Canadian Culture of Human Nobility
By Jim Reid, Founder: Canadian Federalist Party
Canada’s tri-cultural legacy, Native, French & English, created a national cultural identity respected around the world throughout the last century. It all will be lost in this century unless we establish a Constitutional Amendment that protects Canadian tradition and cultural values. A Charter of Canadian Heritage, Culture and Responsibilities must supersede our existing Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Every parent understands that rights are granted after acceptance of responsibilities. Our nation is no different.
Historically, immigration always has an impact that changes the cultural norms of a country. Only the idealists believe that immigrants will assimilate and become like them. Pragmatists recognize that change is coming for the entrenched and the newcomers. Canada is experiencing these changes, but is not adapting well.
Canada’s multi-cultural intentions appear to be producing increasing racism in our country. This is becoming intensified especially between many members of the older generations of Canadians and many of the new Canadians arriving within the past 25 years.
Older generations of Canadians are recognizing all sorts of instances where their entrenched values and traditions are being ignored by new Canadians. It is becoming obvious that many customs and values of new Canadians are different and often in contradiction with the cultural norms they are seeing in their new land.
These include innocuous community things like commercial signs in languages not understood by English or French speaking Canadians. Clothing styles may be common in other countries, but uncommon in Canada. Neighbourhoods are anything but multi-cultural as mono-cultural areas become almost foreign soil within our cities.
Family behaviours, such as restrictions on female rights, are frequently exposed by immigrant teenagers’ rebellions against traditional paternal controls. Extreme instances of murders of daughters and arranged forced marriages are infuriating older generations of Canadians. They ask, “How can people with such barbaric and antiquated beliefs be welcomed into our country?”
Older generations of Canadians are concerned about the indoctrination effects of conservative religious practices that are being imposed within our secular education system. Such practices can appear to foster extremist beliefs and behaviours, rather than encourage moderation and ecumenism in our society. Also, in a single generation, cultures where their children are focussed upon academic achievement and continuous tutoring, rather than the development of well rounded individuals, have rapidly dominated many of the most prestigious university lecture halls.
Even commercial practices are experiencing intra-cultural expansion, especially in cultures where the cash economy is respected and encouraged. It appears to many Canadians, that Increasing government tax and regulatory intervention is affecting more traditional culture peoples than some of the newer immigrant cultures with their closed community economies. Similarly, many ask, “Why is our government social safety net opened to people who haven’t spent their working lives contributing to these funds?”
In recent years, as these issues emerge, the politicians have not been able to find ways to protect the customs and values of the established generations of Canadians. Many immigrants who have left totalitarian nations find the freedoms within Canada a fertile soil to re-plant their unique cultural heritages.
It would appear to many that Canadian politicians have a naive belief that all customs and values of all cultures in the world can be made to peacefully co-exist in Canada. This is a dangerous and poisonous assumption for Canadian culture. What it does is sow seeds of imbalance and conflict within our communities. It also stimulates an anti-social form of tribalism and even gangsterism as people adhere to each other for common community of beliefs and spirit.
Canada`s Charter of Rights and Freedoms offers no protection against this internal polarization within our communities. In many ways, it even protects the rights of people to hold values and beliefs that are anathema to our traditional Canadian values and beliefs.
It is time that Canadians publicly recognize the destructive mistake we made in adopting our Charter of Rights and Freedoms before we established a superseding component to our Constitution that protects our Heritage, Culture, Values, Languages (English, French and Native) and National Citizenship Responsibilities.
We need only look at the political changes and conflicts around the world to see that interest groups can quickly escalate cultural or religious conflicts into violence. Generational Canadians and new Canadians should understand clearly that all beliefs and values are not welcome in Canada. We have had long-standing beliefs and values that are sacred to our Canadian culture. If a new arrival is not prepared to accept, respect and adopt these noble values and beliefs, then they may not become Canadians.
The debate to enunciate these beliefs and values must begin immediately. We must seek the noblest of human values as the benchmarks of our behaviours. We must begin with our traditional Judeo-Christian and Native values as our foundations.
The window is rapidly closing for Canadians to protect the culture, beliefs and values our soldiers died for during the past 150 years. If we don`t stand firm, (On Guard), and stand against those who represent oppressive and repressive cultures, Canada will sink into a theocratic state of mental suppression and mind control within four generations.
Nobility of action derives from nobility of mind which emanates from nobility of spirit. We must define and entrench in our culture the nobility of being Canadian