Spikey Non-Christmas Tree outside of Holts Luxury Department store
at the main entrance of the Square One Mississauga Mall
the hub of activity in Mississauga
[Photo By: KPA, December 4, 2018]
On Thursday Nov 29, 2018, at 12:10 PM
To: Ricardo Duchesne
Kidist Paulos Asrat
Dear Dr. Duchesne,
I frequently read the articles on the website Council of European Canadians, and I have read your book Canada in Decay.
I have been collecting and filing data on Mississauga, Ontario, for about three years now, to publish a book on the city.
I have been living in Mississauga for about five years, having lived in Toronto before that.
My years in Mississauga exposed me to multiculturalism and it steady and nefarious progression into the Canadian life and landscape. Mississauga is conveniently ignored by major cities like Toronto and Ottawa, and is a destination for Third World immigrants who flock here looking for cheaper housing and a safe suburban life, away from the "big city" problems of Toronto. Mississauga now has one of the largest non-white population in all of Canada.
Mississauga's leaders' intentions are starkly displayed at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, where I was a frequent visitor and recorder of the art and artistic activities promoted and programed by the gallery.
About a year ago, I asked one too many controversial question at an AGM gallery event about the lack of Western art on display at the gallery, and subsequently, I received an email from the galley's (still current) director, Mandy Slater, a white woman, to cease my "antagonistic" behavior and not to frequent gallery any more, with my name submitted to the Peel Region Police and the Mississauga Security division, should I not comply. I haven't entered the gallery since then. But the AGM's prolific website provides me with all the information I require on the gallery's exhibitions and programming to follow and monitor their activities. As well, most of the staff post photographs and commentary on their various social media sites.
Since then, the AGM has been making progressive changes in the gallery's structure and organization, and especially so in the past few months. One of the dramatic changes has been the removal of Kendra Ainsworth, its one (of two) white staff. The other is Mandy Salter, the gallery's director, recently hired only about a year ago. All the other administrative and curatorial positions are [KPA edit: since] filled with non-white, mostly Indian (Asian) and Muslim staff. Most are also relatively new to these posts, stretching back about two years for the most senior.
The AGM's purpose of this newly restructured gallery is is to "build a whole new kind of art institution" as I wrote to a correspondent recently. What I mean by this is a gallery that exhibits and promotes works by non-white, non-Western artists.
I have a background in the arts both as a practitioner and as a researcher. I studied photography at Ryerson University, and painting and textile design through various courses and workshops in Toronto, including the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto.
I started a blog called Camera Lucida in 2005 to "explore and shed light on how art, and culture and society converge."
Several years later in 2013, I started a blog I titled Reclaiming Beauty "to document the contribution that beauty had made toward our Western Civilization," where I still continue to blog.
I believe that the AGM is building an institution that can expand into other regions in the province and the country, as a successful example of an art institution that reflects multicultural and ethnic art, and a gallery which has pushed to the sidelines, and even out of the gallery, works by what now Canadians are being regularly told "racist" white artists, and especially those which reflect a Canada of half a century to a century ago, which of course are almost exclusively white artists.
Mississauga's history originates as a "new city" built around the 1970s, as an ambitious vision by a white Canadian, Bruce McLaughlin, to separate this already existing small town from the influences of Toronto, and to build self-sufficient and independent city. Immigration and non-Canadian residents were far from his, and his colleagues' minds. The AGM itself was established in 1987, as a separate gallery, independent from big-city influences, or even the then encroaching multiculturalism, and its inauguration was celebrated with the visit of the Duke and Duchess of York in July 1987.
I will present this historical material in my book on how a once confident city, with confident citizens, now has devolved into this multicultural outpost, almost forgotten by other regional centres, but which is quietly restructuring society and culture.
At some point it will gain some power and start to promote successful and prosperous multiculturalism as an example for other Canadian cities to follow.
The reality, though, is that Mississauga is far from success and prosperity, with some of the highest poverty rates in Ontario recorded in the city's non-white ethnic neighbourhoods, and a non-existent, true, "mosaic" of mixed multiculturalism, with an increasingly self-segregating population separating itself by race, ethnicity and religion. And the various socio-ethnic groups do not work together, in art or other cultural and social programs, especially where their "identities" are involved, and some are even antagonistic towards each other (Indian Hindu and Muslims, for example).
And the AGM would not exist were it not for the close to the third of a billion of dollars in governmental grants it receives annually to promote this artificial mosaic of integrated multiculturalism through its art exhibitions and art programming.
I propose that we co-author such a book, perhaps as part of a larger subject of the practical realities of multiculturalism in Canada, and use Mississauga as one (perhaps the most important) example of how things really do function when multiculturalism is the Canadian government's policy.
Sincerely,
Kidist Paulos Asrat
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On Monday, December 3, 2018, 11:11:24 AM
Ricardo Duchesne <...@unb.ca> wrote:
Hello,
Why not turn this into an article for CEC? You already have a good draft, and need to have an introduction, and a few other revisions to make it into an article. This is a topic I am interested in, and would like to see this developed into article.
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On Monday, December 3, 2018, at 6:09:37 PM
Kidist Paulos Asrat
Thank you for your suggestion.
KPA
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On Wednesday, Dec 5 2018, at 6:47 AM
reclaimbeauty@gmail.com
To: Ricardo Duchesne
Dear Dr. Duchesne,
Thanks once again for your helpful comments.
Nonetheless, I will independently write and publish the book on Mississauga rather than produce a very much condensed article.
Mississauga is a unique place. It warrants a full book: a demonstration of how society devovles as rulers and leaders lose confidence in themselves and a government-mandated plan (Multiculturalism) to change society is forced on all policy makers, which they have to comply with if they want to keep their jobs and have some future to look forward to (retirement, children well-educated, mortgages paid off, etc.).
There was something exciting and fresh about Mississauga when it started out as a city built from the ground up - literally.
The saddest part of this bright history is the current demoralized population, both white and nonwhite.
For example, non-white residents and immigrants relate to their ancestral countries much more so now than a decade or two ago. Most of them are bitterly disappointed in Canada, where they have been unable to "integrate," despite tremendous efforts by government officials and policies to assist them to do so. And their children, the Canadian-born second generation, who are experiencing the same lack of integration, are militant in blaming the "racist" white culture that they fervently believe is denying them their "rights." Thus there is no integration, but increasing ethnic and racial self-segregation. And there is also a new (albeit weak) trend of a repatriation and return "home" by some.
But I believe all this is a good thing, a good sign, demonstrating the failures (and cruelty) of multiculturalism, not just to critics like me, but to ordinary people, which is forcing them to search for, and discover, authentic ways of living.
Here is where I can show systematically how we can all salvage what we have. Those who return to their countries of origin can reclaim their ancestry and abandoned homes. And those like me can reclaim the city as it was once envisioned by its pioneers.
I believe that Mississauga, because of its strange "outlier" geographical position, is a perfect blueprint to demonstrate all these points.
Thank you once again for your communication. All the best in your projects.
Sincerely,
Kidist Paulos Asrat