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“Whatever their particularities immigrants put them aside, because there was a core identity with Canada, and the United States, and it was clearly a liberal democracy,” the professor says. “But we trashed our core value system.”

Or else we simply expanded the definition. Language retention rates of immigrant populations offer a telling story, and, in some ways, tell a similar story to Professor Mansur’s. Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Polish, German — older stock immigrant groups — fully retain their mother tongues at rates far below newer arrivals to Canada.

For example, only 39% of Italians, a group that came to Canada in two great waves at the beginning of the twentieth century and again after the Second World War, are fully fluent in Italian, whereas Punjabi-speaking Indians have an 81.4% language retention rate. That may change for subsequent generations, or it may not.

Professor Mansur claims that we aren’t on our way to becoming “Balkanized” as a nation, but that we are already there. Maybe, in some sad instances, he is right. The other day I sat through a murder trial of an Afghan immigrant, a man allegedly unable and unwilling to adjust to life in Canada and to accept that his wife was accepting of Western ways. So he killed her. It is brutal story.

But there are others to tell.

Parminder Singh is 31-years-old, an immigrant, a Sikh, a medical student and, back when there actually was hockey to watch, a play-by-play man for Hockey Night in Canada’s Punjabi-language broadcasts. Lanky, and with a big beard, Mr. Singh was raised in a multi-generational home where English was effectively his first language but Punjabi was the ‘official’ language, a language he needed to master, by necessity, if he wanted to speak to his grandparents.