Quote:
Originally Posted by OutOfTowner
So, I visited friends in 'A World Class Canadian City' during the holidays and I met up with an old friend. She's great - don't get me wrong - but she's one of those ethnicity/nationality, name-dropping multicultarists: "Ooh, we have to go to the Portuguese bakery next to the Jamaican place and we really should go to the Bangladeshi place because my Croatian neighbour and the Azerbaijani guy at work goes there too. Ooh, and tomorrow we can to this little Maltese place where I know the Spanish waiter..
You know.
Then you go to the dinner party, with all the lily-white friends (there may be a Canadian Asian - sole tribute to multiculturalism) where everybody talks about real estate and daycare and 'good schools' .. and of course, they all rave about the latest Bolivian/Icelandic fusion place around the corner from the Nepalese Yakball joint..
Thing is, few of them can count any of these nationalities as their friends. Few of them can find any of these countries on a map - let alone know aything about said countries. Speak another language? lol!
Multiculturalism in Canada is farce. We import people to take our shit jobs and then pretend that we're generous, accepting, open to all..!
Bullshit. Germany took in over a million refugees yet we're still patting ourselves on the back for taking in 50,000? "Oh we're so wonderful! So Canadian! We're so nice! So many new taxi drivers!"
Canadians love multiculturalism because it hides the fact that we have no culture to speak of - other than Costco, Walmart, MacDonalds, Starbucks, Netflix, etc.. Immigrants are still treated like shit here - look at the numbers - but being the smug-ass pricks that we love to be, we think we're so superior. We're so nice!
We're assholes, but we're such polite assholes that, why wouldn't you prefer to trade your PHD in to be a floor washer here? After all, we're so multicultural!
And of course, whatever happens, we're sorry!
Sorry
And it's so great to be known as a nation of sorry sayers. "Oh, you punched me in the face? Sorry! Sorry that my face got in the way of your fist. Sorry!
That's just awesome but.. we're multicultural!
Sorry!
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It's PJ O'Rourke's vituperation schtick modified for Canada. Actually, O'Rourke could have written this if he'd ever paid any attention to Canada.
The thing about O'Rourke, though, is that he gets as much wrong as he does right. He writes amusingly caustic sentences that stick in the brain, but they don't usually stand up to much scrutiny.
I mean, I enjoyed this. Our multicultural pieties can be cringe-inducing, but still: a lily white group of friends in Toronto? Is that a vignette from 1965? When was the last time that ever actually happened? Even downtown, away from the ethno-burbs, it's virtually impossible to be more than one or two arms' lengths away from a non-white person in any setting.
And reducing immigration to doctors driving taxis is, erm, reductive. Not least because the kids turn into Canadians.
Still, though, yeah. The whole reverence for ethnic diversity in Toronto is a meme that deserves skewering, so good on you for that.