Negotiating Futures: Youth, Democratic Citizenship Education, and the Multicultural Politics of Recognition in Canada

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Citizenship Education: Paradoxes, Processes, Struggles, Possibilities of Implementation at Local, National and International Levels

Proposal

Between 2015 and 2019, the Government of Canada launched a series of unprecedented youth-focused initiatives with an aim to cultivate active young citizens and create opportunities for them to drive social and political change. Notable amongst these moves were Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointing himself the Minister of Youth, the creation of a Youth Secretariat, the Prime Minister’s Youth Council, a Canada Service Corps, the development of the first-ever youth policy for Canada, and the creation of a Minister of Diversity and Inclusion and Youth. This paper examines how the use of democratic citizenship pedagogies in these new state mechanisms incorporates youth into Canada's multicultural politics of recognition and therefore serve to reauthorize historical power configurations of the settler colonial nation-state. In doing so, it considers the paradoxical ability of citizenship education to simultaneously empower and limit youth agency.

For decades, critical scholarship has identified Canada’s recognition framework of official multiculturalism as a project of white-settler nation building (Bannerji, 1995, 2000; Haque, 2010, 2012; Mackey, 2002; Thobani, 2007). Furthermore, feminist antiracist and anticolonial scholars refute claims made by Charles Taylor (1994), Axel Honneth (1995), and Will Kymlicka (1995) that inclusive recognition frameworks like multiculturalism are necessary to materialize equality and justice in diverse societies, demonstrating that in contexts of settler domination, state recognition functions as a vehicle for assigning status categories and managing access to power.
As the cornerstone document governing youth engagement initiatives by the Canadian nation-state, this paper draws on the development and content of Canada’s first national youth policy as a case study. Introduced in May 2019, Canada’s Youth Policy (CYP) is informed by a historic and rare public dialogue that engaged 5000 youth. The CYP claims to re-present the “values and priorities of young Canadians” and “create more opportunities for young people to build a strong and more inclusive Canada”. Yet, while actualizing the right of young people under Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) to be heard by adults and influence decisions that affect their lives, the CYP simultaneously appropriates youth voices to narrate the ideal young national subject within dominant discourses of official multiculturalism.

The paper uses critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2005) to review the text of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, Canada’s Youth Policy, and Building a Youth Policy for Canada - What We Heard Report. The analysis will be conducted using anti-colonial theory and feminist social epistemology. As a result, the research will highlight how democratic citizenship pedagogies to an attendant power structure but are nonetheless negotiated and contested through youth participation.

The discussion will contribute important insight into the pedagogical relationships shaping youth engagement programs, strategies for building transgenerational solidarities across difference, and situated practices of democratic citizenship education in settler-colonial societies of Western liberal democracies.

Author

• Madeleine Ross