Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House to speak in favour of my colleague's motion, private member's motion No. 364. The motion provides for the transfer of the control of multiculturalism away from the federal government to individuals. Essentially, the motion put forward by my colleague from Calgary Southeast calls for the withdrawal of federal funding to multicultural groups.
I concur with that objective. However, just because I think the state should not be funding various cultural groups does not mean that I dislike these groups. Just because I disagree with government imposed multicultural policies it should not be construed to suggest that I dislike other linguistic or ethnic groups. I am arguing against government policy, not against cultural groups.
After all my roots are different from the roots of many other people. Together those generations of various ancestral heritage came to this country to settle and build what became by far the best country in the world. This country was opened up, settled and built without a multicultural policy. In fact I doubt if the term multiculturalism was even coined when my parents came to this country back in the twenties.
My roots are a mixture, a real hodge-podge so to speak. My linguistic heritage is Prussian German but my ancestral affiliation and connection include not only central European heritage but east European heritage, Slavic heritage, including Ukrainian, Polish and Russian. My parents understood and spoke these languages, plus what they called Yiddish. I am led to believe that Yiddish is a kind of Germanic way of speaking Hebrew. If that makes any linguistic sense I really do not know. In a land, in a country, that encompasses much of the earth's land mass with over 150 cultural groups, who am I to question what makes sense in that part of the world. Come to think of it, perhaps there are lessons to be learned given the turmoil that existed for centuries in tsarist imperial Russia, then in the former Soviet Union and presently in the newly created state of Russia.
My parents left their homelands, along with hundreds of thousands of other people from that area, having lived in those lands for almost 200 years. They left to escape the tyranny that was to enslave the people for over 70 years. They came to Canada, where everything was new and very unfamiliar. They had nothing when they came halfway around the world.
However they had freedom. They had liberty. They had liberty and freedom that the people back in the land from whence my parents came could not even imagine or dream about. My parents embraced their newly adopted country with energy and a zeal that was typical of newcomers during that time. Like those who came from places other than Britain, they soon learned English like everyone else. Some youngsters did not learn English until they started school.
For years, for generations, like thousands of families not only from eastern Europe but from all over the world they held on to some aspects of the culture that they had lived with before they came to this country.
Mr. Speaker, do you want to know something? These people all came usually with little or no money and they received not one thin dime from government. Not only did they not ask for money, they did not expect any government money. They came to this country for freedom and for the tremendous opportunities
that this great and beautiful land afforded them. They settled and built communities that helped to build this country.
I suggest to the multicultural minister that what transpired during those pioneering decades was real, genuine, unvarnished multiculturalism. All these people, these families from varied backgrounds, from different parts of the world worked together and co-operated to build churches, schools and communities. Together they worked to build the country.
That was multiculturalism at its finest with no government dollars. They were all proud of the fact that they had become and were Canadian.
Since government funding for all types of programs began, many communities have divided. Friction and animosity has developed. Dependency on the state, on government handouts has been created. Apparently the multicultural minister thinks so too because she has recently mused that Canada has no culture.
I would suggest the minister leave the confines of Montreal and Ottawa and visit rural Canada, the west and Atlantic Canada. She might be pleasantly surprised, if she stays for awhile, of the flourishing culture that she might not only see but also feel. I suspect culture in this country would flourish even more and probably bring Canadians closer together from all parts of the country if the state would only get its nasty little nose out of culture, along with its close sister multiculturalism.