Barrel Strength

Thanks to Girl on the Right. Original contest rules here.

The Department of Citizenship and Immigration is holding a contest for people to send a videotape whose purpose is to stop racism.

About the Racism. Stop It!  National Video Competition

Your video will be judged by a jury of professionals based on:

1. Effectiveness and creativity in the communication of the Racism. Stop It! message.
2. Production quality. Even if your idea is brilliant, no television station participating in this initiative will be able to use it for public broadcast if your images or sound are unclear.
3. Sticking to the rules. Your video must:

and so forth.

The department is to be congratulated on its very un-PC insistence that the contestants must stick by rules. No talk here of overturning the hegemony of the phallocentric western-European white rule-abindingness with various forms of feminist third-worldy unintelligible discourse. No sirree! To be judged, the contestants must submit to actual stated criteria, applicable to all.

Is it not ironic that when Canadians criticize Islamic political behaviour in Canada they do so on the same basis, that the laws of Parliament and the rules of Canadian society apply equally to everyone? Shades of the Herouxville Declaration!

And that they are criticized for being “racist” when they do so. Yet when actual judgments have to be made about videotapes, relatively straight-forward marking criteria have to be used in order to create a sufficiently common set of products subject to judgement. You cannot compare a haiku to a sonnet, though each are valid expressions of culture.

So I say to Citizenship and Immigration, the same process of reasoning applies to judging people as it does to judging vieotapes. There has to be agreement about common standards. And  this agreement is neither racist nor wrong in any sense. Other societies might have different standards, and so be it. But this Canadian society has a standard of behaviour, which is not to be messed with for the purpose of  adapting us to immigrants, but rather them to us.

The fact that this kind of contest is still being held in a Conservative regime is a sure sign that the government has not yet sufficiently purged the bureaucracy.