Journalists have flown in from places such as South Korea, Germany and Japan to spend days with Kerry Starchuk, to talk about the dramatic demographic changes occurring in Richmond, B.C.

Community Engagement: Language on Commercial Signs

What she, along with other and Richmond residents, has been pursuing in the last few years is a simple bylaw requiring English-only signage. But a few months ago, May 2015, Richmond Mayor Malcolm said there would be no language by-law. Instead there would be “education programs” “to facilitate community harmony”. The “two very important events” are a continuation of this effort. A preceding first effort, “Community Engagement: Language on Signage”, took place on March 2015, organized directly by the City of Richmond, described in the official website as “a multi-pronged outreach and education campaign to explore the issue of language on signs in the context of community harmony”. 

This workshop is worth examining in some detail. Innocuous a gathering as it may appear, a mere local affair, it is actually a salient embodiment of the ruling ideology of our times across the West. 

The workshop “presentation” is totally committed to further diversification, with the signage issue turned into an opportunity to “enhance intercultural harmony and co-operation in Richmond”. In order to make Richmond “the most appealing, liveable and well-managed community in Canada”, the presentation states that Richmond citizens need “to better incorporate a value for and understanding of diversity into all its planning and services.” Never mind that every other town and city in Canada has exactly the same mandate, celebrating each city as “unique in its diversity,” while making everyone feel that this is what all Canadians are doing, what is normal everywhere else. Every inhabitant ofevery city in Canada is being told that diversification is a unique component of their city’s vitality; making it the “most appealing and liveable” city. Not just in Canada, but in every country in the Western world. 

Richmond residents will be educated to have “pride in and respect for diverse heritages and traditions”. Be assured that this is primarily directed at White residents; the whole workshop, after all, was occasioned by the Anglo residents in Richmond who objected to Chinese-only signs. Richmond is already 50 percent homogeneously Chinese, and over 70 percent Asian, and the objective is to encourage the remaining White minority to accept the further expansion of Asian residents in Richmond. This is why the mandate looks to the future and speaks in terms of making Richmond “the most welcoming, inclusive and harmonious community in Canada”. 

There is stuff about “inter-faith dialogue” and, of course, about natives, with a brilliant new idea to hold “the first National Aboriginal Day Celebration at City Hall”. Natives are now regularly exploited as mascots by diversity promoters. 

There are two videos; in the first one we see the participants, mostly Whites and Chinese, with a few other Asians. They are all adults. Everyone gives pre-packaged answers, everyone is an agreeable participant in the diversity project; they are all “accepting” people; it is all about making diversity “work.” No one in the audience actually debates the merits of immigration or diversity itself. Whites are expected to be “accepting” about this “intercultural” state of affairs. This is why the new lingo of these promoters is “dialogue”, not “debate”, as we will see in more detail in Part II. 

Debating, a singularly Western trait, the spirit of inquiry, questioning, not accepting the claims of powerful elites, is now deemed by academics and leftist bureaucrats as too disruptive and not conducive to “community harmony”. These are the same arguments elites made in Communist and Nazi controlled societies. 

The second video consists of pro-diversity answers about Richmond and the signage issue. Most of the respondents are non-White, and they all love diversity; some say it might be a good idea to add English in the Chinese-only signs, but the fact that Richmond originally an Anglo community and is undergoing a radical demographic transformation with no end in sight, is not even an issue. Everyone interviewed was a conformist or a minority enjoying multicultural welfare. Diversity is great, and it does not matter if it means less Whites, that is the objective. One Asian in the video is sympathetic to the presence of Chinese-only signs, for, after all, she noticed that this “community” is mostly Chinese; so why should non-Chinese immigrants expects the Chinese majority not to use only their language? 

This is the “ideas board”: 

This is what politics among adults in Canada has been reduced to; child like images and child like slogans interpreted as “ideas” — all amounting to the acceptance of mass immigration and the displacement of Whites from their homelands.

Artistic Rendition of Canadian/Western Values

There is an “artistic rendition of workshop discussion,” which is even more revealing in capturing all the central tenets, feelings, and cliches of the diversity regimen. This work of “art” is the front image for this article, which can be foundhere. According to this artist, “community harmony” was agreed upon by the participants, and by this they meant “multiple sounds”, “empathy”, “inclusive”, “capacity for difference”, “understanding before judgment”, “addressing racism”, “multiculturalism”. These values are inherently inclusive and everyone agrees that they are good; capacity for difference does mean a capacity to think whether diversity may be entailing the radical dissolution of Eurocanadian communities, whether Richmond was already harmonious and democratic before the Asian invasion. 

No, it means a capacity to accept the dissolution of Canadian communities, to accept on your knees millions of immigrants, their different customs, languages, even if this brings an Asian ethnic majority in many cities in Canada. One of the values stressed in this workshop is “good conversation” and “shared vision”; sharing, that is, the diversity vision, and talking about issues in a way that is not disruptive, through amicable dialogue, amicable acceptance of the goals. 

There is “rendition” of questions about assimilation: should new immigrants assimilate the same way Eurocanadians did, learning the English language? I am sure there were participants in this harmonious workshop with queries, comments about what exactly multiculturalism entails; does it mean retaining one’s culture, or do new immigrants assimilate to “Canadian values”? But in reality this question is deservedly on the margins of the artistic rendition, since “Canadians values” have already been predefined by the harmonizers as “multiculturalism”, “respect” for “difference”, for the Chinese language. 

“How do we learn from other ethnic leaders?” It is a done deal: Diversity = Canada, and it means accepting it, and those who want to debate the principles will not be tolerated, accepted, included in the workshop, but instead will be labelled as beyond the pale of acceptable dialogue, ostracized in the most damaging ways, with labels intended to avoid any discussion with them. 

This artistic rendition sums up the entire philosophical outlook dominating the West today. It is the same view Justin Trudeau continually voices when he says that Canada is not really a nation but a place in which humans from multiple cultures around the world hold the same common values of diversity, tolerance, and inclusiveness. It is the view every leader of the West, be they socialist, liberal, or conservative, expresses whenever they make a general statement about their most deeply held beliefs as leaders of their countries.