Down With Multiculturalism, Up With Gym Class!

All races, creeds, and genders have the right to be humiliated on the dodgeball court.

The writers of the Mark Newsroom are going to go home and take a long look in the mirror tonight, because we never thought we’d write this sentence: we agree with Ezra Levant. Well, sort of at least. The Sun Media gadfly’s latest target is a Winnipeg school district where a group of Muslim parents have requested their children not participate in co-ed gym classes or music lessons, a request Levant rightly identifies as setting a terrible precedent. “[H]ow about separation of mosque and state? How about promoting Canadian values?” he asks. Fair enough, but Levant’s targeting of the school board is puzzling considering officials have yet to decide if they will acquiesce with the request. And his insistence on dragging dead Canadian soldiers into the debate by asking what they would’ve thought of this controversy is tasteless, not to mention pointless, because you don’t have to be martyred in Afghanistan to see what’s wrong with secular schools adopting religious policies.

There are valid arguments against multiculturalism, perhaps the most compelling of which is that by attempting to sharply define cultures, society exacerbates, rather than mitigates, exclusion. Far less compelling arguments are put forth by Gurmukh Singh in the Ottawa Sun, and include the idea that thanks to “armchair immigration experts” like academics, “‘ethnicity’ and ‘race’ have become loaded words.” Hate to break it to you, but university profs didn’t make “race” a loaded word. That ship sailed some centuries ago, and it was carrying a few million black Africans to the New World with it.

Singh complains that Canadian ethnic communities have become dangerously segregated, and unfortunately “there is very little possibility that Canada, with its much smaller population but proportionately higher immigration, will ever become a melting pot like the United States where the English majority subsumed other major immigrant groups … into itself.” Really? It will no doubt come a surprise to the 35 per cent of non-white Americans that they are, in fact, English, and anyone who has a passing grasp of 20th century history would find the idea of emulating U.S. policies on multiculturalism laughable, if not horrifying.