Multicultural Nationalism: Civilizing Difference, Constituting Community

Jeffrey J. Cormier is an assistant professor of sociology at the
University of Western Ontario in London. He is the author of The
Canadianization Movement: Emergence, Survival and Success.

Gerald Kernerman believes that Canadians are locked into a sterile
debate over their identity and their politics. What he calls the
“Canadian conversation”—the almost endless discussion over whether
Canadian identity is unified or diverse—forces participants on either
side to repeat standard scripts they cannot throw away. The result,
Kernerman maintains, is intellectual blindness, social exclusion, and
political paralysis.

Kernerman’s prognosis for this unfortunate situation is at the very
least novel. He maintains that the urge to participate in the Canadian
conversation, whether at former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau or
political philosophers such as James Tully, Will Kymlicka, or Charles
Taylor, means that one is already enmeshed in the polarizing oppositions
that are essential to the structure of the debate. Both sides of the
Canadian conversation are motivated by “multicultural nationalism,”
says Kernerman; in other words they are all nationalists,
multiculturalists, and liberals. The structure of the Canadian
conversation, then, forces the two sides to continually confront each
other with artificial oppositions such as equal versus differentiated,
individual rights versus collective rights, etc.

Kernerman maintains that his book, by analysing a series of government
documents, constitutional agreements, public speeches, newspaper
articles, and scholarly discussions, will “confound” and
“disrupt” the desire to have the Canadian conversation in the first
place. This may be true. However, by refusing to participate in the
conversation, Kernerman has managed to write about what people are
talking about without actually engaging in the substance of the debate.
In that sense he is more Ron MacLean than Joe Thornton.