Some Canadians have always been considered more important than others. It’s time to end that.
By
J.J. McCullough
Global Opinions contributing columnist
June 16, 2020 at 1:17 p.m. PDT
As conversations about racism and structural inequality consume the West, I was inspired to reread a 1992 speech by Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a former prime minister of Canada. Delivered at an event hosted by the activist magazine Cité libre in a Chinese restaurant in Montreal, Trudeau’s “Egg Roll Speech” (as it was sometimes known) was initially praised as enormously powerful but is now largely forgotten. I could find no trace of it online, so I uploaded a copy myself, scanned from a physical version (the “speech that rocked the country” proclaims the cover).
At the time, Canadians were being asked to vote on a package of constitutional amendments that would have, in Trudeau’s opinion, established collective rights for certain favored groups of Canadians, thereby creating what he called a “hierarchy of categories of citizens” sorted into six distinct classes. Trudeau feared the collective rights of the favored castes would be used to undermine the individual liberties of the rest.
Though the constitutional amendments were ultimately rejected by voters, it’s not difficult to argue that Trudeau’s feared system of “six categories” of citizen gradually became established practice in Canada anyway, through subsequent legislation, court rulings and general political pandering. Any contemporary effort to redress the structural, systemic or systematic inequalities dividing Canadians today must accordingly begin by acknowledging the degree to which institutionalized privileges, attention and sympathy for some types of Canadians over others define the modern Canadian reality.
Many state-driven inequalities among Canadians are justified by a doctrine that Canada is fundamentally a coalition of three “founding peoples” — the English, the French and the aboriginals. (In his speech, Pierre Trudeau identified French Quebecers, Anglo Quebecers, French Canadians outside Quebec and aboriginal Canadians as comprising the first three classes of citizens, with the other three being broad, miscellaneous groups containing everyone else.) The “founding peoples,” by virtue of their purported historic claims to Canada and their “unique cultures” forged by that history, comprise communities whose interests government allows and encourages to take priority over groups deemed less historic or less culturally “distinct.”
Contemporary Quebec is perhaps the most overt manifestation. Regardless of the party in power, the Quebec government understands itself to be primarily governing on behalf of its French Canadian majority, with an explicit mandate to protect that community. Quebec’s current administration has accordingly cut immigration and imposed clothing prohibitions on religious minorities who seek to interact with public services — all in the name of defending a particular francophone culture assumed to have superior worth.
If such chauvinism seems narrow-minded, it’s undeniably grounded in a long tradition of cultural insularity. To cite a particularly brazen example, until a 2015 “process” of renaming began, at least 11 place names in Quebec still contained the n-word. As Rachel Zellars, a black PhD student who lobbied for the renaming, told the National Post, an obsession with making the plight of the French Canadians the central focus of Quebec politics “eclipses the stories and histories and, really, the oppression of other people, like black people, in this province.”
The same could be said of indigenous Canadians, whose evermore institutionalized status as the victims of Canadian history can similarly obscure the distinct distress of other minorities in the country.
At present, Canada — like much of the world — is ostensibly focusing its attention on the discrete phenomenon of anti-black racism and violence. Yet many Canadian politicians have nevertheless felt the need to insert references to indigenous suffering in their speeches and tweets on the subject. A hierarchy is once again implied, in which black Canadians are not understood to possess a self-evidently important place in the Canadian story and must instead be affixed and analogized to a community that does.
Lumping together distinct racialized communities likewise ignores the possibility that supposedly similar groups may in fact have problematic histories among themselves that deserve addressing. For instance, in an important recent essay on the history of African enslavement in Canada, Natasha Henry, president of the Ontario Black History Society, writes of “enslaved Africans captured as spoils of war by Indigenous allies from raids conducted in the United States and sold or gifted to their Loyalist comrades when they transported them north.”
Canada is said to be in a self-reflective mood about inequality, with politicians across the spectrum readily acknowledging that racism and bigotry are “not just American problems” (a major concession, given Canada’s often knee-jerk culture of anti-Americanism). But having the fabled “difficult conversations” about institutionalized bias should also mean a willingness to examine the degree to which Canada failed to heed Pierre Trudeau’s 1992 warning about the dangers of prioritizing certain groups over others in an increasingly diverse country.
Proper introspection must include revisiting concepts such as “founding nations,” “official language communities,” “distinct societies” and any other philosophy that implies Canadians outside a narrow trifecta of cultures are forever destined to play a supporting role in a country that’s not really theirs.
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