Canada’s mosaic is holding strong

The world wants what Canada has to offer – or so our Prime Minister keeps reminding us. He often has our natural resources in mind: energy, potash and critical minerals. Sometimes he is thinking about our brains, vaunting advances in artificial intelligence. And on his recent trip to Ireland, he talked about our values, and our knack for welcoming diversity without compelling uniformity.

“Canada is a mosaic, not a melting pot,” he said. “A mosaic doesn’t dissolve its pieces. Each is stitched to each, all holding all. The beauty is in the arrangement, not the blending.”

Beautiful words. But are we still a country that is holding one another together, each stitched to all?

Opinions on immigration recently underwent a profound shift, in response to the post-pandemic spike in the intake of new immigrants. For the first time in almost a quarter-century, a majority of Canadians agreed there was too much immigration. Add to this the recurrence of troubling incidents: police officers who abuse racialized citizens; synagogues riddled with bullets; other religious minorities made to feel they don’t belong. When it comes to multiculturalism, are we sure Canada still has bragging rights?

In a new, landmark survey, we asked Canadians to tell us in their own words what multiculturalism means to them. There were some who couldn’t think of anything to say, shrugging their shoulders and skipping to the next, simpler question. But more than 60 per cent wrote a description that was largely positive – using words like harmony, respect, equality and freedom. Yes, there were negative answers as well: division, conflict and the loss of the Canadian identity. But these negative responses add up to just six per cent of the total.

Public opinion research helps us to put things into context. We surveyed almost 7,000 Canadians. That means we received hundreds of negative descriptions of multiculturalism, some of which are plainly racist. But the positive descriptions outnumber the negative ones by a factor of 10-to-one.

We also asked Canadians whether they prefer to stick to our method of selecting highly educated immigrants regardless of which part of the world they come from, or whether we should only accept people from some countries and not others. By a four-to-one ratio, Canadians prefer we stick to the points system, a colour-blind approach to immigration selection that rewards skills over ethnicity or race. Yes, some Canadians suggest we close the door to people from certain countries, but in the case of, for instance, Arabs or Muslims, it’s only five per cent.

Perhaps the most reassuring finding – appropriate as we mark Canada Day – is that most Canadians, regardless of their race or religion, identify with and feel a sense of belonging to the country. Certainly, some facets of identity are more important to some than to others. Race is more likely to be very important to the sense of identity of Black Canadians, religion to Muslim Canadians, and language to francophones. But these tend to co-exist with, and not compete with, a common sense of being Canadian. Only a handful of Canadians cherish an aspect of their heritage – such as their race or religion – without also identifying with Canada.

Let’s be clear: No one is suggesting we all agree. There’s plenty for Canadians to argue about, from energy policy, to foreign policy, to challenging moral issues like assisted dying. And thank goodness for that: the whole point of living in a free and democratic society is that we get to shout our dissent from the rooftops. It’s not uniform thinking we’re after at all, but a willingness to work together to find compromises durable enough to get us from today to tomorrow. Our disagreements, however, are typically about our opinions, and not who we are: we do not say “yea” or “nay” just by looking at where someone was born, what they look like, or whether they pray every day or, like many Canadians, only during the Stanley Cup playoffs. Our disagreements are within communities, not between them. There are conservatives and liberals among new immigrants, among Quebeckers whose families have been here since the days of New France, and among Albertans working in the oil fields. That’s all part of the mosaic too.

The beauty is in the arrangement, not the blending. Happy Canada Day.