Number 113 - May, 1999

Getting More "Diverse" and Enjoying it Less

Like some New Age manta, Canadians are endlessly reminded that they are enriched by "diversity." Not so, according to a March 25 poll by the Toronto Star. In results announced March 30, a resounding 82 per cent answered NO to the question: "Would you say Toronto has become more liveable and interesting because of the influence of immigrants over the past several decades?" It seems fewer and fewer people are buying the party line these days.

Yuk it Up with Immigration Canada

According to the new Citizenship Act, children born abroad of a Canadian citizen are reckoned Canadians throughout their lifetime. Their children also automatically acquire Canadian citizenship -- but this 2nd generation of "Canadians born abroad" must apply (before age 28) to retain citizenship and meet residency requirements. How much of a hardship has that been? Under proposed legislation: "a permanent resident must have accumulated at least three years of physical presence in Canada within a five-year period preceding his or her application for citizenship. ... [BUT], some people who spend only a few days in the country ... (in one case, four days in four years) have been granted citizenship." (News Release #98-59 A New Citizenship Act) "In the past month alone, the Federal Court of Canada has rescinded citizenship awarded to 14 people by the politically appointed judges. ... The Federal Court has already heard more than 200 citizenship appeals, most based on the government's contention that the residency requirement was never met. ... In one recent case, Mr. Justice Max Teitelbaum found that Vancouver businessman Tsong Chou left Canada on the same day, Feb. 8, 1993, that he arrived. ... [The judge's conclusion?] 'Individuals such as the respondent [Mr. Chou] would, I am satisfied, make good Canadian citizens if they would first understand that Canadian citizenship is not purchased but earned." (National Post, January 26, 1999) A novel reading of the fiasco -- not that any of us ever had the chance to discover the enigmatic Mr. Chou's finer points. If the system is so ramshackle and open to abuses that the Immigration Department must resort to the courts to try to rescind citizenship, perhaps we ought to consider an immigration application form that states, clearly and unequivocally: "No MEANS No. If you can't live with that, we don't need to be enriched by you."

Now, Here's Gratitude for You

Last December, former Toronto mayor Barbara Hall was invited to give the third annual Louis Lenkinski Lecture on Human Rights to a Jewish group in Toronto. She "referred with approval to the Mayor's Committee on Community and Race Relations. 'Its work helps to ensure that citizens irrespective of gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability or ethnic origin, can participate fully in the life of the city. Just one example of the committee's advocacy work is a recently initiated complaint against Ernst Zundel for spreading hate on the internet,'" The Canadian Jewish News (December 24, 1998) reported. Apparently, full participation is limited to those with the "correct" views. "In introducing Hall, lecture chair Rabbi Jordan Pearlson said Lenkinski and others like Hall were instrumental is transforming Toronto from 'one of the most bigoted cities' in the world into 'the realm of one of the most peaceful, productive and sensitive multicultural communities in the world.'" The effrontery of these remarks if staggering. Apparently, no one in the rarefied gathering thought to ask just why Pearlson or his forebears chose to come to "one of the most bigoted cities" in the world, or why, having come and found it to be so bigoted, chose to stay anyway.

Canada's Changing Demographics

"As early as 1595, Irish fishing boats plied their trade between Newfoundland and their home ports. ... By the mid-nineteenth century, the Irish in Canada were more numerous than the English or the Scots. ... Today, descendants of Irish immigrants comprise more than 10 per cent of Canada's population. ... Last year, a mere 155 landed immigrants arrived in Canada from the Republic of Ireland. ... The figure for Northern Ireland was 85." (Globe and Mail, March 17, 1999) "A Canadian census in 1981 noted just under 300,000 Jews -- 1.2 per cent of the population. At that point, adherents of Islam in Canada were only a third that number, slightly over 98,000 people, 0.4 per cent of the population. But in a single decade, this ratio changed dramatically. By the 1991 census, Jews in Canada numbered 318,000, still 1.2 per cent of the population, while Muslims had increased to more than 253,000, just below 1 per cent of the whole. ... In recent years, nations such as Pakistan, India and Iran have been among the top ten source countries for immigration to Canada." (Globe and Mail, March 3, 1999)

Ear's to You!: Will Dayaks Be Our Next "Refugees"?

Reuters (March 22, 1999) reported: "A week of savage ethnic clashes in the Indonesian portion of Borneo island has killed at least 114 people and forced thousands to seek safety in the provincial capital, police said Monday. More than 12,000 people have crowded into Pontianak to escape the violence to the north in Sambas district, 875 km (545 miles) northeast of Jakarta, local officials said. The conflict has pitted the region's indigenous peoples against recent migrants from Madura island, off eastern Java. Some victims were decapitated and there have been unconfirmed reports of cannibalism. ... Some of the ethnic groups have started to wear different coloured headbands to identify themselves, yellow for ethnic Malays and red for Dayaks, witnesses said. ... Hundreds, possibly thousands, have died in violence across Indonesia in the past year as deepening poverty exposes long-standing religious and ethnic tensions. One Dayak man was seen wearing an ear from a victim on a necklace, while at the weekend mostly young men drove around displaying the severed heads of Madurese. An official said Madurese fleeing to Pontianak had taken refuge mostly in a sports stadium and a Muslim boarding school. 'The total is around 12,473 refugees, and around 6,535 Madurese refugees are now in Pontianak,'' said Djapari, an official at a post dealing with the victims of the violence. ... A Reuters photographer saw dozens of indigenous Malays and Dayaks drive through streets in the Samabas region of West Kalimantan, 875 km (545 miles) northeast of Jakarta, with their victims' heads displayed on the roof of their pick-up truck. ... There were unconfirmed reports of mobs setting fire to a body and eating it in the town Sambas, West Kalimantan, some 900 km (560 miles) east of Jakarta. `'I saw a body being burned by mobs. It was then divided up and eaten,'' a resident told Reuters." Will some of this lot be Canada's next flood of refugees?

Stop Me if You've Heard This One Before ...

"Tragic refugees in desperate border bid"; "tragic refugees exploited as sex slaves"; "tragic refugees swindled by bogus immigration agency". Only the names change; the particulars are seemingly chiselled in stone. Such stories prompt hypocritical media, legal and political types to squirt a crocodile tear or two, decent-dull-to-normal Canadians pony up just a bit more compassion, and everybody's happy. According to Winthrop D. Jordan, there's nothing very new here. "A very sizeable proportion of settlers in the English colonies came as indentured servants bound by contract to serve a master for a specified number of years, usually from four to seven or until age twenty-one, as repayment for their ocean passage. ... Actually it was his labour which was owned and sold, not his person, though this distinction was neither important nor obvious at the time." (The White Man's Burden, Historical Origins of Racism in the United States, Oxford University Press, 1974) Canada leads the world in obliging "tragic refugees" indentured to snakeheads.

Poll Finds Canadians Intolerant of Swamping

Recently the National Post/COMPAS Research completed a poll probing our attitudes toward ethno-racial minorities. However often we hear that intolerance is the handmaiden of ignorance this poll suggests that familiarity breeds -- not awe -- but contempt. "Across the country, the groups selected for hostility are generally those represented in larger numbers. ... Because few Canadians would openly admit to being racist, the pollster had to get at attitudes in a less direct way. The classic method is to ask whether certain groups have too much power, and then ask how they can change to improve themselves. ... [The sneaky methodology of the pollster implies that even Canadians (initially so receptive) will gradually come to fear and resent a usurpation of power and culture in which they had no say, as much as the varieties of punishment awaiting those who do speak up.] ...The groups targeted for discrimination varied dramatically depending upon the region in which the respondents lived. ... People from Manitoba and Saskatchewan seemed to embrace everyone except aboriginals. In British Columbia and Alberta, fears were expressed toward aboriginals and the Chinese. Quebecers were slightly more likely than most to harbour resentment toward blacks and were far more strongly aligned against aboriginals, Jews, and Italians. And, with the exception of aboriginals, Ontarians demonstrated more antagonism toward all of the groups than the country as a whole [precisely mirroring Canada's minority distribution patterns]." (National Post, March 1, 1999) Whether or not Our Betters care to admit to it, a system that constitutionally emphasizes our differences can only ever succeed in sowing discontent in an ever-widening circle. "This has been lost on vigorous proponents of 'anti-racism' policies that accord special rights based on skin colour. When their policies produce the opposite of what they intended, they press for more of the same. In desperately searching for evidence of racism, it seems Canadian policy makers have helped to foment it." (National Post, March 2, 1999)

Love & Kisses from Immigration Canada

As Ms. Robillard floats her soft-centred immigration "reform" plan, we're suddenly informed that her troops somehow managed to intercept and repatriate 190 Canada-bound Sri Lankans in Africa, last February. They paid smugglers up to $14,000 (U.S.) apiece for the chance to wade ashore here. "Canadian intelligence sources in Asia and Africa uncovered the plot before the ship could load its human cargo off the West African coast and set sail for North America. ... Canada started cultivating foreign immigration sources after the federal government was caught by surprise in 1986 when 155 Tamils were set adrift in two small lifeboats off the Newfoundland coast." (Globe and Mail, January 16, 1999) Despite coming here as part of a smuggling ring, almost all were granted citizenship; as were the shipload of Sikhs that landed in Nova Scotia soon after. When last year's (mostly Tamil) group was stymied in Senegal, Canadian officials said: "humanitarian concerns were always a priority. [Immigration-control officer, Michael] McCaffrey said in an interview that he hired a local doctor and two nurses to tend the medical needs of the men. ... He contracted with the local office of the Swiss-based Organization for Migration to provide supplies. He then convened sensitive negotiations with the Sri Lankan and Senegalese government to repatriate the men. Canada insisted that all of the men had to voluntarily agree to go home and that they would not be subject to reprisals. The Sri Lankan authorities were initially hesitant to agree to anything. But eventually a deal was struck. The men would be held for questioning upon their return, but Canadian and other Western diplomats would be allowed to visit them daily to make sure they were treated well. ... The mission included chartering an aircraft in Africa to fly the Sri Lankans home. " (Globe and Mail, January 16, 1999) Canada certainly sends an unmistakable message to would-be illegals! Did we remember the souvenirs?

Demographics Are Destiny

Two of Canada's oldest and most distinct cultures appear to have lost the will to live. With 35 abortions for every 100 live births in 1997, Quebec achieved a China-like birth rate "of 1.5 children per woman of childbearing age. ... Compare that to the mighty fecundity of Quebec women in the 1950s when they were delivering an average 3.9 babies. ... [In 1996] the most common surname on the island of Montreal was Nguyen, of Vietnamese origin. The 96 baby Nguyens surpassed -- dethroned, as a La Presse headline put it -- the mighty Roys (60), Tremblays and Gagnons (50 each). Runner up to Nguyen, by the way, was Patel, of East Indian vintage, scoring 79 babies in 1996." (Toronto Sun, February 5, 1999) McMaster University's Research Institute for Quantitative Studies in Economic and Population calculates that "over 40 years Newfoundland's population will fall ... a staggering 21 per cent. ... Newfoundland's fertility rate, once the highest in Canada [5 births per woman] is now the lowest -- less than 1.3 births per woman. ... The institute expects Canada's population to grow by 38 per cent over the same period, mainly because of immigration, and Ontario's to grow 49 per cent." (Globe and Mail, March 29, 1999)

We're Becoming An Unreliable Slob Country

Hard-pressed by Mexican border-hoppers, the Americans are left with fewer than 600 guards to patrol Canada's increasingly similar 6,416 kilometre stretch. "John Kyl, an Arizona Republican, said concern over the number of Asian smuggling rings in Canada has led the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to install sophisticated underground sensor equipment near Blaine, Wash., and Buffalo, N.Y." (National Post, March 17, 1999) Stung by the implied criticism, the immigration minister thudded into action. "Ms. Robillard said the Canadian government will lobby other countries and the United Nations to sign an international 'convention on the illegal traffic of immigrants' as quickly as possible. 'We must have a common tool at the international level to fight this phenomenon, to stop not only the victims of smuggling, but the smugglers themselves,' Ms. Robillard declared." (National Post, March 18, 1999) Pining away for even more committees seems like a poor substitute for a coma. It would all be so different if Ms. Robillard were to realize that the victims here are decent Canadian and American taxpayers who are first pressed into subsidizing illegals, and then expected to "celebrate" the consequences. People who freely pay a smuggler to sneak them into another jurisdiction are generally called crooks. Does she really not know that the human smuggling trade would suffer a serious setback without Canada's mouth-breathing compliance? Under the terms of the odious Singh Decision, any self-professed "refugee" may claim sanctuary -- whether that last piece of I.D. is properly digested or not. "'There seems to be a profile of Asians, of Chinese people, who abandon their claims and move south to the U.S.,' said Sergeant Bill MacDonald of the RCMP's immigration branch." (National Post, March 17, 1999) What's that you say? Since we know the profile, why don't we just detain and investigate the "type"? You march right upstairs and wash your mouth out with soap.

Watch and Wonder

Ah, the IdentiKit future: we're told that packing disparate groups cheek by jowl is the enriching path to Utopia -- for us. What is NEVER addressed is the pesky fact that any group that actually believes in something will rightly regard imposed multiculturalism as a continuous and unwarranted assault on cherished beliefs. For example -- "the mosque or Islamic centre, consequently, became the 'second cocoon' sheltering the South Asian Muslims from the ills of Canadian society." (Imam, Abdullah Hakim Quick, Polyphony Vol. 12 pp.120-124, Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1990) The more fervent the belief, the less likely a group can or will assimilate (without the government intervening to trample the very rights and freedoms multiculturalism was supposed to preserve in the first place). Confused? You're sure not alone. In 1994, the French government outlawed the "wearing of 'ostentatious religious symbols' in schools, meaning headscarves. Dozens of Muslim girls have since been expelled. ... [Recently, a Paris court has been examining] the case of a Malian woman. ... She is charged with female genital mutilation, or circumcision, carried out on 48 infant girls in France at the request of their mothers, most of whom are also charged. She told the court she was obeying the word of God; the victim who made the initial complaint says she is now shunned as 'the one who informed on us to the whites'. ... Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a grotesque piece of butchery which each year disfigures mostly African Muslim women, and kills a sizeable percentage of them. If a daughter's sole value is virginity ... few mothers would destroy her life by resisting." (The Guardian, February 12, 1999)

FGM is not necessarily a Muslim convention (however much an otherwise multicultural media enjoys pretending that only Muslim beliefs are -- or can be -- "divisive"). In fact, it is among African animists that FGM is near-universal. Meet Haja Sasso, leader of Sierra Leone's pro-circumcision movement. "When a Freetown newspaper, For Di People, began writing stories critical of female circumcision last year, Mrs. Sasso led what observers say was the largest march the city had ever seen, bringing several thousand angry women into the streets to denounce and threaten the publication." (Globe and Mail, February 1, 1997) However beloved at home, FGM is one of those curious cultural artefacts that simply does not travel well. Even the most ardent diversity-booster is hard-pressed to explain how the removal and/or abbreviation of a helpless young girl's external sexual organs is an enriching experience for her -- or her new host culture. While FGM remains something that immigrant-receiving nations find too nasty to even think about, the medical community has been of one mind: "it's barbaric, but ..." That's because doctors know that the procedure does not vanish with the granting of citizenship papers. On the contrary, it has simply been driven underground instead, with all the attendant untidiness of back street abortions.

Curiously, for all our moral indignation over mutilated genitals, hymenorraphy, or the surgical recreation of an artificial hymen presents no such ethical quandary -- in fact it's legal in all Western societies. "The celebration of the bloody sheet, vividly portrayed in popular cinema, is based on strong religious and cultural beliefs. The Koran states that a bride has to be a virgin, and according to custom a woman found on her wedding night to have been 'touched' brings shame to her family. Consequences include divorce through to death. Hymenorraphy is illegal in most Arab countries. ... Egypt's [covert] trade in hymen repairs, reported last year, reduced 'cleansing' murders by 80% over the previous 10 years. The simplest technique of hymenorraphy, performed days before a wedding, uses catgut sutures to approximate hymen remnants (with or without incorporation of a gelatin capsule containing a blood-like substance which bursts on intercourse)." (BMJ 1998; 316: 461-7 February) That these chatty "tips" should appear in the prestigious British Medical Journal implies that the procedure has become a commonplace. Again that's unfortunate, because a subsequent issue reveals just what a baseless cultural expectation the butcher's bedsheet is: "the practice of reconstructing 'the hymens of adolescent girls who are no longer virgins but wish to appear so' only serves to perpetuate the myth that the hymen is necessarily torn after sexual intercourse. ... The study by Emans et al found that 19% of the sexually active postpubertal females had no visible abnormalities of the hymen." (BMJ 1998: 317: 414 8 August)

Cultural implications for the 20% of women who may be virgins, but whose bridal chamber will not resemble a crime scene, hardly bears thinking about. And who wants to be forced to think about any of this stuff? But that's multiculturalism -- an ever expanding catalogue of uncomfortable topics which mustn't be criticized -- voiced -- thought. As a point of education, the ruddy obsession is not unique to Islam; a characteristically vicious Old Testament passage dictates: "If a man takes a wife and, after lying with her, dislikes her and slanders her and gives her a bad name, saying, 'I married this woman, but when I approached her, I did not find proof of her virginity,' then the girl's father and mother shall bring proof that she was a virgin to the town elders at the gate. The girl's father will say to the elders, 'I gave my daughter in marriage to this man, but he dislikes her. Now he has slandered her and said I did not find your daughter to be a virgin. But here is the proof of my daughter's virginity.' Then her parents shall display the cloth before the elders of the town, and the elders shall take the man and punish him. They shall fine him a hundred shekels of silver and give them to the girl's father, because this man has given an Israelite virgin a bad name." (Deuteronomy 22:13-18) In the matter of the Paris genital mutilation trial: "Hawa Greou, 52, ... was sentenced to eight years. ... [She] had faced up to 20 years in prison. Parents of the girls received sentences ranging from a suspended three-year term to two years in prison." (Globe and Mail, February 17, 1999)

Filipina Nurse With TB Worked at a Hospital?

Somewhere in the world someone will die of tuberculosis in the time it takes you to read this sentence -- that's one person every 10 seconds -- the equivalent of a jumbo jet crashing every hour - every second someone is infected. And Canada still doesn't get it. In 1995, Ludy and Dionisio Masaba immigrated with their two children from the Philippines. Dionisio rescued us from our chronic shortage of casual labourers while, despite her "history of tuberculosis ... Ms. Masaba worked as a nurse in Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. ... [She] was one day short of taking her oath of Canadian citizenship when she died, coughing up blood, in a Mississauga hospital. ... When she started coughing up blood in her Mississauga home, she went to Credit Valley Hospital, where she was diagnosed as having a nosebleed and sent home after an hour and a half. ... 'She was mishandled and did not receive any good medical procedures while suffocating and drowning in her own blood,' Mr. Masaba said. He said that the family wants a full inquest into the death." (Globe and Mail, March 23, 1999)

The Casual Approach to TB

"An estimated 50 per cent of Russia's one million prison inmates are infected with the TB bacillus. ... In Russia, 'to sell a bread crumb' refers to the practice of eating a TB patient's dried sputum in order to infect oneself. These prisoners cling to a hope that they will receive better rations, will not have to work and will be transferred to less-crowded living conditions. ... A very different fate awaits." (WHO Report on the Global Tuberculosis Epidemic, 1998) Driven by despair, these suicidal wretches can still say they enjoy some measure of free will -- however misguided. It's a luxury increasingly denied Canadians: "postal workers in Saskatoon fear they may contract tuberculosis after saliva and mucus samples were sent through the mail in improper packages, including a potato-chip tin. 'They are telling us we are cry-babies,' said Thelma Raabel, union health and safety co-chairwoman for the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. 'It's an airborne disease. It sure as hell shouldn't be coming through the mail in a chip can.' In a letter to Royal University Hospital, Canada Post asks laboratory officials to improve the way hundreds of tuberculosis sputum samples are packaged and shipped to it each year." (Globe and Mail, March 12, 1999)

Terrorist's Wife Nabbed for Welfare Fraud

Through an access to information request the Canadian Press has learned that since 1985, "the RCMP have spent about $26-million gathering evidence in their investigation of the Air-India bombing [the most expensive investigation in the history of the force]. ... No charges have been laid." (Globe and Mail, March 12, 1999) Well okay, there has been one charge. "The wife of convicted bomb maker and Air India suspect Inderjit Singh Reyat has been charged with welfare fraud for allegedly taking more than $100,000 in benefits to which she was not entitled. The charges were sworn against Satnam Kaur Reyat Wednesday in Surrey." (National Post, April 2, 1999)

Feeling Homesick?

"A Toronto man who was deported three times from the U.S. has been arrested by Toronto Police for immigration offences. In March 1989, he was sentenced to 18 years in jail for firearms and drug offences. [Det. Greg] Getty said the man was deported three times to Jamaica because he never told U.S. officials he had landed status in Canada. [Get it? That's three U.S. subsidized trips "home" for a quick visit before heading back to a delighted Canada]. Immigration spokesman Anna Pape said the man was inadmissable to Canada because of his U.S. convictions. .... 'He has an immigration inquiry, and hopefully it will result in a removal order from Canada,' Pape said. [And hoping really is the very best strategy Immigration Canada can offer] Norman Trevor Williams, 46, has been charged with several immigration and drug offences." (Toronto Sun, April 2, 1999)

Arranged Marriage Rebel Kidnapped

One of the problems with multicult is that it upholds the fiction that all cultures and practices are equally to be cherished. Consider the case of the reluctant bride. ''A Toronto woman who refused to marry a man in an arranged wedding is recovering in a U.S. hospital after being found bound and gagged in the trunk of a car at the border. ... Police said the victim and her fiancé were immigrants from Afghanistan and had been living [though clearly not integrating] in Toronto for several years. U.S. magistrate judge Carol Heckman .... alleged the woman was dragged from her Toronto home last Thursday and hidden in a basement until being forced into the trunk for a trip to the border. ... The woman was handcuffed and her feet were bound with rope, she said. ... Heckman alleges the woman's fiancé was also in the trunk of the car to ensure she didn't make any noise as they tried to cross the Rainbow Bridge. ... Jamal Nasser Aziz, 37, of Toronto, and Muhammad Wahid Nader, 29, of San Francisco, have been charged." (Toronto Sun, January 3, 1999) Little "cultural misunderstandings" like this one will doubtless keep Canada's "battered-woman" industry robust for many diverse years to come.

Canada -- Still the Scamster's Delight

"A Venezuelan man who was deported after serving nine years for plotting the jailbreak of two drug traffickers has been told he can come back for a new refugee hearing. The Federal Court of Canada has ordered Roberto San Vincente Freitas, 53, undergo a new hearing and that his air-fare and accommodation be paid for by taxpayers. ... Freitas was jailed in 1990 after he and four other Venezuelans were caught trying to free two Colombian drug smugglers, who were jailed for trying to smuggle $200 million worth of cocaine into Canada [then the largest drug bust in our history]. The traffickers' light plane had crashed in September 1989 on an airstrip near Fredericton, N.B. ... After his release from prison, Freitas moved to Toronto and claimed refugee status, saying he feared persecution in Venezuela because of his political beliefs. ... The IRB excluded him from refugee status because of his criminal record, and deported him last year while an appeal of his exclusion order was before the federal court." (Toronto Sun, March 2, 1999) In sharp contrast to Ms. Robillard's conciliatory dithering; other nations are amending loopholes to stem (rather than accommodate) the flood of abuses ...

Leaders and ... Swingers

In the mid-1700s, Sir Guy Carleton vowed: "this country to the end of time must be peopled by the Canadian race who have already taken such firm root that any new stock transplanted will be totally and imperceptibly hid amongst them." In 1886, Sir Wilfrid Laurier (who believed that the 20th century "belonged" to Canada) elaborated: "As Canadians, we are affected by local and national considerations, which bind us together and so we are led to look back to the land of our ancestors and feel, with all that, to be no less good Canadians. These are the feelings of the race to which I belong, and on this question I am true to my race, I am true to Canada. ... I am above all true to the cause of liberty and justice." And then bell-bottoms were invented. On October 8, 1971 (following extensive travels through Communist hinterlands like the USSR, Cuba and China) Pierre Trudeau made us the world's only officially multicultural country. We were dismissively informed that "Canadian identity will not be undermined by multiculturalism." And, more ominously: "the government cannot and should not take upon itself the responsibility for the continued viability of all cultural groups. The objective of our policy is the cultural survival and development of ethnic groups to the degree that a given group exhibits a desire for this." Get it? We didn't scream loud enough to be "viable". In one fell swoop we were transformed from a functional country into episodic Assemblies of Deprived Persons. Today -- far from "not noticing" our differences -- we agonize instead over meticulously detailed statistics on race, ethnicity and gender in the faint hope of guaranteeing "Victim" groups proportional representation. "Ethnic power-sharing on these lines is not, in fact, a new idea. It has commonly been employed in conditions such as those of Lebanon or Northern Ireland ... where cultural, ethnic and religious groups were separated by murderous antagonisms ... and where the constitution was therefore designed to restrain warring groups rather than to make democratic debate possible. ... Since the problems that might justify ethnic power-sharing do not [yet] dominate prosperous Western democracies, it proposes to foster those problems as best it can. ... Of course, like all such grandiose schemes of social engineering, multiculturalism cannot ultimately succeed. But it can cause a lot of damage in the course of failing." (John O'Sullivan, National Post, March 17, 1999)