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The idea of the Canadian mosaic is that unlike the neighbor to the south Canada has never demanded assimilation into a so-called melting pot. The ideal of a harmonious Canadian mosaic hinges on the manageability of the national/linguistic divide between French Canada and the Anglophone majority in the rest of the country. But a public culture built upon a single great divide which is presumed to be bridgeable by “men of goodwill,” masks other divides and overlooks the fact that true cultural diversity is no more a feature of Canadian than it is of American society. In 1967, cultural diversity was not a mantra of Canadian public culture. The ideal of bilingualism and biculturalism was. In order to foster both, the Canadian government set up a travel program that sent groups of high school students to other regions to be hosted by local students, and the travelers themselves then did the same for a completely different group from another part of the country.
Library and Archives Canada has a collection of press clippings about the Youth Travel Program and they all conclude with a positive assessment and hope that the program will continue. I myself went on one. The most memorable part of the trip was witnessing a performance of a play written and produced for the Centennial by students from a group of towns in rural southern Manitoba. Why memorable? It was a terrible play, but in re-enacting the history of the French exploration of the New World, a Shylockean character is introduced to thwart the daring plans of the would-be explorers. However, in exploring the wilderness (the wild, the pure and the bountiful) what more appropriate impediment could there be than this quintessential urban, (the impure and sadistic/withholding) Jewish moneylender who in a Levi-Straussian sense mediates culture and nature, the familiar and the unknown?