You can’t build a society on nothing but feel-good slogans…
The Liberals love to claim that “diversity is Canada’s strength,” but their idea of diversity has always been surprisingly narrow.
They tend to speak of diversity in the most superficial terms. Throw as many different colours and nationalities together and diversity has been achieved!
Yet, diversity goes far beyond how people look.
Diversity of opinions, perspectives, beliefs, and values are all part of what makes a society truly diverse or not.
A country can be very homogenous superficially yet have significant room for different viewpoints. Conversely, a country can be very diverse superficially but have everyone think almost exactly the same.
Clearly, the Liberals are striving for Canada to be the latter, a place where everybody looks different but diversity of thought is almost non-existent.
Of course, there’s a bit of a problem with this, because it turns out that people from different parts of the world often bring very different attitudes to this country, and a few slogans like “diversity is strength” can’t hide that forever. As you can hear in the Tweet below, there’s a clash going on now over what diversity actually is:
A teacher at Londonderry Junior High School in Edmonton, Alberta Canada, tells Muslim pupils off for skipping school to avoid LGBTQ Pride events.pic.twitter.com/j1OID1sCGK
— Hussein Ebrahim (@therealhebrahim) June 6, 2023
Here we see the paradox that “tolerance” can become intolerant, and that those who would call themselves the most “tolerant” don’t have much room for actual differences of opinion.
As noted by Anthony Koch, those on the left seem surprised that people actually have real beliefs that can differ from their own:
That moment when progressives realize that Islam is actually a system of beliefs that doesn’t always conform to progressive ideology and isn’t just a cute costume minorities wear. #cdnpoli https://t.co/IcaCSbDBnd
— Anthony Koch (@Anthony__Koch) June 7, 2023
A diverse nation must stand for something
We are likely to see more of this happen in Canada, because we are currently seeing two incompatible goals be pursued. One one hand, the Liberals push for massive immigration from all around the world – including places that are extremely culturally conservative.
On the other hand, the Liberals and the ‘woke’ movement in general are increasingly using the instruments of state power to pursue a rigid set of ‘acceptable’ norms and ‘acceptable’ ways of thinking. Those ways of thinking are quite different from the ways of thinking of many newcomers.
Complicating all of this is that the Liberals have also spent years trying to demonize and denigrate Western Civilization, thus undermining the foundation of our country and undermining the philosophical/moral arguments they could have made in defense of individual freedom.
After all, if all cultures are ‘equal’ and all beliefs are ‘valid,’ why shouldn’t newcomers impose their beliefs on Canada?
Ironically, it’s actually an easy problem to solve. By reducing the power of the state, and respecting the rights of the individual, parents who want their kids to be involved in pride events could do so, and parents who want their kids not to be involved could also do so. Further, given that technology makes it far easier for teaching to be decentralized, there is no reason why people shouldn’t be able to opt out of the public school system entirely and put their tax dollars towards private education institutions instead. Let parents and communities build up their own school systems based on their own principles and values, instead of putting the incompetent state in charge of everything. All the technological barriers to this are gone, only the dead-hand of the bureaucratic state and politicians obsessed with control stand in the way.
But again, that would be an approach that is based on the Western idea that the individual should have freedom of choice, something opposed by both the woke left and the far-right.
So yet again, we are seeing why it was such a mistake for our political ‘elites’ to embrace a movement that tore down statues and demonized Canadian history/Western Culture. It has left us more and more open to extremes, both the extremes of the far-left who have no boundaries at all, and the reactionaries on the far-right who seem willing to give up on freedom itself in order to ‘own the libs’.
At the end of the day, a nation must stand for something. Canada must stand for individual freedom, limits on state power, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech, or our pursuit of diversity will devolve into either tribal conflict or the mass conformity of differently-hued ideological clones.
Spencer Fernando
