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ABSTRACT
Compared to other Western democracies, there has been relatively stable support for multiculturalism in Canada since its adoption in 1971, both amongst the general public and amongst the three main political parties. Conservative opposition to multiculturalism has, therefore, typically taken the form of “stealth” reforms to undercut its progressive potential, not direct frontal attacks. During the 2015 election, however, the Conservative Party campaigned on an explicitly anti-multiculturalist platform. This provided a clear opportunity to test “Canadian exceptionalism” in relation to public support for multiculturalism. In this article, I explore the Conservatives’ strategy, and its impact on the election. The evidence suggests that a significant part of the Canadian electorate was responsive to an anti-multicultural—and more specifically anti-Muslim—discourse. However, when this discourse was pushed too far, voters recoiled from what was perceived as an excessive, and indeed “unCanadian,” politics of distrust and division. The article explores different ways of understanding this tipping point, and what it tells us about the precarious resilience of multiculturalism in Canada.
Acknowledgments
This paper began as a talk to the Centre of Canadian Studies at the University of Edinburgh in 2016, and I have since presented versions of it to the British Association of Canadian Studies annual meeting, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, the Canadian Difference Project at Trent University, the School of Sociology at the University of Bristol, and the Workshop on Canadian Exceptionalism in Immigration Politics and Policy at the University of Toronto. Thanks to the respective organizers for inviting me: James Kennedy, Susan Hodgett and Jatinder Mann, Paul May, Momin Rahman, Tariq Modood, and Phil Triadafilopoulos. Special thanks to Phil for ongoing advice and encouragement. Thanks also to the audiences for their questions, and to the two anonymous referees for this journal, whose comments were very helpful.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Even if multiculturalism were abandoned by the federal government, it still might be resilient at other levels of government. Reidel (Citation2015) argues that multiculturalism is now sufficiently embedded at the municipal and provincial levels in Canada that it can survive retreat at the federal level.
2. It is worth recalling that during the 2011 election, Harper “forcefully rejected criticisms of official multiculturalism” by the Bloc Québécois, and argued that it was key to Canada’s success in immigrant integration (Marwah, Triadafilopoulos, and White Citation2013). For other discussions of how Conservative governments in Canada have attempted to co-opt and neutralize, rather than directly attack, multiculturalism, see Carlaw (Citation2017); James (Citation2013); Kymlicka (Citation2013); Fiřtová (Citation2019); Griffith (Citation2013); Tolley (Citation2017).
3. While the exact contours of multiculturalism policies in Canada have changed since 1971, I have argued elsewhere that there are two enduring core ideas at work: (1) that it is legitimate for immigrants to want to maintain their ethnic/religious identities and participate in Canada without having to abandon or hide these identities, and that this is not inherently un-Canadian or disloyal; (2) because participating in Canadian society with these identities is legitimate, public institutions have a duty to accommodate these identities, and to identify and remove barriers that might impede people’s ability to participate (Kymlicka Citation2015).
4. But this claim is not unique to Canada. See Hussain and Miller (Citation2006) for Scotland and Levey (Citation2008) for Australia.
5. Indeed, this is known in the social psychology literature as the “multiculturalism hypothesis” (Berry, Kalin, and Taylor Citation1977).
6. Indeed, some critics argue that it is actually a strategy for preserving white hegemony: expressing support for diversity is a way for white settlers to view themselves as “exalted subjects” (Thobani Citation2007).
7. Grillo argues that, for critics, “multiculturalism is always already ‘unbridled’” (Grillo Citation2007, 987) or what he calls the “ticking culture scenario.” For a good example in the Canadian context, see Maxime Bernier’s rants about “extreme multiculturalism” (Maloney Citation2015). But this crisis discourse has not stuck in Canada. The resistance to crisis talk should not be seen as evidence that Canadians are somehow uniquely tolerant or rational. It is better explained by accidents of geography that radically diminish the possibility of large-scale, uncontrolled migration, and hence sustain a sense of control that is strongly connected to more positive attitudes (Kymlicka Citation2004; Harell, Soroka, and Iyengar Citation2017).
8. “Immigration tops the list of voter concerns in 22 of the 27 EU countries that will vote in European Parliament election in 2019—including Germany, France, Italy and Poland—for the fourth year in a row, according to an EU-wide survey conducted for the European Commission” (Heath and Pawelec Citation2018). In the other five countries (Spain, Romania, Ireland, Croatia, and Lithuania), terrorism was the top-ranked issue, which also feeds nativist populism.
9. Another poll conducted during the 2019 election showed that the top five issues for voters were health care, climate change, affordability, taxes, and the economy. The accompanying news story did not even mention immigration (Global News Citation2019). Put another way, compared to other countries, supporters of multiculturalism are more enthusiastic in Canada, and its critics are less worked up.
10. Besco (Citation2020) shows that right-wing voters in Canada do punish their party when they run minority candidates, but center/left voters do not.
11. See Simonsen (Citation2016) and Simonsen (Citation2019) for cross-national evidence confirming that these symbolic political messages have a profound effect on immigrants’ sense of belonging.
12. Billig famously argued that social scientists pay too much attention to “hot” nationalism—the political moments when nationalism is explicitly and emotionally appealed to—and not enough attention to “banal” nationalism—the moments when it is quietly but pervasively in the background (Billig Citation1995). I think a similar analysis applies to multiculturalism. Indeed, what I am arguing is that multiculturalism is now a part of this banal nationalism in Canada.
13. The decision was issued as an immediate directive under Operation Bulletin 359, and incorporated into section 6.5 of the Citizenship and Immigration Canada policy manual CP 15: Guide to Citizenship Ceremonies.
14. Judicial decisions in Canada do not generally break down along partisan lines—certainly less so than in the United States—so it is not unusual for Conservative appointees to rule against a Conservative government (Macfarlane Citation2012). This court case, however, posed a particular challenge to Harper’s attempt to paint all opposition to the niqab ban as a form of liberal political correctness gone to the extreme.
15. The polling numbers can be questioned on several grounds. For example, the question did not make it clear that candidates for naturalization are required to prove their identity outside the public ceremony, and so some respondents mistakenly believed that removing the niqab was needed to confirm identity. Also, the poll falsely implied that the federal ban was implementing the existing law rather than subverting the law (Mastracci Citation2015). Nonetheless, subsequent polls suggest that, even with more information, a majority of Canadians would have supported a law that requires removing the niqab in the citizenship ceremony (Forum Research Citation2015; Coletto Citation2016).
16. On October 5, 2015, the Federal Court of Appeals denied the leave to stay, saying there was no evidence of irreparable harm to public interest and reiterating the instruction that Ishaq be allowed to naturalize and vote.
17. For a related discussion of how the niqab ban violated both the “hardware” and “software” of pluralism in Canada, see Alibhai (Citation2019).
18. See Radwanski (Citation2015) on the way the Conservatives were trapped into this framing of the election, even when they hoped to “pivot” to economic issues at the very end of the campaign.
19. As Dornan puts it, “Tactically, each of these Conservative measures had its utility. Cumulatively, they were a strategic fiasco” (Citation2016, 20).
20. One of the puzzles of the election is why it was the Liberals rather than the NDP who benefitted from the drop in Conservative support. One proposed explanation is that when confronted with the Conservative challenge to the model of multicultural nationalism, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau was a much more passionate defender of the model, whereas NDP leader Tom Mulcair was more hesitant, and tried to avoid the issue entirely (McGrane Citation2016, 104). Rather than address the issue head-on, Mulcair accused the Conservatives of using “weapons of mass distraction” (Dobrowolsky Citation2018), a response that satisfied neither the progressive defenders of an inclusive Canadian identity nor its conservative critics. However, a more careful analysis shows a different dynamic within the key battleground of Quebec. In that province, while both the Liberals and NDP opposed the niqab ban, the issue became associated specifically with the NDP, particularly in the media. As a recent study concludes, the Quebec media “strongly and negatively associated the NDP with the crystallized issue of religious accommodation,” and the more Quebecers were exposed to this media, the more they shifted support away from the NDP (Bridgman et al. Citation2020), leading to a precipitous drop in NDP support within Quebec in the second half of September. Since the possibility of the NDP winning the election depended on it repeating its previous electoral success in Quebec (the “Orange Wave” in the 2011 election), this drop in support in Quebec effectively meant they could not win nationally. And this in turn meant that the “anyone-but-Harper” strategic vote in the rest of the country started to shift from the NDP to the Liberals (Gordon, Jeram, and van der Linden Citation2019). Paradoxically, then, the NDP may have been perceived as too enthusiastic a defender of the niqab in Quebec (leading to a loss of votes in late September in Quebec), and too unenthusiastic a defender of multicultural nationalism in the rest of the country (leading to a loss of votes in the rest of the country in October). Here, as elsewhere, we should remember that Canadian politics occupies two solitudes.
21. In fact, then-Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould personally called Ishaq to inform her of the withdrawal, and said that as an Indigenous woman, she “understood the importance of respecting diversity.”
22. Christopher Alexander, the Conservative Minister of Citizenship and Immigration at the time of the election, and the chief spokesperson for the “barbaric cultural practices” tip line, acknowledged that “It’s why we lost…we allowed ourselves to be portrayed in the last election as unwelcoming. That was a huge mistake” (CTV News Citation2016). For scholarly analysis supporting this conclusion, see Dornan (Citation2016); Radwanski (Citation2015); Clarke et al. (Citation2017); and Coletto (Citation2016). As Coletto notes, polls indicate that “perhaps more than any other issue, attitudes about the niqab and whether a woman can cover her face during citizenship ceremonies had the greatest effect on the outcome of the election” (320).
23. According to Carver (Citation2016), Harper’s attempt to reorient immigration policy around a “discourse of distrust” was defeated firstly by the courts, in a series of high-profile cases 2012–2015, and secondly by the Canadian public in the 2015 election.
24. By contrast, Quebecers were much less inclined to defer to the Supreme Court on this issue, and various actors have continued to attempt to politicize the issue. As a result, the debate on “reasonable accommodation” looks very different in Quebec, even though the polling numbers on support for the kirpan in schools are quite similar across the country.
25. This is supported by the fact that some of the key ridings that underpinned the Liberal success in the 2015 election were suburban ridings in Toronto and Vancouver with large immigrant populations. The shift in party support in October was almost certainly stronger amongst immigrants and visible minorities (defending their rights) than among the general Canadian population (defending a conception of inclusive nationalism). However, the shift was also visible in areas without large immigrant voting blocs, such as Atlantic Canada.
26. This is sometimes rationalized on the grounds that liberal-democratic multiculturalism should be “secular,” although upon inspection, this appeal to secularism is highly selective and inconsistent, and is only invoked when Muslim claims are at stake. Consider the harsh reaction in Ontario to Muslim claims regarding religious arbitration or public funding of Muslim schools, when comparable claims by non-Muslim groups are accepted as part of the multicultural consensus (Kymlicka Citation2007a; Citation2015).
27. For one version of this argument, see Banting et al. (Citation2019).
28. It is worth noting that, back in March 2015, leading Conservative cabinet ministers such as Tony Clement had insisted that while a niqab ban was appropriate during the moment of naturalization, it would clearly be inappropriate in the federal workplace. Indeed Clement accused Trudeau of scaremongering for suggesting that the Conservatives might try to extend the ban beyond the moment of naturalization (Bryden Citation2015).
29. For example, contrary to the fourth explanation, the level of support for a ban on the niqab in the federal civil service is not markedly lower than support for a ban on wearing it in the citizenship ceremony (Forum Research Citation2015). So the focus on “the very moment” of naturalization does not seem to have played much of a role in public attitudes.
30. See Kymlicka (Citation2013) on the recurring battles between progressive and neoliberal conceptions of multiculturalism, with its many ebbs and flows over the years, and no clear victor in sight.
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Will Kymlicka
Will Kymlicka is the Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy in the Philosophy Department at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, where he has taught since 1998. His research interests focus on issues of democracy and diversity, and in particular on models of citizenship and social justice within multicultural societies and interspecies societies.