Multiculturalism in its controversial glory: Is Canada a ‘country without a core culture’? [View all]

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Just name it, and we have it here, in Canada, the land of 200 languages —
including the two official ones. No matter where people are originally from,
nearly 90% of us primarily speak English or French at home.

Canada is a multicultural country. We know that. We are taught it in school and, for Canadians, especially those living in big cities, we see and hear it around us everyday; written on restaurant signs, advertising delectable ethnic cuisine, and on crowded subway cars and buses where chatter abounds in a multiplicity of tongues.

English. French. Chinese. Russian. Spanish. Tagalog. Creole. Just name it, and we have it here, in Canada, the land of 200 languages — including the two official ones. No matter where people are originally from, nearly 90% of us primarily speak English or French at home. It is a robust number, and yet, beneath it, is a head-scratcher of a figure: more than two million speak neither English or French at home, while some 6.6 million people, more than the number of people in greater Toronto, most often speak something other than French or English at home.

Salim Mansur is a political scientist at the University of Western Ontario. He has been described, including in the pages of this newspaper, as Canada’s “angriest moderate.” And what makes him so angry is that nobody, he says, not the media elite, politicians or even the academics, is willing to have a frank and open dialogue about multiculturalism in this country. He argues that Canada, before it became beholden to a Kumbayah notion that everybody should get along and be free to do so in whatever language they choose to speak was, at its core, a liberal democracy.

We had this discussion at a Tim Horton’s in Brampton, where other men in turbans sat drinking coffee, presumably sharing the news of the day, chattering away in their native tongue. Mr. Singh and I chattered away in English. It was a snapshot of multiculturalism, in all its glory. It didn’t feel like a failure to me, as Mr. Mansur suggests.

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http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/10/24/multiculturalism-in-its-controversial-glory-is-canada-a-country-without-a-core-culture/

Even in a country committed to multiculturalism it remains a controversial concept for some while polls show that it (and high immigration levels) are very popular in Canada.