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18 19 The twentieth anniversary of the proclamation of a policy of multiculturalism for Canada is less than two years away. At least one person is planning to observe the occasion: he intends to publish a book, tentatively entitled "Multiculturalism: The Other Side," devoted to arguments against multiculturalism. He telephoned the Multicultural History Society of Ontario to complain that he had found only one article against multiculturalism and to ask for assistance in locating more. He was given a list of ten or a dozen works. In its second decade multiculturalism has advanced far beyond what was anticipated in 1971, but it has by no means won general acceptance. Multiculturalism "can be defined as the official recognition by governments, expressed in legislation and/or in speeches and programs, of the many different origins of their present populations, combined with the stated intention to protect and assist those who are not members of the founding majority or charter groups." (1) In Canada it is one of a bundle of policies, including those concerning immigration, citizenship and human rights. The aim of the policies is to make Canada open to all on the same terms and to facilitate full and equal participation in society by all, whatever their race, ethnic origin, colour or culture. To that end it is considered laudable for all to retain cherished symbols of their cultural and linguistic heritages, and assistance is made available for such retention. Although the policies are not administered by a single department, they are similar in MULTICULTURALISM: THE SECOND DECADE af Dr. Jean Burnet, The Multicultural History Society of Ontario, Toronto aim and cannot be discussed in complete isolation from one another. Multiculturalism might seem to be a natural and inevitable policy for Canada. Its population was heterogeneous even before European contact, as the name the descendants of its earliest peoples have chosen for themselves implies: not the First Nation but the First Nations. There were at least fifty societies with at least a dozen languages when Europeans began to explore and settle the northern half of North America. The heterogeneity of the popution has increased with time, slowly during the French regime, more quickly under the British, and very quickly during the last century, with the opening of the West in early decades and the massive immigration and flow of refugees after World War II. Now the Canadian population is drawn from all parts of the world, and every region in the country has a characteristic ethnic mixture. The groups forming those mixtures frequently try to trace their Canadian roots to explorers or pioneers whose association with the particular groups claiming them is extremely tenuous. Similarly multiculturalism is sometimes given a lineage as lengthy as it is dubious. Canadians talk of traditions of ethnic and racial tolerance that differentiate them from their usual standard of comparison, the Americans. They are, however, more like the Americans than they like to admit. They have a heritage of slavery of both Africans and Amerindians. If it was more benign, on a smaller scale and of shorter` duration than American slavery, it was so because of economic and geographical conditions rather than moral superiority. Canadians have a long history of - broken promises to the First Nations, for which they are now being called to account, and of discrimination against African Canadians. Anti-Semitism goes back to the French regime, when Jews, along with other non-Roman Catholics; were rigorously excluded from the colony. If Jews were admitted under the British and in 1$32 achieved full rights of citizenship, they have frequently endured discrimination both at the gates to the country and inside it: Abella and Troper's "None Is Too Many (2) presents examples from the 1930s and 1940s that are all too graphic. ':Chinese, Japanese and South Asians - "hindoos" - met little tolerance. Pacifist sects such as the Doukhobors, Mennonites and Hutterites owed their admittance to their reputation as farmes, but that was not enough to win them acceptance from their neighbours; neither, by the way, were the British and Scandinavian ethnic origins and American experience of the Mormons. The people from central and eastern Europe - the stalwart peasants in sheepskin coats, their stout wives and numerous children who were considered the best settlers for the second-best land by the framer of Canada's first energetic immigration campaign, Clifford Sifton - encountered such epithets as white niggers. Discrimination was not only informal: it was built into federal and provincial laws and regulations and local by-laws. Much of it was direct and open. The requirement of 1908 that immigrants had to come on a continuous journey from their country of origin was a veiled attack on South Asians and Japanese - it was also used against Jews - but there was nothing covert about the Chinese Immigration (Exclusion) Act of 1923. Restrictive covenants on residential areas were often frank in barring Jews and Negroes, though sometimes summer resorts genteelly spoke of select clienteles. As late as the 1940s a federal cabinet minister could assert in the House of Commons that Canada was for the white race, and Prime Minister Mackenzie King could opine that Canadians did not want to make a fundamental change in the character of the population by "large-scale immigration from the Orient." (3) <strong>Anglo</strong>-conformity was the aim of policy, and the discriminations against non-British and non-Europeans were coupled with discriminations in favour of British subjects. By the 1930s the mosaic had become a staple of political speeches, but it is difficult to find concrete measures that encouraged the maintenance of differences rather than assimilation. The mosaic was contrasted with the American melting pot, and there was a strong conviction that the British dealt with racial and ethnic relations better than the Americans. The British tradition, not discriminatory immigration regulations, was credited with the lack of colour problems in Canada and with the scarcity of immigrant ghettoes in Canadian cities. Now, when England has received many coloured people from its former colonies and has responded to them with prejudice and discrimination as vicious as that in the United States, it is hard to remember that the British used to claim superiority in dealing with race and ethnic situations and harder still to remember how they explained it. When Mackenzie King made his pronouncement in 1947 the Canadian population was still basically British: outside of Quebec 60
20 percent of the population was of British ethnic origin. It is safe to assume that because of assimilation more than 60 percent was English Canadian in ethnic identity. But at the end of the Second World War this was about to change. The population, while it continued to come from the United Kingdom, the United States and continental Europe, rose remarkably through the post-war years. The first arrivals were war brides, displaced persons and those who were determined to put an ocean between themselves and once and future battlefields. They were quickly joined by others who came to take part in Canada's rapid economic expansion, either by using skills that Canadians did not have or by undertaking hard and menial jobs that Canadians would not perform. Between 1945 and 1967 the ethnic origins most strongly represented among immigrants were British, Italian, German, Dutch, Polish and Jewish; of the six origins, three - British, ,ferman and Dutch - had been among the preferred origins in earlier periods, and the other three were also European. Meanwhile the ethnic ideologies of the past were undergoing revision. The decline of Britain in power and prestige and the demographic changes in Canada called into question the old assumptions of <strong>Anglo</strong>-conformity and the policies related to it. Simultaneously the old discriminations became unconscionable. What had been considered acceptable expressions of anti-Semitism and racism in Canada and throughout the world changed. The horrors of the death camps and in particular the attempted genocide of Jews and Gypsies led to a revulsion against discrimination based on race, language, culture or origin. The United Nations emerged, and quickly began to give leadership in regard to human and cultural rights. In Canada the discrimininatory practices of the past began to be discarded both at the federal and the provincial level. The Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 was repealed in 1947 and small numbers of immigrants from India, Pakistan and Ceylon were given admission from 1951 on. South Asians and Chinese were enfranchised in 1947 and Japanese in 1949. Human rights codes, fair employment practices and fair accommodation practices acts were adopted in province after province. But the immigration of Asians and West Indians was still rigorously restricted. Minister after minister responsible for immigration had to defend the restrictions on grounds they must have known to be false, such as inability of people from the Caribbean to endure the Canadian climate. It was in the 1960s that post-war changes became dramatically evident. In that decade, ethnic movements were occurring in many parts of the world, one of the most spectacular being the Black Revolution in the United States. Such movements formed the backdrop for a crisis in relations between English Canadians and French Canadians. The relations had never been easy, but heretofore they had hardly been desperate. Now, however, came in quick succession the death of long-time Premier Maurice Duplessis, the period of rapid state-directed economic and social change known as the Quiet Revolution, the terrorist acts of the FLQ, the setting up of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, Expo '67, General de Gaulle's cry of "Vive the Quebec libre," the founding by Rene Levesque of the Parti Quebecois and the Official Languages Act. While all this was going on, the relations to English Canadians and French Canadians of the Native Peoples and the ethnic groups that were not Native, French or British also became problematical. Just as the French Canadians of Quebec origin began to express their new conception of themselves by calling themselves Quebecois, the Native Peoples began to call themselves the First Nations and those who had been called Eskimo won recognition for their own name for themselves, Inuit. They established more and more connections with the aboriginal peoples of other countries, including the militants in the American Indian Movement. Governmental concern resulted in the voluminous Survey of Contemporary Indians of Canada, directed by H.B. Hawthorn and M.A. Tremblay, (4) in 1966 and 1967, and a White Paper in 1969 that proposed that the Indian Act be repealed, and Indians receive the same services as other Candians through the same channels and from the same government agencies as other Canadians. The response of the Indians was an angry rejection of the White Paper and an insistence that they henceforth be involved in the formulation of Indian policy. Whereas the Native Peoples had not been mentioned in the terms of reference of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, the other ethnic groups had been given causal recognition. The commissioners had been asked to "take into account the contribution made by the other ethnic groups to the cultural enrichment of Canada and the measures that should be taken to safeguard that contribution." At first the Commissioners, wh. included one Polish and one Ukrainian immigrant, and them directors of research for the Commission intended only to seek out essays on the contribution- of a small number of groups and analyses of the attitudes of a few other ethnic groups towards French-Canadian nationalism and separatism, especially in Montreal. However, the immediate and vehement response of the other ethnic groups to the Commission's terms of reference, the briefs presented at public and private hearings, the discussion sparked by the publication of Porter's The Vertical Mosaic in 1965, and the brief and almost surreptitious investigations carried out by members of the other ethnic groups who had obtained jobs on the research staff resulted in the devotion of Book IV of the Commission's report to the other ethnic groups. In response to Book IV, on 8 October 1971 the Liberal government proclaimed a policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework. In the House of Commons the policy was welcomed by the leaders of the Conservative, New Democratic and Social Credit parties, but outside the house adverse cricitism began almost at once. French-Canadian opinion leaders such as Guy Rocher and Claude Ryan saw it as menacing the more equal partnership for which they had been striving and which they felt had been brought within reach by the Royal Commission. They felt that it put all cultures except the British on an equal footing. They were not reconciled by the statement that multiculturalism was to be within a bilingual framework: since they held that culture and language were inseparable, they saw other cultures being given rights at the expense of the French. On the other hand, spokesmen for the other ethnic groups, especially Slavic groups, complained that multiculturalism meant little if they were not given resources for the maintenance of their languages and cultures comparable to the resources being allocated for official bilingualism. Porter 21
Page 1 and 2: 2 3 Temaet for næste nummer af ENG
Page 3: 16 Inuiterne kom sejlende over Beri
Page 7 and 8: 24 25 The Immigration Act formalize
Page 9 and 10: 28 ASPECTS OF MULTICULTURALISM IN T
Page 11 and 12: 32 33 after the Revolution in 1917.
Page 13 and 14: 36 37 the main character and his ad
Page 15 and 16: 40 41 The Baitchopper (James Lorime
Page 17 and 18: 46 CANADA SET MED FRANSK-CANADISKE
Page 19 and 20: 50 51 a North American who is not a

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