The Politics of Multiculturalism

BOTH IN THEORY AND IDEALLY also in practice, Canada has adopted a constitutional policy of multiculturalism that comprises the layered, interrelated histories and cultures of all its constituent groups: English Canadians, French Canadians, First Nations, and other ethnic minorities alike. Before the passing of the 1947 Canadian Citizenship Act, all Canadians were counted as British subjects, but over the following two decades, mounting local and international tensions — such as Quebec nationalism, growing demands for compensation from members of the First Nations, and post-Second World War immigration policies — required a revision of the Canadian concept of nation. Canadian identity was thus detached from a community ideal as being homogeneously White (or more precisely, of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity and religion), reflecting the heterogeneous makeup of its changing population. Beyond its significant indigenous population now numbering about one million people, and its settlement by originally two groups, the English and the French, Canada has been an immigrant-receiving country since the early nineteenth century. Whereas Canada brought a relatively small number of Jews to safety during the Nazi regime, the country — as a deliberate atonement for earlier mistakes such as the repression of the Japanese during the Second World War and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923 — opened its doors in the early 1950s to hitherto less-preferred immigrant groups, welcoming since 1990 as many as 200,000 immigrants annually. Today, more than one hundred different minority ethnic groups live in Canada, and the foreign-born alone account for about nineteen percent of the overall population.