'Compassion' Bites

David Warren warns of the perils of Liberal-style "compassion"--the cynical, strings-attached type that weeps copious tears for ethnic groups and ushers them ashore in order to pack the land with grateful Liberal voters:

The Liberals built and own Canada's immigration system, together with the justifying public policy of "multiculturalism," that the Trudeau government summoned while pointing a demographic hose at major English-speaking urban areas, back in the 1970s. We take it for granted that no Tory today can hope to win a seat in Toronto or Vancouver, or any other dense urban environment. This result did not come about naturally.

We must accept the consequences of past immigration policy, and the political difficulties in persuading past beneficiaries that they will not benefit from its continuation. For there is such a thing as a tipping point, past which an entire country becomes dysfunctional -- because the cultural virtues on which it depended have been squandered.

In this respect, the public ideal of "multiculturalism" does far more harm than open immigration, though the one policy depends on the other, and both are aggravated by the venal attractions of a welfare state.

A society in which all social, economic, and cultural values are optional, and in which, moreover, all traditional and received values are placed under formal suspicion, is a society that is disintegrating. It is a society in which the self-serving rule, the dutiful are in their way, and hypocrisy is consistently rewarded.

I think that last paragraph should be reworked and added to our national anthem:

Oh Canada
Self-serving rulers reign.
No "values" here
'Cause our loss is your gain...