Ideologies and Policies of Social Incorporation

The question of how to approach the social incorporation of ethnic minorities into the larger society has been articulated in several ideologies and worked into social policies directed at different groups. Ideologies spell out what are held to be the desirable goals to follow with regard to important social issues – in this case, the presence of diverse ethnic groups in a larger society. They also represent the principles underlying programs of action, and hence they can provide the basis for the formulation of social policies. Four distinct ideologies of social incorporation of ethnic minorities in North America have been identified by social scientists: Anglo-assimilationism, melting pot, pluralism, and multiculturalism.

The ideology of Anglo-assimilationism has held that the culture of Canada, other than Quebec, and of the United States is of an essentially Anglo-Celtic character, and ethnic minorities, particularly immigrant ones, should divest themselves of their various cultures and assimilate into the British-based culture as soon as possible. The melting-pot ideology contends that North America is a continent of immigration and that various ethnic groups should freely intermingle; as a consequence, a new culture, or “amalgam,” will develop that is derived from a combination of all these cultures and peoples. The concept of pluralism maintains that ethnic minorities should be allowed to retain their identity as long as they wish or as long as it gives them something of value. Multiculturalism also holds that ethnic minorities should be allowed to maintain their identity as long as they desire, but in addition, it argues for according these diverse identities some kind of public recognition, including support for activities related to their maintenance. Public recognition can then provide the sociopsychological basis for the groups’ incorporation into the broader society.

Each of these ideologies can be said to have right and left, or conservative and liberal, interpretations. The conservative expression of Anglo-assimilationism has been a nativistic doctrine based on the following principles: that Anglo-Celtic culture and institutions are superior, that cultural diversity is divisive, and that total assimilation of ethnic minorities is necessary for the integrity of the country. In the nativist view, loyalty and cultural and linguistic uniformity tend to be synonymous. The liberal wing of the Anglo-assimilationist ideology also places a strong emphasis on assimilation, but it is seen as leading not so much to the country’s integrity as to individual social mobility and achievement. Assimilation is perceived as opening the way to economic opportunities, whereas the retention of ethnicity is thought to endanger those opportunities.

The ideology of the melting pot in its conservative aspect is more than simply an unintegrated mixture of various cultures. Rather, it envisions a superior culture emerging from the combination of all the best elements from various ethnic cultures. All the negative and undesirable ways brought to North America by any ethnic group are to be melted away in the process, and only the more positive, adaptive patterns of behaviour will become part of the new culture and society. The left wing of the melting-pot ideology maintains that the mixture of various cultures may be haphazard, even a hodgepodge, but it will still produce an amalgam that reflects a common pursuit of freedom by diverse peoples. The characteristic feature of the melting-pot ideology is that, unlike the other types, it envisions the emergence of a new culture. This trait is true of both its right and left dimensions.

The conservative side of the pluralist ideology accepts tolerance of cultural difference as its basic principle and allows for cultural retention and maintenance. But it emphasizes assimilation into some central Anglo-Celtic institutions, notably the political and the economic. These are seen as the “cement” that binds the mosaic together. At its liberal end, the ideology stresses diversity without emphasizing the common institutions; indeed, the question of common institutions may not be raised at all. Retention of ethnic differences is seen as a way to maximize social freedom. In its radical dimension, the pluralist concept may stress various forms of autonomous regionalism or separatism.

The ideology of multiculturalism may appear to be a form of pluralism, but it takes that concept beyond the principle of mere tolerance. It perceives various aspects of the ethnic-minority heritage as positive contributions to the broader society. In its conservative dimension, it sees no need for immigrants to give up their heritage. Doing so without cause, especially in a society in which impersonality is the rule and in which prejudices abound and ethnic discrimination is common, may in fact have bad social and psychological consequences. It may create anomic personalities: people who feel that they do not belong anywhere, who have little self-confidence and are driven to the deviant side of mainstream society. The ideology’s liberal wing claims that, while it may not be useful to maintain all aspects of ethnic-minority cultures, it is worthwhile to keep or develop selected aspects of various cultures since they have a value in their own right and can enrich the culture of mainstream society. That society should therefore not only accord recognition to the ethnic minorities, but accept and recognize some of their cultural institutions as part of the general culture.

The most influential ideologies in Canada have been Anglo-assimilationism, pluralism, and, more recently, multiculturalism. The melting pot has been an American concept, although some elements of it are expressed in the works of a few Canadian writers. The assimilationist ideology emerged strongly in the first thirty years of the twentieth century, the period of large-scale immigration of diverse ethnic groups to Canada. It reflected a fear of the newcomers entering the country in vast numbers and bringing with them “lower standards.” The prevalent ideology of the time did not imply a free acceptance of immigrants into the majority group even after assimilation. Rather, the emphasis was on “civilizing” them. Robert England’s The Central European Immigrant in Canada (1929) is a strong statement of this “civilizing” concept. Two decades earlier, the popular writer Charles William Gordon (“Ralph Connor”) had expressed a similar assimilationist attitude in his novel The Foreigner (1909), as did J.T.M. Anderson’s manual for teachers, The Education of the New Canadian (1918).

The motivation behind such views was partly humanitarian, yet often also ethnocentric or nativistic. An interesting combination of the two attitudes is seen in the writings of J.S. Woodsworth in the first decade of the twentieth century. Permeating his work, particularly The Strangers within Our Gates (1909), is a distinction between higher and lower cultural qualities and a desire to help immigrants by teaching them the “higher” qualities of the Canadian culture and at the same time helping them to rid themselves of the “lower” ones in their own background. Woodsworth’s writings, however, contain elements of the melting-pot ideology. He talks about many ethnic customs that, “under proper safeguards,” may be valuable additions to Canadian social life, and he envisions Canadian society as a crucible whose future product can only be guessed.

The pluralist ideology had its beginnings in colonial times in Canada, particularly as a concept and policy for integrating the French into the British-dominated society after the conquest of New France. It was reflected in the attitudes of Governors James Murray and Guy Carleton, who refused to yield to pressure from anglophone merchants to impose British institutions on the francophone population of Quebec. They saw pluralism as a better way to maintain power over colonized peoples. As one historian has put it, Canada was kept British by being allowed to remain French. The pluralist ideology was imbedded in the Quebec Act of 1774, which guaranteed cultural, religious, and linguistic rights to the French. Even though assimilation was the ultimate goal to which this policy was directed, the act was a precedent for Canadian pluralism.

The policies for settlement of the prairies by different ethnic immigrant groups in the second half of the nineteenth century and school legislation in the west between 1870 and 1890 also fostered the ideology of pluralism. In the post-Depression era of the 1930s, the writings of John Murray Gibbon and Watson Kirkconnell contain expressions of the pluralist ideology. Gibbon’s book Canadian Mosaic: The Making of a Northern Nation (1938) can be considered the first full-blown statement of the concept in Canada. The ideas of these men, however, appeared as a reaction against the strong Anglo-assimilationist trends that had been prevalent since the earlier period.

In the late 1980s and 1990s a new variety of conservative pluralism emerged. It originated as a reaction against the policy of multiculturalism established in Canada in 1971. A significant expression of concern over multiculturalism was contained in the report of the Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future, known as the Spicer Commission report (1991). This document asserted that a distinctive Canadian characteristic was the country’s use of two languages and that Canadians accepted and valued cultural diversity. It also supported the wish of ethnocultural groups that their backgrounds be respected, but then it went on to argue that the government had no business entrenching or funding the “remembrance of ethnocultural origins”; rather, it ought to direct its efforts to strengthening the traditional national institutions, such as Via Rail, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police – that is, the institutions and symbols of the British-Canadian heritage – since at the national level, institutions and symbols that derived from other ethnicities threatened to destabilize society.

Unlike the other ideologies, that of multiculturalism has been proposed and propagated by members of the ethnic minorities themselves. The concept and support for it emerged in the 1960s in the context of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. The original concern of the commission had focused on the two “founding” groups in Canada, the English and the French. But volume 4 of its report, entitled The Cultural Contribution of the Other Ethnic Groups (1969), raised the issue of recognition in some form for the culture and languages of those groups. It argued that, although Canada contained two main languages and cultures, its multicultural diversity could not be overlooked in any consideration of the country’s culture.

The volume can be said to represent the first systematic, practically oriented treatment of the basic issues of multiculturalism. It reflects the active participation in the work of the commission of persons representing ethnic minorities, among them Ukrainians and Poles (Jaroslav B. Rudnytsky and Paul Wyczynski). The movement for multiculturalism that emerged at the same time and continued into the 1970s had as its spokespeople such individuals as Senator Paul Yuzyk, author of For a Better Canada (1973), Walter Tarnopolsky, who wrote The Canadian Bill of Rights (1966, 1975); Manoly R. Lupul, author of Ukrainian Canadians, Multiculturalism, and Separatism: An Assessment (1978); Stanley Haidasz, Senator P. Bosa; and others. It successfully lobbied for the legislation that in 1971 introduced multiculturalism as official policy in Canada and for the inclusion of a reference to the multicultural character of the country in the patriated Canadian constitution of 1982.

Canadian policies of social incorporation have differed with regard to three constituencies – the native peoples, francophones, and other non-British ethnic groups. As noted above, since 1985 the old policy of trying to incorporate the aboriginal peoples individually by means of the patriarchal clause of the Indian Act and through the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, which had supervised every aspect of their lives and discouraged the maintenance of their culture and languages, has been more or less abandoned. The department continues to administer various welfare benefits to the native peoples, but in many cases the policy now includes a process of negotiation and participation by the community in the design and delivery of local services.

By the 1990s the focus for the incorporation of the aboriginal peoples has shifted to the collective level. There are at least two main directions that policies have taken. One is the recognition of aboriginal rights regarding land, the operation of native affairs, and the utilization of resources, such as fishing. In 1973 the Supreme Court of Canada recognized that the aboriginal peoples possessed rights to the land that were legally binding, and nine years later the court acknowledged that aboriginal land titles still existed, that bands owned their reserve land, that verbal promises by federal officials were legally binding, and that the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development must transact business only with the permission of band councils. The Constitution Act of 1982 explicitly affirmed the “existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada,” and in a decision brought down eight years later the Supreme Court ruled that federal regulations regarding fishing did not apply to the native peoples because their right to fish was an existing aboriginal one.

The second direction that incorporation policies have taken is towards granting the native peoples self-government within the Canadian constitutional structure. For example, the Inuit of the eastern Northwest Territories are to become self-governing in 1999, and many other groups have lobbied for this right. The federal government has committed itself to a policy of self-government for the native peoples, but it has proceeded on the basis of negotiation with each band separately. Among the problems encountered in this process have been the conditions for negotiation, such as demands by the government that all other aboriginal rights be extinguished, and its resistance to the idea that self-government is an inherent right. Paradoxically, the shift in focus of policies towards the aboriginal peoples from the individual to the collective level has occurred as significant numbers of natives have moved from the reserves to urban areas. These individuals have become inculturated in the Canadian mainstream, including its political culture, while at the same time retaining or “rediscovering” and reconstructing aspects of their native traditions.

The policies of social incorporation with regard to the francophone population are closely tied to efforts to keep Quebec within Canada. These policies have gone through a number of stages. In the late 1960s, after Pierre Trudeau became prime minister and following the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, a policy of bilingualism was established that recognized English and French as the two official languages of Canada. All federal government business had to be transacted in either of the languages on demand, and all official documents, public inscriptions, and labels on products sold in Canada were to be in both English and French. The aim of the policy was twofold. Symbolically, it attempted to send the message that francophones were equal to anglophones in Canada, thus raising their prestige in Canadian society. In practical terms, for many francophones the policy opened up opportunities for social mobility in the broader society. As a result of its introduction, many jobs became available in the federal bureaucracy that required a knowledge of the French language and were filled by francophones both in and outside Quebec. It also worked to lessen the impact of the separatist movement in the province.

From the 1980s on, a new approach to the incorporation of Quebec in Canada was developed. It has aimed at keeping the province in Confederation by means of constitutional accommodation. After a referendum in Quebec in 1980 that was lost by those supporting separation, the province refused to sign the patriated Canadian constitution because it failed to meet all of its demands for special rights. These included the right of Quebec to opt out of the federal program of transfer payments to the provinces, the right to have its own “notwithstanding” clause in the constitution, which would have allowed Quebec not to be bound by all decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada, an acceptable formula for amending the constitution, the right to nominate judges to the Supreme Court, and the right of veto.

Since then, the federal government has attempted to come up with a constitutional formula that would be acceptable to both Quebec and the other provinces of Canada. To this end, the Meech Lake accord was struck in 1987, but it was not approved by all the provinces. Five years later a national referendum was held on a new agreement, the Charlottetown accord, that offered Quebec special powers, but this attempt too was defeated. The policy of bilingualism continues to be maintained, but recent efforts have been directed to finding a way in which Quebec can be recognized as a “distinct society,” yet be incorporated into the constitutional and institutional structure of Canada.

As noted earlier, since 1971 Canada has supported the concept of multiculturalism with regard to the incorporation of the “other” ethnic groups. The policy has given a degree of public recognition to various groups in society with the goal of bringing about a deeper national unity. This idea of incorporation was expressed in the document by which the policy was established. It states, “A policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework commends itself to the government as the most suitable means of assuring the cultural freedom of Canadians. Such a policy should help to break down discriminatory attitudes and cultural jealousies. National unity if it is to mean anything in the deeply personal sense must be founded on confidence in one’s own individual identity; out of this can grow respect for that of others and a willingness to share ideas, attitudes, and assumptions. A vigorous policy of multiculturalism will help to create this initial confidence. It can form the base of a society which is based on fair play for all.”

The policy has four objectives: assistance to cultural groups to support and promote cultural retention, the overcoming of barriers to full participation in Canadian society for members of all cultural groups, enhancement of national unity through the promotion of cultural exchange and interaction between groups, and assistance to members of cultural groups in official-language training. Since it was introduced in 1971, the government has developed a range of programs aimed at fulfilling these objectives. They can be classified under four headings: programs intended to assist various ethnic groups with their cultural preservation and education, including languages; programs directed at exhibiting cultural differences to the general public in order to develop a greater tolerance and acceptance of diverse ethnic groups; programs aimed at the mainstream community with the purpose of reducing prejudice and ethnic and racial discrimination; and programs intended to involve ethnic groups and selected minority ethnic institutions in the mainstream institutions of society.

The original priorities of the policy were established in response to political pressures from the ethnic groups that were instrumental in bringing it into existence. These were mainly white groups with at least three generations in Canada. The original priorities thus focused on the first two types of programs described above. Towards the end of the 1970s a new sector of society began to make demands on the multicultural policy. These were immigrants to Canada from mainly Asian and Caribbean countries who had come to be known as “visible minorities.” In response to their demands, combined with the increased concern of sectors of the mainstream society as to how quickly these new groups could be integrated, the priorities of the multicultural policy began to shift. It now focused on the integration of new immigrants.

In 1988 the Multiculturalism Act mandated all federal government agencies to ensure equal opportunities in the employment of all ethnic and racial groups. The multicultural policy was now directed to the third type of program mentioned above. Two years later Parliament passed the Canadian Race Relations Foundation Act, aimed at facilitating efforts to eliminate racial discrimination in Canada. Criticism of the emphasis of the old policy of multiculturalism came mainly from two sectors: from mainstream society, particularly the conservative political parties – the newly created Reform Party and the Progressive Conservative Party – and from circles in the South Asian immigrant community. In 1995, in response to these pressures, the government again restructured the priorities of the multicultural policy, placing the elimination of racism at its centre. Yet the older programs were not abandoned. In a somewhat modified form and giving special attention to the “visible minorities,” the directorate responsible for multiculturalism has continued to maintain the other types of programs, but severe budget cutbacks in the mid-1990s have substantially reduced their scope.

The last type of public instrument used in the social incorporation of ethnic minorities is human-rights legislation. In general terms, its purpose is twofold: to allow freedom of expression, including its linguistic, cultural, social, economic, and religious aspects, and to eliminate or prevent discrimination in all areas of life, particularly in employment and housing, on the basis of ethnicity, race, religion, gender, age, or other personal characteristics. National human-rights legislation in Canada began with the passage of the Canadian Bill of Rights in 1960, though several provinces had earlier enacted legislation regarding fair-employment practices and other areas of human rights, and the province of Saskatchewan had had its own Bill of Rights since 1947. Other provinces passed similar legislation in the 1960s, and by 1975 they all had some form of human-rights code. Many of them also established commissions to administer these codes. The Canadian Human Rights Act was passed and the Canadian Human Rights Commission set up in 1977. Special bodies, such as human-rights commissions, have been shown to be more effective in promoting human rights than the courts. A number of provinces have also created an office of ombudsman, to whom people can bring complaints concerning the violation of their rights.

The Canadian Bill of Rights was not, however, entrenched in the constitution. In 1982 it was superseded by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which was built into the new Canadian constitution. Among many rights that the charter guarantees, such as fundamental freedoms, democratic rights, mobility rights, and legal rights, are those giving individuals protection against “discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.” But it goes further by stating that this protection “does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those who are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.” The charter also reinforces official bilingualism in Canada by affirming the equality of the English and French languages and the right of children to be educated in either language, and it recognizes the multicultural character of the country and the rights of the aboriginal peoples.

Canada, in its relations with minority groups, is also bound by the international covenants on human rights to which it is a signatory. These include the United Nations Charter of 1945, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, the International Covenants on Human Rights, beginning in 1966, and various other resolutions of United Nations assemblies and international conferences. All these instruments of intergroup relations emphasize the importance of both eliminating obstacles to the equal participation in society by minority groups and insuring that no country will undertake their social incorporation through force by, for example, denying them the basic rights to maintain their identity.

Of particular note are the resolutions of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, to which Canada is a signatory. The resolutions of the conference’s 1990 meetings in Copenhagen include the following statements: “The participating states will adopt, where necessary, special measures for the purpose of ensuring to persons belonging to national minorities full equality with other citizens in the exercise and enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms” (resolution 31); “the participating states will respect the right of persons belonging to national minorities to effective participation in public affairs, including participation in the affairs relating to the protection and promotion of the identity of such minorities” (resolution 35); “persons belonging to national minorities have the right freely to express, preserve and develop their ethnic, cultural, linguistic or religious identity ... free of any attempts at assimilation against their will” (resolution 32); and to achieve this purpose they have the right “to seek voluntary financial and other contributions as well as public assistance, in conformity with national legislation” (resolution 32.2).

Similar conclusions are expressed in the Helsinki Summit Declaration of 1992. It, however, makes reference to the social instability that has developed in the world, particularly economic decline, social tensions, aggressive nationalism, intolerance, xenophobia, and ethnic conflicts, and it reaffirms the intention of the participating states to abide by its resolutions.