Quote:
Originally Posted by YOWetal
You are probably right in both assessements.
That said the idea of Canada as a Anglo-American country is under threat. If we bring in a million immigrants a year for 20 years within one generation the racist replacement theory will come true. Given that India is the current source country of choice and even Indians of different linguistic background losing English seems very unlikely. This isn't California where most of the immigrants speak one language. There is no guarantee that new immigrants and their decsendants will have the same vision for Canada. For many of us we might prefer their vision to the one those with four grandparents born in Canada have but that doesn't change the fact it is different.
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Racism is like pornography: it's hard to define, but you know it when you see it.
Being concerned that values that define Canada may morph into something unrecognizable given a larger-than-average influx of people from one foreign country, sustained over time, is not racist. That
will happen, although there are other things happening in parallel to shift values: there are new technologies that shape our culture and how we interact with people, new generations are born and old ones die, etc. Values will shift no matter what. They even shift in ethnically static societies like Korea and Japan.
Saying that being able to be serviced in English in Toronto and Vancouver is under threat because of immigrants is clearly ignorant and, I'd argue, racist. The English language is not threatened anywhere, least of all in the major English speaking cities of the world. For starters, many of the immigrants come from countries where ESL is pretty strong and almost all of them come here with at least conversational English: the Phillippines, India, Pakistan, etc. Second, I doubt many people who think English is under threat actually go into the stores and services where immigrants who don't speak English work. A Vancouverite who genuinely thinks English is being replaced by Chinese is not going to go to a Fujianese restaurant in Richmond. At best, they're dropping off their shirts at a dry cleaners where it's hard to get your point across to the shopkeeper in English. But here, some basic empathy just one level above sociopathy is required: you're dropping off shirts that need to be pressed for your professional job in an air-conditioned office which you could leave at any time, and the poor sap across from you is going to breathe in perchloroethylene fumes in a 40 degree steamhouse. If he could speak better English, maybe he'd be doing something else. The Berlin or, maybe Montreal, situation where the university-educated hipster barrista only serves you in a foreign language (English) doesn't exist in English Canada.
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