Uneasy Partners: Multiculturalism and Rights in Canada by Janice Gross Stein, David Robertson Cameron, John Ibbitson, Will Kymlicka, John Meisel, Haroon Siddiqui, and Michael Valpy, (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007); xiii + 165 pp. Paper ISBN: 1-55458-012-9, ISBN 13: 978-1-55458-012-5. Numbers in parentheses are page references to this work, except where indicated.

Extract

This collection of essays originated in an article for the Literary Review of Canada by Janice Gross Stein, which prompted replies from two journalists, John Ibbitson and Haroon Siddiqui. The present volume contains essays by three political scientists, Stein, David Robertson Cameron, and John Meisel, three journalists, Ibbitson, Siddiqui, and Michael Valpy, and a philosopher, Will Kymlicka, with an introduction by Frank Iacobucci, former Justice of the Supreme Court. Since the volume has no editor, it is unclear who is responsible for the title, which holds out the promise of an in-depth exploration of problems in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Charter embraces both multiculturalism and rights. Are these really uneasy partners? In fact all the contributors are both pro-Charter and pro-multiculturalism. The uneasy partners turn out to be religion and equality, hardly a novel thesis. Uneasy Partners would have been much improved by the presence of anti-multiculturalists and non-liberal pro-multiculturalists. The three journalists do as much as could be expected of them; but the three political scientists do a mediocre job. When one considers how many political theorists have written on Canadian multiculturalism, surely a university press could have done a better job than this.