Speaking notes for the Honourable Jason Kenney, P.C., M.P. Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism “Good Citizenship: The Duty to Integrate” at Huron University College’s Canadian Leaders Speakers’ Series

University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario
March 18, 2009

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Thank you very much. I’m sorry for those who don’t have a place to sit but thank you for the good turn–out here and let me begin by acknowledging my colleague Ed Holder, the Member of Parliament. Thanks very much for coming out. As well Dr. Lumpkin, Dr. Akins, and distinguished faculty, the entire Huron University College community, thank you for the warm welcome.

It’s a real pleasure to be part of this Canadian Leaders’ Speakers Series, reflecting the importance of this college as a key part of the University of Western Ontario. I hope you don’t hold it against me but just this morning I was speaking at the University of Toronto. They send their regards.

I’m going to speak today about the tension between the responsibilities that I have for immigration, citizenship and multiculturalism. These are all critically important mandates for the kind of country in which we live and its future. Some would say that there’s a sort of tension between these major programs for which I’m responsible, which include the largest immigration program in the world in relative terms.

Canada accepts about a quarter of a million permanent residents each year, just a notch under one percent of our population, which makes it the largest on a per–capita basis number of permanent residents of any developed country in the world on an annualized basis.

To be even more impressive in terms of our immigration intake, last year we received the largest number of newcomers to Canada in our history – over 500,000 if we include foreign students, perhaps including some of you, temporary foreign workers and others, all of whom now have, through the Canadian Experience Class, a pathway to permanent residency.

So I’m partly responsible for that, the largest relative immigration program in the world, as well as the Citizenship Act and program which, of course, is the pathway through which people must pass to join our Canadian political community. And there’s the Multiculturalism Act and program which is the contemporary institutional expression of Canada’s long historical tradition of pluralism.

As I said, each of these responsibilities has a real bearing on what kind of country ours is and what kind of country it will become. Today I want to talk to you about precisely that question. How can a country that maintains such a high level of immigration while embracing the diversity that it brings maintain a sense of social cohesion, a common purpose and a national identity? What more can we do to strengthen the ties that bind us together as Canadians?

Now, I mentioned these remarkably high levels of immigration that we welcome to our country. One of the unique things about Canada, I believe in the developed democratic world, is that we probably have the strongest pro–immigration consensus in our political system of any comparable country.

Unlike most western European countries and arguably the United States, there is no organized political voice which is hostile in principle to immigration. I would submit that, by and large, the differences between federal political formations on immigration are differences of degree, not differences of kind.

At the same time we have this tradition, as I mentioned, of embracing diversity, grounded in our historic, I would say British liberal imperial, tradition of pluralism, and so this is the backdrop with which we face this growing diversity, a diversity which now means that nearly 50 percent of the population of our single largest city, the greater Toronto area, is made up of people who were born abroad.

This creates a certain challenge for us. While immigration obviously fuels our prosperity and is necessary for our future, in fact, within a few years we estimate that 100 percent of our labour–market growth will be because of immigration.

Notwithstanding that fact, notwithstanding the fact that we all benefit from the diversity that immigration brings, I submit that we cannot and should not be cavalier about dealing with challenges, not just the opportunities of that growing diversity.

Some sociologists have argued that there is a thickening of what some people will call ethnic enclaves in Canada, that there are large and growing communities that are arguably somewhat insular, that are not integrating with the same rapidity as in the past.

Some people pejoratively refer to enclaves as the process of “ghettoization.” In Britain they refer to them as parallel communities. I would say that parallel communities, ethnic enclaves, whatever you want to call them, are, to some extent, a natural, unavoidable and arguably even desirable part of the immigration experience as people come to an immigrant–receiving country and get settled by attaching themselves initially to communities with which they’re familiar, that provide social support and social capital.

My concern, and I think it should be a concern of all of ours, is to ensure that so–called ethnic enclaves don’t become traps preventing people from integrating into the broader Canadian society, limiting their opportunities, their economic opportunities or their social opportunities for engagement beyond the cultures with which they are familiar.

Recently a professor at Carleton University and a well known Canadian journalist, Andrew Cohen, wrote a book about this and similar subjects, about the sense of Canadian identity through Canada’s growing diversity.

He entitled it “The Unfinished Canadian,” and in it he deplores the way Canada is becoming, in the words of Yann Martel, “the greatest hotel on earth.” Cohen believes that Canada is becoming a residence of convenience that expects virtually nothing in return for one of the easiest passports in the world to acquire.

I saw an expression of this today in an article op–ed written by a Ryerson journalism student in the Waterloo Record, who said “It is a good thing if Canada does not have a specific identity. Canada is so multicultural and this prevents us from having a fixed identity and that’s a good thing.” Rudyard Griffiths, the former head of the Dominion Institute, has just published a new book, “Who We Are,” and I encourage all of you to read it. He addresses this issue of identity as well.

In it he says that our lack of identity, our lack of pride and symbols and institutions are seen as a virtue in a global society. They would tell us that a post–national identity is what we need in a post national world. One reviewer of his book has written that many see Canada as the perfect rooming house, a peaceful and accommodating post–nation state or as a soulless railway terminus, a place that demands little of its citizens.

But we need to take this metaphor of Hotel Canada very seriously, warns Rudyard Griffiths, because it’s undermining the very strengths and underpinnings that have made Canada a great country. The lack of knowledge of what has given us the country we know, he warns, is potentially disastrous. Now it’s said that civic literacy is the lifeblood of democracy. This is true for all of us who live here, including newcomers who, in the words of Mr. Griffiths, “shouldn’t be left to struggle on their own to master the civic knowledge required to participate in our democracy.”

That is why I want to argue that while we continue to embrace Canada’s best traditions of diversity and of pluralism, we should also focus on those things that unite us, not simply those that make us different. We should focus, in particular, on the political values that are grounded in our history, the values of liberal democracy rooted in British Parliamentary democracy that precisely have given us the space to accommodate such diversity.

What does this mean? Well, for me it means that our immigration program, our citizenship program, our multiculturalism program must increasingly focus on integration, on the successful and rapid integration of newcomers to Canadian society, and on a deepening understanding of the values, symbols and institutions that are rooted in our history, not just for newcomers but for all Canadians.

Perhaps some of you have seen the surveys conducted by the Dominion Institute and others which demonstrate a disturbing level of ignorance about Canada’s political institutions, symbols and history. For instance the vast majority of young Canadians can’t even identify John Macdonald as our founding Prime Minister. The majority of Canadians couldn’t identify in a recent survey Canada’s political system as being characterized as a constitutional monarchy.

The vast majority of young Canadians cannot identify the principal battles in Canada’s military history, important touch points for understanding of our history. And so this leads to a reasonable question. Are we beginning to develop a kind of historical amnesia in Canada, not just among newcomers but among the children and grandchildren of old–stock Canadians?

I would argue that if we do so, we’re losing something that could become unrecoverable.

I’ll tell you what we have done. The multiculturalism program of the 1970’s focused on what was then referred to as “song, sari and samosa” multiculturalism—that is to say, the kind of superficial cultural aspects of diversity, which is great.

My own view is that we need a multiculturalism that is relevant to today’s challenges, not those of 30 or 40 years ago. In fact, multiculturalism, as a concept in Canadian public discourse, was developed in the 1950s and 1960s by people like Paul Yuzyk, a Manitoba academic, and later a Senator appointed by John Diefenbaker, of Ukrainian origin who was the principal historian, up to that point, of the role of Canadians of Ukrainian origin in our society.

Paul Yuzyk remarked on the two–founding–nations theory of the Canadian founding and said that this seemed to leave out of the Canadian narrative about one–third of Canadians like himself who did not identify directly with either British or French ancestry. He praised the institutions and the heritage, the patrimony of the British and French founding as well as the achievements of the Aboriginal peoples who came before the European founders.

But he said we needed discourse that explains the role for those of neither British nor French origin, nor of the First Nations, and he suggested as the key for this discourse the concept of multiculturalism.

He went on to become known as the “father of multiculturalism.”

That’s really where the idea developed. In the 1970s, many have argued, it became, as I said, a celebration of the more superficial aspects of cultural diversity.

I would argue that in Canada today we don’t need the agency of the state to promote that kind of cultural diversity. It exists. It is a fact of life. It is deeply grounded in our society. I would further argue that our ethno–cultural communities are sufficiently large and robust with their own resources that they don’t need government contributions or subsidies in order to maintain diversity. It’s there and we all enjoy it.

What we need to focus on, I argue in our multiculturalism program, are the concrete challenges of integration. What does that mean? It means making sure that people who arrive in Canada are able as quickly as possible to have competency in one of our two official languages as a pathway to economic and social integration. It means that foreign–educated professionals who arrive here don’t have to struggle endlessly in survival jobs waiting as they cut through red tape for their foreign credentials to be recognized.

It means that there must be true equality of opportunity in the economic marketplace for jobs and for people regardless of their origin. It means that young people growing up will hopefully get to know their peers from across the world and will not end up being stuck in any kind of cultural enclave.

Those are the kinds of challenges I think we need to face, as well as, to be frank, the challenge of radicalization.

We’re fortunate that we have not seen too much or too many violent manifestations of radicalization in Canada, but we cannot ignore what we have seen in Europe. We cannot ignore what kind of consequences there are to allowing small minorities of extremists from whatever background to depart from the broad consensus of liberal democratic values and to embrace extremism in either its violent or non–violent incarnations as a way of effecting political change.

That’s why I think we need to focus on youth who can be at risk either to criminality or to extremism. Now that’s exactly what we have done through the multiculturalism program. We’ve changed the priorities of the program to focus on rapid pathways to integration, building bridges between communities to avoid the isolation of particular ethno–cultural communities, focusing on youth at risk and combating radicalization.

I’ll give you one example of how we’re doing this concretely. We have a program I’m really excited about that I’ve just approved which will provide an opportunity for young Canadians of Somali origin, many of whom either arrived in Canada as young children in refugee families or were born here to families in typically disadvantaged circumstances, who came to Canada from violence and strife in Somalia and who typically have grown up in difficult neighbourhoods.

What we are doing through this program now is to make it possible for many of these young people to get internships in professional offices or businesses run typically by members of the Jewish community. Now it is broader than this. It is not exclusive to Canadian Somali youth or Jewish professional offices and businesses, but those are the two communities that have created the template for this kind of bridge to a professional experience.

What a great idea this is, I think. Take a young person who maybe hasn’t had any professional opportunities, has no pre–existing network. You know, his Dad’s not a lawyer who can get a summer internship just by making a call to a friend, and hopefully this kind of program can create a pathway to beginning, developing some professional experience for a young person who might otherwise be in a situation where one could make less healthy choices.

So this is the kind of thing I’m talking about, building bridges between communities, helping people, the beginning of real economic equality of opportunity, and at the same time, in a sense indirectly, combating marginal forces of radicalization. That’s what we’ve done with the multicultural program. We want to encourage people to find other ways to build bridges of understanding between communities.

In the immigration program what we are doing is to focus increasingly on an immigration program that is aligned to Canada’s economic and labour–market needs. Some people have argued that there are recent data suggesting that new immigrants to Canada are doing less well than immigrants did 20 or 30 years ago. If so, this is probably because, to some extent, our immigration intake has been less closely aligned to our labour–market needs and so more people have arrived here, as I mentioned, and ended up finding themselves stuck in survival jobs—the famous phenomenon of the Ph.D. driving a taxi cab in Canada.

So we have taken measures to modify our immigration program and we maintain very high levels of intake. But we’ve also made it possible for people who apply through the federal skilled worker program in 38 priority occupations to get fast–tracked permanent residency in Canada. They can get a decision on their application for permanent residency within six to 12 months rather than the five to six years it was taking in that program.

We’ve also created the Canadian Experience Class which provides, as I mentioned, a pathway to permanent residency for qualified foreign students as well as qualified temporary foreign workers. Both those students and temporary workers, in a sense, have had an opportunity to get pre–integrated, to improve, if necessary, their official language skills and understand Canadian culture, labour markets and the credential–recognition process.

A foreign student who graduates from Western with a Canadian degree is going to have a much easier pathway into his or her chosen profession than say a 45–year–old foreign–educated professional who arrives here without a Canadian degree. So that’s another way that we are giving people a head start in the process of economic and social integration.

We look forward to continuing to make modifications that make our immigration program work better for newcomers and our economy.

Finally, in terms of the citizenship program, this is an area that I’m really looking forward to improving. Frankly, I would argue that it’s been an area that we’ve neglected. We tend to mark success in the Government of Canada in terms of citizenship simply by the number of new citizens that we swear in in a given year, which, on an average basis, is about 200,000 a year.

We don’t tend to measure success in the citizenship program based on how well or quickly people integrate, how much knowledge they have about Canadian political values, institutions or history.

So I’ve asked my department to do a top–to–bottom review of the citizenship program, to review the educational materials, to review and improve significantly the test that’s required of new citizens, to look at improving the language requirement as well.

I’ll give you an anecdotal example of why I’m concerned about this. Six weeks ago I was in India on an official visit. I sat in our New Delhi High Commission on a couple of immigration interviews with people who had applied for permanent residency. I met a woman there, a Canadian citizen, a resident in this country for 15 years who had been a Canadian citizen for, I think, 1 years. In her mid–30s, living in Surrey, British Columbia, she was there to make an application to sponsor her spouse to come to Canada.

This Canadian woman of Punjabi Indian origin could not conduct the immigration interview in English or French but had to conduct it through a Punjabi translator.

We have to ask ourselves, is that an isolated example? Regrettably, not isolated enough, regrettably too typical of our failure to properly give people an opportunity at integration. How can that woman really open the doors to economic opportunity, to broader social integration, if she is locked out by limited linguistic ability?

How broad, how typical is that case? It’s hard to say, but this much I can tell you. Only 20 percent of newcomers to Canada actually enroll in the free language training programs that we offer to permanent residents pre–Canadian citizenship.

We need to do more. Our government has actually tripled settlement funding for newcomers by about $1.5 billion a year over three years. We are providing more language training than ever before, more language courses, more mentorship programs, more programs of all kinds, and yet a relatively small minority of new permanent residents are taking advantage of these courses.

The one thing that we’ll hopefully be announcing this spring as a kind of pilot innovation is a way of making newcomers consumers, empowering them with something like a certificate with a value for language training where they can go and shop around.

They’re in the driver’s seat, rather than making them passive consumers of services that are offered by settlement organizations. This is one of the ways that we’re trying to empower people.

But we need to find other ways. That’s why I’m looking at ways that we can improve the language requirement for Canadian citizenship, but also to ensure that when people do take the oath they really know, they really understand, what it is they are joining in terms of the Canadian political community and the expectations and responsibilities they inherit with it.

To paraphrase former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, everyone who comes to Canada has a right to be different but a duty to integrate. Yes, we have a public responsibility to make it easier for people to integrate into our society, but people need to make an effort as well.

I believe the vast majority of newcomers to this country do so, and that’s why they succeed, but we need to help give them the tools. That is why we are looking at improvements to the citizenship program, and I’ve asked my department, in particular, to look at the example of Australia which made some recent significant improvements to their citizenship program.

One thing that Australia did, and I think Britain has recently done as well, which perhaps is worth consideration, is provide some kind of clear explanation to people before they choose to immigrate to Canada about what they can expect here in terms of our diversity, in terms of our political values, to understand that in Canada women and men are fully equal; to understand that we have respect for all Canadians regardless of race, ethnicity or religion or sexual orientation. These are rights and obligations that we all share, regardless of our own backgrounds.

In this respect, I think it’s important that we speak bluntly about the efforts of some to, in my judgment, pervert the best Canadian traditions of diversity and pluralism by importing, under cover of multiculturalism, extremist ideas. When I say extremist I mean illiberal ideas, I mean ideas about the legitimate use of violence to achieve political ends.

I’ll give you an example. I recently gave a speech in London, England at a major international conference on anti–Semitism. I said in that speech that the Government of Canada takes a zero–tolerance approach towards expression of anti–Semitism in Canada and I gave two specific examples.

I said that I had been concerned, for instance, about the statements of the former President of the Canadian Islamic Congress, Mohamed El–Masri, who said on live national television a couple of years ago that all Israeli citizens over the age of 18 are legitimate targets for elimination, for violence, for murder.

I’m not even going to get into what could underlie that kind of perspective, but to advocate, to try to legitimize the killing of a population—all Israelis over the age of 18, about 4.5 million people—is, in my judgment, beyond the pale. I happen to be a hawk on freedom of expression and we have inherited this marvelously broad British tradition of freedom of expression and thought.

But I don’t think that the organs of the Canadian state need to be used to support organizations that promote, apologize for, or make excuses for extremism or terrorism.

I similarly talked about the case of another organization whose president has called for the legalization in Canada of banned, illegal and irredeemably anti–Semitic organizations, like Hamas and Hezbollah, to be able to operate here, raise money and promote their hateful ideas.

Now my point is simply this. People are free to express their views on foreign policy, on the Middle East, to differ with in, this case, the policies of the Israeli government. They are free to say what they will within the bounds of our laws in Canada. But they shouldn’t expect that, just because they claim to represent a particular ethno–cultural community, any idea, no matter how extreme, is going to be treated, in the framework of moral relativism, as a legitimate contribution to public discourse, and that organizations like that will receive public support.

That’s why I’ve said we will not fund groups that make excuses for violence or terrorism or promote hatred. I think it’s very important, because I’ll tell you, when I made that statement about that organization, I received hundreds of letters.

I’m talking about Mr. Muammar’s Canadian Arab Federation. I received hundreds of letters and e–mails from Canadians of Arab origin saying thank you. Thank you for pointing out that this organization does not represent the vast majority of members of our communities.

I can tell you, as I meet with our diverse communities across the country, people frequently come up to me and say, please don’t allow this marginal individual or organization to claim to represent me or our broader community because they don’t. I believe that.

I think it’s important for people who have public authority and responsibility to support voices of moderation and of broadly liberal values in our ethno–cultural communities, and not allow hotheads and advocates of even non–violent extremism to dominate the discourse on behalf of certain communities.

I’ve taken a lot of criticism for taking that position but when I look at what’s happened in Europe, I think it’s the right position for Canada to take. We are proud of our long tradition of pluralism, respect for others, diversity and multiculturalism, but it does not mean that there are no limits. There are certain limits and they are defined by our deeper and best political values of respect for human dignity, the equality of men and women and of ordered liberty in our Parliamentary democracy.

So in closing, I would say that I’ve made some challenging points here. I think we have a great deal to be grateful for as Canadians, as inheritors of this incredible openness that we have, this cultural openness, this vibrant tradition and policy of immigration, this innovative concept of multiculturalism as it’s been applied in Canada.

We have a great deal to be grateful for in terms of our sense of shared citizenship and history and institutions, values and the symbols upon which it is based, but we cannot take our success for granted.

Everywhere I go across the world, my counterparts, ministers, political leaders and others ask me how is it that Canada has been so successful in reconciling differences, in managing diversity? There’s no simple answer to that question except to say that if we have been successful, we cannot take our success for granted. We Canadians are kind of modest people on the one hand. On the other, I think we sometimes throw our shoulders out of joint patting ourselves on the back.

We cannot be complacent about continuing to embrace the advantages of immigration, of cultural diversity, while also being forthright and honest with ourselves about some of the challenges that come along with the growing diversity of our Canadian community.

So thanks very much for your attention, and I hope that we’ll have a chance for questions. Thank you very much.