Multiculturalism within a bilingual framework: language and the racial ordering of difference and belonging in Canada

This thesis examines the emergence of "multiculturalism within a bilingual framework" as the national formulation for the racial ordering of difference and belonging through language. As the 1960's began, a confluence of events resulted in challenges to the existing Anglo-Celtic dominant national narrative of belonging, and the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963-1970) became the "apparatus" through which the federal government addressed these contestations. This thesis argues that at this particular historical juncture, the need to rearticulate the formulation for nation building and national belonging meant a decisive shift onto the terrain of language and culture to organize and maintain a white settler hegemony while also disavowing racial and ethnic exclusions. Archival records and Commission reports reveal the conflicts and contestations which underlay the emergence of this ostensibly seamless linguistic and cultural policy of "multiculturalism within a bilingual framework" as written through the Official Languages Act (1969) and the Multiculturalism Policy (1971). The emergence of these two defining legislative texts from the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism required the elision and erasure of substantive contestation from both Aboriginal communities and "Other ethnic groups" (which is how non-French and non-English immigrant groups were defined throughout the inquiry) to the dominance of the terms of reference which centred the "two founding races", the French and English, over the both the Other ethnic and Aboriginal groups. In the archival records of the inquiry hearings, it is possible to trace a genealogy of the eventual erasure of Aboriginal groups' claims and the muting of other ethnic groups demands culminating in the publication of the final reports. The shift from overt racial distinctions between founding and other ethnic groups onto the terrain of language and culture meant that racial exclusions could be disavowed as they were smuggled back in through the contradictory operation of language and culture. Furthermore, by fixing a narrow definition of "multicultural" and "integration" in federal legislation, claims for substantive and collective forms of recognition from the State for other ethnic groups could be limited. Alongside the concurrent changes to immigration legislation which were also taking place in the 1960's, language and culture are mobilized through the national formulation of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework in order to incorporate subjects into the contemporary racialized hierarchy of belonging and citizenship rights.