I heart Heather Mallick

CBC columnista extraordinaire Heather Mallick pulls a strip off the hairy back of Canadian propaganda aimed at new and prospective immigrants by equating this booklet with a national personals ad. God dammit woman, could you be more brilliant?

Case in point:

I rather adore Canada, and at times when I am at Wickaninnish in British Columbia or skiing at Lake Louise, Alta., or eating Nova Scotia oysters or drinking a Bloody Caesar (Canadian invention), I am actively in love with it. But at no time do I think we are God's gift to humanity. What arse would say it, or worse, believe it?

And again:

The booklet says Canadian values include equality (ask Muslim-Canadians now regularly referred to in newspapers as "brown-skinned"), freedom (ask a pregnant woman running the Christian-right gauntlet at a Fredericton abortion clinic), peacekeeping (ask a soldier fighting a pointless war in Afghanistan), and law and order (ask those Muslim-Canadian teenagers on trial for terrorism instead of adolescence).

And again:

For the sky is always blue as a jay in this land of moral and personable people devoted to their "parliamentary democracy," unstinting in their "environmentally sound" stewardship of the "clean and prosperous" country that their children will live in, speaking as one in their respect for "cultural differences" and their faith in "international peacekeeping."

No, seriously.

I'm not mocking the federal government's rendition of national perfection for the vulnerable immigrants most likely to fall for it. I understand the impulse. Canada needs skilled immigrants. It's the economic version of dating angst like, "Gosh, if we could just hook up with an emerging tech nation who has relatives who do plumbing on the side."