Friday, August 20

JOHN BARBER

Thursday, August 19, 1999

One thing separates the dog from the unaccompanied children who sailed aboard the latest Fujian freighter to bump into the left edge of our home and native land. The children want to work. The dog, on the other hand, is just a freeloader.

She is already proving to be a tremendous strain on our tattered safety net, gobbling up kibble obtained by the sweat of native Canadian brows, lounging around the luxurious quarters of the Victoria animal shelter while other needy canines -- pedigreed Canadians, each and every one of them -- shiver on the outside, homeless and unloved.

And now this blatant queue-jumper is even getting free medical care, to clear up a minor eye infection. The last time I took my dog to the vet, I paid a good buck for the privilege of getting him back alive. But I'm just a hard-working, taxpaying Canadian. This foreign dog puts one paw on our soil and bang -- she's on welfare. I guess it's a privilege reserved for foreigners. What a bunch of patsies we are.

On the other hand, it's hard not to be moved by the generous and compassionate response her appearance has evoked. People from across the country have stepped up with kind offers to take her in and support her, despite her foreign origins and layabout habits. She has become a celebrity.

That's all well and good, but it's important not to take such sentiments too far. This is something most Canadians, despite their notoriously soft hearts, seem to agree upon. While arms open wide to accept the castaway mutt, the attitude we maintain in regard to the people aboard the same boat was expressed succinctly in a front-page headline in the Victoria Times-Colonist: "Go Home." The newspaper polled more than 3,000 readers and reported that 97 per cent of them want the boat people deported immediately. Bleeding-heart immigrant-lovers in that city whine that nobody has offered so much as a cup of kibble to help the human migrants.

One ventures to say that mainstream Canada shows uncommonly good judg- ment in restricting its affections to the lone canine aboard that boat. The dog may be an illegal alien, and a parasite to boot, but at least she's not going to take anybody's job. But those kids -- there were 43 unaccompanied children on board, the youngest eight years old -- they're a different story.

They came here for one reason only -- to work. Feed them a few crumbs of rice and they'll work 18 hours a day, seven days a week. These people have no shame, and the young ones are the worst of all.

Imagine the calamity that would have occurred had the smugglers landed their cargo on our Atlantic coast instead. Those poor fish-plant workers in Petit Rocher, N.B., wouldn't have stood a chance.

These women had been laid off from their jobs in a local fish plant even before they had worked the 12 weeks necessary to qualify for a year's worth of federal unemployment insurance, and provincial officials were leaning on them heavily to work the balance of the time at another plant 100 kilometres up the road.

Naturally they were outraged, complaining that the demand that they commute to new jobs aboard a government-supplied school bus was "unjust" and "inhumane." Who could blame them? They're just not used to such hardships. But those Chinese kids wouldn't think twice about commuting halfway around the world for the chance to clean Canadian herring at $10 an hour.

Even if those foreign brats had spent only one month cleaning our fish -- good, wholesome Canadian fish -- they would have ruined a year in the lives of the Petit Rocher workers. Without those 12 weeks, the Canadians would have been subjected to the indignity of provincial welfare instead of the federal pogey, a blatant violation of their fundamental rights.

But that's not the only reason to send the Fujianese packing. A public-spirited group named C-FAR alerts us to several more reasons why we should resist the invasions of such implacable job-seekers. They will destroy our cultural roots, the group reports, collapse our infrastructure and set off a plague of infectious disease (the inevitable consequence of "vigorous population mixing," according to a recent C-FAR bulletin). Not only that, but such tremendous population pressure will destroy "already imperilled" Canadian wildlife.

Obviously, we must resist the invasion.

But we don't object to the dog. She's already part Canadian, after all -- half-Labrador -- and she has no intention of working for a living. She'll fit in just fine.
As of today, John Barber's column has moved here from the Saturday Focus section, and will appear on this page every Thursday.