Editor:
Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch has repeatedly chanted the mantra “Canadian values,” and suggests screening potential immigrants to Canada based on these.
Included in her list of venerable ideals is the value of tolerance. I think many of us, whether knowingly or not, hold the same belief but we might be confusing tolerance with welcoming diversity.
Watching events in our big brother south of the border I am convinced that many, president Trump included, are more than willing to welcome diversity as long as it looks like us. Read: white, middle-class male-dominated. Seems somewhat oxymoronic, doesn’t it? I have listened to many friends, relatives, and other pundits describe how followers of Islam don’t think the same way we do (some even implying that killing others is a natural component of that faith), or that Indians who engage in Sikh or Hindu practices have a world view widely disparate from “ours,” or that if we let refugees in they will take “our” jobs. The list goes on and we need not look beyond the borders of our own village to see other examples of the “us” and “them” paradigm.
But, we tell ourselves, we are demonstrating how benevolent and magnanimous we are because we “tolerate” or put up with these differences and fool ourselves into thinking by doing so we are welcoming diversity. Frankly, this is dangerous self-delusion. As residents of an area who have seen the devastation done to our forest industry because of the monoculture practice of repopulating our forests with the one preferred species, we should be aware of the need for diversification. We are not so widely disparate as some would have us believe and if we do not embrace the minute differences among our different cultures we are subjecting ourselves to the risk of a single (elected?) parasite.
Tolerance is not a lofty ideal unless it means putting up with xenophobic, racist attitudes while we work to educate ourselves out of such ignorance. We need to welcome and embrace diversity, not because we tolerate it, but because it is essential to the survival of our species. I agree with Ms. Leitch that we need to be screening people, the people that we elect to office to speak for the rest of us. She certainly doesn’t speak for me.
Sincerely,
Guy Epkens-Shaffer
