Diversity for the sake of diversity

Yesterday I posted some comments on the federal election in which I emphasized the commitment of all the parties to a policy of admitting 250,000 immigrants a year. I tried to show why this is bad for Toronto, but I don't think I did a good job. Attempting to say a lot quickly, I probably wrote a few things people found hard to understand. For example, I used the expression diversity for the sake of diversity. I'm guessing some readers scratched their heads over that, so today I'll try to explain what I meant.

When I wrote diversity for the sake of diversity, I had in mind the idea that immigration should be used as a tool to deliberately make Canada more culturally and racially diverse. In other words, instead of seeing immigration as a way to meet Canada's labour needs with some diversity as an incidental by-product, people now look at it as a way to promote diversity regardless of the economic impact. To put it another way, immigration is seen as a tool for social engineering.

Yesterday, I gave an example of this kind of thinking. Shortly before Pierre Trudeau left office he lowered the annual intake of immigrants in response to high unemployment during a recession. This wasn't controversial, because in the early 1980s, lowering and raising immigration numbers according to the needs of the labour market was routine. However, by the 1990s that had changed. When Preston Manning's old Reform Party put in its platform a proposal to lower immigration numbers during economic downturns, the media and other political parties condemned them for it. In other words, the party was denounced for proposing to handle immigration not much differently from how Trudeau had a decade earlier. Reformers were attacked because by the 1990s diversity had come to be seen as a defining feature of Canadian identity. A proposal to reduce immigration for economic reasons was now viewed as an attack against a fundamental national value. Treating immigration as an economic tool had become an act of sacrilege against the country's new secular religion. (Maybe tomorrow I'll have to explain what I mean by secular religion.)

Younger Canadians may find this hard to believe, but official multiculturalism is a relatively new policy. It was only introduced in the early 1970s while Trudeau was prime minister. For most of our history, immigration was restricted to European countries whose cultures were considered compatible with Canada's dominant Anglo-Saxon culture. Even in the 1960s after Diefenbaker opened up immigration to more countries, newcomers were still expected to assimilate. Most Canadians didn't see cultural diversity as something to celebrate. Instead there was a firm belief among English Canadians that their British-derived culture was superior. Canada's French-speaking minority was tolerated and some accommodations were made for the French language and Roman Catholic religion, but only grudgingly. Official multiculturalism, as much as official bilingualism, was a radical innovation, and I would argue, a pernicious one that threatens Canada's social stability.