Are Be
January 4th, 2005, 10:12 PM
In defence of Del Grande
National Post
January 4, 2005
As politicians frequently remind us, Canada is a multicultural society. Our urban neighbourhoods reflect this. Over the years, different immigrant groups will pass through an area, each one shaping it in its own distinct way. Local politicians cannot ignore this fact, for each group will have its own needs -- including everything from Halal meat shops to soccer fields, ESL classes to bocce courts. Unfortunately, as Toronto Councillor Mike Del Grande recently discovered, some Canadians are so beholden to politically correct pieties that they perceive any discussion of this phenomenon as fundamentally suspect.
Responding to criticism in the Scarborough Mirror, Mr. Del Grande offered last month to take a reporter from the community newspaper on a tour of his Scarborough-Agincourt ward to show the fruits of his labours. Somewhere along the way, the Councillor waded into the subject of race relations -- first noting that "a lot of the white people are moving out" of a local neighbourhood, and later identifying tensions between immigrants from mainland China and Hong Kong.
Mr. Del Grande might have suspected that his comments would be misconstrued to generate journalistic buzz. (And some of the other revelations on his neighbourhood tour -- notably that he had paid three summer students to look at every family house in the ward for property violations, and that he drives around the ward with binoculars and a digital camera searching for potential grow-ops and illegal rooming houses -- seem slightly odd.) But the controversy that followed his remarks, including fellow councillors running to the ultra-liberal Toronto Star to denounce him as "racist" (or was it the Star that ran to them?) has been unwarranted.
No one alleges that Mr. Del Grande was suggesting other residents are inferior to whites, or should be treated any differently. Indeed, asked specifically about race relations, he later told the same reporter that "most people don't care what's next door, Jamaican, Filipino, as long as they maintain their property" and "don't cause a lot of problems and have respect for each other." All he was doing was describing a social phenomenon -- frequently termed "white flight" south of the border, where it is discussed candidly by one and all -- that has profoundly influenced the composition of the area he was elected to represent. Since Canadians make such a fetish of diversity, shouldn't they be expected to care that one group -- even one with such an unfashionable skin colour as white -- is moving out?
The teapot tempest surrounding Mr. Del Grande is emblematic of what has become of race relations in this country. Any ordinary person knows full well that the Councillor's comments were innocent. Unfortunately, the public dialogue about such issues is not conducted by ordinary people, but rather by professional "anti-racism" experts whose mission is to find phantoms of hatred in every nook and cranny. In this case, the hate huntress was Tam Goossen, past president of the Urban Alliance on Race Relations, called on by the Star to label Mr. Del Grande's comments "really concerning" and "totally divisive." The Star, whose editors have themselves never met a racism allegation they didn't find credible, duly reported the story under the slanted headline, "Politician's Comments Criticized As Racist."
When urban populations change, local governments and agencies must work quickly to meet communities' emerging needs. By discouraging them from even discussing those changes, Toronto's media are making life more difficult for people of all races.
© National Post 2005
Copyright © 2005 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest Global Communications Corp. All rights reserved.
Optimized for browser versions 4.0 and higher.
National Post
January 4, 2005
As politicians frequently remind us, Canada is a multicultural society. Our urban neighbourhoods reflect this. Over the years, different immigrant groups will pass through an area, each one shaping it in its own distinct way. Local politicians cannot ignore this fact, for each group will have its own needs -- including everything from Halal meat shops to soccer fields, ESL classes to bocce courts. Unfortunately, as Toronto Councillor Mike Del Grande recently discovered, some Canadians are so beholden to politically correct pieties that they perceive any discussion of this phenomenon as fundamentally suspect.
Responding to criticism in the Scarborough Mirror, Mr. Del Grande offered last month to take a reporter from the community newspaper on a tour of his Scarborough-Agincourt ward to show the fruits of his labours. Somewhere along the way, the Councillor waded into the subject of race relations -- first noting that "a lot of the white people are moving out" of a local neighbourhood, and later identifying tensions between immigrants from mainland China and Hong Kong.
Mr. Del Grande might have suspected that his comments would be misconstrued to generate journalistic buzz. (And some of the other revelations on his neighbourhood tour -- notably that he had paid three summer students to look at every family house in the ward for property violations, and that he drives around the ward with binoculars and a digital camera searching for potential grow-ops and illegal rooming houses -- seem slightly odd.) But the controversy that followed his remarks, including fellow councillors running to the ultra-liberal Toronto Star to denounce him as "racist" (or was it the Star that ran to them?) has been unwarranted.
No one alleges that Mr. Del Grande was suggesting other residents are inferior to whites, or should be treated any differently. Indeed, asked specifically about race relations, he later told the same reporter that "most people don't care what's next door, Jamaican, Filipino, as long as they maintain their property" and "don't cause a lot of problems and have respect for each other." All he was doing was describing a social phenomenon -- frequently termed "white flight" south of the border, where it is discussed candidly by one and all -- that has profoundly influenced the composition of the area he was elected to represent. Since Canadians make such a fetish of diversity, shouldn't they be expected to care that one group -- even one with such an unfashionable skin colour as white -- is moving out?
The teapot tempest surrounding Mr. Del Grande is emblematic of what has become of race relations in this country. Any ordinary person knows full well that the Councillor's comments were innocent. Unfortunately, the public dialogue about such issues is not conducted by ordinary people, but rather by professional "anti-racism" experts whose mission is to find phantoms of hatred in every nook and cranny. In this case, the hate huntress was Tam Goossen, past president of the Urban Alliance on Race Relations, called on by the Star to label Mr. Del Grande's comments "really concerning" and "totally divisive." The Star, whose editors have themselves never met a racism allegation they didn't find credible, duly reported the story under the slanted headline, "Politician's Comments Criticized As Racist."
When urban populations change, local governments and agencies must work quickly to meet communities' emerging needs. By discouraging them from even discussing those changes, Toronto's media are making life more difficult for people of all races.
© National Post 2005
Copyright © 2005 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest Global Communications Corp. All rights reserved.
Optimized for browser versions 4.0 and higher.