Heh, lets see what's in these here history books, eh? what we got here, in no particular order: the Head Tax, internment camps, Africville, Grosse Île, forced labour of the Irish famine children, Seven Oaks massacre, Cypress Hills, the residential schools, Treaty 9, James Bay and Davis Inlet, the War Measures Act, Bennett's New Deal, Meech Lake and Charleton Accord, MK-ULTRA, the Duplessis Orphans and the Avro Arrow, Maher Arar, David Milgaard and Stephen Trustcott and it all founded by an ill-tempered alcoholic and some ruthless offshore monopolies?

Yeah, well ... I'm no curriculumist, but seems to me a tad wisers to ix-nay on the istry-hay, and just quietly welcome the newcomers in and if we keep very very quiet, we can continue to play the modern world's exemplary experimental pluralist social democratic society.

Besides, any time we really wanted a whitewashed monocultural homogeny, there's a great one within 90 miles south of where just about anybody here is living, and its worth a weekend's shopping visit stateside once in a while just to experience how that mythical take on togetherness actually works in practice! :)

When the red neck mentality I have is given a forum to speak it is never pretty, and sometimes not even coeherint(sp?), and without a doubt it is not P.C. but that said it cant be ignored and shouldn't be ignored. The only way to promote an ideaology is to have the best publicist with a deep pocket budget.
I submit the following for your approval and if the idea of what is Canadian doesn't hit home I will resign.
A fifth generation farmer cannot , regardless of intellect and ability make a living.
There is no help whatsoever other than the generosity and far sighted notions of a bank manager.
A first generation (and nationality is irrelavant) is able to open a business and operate it with the full support of the government, inculusive of tax breaks and the original incentives and initiatives.
How the f... does anyone with the ability to see past the end of thier nose say this is how a country should be run.
No one , despite the good intentions they have will convince me this is correct and even smart.
But in the 80's the big joke was if you are white / male and straight ( and we all saw the employmnet applications ) then you are toast, and I mean toast.
So when the next foreclosure happens , and you agree with the policies of the day, go up to the owner of the land being sold and say that one family has been put up in a hotel for a year waiting for either extridition or acceptance into the country and for the same amount of coin we couldnt pay the exact same amount to you to save your farm and allow you to be a contributing member of society as you have been in the past.
wt

In Transactional Analysis Psychology the clinician will not accept finger pointing in any outward direction. They don't mean to say that external forces do not complicate our lives, but only wish to underline how that pre-occupation cannot bear fruit; the easy way to change is by changing ourselves because that's the thing we can change. Of course, before we can take credit for remaking ourselves, the dark scary side of TA is we must also accept the responsibility for our actions, and that means we have to shoulder some blame for our own undoing.

Congo refugees, despite what The Star might say, did not get any carte blanche. I was there, I saw it with my own eyes and helped hand them out: they got gift certificates from Zellers for cheap consumer goods and were housed along aging Don Mills and Dundas W in apartments the reg'lar folk didn't want. Those relocated from Hongkong brought their own cash, converted from the absurd property values there; many of them are still living off that cash years later, because the best they can do here just doesn't pay the bills. We're seeing a lot of them now either sneaking back for 6 months to make some money, or just giving up on Canada and willing to give the PRC a go. Think about that: They'd rather live under communism than stay here! That's not a great endorsement.

Meanwhile farms are failing everywhere, not just here. Fisheries and farms, everywhere. The new religion of Shareholder Profit does not allow for simple things like food, not unless it carries ever-higher profit for its investors. And, to be Canadian is to be fair, so lets remember that it was these post-war farmers who sold themselves into these mass-market pipelines, visions of gilded sugarplums dancing in their heads, they sold out their own future. Ok, the banks very often heavily influenced those choices, but nobody ever held a gun to anyone's head and said they had to bulldoze the fields and chain their production to a million dollars of mortgaged machinery. Yes it is a real big ugly pickle, but it is still largely a pickle of their own making.

I don't know but I been told the orthodox Mennonite farms up on the highgrounds of central Southern Ontario are all still profitable, all still productive, and all still have clean water. That's probably co-incidence.

But there's another issue too: When you've come from a place like the Congo or Vietnam, you look about at the locals and say to yourself, "They are so lazy, they won't even wash toilets or serve fast food to better themselves!" and so they grab a mop. Like us way back generations ago, where they came from they could only watch others do the entrepreneurial merchant thing. So they are highly motivated, highly focussed, and a one-room flat on Don Mills and a job scraping toilets is a damn good deal. Unlike us who strive for weird abstractions, they know what they want. Oprah's The Secret works for them wonderfully.

Did I mention motivation? While our kids puffaw un-sexy jobs and hold out for grants and subsidies, these kids work for their parents for free, working together, eyes on the prize. Some get lucky, buy some beat building and they came here with all sorts of jimmy-rig repair skills we lost two generations ago. They fix it up just enough that only someone from a place like home would think it was just peachy fab, and they rent it for cheap because loyalty has real-market value, and they work together, find jobs for each other, invent jobs for each other. Just like we did, two and more generations ago.

While we're out mortgaging our future chasing HDTVs, PiYoga and SUVs, they are at work watching their kids grab PhDs, equity and MBAs.

Meanwhile the factory farms are replacing workers with machines, and machines, while cheap and hard working, are loyal to no one but the Bank, and Banks are loyal only to the Shareholders.

Is it time to mention John A.'s relationship with the Bankers of Scotland?

I'll grant your point if you can prove it:

"For some unexplained reason, folks who now come from third world countries bring with them a strong sense of 'entitlement'."

Them's pretty big words; do you have sources? And figures please, not anecdotes.

And also, do you really subscribe to the immigration annual reports?? I'm just curious: why would you do that?

As for TA and its relevence to the discussion, I meant to clumsily imply that while life may be 90% luck, it is amazing how lucky you can get when you work hard, and while government policies may not be entirely what you wanted, the way to change them is to roll up your sleeves and get to it, a method I see new immigrants using all the time.

As for the PRC, can I assume you already know about the PRC propping up the US dollar in the money markets? I only mention it since we're talking about subsidies and political favours ...

Wayne, if you think your government lies to you, let me tell you that your government lies to me just as much.

I studied social work in Hongkong and was a social worker. I was told that there was a shortage of social workers here. Do you think I could find work? No! That was 12 years ago when I up-rooted myself and moved to this country which was totally strange to me. A job closest to what I was trained for and experienced in was to work as a relief worker for Community Living a few hours here and a few hours there, for not even half what I would earn in Hongkong. The worst part, however, was that my "professional" input was not recognised. How things were run was too far fetched from an ideal social work situation. But that's besides the point.

5 years ago, I visited human resources in Owen Sound, hoping to seek advice on re-training, so I could join the workforce. There was no programme available. "Pay for a baby-sitter and gas to come out to our workshop and learn how to write a resume." I was told. The frustrating thing is, I saw often jobs advertised, which almost sounded like social work. They would only take candidates who were receiving EI. How could I be receiving EI if I had never given a chance to work.

Around that time, I was talking to somebody who immigrated here about 40 years ago. Stepping down from the plane from England, she and her husband were both professionals. They had a few dollars in their pockets and an infant. Like me, they were told that this country was in need of people like them. However, every time they were given a job interview, the determining question was: do you have any "Canadian experience". Needless to say, they soon found themselves working jobs which provided just enough for bread and butter.

Don't get me started on how this country treat new immigrants!

After what Canadian government has, and has not done for me, I cannot say that I do not find this country harsh and cold. So, I guess I am a security risk by your definition.

Years ago when the young one was still in the stroller I saw this commotion at Toronto City Hall from our hotel. being adventerous I pushed the wee guy up to the see what all the hub bub was about. At the time an embassy had been hit by an errant misle in one of Canadas peace keeping efforts and I was told by one of the TV crews that this was a protest by members of the group who's embassy had been hit. I took it by the several thousand chanting and signs that this group was demanding Canada get out of this conflict.
I saw an ice cream vendor and thoought I would sneak across and get me some treats. So pushing the stroller I found myself in the midst of what was more of a party I thought than a protest, till the stroller and I got surrounded by a group of 16-20 year olds. The comments I got were more in line with because of my "looks" that I wasn't welcome here and and that despite the broad daylight i would be shown I wasn't welcome. I was putting this down as the "mob rule " mentality and kids being kids. After a minute or soo of negotiations regarding my want for an ice cream and that I was not trying infiltrate the ranks a police man on a horse had come along and the group rejoined the rest of the protest. After joking with the officer that the wee one in the stroller could of taken the first 10 and then the other 8 were up to me he said ,"you not from here' and it isnt a good idea to get soo close to a protest like this. He also implied my IQ was lacking due to my want for ice cream...
Farm boys eyes were opened to what I had only read about happened to others
I think being raised on the farm I look at life in the ways of the land.
If we look after the roots of the plant the leaves and flowers which come later will blossom and prosper, If we allow the soil and the foundation of the plant to suffer then the rest of the plant will suffer and struggle to maintain itself by competeting for every drop resource that is available. New leaves will find it difficult to begin. After a while the roots demand all the moisture and in order to maintain itself do not promote the growth of new leaves. I for one think a lovely day long rain would make everyone feel better. But we aren't the ones seeding the clouds.

Just for completeness, because we like completeness and closure around here, the real dope on the whole refugees vs pensioners dupe, which does indeed turn out to be traced to the Toronto Star (lucky guess on my part) but to be fair, it wasn't really their doing so much as the political agenda of a single reader ...

The "pensioners vs. refugees" brouhaha began back in March 2004, when the Toronto Star published an article about plans for Canada to work in conjunction with the United Nations to settle asylum-seekers from a Somali refugee camp to some smaller Canadian cities (outside the usual immigrant magnet communities of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver). As the Star's ombudsman later explained, a single paragraph in the midst of the article was somewhat ambiguous about the amount of financial assistance the Canadian government would be providing to these refugees:

Halfway through the 1,500-word article, unforeseen trouble was lurking. In paragraph 16, the story said single refugees are eligible for $1,890 from Ottawa as a "start-up allowance, along with a $580 monthly social assistance, depending on how soon the person is able to find employment." In addition, they get "a night lamp, a table, a chair and a single bed from the government," the story said. In painful hindsight, those details could have been clearer. Actually, the $1,890 "start-up allowance" — including a $580 monthly social assistance cheque from Ottawa — was a one-time payment for basic household needs such as furnishings, pots and linens. The furniture is used.

Unfortunately, one Star reader who misunderstood the issue set loose an e-mail polemic about refugee entitlement without waiting for clarification, and the author of a follow-up letter to the editor published in the Star repeated the erroneous claim that the African refugees would be collecting monthly government allowances nearly double those provided to pensioners.
[ Urban Legends: Pensioners Should Apply as Refugees ]

And off it went from there, wildfires across the flammable right, xenophobic bile and willful politico misinformation from the get go, and there may be something Blue-Hortons Canadian in that too.

So there you have it, the sad origins of the refugee entitlement myth, and just as Wayne pointed out, not only should we mind the roots of good plants, but it is evident that we need to also watch for roots of weeds too, because good soil nutrition goes both ways.