Ford comments out of line

I had to check the date on SEE #775 [“Splitting The Conservative Vote?”] to verify we are really in the year 2008 when I read the quote by Edmonton Sherwood Park independent candidate James Ford saying: “They are gathering up all the new immigrants and the naïve newcomers to use them on the voting floor.… No one’s saying anything for fear of being called a racist. You know how bad we are at that. As soon as somebody says something or criticizes anything to do with immigration, we get called a racist. They try to drive fear into Canadians to keep your mouth shut.”

Racist or not, Mr. Ford is so ignorant about immigrants he would be well advised to keep his mouth shut and not expose his foolish, paternalistic views to the rest of the community. The idea that immigrants are sitting about waiting to be “gathered up” and used by this or that politician is ridiculous and the claim they are a bunch of “naïve newcomers” would be proven absurd if he spent even an hour in a conversation with any handful of randomly selected new Canadians. Immigrants are some of the smartest, best informed, community-minded and attentive people in town. The charge that someone can herd them about in some mindless way is such a distortion of reality I’m not sure whether to laugh at Mr. Ford’s foolishness or grind my teeth that there are still “respected” citizens who don’t know how dumb it is to be saying things like this out loud.

Just because Mr. Ford’s ancestors came here a lot earlier than Tim Uppal’s and got to bully their way in to decide what the parameters of the dominant culture would be does not mean they are the divinely ordained rulers of this place. It is time we did talk more about racism as our province becomes more diverse. If racism does not have a poisonous role in Canadian life, how do we explain that even the Canadian-born and -educated children of non-white immigrant parents still do not manage to do as well economically overall as children with the same education from white families? How come the ranks of poverty are so over-represented by people who are not white?

Is Mr. Ford saying that there was some deliberate inappropriate manipulation of a bunch of sheeplike non-white immigrants to steal the Conservative nomination in Edmonton Sherwood Park from the anointed darling of the old boys in town? What does he mean by saying “No one’s saying anything for fear of being called a racist?” This anti-newcomer innuendo makes me sick, and voters need to let Mr. Ford know how out of line he is by a variation on Newfoundland premier Danny William’s ABC initiative and voting ABF on October 14: Anybody But Ford.

Jim Gurnett, Sherwood Park

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