Bigotry within Our Borders

Canada's chronic illness, the reciprocal bigotry infecting two of its three founding nations, is threatening to lurch into pandemic status under the Harper Conservative majority.

Until anglophone and francophone Canadians get over their apparently uncontrollable tendency to attack one of the main important strengths that their country has going for it, the future will continue to be uncertain, if there is a future at all.

We now have a  conservative territorial government appealing a Supreme Court of Canada decision requiring the Yukon to build a french-language high school. Bad enough that it would take a court edict to force you to build a school where none exists. The fact that you would go to such lengths to avoid having the phenomenal asset of a regional high school in a second language is simply incomprehensible.

One needn't look far to find other examples of governments promoting ignorance in this country. Quebec, of course, has it down to a science, legislating poor second language skills on 80% of its children!

It must be said, however, that there is no greater force in the service of bigotry and ignorance in Canada that I am aware of, than the Sun media group. Never mind that this is where propaganda is presented as journalism. Never mind that  thousands of pages are painstakingly dumbed down to ensure that no reader might accidentally acquire any useful morsel of information. No, Sun Media's master genius lies in its ability to bolster circulation and spread conservative/Conservative propaganda so efficiently, by inflaming anti-Quebec and anti-ROC sentiments simultaneously on both sides of the Quebec border - like a double-headed serpent!

Then we have our Conservative federal government which, as speculated by Dr. Dawg and others, may now be at the point of writing off Quebec altogether and instead seeking to build support in ROC by fanning the ever-smoldering anti-Quebec flames.

Memo to the Yukon: A brand new high school is a good thing.

Memo to Canadians: A second language is a good thing.

If we can't embrace our obvious assets and remove bigotry from within our borders, it is hard to imagine Canada as the country I have always pictured it as.