Thank you for writing your “spiel” on defining “Canadian values,” and I also found your comments very refreshing.
As a multi-generational Canadian — and Sundreite — I was dumbfounded by Kellie Leitch's suggestion that there is even such a thing as Canadian values. Seriously, how does a multi-cultural, relatively newly-formed settler state conjure up unifying values?
As you did, I could come up with some humorous suggestions, such as complaining about taxes, having bad hair, and shovelling the neighour's sidewalk in the winter. I could also come up with more cynical propositions.
The problem is that we know that the rhetoric that Leitch is inciting implies that there is a very specific type of Canadian that is archetypical and that people without Euro-centric and Christian backgrounds are somehow not worthy Canadians.
After all, Leitch is one of the people implicated in the tip line for the former government's proposed “barbaric cultural practices,” as well as inciting the offensive distraction tactics around niqabs during the most recent federal election. This was all while Leitch was the minister for the status of women in Canada no less.
What I find most absurd about all of this is the absolute erasure of First Nations in the proposition that there is such a thing as Canadian values. The creation of Canada as a dominion, after all, rests on the removal of First Nations people from major tracts of land. Is that one of our values that we should celebrate? Do we begin to tread on the dangerous territory of forcing people to learn Canadian values, as was the goal of residential schools?
There is an incredible arrogance in assuming that there is one right way of seeing the world. This arrogance can become dangerous and violent when sanctioned and encouraged by state rules, such as questionable qualitative methods to examine people on their beliefs.
If we want to begin to define our values as a nation, we need to seriously and carefully consider whose ancestral lands we reside on before we begin to force other newcomers to conform to our own barbaric practices.
Janelle Baker
Sundre
