The Role Of Multiculturalism In Canada

In Canada, multiculturalism describes the various different religious traditions and cultural influences that in unity and coexistence make up a distinct Canadian identity. This term first became popular in Canada in the 1960’s to replace ‘cultural pluralism.’ The concept of multiculturalism is used in three senses: to refer to a society that is characterized by ethnic or cultural heterogeneity, to refer to an ideal of equality and mutual respect among a population’s ethnic or cultural groups, and to refer to policies implemented by the federal government in 1971 and subsequently by a number of provinces. In 1971, Canada was the first country in the world to adopt multiculturalism as an official policy. Doing so, Canada affirmed the value and
dignity of all Canadian citizens regardless of their racial or ethnic origins, their language, or their religious affiliation.
The 1971 Multiculturalism Policy of Canada also confirmed the rights of Aboriginal peoples and the status of Canada’s two official languages, English and French. All Canadians are guaranteed equality before the law and of opportunities regardless of their origins. Canada’s laws and policies recognize Canada’s diversity by race, cultural heritage, ethnicity, religion, ancestry and place of origin. All men and women are also guaranteed complete freedom of conscience, of thought, belief, opinion, expression, association and peaceful assembly (Canadian Multiculturalism).
The political structures of Canada, such as the Canadian Constitution, laws and some daily practices, are governed in a way that public spaces, institutions, and institutional structures of Canada are grounded in formally secularism and pluralism. Unlike the United Kingdom, there is no state religion in Canada. Although there was no official religion in Canada, realistically, there were two quasi-official religions. The Catholic Church was
partially hegemonic and extremely powerful until the 1960s, and the British connection gave power to the Anglican Church. Until well into the 20th century, religious affiliation was the strongest single indicator of party allegiance and voter behaviour. In the past few decades, we have seen a rise in non-religion and anti-religion immigrants. Canada has seen an increasing wave of non-Christian immigrants who have rendered the question of Catholic v. Protestants irrelevant. After the Conquest, the British did not authorize priests from the Jesuit order and the Récollets, leaving the Sulpiciens as the only major group of priests. There were also seven communities of sisters. By the end of the 19th century, however, there were more than 100 communities of priests and 200 communities of sisters (Couture). Due to various factors, there have been changes in political participation. For example, Liberal dominance in 2000 was hinged on the support of two key groups: the visible minorities and Catholics. However, in 2004, neither group was the bedrock of Liberal support that they had been in the previous election. This comes to show that immigration and the entry of new religions has seen the collapse of the historical connections that had existed between religion and politics. Canadian political participation is said to be one of the lowest in the developed world. In addition, in 2008, only 6.8% of the MPs in Canada were visible minorities.
However, as welcoming as Canada is as a nation, certain minority groups in Canada are often discriminated against on a political level, while others favoured. Quebec, in the Canadian Parliament, is considered a nation under a united Canada. In hope that they will coexist and cooperate with the Canadian Parliament, the Quebecois have received some substantial favoritism in terms of policies and laws they pass within their province. On the other hand, new immigrants and the Aboriginals have a harder time assimilating into Canada’s political sphere. Since Confederation in 1867, the Founding Fathers noticed the geographic, cultural, political and demographic diversity of the new provinces, as well as population size and rural and urban characteristics. As a result, they decided to implement the basic principle of representation by population in Canada. They created a formula for distributing the number of seats in the House of Commons among the provinces based on each province’s proportion of the population; although this formula has been revised numerous times since then. This essay addresses some key aspects in which the government has influenced, or has been affected by the various religions and cultures through the minority groups in Canada.
The Quebecois separatists have been fighting for decades to separate from Canada and become a sovereign country.
They are unilingual French, unlike the rest of the English-speaking provinces that have had bilingualism forced upon themselves. They have their own Quebec Provincial Police, their own tax system, and a separate Quebec Pension Plan. They have separatist representatives in the Canadian government called the Bloc Québécois. In the past century, a majority of the memorable prime ministers have lived in Quebec. They believe that the federal government’s treatment towards Quebec is harsher than that of other provinces. Their separatist issues have caused them to receive abject favoritism from the federal government, bringing on strong separatist feelings in the western provinces such as Alberta and British Columbia. If these feelings of alienation increase, these provinces, which are self-supporting and considered ‘have’ provinces, that are not waiting for equalization payments from the federal government, could have their own separatist movement in the near
future.
In 1996, the population of Quebec was 86% Catholic and 6% Protestant. Since New France, the influence of the Catholic Church has been a major factor in the development of the province. Many sociologists, political scientists and historians have argued that francophone Quebec was a priest-ridden society, obsessed by the maintenance of rural values and deeply opposed to modernity and its consequences, mainly urbanization and industrialization. But while the bureaucracy was immense, there remains the question of whether it hindered the province’s development or provided a different road to modernity. The Catholic Church ran a relatively complex school system, invested in real estate and financial markets. At the same time, Catholic unions opposed trusts and big businesses (Couture). In 1960, Quebec saw a tremendous change that soon came to be known as the Quiet Revolution. In this period of modernization, the Roman Catholic Church was the most affected. Topics including values, ideas and institutions that were controlled by the Church were heavily questioned and moved into the hands of the State. Within a period of ten years, Quebec became profoundly secularized and the influence of the Church on the State is almost nonexistent.
As a “have-not” province, Quebec is entitled to equalization payments. According to the federal Department of Finance data, from 2005-2010 Quebec’s share of the equalization pie had nearly doubled to $8.6 billion, which is much larger than any other province. This is mainly due to the aggressive lobbying by the Bloc Québécois. According to many on both sides of the political spectrum, obsessing over Quebec’s existential question has come at the expense of proper transparency and accountability. “I don’t think corruption is in our genes any more than it is anywhere else on the planet, but the beginning of an explanation would be the fact that we have focused for so long on the constitutional question,” says Éric Duhaime, a former Action démocratique du Québec (ADQ) candidate who recently helped launch the right-of-centre Réseau Liberté-Québec. “We are so obsessed by the referendum debate that we forget what a good government is, regardless if that government is for or against the independence of Quebec,”(Partiquin). Waves of political corruption and fraud scandals have swept the province, especially in the past 40 years. Historian Sam Huntington, in reference to Quebec’s widespread government corruption, singled out the province as “perhaps the most corrupt area [in] Australia, Great Britain, United States and Canada,” (Partiquin). This partisanship the federal government has towards the Quebec provincial and municipal representatives, has indirectly empowered them into wielding control and allowing them to use the threat of separation as a weapon.
The Canadian federal government’s prejudice towards Quebec has given the French state the power and ability to manipulate laws and policies that sometimes clash with those within the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. An abundance of evidence from censuses, surveys, and studies points to the fact that people of colour in Quebec are disadvantaged in hiring, pay and promotions. The unemployment rate of immigrants is twice that of native-born Quebecers, and those with university degrees have an unemployment rate that is three times higher than their native-born counterparts. The author emphasizes this point by comparing racial disparities in income in Quebec today are in the same ballpark as those of the United States before the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964-65 (Taylor). In September, 2013, the Charter of Quebec values banned religious symbols for public workers. Bernard Drainville, the minister in charge of the charter stated, “If the state is neutral, those working for the state should be equally neutral in their image” (News, 2013). This policy counteracts the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms which outlines that every resident in Canada has the freedom of conscience and religion. This caused a stir across the country, with surprisingly divided views in Quebec. Although this motion did not pass, the Parti Québécois are on a mission to hold onto their French roots and protect Quebec from being embraced by multiculturalism.
In comparison to Parliament’s favouritism towards Quebec, new immigrants face difficulties in respect to entering the Canadian political sphere. Michael Adams, in his book, explains the ties and tensions between Canada’s growing population of immigrants from Africa, South America and Asia, and the country’s dominant English and French citizens. According to 75 percent of the respondents to the CBC News Survey, Canada is a “welcoming place for all ethnicities” (News, 2014). Statics Canada figures show that in 2011 there were approximately 6.8 million foreign-born residents in Canada. That represents about 20.6% of the country’s population. However, Canadians have conflicted thoughts about immigrants’ roles in society and the workforce. 30 percent of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed that “immigrants take jobs from Canadians.” A surprising 72 percent of respondents in the Atlantic Provinces and 73 percent in British Columbia said they would be comfortable being in a romantic relationship with someone of a different ethnic background, compared with 65 percent in Ontario and 63 percent in Quebec. The significantly lower percentage in Ontario is shocking considering the Greater Toronto Area, apart from Vancouver, is considered one of the most multicultural societies in the world.
Skilled immigrants in Canada struggle in the labour market, facing higher levels of unemployment and lower wages than non-immigrants. Immigrants with a university degree who belong to visible minority have median incomes 32 per cent lower than their white, native-born counterparts (Taylor). Discrimination along the lines of nationality and ethnicity affect job applications across Canada. When employers make hiring decisions about prospective applicants for a position, observable characteristics on a resume may signal unknown information. Employers make assumptions about an applicant’s language skills because of the candidate’s country of education, type of work experience, or even their name (Oreopoulos). Canadian immigration policies favour immigrants with high levels of education and work experience in high-demand industries to attract high-skilled workers to boost Canada’s economic growth. In the past few decades, over half the immigrants have entered Canada under the point system that rates applicants based on favourable aspects, such as education, age, work experience and language ability. The majority of these immigrants arrive from China, India and Pakistan. Under the point system, almost all the immigrants have at least an undergraduate degree. Nevertheless, immigrants face an unemployment rate that is almost twice as high as Canadian-born workers of the same age. Immigrants earn 48 percent lower wages than similarly-aged non-immigrants with equivalent degrees (Oreopoulos). One of the key reasons behind this struggle is because employers value Canadian education and/or work experience more than that from foreign countries. They fear the immigrant’s lack of language and communication skills. Either consciously or subconsciously, they make assumptions about an immigrant applicant’s cultural or language differences.
In Unlikely Utopia, Adams states, “Canada has the highest proportion of foreign-born legislators in the world. This is true in two ways. First, we have the world’s largest proportion of seats in … [the House of Commons] occupied by people who weren’t born here. Second, our proportion of foreign-born legislators comes the closest in the world to matching the proportion of foreign-born people in the country’s population overall … Moreover, the more than three dozen foreign-born MPs … represent every major political party in this country, from the Conservatives to the Bloc Québécois” (Adams, 69). Adams expresses the importance of new and old Canadians managing to live together without tensions we see in other parts of the world. He believes that Canada has been successful in integrating immigrants into the political process. However, looking at the bigger picture, that is not the case. Although Canada’s political parties are becoming more inclusive of racial backgrounds, there were no visible minorities in the House of Commons until the 1980s. Visible minorities continue to have a relatively limited presence in elite-level politics. While it is true that more minorities than ever before have been winning their way into Parliament, they still make up a percentage of the legislature that is much smaller than their incidence among the Canadian population. In 2008, 17.3% of Canadians were visible minorities, while they were represented by only 6.8% of Members of Parliament (MPs) in the House of Commons.
The major cities in Canada, such as Toronto, attract the most immigrants. Adams notes, “The increased concentration of particular visible minority groups in Canadian neighbourhoods is not, then, a case of the growing segregation of long-time Canadians. It’s a case of having more visible minority newcomers than ever before, and of those newcomers doing what newcomers of all races have always done: gone to the most familiar-feeling neighbourhoods in a new and unfamiliar land” (Fatah). This helps immigrants assimilate into a new environment with the help of a familiar community.
Lastly, the Canadian federal government’s impact on the Aboriginal community has been less than favourable. From military allies and fur trade partners, the Aboriginals have been used as stepping-stones towards success. Governments have isolated them on reserves and in conjunction with the major Christian denominations, attempted to assimilate them through the introduction of European agriculture, education and Christianity. Although many Aboriginal children received educations in government funded and church-run residential schools, thousands were abused, physically and sexually, and many more lost their language and culture in the schools. It was thought that Aboriginal languages and cultures must be eradicated and that they would have to be assimilated into a superior way of life (Parrott).
There is a common misconception in Canada that aboriginal people don't pay taxes, but, in fact, tax exemption applies to fewer than half of aboriginal Canadians, and even they have to have very specific work and living arrangements to benefit from it. First Nations people who are recognized as status Indians under section 6 of the Indian Act may be eligible for some tax exemptions. But this does not mean they are all living tax-free. Most exemptions on income, sales and property tax apply only to status Indians living or working on reserves. In 2011, less than half of all registered status Indians, or about 314,000 people, lived on reserve, according to Statistics Canada. About 22 percent of working-age status Indians living on reserves are unemployed and have no employment income, according to 2011 figures from Statistics Canada (Sagan). Anyone that is not eligible to be or not registered as a status Indian follows the same tax rules as all other Canadian residents. In 2011, that amounted to about 55 percent of the 1.4 million Aboriginal people in Canada. Inuit and Métis people are also excluded from the Indian Register and are regular taxpayers. Section 87 of the Indian Act exempts the "personal property" of status Indians from taxation. This includes income earned on a reserve, including income from employment or investment, and property located on a reserve. Status Indians and businesses are also not exempt from paying excise taxes and duties on certain manufactured products. For example, Grand River Enterprises, a company making cigarettes on Six Nations of the Grand River land near Brantford, Ontario, pays about $160 million annually in excise duties (Sagan). These tax exemptions are meant to ensure that the Aboriginals don’t lose their lands. Also, historically, Native Indians were considered wards of the State, which means they are not considered Canadian citizens, and hence they cannot be directly taxed.
Hernando De Soto famously said, “Legal property empowers individuals in any culture,” (Flanagan). Canada's Aboriginals are potentially wealthy landlords, with land reserves totalling nearly 3 million hectares. This land base represents an economic asset that could make a major contribution to raising First Nations' standard of living. There has been an extraordinary increase in entrepreneurship on Indian reserves, including the building of industrial parks, shopping centres, residential developments, etc. But these achievements are hindered by the property rights framework. First Nations do not own their own lands. The federal Crown has legislative jurisdiction over Indian reserves and manages them for the use and benefit of their residents. In practice, this means many transactions involving reserve land have to be reviewed by the Department of Indian Affairs, adding layers of legal work and delay to an already cumbersome approval process (Flanagan). Broadly speaking, the political left in Canada believes in aboriginal self-government, while the political right emphasizes the integration of native peoples into the mainstream. In this case, the left and right can come together and allow First Nations to be able to get underlying title to their land, which is an important aspect of self-government; and they will also find it easier to adopt individual property rights for their landholdings, which will facilitate their participation in the Canadian economy.
In Canada, the Aboriginals are the only community that are forbidden from owning a house or property. The homes on these reserves are in very poor conditions and some are not considered to be in liveable conditions. From an Indians point-of-view, why would they invest and maintain a house or property that they don’t own? The reserves are essentially welfare states, and the band council controls all capital expenditure. If one house becomes inhabitable, the family will be moved to a new one. Fortunately, there are signs that the Harper government may be moving to fix Canada’s property-rights double standard. “We intend to move on our commitment to implement legislation to allow on-reserve property rights,” a government official said, “There is solid support from First Nations for this and we’ll work with them’ (Kay). However, the Indian Chiefs are lobbying against this to protect the current system that allows them to act as the property czars, and ‘trying to preserve their feudal entitlements in the face of market capitalism’ (Kay). Going "beyond the Indian Act" will not solve all problems, but restoring Aboriginal property rights will enhance economic activity on reserves, create more jobs and business opportunities for First Nations people, and improve both the quantity and quality of housing on reserves. Due to the belief that Aboriginal people are attached to their lands, they are incapable of following the economic principles that govern the rest of the country. That lie has done a great deal of damage to Native communities all across Canada for generations, and it is time that it is put to rest. All Canadians, of whatever background, should get the same property rights that the rest of the residents have enjoyed for centuries.
The United Nations special envoy on the rights of indigenous people published its findings on the conditions in Canada's aboriginal communities in 2013. James Anaya, the UN fact-finder said, “From all I have learned, I can only conclude that Canada faces a crisis when it comes to the situation of indigenous peoples of the country,” (Mas). The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women released a report earlier this month stating that Canada has violated the rights of aboriginal women by failing to thoroughly investigate why they are targeted for violence. “Aboriginal women and girls are more likely to be victims of violence than men or non-aboriginal women and they are more likely to die as a result,” the report said, “Yet, despite the seriousness of the situation, the Canadian state has not sufficiently implemented measures to ensure that cases of missing and murdered aboriginal women are effectively investigated and prosecuted” (The Canadian Press). Stephen Harper’s government views this as a crime, rather than a social problem. In Canada's official response to the committee, which the U.N. committee released, the government said it disagreed with the finding of grave violations of rights and the recommendation for an inquiry. The feud between the Canadian government and the First Nations in Canada has been a controversial topic for decades. The government refuses to acknowledge their lack of empathy and support towards the Indians, and disregards the UN’s accusations.
Canada’s diversity and multiculturalism is a national asset. The advances in technology in the past few decades have encouraged international communications. Canadians who speak many languages and understand a variety of cultures make it easier for Canada to participate in areas such as education, trade and diplomacy on a global level. The Canadian citizenship provides equal rights and responsibilities for all citizens. By taking an active role in political affairs, we affirm these rights and strengthen Canada’s democracy. Similar to universal health care and hockey, multiculturalism has become a defining factor of Canada. But this means promoting a higher level of equality on the political level. The government’s favouritism Quebec deters other provinces from uniting with the French province and has indirectly led to corruption within their government. Canada has some of the most satisfied immigrants in the world, but they are still discriminated in regards to job opportunities and income based on stereotypes placed on them. Lastly, Aboriginals are the original inhabitants of Canada, but have been victims of government abuse for centuries. High taxes and the lack of property rights are just a few factors of inequality faced by the Native Indians. On the whole, Canada’s religious and cultural diversity gives it a strong global advantage, and it is important to embrace this and encourage this diversity into Canada’s political sphere.