Protecting Multicultural Canada
Author(s): Cameron McLeod and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Assorted In-Sights (In-Sight Publishing)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08
“More than most other countries, Canada is a creation of human will.”
Preliminary Report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism: 144
In everyday discussions about Canada and its politics, there is often a distinct lack of nuance.
And it’s a sad fact that the most pressing challenges a country might face are not often the most easily framed in a digestible way, or accessible to the average person. It would be pointless to hark on this, it’s just the way our busy, multifaceted lives work. And so in order that every conversation not necessarily begin with a framing of the essentials, then a defining of the parties, and then with each party stating their background in coming to the Canadian conversation — a society like ours rests on assumptions to create an accessible narrative of national conversation. This is multiculturalism. It’s a series of assumptions and basic modes of thinking about the country, that really is the closest thing we have to a national ideology.
But our argument is that resting on assumptions is a lot like resting on one’s laurels. And that can be dangerous. Canada might just be fundamentally more susceptible to a populism that appeals to our baser emotions exactly because those emotions have been starved of air for so long.
Canadians take for granted equilibrium. The politics of division, racial animosity, and religious intolerance are – at present – very far removed from the majority of Canadians’ daily lives. This is not the case everywhere else. There isn’t the space here to define multiculturalism in very much depth, but here’s a shot at a summary. Since 1971, Canada’s official policy is a pluralist doctrine called “multiculturalism.” This is where no one culture is dominant or more Canadian than any other. As that might be contentious, a multicultural approach is probably best defined inversely.
Multiculturalism is where no culture, religion, or ethnicity, is unqualified to be Canadian and co-exist in Canadian society. This way of thinking is frequently articulated, referenced and adhered to, from and across Canada’s political landscape.
As citizens, we’re very proud of this way of thinking because it really self-evidently works. And it’s hardly understated, it’s how we justify our successes and where we look for redemption in our failures. Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s government made it official. And as a young man, Pierre Trudeau, wrote that Canada respects “the big and the small, the one and the several.” (Allen Mills, Citizen Trudeau: 122). I think his is a well put summary.
Still looking at Trudeau, multiculturalism’s founder, he also called Canada a country of la petite patrie. Small homelands. Our country is not home to one nation, but, in Trudeau’s estimate, two.
And more recently we’ve come to recognize many more. Our society, its institutions, its communities, and its people have the ability to identify both with the region and with the nation at large. This has made Canada an open society. On this point, you will find little debate. As a society, we remain loyal to our differences.
This is highfalutin’, sure, but it’s also what we’ve decided to build a country with. Now, it seems, Canada exists coherent and vanquished of much old-world baggage, and free of the tensions of the melting pot down-south.
A Canadian has no particular ethnicity. They speak no particular language (while expected to have English or French, this will never be enforced). They have no particular religious beliefs, and were not necessarily born here. He or she has not necessarily lived here for the majority of his or her life, and has not necessarily been educated a certain way.
They do not hold any particular ideological position (not even that of multiculturalism). Neither must they have any kind of political affiliation, conviction, or loyalty; nor can they have any past affiliations, convictions, or loyalties challenged or used to undermine their “Canadian-ness”.
Canada’s multiculturalism is based on an absence of conditions. Following from this, it takes on a positive character: racism is bad; discrimination according to ethnicity or culture is unacceptable; and ethnicity should not be referenced or described unless in an explicitly positive fashion. And that immigration is fundamental to the country and will continue to be in the future.
These are assumptions, and assumptions students our age have never encountered heard any other way.
This description is to emphasize how “Canadian” is, as all nationalities arguably are, something constructed. Canada is a “creation of human will,” as well as our imagination. Canada, understood as something made, is also something to be maintained.
The best way to do this is to challenge our most fundamental assumptions, not necessarily to disown them, but to better understand where threats to them might strike. We should do this now. We should do it in our schools.
Each generation does not necessarily need to begin again, but it must redefine Canada for itself, if it is to safely lead it deeper into this century. Most importantly, in creating a society where we might drive those not unquestionably subscribed to a multicultural Canada outside the proper opinion corridor, with an out of mind, out of sight sort of complacency – we lost sight of any kind of perspective of where we are, and where we still need to go.
We need voices who question immigration policy, who question what it means to be properly Canadian, and especially if this makes us deeply uncomfortable. If Canada’s pluralistic approach is correct which we believe it is – then we can defend our vision of this country.
Because the most popular narrative is of us as a free, open, democratic, pluralistic, multicultural, and multi-ethnic society, this does mean other narratives do not insidiously live outside that mainstream. In opening up the conversation to voices not traditionally in sight, most likely crude, older politics, we better prepare ourselves for real opposition that might threaten the future of this country.
In being so loose, so malleable, this country is particularly vulnerable to the 21st century’s challenges from and against the global order, especially those for and against the nation state.
The hope is that our generation will have been the last raised never having encountered a serious challenge to their way of thinking. We are concerned with how far our tolerance will stretch before it breaks – and with it, Canada.
Our worst enemy might turn out to be our own, less noble instincts. Mel Hurtig has left us and it’s up to the young today to define a new nationalism fit for this century and this country, and strong enough to embrace open societies and markets, and stable enough to preserve what is fundamentally Canadian – whatever we might want that to be.
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