you'll find that there are some exceptions.

jews & arabs hold strong to identity, as their religion & ethnicity are seen by them as the same thing. further, the question of the effect of african-american identity on black canadians (most of whom are carribbean in origin, or straight from africa) is a complicated thing, as some will adopt it and others won't. the japanese are weird like this, too. but, these are small groups in canada.

more broadly speaking, people coming to canada are coming from big, complicated countries.

china & india & russia are all ethnic confederations, rather than nation states. they're not exactly "multicultural societies", so much as they are coalitions between what are at times rather disparate groups. and, together, they're both half the world's population and the biggest ethnic groups in the country. if you grew up in india, you're used to co-existence, however tenuous, between sikhs & muslims & hindus & buddhists & jains & parsees & ....; when you show up here, you're not going to cling to some narrow concept of what you were, you're going to try and determine where your values best align - if you're religious or traditionalist, you'll align with the conservatives and if you're secularist or progressive you'll end up a liberal or a new democrat. of course, your financial well-being will have something to do with that, as well. & similarly for a chinese immigrant, who is used to existing in a stew of ethnicities brought together by a lingua franca - it's not that different than here, really.

& all i've been saying forever is that if we want a liberal society, we need to attract liberal immigrants or at least stop attracting conservative ones - because the conservatives have figured out that their best shot at avoiding irrelevance is bringing in more conservative immigrants.

which is what we're seeing happen here, in ontario.

and which is what is short-circuiting our premier.

what identity politics does is create unnecessary divisions in the body politic, and that does not help the left. ever. if anybody wants to roll this shit out, it should be ford; the left needs to knock it fucking off.