Canada -- the greatest hotel on earth!

Walt has just finished reading The Unfinished Canadian, by Andrew Cohen (McClelland & Stewart, 2007), and can't resist passing along -- without editorial comment [Who? Me? Ed.] -- this passage from the chapter entitled "The Casual Canadian".

Canada is becoming "a community of communities" -- the vision of Canada expressed by former prime minister Joe Clark -- though surely not as he imagined it....

Yann Martel, the award-winning novelist, calls Canada "the greatest hotel on earth. It welcomes people from everywhere." A perceptive and apt description, it imagines a Canada in which everyone is a visitor, occupying a room, a floor, or even a wing, depending on the means. No one stays for very long because no one wants to make an extended commitment.

A hotel is impermanence, by its very nature the most tenuous of loyalties. People come and go. In point of fact, this is actually true of Canada; some 30 per cent of immigrants are thought to return home after getting citizenship....

This compartmentalization of Canada emerges in unsavoury ways: in the grim, urban corridors where Jamaican, Haitian and other street gangs fight each other; in the high-rise housing projects filled with Somalis and other struggling minorities; in the epidemic of violence against women in the Indo-Canadian community; in the desire of some Muslims in Ontario to use Sharia law; in the arrests of eighteen suspected terrorists, all of them Muslim, whom no authority would identify as such....

There are reasons for worry. Michael Valpy, the journalist and author, sees trouble among second-generation minorities who are not entering mainstream society and risk becoming part of the underclass.

Tarek Fatah, a broadcaster, warns of fundamentalist Islamists who use multiculturalism to present themselves as moderates to "hide their misogynist, homophobic and segregationist agenda." He warns that if Canadians don't redouble their efforts to integrate and promote a secular society, "we risk creating a fragmented nation, divided into twenty-first-century religious and racial tribes, suspicious of each other and longing for the home we left behind."

Walt agrees with and endorses every word, except for the second part of the quote from Tarek Fatah (last sentence in the preceding paragraph) which is hopelessly idealistic and downright naive. The damage has been done, and I can't think of any politically acceptable way to undo it. Can you?

Footnote: Americans and Britons needn't feel smug or safe. Citizenship of the UK and/or USA is harder to get than Canadian -- Canucks are just stupid about this -- but the description of the minority ghettos of Toronto could just as easily apply to New York, or London, or just about any "Western" city.