Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
privilege and marginality in law and convention, and markedly divergent social,
economic and political life chances. While there are some scholars who project
this dismal environment into the present - with most traction in studies of
Aboriginal racialization (Razack 2002) - the hard boundaries of a plural soci-
ety have softened and merged, the tight control and surveillance keeping
people in their place are bonds that have steadily been released. Legal rights,
political enfranchisement, the accoutrements of a liberal democracy have pro-
gressively been expanded. The disappearance of enforced residential segrega-
tion and the growing incidence of intermarriage indicate more fluidity in
inter-group relations. The Government of Canada has formally apologized
in recent years to its citizens of Japanese, Chinese and South Asian ancestry for
its cruel actions - dispossession and internment, legislated exclusion, ad hoc
denial of landing rights - in the first half of the twentieth century, apologies
that provide object lessons for appropriate relations in the present. Institutional
reform has reached deeper into popular culture with anti-racist legislation and
the powerful ideological message of multiculturalism inculcated through
school curricula and civil society advancing recognition, respect and minority
rights in a culturally diverse population (Taylor 1992; Kymlicka 1995).
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Racism in Canada has not disappeared but it is publicly disapproved and
legally prohibited. Ien Ang (2001: 142) has observed that 'we should recog-
nize the difficulty of determining where racism begins and ends, and of
establishing a clear dividing line between tolerance and intolerance in a self-
declared multicultural nation', and what is true for Australia is no less true
in Canada. From large surveys, Kevin Dunn and his team conclude that
about one Australian in eight holds racist attitudes (Forrest and Dunn 2006).
But patterns are complex, sometimes well defined geographically, sometimes
more fully associated with compositional socio-economic factors. Local var-
iation and contingency seem to be dominant features. The authors acknowl-
edge that surveys are incomplete tools, with considerable likelihood of some
bias toward socially approved norms. In a fine-scaled analysis of racism in
Sydney, they also discovered that Australian-born respondents scored more
favourably than residents born in non-English speaking regions of the world
on some key attitudinal indicators of tolerance (Forrest and Dunn 2007).
Survey data suggest acceptance of immigration in Canada, with interna-
tional surveys in 2002 and 2004 indicating much higher positive responses
than in other countries; in the 2002 Pew Global Attitudes Project, 77 per-
cent of Canadian respondents considered that immigration yielded more
positive than negative outcomes, while no other nation recorded endorse-
ment of over 50 percent (Hiebert 2006). Polling data add another level of
contingency, for outcomes show fluctuating levels through time in the bal-
ance of welcoming or unwelcoming opinions. Results from annual polls
asking whether the numbers of immigrants arriving in Canada are 'too
many' or 'about the right number' have fluctuated markedly at different
