ABSTRACT
The Canadian model of multicultural conflict resolution employs a distinction between cultural and religious tests, wherein the cultural test is reserved to a specific minority – the aboriginal peoples – and imposes quite stringent requirements in order to obtain recognition, whereas the religious test is much more open to individual peculiarities. To understand whether a common legal tradition is emerging from the various case by case approaches, and to compare the several arguments developed by judges in different Western jurisdictions appears, in fact, to be an operation essential to the elaboration of a tool to resolve multicultural conflicts. Canada, which had constitutionalized multiculturalism and indigenous cultural rights since 1982, began to actually use it in 1996. The compulsory nature of a practice is often a key element of the solution, one of the topoi, one of those recurring persuasive fixed points in the comparative case law that resolve multicultural conflicts.
