Tim McCulloch

The mosaic metaphor has always carried this evasion at its centre. Canadians have used it for decades to morally distinguish ourselves from Americans, and it flatters us enormously at very low intellectual cost. Americans melt people down and recast them. We are more generous, more cosmopolitan, more wise: we celebrate what people bring. The implicit corollary, never spoken, is that we place no conditions on what they bring. This makes us feel morally superior to assimilationist pressures while relieving us of the obligation to actually defend anything. Pluralism without a core is merely a smug abdication dressed as a virtue. Fault Lines has argued from the beginning that Canada’s foundational wager on pluralism, that freedom and difference can coexist, is not self-sustaining. Pluralism is an achievement that requires hard work and compromise; it is not a starting condition. It was built by institutions, habits of restraint, moral traditions, and a constitutional order that recognized the legitimacy of competing communities precisely because those communities shared enough in common to negotiate rather than annihilate. The mosaic needed mortar. It still does. Ray Pennings, the co-founder of Cardus, makes the essential point: Canada’s pluralism is one of Western tradition’s achievements, not an alternative to it. When pluralism becomes detached from any account of the common good, it becomes its own dogma, and a peculiarly weak one, because it can no longer explain why anything is unacceptable. The paradox is right there in the prime minister’s own public calendar: a society that has elevated diversity to its supreme and self-sufficient value cannot account for why the diversity of opinion that includes Jew-hatred is a problem rather than simply another mosaic tile, however discordant its colouring. Canadians themselves are not entirely sold on this conception of multiculturalism, either: polling from Research Co. finds that while 40 percent endorse the mosaic metaphor, even more (44 percent) prefer the melting pot.1 Historically, our advocacy for the trite notion of a mosaic cost us less than it does today. But decades of adherence to it have yielded real consequences, including the highest rate of antisemitic incidents in Canadian history. The communities driving a significant share of those incidents are not, in the main, importing the values Carney celebrated in Dublin. They are importing the ancient enmities that Canada’s founders understood, however imperfectly, had to be left at the door. Our immigration system—and our political class—for years lacked the vocabulary to say so, because saying so would require admitting that the mosaic has conditions. It would require treating the shared core, the mortar, as more important than any individual tile. Carney’s Dublin speech is the kind of thing a prime minister says when he wants to feel, and to make others feel, that Canada is a generous idea. His Toronto speech was the kind of thing a prime minister says when the generous idea has produced bullet holes in synagogue windows. The distance between those two speeches is the distance between Canada’s self-conception and Canada’s actual crisis. That distance will not close until we are honest about what the mosaic requires to hold together, and honest about what it cannot, and must not, accommodate.

A joint statement from Sportsnet and CBC:

Carney: Canada is a mosaic, not a melting pot. And this is the distinction that matters. Because a mosaic doesn't dissolve or blend its pieces. Each is stitched to each and all the pieces hold all. And the beauty is in the arrangement, not in the blending.

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