Canada as a cultural salad bowl

Vincent J. Curtis

10 Sept 2018

RE: Diversity in Canada has the capacity to inspire the world (The Hamilton Spectator, written by Olga Stachova)

This article is an example of starry-eyed foolishness and bad analysis reaching transparently ridiculous conclusions.

The conclusion that “diversity in Canada has the capacity to inspire the world” is patently ridiculous.  Disregard the fallacy that diversity has a capacity.  There is nothing about Canadian values that is going to inspire countries like Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, Brazil, Sweden, France, Russian, China, or the United States.  Japan, China, Turkey, Vietnam, and Morocco, would look with disdain and horror at Canadian style “diversity.”

There is nothing about Canada’s immigration policies and the concomitant embrace of “cultural diversity” that will inspire the world.

The unasked question in the article is, what does it mean to be Canadian if Canada is a cultural salad bowl?  There is no unifying theme in a salad except for all being in a particular bowl.  Each component is something that isn’t a salad.  Hence, when the author says that “Canadians seem to be shying away from providing hope….”, she is saying, in the first place, that a mixture is single thing.  And that the present salad bowl is saying that it doesn’t want to take on any more components, get larger more rapidly, or get disproportionate in any one component.

Somehow, this reasonable request of the current salad bowl is concerning, and Canadian leadership is called to continue to be “strong custodians of Canada’s pluralistic identity.”  Since Canada is already held to have a pluralistic identity it does not follow that being a strong custodian places a moral obligation on the current salad bowl to get larger, become disproportionate, or take on more components.

This article highlights the confusion inherent in the “Canada is a salad bowl” argument.

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