More Canadian Than A Canadian?

A new Target has recently opened it's doors in my general area. Another one, which is even closer to me, is set to go public before June of this year. With this news, I as well as many other Canadians are being given the chance to witness a grande appearance, a store that is making a grande appearance on the Canadian market and showing it's love not only for Canadians, but for Canada. Which begs the question for this post, is Target more Canadian than the average Canadian? Than you?

Target of course is not the main idea in my question, but does represent a symptom, to an arising condition within Canada. As the Capitalist market continues to run parallel with globalization, we Canadians are becoming more and more aware of the world around us. In the case of Target, we now have the ability to diversify our shopping needs further. We now get to choose an alternative to the retail outlets that are primarily American, with...another American retail store.

It appears that being a Canadian and operating an independent business is becoming further more difficult to do. What made me really stop and think however, was how in love with Canada Target appears to be. So much patriotism seems to be spewing from the advertisements, store banners and general theme the store is portraying. Granted, I love the fact that Target will be taking on Walmart head on, which in reality is a good thing for average consumers and might just slow down the destruction that Walmart is currently unleashing on our country.

However grandiose this love for Canada is, it does not seem like  the right way to showcase "being Canadian". Something just does not feel right when I see a Target banner stating how much it loves Canada. I mean, we only just met, how could it love us so much and as a result share as much patriotism and love for our country as we do? In fact, what do the upper management of Target think they are doing, when they essentially love Canada more than the average Canadian does? Canadians tend to take comfort in comparing themselves to Americans as different, which allows us to have a distinctive identity to be proud of. However, we now have an American company coming onto our land and spreading to us a love for our own country that mimics more it's own patriotism than it does ours. Americans love their country, "God Bless America", however as Canadians, we do not share the same in depth love for our own country as Americans do, but Target seems to be changing that through a genius retail plan...buy from our American run store and at the same time love your country.

Do not get me wrong, I love Canada and believe Canadians have the best support for their country than anyone else, but more importantly, we are not American, so why support our country in the same patriot style of love as the very people we are trying to be different from?

Once again, to further emphasize, Target is not the only symptom of this condition. Globalization has opened up our borders and as a result has taken the foreign out of foreign. Our world is dominated by items made in China or India, licensed or patented by an American company that then ships it to our shores and sells it to us, while destroying our own manufacturing and development within Canada. At the same time, our country begins to lose these jobs to foreign competition that could care less about us and those well paying positions are replaced with low paying service ones, much like the average employee of Target, Sears or in the wost case scenario Walmart.

I was warned in my youth that the devil never shows up with the pitch fork or horns, but usually is dressed in his best with a bible in hand. This warning holds true today more so than ever before and seems to be a defining characteristic of the Canadian identity. We somehow always seem to sell out and allow other players  to come in and take all the credit for our hard work.

What makes this more difficult, is that our own government continues to fully support this kind of activity as opposed to pushing to promote actual Canadian development and success. The damage that this kind of activity causes not only hurts those in manufacturing, but eventually begins to affect everyone as our economy and society begin to degrade.

Looking at the amount of retail space being renovated or built up, you would think that these guys know something we do not and expect the recession to be over in a year or something. I wonder if they even thought about the importance of having money to shop, because even though Target is new, if you have no money, you have no way of buying stuff from them. Eventually reality sinks in and we have to face the writing on the wall, with little being done to enhance and keep the good paying jobs, our government continues to brag about how much its job creation is a success as it promotes low paying service jobs to dominate our country.

If we continue this type of thinking and allow these actions to go forward, we will lose generations of people who would otherwise help continue to promote Canadian greatness. We will lose our infrastructure, our schooling, our freedom and with all of this, we will lose Canada.

I know this sounds very depressing, but we need to think of these things now, before we allow them to take place and actually affect the reality of the situation.

More importantly though, I am curious as to what your thoughts are on Target and the topics discussed in this post. Are we taking the wrong direction when it comes to job creation and development? Are Canadians being out played by foreign entities acting more Canadian than us?

Until Next Time!