Jean Raspail's famous apocalyptic novel, The Camp of the Saints,
On August 12, a Thailand-registered rust bucket, the MV Sun Sea, carrying 490 Tamils, refugees from the losing side in the Sri Lankan civil war, many of them reckoned on the authority of no less than Canada's Minister of Public Safety to be members of the terrorist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam, entered Canadian territorial waters.
Canadian Forces (Canada's army, navy and air force are unified) knew of the Sun Sea's voyage for weeks [Suspected Thai 'people-smuggling' ship reported heading for Canada, By Stewart Bell, National Post, July 15, 2010] , just as they knew that these migrants had paid $30,000 or so each for the privilege of becoming indentured servants to foreign gangsters. So what did they do in response? The same as they always do—they graciously escorted these invaders into harbor.
Everyone knows that once on Canadian soil (or in Canadian waters) the Tamils have the right to the full legal protection of the Canadian legal system. This was the verdict of the Supreme Court of Canada in the 1985 Singh case. My American readers will be familiar with the old saw, "The Constitution is not a suicide pact". Well, in Canada, our Constitution is a suicide pact, and we're proud of it. So the Tamils are now the responsibility of Canada's refugee determination system: "Our guarantee: No tale too tall for acceptance!"
The Sun Sea is the second ship carrying Tamils to arrive in Canada in less than a year. Based on what happened in 2009 , most of the Tamils will be released "into the community", most will apply for refugee status, and most will get it—whatever their provenance.
In fact, Canada has experienced several Boat People incidents since the 1980s. (That we know of—more have been rumored). In 1999, the arrival of four ships carrying Chinese migrants in hock to the Triads threatened to become a political crisis before popular outcry before we were instructed (by Liberal Immigration Minister Elinor Caplan) how "racist" we were. But given Prime Minister Stephen Harper's ostensible commitment to the "war on terror," why didn't the Canadian government stop the Tamils before they entered Canadian waters? After all, Australia did for years, and recently resumed this policy again.
Two reasons: one legal , one moral (or at least political):
Writing in the leftwing Vancouver paper, The Tyee, University of British Columbia law professor Michael Byers claims: "Jason Kenney, the Minister for Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, frequently refers to the SS St. Louis as an example of how racist attitudes colored the policies of previous Canadian governments."[Why Tamil Boat People Should Be Let into Canada | Remember the Komagata Maru — and our leaders' recent apologies, July 19 2010]
Canada has apologized repeatedly for the St. Louis for decades. Harper apologized for Komagata Maru at a Sikh festival in 2008 , and Kenney doled out $2.5 million in memorial funding. Prof. Byers concluded,
"Harper and Kenney's…contrition with respect to the Komagata Maru and SS St. Louis might be rooted in genuine humanitarianism, or be part of a cynical effort to attract Sikh and Jewish votes. Either way, it ties their hands with respect to Tamil boat people. The law allows for options; the principle of consistency does not."
For some reason, apparently, this does not does apply to Australia.
What do the Canadian people have to say about this? It doesn't matter. Their opinion is irrelevant. Stephen Harper, his minority government status notwithstanding, is as absolute as a French king under the ancien regime.
Can a country even be said to be sovereign if it abjures responsibility for its borders? Ask President Obama!
But note Obama has a good partisan reason for erasing the border between America and Mexico. More Hispanics mean more Democrat victories. But the Canadian Tamil diaspora, estimated at 250,000—there are only 100,000 in neighboring India, which is only 50 miles from Sri Lanka!—supports the Liberal Party, not Harper's Conservative Party. Some 20,000 are reportedly Liberal Party members. Prominent Liberals, up to and including former Prime Minister Paul Martin, have appeared at rallies hosted by Tiger front groups and flying the Tiger flag.
As a result, the Sri Lankan government hates the Canadian Liberal Party so much that its foreign affairs shadow minister, Bob Rae, was swiftly deported from Colombo last year.
The people of Toronto , which hosts about 200,000 Tamils, don't like them very much either, especially after they took over a major freeway and brought traffic throughout the city to a standstill last year. Rival Tamil gangs work Toronto's streets, while Tamil businessmen are enjoined to pay a "war tax" to support Tiger efforts back home.
Not that you hear much about this from Canada's media. John Thompson of the Mackenzie Institute think-tank reported on Tamil activities in the Toronto Sun a decade ago. Hundreds of Tamils blockaded the newspaper's offices in response. The Sun apologized.
(This was not the last case of a Canadian newspaper kowtowing to immigrant pressure groups. The National Post made two separate apologies to Koreans after gently mocking the passion of their soccer supporters at the World Cup in 2002. The first apology was similarly light-heartened. But the grocery store trade in Canada is Korean-dominated, and it was put forcefully to the Post that some serious groveling was required—or else Korean grocers would stop selling it. For obvious reasons, most of these stories don't come to light. I got the Korean story privately from an impeccable source.)
To its credit, the National Post has editorialized that the Sun Sea should be stopped from entering Canada. Given that the National Post is among Conservative Party strongest media supporters, what could Stephen Harper be thinking?
Perhaps we should ask Karl Rove. Rove is ascloseasthis to the end-timers who dominate Canadian "movement conservatism". Perhaps he has infected them with his "invade the world, invite the world" Big Tentism.
Or we could ask Jason Kenney, the aforementioned Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism. As we learned from a recent Globe and Mail profile , the Chinese call him the "Smiling Buddha". Immigrants from India know him as "Curry in a hurry". [Jason Kenney: The 'Smiling Buddha' and his multicultural charms, by Joe Friesen, Jan 29, 2010]
Kenney thinks immigrants are better than us: "You observe how these new Canadians live their lives. They are the personification of Margaret Thatcher's aspirational class. They're all about a massive work ethic."
(Longitudinal studies of recent immigrant cohorts are not so rosy, not surprising given the numbers of immigrants that come from such entrepreneurial hotbeds as Sri Lanka, Somalia and Jamaica.)
According to Kenney, Prime Minister Harper tasked him with making the Conservative Party the ethnic party. He and his boss are just so much less white than their Tory predecessors, you see. The Globe's Friesen quotes him:
"'Before Trudeau supposedly invented multiculturalism and the language of diversity in politics, Diefenbaker and the Conservatives were ahead of him,' he said, citing John Diefenbaker as the first prime minister who was neither English nor French, and Senator Paul Yuzyk, credited with popularizing the term multiculturalism in the 1960s.
"'But something happened in the 1970s. You had these two awkward white guys, [Robert] Stanfield and [Joe] Clark, who, for all their best intentions, didn't know how to communicate with Canadians, while Trudeau was out there masterfully monopolizing the symbolic politics of the language of diversity.
" 'From the late 1960s through to just recently, the Liberals were basically given free ice to skate on in terms of organizing, cultivating publishers and editors of ethnic media outlets … and doing the care and feeding of opinion leaders." [Jason Kenney: The 'Smiling Buddha'and his multicultural charms, By Joe Friesen, Globe and Mail, January 29, 2010]
There are just two things wrong with this analysis.
1. It's a damned lie. And
2. Kenney knows it.
After Stanfield and Clark, the Conservatives were led by Brian Mulroney, the suavest (and slippierest) white guy alive. In his nine years as Prime Minister, Mulroney gave Canada affirmative action ("employment equity"), family reunification as a right and priority in immigration policy and record-high immigration numbers. He even expanded on the Liberal idea of importing voters from abroad.
Immigration to Canada is now semi-officially pegged at 250,000 annually—despite 8% unemployment.
But in 1993, Mulroney's Conservatives were reduced to two seats in the House of Commons. The ethnics went back to the Liberal Party, where they have largely remained. Despite the best efforts of Harper and Kenney, the Conservatives do not hold a single seat in the multiethnic cities of Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver.
Doubtless, Kenney believes that this time round the ethnics will succumb to his personal charm. I knew him well back in the 1990s, and he is without question a passionately sincere man—and a strange one.
Newt Gingrich was once asked where he came from and answered "Nowhere." Kenney could say the same. Born in Ontario, schooled in Saskatchewan, Victoria and San Francisco (by the Jesuits), he was parachuted into Edmonton as head of the Alberta Taxpayers Association and then into Calgary as an MP. A Roman Catholic convert, he seriously considered the priesthood for some years. He remains resolutely celibate. Formerly a Liberal, he later became a fiery crusader for balanced budgets and against abortion.
Unfortunately for Kenny, Stephen Harper has given Canada the largest federal budget deficits ever and is committed to maintaining the most pro-abortion regime in the Western world. Harper even ruled out a constitutional amendment preventing the Supreme Court from forcing the Catholic Church to marry homosexuals.
Kenney is a beneficiary of what the American Spectator's Tom Bethell has memorably called the "strange new respect" syndrome. Formerly reviled as a "social conservative" by Canada's elite, he is now lionized for his commitment to dissolve the Canadian people and elect another. He was praised to the skies for his new citizenship manual , which helpfully admonishes immigrants against such practices as "honor killings" and female genital mutilation. Never mind that there would be no need for such cautions if our immigrants weren't increasingly given to these practices, or that Kenney would never breathe a word against the routine Asian practice of aborting female babies. Apparently, the Tamils are future Conservative voters first and potential Fifth Columnists second. Go to his website (http://www.jasonkenney.com), and click on the video for April 28, 2009, wherein you will hear his promise to "expedite" family reunification (AKA "chain migration") for Tamils. And even the gays are warming to him over his talk of helping to "resettle refugees facing persecution based on sexual orientation".
Kenney remains ever vigilant in his search for (secular) heresies. So anyone who criticizes his and Harper's bemusing obsession with Israel is an "anti-Semite", while anyone who criticizes immigration is a "racist." An expert inquisitor into souls, he one morning after Mass insinuated to me (in the presence of a fellow reporter from Alberta Report) that my fondness for German composers likely betrayed a fondness for Nazi ideology.
And it is to this odd religious zealot that Canada's demographic future has been bestowed.
Thank God for geography! At least the Camp of the Saints can't reach us over the Pole.
Kevin Michael Grace (send him email) lives in Victoria, British Columbia. His blog, TheAmbler.com, features original commentaries.
