Time to Face the Multicultural Mess

Here is a short video on the failure of multiculturalism in the West.

It is not just a rant. A handful of precise opinions are voiced, and the underlying research is cited for those who wish to follow up

Deja vu is the feeling I got watching it, because … in 1990 I published The Trouble With Canada (re-published in updated form, as The Trouble With Canada … Still! in 2010), in which I argued that the multicultural legislation passed in Canada in 1988 was a mistake because it meant immigrants would no longer be expected to assimilate to Canada’s unifying deep culture, and the result would be the gradual formation of mini-nations with in the larger nation-state, because a Multicultural policy, as one critic so aptly put it, “condemns immigrants to house-arrest in their own skins.”

Canada’s very long experience with Quebec separatism was sufficient warrant for this opinion. I argued that Quebec and the Rest of Canada (ROC) are now more than ever the “Two Solitudes” about which we had been warned as long ago as 1945 by the novelist Hugh MacLennan of McGill University in a bestselling novel of that very name.

In short, the Quebec experience, which has been a consistent threat to Canadian unity ever since Confederation in 1867, has been, and remains Canada’s first failure with the multicultural experiment.

We have learned nothing since.

When will the West wake up, shake off its self-loathing, revive its confidence in the best of the West, so to speak, and once again undertake to re-learn, defend, propagate, and celebrate the greatest civilization of modernity?

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. Jonathan

    Could you write further about Quebec situation in the present and in the past?
    I really do not know what is average opinion of the majority of Canadians on the issue or if there are too many legal differences in Quebec from ROC.

    1. William Gairdner

      Hi Jonathan –

      If you go to the “Blog” option on my website, and then to “Archive” and find my blog for March, 2014, you can read about the problems surrounding the idea of Quebec Separatism. This essay is drawn from my book “The Trouble With Canada … Still! (2010). Feel free to write if you have other questions.
      William

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