Shame on the Walrus

I am not a regular reader of Walrus Magazine, but I do touch base from time to time, and generally find it to be an excellent source of progressive Canadian thought.

So I was disconcerted yesterday when a came upon an article by Daniel Stoffman entitled Are We Safe Yet? an all too typical fear mongering screed on terrorism. Stoffman, whose work I am not familiar with, usually covers the immigration beat for the Toronto Star as well as blogs on the issue. Here is a sample of his work

it's 2020 and, in Toronto, the days when everyone used the public health-care system are gone. So is the time when a majority of affluent, middle-class parents sent their kids to public schools. In 2020, vast tracts of suburban slums occupy what used to be good farmland on the city's outskirts.

Traffic congestion and air pollution are unbearable. Toronto's reputation as one of North America's most livable cities is a distant memory. It's now known as the "Sao Paulo of the north."

This dystopian vision of the future of Canada's largest city is hardly far-fetched. Toronto is already suffering severe growing pains, the result of the federal government's insistence on maintaining the world's largest per capita annual immigration intake — around 250,000 people a year of whom about 43 per cent come to Toronto. That's more than 100,000 newcomers year after year after year.

It is impossible for any city to maintain its social and physical infrastructure in the face of such relentless population growth.

By 2020, Greater Toronto's population will have ballooned from 5 million to 7 million, or even more if immigration levels are raised higher still.

Switching his sights to terrorism for the Walrus article, Stoffman continues in the same "be very afraid" mode. And he continues with the same anti-immigrant stance with his focus on muslims. Canada in his telling is an immigration free for all awash with sketchy refugee claimants and home to a vast variety of terrorist groups. Thus he argues that

[b]ack in 1998, Ward Elcock, then director of CSIS, said that fifty international terrorist groups were active in Canada, more than in any other country, with the possible exception of the US. That’s no surprise to David Harris, a lawyer and a former chief of strategic planning for CSIS. “We offer everything a discriminating terrorist would want,” he says. “Good communications, ease of travel, a generous welfare system, a good health care system, an excellent banking system, and a wonderfully out-of-control immigration system.”

This of course is the same CSIS whose brilliance on the terrorism file brought us Mahar Arar's rendition to Syria and several similar incidents. Incompetent thuggery is a term that comes to mind.

Immigration has served Canada and particularly Toronto very well. As Richard Florida has noted in works such as Whose your City, Toronto's incredible diversity is its chief selling point. And older suburbs such as Scarborough, while they surely have pockets of real problems are not "vast urban slums" nor are they likely to become so.

More important, however, is our response to terrorism and the threat of terrorism. Canada has had a terrorist attack proportionally equal to 9/11. We lost more than three hundred people in the Air India bombings, the investigation of which was not CSIS' greatest moment. Yet we did not use it as a reason to embrace paranoia and hide behind walls of fear. We are better than this.

Tens of thousands of Britons died during the blitz of World War II. Yet the British people defiantly refused to live in fear. And this, more than anything else, allowed them to prevail. Similarly, if we refuse to live in fear, terrorism cannot prevail. If we embrace fear and succumb to anti-immigrant hysteria, however, they need not even attack us. They have won.