Diversity heading down a rough road, conference told

The public school system is going to fracture. Psychological integration of people in Canada's pluralistic society will be a tough and maybe impossible goal. The sons and daughters of immigrants in particular will be resistant to integration and the defining of collective identity will be maddeningly elusive with not only Canadians, but all inhabitants of the Western democracies asking: "Who are we?"

Good question?

That's the bad news portrait of multiculturalism presented by academics and other social scientists and commentators at a four-day conference on diversity, social cohesion and citizenship put on by the Couchiching Institute on Public Affairs.

What's the good news?

As Oxford University Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan put it, multiculturalism is going to travel a bumpy road over the next two generations.

...

It's a road Canadians will survive, said Queen's University philosopher Will Kymlicka, if they understand that so-called Canadian values and pluralistic diversity are not a trade-off - you have to sacrifice one to get the other - but rather that one is the reason for the other.

So that's the good news then!!

Prof. Ramadan, who has pressed Muslims in Europe and North America to create a Westernized culture for themselves that fits the cultural framework of where they live, said the globalized world is pushing people toward a reduction of themselves, transforming the world into a small village but one paradoxically where landmarks and identities are lost.

The result is not a clash of civilizations, but a clash of perceptions among diverse peoples now living close up to one another. "No one is wrong to be scared," he said. "But you have to accept this and try to go beyond it - and respect people's fears on both sides"

Not bad!

"Let's just say we're scared of Muslim men," Prof. Macklin, University of Toronto law professor, told the conference. "Let's have a conversation about that. It may be troubling, but it's certainly better than putting it in code language."

At least a conversation ...