Geoff Russ: Don’t compare today’s immigrants to the Loyalists of early Canada

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It is to the federal government’s discredit that its own account of the Loyalists is outclassed, ironically, by that of its counterparts in the United States.

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The best the Government of Canada’s website can produce is: “Loyalists came from various ethnic backgrounds and supported the British for different reasons.… Some white Loyalists brought enslaved people with them when they settled in what is now Canada.”

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Grossly, the stubborn quest to artificially shoehorn American antebellum slavery into our national narrative has had great success.

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Compare that with the American National Park Service, which sympathetically describes the Loyalists as people who were “Forced from their homes and persecuted at the end of the American Revolution, United Empire Loyalists sought refuge in British Canada. When war broke out in 1812, Loyalist families committed themselves to defending the British Crown and their lands for a second time.

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“The Americans’ failure to conquer Canada evoked a powerful sense of vindication for many Loyalists who managed to survive both conflicts. Those survivors came to form their own brand of postwar identity — one based on resistance, unity, and loyalty to empire,” reads a National Park Service explainer.

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Night and day.

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It smacks of dishonesty and bad faith to invoke the Loyalists to justify overpopulating Canada one day and then, on another, treat them as afterthoughts or colonial relics in an attempt to culturally re-engineer the country. Everything included in the National Park Service’s tribute to the first Anglo-Canadians is an affront to the Liberal project of turning Canada into a pure “nation of values” that can serve as a laboratory for policy experiments.

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But, for a moment, let us consider “values.”

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The fealty and determination of the Loyalists are qualities that should guide and inspire Canadians today. Questions of allegiance, ethics and obligation will not go away in a country that has undergone such radical social, political and demographic transformation in the past decade.

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In March of this year, it was revealed that there were 152,000 cases of potential non-compliance among international students who had entered Canada. Fewer than 5,000 investigations had been launched in 2023 and 2024. If people will not respect Canadian law, can they be expected to have basic respect for Canada, especially when they face little or no repercussions?

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Many newcomers have shown themselves to reject the very premise and legitimacy of Canada, with one man in Toronto filmed saying that there were “no real Canadians” and using expletives to describe them. Others have adopted radical left narratives about the country, commonly found on university and college campuses, decrying its colonial origins as if they were shameful.

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Even worse, the ongoing surge of migration in this era has resulted in the infiltration of Canada by terrorists and international criminal networks. One of these is the India-linked Bishnoi gang, which has been terrorizing South Asian business owners across the country and using international students as enforcers and money mules.

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Again, in what world do the Loyalists justify this status quo? A Loyalist was nothing like a member of the Bishnoi gang. Loyalists were settlers. They did not seek to wiggle their way into permanent residency through shady consultancy firms and the gaming of their visas.

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We must reject the soppy sentiment of Canada as a pure “nation of immigrants.” We have millions of immigrants in Canada, millions more of their children, and millions more Canadians whose families have been rooted here far too long to be classified as newcomers. There are very good and very bad citizens in all three groups, the former including military and sporting heroes from an immigrant background.

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If we want to fix immigration, a good start would be to stop distorting our own history and producing false apologia for bad policy.

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National Post

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