I am hearing this a lot this week about the argument that people who come into this country need to subscribe to the 'values' of this country, and that we need to protect them. Well let's talk about that for just a second.
As I see it, the only official 'values' of this country as a corporation are its supposed adherence to due process of law and human rights; this is applied universally to all citizens and documented with legislation like the Charter. But when it comes to cultural values however, that is quite different.
There are tens of millions of people in this country and it's illogical to assume that there is a shortlist of values that each of us could hold that should be the same. Thinking about the country like that is thinking in collective terms rather than seeing individuals and that can cause us to easily overlook people and their uniqueness.
If a certain value that a person holds isn't held within the majority, why shouldn't that value (if peaceful) still be respected? The smallest minority is the individual and if we purport to champion any sort of collective values then it should at the very least be the value of adhering to respecting individual liberty and basic human rights.
I see a slippery slope to where we are trying to restrict people's personal values when they don't align with ours and when we want to infringe upon a person's liberty or prevent them from doing something because we don't like what they value, then we are hypocrites to what we say it is that we stand for.
Our views of value are subjective and so long as someone is living their life in a peaceful way that isn't violating the liberty of another person, then who are we to say that their values are wrong? Or should we really get into the business of trying to tell people what language they can speak, what they can eat, what they can wear, or what holiday's they can celebrate and so on? Because that sounds like the collective road of valuing fascism.