritage.

For Americans who like to think of their northern neighbor as a solid anchor of European influence on the continent, it is a shock to discover that Canada could well have a third-world majority sooner than we do. Like the United States, Canada is promoting an immigration policy that is largely non-white. Like the United States, it has discarded the old standard of cultural assimilation and replaced it with a vision of multiculturalism. Unlike the United States, it actually has cabinet officers — Minister of Immigration and Minister of Multi-Cultural Affairs — whose jobs are to help throw off the nation’s ancient racial and cultural heritage.

Canada’s unity has, from the outset, been rent by fissures. Indians and Eskimos live almost entirely outside the European mainstream, and the gulf that separates the French-Canadians from the English-speakers threatens to tear the country in two. Why a nation already racked by disunity should wish to muddy the waters further with third-world immigrants is a question to mystify the historians of the future. In the meantime, Canada has encountered the obstacles that beset every experiment in multi-racialism.

Two Immigration Policies

Since the Province of Quebec governs so many of its own affairs, Canada has something close to two separate immigration policies. The Quebec policy, which was supposed to bolster the francophone, or French-speaking, character of the province has been a disaster.

In 1976, when the all-but-separatist Parti Québécois won provincial control, it appointed as its first immigration minister a priest and retired missionary to Africa, Jacques Couture. Mr. Couture was determined to do two things: bring more French-speakers to Quebec and open the province to the poor and suffering. In what could not have been a more disastrous choice, he decided on Haiti as the perfect source for new Quebeckers. Haiti was French-speaking, in a primitive way, and it was the most desperately poor, backward place in the hemisphere. Haitians would provide both a fresh dose of francophone vigor and an opportunity for white Quebeckers to open their hearts to the downtrodden.

Mr. Couture worked his “wretched refuse of your distant shores” policy with a vigor that would have astounded Emma Lazarus. Rather than take in the best Haitians he sought the worst. Full-blooded Africans were poorer than mulattoes, so his policy favored the blackest and the poorest. New Canadian citizens suddenly began to appear with legal first names like Pas-Besoin (not needed) or Assez-Filles (enough girls). These are names that Haitians give an unwanted child when they already have seven or eight they can’t feed.

The population of Montreal, where most of the Haitians ended up, is now 30 percent non-white. Thanks to Mr. Couture, it got an instant underclass that behaves almost exactly like its counterpart in the United States. Black neighborhoods have become violent, crime-ridden, drug-sodden slums. French newspapers have invented a new word to describe the transformation: se bronxifier, or to become like the Bronx. Without so much as a hint of the “400 years of slavery and oppression” that is supposed to account for black failure in the United States, Canadian blacks are in exactly the same social and economic position as their brothers to the south.

Other aspects of Mr. Couture’s experiment mirror the United States. Although Quebec could not possibly have recruited more poverty- and crime-prone immigrants, their failures are inevitably blamed on white racism. Whenever a white policeman shoots a black criminal, for example, there are shouts of “racism.”

Journalists and even the police have been so intimidated by charges of racism that it is nearly impossible to report on the extent of black crime in Quebec. In one notorious case last fall, police arrested hundreds of Haitians who had forced women into a huge prostitution business. The women invariably white — were treated abominably. Some were branded like cattle. Others were forced to eat their own menstrual tampons. Some of the Haitians liked to shove a gun barrel up a woman’s vagina and threaten to shoot her.

Police are normally eager to publicize big successes, but not in the charged, whites-are-always-to-blame racial atmosphere of Quebec. As the Montreal Gazette, which finally broke the whole sordid story explained (11/17/90), “police say they could hardly afford to call a news conference to say they had been arresting young Haitians by the hundreds.”

Even the arrest of men who force women into prostitution and make them eat tampons is a delicate, difficult thing if the men happen to be black. Canadians hardly take a back seat to Yanks when it comes to tying themselves into knots over race.

The Rest of the Country

Immigration policies in the rest of Canada have not been so catastrophic as in Quebec. Nevertheless, in proportion to its population of about 26 million — one tenth that of the United States — Canada is taking in several times more immigrants. In 1987, its 150,000 immigrants were, per capita, 2-1/2 times the United States’ 600,000. Whites were still nearly a quarter of the Canadian immigrant stream, as opposed to about one tenth for the United States. In 1987, the largest single group was Asians, at 44 percent. African and Caribbean blacks were 13 percent and Hispanics were 11 percent. Since 1980, only half of all immigrants to Canada have been able to speak English or French.

One hundred fifty thousand newcomers every year aren’t enough for Immigration Minister Barbara McDougall. Despite a recent Gallup Poll that found only 17 percent of Canadians favoring more immigration, she has announced a five-year plan that will bring in 250,000 a year. In proportion to population, that is four times the rate in the United States, and the vast majority will continue to be non-whites. At a time when the Canadian government, like that of the United States, is sinking ever deeper into debt, it has earmarked more than half a billion dollars to spend on resettlement costs.

Outside of Quebec, where blacks have created terrible problems, Asians have attracted the most attention. Vancouver, on the British Columbia coast, is their favorite destination, and the metropolitan area of a little over one million now has more than 200,000 Asians. This figure includes Indians, Pakistanis, and Middle Easterners, as well as Chinese and Koreans. Some of these groups have large families; an astonishing 55 percent of Vancouver’s elementary school students list a language other than French or English as their native tongue. “Vancouver will be an Asian city very soon,” predicts Frank Ogden, a prominent Canadian thinker.

Canadian policy towards Hong Kong has been the very reverse of Quebec’s policy towards Haiti. For Hong Kong residents who fear the consequences of the Chinese take-over in 1997, Canadian citizenship has essentially been put up for sale to anyone with at least $150,000 to invest. If a nation is going to dilute its racial and cultural heritage through immigration, it might as well take in the rich and hard-working rather than the poor and idle. Nevertheless, this policy clearly shows that Canadian citizenship has ceased to be an organic bond that holds a people together and is nothing more than a bureaucratic detail.

Race Relations, Canadian Style

The Canadian attempt at multi-racialism has resulted in the same dispossession of whites and fanatical anti-racism as in the United States. Old-time Vancouver residents who do not wish to see their beautiful coastal city become a giant Chinatown, have derisively started calling their home Hong-Couver or Van-Kong. They have been dismissed as racists.

When parents point out that a school system swamped with children who don’t speak English cannot give a good education to children who do, they get lectures on the glories of “cultural enrichment.” When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police recently decreed that Sikh mounties could wear turbans instead of the famous broad-brimmed hat, anyone who opposed the new policy was called a Nazi and a bigot.

The Canadian government, through its minister of multi-cultural affairs, funds many non-white groups whose primary function seems to be criticism of whites. It is as if the NAACP lived off of American tax dollars. Carl Whittaker, head of the Black Community Council of Quebec (BCCQ), explains that 60 percent of young blacks are unemployed because of “a racist structure, which will not give them equal access to policy and jobs.” Clarence Bayne, president of Minority Arts and Culture, says, “Black youths are dysfunctional because the government is unwilling to help black organizations create a solid structure in the community.”

It is a drearily familiar tale. Blacks are not responsible for their own failures. The government must give more money to black organizations. Which black organizations? Why, the very ones headed by the people who thought up this remedy for the problems. To those who point out that the government is already spending huge sums on social services, the BCCQ’s Mr. Whittaker explains that existing services do not meet the “specific cultural needs” of blacks.

Partly as a result of this kind of propaganda, blacks have adopted a truculent, anti-white stance. In 1990, a black candidate, Noel Alexander, ran for the Montreal city council. When he failed to win he blamed white racism. He refused to consider the possibility that his leftist politics may have made a difference.

In Toronto, relations between blacks and the police are so bad that blacks may refuse to cooperate even to find the killer of a black man. A common form of entertainment among Toronto’s Jamaicans is to hold house parties that are open to the public for a fee. Several hundred blacks may crowd into a small house, and violence often breaks out. Recently, young men have started shooting each other at these parties, and though there may be dozens of witnesses, blacks refuse to testify against each other. Even black editorialists have been appalled at this trend.

‘Sensitivity’ and Thought Control

Canada has institutionalized racial “sensitivity” just as the United States has. Last year, the Zellers department store in Halifax was made to apologize for selling black-faced dolls named Eeny, Meeny, Miney, and Moe. The furor from Nova Scotia blacks was so great that Zellers promised to spend large sums to sponsor black cultural events in the province.

The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto recently put on an exhibit called Into the Heart of Africa, about 19th century missionary work. The exhibit was highly critical of the naive and reportedly patronizing attitudes of early missionaries, but even this reminder of a colonial past was intolerable to Toronto’s blacks. They mounted a weekly demonstration outside of the museum, and vandalized the home of Jeanne Cannizzo, curator of the exhibition.

Miss Cannizzo teaches African anthropology at the University of Toronto. Black activists disrupted her classes and followed her down the halls, taunting her. She was so distressed by this treatment that she has, at least temporarily, stopped teaching.

As in the United States, even the most rigorously academic investigation of racial differences is considered a thought crime. Prof. Philippe Rushton, of the University of Western Ontario, has concluded that North Asians have higher average IQs than whites who, in turn, have higher average IQs than blacks. His classes have been repeatedly disrupted, and the premier of Ontario Province as called for his dismissal in spite of academic tenure.

Prof. Rushton’s university recently ordered him to teach his courses by video tape rather than in person, since a face-to-face class would invite disruption and possible violence. As Prof. Rushton points out, if right-wing extremists threatened to disrupt a communist professor’s classes, the university would put a stop to the problem immediately.

Since it has been established by fiat that Canadian blacks, like American blacks, are just as intelligent and hard-working as whites, inequalities in employment must be remedied by affirmative action. Both public and private employers set targets for non-white hiring and promotion. White Canadians have been even more passive than white Americans in the face of this form of official discrimination.

Where does all this leave The Great White North? In Canada, as in the United States, immigration policy and race relations are governed by rigid thinking that will eventually lead to the transformation of a Western, European nation into something else. This thinking leaves no room for those who love their European character and heritage, and wish to preserve them. A recent article in the Ottawa Citizen (6/4/90) perfectly conveyed the required point of view: “Polls over the past two years indicate bigotry is spreading among Canadians anxious about increasing ethnic diversity . . . Polls show those concerned about Canada’s changing ethnic makeup have increased from 24 per cent two years ago to 38 per cent today.” Precisely. Any white person who loves his people and his culture, who does not wish to see Canada become a third-world nation, is a bigot.