This dissertation offers an alternative lens to understand Canada’s gradual embrace of multiculturalism. Scholars have typically “worked back” from Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s famous 1971 declaration to unearth the origins of multicultural legislation, focusing on departmental policies, intense lobbying by ethnic organizations, and changing attitudes during the sixties’ container of “third force” (of neither English nor French origin) activism. This story of Canadian multiculturalism is told from the grassroots level of immigrant leisure, where a pluralistic envisioning of English Canada was foreshadowed, renegotiated, and acted out “from below.” It argues that the thousands of European immigrant men who played and watched sports on Toronto’s sport periphery were agents of change. They created a competitive model of popular multiculturalism that emphasized cultural distinctiveness during a period of rapid social and political transformation and national self-reflection. By the 1980s, the first-generation immigrants and community leaders moved this model of competitive pluralism into transnational spheres and interacted with other diasporic projects when they sent their Canadian-born children on “homeland trips” to Europe to discover their roots in the context of sport tournaments. At the same time, popular multiculturalism moved into the mainstream when the City of Toronto appropriated soccer fandom as the example for its own rebranding as a metropolis of urban harmony and conviviality. This dissertation also studies how and why one immigrant community played an outsized role in the grassroots organization of diversity. Italians were the first to establish a profitable model out of ethnic sport, and the estimated 250,000 people who celebrated unscripted on the streets of Toronto after Italy’s 1982 World Cup victory, it is argued, produced a watershed moment in the history of Canadian multiculturalism. The World Cup party inaugurated new modes of citizen participation in the public sphere, produced the narrative with which Italians formed a collective memory of their post-migration experience, and prompted mainstream political and commercial interests to represent themselves to the public in the symbols and language of multiculturalism as sport. This dissertation also shows how the movement of a male-driven, competitive pluralism to the centre, sometimes accompanied by outbursts of rough masculinities, revealed the paradoxical problem that in the new vision of inclusivity, cultural distinctiveness had to be identified, maintained, and sometimes defended to survive. / Graduate / 2019-02-05

This study examines some of the ways in which Second World War veterans helped shape Canadian society in the years after 1945 by using the life experience of one of their number, Major-General Daniel Charles Spry, as an interpretive model. Just over one million Canadian men and women re-entered civil life after their wartime military service. Representing approximately 35 per cent of Canada’s adult male population aged 25 to 49 in 1951, and found in nearly every facet of Canadian life, Second World War veterans possessed social importance that extended far beyond their experience of the Veterans Charter. Using Dan Spry’s documented thoughts and actions in war and peace, this study argues that a number of these individuals learned lessons regarding leadership, character, citizenship, and internationalism during their wartime military service and – finding them useful – applied such lessons to various aspects of their lives after the war’s end. In so doing, Second World War veterans helped to influence the character of postwar Canada’s institutions, workplaces, and the lives of many Canadians by providing societal leadership, moulding children’s character, developing future citizens, and trying to build a better world. Appreciating their varied contributions provides new insight into both veterans’ attitudes and the sort of place that Canada was after the guns fell silent in 1945.