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 As an alternative to multiculturalism, others have pushed the concept of interculturalism, which he describes as striving for a proper balance between participation in a common culture and retaining individual expressions of diversity.
The International Symposium on Interculturalism is to hash out strategies for grappling with increasing cultural diversity in Europe, Quebec and the rest of Canada. A recent poll shows that many people in this province don’t understand the term "interculturalism."
Photograph by: Allen McInnis, Gazette files
MONTREAL - What's in a name? Is interculturalism just a new, more acceptable label for multiculturalism?
Or is it a different animal? The ambiguity hovers over an international symposium on interculturalism that opens Wednesday evening at the Bibliothèque nationale.
Organized by Gérard Bouchard, the Chicoutimi history professor who co-chaired the 2007-08 Bouchard-Taylor Commission on accommodation of minorities, the threeday meeting will hash out strategies for grappling with increasing cultural diversity in Europe, Quebec and the rest of Canada.
"Multiculturalism has been criticized. It has been rejected. There has been a lot of noise by Angela Merkel, by David Cameron, by Sarkozy, saying multiculturalism is a failure," said Peter Leuprecht, director of the Montreal Institute of International Studies and law professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
But Leuprecht, an international human-rights expert and former deputy secretary-general of the Council of Europe, said the recent attacks by the German, British and French leaders boil down to a backlash against today's pluralistic societies.
"For me, a multicultural society is just a fact - it's not an ideology," he said.
And the differences between interculturalism and multiculturalism have been greatly exaggerated, he added.
"To play Quebec interculturalism against Canadian multiculturalism, I think it's pretty artificial," said Leuprecht, who will chair a session Thursday on different approaches to integrating minorities in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
In fact, interculturalism is just another way of saying that society should accept cultural diversity while upholding commonly held values, he said.
"The main thing is to build a harmonious society where discrimination is reduced to a minimum," Leuprecht said.
The distinction between multiculturalism and interculturalism is not obvious to the average Quebecer, either, according to a recent survey for the Association of Canadian Studies.
Fifty-three per cent of Quebecers are unclear on the difference between the two concepts, said the poll by Léger Marketing.
The poll also suggested that multiculturalism is not as unpopular in Quebec as is generally assumed. Threequarters of respondents agreed that the Quebec government should support the preservation and enhancement of Quebecers' multicultural heritage.
The pollster questioned 1,000 Quebecers on the Internet May 4-6. An equivalent telephone survey would have a margin of error of 3.9 points, 19 times out of 20.
Bouchard, however, maintains that interculturalism differs from multiculturalism in that it strikes a balance between the rights of Quebec's French-speaking majority and those of other groups, including anglophones and immigrants.
Interculturalism emphasizes integration and "strives for a proper balance between participation in a common public culture and individuals' commitments - their expressions of diversity," Bouchard and three other experts wrote in The Gazette in a lead-up to the symposium.
Bouchard says that despite his $5-million commission, which held hearings across the province, Quebecers still need guidelines on how to manage diversity - especially the rights of religious minorities.
Quebec has taken a harder line on religious accommodation than other Canadian jurisdictions.
It has tabled legislation to ban face veils worn by some Muslim women from government offices and other public spaces such as schools and has barred Sikhs wearing a kirpan, or ceremonial dagger, from the National Assembly.
The sentiment that religious rights should take a back seat to other rights, such as equality for women, alarms Leuprecht. "Once you start saying that some rights are more important than others, it's quite dangerous," he said.
In fact, much of the recent criticism aimed at multiculturalism in Europe is a thinly disguised rejection of cultural diversity, he said.
"You have a questioning of pluralism," he said.
"We have to clarify what we mean by integration. It can't possibly mean assimilation," he added.
Stephan Reichhold, director of a coalition of groups serving refugees and immigrants, emphasized that interculturalism must be a two-way street.
Much has been said on the need for immigrants to adapt to Quebec culture, but little has been done to help newcomers integrate, said Reichhold, who heads the Table de concertation des organismes au service des personnes réfugiées et immigrantes.
For example, Quebec has created numerous pamphlets, guidebooks, Web pages and information sessions to induce immigrants to adopt Quebec values, but has not ended widespread discrimination against minorities in the workplace, he noted.
"The message we are sending to immigrants is not very clear," Reichhold said. "There is a lot of prejudice and a lot of incomprehension."
The International Symposium on Interculturalism opens Wednesday at 6 p.m. at the Grande Bibliothèque, 475 de Maisonneuve Blvd. E. It continues Thursday and Friday at the Université du Québec à Montréal's Sherbrooke building, 200 Sherbrooke St. W. Speakers include Gabriella Battaini-Dragoni of the Council of Europe, Quebec Immigration Minister Kathleen Weil and International Relations Minister Monique Gagnon-Tremblay. Admission is free but people must first register online.
For information on the conference, please visit
Read more at source
The Gazette May 27, 2011
A recent poll found that more than half of Quebecers are unclear on the difference between “multiculturalism” and “interculturalism.” For this they can be readily excused.
What difference there is between them is mostly semantic. In practice they amount to much the same thing.
But that hasn’t stopped Quebec’s chattering class from indulging in a furious debate on the subject in recent years, one that spilled into an international symposium on interculturalism held in Montreal this week organized by historian Gérard Bouchard, who co-chaired the Bouchard-Taylor Commission on accommodation of minorities in the province.
Multiculturalism has been a dirty word in the Quebec nationalist lexicon ever since it was propagated as a Canadian policy by Pierre Trudeau in the 1970s. It was intended essentially to aid the accommodation of Canada’s increasing ethnic diversity by recognizing the value of cultural traits of different immigrant groups. It has since been attacked – and misrepresented – by Quebec nationalists (who tend to loathe Trudeau and all his works largely for his success in frustrating the separatist movement) as an attempt to cast francophone Quebecers as just another ethnic group in Canada, on a par with Canadians of Ukrainian, Chinese, Italian or Arab background.
As an alternative to multiculturalism, Bouchard and others have pushed the concept of interculturalism, which he describes as striving for a proper balance between participation in a common culture and retaining individual expressions of diversity. But multiculturalism in no way seeks to discourage integration, as is attested by the fact that the rest of Canada, where multiculturalism is in force and there is no semantic squabble on the subject, does a better job than Quebec of integrating immigrants into the social mainstream.
The definitive take on the controversy at the symposium came from human-rights expert Peter Leuprecht, director of the Montreal Institute of International Studies and a law professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He said differences between multiculturalism and interculturalism are greatly exaggerated and playing them against each other is a sterile exercise. Multiculturalism, he rightly noted, is not so much a policy as a simply a fact of our ethnically pluralistic society.
Another speaker, Stephan Reichhold, director of a coalition of Quebec groups serving refugees and immigrants, said that while much has been said by the champions of interculturalism about the need for immigrants to adapt to Quebec culture, relatively little has been done to help newcomers integrate. Here, in fact, is the nub of the problem in this province. It’s not a case of multiculturalism discouraging immigrants from integrating into the established cultural mainstream, but reluctance in the mainstream to taking them in.
This is particularly notable in the employment record of Quebec’s public institutions, which should be in the vanguard of integrating newcomers. The provincial civil service discriminates against even long-established minority groups, anglos and aboriginals, along with newcomers. While anglos, aboriginals and other ethnic minorities account for roughly 20 per cent of the population, they account for only six per cent of provincial civil servants. This is still a third shy of the nine-per-cent goal set 30 years ago when the government launched a supposed drive to increase their numbers from what was then less than two per cent.
In multi-ethnic, multicultural, intercultural – call it what you will – Montreal, the situation is little better, as city-council opposition leader Louise Harel pointed out this week. While ethnic and visible-minority persons account for 30 per cent of the city’s population, they hold a mere 13 per cent of the positions in the city’s public service – and this despite the fact that 51 per cent of immigrants who settle in the metropolis have university degrees.
Obviously the problem is not one of qualifications or willingness to work. It is more a case of the door to integration being shut in their faces. It is this travesty that the chattering class should be confronting, rather than pointless quibbling about pinhead differences between multiculturalism and interculturalism.
Read more at source
Multicultural vs. intercultural: a superficial exercise in branding
By JACK JEDWAB, The Gazette March 8, 2011
In Canada there are legitimate debates around the message of multiculturalism and government policies aimed at responding to the ethnic, racial and religious diversity of the population. Critics and supporters of multiculturalism have raised concerns about whether some expressions of religious identity conflict with gender equality. At times these issues can be complex, but it is important to avoid generalizations about the preservation of minority cultures that purportedly prevent the integration of immigrants.
Immigrants and their children can maintain their customs and traditions while integrating into society: that idea underlies both the message and the policy of multiculturalism. But some critics prefer attacking multiculturalism to debating matters of religious identity from the perspective of fundamental freedoms as prescribed in the Quebec and Canadian Charter of Rights. CharlesPhillippe Courtois (Opinion, March 1) insists that "the decision allowing kirpans in Quebec schools was based on Article 27 of the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights in which "the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians is entrenched." However, nowhere in the Supreme Court of Canada judgment on the kirpan in schools (the 2006 Multani case) is there a reference to that article of the Charter. Rather, the judges wrote that "the court does not at the outset have to reconcile two constitutional rights, as only freedom of religion is in issue here." The judges declared that the decision prohibiting Gurbaj Singh Multani from wearing his kirpan to school infringed his freedom of religion.
Courtois rightly points out that several Quebec political leaders have publicly denounced "federal" multicultural policy. However, they have not always practised what they preached. Under Premier René Lévesque in 1981, cultural communities minister Gérald Godin introduced an action plan entitled "Many Ways of Being a Quebecer." One of its objectives was to "assure the preservation and development of cultural communities and their specific characteristics."
Does the Canadian policy of multiculturalism impede immigrant integration? Not according to a 2011 international study sponsored by the European Commission, where Canada ranked third among 29 countries for the strength of its integration policies. Courtois insists that Canada's multicultural policy is seen as weakening Quebec's message of integration. However, he provides no evidence in support of that claim other than a poll published in La Presse on Feb. 14 that found that 79 per cent of Quebecers approve of Bill 101 and 66 per cent see multiculturalism as a threat to the future of French in Quebec. The survey merely reminds us that many francophones believe that the ethnic and linguistic diversity of the population is a threat to the French language. Federal multicultural policy and the Canadian Charter's article on multiculturalism have not affected either the objective or implementation of Bill 101.
Scholar Gérard Bouchard offers a more serious challenge to "federal" multicultural policy (Opinion, March 2). Along with other academics, he contends that interculturalism is Quebecers' preferred alternative to multiculturalism. Bouchard et al. imply that Canadian multicultural policy detracts from the necessary focus on integration. Yet the federal policy states explicitly that "Canada is committed to reaching out to Canadians and newcomers and is developing lasting relationships with ethnic and religious communities in Canada. It encourages these communities to participate fully in society by enhancing their level of economic, social, and cultural integration." Bouchard et al.'s definition of interculturalism as "managing integration in pluricultural societies or nations while respecting diversity" sounds strikingly similar to the way the federal government describes multiculturalism. Divergence appears around the idea that Canadian multiculturalism does not acknowledge the existence of official or majority cultures. But the presence of federal multiculturalism did not prevent federal parliamentarians from voting a resolution in the House of Commons recognizing that "Québécois" form a nation within a united Canada. It's true that when multiculturalism was first introduced in 1971, prime minister Pierre Trudeau felt that legislating official cultures risked excluding those that were not part of one of the majority cultures. Indeed, were Quebec to recognize in law the "majority culture" there is a serious risk that many would feel "officially" excluded.
The real question is whether Quebecers understand the meaning of interculturalism beyond the legitimate objective of promoting cultural exchange and interaction between majority and minority cultures - something that surveys indicate is enthusiastically endorsed by supporters of multiculturalism. Critics of Canadian multiculturalism often appear as though they have not read the federal policy. Without comparing federal multicultural practices with what Quebec does in this area, replacing the term multiculturalism with interculturalism seems little more than a superficial exercise in rebranding.
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