A NONCONFORMING NATION
Today’s multiculturalism is deeply woven into history of Canada, writes Wilf Popoff.
“Taken together, all these policies help explain what scholars call ‘the Canadian exception’: the fact that Canada has managed to avoid the anti-immigrant backlashes that have rocked virtually every other industrialized state in recent years. They help explain why the Migrant Integration Policy Index (a global survey) ranks Canada’s immigration system among the best on the planet.”
This quotation is from The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline, published when a racist candidate for the American presidency was stomping to victory and similarly racist European politicians seemed unstoppable. The book singles out Canada for refusing to conform. Its author, Jonathan Tepperman, is managing editor of the U.S. magazine Foreign Affairs. His chapter on immigration focuses on Canada, where he grew up.
The Economist also recognized “the Canadian exception.” An editorial, “Canada’s Example to the World: Liberty Moves North,” asks: “Who will uphold the torch of openness in the West?
“Not America’s next president. Donald Trump, the grievance-mongering Republican nominee, would build a wall on Mexico’s border and rip up trade agreements … Britain, worried about immigrants and globalization, has voted to march out of the European Union. Angela Merkel flung open Germany’s doors to refugees, then suffered a series of political setbacks.”
The Economist piece said Canada is a “heartening exception” in “this depressing company of wall-builders, door-slammers and drawbridge-raisers.” It closes, “… the world owes Canada gratitude for reminding it of what many people are in danger of forgetting: that tolerance and openness are wellsprings of security and prosperity, not threats to them.”
Tepperman credits Canada’s success to Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s 1971 multiculturalism policy and its complementary “color-blind and economic-focused immigration system.”
It was actually Prime Minister John Diefenbaker who, facing an acute labour shortage in 1962, ostensibly stopped limiting nonwhite immigration, making Canada the first country in the world to exclude ethnicity in appraising immigrants.
However, because Ottawa continued to recruit in white countries, the labour problem was not solved. Prime Minister Lester Pearson replaced ethnic consideration with a point system, a policy followed today.
To protect multiculturalism Trudeau set up the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Then in 1982 he gave teeth to his strategy by patriating our Constitution, incorporating the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. His successor, Brian Mulroney, bestowed statutory validity on multiculturalism. Stephen Harper did not scrap these innovations and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau welcomed 35,700 Syrian refugees in his first year. Shortly after his election he told The New York Times Magazine, “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada. There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first postnational state.” (His interviewer, Guy Lawson, grew up in Saskatchewan.)
The Canadian novelist, Charles Foran, endorses Trudeau’s concept. His essay, “The Canada Experiment: Is This the World’s First ‘Postnational’ Country?” appeared in The Guardian on Jan. 4, half a year after the U.K. voted to leave the European Union and limit immigration. Foran conjectures: “As 2017 begins, Canada may be the last immigrant nation left standing.”
Foran is also CEO of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, cofounded by Adrienne Clarkson and philosopher John Ralston Saul. He wears this hat as he notes that the “greater Toronto area is now the most diverse city on the planet, with half its residents born outside the country.”
Foran equates postnationalism with prenationalism by alluding to the centuries before Canada formally became a nation-state 150 years ago this Saturday:
“In some sense, we have always been thinking differently about this continentwide land mass, using ideas borrowed from indigenous societies. From the moment Europeans began arriving in North America they were made welcome by the locals, taught how to survive and thrive amid multiple identities and allegiances.”
Saul explores this foundation in A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada, which begins, “We are a metis civilization.” He talks about Canada’s triangular reality, arguing it has been shaped by the ideas of aboriginal people who were dominant or equal when the French and English arrived 500 years ago.
Saul views this original relationship as integration, not simple interaction, and offers the genesis of the Metis as proof: “By marrying into the indigenous world, most of the newcomers were marrying up. They were improving their situations socially, politically and economically.”
He credits this integration for our Canadian mindset. Canadians do not embrace the vigorous individualism of their European forebears or their American neighbours and are predisposed to racial harmony and social compassion.
“The idea of egalitarianism that we have today is far closer to that of the seventeenth- or eighteenthcentury First Nations than it is to that of the newcomers of that period.”
Multiculturalism, Saul claims, was thriving long before Europeans came. It is worth noting that it is failing in both France and England.
Published the same year as A Fair Country, Jennifer Reid’s Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada also recognizes Canada’s debt to its Metis origins in creating a distinct identity and culture.
“… it is Riel as the emblem of ‘in-between-ness’ who expresses a most basic fact of the Canadian experience: that of cultural hybridity ... It is this hybridity that I wish to suggest rests at the foundation of an elusive Canadian identity. In the first instance, this argument requires that the issue of identity be firmly separated from the ideas of ‘nationhood’ and ‘nationalism.’ ”
Reid argues that because French and English Canada were never united we must look to our aboriginal heritage for those values that define us.
Adam Gaudry, himself Metis, dismisses Reid’s and Saul’s arguments. Gaudry taught indigenous studies at the U of S before moving to the University of Alberta in 2016. By claiming that Canada is a Metis civilization, he argues, the authors remake Canada’s colonial history as a succession of collegial Canadian indigenous interfaces and overlook an exploitative colonial relationship.
“For both of these thinkers, indigenous cultures are the foundation for, or at the very least a central component of, a uniquely Canadian polity and society in which all Indigenous peoples and Canadians are unproblematic members. However, by making these mythological claims, these theorists reject the very real history of Canadian colonialism, as well as a colonial present and future.”
Despite the praise Canada enjoys for its multicultural triumph, human rights and equality problems remain. Gaudry alludes to the most glaring while reminding us of past injustices.
As 2017 begins, Canada may be the last immigrant nation left standing.