The myth of the mosaic

Posted by admin on Feb 20, 2007 in Volume 14 Issue 1 | 0 comments

Ever since John Murray Gibbon first used the term in his 1938 book, Canadian Mosaic, we who live north of the continental United States have become increasingly obsessed with the notion of Canada as a mosaic.

The picture we have is that Canada is a land 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, where they are forced to pledge allegiance to the American flag first, and where their traditions must be secondary to the American way.

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

The unofficial, and, at various times, official policy of the government of Canada, 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 the Anglophones to grow to outnumber the Francophones. Today far more Francophones than Anglophones are required to be bilingual for their work.

The treatment of Aboriginals 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 languages, 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 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 6500 worked on the railroad. The familiar adage, “one dead Chinaman for every mile of railroad,” stands as a reminder of the conditions in which they worked. As soon as the railroad was finished, however, the Canadian government placed a head tax on new Chinese immigrants, in an attempt to dissuade them from immigrating here. 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, it simply made it illegal for more than a few Chinese to immigrate to Canada annually.

Government policy is one thing, but the question remains, how do people actually live in Canada? In Vancouver, as in Toronto and Montreal, there is a very different perception of diversity than in the rest of the country. For those who live in one of these three cities, it probably seems like Canada is a pretty diverse place. But even in Vancouver, this may not be as true as we think. Our ideal of different people living together, each enriched by others’ cultures, has typically manifested itself as a series of ghettos for minorities.

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 World War II, where Aboriginals on reserves were denied patronage until 1960, where it was illegal to be a homosexual until 1969, and where we’ve been bragging about our multicultural, tolerant mosaic since the late 1930s.