Myth # 1 "Canada is a nation of immigrants"
Feeling guilty yet? Well, you should be, at least
that's the idea that drives these cliches. Of course, it's true. Whether
we arrived by way of the Bering Land Bridge or in steerage, we all came
from somewhere else. According to that logic, aboriginals are immigrants
too. As the oldest, best-established group on the continent, they presumably
owe an enormous debt of gratitude, moral support, time and money to all
subsequent arrivals. But somehow it doesn't work that way. It is Canadians
of European descent who are expected to subsidize - in perpetuity - those
who came before us, as well as those who continue to roll in. In other
words, we must assist those we displaced, while supporting efforts to displace
us.
Aboriginal rights revolve around the idea that a standing population
was first overwhelmed, then subsumed and forced to toe the line by new
people(s) and new culture(s). We've heard the charges of genocide and cultural
extermination. (Both concepts have been rather successfully marketed to
Canadians of European descent under the guise of 'multiculturalism').
Noticing any similarities is rather forcefully discouraged. Aboriginals
may balk at the the mere suggestion, but their ancestors crossing the Bering
Land Bridge, had more in common with immigrant European arrivals than PC
politics will admit. Aboriginal and European antecedants did not find their
way here through the intervention of an immigration lawyer or consulting
service. And both arrived in a wilderness. They most assuredly did not
find welfare, educational, old-age or medical programs. Even the most hopelessly
brain-dead liberal knows there is a WORLD of difference between today's
immigrant and those (red and white) who created something of that wilderness.
The liberal just doesn't want you to talk about it.
And while we're on the subject, not all of us came to North America
as immigrants. Indeed, our two major founding European peoples -- the French
and the English -- came to part of their homeland. The French came to "New
France"; the English to a British colony.