Marching to a Canadian Drum

What strikes me as particularly Canadian in Sean Quigley's viral YouTube interpretation of "The Little Drummer Boy" is not his red and white maple leaf mittens.  Nor is it that he is wearing shorts and a t-shirt while drumming in the snow (because, lets face it, who doesn't?).  What strikes me as particularly Canadian in this video is that it is the most natural thing in the world for a 16 year old from Winnipeg, Manitoba, to gather a bunch of his friends and have them hold up pieces of paper stating "Merry Christmas" in their own languages, then put them in his music video.

I confess!  I'll admit it!  I'm a Trudeau baby!

I'll explain the connection in a minute. 

That is, I've never known a Canada where "multiculturalism" wasn't a fact of life.

What ever your opinions are on the policies and politics of Canada's 15th Prime Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, his concept of "multiculturalism" was a unique solution to Canada's identity crisis.

At the time, Quebec was waking up and asserting its cultural and linguistic identity on the national stage.  The status quo was being challenged and this forced the rest of Canada to wake up too.  Canadians had to confront two uncomfortable questions: "What is Canada?", and "What does it mean to be Canadian?"  At its ugliest, tensions escalated into terrorism and Marshall Law.

As we were technically under British authority (and to some extent, still are), many Canadians believed that English customs, language and values should define Canada.  Even many non-British immigrants would eagerly shed the languages and customs of their homeland.  Those who didn't faced discrimination.  What the citizens of Quebec asserted was  their uniqueness from other French speaking cultures of the world, and their unique placement in North America.  They wanted the right to protect their language and cultural heritage.  As a founding province of what we now call Canada, with a heritage far older than British rule, and totalling over 30% of the Canadian population, the rest of Canada couldn't ignore them.  A British Canada wouldn't work.

So who were we?  Were we a state with two national identities: English and French?  But there are other cultures with even older ties to the land than the French: the First Nations and the Inuit.  Shouldn't they also be recognized?  An earlier proposal for the Canadian flag had 3 maple leaves to symbolize the three founding cultures: First Nations, French and English.  This opened even more identity problems.  Populations of First Nations people are small.  Many provinces have other immigrant populations bigger than First Nations or French.  At the time, British Columbia had few French speakers but nearly 30% were of Asian heritage.   Should we recognize all significant cultural minorities?  How do we decide which cultures are Canadian and which cultures are not?

The answer was "multiculturalism".  It's a Canadian word: look it up!  Instead of trying to squish everybody into a single, specifically defined cultural identity, we expanded our identity to encompass everybody.

Some scholars define us as the first post-modern state.  We are comfortable with our uncomfortably ambiguous identity.  Debating who we are is a part of who we are.  Instead of solving our identity crisis, we've accepted that we ARE the identity crisis.  Our identity is squishy like Play-Dough, not a masterful stone monument.  For those born after 1971, when Canada's "Multicultural Policy" was introduced, speaking two languages at school and a third language at home is normal.  Buying calendars marked with holidays you can't pronounce is normal.  Attending cultural festivals that have nothing to do with your own heritage is normal.  Correcting Americans for not using the <<correct>> pronunciation of a word's language of origin is normal.  And seeing how many cultures you can represent through a single phrase in a high school music video is absolutely, completely, normal.

What Canadians might forget is that on a global scale, this is not "normal".

So as you go through this holiday season, reflect: What's your normal?

Multiculturalism
Trudeau is credited with introducing Canada's "Multiculturalism Policy" on October 8, 1971 recognizing that while Canada was a country of two official languages, it did not have a single unitary culture but rather recognized the plurality of cultures - "a multicultural policy within a bilingual framework". This reflected what the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism found in their hearings across Canada, as described in Book IV of the Commission's report.

Pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Trudeau#Multiculturalism>