The thesis examines the public discourse on race, foreignness, ethnic diversity, inclusion of "new Canadians" in the Canadian national community, and the meaning of "Canadianism" during the WWII years, from 1939 to 1945, and maps the dialectic course of its construction by the Canadian mainstream intellectual and political elite (mostly Anglo-Saxon and Protestant) and the Liberal government in place.
The pre-WWII years were marked by noteworthy official disinterest in "Canadianizing" newcomers and by a latent "racialization" of diversity mostly articulated on the basis of "foreignness" or cultural "strangeness" of so-called "racial" origins of non-British and non-French immigrants. With the outset of war, the "we vs. they" polarization, until then specifically implying on the political scene the British vs. French dualism, began to refer as well to a rather different tension in power relations, generated by the "Canadian born" vs. resident "foreign born" or "immigrant" dichotomy. The meaning of this duality briefly shifted to signify the potential distinction between "loyal citizen" and "enemy alien". Fascist or communist ideological leanings and strong nationalist feelings for the fate of the embattled homelands in Europe further exasperated this tension.
In the heat of the WWII years, the Canadian government hired Tracy Philipps---an Englishman with expertise in colonial, Middle-Eastern and East-European affairs---to act as an adviser in its endeavours to secure loyalty and support for its war efforts among Canadians of continental European origin, to mitigate the adversarial relationship among various cultural groups, and to encourage faster assimilation of "new Canadians". To this end, the government set up the Committee on Cooperation in Canadian Citizenship and established the Nationalities Branch within its Department of National War Services, with Philipps as its European Adviser.
The thesis explores the subsequent changes in the discursive practice created by the mediation of different ideological approaches brought forward by Philipps, various politicians and adult educators in their search to recognize and define what constituted being a "citizen", a "foreigner"---and, most of all, a "Canadian". The debates accelerated the process of common national self-identification and the emergence of a new institution of "Canadian citizenship". The resulting new discourse affirmed the idea that Canada was a national unit with, nevertheless, an inherent diversity that can be contained and managed if that management were entrusted in the state authority as guarantor of the equality of all its citizens.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/29281 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Caccia, Ivana |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 448 p. |
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