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Article Excerpt
In 2006 Canada's official multiculturalism policy celebrated its thirty-fifth birthday. What better time to stop and reflect on where we are, where we would like to go, and how we expect to get there. This special issue of Canadian Ethnic Studies/Etudes ethniques au Canada does exactly that.
Over the years, multiculturalism has come to evoke a peaceful image of an integration-based model in which many cultures live together within one nation-state. As Canada has evolved, the success of its multiculturalism policies has earned it worldwide admiration, though the policies are not without their critics and weaknesses. While it is recognized as a liberal country that welcomes diversity and can transform itself over time by including diversity in the social fabric, Canada must also deal with conflicts within and between groups of immigrants. At Canada's core is the duality of its two European colonizing peoples. However, during the twentieth century, Canada evolved into a country that acknowledges diversity, a policy that gained explicit recognition in the early 1970s and which came to the fore in the 1980s.
Nevertheless, in the early years of the twenty-first century, tensions have emerged, and many countries moved rapidly away from multiculturalism, including Denmark, Australia, the Netherlands, and now the United Kingdom. Ironically, the same range of tensions faces states that have never espoused multiculturalism as an approach, states such as France and the United States, thus suggesting that the policy prescription of rapid abandonment of multiculturalism might, at its most benign, be useless in addressing these tensions, and perhaps, at its worst, be counter productive.
While there are unquestionably prominent critics of multiculturalism in Canadian public discourse, they are not the dominant voices. Critics usually emerge in full voice following incidents like the terrorist attacks of 9/11, or the arrest of terrorist suspects like the 23 of Operation Thread in 2003, or of the Toronto 17 (apparently now 18) in the summer of 2006. Even when the charges are dropped, as they were in the case of Operation Thread, critics maintain that they might have been wrong that particular time, but multiculturalism will still be responsible for our demise as a society. Admittedly, these vocal criticisms vary considerably between English and French language media portrayals, with the latter being generally far more moderate, as Belkhodja and Richard's article suggests, although the present debate surrounding reasonable accommodation is more intemperate than the usual coverage of diversity issues in the French press.
The debate mainly focusses on the dialogue and engagement necessary for coexistence in a society that is, incontrovertably and historically, multicultural. In terms of demographics, Canada's population growth will increasingly depend on immigration and will become increasingly diverse. According to Statistics Canada projections, the number of visible minority persons in Canada could reach between 6,313,000 and 8,109,000 by 2017, or about 20 percent of the population, while Canadians of non-Christian religious affiliations are expected to comprise between 3,049,100 and 3,898,800, or roughly 11 percent of the population (Statistics Canada 2005). Further discussion of these demographic projections can be found in the Perspective piece by Kamal Dib of the Multiculturalism Program at the Department of Canadian Heritage at the end of this special issue.
In the face of this accelerating change, new stresses have joined pre-existing strains. It becomes increasingly important to address challenges posed by religious pluralism in an avowedly secular country. Similarly, the intersections of identities like gender, race, religion, language, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, and region are increasingly hard to address within the parameters of existing policy and programs. Meanwhile, pre-existing strains such as economic inequalities persist. Rates of poverty among recent immigrants have risen, and unemployment, under-employment, and wage gaps are evident for some communities like Black, Muslim, or Portuguese Canadians (Biles, Tolley, and Ibrahim 2005). In addition, change is not something embraced by everyone, as Levine-Rasky chronicles in her article in this issue.
This special issue...
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