Multiculturalism is CanadaÂ’s greatest mistake, but if it is any consolation, it is every western countryÂ’s greatest mistake. And now some of them are paying a terrible price. If I have to elaborate on the names Pim Fortuyn, Theo Van Gogh and Ali Hirsi, then you just havenÂ’t been paying attention.
The official idea behind multiculturalism was that cultural diversity would make us all better people. It would enrich our drably homogeneous social fabric, encourage tolerance and combat hatred. The happy surface of multiculturalism is a street-enlivening diversity of skin hues, native fabrics, with a panoply of foreign cuisines on every corner — schwarma, pad thai, falafel, tandoori goat — not to mention the feel-good, meticulously painted-by-number rainbow of visible minorities one sees working in government agencies, non-profit organizations and university equity offices.

The underside of multiculturalism is its ideological root in West-bashing. Sometime around 1960, it was determined by a few French intellectuals (whose unintelligible gibberish other intellectuals pretended to understand) that the greatest criminals against humanity in the history of the world werenÂ’t the Nazi and Communist murderers of 100 million people. Rather, it was European colonialists, who imposed their cultural values on their captive audience.

Even though Canada was a colony itself, and had never indulged in imperialism of any kind, Canadians were informed they must share in the blame because of their religious, racial and cultural association with former colonialists.

Multiculturalism is idealistic in theory, but its real effect has been the entrenchment in our intellectual and cultural elites of an unhealthy obsession with a largely phantom racism amongst heritage Canadians that no amount of penance or cultural self-effacement can ever transcend.