ABSTRACT
The development of Canada’s self-image as a pluralist cultural ‘mosaic’ at first seems contradictory when compared with earlier immigration and cultural policies that centred on maintaining British cultural hegemony. In this chapter I argue that the introduction of multiculturalism was a response by the elites of Canada to a dangerous and ambiguous situation with regard to the cultural politics of difference in post-war Canada. Here I refer to the emergence of Quebec separatism and also the increased politicisation of cultural minorities. Rather than trying to erase difference and construct an imagined community based on assimilation to a singular notion of culture, the state attempted to institutionalise various forms of difference, thereby controlling access to power and simultaneously legitimating the power of the state. Further, the production of a putatively ‘pluralist’ rather than singular national identity drew on historically constituted discourses of identity discussed in the previous chapter. ‘Multiculturalism’ was developed as a mode of managing internal differences within the nation and, at the same time, created a form through which the nation could be imagined as distinct and differentiated from external others such as the United States. To understand the contradictory nature of this form of national imagining, it is revealing to look at the way cultural differences were discussed during and after the Second World War.
