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.