Word: canadas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After all, as former Toronto Sun editor Barbara Amiel points out, if multiculturalism cannot work in Canada, where can it work? If it cannot work in a country as civil, decent and tolerant as Canada--a country where the majority English speakers have been extraordinarily generous in granting all kinds of cultural protections, subsidies, special rights and privileges to the linguistic minority of French Canada--then where...
...avenues to genius. But for every such cultural synergy there are 10 cases--from the Balkans to the former Soviet Union, from Africa to Asia and now to North America--of cultural explosion, where the clash of ethnicities yields weakness, conflict, division, even war. Indeed, the bitterness of French Canada's drive to amputate its century-old confederation with English Canada tells us much about the unexamined belief in the strength and beauty of the multicultural mosaic...
...their Oct. 30 referendum, half of Quebeckers--and a solid 60% of French speakers--said they want out of their partnership in a culturally diverse Canada. Why? For the answer, Americans might look no farther than Louisiana...
Which is why Quebec's referendum is not the provincial story it seems. The 60% of French-speaking Quebeckers who voted to sever their political union with bicultural Canada are a herald of the death of diversity. They are a living refutation of the warm and cozy notion, based more on hope than on history, of multicultural harmony and strength. They are a warning...
...cannot work in Canada, where the issue is the coexistence of just two (quite similar, one might note) cultures, how will it work in, say, Bosnia, with three, or India or America, with dozens? One looks at Canada and wonders whether the current naive and confident American celebration of cultural diversity--with its insistence on group rights over individual rights, sectarian history over American history, ethnic culture over a common culture--is leading us down a path from which there is no escape...