Vol. 59, No. 1 — January 1978 —
A Multicultural
Society
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The nation of minorities called Canada has
been compared to a mosaic and a flower garden. And indeed
this remarkable cosmopolitan society offers many rewards.
Now the time has come to demonstrate the reality behind the
rhetoric. And to prove that equality and fraternity really
can exist...
There is tea from China, shortbread from Scotland, canned
salsifis from Belgium. There is couscous from Morocco, taco
pastry from Mexico, feta cheese from Greece. At the meat counter
you find Polish, German and Italian sausages and beef butchered
in the French fashion. Delicatessens like this flourish in
all of the larger cities of Canada, and people of practically
every racial origin under the sun come to choose among their
multifarious goods.
Here the richness of Canada's multicultural society gleams
through among the colourfully-packaged foodstuffs from scores
of nations. These crowded shelves are an unconscious celebration
of all that Canada has gained by offering a home to people
from around the world. Canada traditionally has been regarded
in other nations as an essentially dull place of diligent
but plodding inhabitants - grey figures on a grey landscape.
There may have been some truth to this impression long ago;
thanks to the zest infused into this country by millions of
immigrants and their descendants over the years, it is anything
but true now.
Contemporary Canadians, no matter what their mother tongue,
are the beneficiaries of a world of cultural inspiration.
More than they usually realize, they have incorporated the
ways of other nations into their own way of life. This shows
in their clothing, housing, furnishings, pastimes, cuisine,
and attitudes. Nor have they partaken uniformly of the same
influences; on the contrary, the range of choice is so broad
and Canadian tastes so diffuse that it is often lamented that
Canadians have no distinctive national culture of their own.
In a sense, though, this diffusion and amenability to the
unfamiliar is the Canadian culture. The tradition of absorbing
the best from various cultural sources goes to Canada's roots.
As a native Indian leader has pointed out, the original Canadians
formed a multicultural and multilingual society long before
the first white man ever came to the country. The upper part
of North America was occupied by tribes as different from
one another as Swedes are from Corsicans, with all the strains
in between.
Despite the violence that marred relations between the Indians
and whites in the early years of European settlement, the
two groups went ahead and pooled their lore and artifacts.
From the Indians the French-Canadians learned woodcraft and
adopted snow-shoes, moccasins and canoes. While they brought
alcohol and strange diseases to the Indians, the white men
also brought iron pots and axes, woven fabrics and fire-arms.
On balance, the intermingling of these contrasting peoples
may have done more harm than good - but it did do some good
nevertheless.
In later years the French and English forged alliances with
Indian tribes as they battled for control of North America.
When the war for Canada finally ended, the victorious "English"
(many of whom were actually Gaelic-speaking Scots) joined
in a marriage of convenience with the Indians and Canadiens
to probe the wilderness and fight off invasions from
the newly-created United States. An interchange of crafts
and customs ensued between French- and English-speaking Canadians
in their common interests. Yet they stayed identifiably different,
as they are to this day.
The perpetuation of separate French and English identities
in defiance of historic animosities formed the foundation
of the great Canadian modus vivendi. The principle
that citizens of different national origins should maintain
their own ways of life without detracting from their rights
was enshrined in Canadian political philosophy even before
the Canadian nation was born. Following the first discussions
in 1864 among the British North American colonies on the founding
of the Dominion of Canada, one of the Fathers of Confederation,
Hector Langevin, explained:
"In Parliament there will be no question of race, nationality,
religion or locality ... The basis of action adopted
by the delegates to the Quebec Conference in preparing the
resolutions was to do justice to all - justice to all religions,
to all nationalities, and to all interests."
The respect for national and religious identities smoothed
the way for the settlement of large numbers of Scottish, Irish,
German, Ukrainian, Polish and Scandinavian immigrants to Canada
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While William
Howard Taft, President of the United States from 1909 to 1913,
would boast, "We have taken millions of foreigners into our
civilization, but we have amalgamated them all, we have made
them all Americans", there was little taste for such thorough-going
assimilation here. "We have bred a type," Taft jubilated;
for a variety of reasons, none wholly unselfish, there was
no great interest in breeding a typical Canadian. Instead,
Taft's contemporary head of government, Sir Wilfrid Laurier,
echoed a popular sentiment when he compared Canada to a gothic
cathedral made of marble, oak and granite. "This is the image
I would like Canada to become," he declared. "For here I want
the marble to remain the marble; the granite to remain the
granite; the oak to remain the oak; and out of all these elements
I would build a nation great among the nations of the world."
But if politicians may build nations, they are only upheld
by the will of ordinary citizens. Had the people of Canada
allowed their cultural and religious differences to split
them into hostile factions, Laurier's cathedral would have
collapsed in ruins. That people did not do so in Canada's
pioneering days, when racial discrimination was rife elsewhere,
seems partly due to the exigencies of the land and its climate.
In a situation where one's survival might well depend on the
aid of a neighbour regardless of his race or religion, it
was prudent at least to keep one's prejudices to oneself.
It is difficult to hate for no good reason a man who shares
a mid-day meal with you after you have both put in a hard
morning's work
Conditions in the primarily agrarian Canada to which more
than 3 million immigrants came between the mid-1890s and World
War I often threw members of different national groups unexpectedly
together. "Now the Ukrainians were used to the cold and knew
how to build good houses, but we didn't," one of the first
Black American settlers in northern Alberta recalled recently.
"They had a way of plastering their houses with something
they mixed out of clay and dirt and other things and could
plaster up a house just as nice as stucco. Sometimes the coloured
folks would hire the Ukrainians to help with their homes."
Through contact of this kind, the innate barriers of suspicion
among racial groups were breached. "Ignorance alone makes
monsters and bugbears," wrote William Hazlitt; "our actual
acquaintances are very commonplace people." It is difficult
to hate for no good reason a man who shares a mid-day meal
with you after you have both put in a hard morning's work.
In an age of intolerance, Canadians came to practise the paradoxical
brand of selective tolerance typified by Jonathan Swift's
statement: "Principally I hate and detest that animal called
man; although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas and so forth."
There was still much intolerance; yet it is evident there
was sufficient plain human goodwill to permit a multicultural
society to germinate.
Its growth over the decades since has not been without its
difficulties and set-backs. Yet again, at least a sufficiency
of tolerance has prevailed. As more and more people from more
and more countries streamed in looking for a new life in the
years following World War II, a spirit of casual generosity
overrode intergroup bickering, racial prejudice and recurring
complaints that immigrants were taking away jobs from Canadians.
As a result, well over 4 million newcomers from approximately
100 nations and colonies have settled in Canada in a general
atmosphere of goodwill since 1945.
This mass influx of people from so many different lands
has wrought striking changes in Canadian life, mainly for
the better. The economy and the arts and sciences have been
strengthened greatly by the contributions of "new Canadians"
from far and wide. They have brought the world to Canada and
brought Canada into the world by adding a cosmopolitan dimension
to the outlook of their native-born compatriots. They have
made the Canadian scene immeasurably brighter as well.
Can such a loosely-knit patchwork of ethnic groups have
a common cause?
The cumulative effect of immigration in the twentieth century
has been to turn Canada into a nation of minorities. At the
beginning of the century people of British origin made up
about 57 per cent of the population - although it should be
noted that this group was a composite of English, Scottish,
American, Irish and Welsh. The 1971 Census showed that, even
when all these disparate Anglo-Saxons and Celts of different
religions and tenure in Canada were classed as a single racial
entity, they comprised less than 45 per cent of the population.
People of French origin made up the second largest group at
28.7 per cent; the rest originated in all parts of the world.
This new demographic pattern has presented a challenge to
Canadians in their quest for unity. Can such a loosely-knit
patchwork of ethnic groups ever hold together in a common
cause? Few nations in the world have no homogeneous majority
or pervasive national culture. Canada is unusual in having
two official languages, English and French. All this makes
the nation vulnerable to the forces of parochialism and divisiveness.
Thus when in 1971 Canada was officially declared a "multicultural
society within a bilingual framework", Canadians entered into
an experiment in human relations which tests the goodwill
of them all.
There can be no turning back to the homogeneity of the American-style
"melting pot". The desire among cultural groups to assert
their distinctive identities has only grown stronger in recent
years. As a result, Canadians are now at the point where they
must come to terms with their nation's multicultural character
if it is to survive as a cohesive working democracy. That
great student of democracy, Lord Acton, wrote in 1836, "A
State which is incompetent to satisfy different races condemns
itself; a State which does not include them is destitute of
the chief basis of self-government." How aptly these words
apply to the case of Canada today.
The policy of official multiculturalism will only succeed
if there is a full awareness of its inherent dangers. One
of these has been pointed out forcefully by spokesmen for
French Canada: that multiculturalism might be employed as
a trojan horse to promote the English language and English-Canadian
culture, thereby threatening the status of French-Canadians
as one of Canada's founding peoples, and the survival of the
French-Canadian way of life. Another is that the policy might
lock ethnic citizens in their existing social and economic
positions, reserving the top of the heap for its traditional
occupants, who are mostly of British origin. Yet another is
that multiculturalism might be exploited for partisan ends,
pitting one group against another for the sake of political
power.
Canadians, of all people, should appreciate the value of
tolerance
Perhaps the greatest danger of all is that the multicultural
policy could be distorted to further the evils it is designed
to eliminate. Rosemary Brown, a former British Columbia cabinet
minister of West Indian birth, has warned: "Multiculturalism
should not, and must not, be a situation where ethnic groups
maintain their cultural identity because they are alienated,
isolated, oppressed, ostracized, categorized or manipulated
on account of a particular cultural background."
In these demanding new circumstances it would be self-defeating
to pretend, as in the past, that intolerance is an insignificant
factor in Canadian society. Racial violence lately has reared
its truly ugly head in Canadian cities which contain large
numbers of non-white people. While overt racial conflicts
make headlines, there is ample evidence that covert racial
discrimination is practised in Canada daily. Certainly intolerance
on both sides has envenomed the national debate over bilingualism
and the political future of Quebec.
Yet Canadians, of all people, should appreciate the value
of tolerance. Their history and their surroundings should
teach them how little it costs in relation to its rewards.
The tolerance of ethnic diversity in Canada has led indirectly
to a tolerance of eccentricities and alternative lifestyles
- of "doing your own thing", as the current expression has
it. A society which tolerates a diversity of cultures is also
capable of tolerating a diversity of opinion, and so it does
in Canada.
It is instructive to consider the elements of intolerance
run wild
The consequences of a break-down of tolerance are all too
obvious. Watching the news from other parts of the world,
Canadians must find that they are a fortunate few. Northern
Ireland and Lebanon provide the most recent and conspicuous,
but not the only, examples of what happens to people when
intolerance predominates. Many present-day Canadians know
the oppression and terror of intolerance first-hand, having
fled from it elsewhere. And lest we forget, more than a million
Canadians served - and almost 50,000 died - in a war to eradicate
the unspeakable racialist scourge of Nazism not so long ago.
In this context it is instructive to consider the elements
of intolerance run wild: jealousy, suspicion, cruelty, ignorance,
vindictiveness, and a contempt for the dignity of one's fellow
human beings.
Intolerance, then, is an amalgam of the worst of human emotions.
It should be beneath civilized people; but civilization is
a fragile state, as the periodic plunges by mankind into barbarism
still prove. Let no one be deluded that civilization is inviolate
in Canada. Our national woodwork has at least its share of
bigots, bullies and related rabble ever-alert for an opportunity
to come crawling out.
Politicians may erect elaborate institutional structures
to support the spirit of multicultural tolerance, but again
it is up to ordinary citizens to uphold it. Government-sponsored
folk festivals and ethnic conferences are worth little if
they do not advance the mass public understanding needed to
sustain the multicultural ideal.
Up to now, Canada has been a nation in which everyone is
considered equal, but some are more equal than others. For
many years the picture of Canadian democracy presented by
governments and educational institutions was something like
the picture of Dorian Gray - not to be examined too closely
for fear of being confronted with the unsightly facts underlying
the face shown to the world. Canadians of the dominant Anglo-Celtic
group congratulated themselves for their tolerance while they
expected members of other ethnic groups to be good sports
and keep in their subordinate places. The door was opened
no more than a crack to non-white immigration until only a
few years ago. The false face has since melted in the heat
of democratic dissent, and now real injustices must be corrected
in a spirit of real tolerance. If not, the multicultural society
could one day turn into a cockpit for multicultural strife.
So the time has come to replace rhetoric with reality. It
must be made manifest that the remarkable multicultural community
which has grown up in Canada is not a political mirage; that
it really does offer the best hope of equality for all concerned.
To achieve this, individual Canadians must show that they
are capable of rising above the antagonistic tribalism which
has always blighted the human condition. They must prove the
unlikely proposition that there can be unity in diversity.
In so doing, they may also prove that there are such things
as enlightenment and human progress left in this world.
The New Look
With this edition we introduce a modernized version
of the Monthly Letter, featuring somewhat briefer essays and
a new typographical design aimed at easier reading. While
this is a departure from former practice, we intend to maintain
the traditional high standard of commentary on a wide range
of subjects which has won the esteem of people the world over.
We trust that the Monthly Letter will prove to be as useful
and enjoyable to readers in the future as it has been in the
past.
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