Conversions to Islam

This is actually a pretty lame post. I really tried, I tried my very best to find information on how many people in Canada convert to Islam. This information is, as of today, simply not available to the public (or perhaps anyone).

But, I offer this as a cop-out. Information on the amount of people who convert to Islam in the United States. I think it reasonable to assume that the numbers would be very similar in Canada.

There's this one number, that since the mid 90's, around 20,000 people per year in the US convert to Islam. You see this one a lot.* This is a very small number for a country of 300 million people. It's only 0.000067% per annum. There's also a similar one of 25,000 the New York Times used once. That's still only 0.000083%. Using the upper-end number of 0.000083%, I think we can reasonably estimate that around 2600 people in Canada convert to Islam every year, being so similar to the US. But this would be "overblown" according to "theologians and demographers" referenced by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Conversion is a fairly insignificant area of growth for Islam in Canada, the main reason for growth is immigration. Muslim immigration to Canada is high. (Canadian Census data). In 1991 there were 253,300 Muslims in Canada. In 2001 there were 579,600. Of those 326,600 new Muslims, around 270,000 immigrated to Canada, and so, assuming 2600 converted each year, around 53,400 were born and stayed in Canada. It's impossible to get a truly accurate birthrate from this. But if we assume both those numbers are distributed evenly throughout those ten years (which creates a little inaccuracy for this purpose) and that the number emigrating from Canada is negligible (which may be true), we get a birthrate of around 21/1000 per annum which is much higher than the 2006/2007 Canadian total of 10.9/1000, though it seems very reasonable.

Keeping that birthrate going from 2001 we would end up with 643,000 in 2006 from natural growth, and keeping the trusty 2600, we would have 656,000 from birth and conversions. The officials report there is an estimated population of 783,700 Muslims in Canada in 2006. With our numbers, that would imply an immigration to Canada of about 127,000 in 5 years, which is pretty close to the rate of the official census amount of 270,000 in 10 years from 1991 to 2001. So the birthrate of 21/1000 per annum for Muslims in Canada seems like a reasonable estimate.

* You see this a lot though too: "Rates of conversion have gone up since 9/11!" As if to say, "Terrorism works!"

Jean Charest The Sell Out

All you in Quebec are being a bunch of xenophobic, Islamophobic, racists -- that's what Jean Charest is trying to imply. He says the rest of the world in frowning on Quebec, "People in the rest of Canada, in the United States and in France are wondering what's going on in Quebec," which I sincerely doubt. In France they recently voted in Sarkozy largely for the same problem of erosion of culture from mass immigration that Quebec faces. The US has no mean share of voices demanding more assimilation from immigrants. And the rest of Canada, well I still don't think one of three is very good. But you won't be able to use this phrase "the rest of Canada" in relation to Quebec if Quebeckers' interests are continually unmet by a divergent Confederation.

But Charest doesn't really care about any of that, you can see the real reason he wants to oppose the popular movement in Quebec and keep high immigration: "...we need to open our doors to others because we're short of workers, because some of our regions are in a demographic decline, and because we're having fewer children." Money. It is much more profitable, rather than to raise-up native workers to keep your economy going, to just import them fully grown and primed for work from poor nations, and this is what Charest wants. ("Imagine if no one had kids! You'd be rid of that 17-26 years of complete unproductiveness from every citizen's life!" -- I'm sure this is what Charest thinks with glee). He doesn't care that following along this path leads to the eventual turning over of Quebec from the Quebecois.

Imagine someone offering you: "Money. And lots of it. But you have to become a totally different person to get it." Who would in their right mind take such an offer? What good is the money to you if the person who gets it is you only in name, and not in essence? The same for Quebec. Rather than create a stable society with a replacement birthrate, Charest would keep an unstable one with a high turn-over rate, like some sort of civilisational Wal-Mart. Profitable, cheap, and crap.

My suggestion to Quebec: sacrifice the money. It won't buy you a nation when that's been scattered to the winds of Islamic Expansionism.