The trouble with immigrants

I see where Karen Wang has been shelved as the Liberal candidate for Burnaby South after party apparatchiks found out she'd referred to her primary competition, NDP leader-without-a-seat Jagmeet Singh, as an "Indian."

Jagmeet has been the lame-duck NDP leader since he became NDP leader, but thus far nobody has had the politically incorrect effrontery to refer to him as "Indian."

We're talking about Indians from India, of course, not the Canadian variety... you know, the folks we swindled out of this land. Karen had the temerity not only to note that Jagmeet was "Indian," but she suggested to her Chinese constituency that if they all voted along ethnic lines, they could collectively deny him a seat in the House, thereby rendering the lame duck even lamer.

Cue the moral outrage! The Lib party elite desperately want Jagmeet to win in Burnaby, mainly because they want a lame-duck NDP leader to run against in the next federal election. God forbid the NDP come up with someone remotely appealing as the leader they'd have to face!

So Wang's candidacy has been duly rescinded to appease the gods of political correctitude, but also to serve the interests of the party elite.

Here's how the always astute CBC reports the matter;

"Recent online comments by Karen Wang are not aligned with the values of the Liberal Party of Canada," said a statement from the party.

"The Liberal Party has a clear commitment to positive politics and support for Canadian diversity, and the same is always expected of our candidates."

So Karen Wang's sin was to appeal to the ethnic identity of voters in Burnaby South.

That's the trouble with immigrants. Sometimes they remember where they came from. Sometimes they even remember the ethnic rivalries of the places they came from. That's obviously a taboo in our politically correct climate.

Because diversity is our strength...

My own clan were DP immigrants from Germany who got off the boat at Pier 21 in 1956. Of course we remembered where we came from! The fact that the Germans had lost two world wars in rapid succession was never allowed to becloud our belief that we were superior in every way to Poles, Greeks, Italians... just about everyone, come to think of it! That's just the way of the world...

Or at least it used to be.

In the fullness of time, our extended clan eventually adopted, married into, became business partners with, or sponsored as refugees virtually every ethnicity under the sun! 

The world today is in the hands of folks who write books like "Maximum Canada." That's the McKinsey & Co vision of a Canada with a hundred million citizens who all cleave to a generic and politically correct version of nationhood where "diversity is our strength..."

Whatever that means.

Karen Wang is obviously too smart to internalize that bullshit.


Diversity will only become a strength when we can call out, comment on, and at the end of the day, respect our differences.

(Postscript 25.1.2019  My dear parents recently had their DNA tested by one of those ancestry outfits, and apparently their German DNA is swamped by Swedish and East European DNA... so we weren't really all that "German" after all.)