It’s not such a bad thing that eventually everyone dies. Traffic thins out. Houses are freed up for the young. Old journalists’ lips are loosened about people who can neither sue nor be offended.
Expect no hot revelations, but I’m the only living newspaperman present at the birth of the public life of the man who battered Canada’s racial barrier against blacks.
Lincoln Alexander strode into magistrate’s court in Hamilton, a stunningly handsome six-foot-three gent, one morning in the mid-1950s. A lawyer, not the accused.
It was a fine snapshot of what Peter C. Newman called, in a 1995 tome, the Canadian Revolution, and the post-war worldwide rise of the “coloured” races and decline of white power: a New Order, born-poor black man before the bar, and the Old Order on the bench – Magistrate Beamer W. Hopkins, a soft-spoken pink man who looked uncannily like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland.
Immensely popular West Indian-born Alexander died recently aged 90, after a life of honours piled on honours, firsts followed by firsts – first black MP, cabinet minister, lieutenant-governor.
I ran into him later and lightly recalled his magistrates’ court days. I felt his steel. Not amused. Did he think it was a sly put-down, soft-glove racism? Possibly.
Prejudice, more kindly racial preference, hits you in the face every day. The state’s punishment of expressing anything that might offend someone – “vee haf vays of making you tolerant”, as the mocking take-off on Nazism used to have it – drives it under-skin, so to speak.
Like everyone, I harbour certain racial prejudices – rather, postjudices, not prior perceptions but based on real-life observation.
Like: Some immigrants should never have been let into Canada – screened and rejected if they were mass murderers, fleeing fraudsters of any colour obviously. But also parents inclined to “honour killings” of their own family members, or using Canada as a terrorist base for their homeland grievances, or conniving to replace Canada’s law system with theirs.
It’s absurd to be unreservedly either “for” or “against” immigration. There are just individuals making choices.
Vancouver’s David Lam set the bar for immigrant philanthropists. Iranian-born real estate developer Djavad Mowafaghian has written big cheques for research at UBC and Simon Fraser University, recently $6.5 million for BC Children’s Hospital. West Vancouver philanthropist Robert H.N. Ho and his wife Greta just donated $10 million for a Lions Gate Hospital mental health facility to be called the HOpe Centre. Such immigrants can’t be praised enough.
Nor can Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney for stifling abuses, most recently offshore-hatched marriage law fraud. Top economist and former MP Herbert Grubel’s detailed research shows that (Liberal-era) immigration selection policy has failed: recent immigrants on average have had much lower incomes than native Canadians – largely because, speaking neither English or French, they can’t find high-paying jobs – “and have imposed a fiscal burden on Canadian taxpayers amounting to as much as $23 billion a year.”
Eminently sensible retired diplomat Martin Collacott notes that immigration numbers should match circumstances: now isn’t a good time.
On Tuesday the great republic to the south votes – many by the colour of their skin (and the colour of their class). Blacks will overwhelmingly vote for first black president Barack Obama. National Post reporter Kathryn Blaze Carlson noted that the Republican Party’s base is “so homogeneous about 90% of those who cast ballots during its primaries were white.” The ghetto of any colour is the norm.
Business angle: capitalism, far more than kneejerk-liberal idealists, is the great racial emancipator. There’s something sweet and uplifting about an ethic that cares foremost about the colour of the money. •
