Word: canadas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Prime Minister Bertie Ahern. Later on Friday the Parliament passed the new statutory-rape law (whose age of consent, 17, fits uneasily with survey data placing the average start of sexual intercourse in Ireland at 15 1/2). Critics say the law should have been fixed years ago. Britain and Canada recently reformed their laws to include an "honest belief" defense for statutory rape, and the flaws in the Irish statute were highlighted by a government commission in 1990. Mr. A's release was "a case waiting to happen," says Ivana Bacik, a criminal-law professor at Trinity College, Dublin...
...of Québec, you learn not just the joys but also the perils of bilingualism. A separate national identity, revolving entirely around "Francophonie," became a raging issue that led to social unrest, terrorism, threats of separation and a referendum that came within a hair's breadth of breaking up Canada...
...Canada, of course, had no choice about bilingualism. It is a country created of two nations at its birth, and has ever since been trying to cope with that inherently divisive fact. The U.S., by contrast blessed with a single common language for two centuries, seems blithely and gratuitously to be ready to import bilingualism with all its attendant divisiveness and antagonisms...
...that changes when you have an enormous, linguistically monoclonal immigration as we do today from Latin America. Then you get not Brooklyn's successful Babel but Canada's restive Québec. Monoclonal immigration is new for the U.S., and it changes things radically. If at the turn of the 20th century, Ellis Island had greeted teeming masses speaking not 50 languages but just, say, German, America might not have enjoyed the same success at assimilation and national unity that...
That would not be the end of the world--Canada is a decent place--but the beginning of a new one for the U.S., a world far more complicated and fraught with division. History has blessed us with all the freedom and advantages of multiculturalism. But it has also blessed us, because of the accident of our origins, with a linguistic unity that brings a critically needed cohesion to a nation as diverse, multiracial and multiethnic as America. Why gratuitously throw away that priceless asset? How mindless to call the desire to retain it "racist...