Proudly Multicultural

We were, at one time in our not-so-distant history as a nation, proudly multicultural.  Most of us thought that it redounded well on Canada's social values that it made such an overt gesture to new immigrants.  To make them feel truly welcome, and part of the new society that was absorbing them into its greater community.  A community that indeed was largely comprised of previous immigrants.  When immigrants came over in waves, escaping situations in their home countries that were intolerable.

Like the great Irish famine, like persecution and pogroms that sent Jews packing out of Europe and looking for a new home in which to settle.  Germans, Ukrainians, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, Greeks; Europe disgorged out of its morass of national competitiveness against one another that resulted over the centuries in one war after another, new Canadian citizens.  They joined the earlier exodus of British pioneers and French settlers that left their home countries for what they hoped would be new opportunities in greener pastures.

Chinese and Japanese and people from the Caribbean made their ventures, along with East Indians to add to the cultural, ethnic, heritage and religious admixture of a population that did its best to overcome base human instinct to shun and to slander those that are different.  Shouts of "Paki go home", and "Christ killer", became less common as time went on, and Canada looked on its human rights record of the past with well-earned shame.

What the newcomers to the country did in those past times, however, was accept that there was an indigenous culture, a social contract that was different from what they were familiar with.  And this was part of what had attracted them and that they did their best to become part of.  On the way to which they shed some of their inherited social adversities toward others.  There is little doubt that the initial official introduction of multiculturalism helped the country to overcome its inherent bias of discrimination.

But perhaps it is also true that an ongoing devotion to multiculturalism eventually bred an attitude that conspired in its extended effect to become completely adverse to the cohesion of a social community - and encouraged ethnic, religious and cultural groups to feel entitled that they could and should preserve everything in their historical past, eschewing the equality gains that the country had made on its way to the present.

By absorbing people from over a hundred countries of the world, Canada has become cosmopolitan, yet at the same time sectorially inbred, as enclaves of people sharing a similar past have tended to gather, keeping themselves apart from the general population, nurturing 'their own' values and cultural proclivities, diluting the overall values found within Canadian society.  This more recent phenomenon is troubling and it is harmful.

From a country with two official languages, Canada has evolved into a country of hundreds of languages spoken at home, at celebrated cultural ethnic events, and resisting absorption into the greater Canadian community of a shared language of the street, of business, of government, of the media and politics.  In the past, with time, there was a gradual melding that took place.  Now the country has groups in place that have brought with them social malignancies that fester.

What is now occurring within a much shorter  time span than the integration that occurred in the past, is a balkanization of Canadian society, with specific groups claiming their values and cultural mores, often enough in contrast to Canadian ones, and sometimes criminally so, more resembling a fractious world parliament of differences than a shared national aspiration.  An ongoing confrontation between the preserved cultures averse to Canada's core values and those who have absorbed those core values.

These carefully preserved and nurtured differences of language, ethnic origin, social culture, religion and preserved heritage servs to push people further apart from one another.  Belligerence, intimidation, slander and rigid dysfunction results.  The country, through its gracious tolerance, is creating a national community of differences, rather than one of shared values and priorities.

"Numerous languages spoken inside a country is only a problem, and a lethal problem, when the core identity of that country comes to be increasingly disputed - as is happening in Canada.  A multicultural country, and officially so designated, has basically indicated it is a country without a core culture, or the core culture that once gave it cohesion, identity, framework, anchor, has been jettisoned to embrace a multiplicity of identities - and thereby the unintended consequence is that there is a void in the centre.

In the past....

"Whatever their particularities, immigrants put them aside because there was a core identity with Canada, and the United States, and it was clearly a liberal democracy.  But we trashed our core value system."
Salim Mansur, political scientist, University of Western Ontario (Indo-Canadian Muslim)