Dakota Jeffrey-Petts: Repeal the Multiculturalism Act
Passed by the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney in 1988, the Act is now abused by supporters of violence and terror.
On Saturday across Canada, crowds rallied in cities for Al-Quds Day, which is seen as the biggest annual occasion for supporting Palestine. But it was far more than that. Many waved the flags of Palestine’s top patron, the Islamic Republic of Iran, which just bombed a Canadian base in Kuwait.
The Ontario provincial government had filed an injunction to try to halt the rally, but it was a last-minute, toothless action that was squashed by the courts. If the militant wing of the pro-Palestine movement has achieved anything useful in Canada, it has revealed the jarring limits of official multiculturalism.
Once again, synagogues in Toronto were fired upon this month, and Middle Eastern blood feuds played out with no real movement forming against them. Yes, politicians will condemn such attacks, and they will maybe even arrest a handful of suspects. However, those suspects are mostly being let off the hook.
Take the case of the 34-year-old man who threatened to put somebody “six feet deep” at the Eaton Centre in 2023, or others charged with crimes like mischief, harassment, and assaulting peace officers in relation to pro-Palestinian activism. Nearly all have had their charges dropped.
There are many root causes of this sorry state of affairs. On the political side, both the Liberals and the Conservatives must bear their share of the blame for indulging a reckless form of multiculturalism without any real guardrails around it.
Nobody in Ottawa seems ready to take any bold measures to address this, even the Conservatives, who passed the Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1988.
Described as an attempt at “big tent” politics by then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, it was certainly one way to out-Trudeau the elder Trudeau, court swing voters, and distinguish Canada from the rugged, assimilationist “melting pot” to our south.
Conservative governments have an unfortunate tendency to plant their own seeds of progressive social engineering, watch them grow into a strangling vine, and then stand by with a look of bewildered resentment as the Liberal Party uses that vine to hang them.
Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives codified the idea that the Canadian state should not just tolerate diversity, but actively finance, manage, and curate it. The Act was passed just prior to the 1988 election, but few would dispute the Liberal monopoly on multicultural rhetoric and organising.
Nearly four decades later, the “big tent”, and, I dare say, Canada itself, is fraying at the seams, and the Conservatives can do something about it. The Multiculturalism Act has transitioned from a polite handshake into a bureaucratic straitjacket.
One must only look at the support for the Iranian regime manifesting on our streets to see that.
To save the Canadian social contract, the modern Conservative Party must find the courage to dismantle one of the crowning policies of its predecessors. The Act, so to speak, was an original sin born of a different era.
Canada was still grappling with the fallout of the first peak of the Quebec sovereignty movement and the initial referendum less than a decade before. Mulroney’s Tories thought they could stabilise the national identity by making it “multi-faceted”.
The logic was simple: if everyone is a minority, no one is a threat.
But there is a fundamental difference between a pluralistic society, which Canada is, and a multicultural state.
A pluralistic society is a spontaneous, bottom-up phenomenon driven by individuals who bring their food, faith, and families to a new land while adopting the laws, values, and institutions of their new home.
A multicultural state, however, is a top-down project that requires a massive bureaucracy to categorise citizens, distribute grants based on ethnicity, and prioritise group rights over individual agency.
By institutionalising multiculturalism through mere procedure, the Tories inadvertently signalled that integration was a secondary concern. They created a framework in which the state’s role was no longer to help newcomers become Canadian, but to help them remain whatever they were before they arrived.
In doing so, they sowed the seeds of the very “post-national” state that Justin Trudeau now champions with such hollow pride.