The world at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century is much different from the world at the end of the 1960s, the era when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau promoted Canada’s policy of multiculturalism.
In The Muddle of Multiculturalism author Salim Mansur examines the impact of the policy.
He points out the promises of the earlier times have been severely shaken in the last 40 years. Mansur says, “The cheerful optimism of the centenary year has been jolted by the politics of separatism in Quebec, by the demographic changes through immigration in the main urban centres, by the forces of globalization and free trade agreements, and by the insidious nature of security threats from international terrorism _ in particular, radical Islam or Islamism _ to an open, liberal, democratic society. To those forces have been added the economic uncertainties of a global recession that came quite unannounced in the late summer of 2008.”
Salim Mansur is an Associate Professor in the faculty of social sciences at the University of Western Ontario, and teaches in the department of political science. He is the author of Islam’s Predicament: Perspectives of a Dissident Muslim and co-editor of The Indira-Rajiv Years: the Indian Economy and Polity 1966-1991 and has published widely in academic journals such as Jerusalem Quarterly, The Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Arab Studies Quarterly, and Middle East Quarterly.
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