MONTHLY LETTER

A Multicultural Societ: The nation of minorities called Canadahas been compared to a mosaic and a flowergarden. And indeed this remarkablecosmopolitan society offers many rewards.Now the time has come to demonstratethe reality behind the rhetoric. And to provethat equality and fraternity really can exist...

[] There is tea from China, shortbread fromScotland, canned salsifis from Belgium. There iscouscous from Morocco, taco pastry from Mexico,feta cheese from Greece. At the meat counteryou find Polish, German and Italian sausages andbeef butchered in the French fashion. Delicatessenslike this flourish in all of the larger cities ofCanada, and people of practically every racialorigin under the sun come to choose among theirmultifarious goods.

Here the richness of Canada’s multiculturalsociety gleams through among the colourfully-packaged foodstuffs from scores of nations. Thesecrowded shelves are an unconscious celebration ofall that Canada has gained by offering a home topeople from around the world. Canada tradition-ally has been regarded in other nations as anessentially dull place of diligent but ploddinginhabitants- grey figures on a grey landscape.There may have been some truth to this impressionlong ago; thanks to the zest infused into thiscountry by millions of immigrants and theirdescendants over the years, it is anything buttrue now.

Contemporary Canadians, no matter what theirmother tongue, are the beneficiaries of a world ofcultural inspiration. More than they usuallyrealize, they have incorporated the ways of othernations into their own way of life. This shows intheir clothing, housing, furnishings, pastimes,cuisine, and attitudes. Nor have they partakenuniformly of the same influences; on the contrary,the range of choice is so broad and Canadian tastesso diffuse that it is often lamented that Canadians

have no distinctive national culture of their own.In a sense, though, this diffusion and amen-

ability to the unfamiliar is the Canadian culture.The tradition of absorbing the best from variouscultural sources goes to Canada’s roots. As a nativeIndian leader has pointed out, the original CAna-dians formed a multicultural and multilingualsociety long before the first white man ever cameto the country. The upper part of North Americawas occupied by tribes as different from oneanother as Swedes are from Corsicans, with allthe strains in between.

Despite the violence that marred relations be-tween the Indians and whites in the early yearsof European settlement, the two groups wentahead and pooled their lore and artifacts. Fromthe Indians the French-Canadians learned wood-craft and adopted snow-shoes, moccasins andcanoes. While they brought alcohol and strangediseases to the Indians, the white men also broughtiron pots and axes, woven fabrics and fire-arms.On balance, the intermingling of these contrastingpeoples may have done more harm than good--but it did do some good nevertheless.

In later years the French and English forgedalliances with Indian tribes as they battled forcontrol of North America. When the war forCanada finally ended, the victorious "English"(many of whom were actually Gaelic-speakingScots) joined in a marriage of convenience withthe Indians and Canadiens to probe the wildernessand fight off invasions from the newly-createdUnited States. An interchange of cralLs andcustoms ensued between French- and English-

speaking Canadians in their common interests.Yet they stayed identifiably different, as they areto this day.

The perpetuation of separate French and Englishidentities in defiance of historic animosities formedthe foundation of the great Canadian modusvivendi. The principle that citizens of differentnational origins should maintain their own waysof life without detracting from their rights wasenshrined in Canadian political philosophy evenbefore the Canadian nation was born. Followingthe first discussions in 1864 among the BritishNorth American colonies on the founding of theDominion of Canada, one of the Fathers of Con-federation, Hector Langevin, explained:

~’In Parliament there will be no question of race,nationality, religion or locality . . . The basis ofaction adopted by the delegates to the QuebecConference in preparing the resolutions was to dojustice to all --justice to all religions, to all nation-alities, and to all interests."

The respect for national and religious identitiessmoothed the way for the settlement of largenumbers of Scottish, Irish, German, Ukrainian,Polish and Scandinavian immigrants to Canadain the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.While William Howard Taft, President of theUnited States from 1909 to 1913, would boast,"We have taken millions of foreigners into ourcivilization, but we have amalgamated them all,we have made them all Americans", there waslittle taste for such thorough-going assimilationhere. "We have bred a type," Taft jubilated; for avariety of reasons, none wholly unselfish, therewas no great interest in breeding a typical Cana-dian. Instead, Taft’s contemporary head of govern-ment, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, echoed a popularsentiment when he compared Canada to a gothiccathedral made of marble, oak and granite. ~Thisis the image I would like Canada to become,"he declared. ~’For here I want the marble to remainthe marble; the granite to remain the granite; theoak to remain the oak; and out of all these elementsI would build a nation great among the nations ofthe world."

But if politicians may build nations, they areonly upheld by the will of ordinary citizens. Hadthe people of Canada allowed their cultural andreligious differences to split them into hostilefactions, Laurier’s cathedral would have collapsedin ruins. That people did not do so in Canada’s

pioneering days, when racial discrimination wasrife elsewhere, seems partly due to the exigenciesof the land and its climate. In a situation whereone’s survival might well depend on the aid of aneighbour regardless of his race or religion, it wasprudent at least to keep one’s prejudices to oneself.

It is difficult to hate for no goodreason a man who shares a mid-daymeal with you after you have bothput in a hard morning’s work

Conditions in the primarily agrarian Canada towhich more than 3 million immigrants camebetween the mid-1890s and World War I oftenthrew members of different national groupsunexpectedly together. ~Now the Ukrainians wereused to the cold and knew how to build good houses,but we didn’t," one of the first Black Americansettlers in northern Alberta recalled recently.’~They had a way of plastering their houses withsomething they mixed out of clay and dirt and otherthings and could plaster up a house just as niceas stucco. Sometimes the coloured folks would hirethe Ukrainians to help with their homes."

Through contact of this kind, the innate barriersof suspicion among racial groups were breached."Ignorance alone makes monsters and bugbears,"wrote William Hazlitt; "our actual acquaintancesare very commonplace people." It is difficult to hatefor no good reason a man who shares a mid-daymeal with you after you have both put in a hardmorning’s work. In an age of intolerance, Cana-dians came to practise the paradoxical brand ofselective tolerance typified by Jonathan Swift’sstatement: ~’Principally I hate and detest thatanimal called man; although I heartily love John,Peter, Thomas and so forth." There was stillmuch intolerance; yet it is evident there wassufficient plain human goodwill to permit amulticultural society to germinate.

Its growth over the decades since has not beenwithout its difficulties and set-backs. Yet again, atleast a sufficiency of tolerance has prevailed. Asmore and more people from more and more coun-tries streamed in looking for a new life in the yearsfollowing World War II, a spirit of casual generosi-ty overrode intergroup bickering, racial prejudiceand recurring complaints that immigrants weretaking away jobs from Canadians. As a result, well

over 4 million newcomers from approximately 100nations and colonies have settled in Canada in ageneral atmosphere of goodwill since 1945.

This mass influx of people from so many differentlands has wrought striking changes in Canadianlife, mainly for the better. The economy and thearts and sciences have been strengthened greatlyby the contributions of ~’new Canadians" from farand wide. They have brought the world to Canadaand brought Canada into the world by adding acosmopolitan dimension to the outlook of theirnative-born compatriots. They have made the Ca-nadian scene immeasurably brighter as well.

Can such a loosely-knit patchwork ofethnic groups have a common cause?

The cumulative effect of immigration in thetwentieth century has been to turn Canada into anation of minorities. At the beginning of thecentury people of British origin made up about 57per cent of the population- although it shouldbe noted that this group was a composite of English,Scottish, American, Irish and Welsh. The 1971Census showed that, even when all these disparateAnglo-Saxons and Celts of different religions andtenure in Canada were classed as a single racialentity, they comprised less than 45 per cent of thepopulation. People of French origin made up thesecond largest group at 28.7 per cent; the restoriginated in all parts of the world.

This new demographic pattern has presented achallenge to Canadians in their quest for unity.Can such a loosely-knit patchwork of ethnic groupsever hold together in a common cause? Few nationsin the world have no homogeneous majority orpervasive national culture. Canada is unusual inhaving two official languages, English and French.All this makes the nation vulnerable to the forcesof parochialism and divisiveness. Thus when in1971 Canada was officially declared a ~multicul-tural society within a bilingual framework",Canadians entered into an experiment in humanrelations which tests the goodwill of them all.

There can be no turning back to the homogeneityof the American-style "melting pot". The desireamong cultural groups to assert their distinctiveidentities has only grown stronger in recent years.As a result, Canadians are now at the point wherethey must come to terms with their nation’s

multicultural character if it is to survive as acohesive working democracy. That great student ofdemocracy, Lord Acton, wrote in 1836, ~A Statewhich is incompetent to satisfy different racescondemns itself; a State which does not includethem is destitute of the chief basis of self-govern-ment." How aptly these words apply to the caseof Canada today.

The policy of official multiculturalism will onlysucceed if there is a full awareness of its inherentdangers. One of these has been pointed out force-fully by spokesmen for French Canada: thatmulticulturalism might be employed as a trojanhorse to promote the English language andEnglish-Canadian culture, thereby threateningthe status of French-Canadians as one of Canada’sfounding peoples, and the survival of the French-Canadian way of life. Another is that the policymight lock ethnic citizens in their existing socialand economic positions, reserving the top of theheap for its traditional occupants, who are mostlyof British origin. Yet another is that multicultural-ism might be exploited for partisan ends, pittingone group against another for the sake of politicalpower.

Canadians, of all people, shouldappreciate the value of tolerance

Perhaps the greatest danger of all is that themulticultural policy could be distorted to furtherthe evils it is designed to eliminate. RosemaryBrown, a former British Columbia cabinet ministerof West Indian birth, has warned: ’~Multicul-turalism should not, and must not, be a situationwhere ethnic groups maintain their culturalidentity because they are alienated, isolated,oppressed, ostracized, categorized or manipulatedon account of a particular cultural background."

In these demanding new circumstances it wouldbe self-defeating to pretend, as in the past, thatintolerance is an insignificant factor in Canadiansociety. Racial violence lately has reared its trulyugly head in Canadian cities which contain largenumbers of non-white people. While overt racialconflicts make headlines, there is ample evidencethat covert racial discrimination is practised inCanada daily. Certainly intolerance on both sideshas envenomed the national debate over bilin-gualism and the political future of Quebec.

Yet C~nAdi2ng, of all people, should appreciatethe value of tolerance. Their history and their sur-roundings should teach them how little it costsin relation to its rewards. The tolerance of ethnicdiversity in Canada has led indirectly to a toleranceof eccentricities and alternative lifestyles--of"doing your own thing ~, as the current expressionh~g it. A society which tolerates a diversity ofcultures is also capable of tolerating a diversityof opinion, and so it does in Canada.

It is instructive to consider theelements of intolerance run wild

The consequences of a break-down of toleranceare all too obvious. Watching the news from otherparts of the world, C~n~diAn.q must find that theyare a fortunate few. Northern Ireland and Lebanonprovide the most recent and conspicuous, but notthe only, examples of what happens to people whenintolerance predominates. Many present-day Ca-nadian.q know the oppression and terror of intol-erance first-hand, having fled from it elsewhere.And lest we forget, more than a million CanadiAnsserved--and Almost 50,000 died- in a war toeradicate the unspeakable racialist scourge ofNazism not so long ago. In this context it isinstructive to consider the elements of intolerancerun wild: jealousy, suspicion, cruelty, ignorance,vindictiveness, and a contempt for the dignity ofone’s fellow human beings.

Intolerance, then, is an Amalgam of the worstof human emotions. It should be beneath civilizedpeople; but civilization is a fragile state, as theperiodic plunges by mankind into barbarism stillprove. Let no one be deluded that civilization isinviolate in Canada. Our national woodwork hasat least its share of bigots, bullies and relatedrabble ever-alert for an opportunity to comecrawling out.

PoliticiAn~ may erect elaborate institutionalstructures to support the spirit of multiculturaltolerance, but again it is up to ordinary citizensto uphold it. Government-sponsored folk festivals

ALSO AVAILABLE IN I~ AND IN

and ethnic conferences are worth little if they donot advance the mass public understanding neededto sustain the multicultural ideal.

Up to now, Canada has been a nation in whicheveryone is considered equal, but some are moreequal than others. For many years the picture ofCanadian democracy presented by governmentsand educational institutions was something likethe picture of Dorian Gray- not to be examinedtoo closely for fear of being confronted with theun.qightly facts underlying the face shown to theworld. Canadi~n~ of the dominant Anglo-Celticgroup congratulated themselves for their tolerancewhile they expected members of other ethnicgroups to be good sports and keep in theirsubordinate places. The door was opened no morethan a crack to non-white immigration until onlya few years ago. The false face has since meltedin the heat of democratic dissent, and now realinjustices must be corrected in a spirit of realtolerance. If not, the multicultural society couldone day turn into a cockpit for multicultural strife.

So the time has come to replace rhetoric withreality. It must be made manifest that the re°markable multicultural community which hasgrown up in Canada is not a political mirage;that it really does offer the best hope of equalityfor all concerned. To achieve this, individual Ca-nadians must show that they are capable ofrising above the antagonistic tribalism which hasalways blighted the human condition. They mustprove the unlikely proposition that there can beunity in diversity. In so doing, they may alsoprove that there are such things as enlightenmentand human progress left in this world.

The New LookWith this edition we introduce a modernizedversion of the Monthly Letter, featuring some-what briefer essays and a new typographicaldesign aimed at easier reading. While this isa departure from former practice, we intend tomaintain the traditional high standard ofcommentary on a wide range of subjects whichhas won the esteem of people the world over.We trust that the Monthly Letter will prove tobe as useful and enjoyable to readers in thefuture as it has been in the past.

O THE ROYAL BANK OF CANADA 1978/P~NTED IN CANADA