Canada must face up to multicultural angst: Experts

The Canadian practice of "papering over" any angst about multiculturalism and immigration must be replaced by a frank conversation if this country is to thrive in an increasingly diverse future, experts say.

A report from Statistics Canada this week projected unprecedented population shifts over the next two decades and sparked a wave of vitriolic online comments, yet experts say there's widespread reluctance to admit there are problems here.

"There's no need to paper over the fact that not every Canadian is happy about these changes," says Jeffrey Reitz, a professor of sociology and ethnic and immigration studies at the University of Toronto.

Yet that's what frequently happens in Canada, he says. Government bureaucrats who insist there are problems with discrimination and racism are swiftly muzzled, he says, researchers have a hard time getting a grasp on the scope of the issue and communities often refuse to believe it's happening in their backyards. As a result, public discourse often doesn't reflect minority issues, Reitz says, but in the coming years, the growing size of this diverse population could force politicians and citizens to pay attention.

The Statistics Canada report projects that by 2031, at least one in four people in this country will have been born elsewhere and that population will grow four times faster than the Canadian-born segment. Canada's visible minority groups are growing rapidly, too, expected to account for nearly one in three people two decades from now.

"It's been a long time coming, this new Canada, in terms of an awareness of it," says Henry Yu, a history professor specializing in migration at the University of British Columbia.

But the Canadian reluctance to openly discuss issues of race and culture means we don't "count" different groups as carefully as the United States, says Yu, and as a result, reports like the Statistics Canada projections released this week catch people off-guard.

Canadians tell themselves they're colour-blind, but that's a problem, not a virtue, he says, because it only perpetuates unfairness to pretend past inequalities such as residential schools or anti-Asian policies didn't exist.

"Canada, unlike the United States, in having a colour-blind society where everything is fair, often has historical legacies that the United States took care of a long time ago," he says. "Lots and lots of people don't think of Canada as having a racist past. Or if they say, 'Yeah, there's a racist past,' it's past and was all fixed. 'We're not Americans, we don't have racists.' "

For all its challenges with race relations, the U.S. has something to teach Canada, says Richard Day, a sociology professor at Queen's University.

"They're more likely to be openly, horribly racist, but they're also more likely to acknowledge the facts: 'OK, we have these differences. You're you, I'm me,' " he says. "And the kind of fantasy in Canada that we're all the same and we get along is the most dangerous thing. We're not all the same, we don't all get along."

Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association for Canadian Studies, says the American and Canadian approaches to newcomers are converging in some ways.

American scholars have started questioning whether melting-pot assimilation is even achievable in that country, he says, while there's a growing sentiment in Canada that newcomers should integrate more.

"There is some insecurity out there and there is some fear, and we've got to be mindful," Jedwab says. "There is racism out there and we're going to have to continue to be very vigilant about that, probably more so in the future because we're going through a serious transition."

However, Reitz says Canada has successfully redefined its identity amid waves of newcomers before.

In the 1970s, there was hand-wringing when Toronto's population was no longer dominated by people of British origin, he says, and at the time, European immigrants from countries such as Italy and Poland were viewed as the encroaching "them."

Today, Canadians of European background are seen as quintessentially "us" and it's more recent waves of non-white immigrants from places like South Asia and China cast as "them," he says.

"It does change things; our sense of who Canadians are is changing, but there's a lag. What people have in their mind about what a Canadian is, is always a little bit behind what's actually there based on recent social trends, and that's been the case in the past," he says. "This business of adjusting our identity as to who we are and who 'they' are has been going on for some time."

What has changed in recent years is the virtual link newcomers maintain to their home countries, says Jedwab.

Fifty years ago, immigrants were virtually cut off from their country of origin, but they can now follow news and stay in daily touch with people from the life they left behind with the help of technology, he says.

He predicts these "transnational ties" will be a hot topic in Canadian multiculturalism in the years to come.

"Some people will see this as zero-sum: The more you connect to your country of origin, the less you connect to your adopted country or your new country," Jedwab says. "There's much more evidence to support the idea that feeling a sense of rootedness or attachment to one's identity or identities is mutually reinforcing, not zero-sum. It doesn't subtract from your Canadianness."

A recent survey found that 90 per cent of allophones in Canada — those whose first language is neither French nor English — said they felt a stronger sense of pride when Canadian athletes won medals at the Olympics, he says, compared to 86 per cent of all Canadians.

"We're getting too caught up on the idea that there's one way to be Canadian, and there isn't," he says. "There are many ways of expressing one's Canadian identity and we're a classically hyphenated country."

In fact, a nationalistic campaign in the early 1990s that encouraged people to select Canadian as their ethnicity on the census only succeeded in producing a more hyphenated society of Chinese-Canadians, Italian-Canadians and Filipino-Canadians, he says.

Most nationalistic identities are packaged in superficial symbols like flags and hockey jerseys, Yu at UBC says, but in the years of change to come, he believes a more substantive aspect of Canadianness will serve us well: our politeness.

"I actually have great hopes for Canada because we don't live in segregated neighbourhoods, we actually try very hard in unconscious ways to get along in our cities, to get along in our small towns," he says. "It may seem empty, but actually that's not a small quality for civil society."