Subsidizing Suppression, Betrayal, And Deceit At The CBC

A few years ago, a 16-year old Chinese girl from Taiwan innocently asked a teacher at a Vancouver school: "Sir, why did you move here? It's all Chinese!"

This is quite an amazing question.

The student was not aware that the teacher was born in Canada, and that his ancestors had arrived here about 200 years ago. She also did not have much knowledge of early or more recent Canadian history. In particular, she did not know that most of the Chinese she saw around her were recent arrivals, the result of Canada adopting in 1990 the highest continual per capita immigrant intake in the world.

The main point she wanted to make was that she was clearly embarrassed for the teacher that he was a minority in a large group of Chinese. In the previous 10 years, at least a dozen other students had expressed the same sentiment to him.

It would seem logical to discuss and ask questions about a culture being overwhelmed by new arrivals. But Canada's CBC, which should provide a forum for such issues, has told us that the immigration flood can be only a positive thing and that we should celebrate it. In fact, CBC employees will often proclaim, "We are diverse", as if to say that surrendering and managing the inflow are the only things that can be done.

The CBC's notions of "diverse" and "diversity" are not high points in human thought. They have been appropriated from biology where they describe the healthy state that results when an ecosystem contains a variety of forms of life.

However, as the Taiwanese student pointed out, the area that she lived in looked more like a huge ethnic monoculture---as do other areas of the country that have experienced the human inflow of the past 16 years.