In October 1971, in an attempt to decrease tensions between French-speaking and English-speaking Canadians, Pierre Trudeau introduced a policy that has come to stand for the right to celebrate and retain a diversity of languages, ethnic groups, and cultures. The understanding of diversity, however, was not always so expansive. With The Racial Mosaic: A Pre-history of Canadian Multiculturalism, the historian Daniel R. Meister details how Eurocentrism and even eugenics laid the groundwork for what would become a hallmark of our country’s identity.
As early as the 1920s, cultural pluralism —“the idea that immigrants to Canada should be allowed or even encouraged to retain some aspects of their cultures”— had already emerged, and it would evolve through the next decade and the Second World War. Meister explores this development with chapters that focus on the role of the press and radio and the ideological shifts that took place during wartime. But at the core of...
Shazia Hafiz Ramji is the author of the poetry collection Port of Being. She divides her time between Toronto and London, where she’s writing a novel.
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