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designed to fight against discrimination. 13 greater than the size of the English-language
Finally, let us acknowledge the efforts of a majority in Canada as a whole. To round out
significant portion of the Parti Québécois, a the picture we could add the historically sig-
14
sovereignist party, to build an inclusive nificant religious cleavage, and the increas-
Québec nationalism. ingly salient distinction between visible
Conceiving of diversity as the fact of minorities and other immigrant communities.
minorities who exist in parallel with a homo- These various axes of cleavage co-exist and
geneous national majority constitutes one often intersect in the context of a relatively
form of ‘imagined community’. How are we decentralized federal political system and on-
to interpret a conception of diversity (here going regional rivalries and alliances. This
global) which refers to the sum of national section locates Canada’s ethnic pluralism in
differences, where nations are themselves comparative perspective and illustrates the
seen as homogeneous culturally? Indeed, of connection between the main axes.
what diversity are we speaking when it is due In recent decades both the scholarly com-
to differences between national groupings, munity and the general public are becoming
which are themselves conceived of as being increasingly aware that homogeneous nation-
ethnically and culturally homogeneous? states are very much the exception on the
As Laczko now discusses, such assump- world stage, and that most states in the con-
tions of intra-national homogeneity are mis- temporary world system are in fact multilin-
leading in Canada, and of decreasing gual, multinational, and polyethnic. Indeed,
pertinence throughout the ‘developed’ world. in a world with thousands of distinct ethnic
groups and languages and fewer than 200
independent states, we should expect most
states to be heterogeneous to some extent.
CANADIAN DUALISM AND Over the past few decades several attempts
CANADA’S EVOLVING CLEAVAGES have been made to quantify the volume of
(LESLIE LACZKO) ethnic and linguistic diversity or pluralism
within states. Quantitative indices of diversity
Canada’s ethnic structure is complex and are of course fraught with many difficulties
multidimensional, and several dimensions and need to be handled and interpreted with
or axes of ethnic diversity can be distin- caution. By themselves, they do not tell us
guished. The evolving relationship between how and whether linguistic and ethnic cleav-
Aboriginal peoples or First Nations and the ages are politically significant. Still, it is
larger society, Canada’s historical and over- interesting to note that Canada’s level of
arching French-English dualism with a French- internal ethno-linguistic diversity or plural-
language sub-society centred in Québec, and ism, whether measured in the 1960s or the
its history as an immigrant-receiving society 1990s, is much higher than that which would
are often identified as three distinct axes that be expected given its high level of develop-
each have their own dynamic. This chapter ment. Canada is an exceptional case (an out-
concentrates on the second and third of these, lier, in statistical terms), in this overall inverse
and the connection between them. The lan- relationship, as are, at least in the earlier data
guage cleavage is overarching in the sense that from the 1960s and 1970s, Switzerland,
Aboriginal and immigrant ethnic minorities Belgium, and the United States (Laczko,
are to variable degrees part of the larger French 1994, 2000, 2002). These societies all display
15
and English language communities, if only for pluralism scores that are significantly above
communication purposes. Looking within the trend line, which shows the overall inverse
Québec, the three axes are present as well, relationship predicted between a country’s
except that the size of the French-language level of socio-economic development and
majority within Québec is proportionately its ethno-linguistic diversity.