Canada draws strength from diversity.
I could see an American conservative looking at this list and shudder in fear from the "loss of white culture", and how immigrants couldn't possibly love their second country as much as native-borns.
Yet we do. And Vancouver is proof. Source: Am Immigrant Vancouverite (presently living in Europe)
* Obligatory footnote acknowledging our dark past with Japanese internment, and dark past and present with dealing with social problems that affect first nations communities disproportionately.
Research shows that as diversity increases, so do political difficulties. Homogeneity is credited for a lot of policy successes in Scandinavia. Canada is simply another example of this, plus it is one of the earth's biggest petro-states.
It is less a cosmopolitain melting pot and more like Minnesota with the oil wealth of Texas. Vancouver and Toronto are admirable exceptions.
I now live in the most diverse part of Toronto. My building probably has speakers of a least a dozen languages. I love it here.
> plus it is one of the earth's biggest petro-states.
This is killing us economically. Ten years of Harper's policies pushing us harder into economic reliance on oil, now oil is way down in price and our economy is going with it.
This is why we need immigration and education: to build a stronger economy that isn't reliant on natural resources.
You're vision of "a stronger economy that isn't reliant on natural resources" is one of the main points of the Alberta Heritage Fund [0]. Even Albertans recognize that you can't rely on natural resources forever. However, it is naive to think you can't use them to help you change the future. In terms of education, the article states that Alberta as a sovereign state would be in the top 5 in science education on the PISA international test.
Also, "now oil is way down in price and our economy is going with it" is completely fallacious as the only reason why our economy could fall is because our oil industry was propping it up. Here is a nice graphic to show the parity between the two [1].
At the end of the day, it takes time to convert your entire country to clean energy sources. Even in Canada where we have 2/3 already renewable, the amount of time it would take to make that 100% is going to take decades. Until then, my main argument for the oilsands is that I'd rather have people earning honest wages in a country where the companies are held liable to environmental destruction instead of the Middle East.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_Heritage_Savings_Trust... [1] - http://news.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/diagram770.jpg
Heh. It used to be sold as the 'melting pot'.
Because I'm an immigrant living in Toronto. The diversity here, while "nice", seems to be a significant weakness if anything - a highly fractured, multi-cultural society simply tolerating one another's existence with no real united identity, goals or vision for Canada's future.
Transitioning from a bi-cultural society to a multi-cultural society is actually an improvement, because it reduces the power of English and French cultures to simply strong minorities among many. It's resulted in a balance-of-power arrangement, where neither has any hope any longer of dominating the whole of Canada.
It means it's unlikely that either English Canada or French Canada will try to go to civil war with the other, because they have nothing to gain and everything to lose. That's a remarkable achievement all on its own.
How's that different from your average major metro area in the USA? Or, for that matter, anywhere else in the First World right now?
I think they're more worried that immigrants won't love whites as much as other whites do.
I'm not saying non-whites hate the whites or anything. I'm suggesting that's not the primary motivation for immigrants. For refugees... they literally just want to escape their hometown to escape death, so I think survival comes before anything else really.
NYC and Toronto are success stories in multiculturalism, where people come, become educated, and integrate into the local culture, but ethnic/cultural enclaves that have been forming in cities overseas are not (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9r6ZCwQxZk).
