Canada, Citizenship Education and Multiculturalism in

Cultural diversity has been a key factor in shaping Canada and Canadians' sense of themselves from well before Canada was an independent nation and has been the central concern of citizenship education throughout Canada's history. In the first half of the 18th century, Lord Durham—a British administrator sent to investigate social unrest in the colonies of Upper and Lower Canada—reported that he found “two nations [English and French] warring in the bosom of a single state.” His proposed solution was to create political and social structures to foster the assimilation of one of those nations (the French) into the other. Although that assimilation did not occur, the view that diversity was a threat to national unity and therefore to the legitimacy of the Canadian state ...