Multiculturalism

I've been away for the past three weeks, so here's a very long post to make up!



Canada has been officially multicultural since 1971 and this policy has been subject to controversy since inception. Canadian multiculturalism, as it is usually described, is a vision of our society as a mosaic of ethnic groups, each of which have their own culture and traditions. This contrasts with the model found in most European countries of a single, historically-rooted national society and the American model of an ever evolving melting pot. In accordance with our policy of official multiculturalism, immigrants who settle in Canada are encouraged to preserve their culture and traditions, notably by forming cultural organisations with fellow immigrants of the same ethnic origin. Federal and provincial governments award millions of dollars in grants every year to such organisations, and also support festivals and public events that celebrate the cultural heritage of New Canadians.

Multiculturalism has always been criticized on multiple fronts. Many people purport that a policy which encourages immigrants to preserve the traditions of their motherland and to seek out fellow immigrants of the same descent inevitably encourages ghettoisation and discourages integration into mainstream society. Others, most notably in Quebec, would prefer a more traditional vision of Canadian society that recognizes the cultural primacy of the three founding peoples. They believe that immigrants should be encouraged to assimilate into the established cultures – principally Quebecois and English Canadian- and to let go of their former traditions. Many Quebecois are also hostile towards multiculturalism because they believe it reduces their own cultural nation to an ethnic group like any other. They say that, since Quebecois culture and the French language is spoken by a minority in North America and therefore under threat, the national government should not be encouraging the development of rival ethnic communities in the province.

But if we look at our country objectively, giving weight to statistics rather than anecdote, it is hard to avoid concluding that these objections are little more than scaremongering.

Canadian cities are among the most diverse in the world, providing their residents with a high general standard of living and employment. Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto, which absorb roughly 70% of the 250 000 immigrants admitted to Canada each year, have consistently maintained a median income comparable to the provincial median, moderate unemployment and a relatively low rate of crime. Of course, immigrants are not evenly distributed throughout these cities. As has traditionally been the case around the world, immigrants of same descent tend to group together and many neighbourhoods therefore have a high proportion of immigrants of same ethnic origin. But since the standard of living is generally high, it is not accurate to say that our cities are becoming ghettoised.

There are admittedly a handful of areas –the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver and the Jane and Finch corridor in Toronto being the most notable- that have a high proportion of immigrants and which are also beset by serious social problems. The situation in these neighbourhoods gets a lot of media coverage, and rightly so, but we sometimes forget how small they are. Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside has less than 20 000 residents. Jane and Finch has roughly 85 000. To put things in context, Canada has welcomed 3.5 million immigrants in the past 15 years. There are far more New Canadians living in Richmond, a municipality in metro Vancouver in which 65.1% of the population belongs to a visible minority and the average income is only slightly below the provincial average, than in the Downtown Eastside. There are far more immigrants who have settled in Markham, an affluent town of roughly 275 000 people in the GTA where most residents are foreign-born, than in the Jane and Finch corridor.

Information released by the Correctional Service of Canada indicates that visible minorities are not over-represented in Canadian prisons. In fact Asians, who make up the bulk of new immigrants, are significantly under-represented. This contrasts sharply with the situation in France, a staunch advocate of immediate assimilation, where it is estimated that between 60 and 70% of prison inmates are from immigrant families and a similar proportion are Muslim. It also contrasts with the situation in the United-States, home of the melting pot where Hispanic males are incarcerated at a per capita rate six times that of white males.

In Canada it is not the immigrant population that is over-represented in jails, but the aboriginal population. The irony is undeniable. Roughly 20% of offenders incarcerated in the Canadian penitentiary system are of Aboriginal ethnicity, despite the fact that First-Nations only represent 3.8% of the Canadian population. Native Canadians suffer from many of the problems that are associated with immigrants in Europe and Afro-Americans in the United States. The employment rate of Native Canadians is around 70% while the employment rate of non-Natives is above 80%. The Caledon Institute of Public Policy published a study showing that 58% of Aboriginals on reserve between the ages of 20 and 24 haven’t finished high school.

In contrast immigrants and, most importantly, their children, are actually among the best educated Canadians. The immigration selection process places great weight on education, so it is perhaps not particularly surprising that immigrants are, on average, better educated than Canadian born citizens. Significantly, however, a study by University of Ottawa professor Miles Corak (based on 2001 census data) showed that this advantage is replicated in the second generation. In other words, the children of immigrants (even those without a university degree) are better educated than the children of parents who were born in Canada. Second-generation immigrants are also more ambitious. A 2006 study revealed that 78% of visible minority immigrant youths hope to complete at least one university degree, while only 59% of non visible minority youths born in Canada expressed this objective. This is not the case in most other countries, where children of immigrants typically don’t do as well at school as native-born children. Canada has the distinction of being one of only three countries in the OECD where second-generation immigrants scored higher in primary school than native-born children in math and reading tests.

It’s tempting to claim that New Canadians are struggling to integrate mainstream society on the basis of a few highly publicized anecdotes and polls that claim to measure the national pride level of immigrants. The fact that second-generation immigrants are doing so well at school, coupled with the low crime rate of visible minorities and comfortable standard of living in most immigrant communities shows that, actually, Canada isn’t having serious difficulty with integration. Is this thanks to multiculturalism or despite it? Who knows and, frankly, who cares? Whatever we’re doing is working, and as common wisdom would suggest ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’.

Many people argue that Canada isn’t nearly as multicultural as it claims. And certainly the policy of multiculturalism often seems to correspond more to rhetoric than to actual practice. Sixty-nine percent of Canadian say that immigrants should “integrate and become part of the Canadian culture,” rather than “maintain their [own] identity.” Equally significantly, our governments also spend far more money and energy on the protection of Francophone and First-Nations communities than on the preservation of immigrant cultures. The province of Quebec rejects multiculturalism in favour of an approach that gives primacy to French. The federal government allows it to virtually run its immigration policy, with the result that 60% of immigrants who settle in Quebec are now francophone.

A 1994 study by University of Toronto sociologists Jeffrey Reitz and Raymond Breton found that language retention of third-generation immigrants was less than 1 per cent both in multicultural Canada and in the melting-pot United States. This is as good an indication as any that it doesn’t really matter what integration policy government chooses to follow, because this doesn’t seem to influence the 99% assimilation rate. The only thing we should acknowledge about assimilation in Canada is that it seems to run more smoothly than in most other western countries. Most European countries also have reasonably powerful far-right parties that are openly racist and committed to the expulsion of immigrants. In Canada, there is no far-right. Australia, the U.K., France, Belgium and the United States have all had serious riots in the past 20 years involving thousands of people, all caused by poor relations between the immigrant community and the rest of society. And although there was a riot in North Montreal on the night of August 10, 2008 involving a few hundred people that was viewed as a reaction to suspected racial profiling by the Montreal police force, this is small potatoes in comparison to the civil unrest that has been experienced in most other western countries.

So maybe multiculturalism is a good thing after all. Or maybe welcoming immigrants successfully is simply part of who we are.