Canadian Tolerance

In an ideal world everyone would behave themselves and respect others. In an ideal world there would be no conflicts, there would be people going about their business, looking after the necessities of life, appreciating the opportunity to do so. In an ideal world people would be satisfied with what they have, would not begrudge others what they possess. In an ideal world people would care about one another, even the well-being of strangers.

There is no ideal world. And many claim we would die of boredom if it existed. We need stressors in our lives, we require those existential shoves from time to time to haul us out of our state of complacent inertia, to motivate us, to make us exert ourselves and to appreciate the opportunity to do so. Aha! perhaps that's something that both an ideal world and the imperfect one have in common, then?

Multiculturalism was the brainstormed conclusion of people who thought of themselves as enlightened. Give people the opportunity to be themselves without constraints of any kind, and they will be unassertively kind to one another. Make them feel that they're special because of their inherited background, culture, customs, ethnicity and they'll feel generously disposed to others.

Have them reach the conclusion that no one stands in judgement of them and they're free to do as they wish. It isn't really necessary to inform them simultaneously that just as they're free to live as their heritage, religion, custom has accustomed them to, from the world they originated from before embarking on a permanent pilgrimage to another country, others have that same freedom. Leave them free of the constraints of obligation.

There is no need for them to take note and to conform with a prevailing social order with its cultural values and laws meant to apply equally to all. Nor to understand that as a pluralist society there is greater value in accepting the societal norms that prevail, and although there may be comfort in continued conformity to the familiar, there is an imperative - yes, an imperative - to recognize that some customs and values brought with them are inimical to the new order they've become part of.

Multiculturalism, which relaxed the ages-old method whereby people who joined a new community whose language, customs, values and laws are quite different from those of the migrant community, failed to address the negative issues of ethnic villages known as exclusionary ghettos, failed to impress upon immigrants the desirability and the need to become integrated into the community to share the common indigenous culture.

Multiculturalism, while favouring the comfort of the immigrant, failed the need of citizenship. It became an institutionalized encouragement to separation, and to unearned entitlements. It enabled people to feel they were perfectly within their rights to bring to their adopted country resentments and ethnic hatreds from their country of origin, that cultural and social habits that were engrained in the society of origin would be perfectly acceptable within the adopted country.

In fact, ancient animosities have no place in a society and in a country dedicated to egalitarianism, equality between the genders, acceptance of religious freedoms and alter-gender orientations. And cultural niceties like female genital mutilation, female sequestration through the enforced wearing of the niqab and the burqa, honour killings, and other manifestations of a regressive patriarchal society such as acceptance of polygamy are morally offensive and illegal in Western countries.

As is hanging on to base discriminatory behaviours and attitudes that make an enemy of those worshipping a religion unlike one's own, or people of other ethnic origins, or those with whom one does not share ideological underpinnings. Official multiculturalism made all of these habitual customs seem to the practitioner to be acceptable. And even when it became patently clear that some of these customs were not permissible under the law, resistance to change was inevitable because that feeling of entitlement had become pervasive.

With little-to-no obligation to become Canadian in spirit, to accept prevailing customs as one's own, to encourage offspring to become fully assimilated into the endemic value system, adopting the same cultural mores and respect for others, and to abide by the laws meant to be equally apportioned to all, people felt no need to voluntarily make the sacrifices of surrendering customs that failed to meet Canadian standards of behaviour.

The time is long past for the fixation on promoting tolerance by encouraging intolerance; assuming that it is wrong to insist that immigrants adapt to and adopt liberal traditions and surrender their medieval cultural practises to fit into Canadian society. The transformation will not be seamless, people have to learn to adjust their expectations and to make an effort that is required to complete their transition from one society, one culture, to another.

A new formula must be devised - and it might do well to reflect the one that existed before multiculturalism became the official self-congratulatory byword of Canadian tolerance and acceptance; that immigrants should be accepted only when it is evident that they have the capacity and the will to adapt to the prevailing societal values and customs.

And that it then be incumbent upon them to prove it by gradually transforming themselves into true, unhyphenated Canadians.