Trop de chefs progressistes, plus assez d'indiens (en anglais)

Mark Steyn

There’s an abandoned town in Labrador called Davis Inlet. An Innu
community — i.e., natives, of the Mushuau people, if you’re big on who’s
who in the Great White North. About a decade ago Canadians switched on
their televisions and were confronted by ‘shocking’ images of the town’s
populace passing the day snorting drugs, glue, petrol and pretty much
anything else to hand.

So, as any impeccably progressive soft-lefties would, Her Majesty’s
Government in Ottawa decided to build the Mushuau a new town a few miles
inland — state of the art, money no object, new homes, new heating
systems, new schoolhouse, new computers, plus new more culturally
respectful town name (Natuashish). Total cost to Canadian taxpayers:
$152 million, which works out to about $217,142.85 for each of the
town’s men, women and children. Got a wife and two kids and you’re
looking at a government handout of about nine hundred thousand bucks.

And the upshot of Canadian taxpayers’ generosity? Two years after the
new town opened, the former Mushuau chief and the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police both agreed that there were more drugs, alcoholism, gas-sniffing
etc., than ever before. Also higher suicide rates.

Gas-sniffing is not a traditional native activity. Before the first
European settlers came, the Mushuau did not roam the tundra hunting for
Toyota Corollas to siphon the tanks of. That’s a particularly perverse
form of cultural co-mingling, but one in which ‘compassionate’ white
liberals seem determined to keep the natives mired. The government
showers native communities with money; there’s no economic downside to
sniffing petrol all day; and as everyone in Natuashish is driving around
in brand-new pick-ups on roads that go nowhere you might as well use
that full tank of gas for something. The net result of 40 years of a
‘caring’ policy intended to maintain communities in their traditional
‘culture’ is that Canadian natives now have tuberculosis, diabetes,
heart disease and brain damage at levels accelerating further and
further away from those in society at large, not to mention lower
life-expectancy, higher infant mortality, and endemic suicide. On the
last point, the Canadian government doesn’t give natives the rope with
which they hang themselves, but they do give them free supplies of
ammunition. (Natives have higher murder rates, too.) Identity-group
grievance-mongers routinely go on about the first Europeans introducing
disease to hitherto vigorous North American Indians four centuries ago,
but the current health crises afflicting literally dying communities are
of less concern. Nonetheless, the math seems unarguable: too many
agonised white liberal multicultural chiefs leads to not enough Indians.

Canadian natives, as the most comprehensively wrecked minority on the
continent, are a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with
multiculturalism. The premise of multiculturalism is that all cultures
are equally ‘valid’, but of course that’s bunk: some cultures are
better, some are worse, some are successes, some are failures. I’m not
being ‘Eurocentric’ here. Perish the thought: an awful lot of European
cultures have proved hopeless at sustaining over any length of time
representative government, property rights, the rule of law and
individual liberty. Those are largely features of the Britannic world —
not just of the United Kingdom, America, Australia and New Zealand but
also of India, Singapore, St Lucia, as well as Quebec and Mauritius, to
name but two francophone jurisdictions all the more agreeable for having
spent their formative years under the British Crown.

That’s one reason why I’m a Eurosceptic — because I don’t think the
British have anything to learn from the Belgians or Germans