Immigrants must strive to embrace Canadian identity

Re: Canada struggling to ‘absorb’ immigrants, Douglas Todd column, Aug. 11.

At my citizenship ceremony in 1983, the citizenship judge told me and citizens of 22 other countries that we need relinquish nothing of our native cultures in becoming Canadian.

Coming from Ireland, I knew this is a grave error. After 400 years, Scots settlers haven’t integrated and the Irish don’t wish to accommodate them.

In a Canadian Studies lecture in 1993, I warned against too great speed, volume and cultural diversity of immigration. A Quebec delegate told me he agreed with everything I said and that his province would never accept multiculturalism.

As for the rest of Canada: As the unpublished new report acknowledges, we’re seeing the formation of ethnic enclaves in the bigger cities and the mutual estrangement of citizens.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau employed the Multiculturalism Act (1971) to end the two solitudes. That didn’t happen and what he may have bequeathed to Canada is the likelihood of as many solitudes as he could possibly have wanted.

What is urgently needed is plain public speaking, strenuous and sympathetic efforts to encourage integration, promotion of a common Canadian identity to which economics must be subordinated, acceptance of multiculturalism as an urban fact, and a no-holds barred review of it as a government policy.

John Wilson Foster, Country Down, Northern Ireland