Being in this time and with the current perspective of this century in mind and with all the aspects of our evolution the question arises “have we made any progress”?
Yes, we have accomplished much and in some instances we are not there yet.
We all can agree that the notion to say we are far away from the trouble around the world and it is over, however; in this global village every given situation good or bad affects us all.
We must start to think in more relevance to our century no matter how high we build our fences around our individual country this is not going to be the solution for our humanitarian responsibility.
The elders of my village used to say “you cannot detach the pulp of an orange without wasting the juice” the two go hand in hand.
I had the opportunity to participate in recent conferences organized by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation with the City of Vancouver and the City of Richmond addressing our current integration challenges and a UBC sponsored conference of Cultural Diversity and Policing Forum that addressed strengthening relationships and identifying emerging priorities. These were very engaging and constructive forums to initiate dialogue and concerns amongst the general community.
It must become more important to our new elected leaders to open their mind and eyes on the issue of integration and encourage dialogue to foster our common role and responsibility as citizens.
This will give all communities and individual elected leaders the truth about what we face and move forward as a country in the fore front of integration and multiculturalism.
We must be vigilant as the social justice and economic integration should not become a repeat crisis of the past as different players in a different time play the same beat of ignorance.
The consequences we face today is that of our elected officials for the last 15 years going around the world selling Canada. We solicited easy and unscrupulous funds and allowed it to enter our system and now some of our provinces are suffering due to this rushed quick fix economic policy. We should not be surprised at the challenges we face as a country. It is not just one persons problem. Today our elected officials are scrambling to find answers to some of the issues we face; namely the high housing cost crisis in Vancouver. This just proves that we were not prepared or equipped with the right solutions from the get go. We should never rush to grow our population and economic stance by adopting shortcut methods. Ultimately, this adaptation of politics will only get more challenging in the time to come.
We must review and update our governing laws to the conditions of the 21st Century as some of our legislative laws especially the labour law to protect the most vulnerable working force in our society is old and lacks integrity for immigrant workers. Failing to do this step we will face big trouble sooner or later as the new flock of immigrants and the previous wave of immigrants to our system are not protected from ’slave’ labour.
The advancement of society and the technology growth of our current world makes it imperative that all government institutions quickly adapt but to keep to the past and have a handle on our security parameters in order to maintain our sustainable growth and development as a country.
Today our democracy is loosing the key component to the tradition of our development. It is critical that we must protect the authenticity of governance. This is vital to our communities development and played a tremendous role in our dominion for over 200 years.
Let our voice remain constructive to our development and progress as we celebrate Black History Month.
