The Editor,
Re: "Sign language reflects business," Opinion, Jan. 27.
Despite Richmond officials acknowledging that many residents are upset by the large Chinese-only signs being erected in the city, Vancouver Sun columnist Douglas Todd in a recent article commented on the concerns of long-time Richmond resident, Kerry Starchuk, having been consistently stonewalled by the city in her efforts to restrict the predominance of Chinese-language signs in her hometown.
When on July 7, 1988, Parliament passed the "Act for the Preservation and Enhancement of Multiculturalism in Canada," augmented in 1991 by the "Department of Multiculturalism and Citizenship Act," we effectively stopped ascribing any value to the integration of newcomers, and instead institutionalized the notion that host countries aren't legitimate entities with their own cultures, but only geopolitical receptacles for a multitude of co-existing cultures.
Seeking refuge in the "no man's land" of our centrifugal "cultural mosaic," honest debate about the divisive notion of a government-imposed quiltwork of encouraging and reinforcing ethnic and cultural differences has been stifled in the name of political correctness.
As a euphemism for a benign form of apartheid, multiculturalism and its divisive policies of social and cultural engineering have of late become the object of much more candid and critical scrutiny in countries like Britain, Holland, Germany and Australia, where now they are beginning to be openly recognized as abysmal failures.
Indeed, Canada's "We are the World" multiculturalism as a "homegrown" legislated political ideology has, in fact, become an instrument of racial and ethnic segregation, that has led to the "self-ghettoization" of newcomers to this country, creating a tribal Canada with no coherent political and cultural centre, actually encouraging new immigrants to remain outside the lingual and social mainstream of the host country, disappearing instead into the "self-segregated" cultural cocoons of the various ethnic silos, insulated from the cultural mainstream of the host country.
Richmond, it is sad to say, has been a prime example of newcomers being virtually encouraged for their language and culture to trump that of the country they have chosen to immigrate to.
Having fallen victim to the virus of political correctness and expediency, apparently Richmond city officials and politicians have not been sharing Starchuk's language concerns, thus reflecting the extent to which our official multicultural outreach efforts of accommodation to newcomers have truly descended into a theatre of the absurd.
Edward Bopp
Richmond
