Cultural Assimilation: A Solution

What needs to be done is a balance between the two sides, and one action that needs to be taken is policies created to do exactly what Alfred, Lowe, Coulthard and Smith propose. They have a number of goals of resistance and resurgence to the dominant order and one important one is ‘intellectual and cultural self determination’ (Alfred et al. 2006) which instead of the immigrants being assimilated into the dominant order, they are moving away from it. This is important because it gives them the ability to maintain their culture, and if other policies are created to meet the goal of ‘economic self sufficiency’ they will be able to maintain their culture while being successful in the Canadian society. ‘Whiteness’ has become the black hole of the Canadian galaxy (Baldwin et al. 2011) and as we move farther away from this black hole we will become not racialized (Day 2013), which will only prove to be positive for Canada. As a white Canadian citizen I believe that I will never know what it is like to be assimilated into the Canadian culture and so I believe that the policies that are created for the immigrants need to be made with immigrants so that the policies will truly be beneficial for the new Canadians.

More educational organizations and groups (like those mentioned in Kay’s article) need to be incorporated into the system. Originally those groups were not even designed for immigrants per say but parents in general, but it just so happened that the only ones that were using them were the ones who were trying to transition from the culture of their previous country into the Canadian one. If more groups and organizations are made specifically for new Canadian immigrants from all over the world, the transition process would be much smoother, and the change of one’s culture into another one would be less extreme. These organizations would then give the opportunity for the new citizens to talk and share ideas, to have people with similar and different cultures to relate and talk with, and it is with these things the Canadian immigrants would not only have a group of people they share common interests and experiences with, but they would be able to function well in the Canadian society.

Something that is difficult to change, but needs to be is the way the media portrays people and how this creates stereo types. The media is a great source for news, weather, and learning about issues all over the world but it has become a tool that creates preconceived mindsets among people. This needs to change because the way Canada is, it is sometimes ‘multicultural’ but most times it is not. Multiculturalism in Canada needs not to be ‘tolerance and integration’ as Abigail Bakan and Daiva Stasiulis state but for it to be acceptance and assistance (Bakan and Stasiulis 2005). In Vancouver where Ayelet Tsabari immigrated too, the Jewish culture was nothing she knew of, or had experienced (Tsabari 2013). The ‘Jewish restaurants’ were European Jewish Restaurants and the reason for this is because of how the media played a role in portraying the majorities of people and not taking into consideration the minorities. This makes life difficult for new immigrants in Canada because it leaves people a lot of the time in a state of ‘trying to fit in,’ for there is nothing around them that they know. See this is not accepting and assisting immigrants into the Canadian culture, but tolerating them and integrating them which do not prove beneficial for development. This increases the amounts of people that are assimilated into the Canadian culture and it is not an accepted change, but a forced one. What needs to be done is the government needs to take into consideration all majorities, minorities and everything in between when making policies, opening up stores, creating organizations, schools, religious centres, etc. and until we do that, too many immigrants will be assimilated into the Canadian culture without consent, and the development of Canada in general will remain at a standstill.