SOURCE: "The Center: Can it Hold?" in Books in Canada, Vol. XXIII, No. 8, November, 1994, pp. 32-3.

Below, Keefer argues against the premise of Bissoondath's Selling Illusions.

Neil Bissoondath has discovered the root of all evil in contemporary Canada: not economic collapse or the devastation of our environment, but multiculturalism. Bissoondath contends that multiculturalism has cost Canadians any fixed sense of who we collectively are by eradicating that center that we yearn to have "bind" us. Equating multiculturalism with apartheid, racialism, and ethnic ghettoization, he accuses it of destroying that unifying, Anglo-centric "old Canada" so many of us supposedly found so comforting. The only alternative to multiculturalism Bissoondath deigns to sketch out, however, is a vaguely envisioned Canada

where inherent differences and inherent similarities meld easily and where no one is alienated with hyphenation. A nation of cultural hybrids, where every individual is unique, every individual distinct. And every...