Recently there was a call to make Punjabi language as a national language along with english and french
White Canadians were QUICK to shoot it down.Ms. Joyce Poley wrote in the Vancouver sun…Canada needs a glue to bind the communities together.. that sticky yucky glue for her is a common language. She wrote :making other languages official and invest in their developement.. would be stagerringly costly and counter productive” Instead we should let everyone learn English
Mario Castanon has better suggestion, ask all those reluctant to learn either english or french to stay in their own home land.

I come from a Country that has three totally different races(not including east Malaysia). Malay was spoken in the land before the settlers came from China and India. No one chnaged that. Every Malaysian speaks malay..yet no one prevents you from learning your mother tongue. Every single Malaysian child can study in Malay, Chinese or Tamil school. Most of our kids are multilingual. they can speak fluently malay, hokkien/hakka/mandarin,tamil and ofcourse english. You can buy panadol from the pharmacy and have the instruction in english, malay,chinese and tamil. A simple pouch to dispense medicine at the clinic will have the instructions in all four languages. Malay is the national language, yet Chinese language and Tamil survives..

Is it the same in Canada? The white settlers came, forced their language on the native indians. French settlers came in 1534 and the english settlers in 1666. Neither learned the native language, Instead they made the native people learn english. Now Canada has two official language.
However how many Canadians speak French?
I speak fairly fluent french.learned as a second language at secondary school level, later as a foreign language at the Alliance Francais in KL. It was easy to learn French in Malaysia.
It isn’t the same in Canada.
There are no places where I can send my kids to learn French within the 40 km radius around my home in Canada. At school they don’t learn french either. They can go to French immersion school which is about 24 km away and there is no guarentee they would get admission because of the disparity between the supply and demand. The school board draw lots and see which lucky ones get to learn french.
What would happen if you make Punjabi a national language? When you already have a title for the “less/not so” Canadians( like Indo Canadians), why not encourage their language?

About the staggering cost Ms Poley mentioned.. it looks like she thinks the immigrants are draining the Canadian economy.. not filling the bottomless pit. She perhaps is conveniently forgetting that immigrants are paying substantial amount in various forms of tax, so that the baby boomer Canadians can still have healthcare/disability pension/and pension.
Immigrants pay income tax to support the Canadians, while their own parents live in their home country( currently the waiting period is 3.5 years for an immigrant to sponsor his/her parent)

The white Canadian think that they can tell to the “less/not so” Canadians, ” you are in my country.. you listen to me..speak my language or go back to your home country..
Sound very much like the Malaysian idiot who said in the parliament”if you are not happy, go back to your home country”.. There is a difference though.. It isn’t the native indian who is saying that.. It is the white settler, who came a few centuries ahead of the punjabi, but now is the superior, by virtue of his skin.. The same settler who destroyed the native indian culture/language, and now weary of the punjabi.
When would this white supremacy end?