Divide-and-conquer plan? It’s working for Ford
What is Ontario Premier Doug Ford up to? His wilful decision to gerrymander Toronto wards and intensify suburbanurban competition was done to turn Torontonians against each other. He found it fun, a child’s indoor war game on a rainy day, and at the end, everything blows up real good.
But achieving unity is a politician’s most basic task. Canadians are better together, especially as President Trump threatens our economic interests, as forest fires ravage a baking world, as immigrants consider fleeing here. This is why the prime minister travels constantly, working to bring Canadians together. Co-operation and cohesion are the basis of his job, not identity politics and political tribes.
Ford doesn’t even try. If citizens are distracted and chewing at each other’s vitals, Ford sits back and laughs. He doesn’t like democracy. He wishes to impede it.
It’s the latest example of the drive to divide, the hallmark of the Trump era. Like measles outbreaks when some vaccinate and others don’t, division spreads and public safety is at risk.
Ford’s decision to cancel modern sex education in Ontario schools is just another game. In 2015, parents, many of them new Canadians, fought the new curriculum, distancing themselves from modern social values.
In 2017, Hindu activists in Peel fought against Muslim prayers being allowed in public schools, a semiconcealed religious and ethnic battle that puzzled many observers.
These quarrels are damaging. I wonder why Ford decided to stir this particular soup, already on a rolling boil. On Tuesday, he accused the NDP of racist heckling, while himself mixing up India and Pakistan.
In Markham on the weekend, a group of Chinese-Canadians demonstrated after a rumour spread of a city offer to temporarily house a handful of asylum seekers locally.
Appalled by the visuals and morally offended, other Chinese-Canadians demonstrated to welcome migrants. Fights broke out, as YorkRegion.com reported. The police were called. It was not a good look.
Consider the flight of the Vietnamese boat people in 1978. Many of those fleeing after the U.S. defeat were Chinese, something not much remarked on at the time.
But as Amy Chua notes in her new book, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, Vietnamese nationalism always had an ethnic dimension unknown to the Americans. The Vietnamese resented a historically wealthy Chinese elite with vast governmental power.
Canada took in those fleeing Vietnam by boat, people of any ethnicity. Human decency overcame racism.
To see a small group of prosperous Canadians objecting to asylum-seekers — many with black skin — is a sorrow and a defeat. We have to mix and make friends. Enclaves are inimical to modern Canadian life.
I know this because I am of mixed race (South Asian and Scottish) and live in a white enclave. There’s something deadening about it. People wear oddly truncated pants and “tops.” Music festivals shut down at 8 p.m., which I presume is the local bedtime. Fridge magnets and ’80s rock abound.
I am a reliable feminist and all abortions are fine with me, but it was sad to hear that sex-selective abortions among South Asians in Ontario are not limited to the first generation, but continue in the second.
Young South Asian women are pressured by misogynist families to abort female fetuses, or they may think women’s lives are too hellish for them to retain one in good conscience. Either way, these women are still not part of mainstream Canadian life where girls are as much a joy as boys are.
I will not dwell on the racist attacks after the murderous Danforth mass shooting, on the gunman and his family, or on the victims who were seen as undeserving of so much attention. That hate is expressed on social media, which you should avoid reading.
Division exists and it’s spreading. It’s as if some Canadians saw Trump-sponsored hate against racial groups and thought it was now socially acceptable. It is not, profoundly not.
In Canada, we follow international rules, accept self-identified asylumseekers and give them a fair hearing. We do not disparage people of other races. We work, and succeed, en masse. That’s why we’re a rich country. Despite the Fords, we’re all in this together.