Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity

What was the nature of the Canadian identity in the decades leading up to World War II? This was an era of enormous economic and social change, but old themes persisted. In Quebec, still a French-speaking and passionately Roman Catholic island in a vast English-speaking and Protestant North American sea, the sense that French-Canadian peoplehood and cultural cohesion were besieged remained deeply felt. For much of French Canada, identity remained narrowly defined – distinct and tied to lineage, not to citizenship as a civil right. Immigrants were outsiders best guarded against.

In English-speaking Canada the institutions of the civic culture required little or no discussion of what constituted Canadian identity. In its public face, it proclaimed itself to be a stalwart outpost of British institutions and civility in North America. Anglo-Canadians were in North America, but were not Americans; they were British subjects resident in Canada. To the degree that a myth of national identity was officially presented, it was fixed on Canada making its own way in the world but, at the same time, remaining integrally linked to the larger destiny of the British people, in alliance with the other white dominions. By this vision, English Canada proclaimed itself to be a rock of British imperial certainty in the New World, while it drew a line separating itself culturally and emotionally from the American experiment to the south.

There was no room in the vision for any positive role for cultural pluralism in shaping Canadian identity. Until the end of World War II, the ideology underlying the integrative process for immigrants, including those in Quebec, has been described as Anglo-conformity, a process by which it was intended that immigrants and their children would assimilate to British-Canadian ways. In the Anglo-conformist scheme of things, ethnic identification was at best a transitional stage, a way station on the road from immigrant to true Canadian. Ethnicity should have no permanent role and certainly not for the children of immigrants. As far as Canada’s gatekeepers were concerned, the sooner that newcomers voluntarily cast their ethnic identity aside, the better for Canada and the better for them and their children.

But in the decades after the war, this Anglo-conformist concept would eventually give way to what is now called multiculturalism, and it was the tumultuous events of the post-war era that provided the catalyst and shifted Canada from Anglo-conformity towards a multicultural policy. The highly charged English-French debate that built slowly after the war’s end was particularly important in this regard. During these years a new pattern of political and social relationships gradually projected itself on the national canvas. The English-French debate erupted not just out of the upheaval in Quebec that came to be called the Quiet Revolution but also out of an awkward identity malaise that took hold in English Canada. As the British imperial dream in the world and Canada’s place in that vision lost all relevance in the post-war era, the myths associated with English Canada as bulwark of British values in North America first frayed and then snapped. Cut loose from its moorings in British identity, English Canada seemed adrift, and the search began for a meaningful and bonding vision made in Canada. One can find the markers of this search for identity scattered throughout the postwar decades – the formal introduction of Canadian citizenship in 1947, the Massey Commission (a federal royal commission into the state of the arts, letters, and science in Canada which gave rise to the Canada Council), the campaign to place Canadian studies in school curricula, the great flag debate. The list goes on.

But if the heightened self-awareness of Quebec and the identity struggle in English Canada dominated the debate, other factors also coloured it. Among these were changes in the Canadian economy. The country’s soldiers had left an economically stagnant Canada when they marched off to war, but they returned to a major urban industrial power. Anticipation of further economic growth and social change was almost palpable. Again, immigration was very much at the heart of this change. Several points must be noted. The surprisingly strong post-war economy resulted in shortages of labour, and to meet the demand, immigration restrictions enforced since the early 1920s were pushed aside. In short order, tens of thousands of “displaced persons” and eastern and southern European immigrants, who previously would have been regarded as undesirable, were admitted into Canada. Most eventually built new homes and put their talents and muscle to the service of the increasingly high-skilled and industrialized sectors of the Canadian economy.

Although immigration numbers would fluctuate with each twist and turn in the economy during the post-war decades, this European influx changed not only the economic face of the nation but the social and political profile of the larger civic culture as well. In part as a result of political pressure from a liberal coalition that included Canada’s newly politicized ethnic communities, the wall of legally sanctioned prejudice and ethnically or racially based discrimination began to crumble, although not as quickly or easily as many hoped. The change came slowly and only after much lobbying. But this effort was now supported by the results of new scientific research in biology and genetics and the conclusions of those in the social sciences, all of which combined to debunk the pseudo-scientific racial assumptions that had helped to shape Canadian immigration legislation in an earlier era.

Nor were immigrant and ethnic lobbies alone in decrying racial and ethnic prejudice in Canada. The larger public proved increasingly receptive to an anti-discrimination message. In the aftermath of the Holocaust and in the shadow of a black civil-rights movement in the United States, Canadians attacked obvious manifestations of racism in their own society. Certainly, ethnic communities found both the political climate and the judicial systems more amenable to the elimination of noxious and racially motivated social practices than had been the case earlier. In 1947 Saskatchewan’s social democratic government became the first to enact a bill of rights. The legislation went beyond guaranteeing freedom of expression, association, and religion. It declared discrimination on the basis of race, colour, creed, or ethnic or national origins illegal. The following year Canada signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which acted as yet another incentive to further human-rights legislation in Canada. Before long, other provinces joined Saskatchewan in enacting legislation that barred ethnic, racial, or religious discrimination, and in 1960 the Canadian Bill of Rights, in the end more symbolic than legally effective, was passed by Parliament.

Perhaps nowhere was this new spirit more telling than in the area of immigration law. Over a period of almost twenty years beginning in 1948, regulations that had discriminated against or precluded the immigration of would-be settlers because of race, religion, or national origin were gradually loosened. In 1967 the last racially discriminatory barriers to immigration were finally expunged. What followed was dramatic: arrivals shifted away from persons of European origin towards those from previously non-traditional areas, particularly Asia and the Caribbean. Before 1967, the black and Asian communities in Canada were small. Today, as immigrants from the developing world and other non-ethno-European sources continue to outnumber ethno-Europeans, visible minorities have quickly become an important part of the national fabric.

Furthermore, while the racial composition of the regular immigration stream was changing, Canada was also responding to the tragic plight of refugees, those adjudged to have a well-founded fear of persecution in their homelands. As a result of resettlement programs beginning in 1956, this country became home to many thousands of refugees – Hungarians, Czechs and Slovaks, Tibetans, Ugandan Asians, Chileans, other Latin Americans, and those from the Horn of Africa and South and Southeast Asia. Admittedly, the decision to allow refugees into Canada was sometimes more than a humanitarian gesture. In some cases authorities were careful to skim the cream of the refugee crop, and thus they succeeded in doing well while doing good. But the entry of so many young, educated, energetic, and, as time passed, more and more non-white newcomers made it all the more obvious that the issues of racial, and not just cultural, pluralism would soon need to be addressed.