Embracing multiculturalism, a Canadian value

Although he has not brought forth any changes to our immigration laws yet, our immigration minister Jason Kenny is out stumping across the country testing the waters for his plans to reform our immigration and citizenship rules.

Where his predecessor brought in new immigration rules to bypass the queue if the immigrant had a value to the Canadian economy, be it low skilled temporary workers to fill vacant service industry jobs in Fort McMurray or highly trained professionals that could fill a shortage of engineers and the like, Jason is more concerned with the assimilation of immigrants into our Canadian culture.

With his first proposal immigrants must be fluent in English or French, which is not necessarily an insurmountable requirement depending upon the definition of fluent, Jason is now proposing that people becoming Canadian citizens have a full appreciation of the country's values.

We want to make sure that when people become Canadians, they totally understand that Canadian history becomes their history, Canadian values become their values," Mr. Kenney, MP for Calgary Southeast, told reporters.

Of course defining those values might be a bit of a problem.

Values are considered subjective, vary across people and cultures and are in many ways aligned with belief and belief systems. Types of values include ethical or moral values, doctrinal or ideological (political, religious) values, social values, and aesthetic values.

Although this makes great fodder for the Reform wing of the conservative party. Strange looking immigrants taking Canadian jobs was the Reforms biggest success in Ontario.

Canada is a multicultural country. It is one of our values. Our immigration and citizenship rules should embrace other cultures it makes us a richer society.

However for citizenship purposes under our present government it might be wiser for new Canadians to claim that they want to live in a country where they can get a job, raise their family, possibly sign their kids up for hockey, let them get an education, grow old, retire, play with their grand kids and die.

Of course that was probably their intent, in the first place.


JAWL