Mr. Speaker, you should visit us sometime. I think you might enjoy it. Although we had some snow over the winter, we now have daffodils poking their noses up.
I am a Canadian and what is more I am proud to be a Canadian. As a matter of fact for over 41 years I wore the word Canada on my shoulder flash in the air force.
It has been my good fortune to have travelled most of the world, usually as a private citizen, but for three years as a Canadian
diplomat. It did not matter what my status was, my Canadian passport gained me a warm welcome no matter where I went. The people I met did not care about my ethnic origin. It was the fact that I was from Canada that mattered.
During the 1996 census one in every five Canadian households was asked: "Is this person white, Chinese, South Asian, black, Arab, West Asian, Filipino, Southeast Asian, Latin American, Japanese, Korean or other?"
For the first time in our history Canadians were required to define and identify themselves by race. Many Canadians view the omission of the term Canadian in question 19 of the census as a denial of their heritage. This omission has prompted my colleague from Beaver River to introduce Motion No. 277, and I welcome this opportunity to address the important issues prompted by the motion.
It reads:
That, in the opinion of this House, the government should return the word "Canadian" among questions of ethnic origin on the Canadian census.
Stats Canada readily acknowledges that they excluded the term Canadian from the list because including it would make it impossible for them to determine the numbers and characteristics of the visible minority population in Canada. This was the essential purpose of that question. Why must visible minorities be defined? Why do we have to segment, to separate Canadians into racial groups? Why simply, Mr. Speaker, to enable the employment equity act to be implemented.
Let us have a look at what is accomplished by employment equity. Thomas Sowell, a well respected African-American economist has written extensively on preferential hiring programs around the world and observes that preferential hiring policies invariably expand, often hurting the very people they are designed to help. They create tensions among winners and losers and are invariably associated with heavy costs because they invite large numbers of fraudulent claims from those who do not belong to a minority group but wish to obtain the advantages.
In Democracy on Trial , Jean Bethke Elshtain writes of the condescending paternalism experienced by scholarship recipient Richard Rodriguez, the son of Mexican immigrants to California. Although he had personally received an excellent parochial education he was treated as a victim of cultural deprivation. He noticed that many of his peers who were both poor and poorly educated received all sorts of allowances and were pushed ``through the system under the assumption that standards of merit and achievement are themselves unfair impositions by an anglo majority on any and all minorities''.
In Rodriguez's own words: "The conspiracy of kindness became a conspiracy of uncaring. Cruelly, callously, admissions committees agreed to overlook serious academic deficiency. I knew students in college then barely able to read, students unable to grasp the function of a sentence. I knew non-white graduate students who were bewildered by the requirement to compose a term paper and who each day were humiliated when they couldn't compete with other students in seminars.
Not surprisingly, among those students with very poor academic preparation, few complete their course of study. Many drop out blaming themselves for their failure. One fall, six non-white students I knew suffered severe mental collapse. None of the professors who had welcomed them to graduate school were around when it came time to take them to the infirmary or to the airport.
The university officials, who so diligently took note of those students in their self-serving totals of entering minority students, finally took no note of them when they left".
I can speak personally on this practice as it is applied in the Canadian Armed Forces where a conscious effort is made to achieve the correct ethnic ratio in the rank structure.
Francophone officers were often given priority on promotion lists, sometimes bypassing 10, 20, 30 or even 40 anglophone officers who had been more highly rated.
Unhappily, in the system's effort to achieve the correct ratio, some very good francophone officers' careers were curtailed. They had been advanced too quickly, spent too little time in each rank which in turn denied them the experience they would have acquired if they had followed a more normal pattern. Some wound up in positions of responsibility for which they were not adequately qualified and this caused them to fail to fulfil their duties as well as expected. The result: people who had the potential to progress much further wound up limited in their advancement because they had been pushed too fast and too hard.
Merit is the primary criterion on which selection or advancement should be based. Any interference with this principle is demeaning to the individuals to whom it is applied. It says to them: "You are not good enough to make it on your own so we will deny others to help you".
It is ironic that employment equity programs designed to create equality in fact divide and create disparities. Yet the word Canadian unites us, while recognizing and accepting our individual distinctions, heritage and ancestral roots.
As people from Quebec are proud to be Quebecois, I am proud to be a British Columbian. My roots are tied to this beautiful land: the sea, the mountains, the uniqueness of our Pacific culture and, most
of all, family. It is the place of my birth, my home as a youth, now again, by choice, my home and the place where my children and grandchildren have made their homes. It is a place of the heart.
I am a fourth generation Canadian. My ancestors were Scottish and, I suppose, if I go back far enough, French. However, I do not wish to be known or considered a Scottish-Canadian or an anglo-Canadian or any sort of a hyphenated Canadian. I reject this divisive principle and have received much input from constituents who also reject hyphenated Canadianism.
For this reason, I cannot accept the census question asking us to become hyphenated Canadians. Nor am I able to support the Bloc amendment by the member for Bellechasse, seconded by the member for Saint-Hubert, which reads:
That the motion be amended by replacing all the words after the word "should" with the following: "include Canadian, Quebecer, English-Canadian, French-Canadian and Acadian among questions of ethnic origin on the Canadian census.
Section 15(1) of the charter states:
Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.
Section 15(1), standing alone, affords protection of all civil rights.
Section 15(2) of the charter goes on to state:
Subsection 1 does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups, including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.
Section 15(2) of the charter is equating equality with sameness. The very heart of section 15(1) has thus been stripped away. It now rings hollow.
This coming August my wife Jean and I are going to Aberdeen in Scotland to attend the 800th anniversary of the formation of the Frazer clan. At that gathering we expect to meet Frazers from many parts of the world, from Canada, United States, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, France, India, other countries and, of course, Scotland.
We will be joined together by our common name or connection to that name, but that will not take away the fact that we will still be Canadian, American, Scottish or whatever. Our nationality and pride in our individual countries is in no way diminished by our common name connection.
There is something drastically wrong if the Canadian census form does not allow Canadians to identify themselves as Canadian. I hope members of this House will agree and support MotionNo. 277 proposed by the member for Beaver River.