Trudeau has transformed 'White' Canada

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Canada used to be a white country. When Pierre Elliott Trudeau entered federal politics in 1965, over 98 percent of its people were of European origin, and there were laws to keep it that way: the racist 1910 Immigration Act denied entry to those who were "not suited to the climate or the customs of Canada."

Fully two-thirds of Canadians in the 1960s were descended from settlers of British or French stock, and the obsessive rivalry and suspicion between those two groups was on the verge of splitting the country apart.

And since it was the 1960s, the mainstream politics of separatism in French-speaking Quebec inevitably had a terrorist fringe that set off bombs, kidnapped and even murdered people.

Trudeau, who died on Sept. 28 at 80, suppressed the terrorism with tough and sometimes brutal tactics, but that simply opened the way for the legitimate separatists to come to power in Quebec City. By the time he finally left power in 1984 there had already been one unsuccessful referendum on Quebec's independence, and the question had come to dominate both the Quebec and the Canadian political agendas.

If that were the sum of Trudeau's achievements, his political legacy would be very modest indeed. But behind the spurious glamor of his early years in office, Trudeau was always the subtlest political thinker of his generation.

Even before he became prime minister in 1968, he took the lead in cabinet in bringing about the change in Canada's immigration policy that threw the country's doors open to the whole world.

It is hard to believe that he did not foresee the long-term implications of that. Quebec separatists certainly do not doubt that he was deliberately acting to sabotage their project of independence.

The declared reasons for scrapping the country's old "whites only" immigration policy in 1967 said nothing about this, of course. The change was justified on the practical ground that it was the only way to get enough immigrants to keep the economy going at a time when the Canadian birth rate was plummeting, and on the moral ground that racial discrimination was simply wrong. But strategically speaking, doing the right thing is also sometimes the right thing to do.

Thirty-three years after the change in immigration policy, Canada is a country transformed. For over three decades it has been taking in a relatively huge annual quota of immigrants, and some 20 percent of the country's population is now foreign-born. (Compare only 8 percent foreign-born in the United States, and 10 percent in Germany.) Moreover, a majority of Canada's recent immigrants are not from Europe.

Indeed, the origins of Canada's current immigrants almost exactly mirror the distribution of the human race around the planet. All large Canadian cities are home to dozens of different ethnic communities, and Toronto has been identified by the United Nations as the most ethnically diverse city on Earth.

This has already had the effect, in English-speaking Canada, of smothering the old British anti-French tribalism. The Loyal Orange Order, once the embodiment of militant Protestantism, no longer marches through the streets of Ontario towns. And though the corresponding anti-English tribalism is not yet fully defunct -- the Saint Jean Baptiste Society still does march in Quebec -- it is on its last legs.

Quebec has received less immigration than the other large provinces, and until the mid-1970s most immigrants who did go to Quebec joined the English-speaking minority there. But Trudeau's strategy created an insoluble dilemma for Quebec separatists.

They could either allow these immigrants to swell the English- speaking population while a low birth rate rapidly shrank the number of French-speakers -- or they could force the immigrants to become part of the French-speaking community, and in so doing dilute its ethnic purity and historical identity.

In the mid-1970s the separatists bit the bullet, and passed laws compelling immigrants to Quebec to educate their children in French. It then became a race to win a referendum on independence before demographic change transformed French-speaking Canadians into a multi-cultural society that no longer cared about that goal. It is a race that they have probably already lost.

At the end of the second failed referendum in 1995, then separatist leader Jacques Parizeau drunkenly told his heart- broken followers that they had been betrayed and beaten by "money and the ethnic vote."

The "money" part may have referred to federal spending during the referendum, or it may have been a cruder accusation of an Anglo-Jewish conspiracy, a favorite with an earlier generation of Quebec nationalists. But there is no doubt about what the "ethnic vote" referred to.

Parizeau was forced to resign the next day, but on that point he was right: it was the votes of relatively recent immigrants to Quebec that turned the tide in the referendum. What he neglected to add was that a large and growing proportion of these immigrants are "new francophones": people whose presence in the country guarantees the future of the French language, but only at the price of abandoning the separatist dream.

Several times I asked Trudeau if that outcome had been in his mind from the first. Each time, of course, he smiled and said nothing: he could never afford to admit such a thing, especially if it were true. But he was always a strategic thinker, and he is one of the very few people of whom you could truthfully say that he saved his country.