When Mass Immigration Meets Multiculturalism PC is Born

One might recall the story of Colleen, my local pharmacist, who explained to me why it was necessary for Canada to import pharmacists rather than rely on internal sources. It is a story of criminal government incompetence, which permitted a labour shortage in this occupation to grow to such proportions that domestic redress was not expediently possible. Her revelations were prompted by mine about Bill Gates and his plans to do an end run around the US government by establishing a plant on the Canadian side of the border just two hours north of his Redland, Washington operational headquarters. Gates could not lobby Congress successfully to widen the pool of the H-1B Visa entrants to the US, so he hatched a plan to have cheap brains from India and elsewhere come instead to his Canadian plant under Canada’s loose “Temporary Worker’s Visa”. Once there, Gates would then, under the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement, slip them unmolested through customs across the border to his U.S, centre. I stressed that there was an abundance of home-grown talent available to Gates and his competitors in the field, only that they were not prepared to pay them the going rate of $100,000 per year when foreign born IT workers could be hired for 60% of that salary. As I wrote in March: It was at this point the Pharmacist injected. Colleen had been working long hours six days a week year after year unassisted in her store. She explained that she had tried many times to find another pharmacist to help her, but no one would reply to her advertisements because pharmacists in Vancouver and across the province were working similar hours to hers. That was because, she said, there was a shortfall of 600 pharmacists nationally and 300 in BC. "How did this come to pass?" I asked. "It began with the tuition freeze imposed by the Provincial BC NDP government on colleges and universities in the 1990s." (Presumably emulated by other governments as well). The freeze was a sop thrown to its working class constituency that on the face of it was positive because it made post-secondary education more affordable to lower-income students. However, by depriving the educational institutions of revenue, it forced them to cut back the construction of labs or the acquisition of equipment for training, the number of instructors hired, the number of courses offered and the number of placements available. "The result was fewer students graduated in pharmacology." Colleen pointed out that Ontario and a few other provinces were now trying to close the gap by training more students. It is not simply a matter of making tuition affordable but investing more money in the whole training system. In the meantime though, she said, immigrant pharmacists are a welcome relief. (Then): Six months later, a few weeks ago, after a long tortuous wait of grueling years, Colleen’s welcome relief finally came, in the form of a young gentleman by the name of “Muhammad”. In my one encounter with him I found very polite, helpful and competent. I am sure this small community will warm to him in the same way I did. Much as they did to the South African doctor in the nearby town after the federal government tried to bounce him out of the country. Virtually everyone signed a petition demanding that they allow their doctor and his family to stay. In microcosm, you have now tallied up two markers on the “benefit” side of a cost/benefit analysis of immigration. A small community plugs a major hole in its needs from a foreign source expeditiously. And the immigrant who plugged that hole is a decent chap who is going to fit quite nicely into the community. Now for the “cost” side of the ledger. Adding one consumer to a community of 2700 people constitutes a growth increment of .0004%, as compared to Canada’s national growth rate of 1.08%. The jury says that Muhammad’s ecological burden to our area is negligible. The same cannot be said for the five million people who have been injected into the consumer economy of Canada as immigrants since 1990, yet despite that, we find five million Canadians still without a family doctor. Obviously an immigration policy not made to fit our needs. The real cost, I found to be political. I keep a column for a local publication and that is a space I keep for seemingly non-controversial matters, namely humour. But oddly, in the heart of political correctness, I have discovered humour to be the most contentious of anything I write. I just submitted a piece about discovering that my dog was a “sleeper”-- a cold ruthless graduate of an Al Queda terrorist boot camp. And the plot went on from there. Sorry, the editor said, we can’t run that. Why? “We now have a valuable member in our community of the Muslim faith, and it is important that he feel welcome. This might offend him.” While Canadian law has made a statement that ethnic and religious harmony trumps free speech, in a small community harmony is an even more vital priority. Her editorial policy is that when I mention anyone’s name in an article , I must phone them up for permission to print it. Her conception of good journalism is when a writer or reporter is constrained by two questions. “Is it kind and is it necessary?”. That is why I walk around this summer wearing a T shirt that reads “Writers are not elected to be Kind”. A small community like mine is the ideal pilot project for the totalitarian model which this secular theocracy of “Multicultural Growthism” has been developing. It is political correctness in highly concentrated form. And at last I have recognized it for what it is. It is that village that Patrick MacGoohan was trapped in the late 1960s in the cult series “The Prisoner”, complete with the veneer of cheer and friendliness and the sense of subterranean scheming and conspiracy. Read the DVD and see my drift. Like a public school prefect trying to enforce a curfew these guardians of political orthodoxy actually believe that they can change public attitudes by narrowing our range of verbal expression. On a national level their weapons are “Human Rights Tribunals”, which of course, are not inclusive of the human right to freely express an opinion contrary to multicultural group-think without legal penalty. That penalty involves the right of the complainant to launch a frivolous complaint against the likes of me for say, a million dollars in damages for insulting his religion with a cartoon, then lose the case before the tribunal, and still have all of his court and legal fees picked up by the taxpayers, of which I am one. While I of course, as the “winner” would still have to mortgage my house to cover my legal expenses. It is no wonder that newspaper editors are afraid to publish anything remotely offensive to the whole rainbow of identity groups who await like sharks for any careless remark to fall overboard. And it is not surprising that there are more and more sharks. When word got out that the loser doesn’t have to pay court cases suddenly everyone nursing a victim complex in Canada is thirsty for blood and wanting to act like a stern librarian walking around the country telling every white Canadian male to be quiet. Just as was described in such books as the “Tenure of Radicals” and “The Closing of the American Mind”, young creative minds enter Canadian post secondary institutions only to have to run a gauntlet of courses led by militant feminists, Marxist fossils and Green globalist cosmopolitans whereby it is impossible to emerge with an flexible mentality. But if by some miracle a graduate student still has a residue of native intellectual integrity and independence left in him, graduate studies in a school of journalism or planning would finish it off. Political correctness is the lubricant of mass immigration. To ram growth down our throats at this frantic pace, we have to apparently be fed with a rich and varied cultural mix, and so goes corporate choreography, the vast volume of one half million New Canadians who pour into the country every year, including permanent and so-called “Temporary Visa” applicants, must be made to feel “comfortable”. Our comfort is not of any concern. That is why Muhammad is a tail that wags a dog of 2700 people. Nice as he is.