More than just a policy

Editorial

The leaders of Britain, Germany and now France have all explicitly and unequivocally declared multiculturalism a failure. It is difficult for Canadians (now in the midst of Multiculturalism Week celebrations!) to put these statements by foreign leaders in context, given the role multiculturalism plays in our national self-image. It becomes easier, however, when it is understood that there are fundamental differences in meaning when Europeans and Canadians use the same term, multiculturalism.

Germany, France, Italy and other European countries are fundamentally ethnically based states formed around common languages and cultures. Multiculturalism was an effort by European countries to try to alleviate the cognitive dissonance caused by Britons who look Bangladeshi, French who look Algerian and Germans who look Turkish. The issue arose as citizens of former colonies migrated to the parent country, or when countries resolved labor shortages by inviting in temporary workers (many of whom now have European-born children).

For Canadians, multiculturalism is more than just a policy for dealing with immigration and integration. First, Canada is not ethnically based, but a nation of immigrants, our borders determined not by traditional racial boundaries but by happenstance and imperial dictate.

In the past 40 years, a Canadian consensus emerged, altering our self-perception as a British-founded Empire/Commonwealth country with a “French fact.” With the Multiculturalism Act of 1971, we re-imagined ourselves not as a multicultural country, but as the multicultural country. Multiculturalism is what defines us, partly because we lack much else to define us. Admitting that multiculturalism is a failure would be far more catastrophic to Canada than it will be to the United Kingdom, France or Germany.

For Canadian Jews and other minority groups, who often felt like outsiders in Canada’s French-English duopoly, official multiculturalism provided a real sense of belonging. The historian Harold Troper has written about how this emerging Canadian sense of pluralism helped Canadian Jews redefine their own self-identities as both Jews and as Canadians. But, as Eugene Kaellis suggests in the Feature this week, multiculturalism has become a double-edged sword, as a large number of new Canadians come from places where Jew-hatred is inculcated in citizens to the best abilities of the autocrats who rule them.

This gets to the root of why we are hearing the anti-multicultural musings from across the Atlantic. Multiculturalism is being declared a failure in Europe because of the emergence of “home-grown” Islamic terrorists. While Canada has not been immune to home-grown radicalism, we are not ready to blame it wholly on the failure to “integrate” minority communities. The radicalization of a small number of minority individuals does not – must not – undermine the concept of multiculturalism in Canada.

Immigration, which is inextricable from multiculturalism, is a necessity for a country like Canada, with a falling natural growth rate. Indeed, we just discovered this week that, in 2010, Canada welcomed more immigrants than in any year in our history. We have no choice but to find a collective accommodation; this is an economic fact.

But there are other reasons. While not without its faults and certainly not the utopia we may have hoped, multiculturalism is an irreversible reality here. We cannot “integrate” immigrants, because we are all immigrants, save the descendants of the original peoples. This is a demographic fact.

Moreover, without multiculturalism, we have a serious, possibly existential, identity problem that goes beyond rhetoric. While amorphous and impossible to perfectly define, multiculturalism remains too unifying an ideal for us to completely abandon without a whole new vision for what our country is and why we are Canadian. This is a fact of national identity.

But finally, and most importantly, multiculturalism must survive because we still believe in the potential of multiculturalism, in the idealistic vision of a country where everyone is truly welcome. This does not mean that immigrants do not need to adapt in some respects. Ill-treatment of women and bad attitudes toward minorities are not multicultural values. A healthy multiculturalism need not overlook the faults of newcomers, nor must it deny the existence of core national values. Adherence to the law is the duty of every citizen, new or not. Multiculturalism does not grant anyone the right to political violence, nor is it a cause of radicalism or terrorism. If Canadians – new or not – foment violence, this is a criminal matter, not one for the multiculturalism ministry.

If it seems naive to insist that we still believe that multiculturalism can build a better society, it is, in reality, no more naive than the Europeans who scapegoat multiculturalism for their troubles and believe that abandoning it will buy them peace.

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