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February 18, 2011

Living in multicultural Canada

EUGENE KAELLIS

Feb. 13-19 is Multiculturalism Week in Canada and, earlier in the month, on Feb. 2, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) released its 22nd annual report on the operation of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act.

In the foreword, the Hon. Jason Kenney, minister of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism, notes, “The government of Canada’s commitment to the Canadian Multiculturalism Act is demonstrated by the more than 130 submissions received from federal institutions to develop this report.” He also points to various initiatives, such as Inter-Action, a new multiculturalism grants and contributions program, the Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship study guide and Canada’s hosting of the second conference of the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA), which ratified the Ottawa Protocol last year.

Canada has had an official multiculturalism policy since 1971. It is, in large measure, an adjunct to our immigration policy. Canadians have a replacement rate (one male, one female, two children) of about 1.8. For maintaining population levels, and factoring in infant and child mortality, it should be about 2.1. Without substantial immigration, our population would diminish, reducing prospects for a growing domestic consumer market and, in “normal” times, an adequate workforce. According to CIC, in 2009, more than 156,000 people became Canadian citizens and more than 250,000 new permanent residents settled across the country. British Columbia welcomed 41,438 new immigrants in 2009.

While multiculturalism may stimulate immigration and create a more positive environment for different ethnic cultures, it has some less desirable aspects. Significantly supported by government grants, official multiculturalism has created a fertile field for opportunism by recipient organizations and posturing by politicians. In some ethnic communities, cultural expression may be mixed with political advocacy; for example, Jewish organizations generally support Israel; Muslim organizations may be pro-Palestinian, even pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah. Ethnic solidarity can also be used for manipulative purposes, e.g., ad hoc recruitment of riding organization members of the same ethnicity voting en bloc to nominate their own candidates.

Culture invariably, if sometimes tardily, reflects values, and many old cultures retain practices regarding gender relations which, when combined with the expectation of absolute obedience to parents, especially fathers, have resulted in notorious, sometimes criminal, behavior or at least abrasive relationships between parents and youth, particularly young women emulating their Canadian peers.

Not only are gender relationships of these types often incongruent with Canadian values, some traditional cultures sometimes include long-standing hatreds and, while immigrants are asked “to leave these behind,” they may, nonetheless, express them in their new environment. Readers don’t have to be told about the small but significant presence of jihadists in various Muslim communities. Bombings in London, Stockholm and Madrid, a fatwah against Salman Rushdie and the murder of a Dutch anti-Islamism activist have attracted widespread attention and raised serious questions on the limits of what Quebecois call “reasonable accommodation.” Some Chassidim in la Belle Province objected to women exercising in a loft opposite theirs; evidently, using heavy drapes did not occur to the complainants.

Multiculturalism, by its very nature, is a conservative force. It necessarily promotes traditionalism and, thereby, may perpetuate cultural anachronisms. While young people in Kiev are rocking, their Canadian counterparts may still be doing the hopak.

Canadian Jews benefit from Canada’s official multicultural policy in the same ways other organized ethnic groups benefit: funding for projects and institutions. Multiculturalism also helps create a social-cultural environment for the acceptance, even the celebration, of heterogeneity, an important element for a small minority, like Jews. How real this acceptance is, of course, questionable. Now that Israel and pro-Israel Jews have been targeted by significant sections of the left, attacks from the extreme right and from within sections of the Muslim community, Jews are finding that, whatever their ideological attitude toward the Jewish homeland, they have to make a decision as to whether to respond to the attacks on Israel, to participate in them (as some Jews have done) or to oppose them privately and/or publicly.

Within the multicultural mosaic, Jews are well aware that there are people who have come from cultures that have traditionally been antagonistic to Jews and that some of this antagonism has been acted out lethally. As widespread as Jews were and as unique and vulnerable as was their confined placement in Old World societies – Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Balkans and the rest of eastern Europe – there is hardly an ethnic group of European, Maghreb (North African, from Egypt to Morroco) or Yemeni origin whose history is not marked by oppression and violence against Jews. This likely contributes to the fact that, in Canada, there are consistently more hate-motivated crimes against Jews than people of most other religions or ethnic groups.

How do some Jews or our representative organizations react to other “ethnics”?

In 1997, when I was education director for a local multicultural society, I had what I thought was a good idea. That year marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Heinrich Heine, Germany’s greatest Romantic poet, whose songs, set to music by several composers, are still widely sung in Germany and elsewhere.

There is a significant German community in the Lower Mainland and I thought a German-Jewish celebration of Heine would be good for both communities. Heine, as the reader may know, formally converted to Christianity, but it didn’t help him attract clients to his law practice and, bitter, he spent the rest of his life in Paris, highly conscious of his Jewishness.

The head of Vancouver’s Goethe Institut (no longer here because of funding restraints by the German government) was enthusiastic, but I couldn’t persuade the local Jewish community. Nonetheless, a speaker came to Vancouver from the Heinrich Heine Institut in Dusseldorf, Heine’s birthplace, and I listened attentively, regretting an opportunity wasted. In response to a question I posed, he enlarged on the significance of Heine’s Jewishness on his life and work.

Had such a Heine celebration taken place it might not have improved relations between Canada’s German and Jewish communities. In late December, Tony Bergmier, speaking for the German-Canadian Congress, objected to a planned Holocaust exhibit in the Canadian Museum of Human Rights on the grounds that during and since the Second World War there had been other terrible violations, including, he pointed out, the displacement of Germans as boundaries were adjusted after the war. Jews have had related problems with the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.

Such incidents are disheartening, but accepting the status quo and its presumed extension into the future is not the only, certainly not the best, option. Generations change, people change, outlooks change. Opportunities to catalyze that process should not be ignored.

Greater Vancouver and, indeed, all of Canada’s major cities have large ethnic populations. As the reader knows, Jews and Israel are now under sustained attack. Making alliances with other communities should, I believe, be a high priority for Canada’s Jewish communities.

Perhaps a good place to begin is with Asian communities, which do not have a history of antisemitism. There was good contact with the Japanese community over the efforts of Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese vice-consul in Lithuania during the Holocaust, who saved the lives of thousands of Jews, only to be reprimanded by his own government.

Perhaps an approach to the growing Chinese population over the history of Jews in Kaifeng or Shanghai would offer another point of positive contact, or something revolving around Dr. Feng Shan Ho, the Chinese consulate general in Vienna, who also risked much to save thousands of Jews from Nazi persecution.

Some people of the German community or German departments of local universities and colleges might be involved with (regardless of a significant anniversary) a symposium on Heine as a German Jew or on Gotthold Lessing, a significant figure in German theology and philosophy, who was a close friend of Moses Mendelssohn and author of Nathan der Weise.

Our community has done some cooperative projects with other ethnic groups in the past, but we should be doing more.

Eugene Kaellis has written a novel, Making Jews, on the theme of the current basic problem of Diaspora Jewry, which is available from lulu.com. He was the education director of a local multicultural society for 10 years.

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