The toxicity of Trump's relentless immigrant bashing and fear mongering has been permeating across our border, further polluting Canadian politics and ideals.
The toxicity of Trump's relentless immigrant bashing and fear mongering has been permeating across our border, further polluting Canadian politics and ideals.
Conservative Party leadership candidate Kellie Leitch and her supporters have recently been echoing his call to implement extreme vetting to make immigrants pass a test that will determine whether they hold "anti-Canadian" values.
First of all, who would be assigned with the dubiously ambiguous task of writing this test to begin with? What would the questions even look like: "Do you prefer hockey or soccer? Poutine or shawarmas? Frozen tundra or desert dunes? Horses or camels?"
But seriously, all levity aside, who would actually get to decree precisely what it means to be Canadian, anyway?
Two parties with differing political ideologies — at least on some policies — would no doubt have completely different interpretations of what it means to be "Canadian".
As a French immigrant who moved to this country at the age of five, I mostly learned over the past three decades — or at least was largely led to believe — that Canada embraces its multicultural tapestry that has been made all the stronger by its dynamic social diversity.
But isn't being prejudiced against a people based on where they're coming from alone an anti-Canadian value? Perhaps that could be one of the questions: "Do you judge entire populations based solely on where they're from?"
Yet alarmingly, according to a recent poll that I hope is skewed, a stunning two-thirds of Canadians favour screening migrants for "anti-Canadian" values. Ironically, many of these people likely would fail the same test they would expect others to pass with flying colours.
The proof is in Trump's own supporters, some of whom demonstrated a stunning inability to recognize their own country's laws when posed questions that could be included on a test for migrants. When asked to complete the following sentence, "Two men getting married is..." — legal in the U.S., and Canada for that matter, is the correct answer — a Trump supporter replied "disgusting" without even flinching.
To be Canadian represents as wide a variety of ideals, morals and beliefs as there are Canadians, and our existing citizenship test should be sufficient.
I took, out of sheer curiosity, a random, untimed 20 multiple-choice question Canadian citizenship test online simply to see how I would stack up, and scored 90 per cent. Although that's not bad, it's not 100 per cent either.
For the record, I guessed wrong the name of who apparently was the first leader of a responsible government in Canada: Sir Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine. I also erred on the last province to join Canada, which of course was Newfoundland. Again, I doubted myself as I selected an answer I knew wasn't right: Alberta.
Many of the remaining questions were rather hard to get wrong, such as what the capital of Alberta is, when we celebrate Confederation, and the origin behind the name of our country itself, Canada — which as many well know is the evolution of the word "Kanata," a First Nations term for "village."
On that note, surely we don't want to become the village that is seen on the global stage as just another regressive, isolationist nation that without second thought would turn its back on contributing to the international community's efforts to provide help for millions of displaced, downtrodden and destitute denizens who are guilty of nothing more than being born somewhere different?
Because that doesn't sound very Canadian to me.
