Genuine Multiculturalism: The Tragedy and Comedy of Diversity

513 Pages·2014·5.162 MB·English

by  Cecil Foster

genuine multiculturalism
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Genuine Multiculturalism
The Tragedy and Comedy of Diversity
cecil foster
McGill-Queen’s University Press
Montreal & Kingston London Ithaca
• •
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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2014
ISBN 978-0-7735-4255-6 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-7735-4256-3 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-7735-8943-8 (ePDF)
ISBN 978-0-7735-8944-5 (ePUB)
Legal deposit first quarter 2014
Bibliothèque nationale du Québec
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free
(100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian
Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to
Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada
Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the
financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book
Fund for our publishing activities.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Foster, Cecil, 1954–, author
Genuine multiculturalism: the tragedy and comedy of diversity / Cecil
Foster.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-7735-4255-6 (bound). – ISBN 978-0-7735-4256-3 (pbk.). –
ISBN 978-0-7735-8943-8 (ePdf). – ISBN 978-0-7735-8944-5 (ePUB)
1. Multiculturalism – Canada.  I. Title.
fc105.m8f68 2013 305.800971 c2013-906752-3
c2013-906753-1
This book was typeset by Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.
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Contents
Preface ix
Introduction: The Tragedy of Living, the Comedy of Trying 3
part one natural differences and social equality
1 Genuine Multiculturalism 49
2 Dramatis personae 64
part two practices against social diversity
3 A Hegelian – Christian Model 97
4 Multiculturalism in the Americas 133
5 Canada’s Second Covenant: The Charter of Rights 170
6 When Tragedy Becomes Comedy 192
7 The Legacy of the US Civil War 217
8 Canada: Forging a Single Consciousness 237
9 Citizenship with Difference: The CBC and I 258
10 Crisis 2001: Not Enough People! 277
11 Massey and Culture: From Bi to Multi 299
part three accepting diversity, promoting
social equality
12 Tyranny v. Freedom: Strauss v. Kojève 329
13 Rawls and Trudeau’s Just Society 357
14 Rethinking the CBC and Me: From Tragedy to Comedy 373
15 Tragedy: The Comedic Folk Saviour 398
Notes 435
Index 479
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Preface
approach of the study
I set up this study as a search for social justice in Western societies now
grappling with diversity in multiple forms. The task is how to produce
initially a mechanical sense of sameness in the face of countless differ-
ences in the ways citizens of the modern state are naturally human and
social beings. At the end of the process should be a transformation that
is a reconciliation, rather than the wiping out, of these differences: of
moving from a mechanistic solidarity to a fraternity of thick relation-
ships that might even be considered as organic and as on a par with
those perceived as harmonious in any discussion about the natural folk,
their land, and their state. This is analogous to starting life as a tragedy
and moving to a comedy, where ideally everyone receives what she or he
knows that he or she deserves in life. Or at least they agree to act as if
there is justice. The primary site for this examination is Canada: the so-
called first postmodern nation-state but also the first country to declare
itself officially multicultural. The implicit meaning is that Canada wants
to emphasize the multiple differences that make up the Canadian iden-
tity and way of life. What then are this Canadian identity and way of
life? Why – they are still evolving. Canada as a final stage for the acting
out of what people agree on as socially just is still under construction,
the final act in this drama not yet complete. The alternative to this inven-
tiveness on the fly, which Canada has obviously rejected, has been to
search historically for a single conformist model that assimilates all dif-
ferences into a single identity or a peculiar set of cultural practices that
a few impose on the many. For too many people, such an existence has
been merely tragic. Historically, such a model led the search for social
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viii Preface
justice into a dead end and despair resulting from realizing that even the
way back is not an option.
With this approach I am hoping to make an important intervention in
a generations-old argument on whose voice matters in debating what
Canada is, what Canada as a whole or in parts is good for, what its
future should be, and, very important, which folks are deciding on that
future. Currently, observers often present this discussion as either a
debate on power relations between two nationalisms that have long
dominated Canada, namely the French and the English, about how any
domination should continue or ease between the two groups, or a very
separate debate on justice for the aboriginal / indigenous people of the
part of Turtle Island now called “Canada.” I am offering an intervention
for another group – those whom Canada routinely calls “immigrants,”
even when they are full citizens but who are not aboriginal, even if for
some of them there is little or no difference in the low social statuses they
share with indigenous Canadians. Yet they are citizens; unlike the First
Nations, they come from elsewhere and applied for and received sup-
posedly full membership in the existing state, which now claims them
as citizens.
Yet they retain the ascribed identity of immigrant as Canadian soci-
ologist Peter Li suggests in Destination Canada: Immigration Debates
and Issues, primarily because they are not of European ethnicities and
racialized as white, and they are not indigenous.1 This is a group fast
achieving “numbers that matter.” According to Statistics Canada in 2006,
“the proportion of Canada’s population who were born outside the
country reached its highest level in 75 years. The census enumerated
6,186,950 foreign-born in Canada in 2006. They represented virtually
one in five (19.8%) of the total population, the highest proportion since
1931.”2 This says nothing of the offspring of those whom Canada still
identifies as immigrant or as visible minorities, the term I use most in
this volume.
Continuation of current immigration patterns, along with the aging of
the Canadian-born population, suggests this group will keep increasing
its share of the citizenry. It will continue to shape Canada. Indeed, its
voting federalist in the second Quebec referendum on sovereignty in
1995 saved Confederation by the slimmest of majorities – 50.58 per cent
no to 49.42 per cent yes. Its support remains essential for any reformula-
tions that will take place in Quebec or Canada as a whole.
With this intervention, I argue that the indigenous / aboriginal peoples
and those stigmatized as new Canadians or immigrants are ultimately the
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Preface ix
groups that will drive Canada towards becoming a just society. I see this
achievement as the rationalization of a genuine multiculturalism deriving
ultimately from the demise of the dominant nationalisms of French and
English as the purported essences of an exclusively ethnoracially white
mainstream of Canadian life. Canada must transcend the state or states
that some in Quebec challenge to become its own independent state and
become more inclusive. It is the two traditional ethnic nationalisms that
have confronted each other for dominance and even exclusivity because
they see themselves as founding peoples of Canada and / or Quebec,
which in fact must die in their historic forms.3 They should transfigure
themselves into just another particular way of life in a diverse Canada (or
even multi-ethnic Quebec) for genuine multiculturalism as social justice
and civic liberalism to occur. Any alternative with exclusive ethnoracial
nationalism would not be democratic and, hence, would not be socially
just. Any retreat would be back to the beginning, to issues of natural
justice that only the indigenous peoples of the Americas could justifiably
determine. This would mean applying their rules of social justice, which
were in place before what we now call “contact” led to Europeans’ sup-
planting existing societies with their own and then trying to discover how
to make these newer systems that we now inhabit socially just.
structure of the book
I lay out my case in three parts; each discusses both the theory of the
ideals of multicultural and the living experience that is Canada: part I:
Natural Differences and Social Equality, part II: Practices against Social
Diversity, and part III: Accepting Diversity, Promoting Social Equality.
Part I consists of two chapters. Chapter 1 lays out the mythology on
which genuine multiculturalism rests, as a quest for freedom and social
justice, which we may as youngsters absorb in the form of fairy tales and
stories of good and evil and of how good eventually will triumph and
lead the way to social justice for all the people. These accounts present
ideals of who is good and who is evil and of the types of characters that
would make good citizens. We receive from them the archetypes of Bad
John, Cinderella, Prince Charming, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and
other ideal types in a society that challenges them and forces them to
struggle, so that in the end they may “live happily ever after.” Significant
to these tales is the enduring notion that the state, as a producer as well
as the collective of the people, is female and seemingly always virginal,
like Snow White, and without agency, like Sleeping Beauty.
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