Canadian Polonia has always complained about the lack of financial resources for its community endeavours. It could be argued that the place of the Polish-Canadian community in Canada is rather attenuated, despite the figures of the 2011 Canadian Census which suggest there are over a million persons of Polish descent in Canada.
Vast initiatives are indeed required to raise the saliency of Canadian Polonia. Some fairly obvious directions are to increase the pressures on all levels of government (federal, provincial, regional/municipal) to provide a more equitable share of multiculturalism and other cultural-related funding to the Polish-Canadian community. It would be helpful if some systematic, comparative research could be done in this area, so that Canadian Polonia could approach the various levels of government with some solid statistics. It should also be remembered that effectively writing grant proposals and putting together grant applications is a major skill.
It may also be remembered that the proposals for establishing a “Polish-Canadian Defence Fund” which were made some years ago, have achieved comparatively little. It could be argued that in the current-day climate, the task of watching the main Canadian media for any anti-Polish comments has to be, at least to some extent, entrusted to very competent, salaried, hopefully full-time, professional researchers. Along with writing letters-to-the-editor and letters to publishers and producers as needed, such persons could also take a “pro-active” role by trying to have Polish-friendly articles appear in various Canadian media. In the case of an institution like this, the funds can only come from the community itself.
In these days of “the Internet Two” some attention must also be paid to social media strategies. There should be an attempt made to build up a reliable “cadre” of individuals that will reliably put forth well-phrased, pro-Polish messages – and fight back against “Pole-bashing” -- on the various social media and major newspaper and magazine comment threads they participate in. For example, the community should become able to raise a “Twitter storm” when faced by particularly egregious insults.
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