For all the praise Canada receives as “the one Western country” untouched by bigoted populism (
to quote Fareed Zakaria), recent anxieties in the province of Quebec are a reminder that there exist challenges of multiculturalism even the clever Canadians can’t solve.
Like many diverse countries, Canada houses minority communities both old and new, and the ensuing tension provokes a familiar dilemma: Can a state treat all minorities with respect and fairness while offering above-and-beyond cultural and political protections to the groups it deems especially worth defending?
Much consternation was had in Quebec recently
when figures from the 2016 Canadian census (
since shown to be false) appeared to correlate rising levels of immigration with declining use of French in the French-speaking province. Some politicians found the timing disturbing — August marked the 40th anniversary of
Quebec’s Charter of the French Language, a sweeping piece of legislation intended to entrench French in all corners of Quebec life — and began thundering about
the need for even tougher laws.
In Canada’s English-speaking provinces, declining rates of English are generally characterized by Anglo politicians as inevitable — if not exciting (Toronto Mayor John Tory even proclaimed an
official day to “promote linguistic and cultural diversity”). Yet English Canada is not considered the protected reserve of a particular people, while Ottawa explicitly recognizes Quebec as the home of the French Canadian “
nation.”
Though unanimously endorsed by Canada’s political class, this notion that Quebec is — and should be — the country’s French-Canadian homeland grinds awkwardly against the egalitarian, “post-national” multiculturalism that has earned Canada so much international acclaim in the age of Trump and Brexit. Keeping Quebec French (however broadly one wants to define that adjective), after all, implies a certain level of judgment should await residents who are not.
For the past four years, successive Quebec administrations, representing two different political parties, have
been trying to pass some
manner of public-sector “headgear ban,” mostly to prevent Muslim women from wearing headscarves in government-controlled spaces. This dislike of “ostentatious displays” of religiosity from minorities — said to be rooted in the French tradition of aggressive secularism — has been
similarly blamed for the low Quebec poll numbers of
Jagmeet Singh, the popular turban-wearing Indo-Canadian front-runner to lead the New Democratic Party. Many will find such explanations overly-intellectualized excuses, of course. Earlier this month, the
CBC aired a documentary about an aggressive Quebec anti-immigrant group called
La Meute, which the CBC characterized as the largest far-right group in the province “and maybe even the country.”
In Canada, it’s considered highly taboo to pass judgment on Quebec peculiarities. I wrote an article in February observing that many Canadians consider Quebec a “noticeably more racist” place than elsewhere else in Canada and was
unanimously denounced by a furious vote of the Quebec legislature. Such touchiness merely exposes the depth of the dilemma.
The French Canadians consider themselves a persecuted minority and have fair historic justification. The French of North America are a conquered, colonized people who faced systemic discrimination under Canada’s long reign of Anglo-supremacy. Yet there are many other minority groups in Canada who can plead a similar case, including the non-French minority within Quebec itself. Many of Quebec’s customs and laws are intended as French Canadian empowerment after years of marginalization, though in practice this can often look like one minority demanding its cultural grievances supersede all others.
Facing a vacancy on Canada’s Supreme Court, last October Prime Minister Justin Trudeau skipped an opportunity to appoint a high court judge of color (something Canada has never had) in favor of a
white, French-speaking male because Trudeau had promised Quebec voters a Supreme Court in which every judge speaks fluent French. Many aboriginal activists, and indeed the
broad Canadian left, wanted Trudeau to appoint an aboriginal Canadian as governor general. He instead appointed the Quebec astronaut
Julie Payette, defaulting to Ottawa precedent that every second governor general should be French Canadian.
The problems, hypocrisies and paradoxes surrounding les Québécois may be a uniquely Canadian issue, but analogies can be found in most Western democracies these days. Like Canada, many Western nation-states were originally set up as limited arrangements of a few ethnic groups, only to see the drama between those groups appear increasingly dated or privileged as populations grow more diverse, inhabited by peoples from every corner of the globe.
In the United Kingdom, the demands of Muslim immigrants must compete with Britain’s traditional minorities — Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish. In the United States, debates on Washington’s obligations to the descendants of enslaved African Americans and displaced Native Americans share space with conversation about recently arrived Hispanics. Australians and New Zealanders balance accommodation of their large Asian populations with historic promises to indigenous residents. From Catalonia to Corsica, virtually every
European nation includes a historically aggrieved community whose dreams of autonomy threaten being overshadowed by their country’s more modern cultural cleavages.
Canada offers no useful lesson on how to resolve the tension between minorities old and new — except perhaps that double standards and blind spots are a more inescapable part of managing 21st-century multiculturalism than many may like to believe.
