AFTER THIRTY-EIGHT YEARS

Vladimir Cicha, North Vancouver
 

In 1968 I came to Canada with my wife and son because armies of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact (excluding Romania) occupied my country, Czechoslovakia, (since 1993 it is Czech Republic and Slovakia).

We were accepted very nicely into this big country and we will never forget that.

What we had looked for in our new future was the freedom and democracy Canada was offering.  We tried as soon as possible to improve our English which, at the time of our immigration, was rather poor and mostly passive.

I recall our early years in this country when we came empty handed, with only two suitcases and 6-year-old son. Fortunately I began to work in my field even if not on the proper level equal to my qualification and degree, but I never complained. My wife took a few ordinary jobs before she could continue, after language and other examinations, to work in her profession as a Registered Nurse.

The famous song says “As Time Goes By” and it is really the case. Once in a while I compare our second homeland Canada as it was in the early seventies and now, as it is in the early years of the 21st century.

We left our first homeland because of oppression, lack of freedom and democracy, and absurdities very similar to those described in Orwell's novel, 1984,  applied daily after the communist takeover in 1948.

Even if nobody from my family was executed or jailed, the atmosphere in our country was very unpleasant. The Soviet occupation in 1968 did not promise anything better and so, after a few months, we left our homeland.  

Now, in retrospection from the comfort of our new homeland, I often recall those times as very interesting and specific, not easy, but unforgettable in the best sense of the word; because those times had a certain aura, even if a mostly negative one. Also, we were younger then, and to do something which was not allowed or authorized by the regime gave one some excitement. But it was not a strong enough reason to stay in Prague.

The beginning of our new life in Canada gave us very exciting feelings too, but from a completely different perspective.  Part of it was learning about our new home, it's basic history, the contribution of Canada to 20^th Century world affairs. We soon learned about Canada’s very good international reputation. 

There were not many nice ethnic restaurants in Winnipeg when we began our new life, and to buy alcohol you had to fill out a form. On Sundays, even in the restaurants, you had to drink coca cola or water with hearty meals. There were unbelievable restrictions for the clothing of small children, and some other hardly understandable issues and regulations were a source of wonder for us.

But we could leave our home without worry as it didn’t matter if we left doors locked or unlocked; we didn't have to buy a security bar for our car (such a device, I believe, was not even on the market in those times, if I am not mistaken). We didn’t make a big money, far from it, actually, by the standards of those days, but we were very happy and comfortable.

About a year and half after establishing ourselves in Winnipeg, we travelled to British Columbia. We also made a 10,000 km-long trip into the USA.  It was a very great and interesting affair.

By working we got better and better off economically and finally in 1975 (in those days waiting time before one could get Canadian citizenship was five years, not three like now) we became Canadian citizens.

It was a great feeling, living in Canada in seventies and perhaps even in beginning of eighties. We felt that we had made a good decision in a selecting Canada as our new home, a democratic country with such a great reputation in the world.

But as time went by we couldn't ignore some changes which were taking place, slowly but surely.

And now, 38 years later, we often think about those changes.

In the following I will try to explain our reasons for such a statement. They might be very personal, but some more educated and experienced authors than me just confirm my feelings and statements. 

Canada, a country of almost 35 millions souls these days is still, and rightly so, considered to be a country of newcomers, immigrants. There is nothing wrong with it. And Canadian governments, one after the other, are supporting immigration but in very different ways now than 30 years ago, and are preoccupied with the policy of multiculturalism.

I try to keep my eyes open as well as my ears. I try to read as much as I can, even being handicapped with the slow way I read English. But it is sometimes an advantage, if one selects carefully for his readings; there are so many books on the market and some of them make really good sense to me.

One of such book is The Trouble With Canada by W. D. Gairdner, which summarizes everything about Canada in the last 30 years of 20th century in the most complete fashion possible. Now, after 38 years of our living in this country, I fully agree with all that is written in this book.   

There is officially trumpeted a statement that Canada will almost die without immigration. On March 15, 1979, in Vancouver, then-prime minister Trudeau said:  It doesn't matter where the immigrants come from.

This statement is not only wrong, but very damaging to Canada when practised; we can feel it even today, unless we accept the rules of political correctness.

Communism, or socialism, has been described in many books and articles. One can read and make up his mind about it. But now we know how flawed those theories are. Nobody can take them seriously anymore.

But there is something similar in the way of application and establishing the idea of political correctness; just the words...words ...words. The words pushed through our minds by authorities ... and I can't understand why!

This ideology seeps into many ways of our life.

Immigration to Canada was practised under different rules 30 years ago. Equal employment policy and multiculturalism are now the law.   The expertise, language knowledge, good health and other aspects are no longer considered as fundamentals for the welfare not only of newcomers, but all Canadians as well. The result: Canada receives a different type of immigration than 30 years ago. Traditional, educated and skilled professionally capable and mostly English-knowing white-European immigration is almost eliminated.

What are the results of such a policy change? Not very encouraging, if you try to be fair and respect the facts.

Canada, even with a population of about 35 millions, has less in the economic sense. The majority of products seem to be made in China or Hong Kong or India or Pakistan. Is it good for Canada, the Canadian economy that now you can't buy anything made in Canada? I doubt it. Many smaller countries are much better off in this respect ... Czech Republic with beer, glass, even cars, Germany with cars.

Yes, lately, the oil price on the world market changed the economic outlook of the Province of Alberta. The present situation made even the expensive production from the sand profitable and with great economic benefits.  The Province of Alberta is prospering even without the nature's help, thanks to its government.  How the rest of the country will profit from this very promising situation remains to be seen.

This country probably has the most regulations for so many items, probably more than any other country in the world. Is that necessary?  The above-mentioned book The Trouble With Canada has the answers; explaining why all the recent changes are damaging Canada as a country. It was published in 1991. Now the situation is even worse than was described in that book at the time of its publication.

For many years crime in Canada, or at least in British Columbia where we have lived for last 25 years, is on the rise. Do we need more crime from ethnic criminal clans? And drug dealers and drug addicts? Do politicians read the daily papers? Why is it that Statistics Canada informs us about a decline in crime?

Only a dreamer can think that the general intellectual and economic level of Canada is not in decline, even taking into an account Alberta.

When we came to Canada, we tried to learn English as soon as possible. Now, more and more often, we can hardly communicate with the owners or employees of some stores, not because our English is poor, even if it's not perfect.

And foreign capital affects real estate prices, in British Columbia at least, and not only that, new monster houses are being built, changing the property tax situation for people living nearby, many of them, such as retired people, on a fixed income.

Vancouver is now changing so fast, almost every street has an excavation where a huge new huge house is being built. The same goes for downtown Vancouver. This city is approaching the shape of Hong Kong, slowly but surely. But big is not always good and nice. And too much of everything is not too good either. Very often I ask myself a question: do elected city authorities respect the wishes of their voters and citizens? Are these voters and citizens stupid and blind and do they like the present development? If the latter is the case we might all be sorry later.

These are the reasons for my disappointments with the trend this country is going through.  It seems to me that the attributes of a prospering democratic society have been lost in the stream of political correctness. Will we be able to find and cherish those logical and long-time justifiable attributes again? Like saying something which is green that it is green and not brown? Well, watching the way the western world, as well as Canada, is capitulating, I don't think there is a chance.

My wife says it is probably only one of many cycles through which our civilization will have to go, and that there is no protection against it. Maybe she is right. But even then, I think that we should do our best to slow down the process as much as we can. Our political representatives in Ottawa and Victoria are doing less than necessary in this respect.

Political correctness is prospering like ivy and is tolerated and fertilized by many otherwise honest and good people. Why? Fear and timidity lead only to more problems.

What would have happened if there were only politicians of today's Canada in the times of Churchill? The world might be very much different even today. 

Well, I am still glad to live in Canada.  But the changes in Canada which took place in those 38 years make me less and less happy.  No, they make me sad, very sad, and, sometimes scared, because I do not like the world of Kafka, or the world of Stalin. But Stalin is dead, as well as the experiment of socialism. The biggest part of the world finds that the capitalistic and democratic system, despite of its weak points, is still the best for people, not only for the rich, but for the majority as well.

One can say those times of the Kafkian world are over! But, now we have another dragon, the already mentioned political correctness. And it is this, together with a greediness of the capitalist corporations, at least in my mind, that risks the prosperity of our world, saved now for more than half a century from the disaster of another world war.

What else can I say? Nature around us is still nice? That  jazz is prospering here better than about 10 years ago? True. But ... is it enough?

Vladimir Cicha, North Vancouver

 

In support of Mr Cicha’s concern over “political correctness”

www.realjustice.ca : from Robert Hughes book The Culture of Complaint

Pages 17/18

“Thirty years ago, one of the epic processes in the assertion of human dignity started unfolding in the United States: the Civil Rights movement. But today, after more than a decade of government that did its best to ignore the issues of race when it was not trying to roll back the gains of the 1960s, the usual American response to inequality is to rename it, in the hope that it will then go away. This, as George Orwell pointed out in Politics and the English Language, destroys language without shifting reality one inch. The only safeguard against it, he argued, was to be concrete:

“If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change all this in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits …”

“Orwell wrote that in 1946, and it remains true half a century later; indeed, it will always be true. There are certainly worse things in American society than the ongoing vogue for politically correct language, whether of the left or of the right. Yet there are few things more absurd and, in the end, self-defeating.

Page 20

“Just as language grotesquely inflates in attack, so it timidly shrinks in approbation, seeking words that cannot possibly give any offence, however notional. We do not fail, we, underachieve. We are not junkies, but substance abusers; not handicapped but differently-abled. And we are mealy-mouthed …

Craig