Once More, Whence and Whither Canadian Multiculturalism?: A Review Essay of Revisiting Multiculturalism in Canada

Multiculturalism once held hegemonic sway in various nation-states, especially in the Anglophone Western world, as the preferred approach to addressing cultural and ethnic diversity. But multiculturalism was also contested from the start, critiqued from both the left and the right within these countries, and it has been eschewed in Latin America and in Europe in favour of interculturalism. In addition to the turn to interculturalism as successor regime for addressing cultural diversity, multiculturalism has had to contend with the turn of progressive theorists to alternative conceptual frames, initially to anti-racism in the case of Britain and Canada, and more recently to a plethora of alternatives from transnationalism to diaspora, cosmopolitanism to critical race theory.

As the country that gave the world official multiculturalism, Canada has a particular interest in and peculiar relationship to these developments. In Canada conservative critics critiqued multiculturalism as hegemonic, divisive, and essentializing and called either overtly or by implication for a return to assimilation and the “natural” ethnic ordering (read Eurocentric British and French descendants and cultures at the top of the hierarchy and everyone else falling in place from other Europeans next and then “visible minorities,” with Aboriginals either at the bottom or as idealized afterthought). Leftists, on the other hand, decried multiculturalism’s failure to address white supremacy and the pivotal problem of racism and called for a turn to a politics of difference over diversity talk and to anti-racism as official policy. And critical, progressive Aboriginals have wanted little to do with the entire enterprise, the idea of the largesse of Canada offering welcome to “our home and native land”—which was always already Native land—being altogether too ironically, arrogantly audacious and dismissive of Aboriginality to bear. Partly in response to these critiques, multiculturalism in Canada, even as official policy, has not remained static but rather has evolved over time from an initial focus on ethnicity through an acceptance of a responsibility to address the problematic of race (and the problem of racism?) to a turn to social cohesion and then to the individual’s responsibility in citizenship, etc.

While Canadian multiculturalism appeared to have weathered early criticisms from both the left and the right, it now finds it has to contend with renewed accusations that it fosters ethnic and cultural silos, and its dismissal as simply passé. Taking this history and these more recent developments into account, I have described the present as a moment of danger for Canadian multiculturalism (Wright 2012). Interestingly, however, multiculturalism (especially in its liberal, celebratory form) remains dominant as official policy, national ideology, the primary approach to diversity in fields like education and Canadians’ common sense understanding of sociocultural diversity and, indeed, national identity. In short, despite the history of critiques and the rise of alternatives elsewhere (including the inconvenient fact of Quebec interculturalism), contemporary Canadian multiculturalism enjoys a peculiar, almost complacent hegemony (ibid.).

Because Canadian multiculturalism has always been and continues to be contested, it is not surprising that its history has been repeatedly retold from various perspectives and that there are recurrent and varying efforts to articulate its past, present and future as policy, as academic discourse in various disciplines, as praxis and in the context of how diversity/difference is being addressed in relation to various models from and contexts of other countries. This edited collection, Revisiting Multiculturalism in Canada, is one of the latest in what has evolved as a perennial, albeit arguably productive and useful taking of the pulse of Canadian multiculturalism; articulating and rearticulating from various perspectives its history, status quo and future (a future which in some circles is being articulated in the loose discourse of “post-multiculturalism”).

Guo and Wong have assembled an interesting set of contributors including Will Kymlicka, a political philosopher who is readily recognized as one of the most prolific exponents and ardent defenders of Canadian multiculturalism, and Ratna Ghosh and Carl James who are both leading figures in...