Multiculturalism: a pipe dream
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We have already discussed the point system in Canadian migration system. I have argued that the new Canadian approach to migration was at least partially a ploy to keep Québec nationalism at bay. However, the point system only gives us a glimpse into what a model minority would like. The only thing it tells us is that the Canadian government was sure that there actually did exist a 'model minority' or an 'ideal migrant'. The point system was largely a filter to restrict the migration to the potential future model minorities.
If we compare Canada’s attempt at multiculturalism to other countries like the UK and Germany, we see that there has been a common thread of effort during the global sixties. However, as David Cameroon and Angela Merkel have decried the failings of this political philosophy, Canada has proudly claimed its multicultural character. Why? Amarasingam, Nagathan & Hyndman have claimed that this is because being multicultural is part of being Canadian (120).
I found this claim to rather vague. A better explanation would be that Canada differed from Germany and the UK in one key aspect: we didn’t have much of a historically defined nationalism to begin with. For the longest time, Canadian ‘nationalism’ had been informed by Britain’s relationship with the USA and Canada’s incessant struggle with the indigenous people. The former started to become inconsequential as the Crown slowly retreated from Canada. While the latter became an unsavoury (and unacceptable) emblem of Canadian nationalism. Therefore, Canada hopped onto the only relatively acceptable part of its history; which was its notion of a mosaic of nations and ethnicities. Although, historically speaking, this mosaic was very limited to different shades of white. This mosaic narrative fit well into the multiculturalism effort. And, Canadians were happy to adorn it as part of being a Canadian.
However, just because it is part of your national identity doesn’t mean it works. Multiculturalism is a flawed concept. A nation cannot be multicultural when the end goal is integration. As Thobani points out, Canada is still pretty much officially a bicultural and bilingual nation (145). So, Canada claims multiculturalism while promoting integration. Integration involves letting go of the past and fitting into predefined notions of being a Canadian i.e, White Canada. Though, I don’t find anything particularly wrong with the end goal being integration because a country can have strict social rules that aren’t very accommodating. But, in the case of Canada, such argument can’t be made on the basis of its history as a settler colony. Logic suggests that the Chinese are free to demand everyone to speak Mandarin in China due to historical continuity but Canada can’t make any such moral claims.
In the same vein, multiculturalism gets invalidated by the very act of a nation’s volition to adopt it. Multiple cultures such as those seen in India, Africa and elsewhere develop over hundreds of years in a very subtle manner. They are organic. They are not a melting pot nor a mosaic. There are regionally continuities with multiple layers of mutual intelligibility of customs and languages. It seems like a pipe dream to expect such coalescence in a generation or two especially when given the number of cultures present in Canada, mutual intelligibility would be almost impossible outside the pre-existing framework of White Canada, i.e., French and English languages. Also, the very act of wanting it activates the counter-forces who oppose it.
At best, I would say that Canada is a country with many different cultures that are in the process of integration into the pre-existing white Canadian framework. We see a resurgence of want for culture in the subsequent generations (i.e., generational melancholia) due the white Canadian framework’s implicit racialism. But for the most part, even that melancholia works with the white Canadian framework (e.g., second generations still tend to live more like a white Canadian than like anyone from their ethnic background).