The myth of the Canadian Mosiac

Canada stirs the melting pot (if space only!!)

SVEN HEYDE MARS’ HILL (TRINITY WESTERN UNIVERSITY)

LANGLEY, B.C. (CUP) — Ever since John Murray Gibbon published his 1938 book Canadian Mosaic, Canadians have been increasingly obsessed with the notion of Canada as a country where new immigrants are encouraged to retain their traditions, where we respect the uniqueness of minority groups, and where pluralism and diversity are honoured.

Canada is contra the U.S., where immigrants are assimilated, forced to pledge allegiance to the American flag, and where their traditions must be secondary to the American way.

This myth, of the mosaic and the melting pot, is one that for a variety of reasons will not die.

The unofficial, and, at various times, official policy of the Canadian government, even prior to 1867, has been to assimilate French-Canadians into the rest of Canada: they were to give up their language, religion, and customs. The institution of elected representation in Canada was initially delayed for several years while the British government waited for anglophones to outnumber francophones. Today, far more francophones than anglophones are required to be bilingual for their work.

The treatment of aboriginal people in this country is much worse. Residential schools are older than Canada, and have an ugly history. In 1969, the federal government took control of residential schools from the churches. By the mid-’70s many residential schools had shut down, but the last one remained open until 1996.

Children at these schools were sometimes beaten, sexually molested, not allowed to speak their own language, told that their culture was evil and not worth preserving, and forced to try to be like their oppressors.

It is worth noting that the forced removal of children from their parents and their culture, one of the hallmarks of residential schools, is one of only five acts explicitly regarded as genocide by the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, signed by Canada, among others.

In the 1880s, 15,000 Chinese immigrated to Canada, of which 6,500 worked on the railroad. The familiar adage, “one dead Chinaman for every mile of railroad,” stands as a reminder of the conditions they worked under.

As soon as the railroad was finished, however, the Canadian government implemented a head tax to dissuade further Chinese immigration. By 1903 this head tax was $500, the equivalent of two years’ wages.

Those Chinese people who could afford to come here were then denied citizenship. When the head tax did not deter enough Chinese from coming to Canada, the Exclusion Act was instituted in 1923. Until its repeal in 1947, Chinese immigration to Canada was limited to only a few annually.

Government policy is one thing, but the question remains, how do people actually live in Canada? In Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, there is a very different perception of diversity than in the rest of the country, and for those living in one of those cities Canada probably seems pretty diverse.

But even in Vancouver, this may not be as true as we think. Our ideal of different people living together, each enriched by each other’s cultures, has typically manifested itself as a series of minority ghettos.

The myth of the mosaic betrays the Janus face of Canadian diversity: we live in a country where women couldn’t vote until 1918, where Japanese-Canadians were forcibly moved into camps during the Second World War, where aboriginals on reserves were denied patronage until 1960, where homosexuality was outlawed until 1969, and where we’ve been bragging about our multicultural, tolerant mosaic since the late 1930s.