Canadian Divides

• Main Author: Hemer, Oscar
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Malmö universitet, Master program in Communication for Development 2014
• Subjects: Canada; First Nations; inuit
• Online Access: https://ojs.mau.se/index.php/glocaltimes/article/view/82

Canada seems to be the exception to the worldwide rule of hostility towards culturally different migrants. Notwithstanding an annual intake of newcomers that by far exceeds that of other immigration countries, like the USA and Australia, and despite the fact that the great majority of the new Canadians are of non-Western origin, Canada has not (yet) suffered from any xenophobic backlash. On the contrary, USA’s northern neighbour is proudly affirming its multicultural reality and maintains its official policy of multiculturalism, even under the current right-wing conservative government. In 2011 more than a fifth of the country’s population was foreign-born, and in the urban centres, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, more than half the residents belong to “visible minorities”, that is, the Canadian term for “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour”.[1] As social researchers Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley note in their comparative study of South Africa, Germany and Canada,[2] the Canadian example is a largely untold success story, which stands out in conspicuous contrast to the darkening powers of xenophobia in Europe Yet, multiculturalism remains largely an urban phenomenon in the vast country where rural and remote are keywords, and it does not seem to encompass the Aboriginal peoples, which amount to 1,4 million or 4,3 percent of the entire population.[3] Canada’s shameful treatment of its Aboriginal population is another story that, albeit not untold, remains unresolved. From the year of Confederation, 1867, a policy of “aggressive assimilation” was implemented and it was to be carried out for more than a century through a system of church-run, government-funded residential schools. In all, about 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children were removed from their communities and forced to attend these “schools”, where they were subject to systematic mental and sexual abuse. More than 4000 children are reported to have died in them. At its heyday in the ...