On Oct 8, 1971, then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau announced multiculturalism as an official government policy. On the 50th anniversary of the announcement, Canadian Geographic is publishing five essays that explore the theme. The series forms part of Commemorate Canada, a Canadian Heritage program to highlight significant Canadian anniversaries. It gives Canadian Geographic a chance to look at these points of history with a sometimes celebratory, sometimes critical, eye.

My father emigrated to Canada from Lebanon in December 1971, when it was on the cusp of a civil war that would eventually kill four percent of the country’s population and displace another quarter. He was 16, but by the time he could legally vote he didn’t have to think about who he’d cast his ballot for: Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the man who spritzed multiculturalism into the crisp Canadian air. Though the official policy felt fragile in those rare moments when he was called a “deport,” or when he overheard complaints of immigrants taking jobs from Canadians, you couldn’t convince Ahmed that Allan had an advantage over him.

Or that Ahmed had an advantage over our Assiniboine neighbours in Alberta. “In Canada,” my father once told me, “if you work hard you will succeed.” Asked if he thought that recent newcomers such as Syrian refugees would have the same shot at success that he had, he said that they have it even easier with so much government support; that kind of direct support didn’t exist in the early ’70s.

The lesson, as I interpreted it, was that labour was the main ingredient in a Canadian’s prosperity; it had nothing to do with race, religion or anything else.

His unshakeable faith in Canada’s multiculturalism project is common amongst his generation of Muslim immigrants. I heard it echoed often from Canadians and Americans alike when I talked to them for my book Praying to the West, for which I travelled from mosque to mosque across 10,000 kilometres in the Western hemisphere. This optimistic outlook, however, was not always shared by my dad’s generational peers who migrated in the last 20 years, and it was rarely felt by their children, my Millennial and Gen Z counterparts, even those who gained citizenship as birthright.

To us, multiculturalism is, at best, a work in progress, but less than that. It’s apparent in the word’s dual connotations, how it’s sometimes used by one side of the political spectrum to deflect attention from systemic racism, and by the other side to justify these ills. Over the last few elections, we’ve seen how “multiculturalism” is often employed as a dog-whistle to vilify our Islamic heritage, to fearmonger about the dangers of cultural practices that this policy, in their opinions, protects to the detriment of others.

At the root of these sentiments is an exaggerated focus on a religious minority born out of fear. According to 2015 and 2017 public surveys, most Canadians disapproved of the right of ultraorthodox Muslim women to wear face coverings such as a niqab in public spaces. And three in four Ontarians — living in Canada’s most diverse province — believed Muslim values are fundamentally different from their own.

Of course, religion wasn’t on père Trudeau’s mind when, on October 8, 1971, he introduced an official policy of multiculturalism with these words: “No citizen or group of citizens is other than Canadian, and all should be treated fairly.” Quebec separatism was on the mind, language and ethnicity was on the mind, but “religion” was barely an afterthought. It was only mentioned once in the ensuing parliamentary debate, shortly after lunchtime recess, and merely as linguistic flourish to the many elements of cultural diversity that endow “all Canadians with a great variety of human experience.”

Fifty years later, religion and the right of individuals to practice it in accordance with their own personal exegesis, has become synonymous with Canadian multiculturalism and the rights it protects. And Islam in particular has become a national Rorschach test about the value of Western pluralism. Depending on whom you ask, the growth of Canada’s Muslim population — from invisible and infinitesimal in 1971 to visible and influential today — is a sign of how far multiculturalism has come, how far it has to go, or that it has gone too far.

To be certain, Islam as Canada’s fastest growing religion has less to do with multiculturalism and more to do with immigration policy transformations in the 1960s. The first substantial waves of Muslim immigrants, which included my parents, indeed overlapped with multiculturalism as policy and eventually law. But their arrivals were a consequence of a new points-based system and refugee commitments replacing decades of blatantly racist rules designed to stymie immigrants of colour from becoming Canadian.