Kim Campbell, former Prime Minister of Canada
What is the experience of your country in managing diversity?
Well, Canada has had a very interesting experience in managing diversity from two perspectives, because Canada is a country that was created by Europeans who came to a land that they like to think of as being new and unsettled but in fact had a large indigenous population.
So, one of the first challenges that has had to be managed, and that would be the one that I would say we had done least successfully, is managing the integration of an immigrant population in the first way mostly of Europeans with the needs and traditions and lifestyle and land-use priorities of an indigenous population. So, it has always been there and, as I say, most Canadians would say that it’s not the most praiseworthy or best part of our history; that we often were extremely insensitive, discriminatory, etc.
In the early 1980’s aboriginal rights were tried in the constitution and we’ve tried to work from there to define them. But also the aboriginal population of Canada is very diverse itself. I mean they were, in my own province of British Columbia there were like European nations. There were, I think five or six major groups with different languages, different traditions. They warred with one another. So, you can’t even assume, there are people of the north, which used to be called the Eskimo and the native Indians, there is a lot of variation among those groups.
So, that’s one challenge that we’ve had to deal with in trying to balance the demands of a modern industrial society with traditions that people have that are often of a previous country gathering era. How do the aboriginal people themselves balance their desire to be made closer to their culture, while at the same time being fully fledged citizens and participants in a modern world?
The other aspects of Canada’s dealing with diversity is simply that we are a country that has been largely built on immigration and in the early days that immigration had come largely from France and from Great Britain. That in itself created an interesting tension, because we have two founding language groups. So, we have had to deal with the fact that we have a very large French speaking population as well as a large English speaking population and we have dealt with this in some ways by creating a federal structure so that the problem with Quebec, for example, uses as its domestic law the European civil code approach whereas the other provinces, in their provincial law, use a more British system of common law, although we have a uniform system of law at a national level. But we’ve had to work at again making sure that Canadians who were either unilingual English speaking or unilingual French speaking could get full access to the services of the government, irrespective of their mother tongue.
So, that first establishment of the country had to deal with a profound linguistic and cultural diversity. Also religiously Quebec tended at that time to be overwhelmingly Catholic. Although there were Catholics in the rest of the country, but they tended to be more Protestant. So, there were those things.
But also, as Canada has grown, I think at the turn of the 19th to 20th century about 80 percent of the English speaking people in Canada had in fact been born in Britain. I mean so great were the waves of immigration that many people still have very close ties to Britain. That is much less the case now. I come from a family of Scottish origin, but I don’t feel at all British. The queen is the queen of Canada, quite independently from her role in the United Kingdom and Canada has taken the monarchy and used it for its own purposes. The queen’s representatives have represented people from all across the spectrum. We’ve had the current governor general of Canada is a woman of Haitian origin. Her predecessor was a woman who had been born in Hong Kong. We’ve had black, we’ve had white, we’ve had … you know, at the provincial level, but we’ve used that as an instrument of bringing our diversity together and celebrating it by bringing people from all different ethnic groups into that most prestigious position, which is to represent the queen, either at a provincial or at a national level.
But, also because we have a demand for labour, particularly since World War 2, the source of our immigration has changed dramatically. When I was a young girl most of our immigrants came from Europe and particularly after World War 2 when many people from Central and Eastern Europe and Western Europe as well were looking for new opportunities, because the countries had been badly damaged by the war and they needed new chances to drive.
But now our immigration is much more diverse. Many moved from Latin America. Of course, we’ve had large Asian immigration. The Chinese immigration started actually in the late 19th century when we were building the railway, and again, that was an experience where we were quite discriminatory against the people who came. So, Canada has become very, very diverse ethnically, religiously and we’ve had to learn to try and make first class citizens out of those who have come to be new Canadians, and that’s a challenge.
So, when you talk about the challenges of diversity, I don’t think there is any place in the world that has them anymore than Canada, both historically and in terms of what we’re dealing with today.
What would you say are the main challenges for democracy today?
I think one of the main challenges for democracy today is that simply, the nature of democracy is that the people get to make the policies and the people are not always tolerant. Diversity, if immigration changes its demography are often stressful, the populations and we’ve seen this in Europe, the growing concern about the Muslim minorities, the tensions in Holland and France and elsewhere and they are searching for policies to deal with it, and it requires people themselves to be wise, to be tolerant, to try and set some priorities.
So, I think with democracy it is a challenge of creating the legal structures that protect the rights of minorities. But that also establishes certain frameworks that give the majority population comfort and confidence. I mean, for example, I think that it is very important to be tolerant of different views, but there are some values that are not negotiable and that is sometimes where you get the tension. For example, a certain group of immigrants come from a culture where women’s rights are not respected.
In my country women’s rights are enshrined in the constitution. There can be no negotiating out of that framework and, in fact, if people feel that there is a negligence or a disdain for those aspects of our legal structure that we’ve worked very hard to create and to enshrine in constitutional principles in Canada, then they become more hostile to immigrants, and this notion that they have to accept our way of life.
Well, what is our way of life? Is our way of life our religion? No, I think we need to be tolerant about that, but a way of life really consists of the values, the things that are not negotiable, all the values that we enshrine in our law and in our constitutions. And that’s difficult, because, well societies do change and I think that my own country is dramatically enriched by the diversity of immigrants, culturally or in terms of the cuisine, and different terms of the networks that we have around the world, because we have the Diaspora populations that bring us close to other countries that we want to trade in, etc. But it is a challenge to find that balance between tolerance and welcoming of diversity and the protection of certain fundamental values that democracies are built on, rule of law, equality, protection of minorities, the stature and role of women, these kinds of things that are not negotiable, and that’s where the tensions come from.
Phone interview with Ms Kim Campbell, former Prime Minister of Canada, 25 May 2007.
Interviewer: Bénédicte Walter, International IDEA’s Acting Head of Communications.
