This week, the Liberal government announced expanded immigration goals. The arguments for this centre around what immigrants bring to Canada: skills, labour power, support for those about to retire, new cultural elements. But I’d like to add: It’s not just what they bring with them, it’s how they reshape what they find already here. Immigrants enrich, alter and even create our mainstream culture.

It’s been clear in the U.S. Take Jewish immigrants last century. A generation of songwriters plunged exuberantly, almost drunkenly, into their new language, delighting in rhymes and wordplay, like Yip Harburg of The Wizard of Oz. (Dorothy: Are you gonna stand around and let ’em fill us full of horror? Lion: I’d like to roar ’em down but I think I lost my roarer!)

Irving Berlin wrote God Bless America. Jewish movie producers created historical myths around figures like Abraham Lincoln. The U.S. literary canon, with its sanctified aura, was largely created by critics such as Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler and Philip Rahv. That nation-building impulse then falls away, or is handed on to other immigrants, or transforms into a darker, critical mode. No one thinks of Bob Dylan as a Jewish-American songwriter. He didn’t glory in giddy, precise rhymes, he avoided them; and as if in answer to God Bless America, there’s his acerbic With God on Our Side.

It happens in Canada, too, though sometimes in a more sober key: Mennonite writer Rudy Wiebe’s novel about Big Bear, for instance; or Riot, by Jamaican-Canadian playwright Andrew Moodie, which ends with a character saying: If you put your ear to the ground and listen very, very hard, you can hear the sound of . . . Canada.

Recently, immigrant writers here have tended to explore their previous homes, rather than Canada. But the inaugural speech of Governor-General Michaëlle Jean belongs in the nation-shaping category, especially her remarks on multiculturalism and overcoming our “solitudes.”

I’ve been wary of multiculturalism ever since it began as Pierre Trudeau’s ploy to undermine Quebec nationalists by equating them with mere ethnic groups. Still, those groups ran with the policy, making it more than an anti-Quebec tactic. But a bane of multiculturalism (and identity politics) has been reductionism: None of us is a pure anything, and few of us want to be.

Another problem has been the hiving off of cultures. With her call to break down solitudes, the new G-G sounded more sympathetic to the “hybridists,” who say: Since we’re all a mix anyway, let’s go for it. As for Quebec sovereignty, I thought she put her stress on opening up attitudes between Quebec and Canada, rather than the old debate about separation. But it was certainly no comfort to sovereigntists. And I thought it bold for a Québécoise to use a phrase from an Anglo-Canadian novel, in order to rebuke a narrow Québécois view, and then extend its application to all of us, and the world.

None of this amounted to defining or redefining Canada, which would have been presumptuous, irritating and impossible. What it did amount to is a valuable contribution to a national discussion, based on her experience as an immigrant. It’s impressive how she got to this point by being herself, and continues to do so. If that sounds trite, consider the U.S., where a woman like Hillary Clinton, who wants to rise, must abandon some of her former views and speak acceptably. Why don’t quite the same pressures exist here?

It may have to do with Quebec, which once held a conquered, dominated minority but, unlike blacks in the U.S., was geographically compact, culturally cohesive and able to mount a political challenge, including the threat of separation. That forced more dominant forces to accommodate it in significant ways. It ended up not hurting at all and bred some tolerance, too.

I don’t think there’s an essential Canada for all time. Not long ago, medicare was attacked as anti-Canadian. Official immigration policies were exclusionary and racist. Now the opposite views have become “Canadian values.” It’s an unfolding process, in which immigrants are indispensable creators, as well as valuable imports.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.