Previous Issues
?Xenophobia is anti-Canadian
?On the surface of it, “xenophobia” is a fairly innocuous word. It’s only when you dress it up in white robes, and accompany it with burning crosses and a name like the Ku Klux Klan, that you begin to recognize it for what it really is: irrational hatred of anything, or anyone, that isn’t you. It can be about race, or religion, or ethnicity, or merely a fear of anything that makes you uncomfortable.
Every week at the Cosmos (and probably many of our readers have the same experience), we receive e-mails that explicitly promote xenophobia. They encourage the recipient to distrust immigrants, or even Canadian citizens, who might want to hang the flag of their homeland from their porch during a traditional festival, or sing our anthem in their own mother tongue, or encourage their children to honour their heritage by performing an ethnic dance in a pageant at school.
“Why can’t these people just take the trouble to become Canadians?” these e-mails ask. What they mean is, why can’t they be like us?
But what is “us”? What is “Canadian”? We strongly suspect that if you took a cattle rancher from the Alberta foothills and put him beside a Bay Street banker, they’d have as little in common, maybe less in common, than two steel workers from Hamilton and Sarajevo. We’re all immigrants, after all, even supposedly “native” Canadians, it’s just splitting hairs as to how long it was since our forefathers and foremothers came across the Atlantic or the Bering Land Bridge.
And to complain about newcomers respecting their heritage, and being slow to make a contribution to their new home, is first to ignore how many second- or even first-generation immigrants have made a huge impact on Canadian business or the arts, to mention only two spheres of influence. But it’s also to ignore how hugely difficult we make it for newcomers to do what they do best. Our ridiculous restrictions on professional certification are why so many foreign-born physicians end up driving cabs, or waiting tables. Far from being the welcoming land of legend, Canada can be a frustrating, heartbreaking place that drives many immigrants back to a dangerous homeland.
At core, what is the difference between a bunch of O’Rourkes and Murphys sitting around in the Harp&Castle, drinking green beer on March 17 and singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling”, and a Sikh mountie wanting to wear a turban on duty? We might dismiss the former as a trivial tradition, we might inveigh against the latter as a religious requirement that has no place in Canadian society.
But both are ways of expressing how much we cherish our ties to where we came from. When you read our Canada Day section starting on page 7, you’ll see how many of our subjects express equal love for the land they were born in, and the land they call home. It’s as natural as enjoying a holiday, but loving coming back home.
What we find most disturbing about the xenophobic e-mails is that the source is not anonymous. They’re sent to us by local residents, people we know. To those people we would say, read pages 7-16 closely. Realize that in these wonderful neighbours of ours, there is nothing to fear, nothing to hate. Enjoy the diversity that is Canada.
