The Book of Others (Book IV): Canadian Multiculturalism, the State, and Its Political Legacies

The Multicultural Move to Language

It is always worth reminding Canadians that when Pierre Elliott Trudeau introduced the Multiculturalism Policy to Parliament in October 1971, it was not an attempt to change the fundamental character of the modern Canadian nation-state. Rather, the policy’s intent was to manage the non-French and non-English peoples of the nation, as Eve Haque clearly explains in her discussion of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism’s (B and B Commission) production of the “other ethnic groups” of the Canadian body politic (186-237). The B and B Commission’s work simultaneously cemented the idea that French and English/British ethnicities constituted the founding “races” of Canada (5-8, 14, 53-56, 87-93, 140-52). Furthermore, the move to language rather than ethnicity for the white French and English/British was a cover to preclude racial designation as foundational to the nation, all the while making it fundamentally so (6, 18, 62-71, 75-78, 160-62). Indeed, the late Robert Stanfield, the Progressive Conservative Opposition Leader, stood to endorse the policy by saying that, “I wish to state immediately, Mr. Speaker, that the emphasis we have given to multiculturalism in no way constitutes an attack on the basic duality of our country” (234). The duality that was already assumed and came to be enshrined in the bilingual and multicultural articulation of the nation-state as fundamental to its founding was soon after enshrined in legislation and law.

Multiculturalism as Raciological Thinking

Eve Haque’s Multiculturalism Within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race and Belonging in Canada returns us to the origin scene of the Canadian nation-state’s formation and management of its non-French and non-English/British others, to provide an account of how language, race, and culture have produced the modern context of contemporary multicultural Canada. Haque’s engagement with Canadian multiculturalism focuses squarely on “the Preliminary Report and Books I (The Official Languages) and IV (The Cultural Contributions of the Other Ethnic Groups)” (7); her focus cannot be downplayed, for the effects of Book IV continue to mark Canadian multicultural policy, politics, and their associated imaginaries. Haque begins her study with Jacque Parizeau’s 1995 outburst that “money and the ethnic vote” were the reasons that the “No Campaign” was narrowly successful in the last referendum in Quebec (3-4, 238, 264). By beginning there, Haque pinpoints how deep structures of language, culture, and race continue to shape contemporary Canadian politics, the public sphere, and the national imaginary. This shaping of the contemporary Canadian national imaginary is fashioned through a recourse that places two languages outside the boundaries of race and ethnicity, only to be remarked by their accent as cultures – the founding cultures of Canada. Indeed, Haque’s work seeks to unmake such remarking as the troubling work of race and raciological thinking.

Furthermore, it is Haque’s argument that multiculturalism as policy usefully operated and operates in a space where public policy as “biologically based racial exclusions became increasingly politically and socially disreputable” (6). The disturbing impact in the aftermath is how language and culture has come to stand in for race and raciological thinking and practices in new and sustained ways more than forty years later.

It is precisely the manner in which language and culture appear to foreclose discussions of “race” and racism in Canada that makes Haque’s contribution and reading of the historical documents so important to contemporary debates on multiculturalism and racism. Indeed, Haque’s analysis in part points to the reasons why the term “barbaric cultural practices” is currently used by the Government of Canada to describe exclusively non-white cultural practices in the Canadian citizenship guide (Zine 2012, 18). In addition, it also provides ample material to understand how debates about reasonable accommodation and “common values” in Quebec have been explicitly articulated through cultural difference, even though they have plainly centered on the same non-white peoples from South Asia and the Middle East. The vernacular language of culture marks them as racial selves in need of...