Vancouver Courier
January 14, 1996
As defenders of multiculturalism go, perhaps
no one is more articulate than Orest Kruhlak, regional executive director
for the Department of Canadian Heritage. A civil servant who began his
career during the Trudeau years, Kruhlak says that what critics say about
multiculturalism and what multiculturalism actually does are two entirely
different things. In an interview conducted last November, he said those
who condemn multiculturalism do so out of ignorance and misperception.
Rather than a Balkanizing, destructive
policy, he said: “Multiculturalism is a program designed to promote the
equality of all people in Canada and to recognize that everyone,
irrespective of ethnic background is legitimately Canadian.” Prime Minister
Trudeau, therefore, promoted multiculturalism as a way to level the Canadian
playing field so that, in Kruhlak’s words, “everybody could be made
legitimately Canadian instead of someone of an ethnic or racial origin.”
Trudeau's great worry was French-Canadian
nationalism. He wanted to show French Canada that English Canada was not
threatening. He did this by promoting the dilution of English Canada's
cultural cohesion—to the extent that such cohesion could be said to exist.
“Trudeau saw the legitimization of
non-English, non-French Canadians as another countervailing force in Canadian
society,” said Kruhlak. “It was also to say to French-speaking Canada: 'The
English-speaking community was not a monolithic bloc standing in opposition
to the aspirations of French-speaking Canada,’ as many French-Canadian
nationalists were portraying English-speaking Canada, and still do.”
Kruhlak said Trudeau was a liberal in the
tradition of John Locke, the 17th-century English political philosopher and
intellectual progenitor of the American Declaration of Independence. The
idea that American liberal individualism could be foisted on conservative,
Tory English Canada seemed neither odd nor bad to Kruhlak; in fact it was eminently necessary: “I don’t think
(Trudeau) would argue that the Canada that existed for up to 100 years was
a fundamentally unequal Canada.” It was a Canada, he said, wherein French
Canadians, aboriginals and minorities were at best second-class citizens in
a country where only Anglo-Saxon Canadians mattered.
All multiculturalism seeks to do, he said,
is to promote a common citizenship, and those who object do
so out of ignorance, misunderstanding and a longing for the good ol’ days
of Anglo-Saxon privilege. Canada has no national culture, and this is not a
bad thing, for culture, he says, is not national.
If multiculturalism is so obviously the
saving grace for Canada how come one in two respondents to a 1992
immigration department poll “expressed the fear that they were becoming
strangers in their own land?” How is it that the 1991 Spicer Commission
found public anger toward multiculturalism came second only to that for
Brian Mulroney? Why did a 1994 poll find 67 percent of Torontonians
discontented with multiculturalism? The sad fact is that Kruhlak’s rosy
arguments aren’t exactly airtight. In his new book Nationalism Without Walls:
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian, (the source for the polling
results) Toronto Star columnist Richard Gwyn argues that by
undermining English Canada, multiculturalism undermines the whole nation
and promotes inequality.
First, he writes that the tolerance
argument doesn’t hold water, because Canada’s social values were already
moving towards greater tolerance. By 1962, the last of Canada's restrictive
racial legislation was repealed, allowing for free immigration from Europe,
and in 1967 immigration was opened to the world. “We stopped being
(parochial and colonialist) for quite some time: within the lifetime of
almost every Canadian adult, our attitudes have undergone a sea change,” he
wrote. Multiculturalism was irrelevant before it even began.
Second, Gwyn said the image of the
downtrodden “ethnic” is fiction. Cultural groups do fine on their own, and
besides, Ukrainian Canadians were the only ones demanding the 1971
multiculturalism act.
In fact, multiculturalism has only served
to promote dissention between the majority culture and the “multicultural
communities”: “Overwhelmingly, the anti-racist programs of the department
of multiculturalism are directed at white or European Canadians as if
racism were a function of colour instead of race itself.” Kruhlak’s
condemnation of “the old Canada” seems to assume an underlying bigotry
among Canadians that only high-minded multiculturalism can cure.
This is not only ludicrous, but it is
condescending and an insult to all Canadians. How are Canadians supposed to
react when they’re being brought up to disrespect their British heritage in
favour of a nihilistic policy that, for example, puts refugees on the same
constitutional footing as citizens? What is Canadian citizenship worth?
This is the crux of Gwyn’s criticism.
Kruhlak may disagree with this assessment,
but perception and reality are indistinguishable. Kruhlak’s interpretation
of multiculturalism may in fact reflect Trudeau’s thinking and may also
have been done with good intentions, but it no longer matters. The
abovementioned polls only make sense if looked at from Gwyn’s point of
view. Canadians are decent, tolerant people, but they strongly resent
having their country, like the proverbial rug, pulled out from underneath
them.
In fact, no multiculturalist has made the
case that the program is necessary. It has survived for as long as it has
only because the Liberals need ethnic votes and large immigration quotas,
especially for Toronto, to stay in power, so no serious examination of the
issue is likely.
Kruhlak says we must
water down our attachment to our British past in order to develop our own,
Canadian mythology. He is certainly right that we need such symbols, but
myths and symbols must be developed over lifetimes. Turning our back on our
past is psychologically self-destructive.