No one wins, every Canadian is harmed in this culture war
There’s a striking commonality about the letters to the newspaper and calls to phone-in shows about the niqab issue. People on opposite sides use the same language: This is not my Canada. This is an attack on Canada’s fundamental values. I’m afraid that the niqab (or the ban on the niqab) will destroy the Canada where I grew up, and everything my immigrant parents/grandparents fought for.
Two sides, each sincere in the conviction that their beloved Canada would cease to exist without certain shared values. Both completely at odds about what those values are.
One one side is the belief that Canada is at its core a “Judeo-Christian” or a “Western” society, even a British one, and it is only by sustaining those values, and requiring newcomers to assimilate, that society holds together. On the other side is the famous image of Canada as a mosaic (or in Yann Martel’s words, a “hotel”), where each group sets its own norms, and what holds the country together is nothing more than respect for diversity itself. One side defines citizenship by what we share; the other by what we don’t.
As the past 30 years of watching American politics should have taught us, the problem with a culture war is that it’s unwinnable. It turns each election into a futile and harmful exercise in trying to impose one side’s values on the other.
Now, the Conservatives are creating just such a culture war to help them win this election. And by framing the election as a fight to impose certain values, the Conservatives could undermine their own moral character, erode the very liberalism they call “Western,” and change the Canadian political landscape in ways they might not intend. *** In the 1970s, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s government implemented multiculturalism as an antidote to nationalism. Children of the 1970s and 1980s learned from their textbooks that Canada differed from the United States in one fundamental respect: While the U.S. was a melting pot, Canada was a mosaic.
The word “assimilation” was spoken with a hiss, and not only because it represented the odious history of Canadian policy toward aboriginal people.
For nearly a half-century, multiculturalism has been the official national policy of Canada, and has remained so under this Conservative prime minister. We pride ourselves on it. The Aga Khan set up his Centre for Global Pluralism in Ottawa, “inspired by the example of Canada’s inclusive approach to citizenship.”
Even the Canadian government’s own website currently has a multiculturalism section that declares: “with no pressure to assimilate and give up their culture, immigrants freely choose their new citizenship because they want to be Canadians.”
But Stephen Harper has shown some inclination to push back at the idea over the years he’s been prime minister, while never outright disavowing it. And during this election, he has several times focused the nation’s attention on ridiculous policy proposals to divide Canadian values into two opposed camps.
There is the tip line for “barbaric cultural practices,” and the determination to fight in the courts to ensure that no woman can wear a niqab at her citizenship ceremony. (Two women, so far, have wanted to.) Now, Harper is even musing about banning niqabs in the public service, despite the fact that there do not seem to be any women wearing niqabs in the public service.
These issues do not matter in any practical sense. The practices that the tip line purports to concern itself with, such as forced marriage or genital mutilation, are serious indeed, but they are already against the law and there is absolutely no reason to think a tip line would be necessary or helpful.
The Conservatives are pushing these ideas because they know they get people talking; indeed, they get people furious.
Yet while the animosity they’re stoking is directed squarely at Muslims, the Conservatives think their real enemies in this fight are big-city elites who fear to open their mouths out of deference to political correctness. They think that after all this time, they can strike a blow at the legacy of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, by chipping away at the policy of multiculturalism he implemented in 1971, and that the victory will be all the sweeter if they defeat his son at the ballot box while they do it.
The truth is that multiculturalism in Canada simply doesn’t work the way its critics — or even some of its defenders — say it does. There is no moral relativism tearing this country apart: the “barbaric practices” the Conservatives abhor are abhorred by every part of the spectrum, every political party.
More to the point, pluralism is not one side in an existing culture war — it’s a way to prevent one from starting. It’s the way to make sure that everybody’s values, including those of social conservatives, are respected right up to the point where they interfere with someone else’s rights.
The successful model of Canadian integration, with its accommodations and respect for individual liberty, has allowed many sets of values — including conservative ones — to coexist and overlap, while preventing the very moral relativism that opponents of multiculturalism fear.
Over and over during these last weeks, I’ve heard people talk about immigrant ancestors who ostensibly left all their old practices and beliefs behind and worked hard to fit in, to be just like everybody else.
The history of the country suggests that’s bunk. Irish immigrant politics created unspeakable violence in Ottawa in the 19th century. Not to mention all the waves of European immigrants who showed precisely zero inclination to “fit in” to indigenous cultures.
And even in less extreme examples, where did all the cultural associations and religious institutions and language schools across this country come from, if immigrants in the “old” Canada abandoned their identities when they arrived?
No, what people mean, when they say their ancestors worked to fit in, is not that they tried to be like everybody else, but that they worked hard to get along with everybody else. In other words, they integrated. They sent their kids to public schools during the week, and on the weekends they sent them to Hebrew class or Ukrainian dance practice. And they changed, and were changed by, the communities in which they lived.
It’s not a melting pot; the constituent parts don’t disappear. But it’s not quite a mosaic either — that image implies that each piece stays intact, immutable. In fact, Canadian kids grow up knowing some of their own ancestral culture and some of their classmates’. It’s a way of life that breeds respect and curiosity, that encourages young people to examine their own culture’s assumptions, to adopt what they like and abandon what they don’t.
But the myth persists that when the “old” immigrants came here, they obediently adopted “our” values and therefore we welcomed them into the fold. This argument requires us to forget our own country’s disgusting treatment of Jewish and Chinese and Indian immigrants, our forebears’ certainty that in fact those people did not share “our values.”
Of the very few women who wear the niqab in Canada, some are Canadian-born. They have as much claim to define “our” values as anyone, and they can’t be accused of importing their practices from their places of origin.
That raises the question of who is meant by “us” when Canadians talk about “our values.” If a Canadian-born Muslim woman doesn’t count, then it isn’t really about citizenship or place of birth, is it?
That’s why the “stock” part mattered in Stephen Harper’s “old stock” comment. My dad’s an immigrant, but because he’s an immigrant from the U.K., I’ve never once had anyone tell me I should be careful to adopt “our values.” I’ve never once had a well-meaning person ask me where I’m really from. That’s why the “cultural” matters in the “barbaric cultural practices” bill. It’s a signal that we’re talking about Certain People.
The idea of the cultural mosaic feeds the false idea that multiculturalism means every microculture remains entire unto itself, that moral relativism and political correctness means we can have no dominant Canadian culture. But that’s demonstrably untrue. There is no political faction in this country arguing that forced marriage or female genital mutilation ought to be OK. The Conservatives are making it up. They’re setting up the supposed multiculturalist attack on Canadian values as a straw man.
When Conservative candidate Jason Kenney talks about defending “Christian patrimony,” this is not some secret agenda. It’s the same overt populism that has guided Conservative policy over the last decade. It’s a defence of regular folk against big city elites telling them what to think. Even while the Conservatives mouth the catechism of multiculturalism as government policy, even while Kenney does his curry-in-a-hurry routine, the Conservatives see themselves as the defenders of regular folk who just want things to be the way they’ve always been, or at least how nostalgia tells them it was.
Politically, this could end up helping Justin Trudeau as much as it helps the Conservatives; he’s already shown he’s happy to defend his father’s legacy. But no matter who ultimately benefits politically, a culture war is bad for the country.
Victory would require one side to give up and adopt all the values and beliefs of the other side. In a free country, that is never going to happen — and nobody who believes in freedom should want it to.
We must have the freedom to disagree on common ground.
If we have no shared spaces, we lose our ability to speak out as a nation, to draw moral lines in the sand about practices that we all agree are simply wrong.
If you tell a woman who wears the niqab she cannot work in the public service, you are drawing a line between her culture and the civic space and forcing her to choose. This creates enclaves and suspicion. It cuts off access to power structures and public spaces for whichever people are deemed to have unacceptable clothing or holidays or prayers.
It is, in fact, doing exactly the same thing that conservatives accuse the politically correct elites of doing: separating people into acceptable and unacceptable ways of life. Do Christian conservatives really want the Treasury Board to police personal religious observance among public servants? Are they actually arguing for a war on Christmas?
There is no victory in a culture war; there is only collateral damage, on both sides.
Pluralism itself is an integrating value; it opens up a space for people of all traditions and creeds to work together in common institutions. And it gradually erodes bigotry by breeding familiarity and, most importantly, by providing access to power for people from all backgrounds.
This is why so many people believe that it is their Canada that has flourished over the last half century, even people whose notional Canadas are directly opposed. It isn’t an absence of universal values and beliefs that will tear Canada apart; it’s an insistence upon them.
There is no victory in a culture war; there is only collateral damage, on both sides.