With Good Reason

Is Canada doing too much to accommodate visible minorities? According to a poll commissioned by the Globe and Mail and CTV News, 61% of Canadians as a whole, and 72% of Quebeckers, answer in the affirmative. This figure is higher among rural as opposed to urban dwellers, people over fifty, and those who earn less than $50,000 a year. Yet 88% of respondents believe their community is welcoming of visible minorities. Moreover, only 9% claim to be bothered by the fact that non-Whites now make up a sixth of the country’s population, while 48% see this situation as positive and the remaining 42% are unsure.

The findings seem contradictory at first glance. It appears the majority of Canadians are not disturbed by non-European immigrants per se but feel the government is bending over too far backwards to please them. Furthermore, 45% of those who took part in the survey say newcomers are holding onto traditions from their homelands for too long; most of the rest think immigrants are integrating at an acceptable pace.

Peter Donolo of the Strategic Council, the polling firm that actually carried out the survey, says recent controversies like the establishment of Islamic sharia law and funding of faith-based schools have contributed to Canadians’ ambivalence about immigration. The Globe and Mail provided a forum along with the article for readers to discuss the poll’s results. As often happens, the forum turned into a White versus non-White altercation, with some participants on one hand loudly decrying immigrants’ attempt to impose their customs on mainstream Canadian society and others condemning Canada’s hostility towards visible minorities. One reader in the former camp cites the acceptance of the Sikh turban in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the creation of Black-focused schools and the attempt to bring sharia law to Ontario as examples of non-White immigrants’ incessant demands. He attributes this situation to the failure of Canada ’s multicultural policy.

Nonetheless, the framing of the issues mentioned by this reader, and by Donolo, as a White vs. minority debate is somewhat simplistic. Take the subject of Black-focused schools. By no means did all Blacks support these schools; in fact, many people who adamantly opposed their establishment or expressed scepticism towards them (like our editor Cynapse) were African-Canadian themselves. The same thing occurred with the controversy over sharia, in which Muslim Canadian Congress founder Tarek Fatah was among those who spoke most vociferously against its introduction to Ontario . In addition, it is doubtful whether non-Whites played much role at all in some of the other examples of minorities supposedly foisting themselves upon Canadian society. Multiculturalism, for instance, was established by the late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1971, when non-Whites constituted a miniscule portion of the country’s population. It is likely Trudeau was trying to appease not the few visible minorities in Canada at the time but the so-called “White ethnics” such as Italians and Greeks. Similarly the faith-based schools debate in Ontario in the fall of 2007 was hardly a case of people of colour demanding special privileges for themselves at the expense of White Canadians. Yes, some advocates of these schools belonged to racial minorities, but the majority, like most proponents of Jewish and evangelical Christian institutions, were of European descent.

Now for the hard question: do I myself feel Canada is going too far in accommodating visible minorities? In general I would say no. I also believe some of the issues surrounding the accommodation of minorities are more complicated than extremists on both sides make them out to be. One such issue is the debate over whether to allow Sikhs to wear turbans in the RCMP. I lack strong views on the subject either way. I suppose at the end of the day if a Mountie is doing his job of protecting the public what he wears on his head does not really matter to me. However, I understand that many people feel passionately about maintaining the traditional Stetson cap, and these concerns should not be automatically dismissed as racist. Ultimately this is a question the RCMP must resolve on its own.

Other times I think the government has indeed overreached itself in its effort to equal the playing field for non-Whites. This occurred in the 1990s under the Bob Rae administration in Ontario with the employment equity legislation, which would have required companies to hire a certain percentage of visible minorities. Now I am not completely opposed to employment equity or affirmative action in all instances. While I tend to lean towards meritocracy in hiring, I believe the idea of providing some sort of compensation to American Blacks, whose ancestors were brought forcibly from Africa to endure slavery and discrimination like the Jim Crow laws, or to Native Canadians, who suffered through residential schools and deprivation of their land, is at least worth discussing. On the other hand, is somebody whose family immigrated to Canada in the last three decades and who just happens to be non-White entitled to the handout that employment equity would give him or her? Again, I would say “no.” So, according to many political analysts, did the voters of Ontario , and Bob Rae lost the 1995 elections.

Immigration has always been a controversial issue. Canada in particular seems to be attempting to strike a balance between welcoming newcomers of all backgrounds on one hand and ensuring they integrate peacefully into mainstream society on the other. In the end time will tell which approach works best in achieving these goals.