By Michael Bonner, August 21, 2025
All policy first takes shape in the mind. It begins as an ideal: a perfect vision of what can or should be done. But its real expression – adoption and implementation – must always fall short of the ideal. That’s a truism, bordering on banal. Yet Canadian elites are loath to take it to heart, especially when it comes to their most cherished beliefs.
The supreme example of this is the policy of multiculturalism. Perhaps nowhere else is the gap between ideal and reality greater.
No other Canadian policy seems to have drifted further from its original intention. Nothing else seems more poorly understood, and no other policy seems quite as ill-suited to the present moment’s needs than official multiculturalism.
To understand how we reached this point, we must understand multiculturalism’s mid-20th century emergence, and its evolution thereafter.
Canadian self-image, like that of many other peoples, has always been an amalgam of tensions and contradictions. But as far as elite opinion goes, to be Canadian must somehow be unique and exceptional, and so our obvious similarities to our British and French cousins, to say nothing of the Americans, are inconveniences which our elites prefer to ignore. Anglo-Canadian nationalism once meant fighting in the Boer War and the two World Wars for the defence of the British Empire. Quebecois nationalism took shape amidst indifference to those adventures, opposition to conscription, and later the secularism of the Quiet Revolution.
And yet, the disappearance of the British Empire failed to reconcile the Two Solitudes. Our elites feared what the end of it might mean for Canada. They became obsessed with national unity and saw the symbols and culture of British Canada as an impediment. Instead, they turned to internationalism, and the second half of the 20th century became the era of the “Honest Broker,” peacekeeping, and the United Nations. Those activities were not always successful – least of all our mission to Rwanda – but they were at least a relief from the bicultural politics that seemed to embarrass and exhaust our elites.
In that context, a new ideal arose in the Canadian mind: two official languages, no official culture, as then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau said. Thus, the policy of multiculturalism was adopted in 1971, and enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 and the Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1988. It is now the barycentre around which the heavenly bodies of policy and identity seem to orbit.
And yet, Canadians struggle to agree on what multiculturalism means today. The province of Quebec has always rejected it in favour of its own cultural particularity. But many English-speaking Canadians, like academic Will Kymlicka, speak of Canadian multiculturalism in almost mystical tones, as though it were the philosopher’s stone that had transmuted Canada into a uniquely virtuous and successful country. The political slogan “diversity is our strength” seems to represent this mode of thought and reflect the English-speaking Canadian official view of the matter.
Others who follow Canadian writer Neil Bissoondath take a much dimmer view. Bissoondath’s 1994 book Selling Illusions calls Canadian multiculturalism a “cult” and an “illusion.” A fundamentally bi-cultural country was reimagined, he argues, as a largely imaginary “mosaic.” In reality, multiculturalism perpetuates the foreignness of newcomers, often against their own wishes, and prevents national cohesion. Bissoondath also denounces what he sees as a superficial interest in public festivals, food, and traditions at the expense of meaningful intercultural understanding and addressing the problems of ethnic or sectarian hatreds—something we might contemplate amidst the importation of inter-ethnic strife and the increasingly violent pro-Hamas demonstrations in Canada’s big cities and the deliberate harassment of Jews.
A third view takes shape within the thought of John Ralston Saul. His is an eccentric notion which has received withering criticism. But it nevertheless merits consideration. Saul’s book A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada contends not that multiculturalism is a sham, but that Canadians are in denial about it. For the Canadian identity owes everything, or at least everything good about it, to Canada’s First Peoples. Accordingly, multiculturalism is the way in which Canadian Aboriginals have always lived, and their conception of it, along with seemingly all their other ideas and practices, has influenced and blended with British and French cultures to produce a “Métis nation”—a term which normally describes people of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry. Canadian academic Andrew Potter, who reviewed Saul’s book, has rightly pointed out a certain incoherence and circularity to its arguments insofar as it simply affirms that whatever the author approves of must have an Aboriginal origin. But the fact remains that the Aboriginal contribution to the Canadian identity is habitually overlooked or unfairly denied.
Those three positions seem to be the most distinct in a continuum of opinions and analyses of Canadian multiculturalism. And, leaving aside extreme nativist or radically egalitarian positions, they seem most worthy of consideration by serious observers of multiculturalism. One may be forgiven, though, for wondering whether they are all talking about one and the same phenomenon.
Canadian multiculturalism emerged from the thought-world and experience of the Canadian elite in the mid-20th century. This happened in the shadow of the Second World War, amid the collapse of empires and Cold War tensions, and before a domestic backdrop of rising Quebecois nationalism, the Quiet Revolution, and Anglo-Canadian self-doubt. In that context, the meaning of multiculturalism seemed obvious.
That meaning took shape amidst the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism—the Summa Theologiae of mid-20th-century Canadian cultural anxiety. The so-called Bi and Bi Commission mentions multiculturalism (or as it says ‘multi-culturalism’) only twice. Yet this huge work – published in four ‘books’ between 1963 and 1969 – is the undoubted inspiration for Pierre Trudeau’s multicultural vision. Book IV of the Bi and Bi Commission seems to explain it:
“Acculturation is inevitable in a multi-ethnic country like Canada, and the two main societies themselves are open to its influence. The integration of immigrants into the life of the country, with the help of its institutions, is surely the road to their self-fulfilment. But in adopting fully the Canadian way of life, sharing its advantages and disadvantages, those whose origin is neither French nor British do not have to cast off or hide their own culture. It may happen that in their determination to express their desire to live fully in this mode, their culture may conflict with the customs of their adopted society. But Canadian society, open and modern, should be able to integrate heterogeneous elements into a harmonious system, to achieve ‘unity in diversity.’”
Acculturation, according to the commission’s report, is “the process of adaptation to the environment in which an individual is compelled to live as he adjusts his behaviour to that of the community.” In other words, the basis of what became known as multiculturalism began as a theory of integrating newcomers into the “Canadian way of life,” into a “harmonious system.” The result of this would be “unity in diversity.”
And so, what the commission’s report said, “unity in diversity,” appears to be what Pierre Trudeau meant by multiculturalism. At some point in the mid-1990s, Trudeau lamented before a private audience that contemporary multiculturalism had not turned out as he had intended. Former Liberal MP John Bryden, who was present, later reported Trudeau’s criticism: multiculturalism, he said, had been “twisted to celebrate a newcomer’s country of origin and not a celebration of the newcomer becoming part of the Canadian fabric.” This was reported by journalist Chris Cobb in the Ottawa Citizen in July of 2005, but can only be found online now in secondary sources. One wonders what Trudeau père would have thought of his son’s theory of Canada as a post-national state with “no core identity.”
What explains the shift from acculturation to diversity for its own sake? The first reason is surely that multiculturalism was never explicitly defined anywhere. And so it easily became unmoored from the thought-world of the mid-20th century. Evidence of the shift, incidentally, can be observed in the Canadian Multiculturalism Act itself. It does not define multiculturalism, and seems to assume that a multicultural society is already an established fact. And, amongst various other provisions, the Act pledges to respect and value diversity seemingly as an end itself. Furthermore, the government website that now hosts the Act preposterously describes it as “a legislative framework for promoting diversity, equality and inclusion”—a set of contemporary buzzwords unknown in the late 1980s and which are not even mentioned in the Act.
The heavy emphasis on diversity to the detriment of unity belongs to the thought-world of late 20th-century globalisation and postmodern eclecticism. That world and its assumptions are rapidly passing into history. But they were once highly influential, and our multiculturalism policy was affected by them. In the 1980s and 1990s, localism was out and internationalism was in. Davos Man, who had shed all national characteristics, moved smoothly from one international city to the next. Meanwhile, the postmodernist suspicion of “grand narratives” – like national stories, myths, religions – gave way to a preference for the individual, the particular, and the diverse. Harmony was held to result from diverse peoples living side by side or moving freely throughout the word without overarching stories, theories, or purposes.
However convincing that outlook may once have been, it is now widely rejected. Polling by the Environics Institute has shown that nearly 60 per cent of Canadians claim that newcomers do not share Canadian values and that they fail to integrate themselves within Canadian society. According to Leger, 51 per cent expect government institutions to do more to integrate newcomers and 55 per cent believe that immigrants must adopt “broad mainstream values and traditions and leave behind elements of their cultural identity that may be incompatible with that.” The same study reveals only 24 per cent of Canadians believe “diversity is our strength” without qualification, and most now see diversity as a source of conflict. In other words, most Canadians now look upon the outcome of official multiculturalism with suspicion.
We might conclude that multicultural policy has been pushed to an illogical extreme, or that an originally good and well-intentioned policy has been perverted. There is, however, a sense in which any official policy of multiculturalism is inherently superfluous and bound to fail. It is superfluous because all societies everywhere are multicultural in one sense or another. There is no country without local and regional diversity in culture, food, language, accent, dialect, and so on; and these differences tend to be robust over time. It is bound to fail because, in the long run, the general culture of a place will tend to become more and more homogenous.
Those two observations are not contradictory. A demonstrative example is Great Britain: a place repeatedly invaded and settled by various peoples over the first millennium AD, which nevertheless developed a common British identity as well as multiple, subsidiary national and regional cultures long before 20th century mass immigration. Given enough time, a place like Canada would surely turn out much the same: rich in cultural and linguistic diversity, with a blended population of many Indigenous peoples and others distantly descended from immigrants, all united by a common Canadian identity centuries in the making: John Ralston Saul’s “Métis nation” at last. Many would applaud this outcome, but it would hardly resemble the contemporary ideal of multiculturalism.
So it seems that, if we no longer understand the original meaning and purpose of multiculturalism – and if most Canadians object to the outcome of diversity for its own sake – then the concept itself is no longer useful. At the very least, the meaning and purpose of it should be redefined. If multiculturalism is to be of any further use it must be able to tell us both where we came from and where we are now; both who we are in particular and who we are in general. And if multiculturalism cannot do that, then it will not survive.
Dr. Michael Bonner is a former Government of Ontario policy director, a historian of ancient Iran, and author of In Defense of Civilization: How Our Past Can Renew Our Present. He is a contributor for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
