How Canada benefits from immigration, multiculturalism, and reimagining race as culture
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Canada had much to benefit from opening its doors to non-European immigration and adopting multiculturalism as official state policy in 1971 under Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s Government. For one, Canada needed to fill a labour shortage in a post-WW2 economic boom while Canada was facing a declining birth rate. Likewise, Canada’s elimination of racist immigration policy during the period of civil rights and decolonisation movements gave Canada an international reputation of being an open-minded, cosmopolitan, inclusive haven for immigrants. It allowed Canada to build relations with post-colonial independent countries in Asia and Africa, secure respect from the United Nations, and its formal multiculturalism policy became a necessary “diffusing or muting device” for domestic tensions from French separatists and Indigenous activists fighting for self-determination. Additionally, because Canada’s state policies were in part informed by Nazi racial science and because Canada was white settler country, Canada needed to distance themselves from the genocidal and violent associations with post-WW2 whiteness to justify their claimed moral superiority from Germany after WW2. Canada, like many Western countries after World War 2’s unveiling of white supremacy to the world, went through an identity crisis and needed to rebrand. Multiculturalism was a strategic gateway for this rebrand. Canada’s new immigration policy reinvented Canada as a tolerant multi-ethnic, liberal-democratic society—distinguishing itself from America and pivoting away from the negative ideas of whiteness after WW2.
Not only did formal multicultural policy provide Canada with economic and political benefits, but it enabled Canada to reposition non-white people as culturally different instead of racially different from Canada’s white hegemony which helped preserve Canada’s white supremacy in a sneaky way. Although Canada increased its allowance of immigration, its exclusionary and discriminatory practices against non-white people was already ingrained in Canadian policy. Open immigration policies were strategically passed only after white hegemony was nationally institutionalized. For instance, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in 1963 was put forth before Canada opened significant immigration. The Bilingualism and Biculturalism act declared French and English settlers as the founders of Canada, essentially asserting that white French and English citizens were the only true Canadians, excluding people of colour and totally erasing Indigenous people as the original people of this land. This and many other policies made Canada a fundamentally and institutionally racist country. By reimagining non-whites as culturally different instead of in terms of race (through continuous campaigns that emphasised Canada’s diversity in terms of culture and ethnicity instead of race which was done using positive rhetoric during Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s government), it allowed Canada to sideline its deep-rooted institutionalized racism and brush off racist discrimination as cultural exclusion. The distinction between attributing exclusion to cultural differences rather than racism is crucial for Canada to subtly preserve its white supremacist dominance. By shifting the blame for exclusion onto cultural communities and their failure to assimilate, the state avoids confronting the underlying issue of racial discrimination. This allows Canada to uphold its self-image as a tolerant and non-racist society, while continuing to perpetuate racial inequalities.
Blaming immigrants for racial issues by portraying their cultural practices as backward or primitive helps white Canadians reinforce their supremacy. When non-white people are framed as stubbornly traditional, intolerant, and resistant to modernity, despite Canada’s welcoming offer to assimilate and ‘civilize’ them, it allows white Canadians to position themselves as more sophisticated and morally superior while essentially blaming immigrants for the cause of their own exclusion. For example, many white people justify their Islamophobia by claiming Islam is homophobic, which in turn allows them to see themselves as more tolerant and progressive. This narrative of cultural deficiency shifts the blame for racial issues onto immigrants, deflecting attention from Canada’s own history of racism, colonialism, and exploitation. Multiculturalism, in this context, serves to reinforce the idea that whiteness is progressive and tolerant, while people of colour are seen as parochial, perpetuating white superiority.
