Canada’s Multicultural Utopia Now a Balkanized Grievance Factory

Canada has become a nation of diasporas. Rather than wrapping ourselves in a common flag, we huddle in our enclaves: Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Jewish, Chinese, Black and the list goes on. Faith, color and country of origin divide the nation. Everyone is the “other,” and increasingly, the enemy. Violence and acts of hatred are multiplying in our streets.

{snip}

In 2023, however, there is a new wrinkle: the importing of larger geopolitical conflicts to Canada. Pro-Palestinian protestors openly demand the boycott of Jewish businesses and call for the eradication of Israel. {snip}

Canada has become a balkanized grievance factory, and all of us are paying the price. You don’t have to be a Jew terrified to put a mezuzah on their door, a Chinese Canadian being intimidated at the ballot box or a Hindu child bullied by Sikh kids on the playground. Instead of uniting around human rights and standing against hate speech, Canadian society is allowing all manner of aggression in the name of fighting “privilege,” and is tearing itself apart in the process.

How did we get here? First, the state-sanctioned multiculturalism policies of Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the 1970s encouraged newcomers to keep their culture of origin, rather than build a common one. {snip}

After 2000, another factor fueled further division: the global rise of identity politics. {snip}

Then came 2015, and the current federal government’s attempt at Indigenous reconciliation. Rather than focusing on building economic opportunities for the future, it dwells on shaming Canadians for the wrongs of the past, even though the bulk of today’s population have nothing to do with the colonization of Canada hundreds of years ago. Worse yet, newcomers are encouraged to “other” themselves along these lines: white immigrants are lumped in with colonizers, while immigrants of color are considered oppressed and thus allies of Canada’s Indigenous peoples, regardless of whether they may have, ironically, oppressed other groups in their own country of origin.

The result is a nation balkanized along a thousand fault lines. {snip}

{snip}