Passages: Welcome Home to Canada Read Online Free PDF Page A

by, Then why did you come? The undeniable fact is, I have come and here I am. Three hundred thousand immigrants come to Canada every year, to keep this nation viable. The world has changed. Population growth statistics for the Western countries indicate that they can continue to thrive only with the influx of immigrants. The populations of African and Asian countries, on the other hand, are exploding. It takes no clever guessing to tell where some of these extra populations will end up. And it is important for this to be the case if our planet is to keep conflicts between rich and poor to a minimum. Surely the nature of the world’s developed nations, especially those that must depend on immigrants, must change.
    I recall how, in the 1960s, when Kenyan Asians with British passports started going to England to claim their residency rights there, they were faced with vicious public protests. Enoch Powell, eminent classical scholar and Conservative politician, announced famously, by way of protest, that England is fish and chips, not rice and curry. Forty years later now, rice and curry is precisely one of the items Britainpromotes in its self-image. And only recently it allocated permits to Indian teachers to go there and teach. What was unthinkable once sounds natural now.
    It is cometimes argued that Canada needs a strong identity, a sense of its essential self and destiny, such as the United States possesses. An American does not feel two ways about being American. If immigrants are allowed to live in Canada without coelescing or assimilating into an unequivocal national identity, goes this argument, they will only contribute further to this country’s character as a confused, hapless nonentity on the world stage.
    But America is the wrong model. It is an older, more established, more populous country, which came into being with a strong founding mythology and began with a war of revolution. American identity is a religion; in that it is surely unique. Watching the American flag ceremony at an event such as the Super Bowl, pitched with emotion and fervor, is as wonderful and mysterious and awesome as seeing a few thousand Muslims kneeling in solemn prayer, turned towards Mecca, or conservative Jews at the Wailing Wall.
    Canada is where the Loyalists came. It was part of the British Empire, which is why people from the former British colonies found it easier to come to it.With a larger percentage of new immigrants, it presents a lesser inertia to change. It welcomes and accommodates the world, and as a result it reflects global diversity in a peaceful mode. That should surely be its strength and its identity, its uniqueness—not its source of insecurity.
    The destruction of the World Trade Center brought home dramatically, to many of us in Canada, how tenuous is the concept of a narrow, inflexible national identity. In the days and weeks that followed September 11, there were many cries of, “We are all Americans.” Canada ran out of American flags. The rallying cry had always been, “We are
different
from Americans.” The more nationalist-minded Canadians used to bristle with anti-Americanism. The difference between the two nations was something which many immigrants, who had seen Canada as merely an extension of America from afar, had to learn, much to their embarrassment and the consternation of those who reminded them of this.
    So what happened? September 11 showed that there are ties that are impossible to forget or break. They may be historic, they may be racial, tribal or geographic, but they are there in the mind. And when the world, among commentators and analysts, began to be divided among “us” and “them,” or the“Roman Empire” and the “Barbarians,” or clashing civilizations, then, however we interpret these concepts (and they are fundamentally contestable), it was clear that the time of narrow nationalism was over in more ways than one.
    And if we were all Americans at that particular crisis