SINGH: Canada needs a single national identity

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To assist Canadian youth of various backgrounds create a nationwide dialogue that displays the true variety of opinions that we all know is on the market, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute launched the Communicate For Ourselves Essay Competitors, inviting essays from college students — such because the one beneath from Arjun Singh — that push again towards the prevailing narratives which are imposed upon or search to marginalize various voices.

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Canada has by no means had the chutzpah to say a single nationwide id.

The nation’s dominant narrative has been of “two nations” comprising its two largest ethnolinguistic teams — the English and French.

It’s assumed these are the co-equal homeowners of Canada, who collectively management its assets and establishments for cultural safety and social concord. Every time tensions have arisen between them, the speculation of “two nations” has been a secure quotation to pacify controversy.

Nonetheless, there’s one giant exclusion from this idea: ethnic minorities.

Certainly, the 2 founding nations idea catastrophically undermines the multiculturalism supposedly enshrined within the Constitution. Canadians who’re neither English nor French should dreadfully tolerate a glass ceiling above them.

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They’re tolerant as official bilingualism — the bedrock precept of the “two nations idea” — spreads its tentacles all through Canadian life. Most minorities lack the assets for schooling within the different ‘official language’ (and language schooling in public colleges is a joke). Therefore, they’re shut out of management in Canada’s private and non-private realms.

This systemic inequality has paradoxically saved Canadian cupboards, boardrooms, and court docket benches overwhelmingly white within the twenty first century, regardless of main demographic adjustments. Not figuring out the ‘different language,’ they’re handled like colonial topics — anticipated to stay grateful for plateaued existence within the middle-class.

Ought to somebody enter excessive workplace sans bilingualism — most not too long ago, because the Governor-Normal and CEO of Air Canada — they’re assailed till a groveling dedication to studying the opposite language is obtained. Thus, within the title of “two nations,” a complete class of Canadians is disadvantaged of equal alternatives for fulfillment.

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Furthermore, beneath the “two nations” banner, minorities are anticipated to be tolerant as Quebec — claiming the mantle of one in every of these nations — shuts them out of public life with Invoice 21, undermining the core liberal worth of non secular freedom within the title of cultural safety. Minorities are anticipated to bear this sufferance for the sake of stability, lest the Quebecois nation search to secede from the “two founding nations” compact. In Canada, it appears, their rights are value sacrificing for Francophone emotional safety.

The thought of two founding nations, therefore, is the foundation of Canada’s structural inequality — reinforcing the privileged standing of white outdated inventory elites over everybody else. Unchallenged, the speculation is the best handicap on the mobility of minority Canadians, consigning them to second-class citizenship.

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No quantity of “variety,” “fairness,” or “inclusion” will make a distinction to their lives so long as this idea persists.

Canada should be part of different states and embrace one pluralist id, the place no language teams are granted formal primacy and individuals are handled as people. As an alternative, let a typical tongue — be it English, French, or one thing else — emerge by means of the play of life and circumstance in a free society. Solely then will actual multiculturalism be potential, the place all backgrounds are equal.

Canada has an ethical obligation to comprehend this imaginative and prescient. In any other case, it is going to stay a neo-colonial enterprise of two nations within the bosom of a single, flawed state.

— Arjun Singh is a latest graduate of political science from the College of Toronto