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Old August 18th, 2016 #1
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Post Michael Ignatieff and the Canadian Non-White Rights Revolution

We are constantly told Canada has a "distinctive" multicultural identity in the world. The constitutional recognition of multiculturalism as a "Canadian value" in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982), and the announcement in the Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1988 that the "preservation and enhancement of multiculturalism" is a vital objective of the government, are regularly invoked as legally enacted expressions of this "distinctively Canadian" identity.

It is an identity our current elites have promoted intensively since the 1980s. Many have eagerly embraced it as a solution to the much talked about ambivalence Canadians have had about their identity in the face of the American nation to the south controlling much of Canada's economy and culture.

But now, since the 1980s, we have found our identity, and, oh my, how amazingly different we are! — a country where "people of every race and ethnic background can join in social, cultural, economic and political affairs," and where "hatred or distrust toward a certain race or ethnic group...is not allowed in Canada."

Don't they know that every Western nation today claims to be a uniquely multicultural nation based strictly on civic values without any core ethnic identity; England, France, Sweden, United States, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Spain? Most of the "educated" who condescendingly pretend they are above Trump's "uneducated" supporters don't know.

The ones who know are the academics who formulated the theory that Canada is a distinctively multicultural nation that stands as a model to the rest of the world in "reconciling individual and group rights within a multinational, multilingual state."

These are the words of Michael Ignatieff, former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition from 2008 until 2011, and currently "Edward R. Murrow Chair of Press, Politics and Public Policy" at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Ignatieff made this argument in his CBC Massey Lectures in 2000 under the title "The Rights Revolution". By "rights revolution" he means a movement that "took off in the 1960s in all industrialized countries" in "women's rights, rights of gays and lesbians, aboriginal rights, children's rights, language rights, and constitutional rights" (p. 1). The struggle and recognition of these rights were hardly limited to Canada. What was particular to Canada, Ignatieff says, was the theoretical articulation and institutional application of ethnic group rights and national rights expressed, for example, in Quebec's language laws (Bill 101), in territorial aboriginal rights, and in multicultural rights for immigrant minorities.

Ignatieff identifies Will Kymlicka, "probably the world's leading authority on group rights for minorities," Charles Taylor, James Tully, Peter Russell, Stéphane Dion and Guy Laforest as the intellectuals behind this Canadian ethnic rights revolution. Emphasis on ethnic collective rights is the most important compone

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read full article at source: http://www.eurocanadian.ca/2016/08/m...evolution.html
 
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