Growing Canada?
True, Canada represents a huge territorial geography. The Canadian landscape is varied and magnificent. from our boreal forests to our maritime provinces, our industrial heartland to our thriving prairies, bordered by the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Arctic. The country's natural resources, from minerals to lumber, natural gas and oil deposits to fish stocks and inland lakes, our great prairies and agricultural lands, and our productive and entrepreneurial population, reflect abundance and good stewardship.
Do we really need to think about improving on what we have to the extent of planning to increase our population from its current 34-million to double, triple that? While it is true any economy needs a growing, educated and capable workforce to ensure that production of goods and services remain equal to our needs and that our industrial capabilities keep pace with our need to export to balance our imports, and to grow our markets, domestic and international, at a modest rate to reflect positively on our GDP, there are limits to be cognizant of.
Canada is basically a northern country, and as a result of that geographic reality its population consumes a large share of the world's energy for heating and cooling and production needs. Our large geographic area means more energy is used in transporting goods across the country. Technological advances and new sources of energy may, in the future, ameliorate the harmful effects of traditional energy usage and the spewing of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but in the short term a larger population does translate as one that requires more of everything.
At one time when Canada accepted immigrants to swell its population, those immigrants were left to their own devices. To adjust to the climate, the society, the politics, the entitlements as landed immigrants and citizens, and above all, to the employment opportunities available. To do this, new immigrants had to learn a new language, new customs and shed the traditions and loyalties they left behind, embracing Canadian values and the need to integrate into the larger society.
In this new, enlightened world, newcomers to Canada no longer have to face the perils of a personal struggle to exist and to conquer adversity in a strange land. Tax dollars, administered by government agencies and by private concerns which are also largely funded through tax dollars, help immigrants adjust, learn a new language, prepare them for meaningful employment, teach their children, and offer health and social services as and when required. Immigrants take advantage of the opportunities availing them to sponsor extended family members; another cost to the taxpayer.
These costly and assistive devices to welcome new immigrants have their limits. Inviting much greater numbers of the world's migrant populations to Canada will impose an ever larger burden on the indigenous population before the newcomers can even begin to pay their way through becoming financially independent and through paying their own share of the tax burden. And then there is the reality that most immigrants seek to settle in large urban areas.
Canada's largest cities are already overburdened and close to being overwhelmed by a huge influx of immigrants from various parts of the world. Cities like Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Winnipeg and Ottawa are already groaning under the added civic burden to provide new housing and other needed civic infrastructure, (public transportation, sewage, hydro transmission) all of it costly, to adequately function. Crowded conditions in the country's major cities will impair their functionality with long transit times, and a need for new infrastructure.
Additionally, too many of those immigrants have not been instructed on entry of their obligation to assume the values and the customs that already prevail within the country. We see large enclaves of ethnic and religious groups setting themselves aside and apart from the prevailing society. People are wont to do this, seeking comfort in the familiarity of surrounding themselves with others of like background and traditions. But this does not aid integration. In earlier decades, people gradually assimilated, while still honouring their heritage, but this is occurring less and less.
The expectation for and pursuit of social cohesion is the defining force of a well functioning society, even while it acknowledges that the addition of a multiplicity of other authentic customs that can complement the original culture, can be desirable. A pluralistic society where all of its constituents love in mutual respect and harmony with one another is the goal. And while people will always have their differences, the goal is to offer equal opportunities to all, so that no one will feel ill done by and left out of the general pool of aspirants to success.
Indifference to the situation that exists now in Canada where immigrants from countries vastly unlike those of North America and Europe - people escaping intolerable social conditions, living under totalitarian governments, where rights are restricted, often arrive anxious to claim new liberties - yet insisting on importing their customs and traditions rather than melding them with those that already exist, and accepting that this country's laws and traditions and existing social customs apply to everyone equally, does us no credit.
The insistence from the liberal-left that everyone and everything is equally valuable with no discrimination against customs and traditions that run counter in value and priority to ours represents a harmful sanctimony. When one group of immigrants harbours a resentment against another that hearks back to traditions prevailing in their countries of origin and scurrilous attitudes demeaning one to the other prevail, civil society suffers. When customs are imported that run counter to Canada's, customs that are degrading and harmful, they must be apprehended.
It is one thing to be nostalgic for what has been left behind. It is another thing entirely to import customs and behaviours that are not socially acceptable in a country that has welcomed immigrants to be part of their future. Canada needs to welcome people who can demonstrate that they are capable of integrating, of valuing the social customs that prevail in the country. The social contract prevailing in Canada is one that prizes and protects the rights of the vulnerable in society; women, children, gays, the physically and mentally challenged.
This is an egalitarian society, and theoretically as well as practically, people are free to practise what they will, as long as no harm comes to others by so doing. These are freedoms guaranteed to Canadians under the law of the land; the Canadian Charger of Rights and Freedoms. Freedoms to practise one's religion, freedom of speech and assembly, and all other freedoms that flow from those, with respect to our democratic rights, our equality and legal rights.
All these and other issues should be carefully thought out before the bright lights of the intellectuals in academia and government muse about dramatically increasing the size of the Canadian population through a deliberate course of accelerated immigration.
Do we really need to think about improving on what we have to the extent of planning to increase our population from its current 34-million to double, triple that? While it is true any economy needs a growing, educated and capable workforce to ensure that production of goods and services remain equal to our needs and that our industrial capabilities keep pace with our need to export to balance our imports, and to grow our markets, domestic and international, at a modest rate to reflect positively on our GDP, there are limits to be cognizant of.
Canada is basically a northern country, and as a result of that geographic reality its population consumes a large share of the world's energy for heating and cooling and production needs. Our large geographic area means more energy is used in transporting goods across the country. Technological advances and new sources of energy may, in the future, ameliorate the harmful effects of traditional energy usage and the spewing of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but in the short term a larger population does translate as one that requires more of everything.
At one time when Canada accepted immigrants to swell its population, those immigrants were left to their own devices. To adjust to the climate, the society, the politics, the entitlements as landed immigrants and citizens, and above all, to the employment opportunities available. To do this, new immigrants had to learn a new language, new customs and shed the traditions and loyalties they left behind, embracing Canadian values and the need to integrate into the larger society.
In this new, enlightened world, newcomers to Canada no longer have to face the perils of a personal struggle to exist and to conquer adversity in a strange land. Tax dollars, administered by government agencies and by private concerns which are also largely funded through tax dollars, help immigrants adjust, learn a new language, prepare them for meaningful employment, teach their children, and offer health and social services as and when required. Immigrants take advantage of the opportunities availing them to sponsor extended family members; another cost to the taxpayer.
These costly and assistive devices to welcome new immigrants have their limits. Inviting much greater numbers of the world's migrant populations to Canada will impose an ever larger burden on the indigenous population before the newcomers can even begin to pay their way through becoming financially independent and through paying their own share of the tax burden. And then there is the reality that most immigrants seek to settle in large urban areas.
Canada's largest cities are already overburdened and close to being overwhelmed by a huge influx of immigrants from various parts of the world. Cities like Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Winnipeg and Ottawa are already groaning under the added civic burden to provide new housing and other needed civic infrastructure, (public transportation, sewage, hydro transmission) all of it costly, to adequately function. Crowded conditions in the country's major cities will impair their functionality with long transit times, and a need for new infrastructure.
Additionally, too many of those immigrants have not been instructed on entry of their obligation to assume the values and the customs that already prevail within the country. We see large enclaves of ethnic and religious groups setting themselves aside and apart from the prevailing society. People are wont to do this, seeking comfort in the familiarity of surrounding themselves with others of like background and traditions. But this does not aid integration. In earlier decades, people gradually assimilated, while still honouring their heritage, but this is occurring less and less.
The expectation for and pursuit of social cohesion is the defining force of a well functioning society, even while it acknowledges that the addition of a multiplicity of other authentic customs that can complement the original culture, can be desirable. A pluralistic society where all of its constituents love in mutual respect and harmony with one another is the goal. And while people will always have their differences, the goal is to offer equal opportunities to all, so that no one will feel ill done by and left out of the general pool of aspirants to success.
Indifference to the situation that exists now in Canada where immigrants from countries vastly unlike those of North America and Europe - people escaping intolerable social conditions, living under totalitarian governments, where rights are restricted, often arrive anxious to claim new liberties - yet insisting on importing their customs and traditions rather than melding them with those that already exist, and accepting that this country's laws and traditions and existing social customs apply to everyone equally, does us no credit.
The insistence from the liberal-left that everyone and everything is equally valuable with no discrimination against customs and traditions that run counter in value and priority to ours represents a harmful sanctimony. When one group of immigrants harbours a resentment against another that hearks back to traditions prevailing in their countries of origin and scurrilous attitudes demeaning one to the other prevail, civil society suffers. When customs are imported that run counter to Canada's, customs that are degrading and harmful, they must be apprehended.
It is one thing to be nostalgic for what has been left behind. It is another thing entirely to import customs and behaviours that are not socially acceptable in a country that has welcomed immigrants to be part of their future. Canada needs to welcome people who can demonstrate that they are capable of integrating, of valuing the social customs that prevail in the country. The social contract prevailing in Canada is one that prizes and protects the rights of the vulnerable in society; women, children, gays, the physically and mentally challenged.
This is an egalitarian society, and theoretically as well as practically, people are free to practise what they will, as long as no harm comes to others by so doing. These are freedoms guaranteed to Canadians under the law of the land; the Canadian Charger of Rights and Freedoms. Freedoms to practise one's religion, freedom of speech and assembly, and all other freedoms that flow from those, with respect to our democratic rights, our equality and legal rights.
All these and other issues should be carefully thought out before the bright lights of the intellectuals in academia and government muse about dramatically increasing the size of the Canadian population through a deliberate course of accelerated immigration.
Labels: Canada, Economy, Environment, Human Relations
posted by Pieface | 7:35 PM
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