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Song in a minority key

Paul Martin insists “Canada is a nation of minorities,” and that only his Liberal party can defend this nation’s minorities from some bullying majority.

I have never understood how, if Canada is a nation of minorities, can there then be some malevolent “majority” within this nation that needs to be kept at bay? Who is this scheming majority against whom the rest of us minorities must remain ever vigilant in protecting our rights?

Then again, it is difficult to make sense of Liberal-speak.

“Canada is a nation of minorities” is an ideal example. The statement is sheer nonsense. A nation is not an aggregate of few or many people of different linguistic, religious, cultural or racial origins jostling together.

On the contrary, a nation—irrespective of size—is an entity by itself. It is not internally divided into majority and minority components. It is set apart from other nations by language, religion and culture, for example, as Danes as a nation are set apart from their Dutch or German neighbours.

John George Lambton, Earl of Durham, sent by the British government in 1838 to British North America as governor, described the core problem in his report to London. He wrote: “I expected to find a contest between a government and a people; I found two nations warring in the bosom of a single state: I found a struggle not of principles but of races.”

Now, 168 years later, Canada is a single state. It might have more than two nations warring in its bosom, but this single state is not one “nation of minorities” as Paul Martin describes it.

Moreover, defining Canada as a nation of minorities is insulting to both founding nations—English and French—mentioned in the Durham Report.

It seems obvious that Martin’s Liberal-speak is designed to reduce francophone Quebecers—the French-Canadian nation of the Durham Report—to just another minority ethnic or lifestyle group, thereby dismissing their claim to “distinct society” status within Canada or their nationalist aspirations for independence.

Similarly, Liberal-speak dismisses the Anglo-Saxon entity—the English-Canadian nation—whose role in the making of modern democracy, and modern Canada, is singular. Instead, the English-Canadian place in historical-cultural terms is leveled to that of any other minority ethnic group in an evolving Canada.

Liberal-speak functions as the ideological tool of multiculturalism. It works to strip Canada of a traditional history that made this country a unique political experiment in democracy and federalism, a society open and inclusive to people of all ethnic origins seeking a home within its expansive bosom.

Liberal-speak and multiculturalism have actually widened the distance between the two founding nations, and, by indulging whims of hyphenated ethnic minorities, increased divisiveness at home.

As a result, Canadian unity under Liberal stewardship is now at its most precarious point in a generation—at a time when unity is urgently needed to confront terrorism, nuclear proliferation, diseases and multiple challenges in the global economy.

But Liberal-speak serves Liberal party interests at the expense of the country. It divides Canadians, making them suspicious of each other—while Paul Martin presents himself as indispensable for governing a country his party has systematically weakened.

Canadians wanting their country’s political health restored might consider that the cure begins with removing the malady—Liberals and their Liberal-speak—from their midst.

Salim Mansur
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