Official multiculturalism has been a success, but not in ways usually appreciated.  Official multiculturalism proved to be the death nail Anglo Canadian identity based on god, king and country.  As it stood Anglo Canadian values were not woven together by prominent national myths as in the United States and without official state sanction such an identity simply dissolved as Canada opened its borders to more and immigrants.  Only trace elements remain. 

The policy was not nearly so successful when it came to Quebec.  Quebec nationalists have for decades used to state institutions to sew together a new secular identity out the historical threads of an older catholic Quebec that modernity had unraveled.  Thankfully, the emergence of a large “ethnic” community has made Quebec nationalist identity based on blood and shared historical grievances into an anachronism.  Perhaps with help of Harper, the sovereigntists dream may very well be realized, but it will not be the Quebec Lévesque wanted.

Official multiculturalism has done something else.  It has severed as an anticoagulant, preventing a crust from forming on top of the Canadian melting pot.  Canadian identity is, as it should be, a work in progress.  There is no Canadian dream as there is an American dream.  We are not limited that way.  We do not believe in passing down a script of what it means to be Canadian down from one generation to the next.  We leave it up to each generation to decide who they are through existential engagement. The process only allows a generation to do decide who they were by retrospectively looking back; for Canadians as for Hegel, the Owl of Minerva only flies at night.  For those who are still the sunshine of their lives, they simply say want they know they are not, viz., Americans.

If there is a downside of official multiculturalism it is this: it has helped encouraged certain forms of ethnic essentialism.  Cultural traditions are not something that can be boxed away and put in a museum.  Cultural traditions are by products of a great interplay of forces (political, social, and economic) and it is these forces that give the traditions their meaning.  Take the Hindu prohibition against killing cattle. Taken alone the prohibition seems strange.  However, the important role the cow has played, and indeed in some parts of India continues to play in the lives of peasants, such a prohibition becomes intelligible.  (Cow dung was important source of fuel and building material.  Cattle were used to plow fields and of course cows are source of milk.)  Removed from social-economic body, these traditions harden and eventually die.