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Did the introduction of the Charter of Quebec Values in September 2013 signal a repudiation of Quebec's longstanding consensus on liberal-pluralism in its dominant integration model? While the Charter died as a result of the election defeat of the minority Parti Québécois government in May, 2014, its salience and impact continues to be felt, in that it has moved the normative benchmarks around ethnocultural and ethno-religious diversity and represents a qualitatively new framework for regulating the terms of belonging in Quebec. This paper, however, contends that such a reading of the legacy of the Charter misses a significant part of the story. A broader contextual overview reveals that recent events in Quebec are conditioned by variables associated with the unfinished nature of a constitutive project for national integration. Regardless of whether or not the proposed Charter signaled a permanent normative turn in Quebec, or merely an intensification and greater polarization of an interminable argument, this paper will attempt to provide some context with which to interpret this 'trial balloon' of the minority Parti Québécois government in power from 2012-2014. I argue that this short-lived incursion into more exclusionary politics are the direct result of a variety of factors that go beyond standard normative principles usually attributed to citizenship and actually reflect structural difficulties associated with Quebec's status as an unrecognized minority nation. The article will proceed to highlight the primary identity-forging initiatives undertaken by Quebec in lieu of citizenship, and conclude with some reflections on some distortions that may be attributable to a protracted, frustrated and unfinished constitutive journey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses one particular feature of Canada's accommodation of diversity -- the existence of French-language communities outside of Quebec and New Brunswick -- to show how there continues to be conceptual difficulties in reconciling Canada's many diversities. More specifically, we are concerned with conceptual ambiguities associated with the place of these minority communities in Canada's constitutive political sociology, and difficulties in promoting a coherent set of policies for their flourishing. Moreover, this paper will not simply rehash arguments about their forma and conceptual status. We are interested in illuminating a recent initiative that seeks to direct immigrants to these communities in the hope of maintaining their overall percentage of the Canadian population. This is a development that has received little attention to date from the perspective of the scholarship of multiculturalism and minority rights, and political theory more generally. We argue that the strategy to target Francophone minority communities as 'sites' of integration represents a false promise for both these communities and immigrants. This article will show that the federal framework of 'multiculturalism within a bilingual framework' obscures the realities confronting Francophone minority communities and thus their capacity to integrate newcomers, on both empirical and normative grounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a public history project conducted by the author for the Danish Canadians of Montreal in the 1990s. The Danish Canadian community expected that researching their community history would help them recover a more authentic ethnicity and shine a light on their group's unique ethnocultural practices. However, to the community's disappointment, historical research instead revealed a strong trend toward Anglo-conformity, to the point that many Danish Canadians were nearly indistinguishable in Montreal's Anglophone society. In the current climate where the concept of the ethnic mosaic is emphasized in Canada, the history project dealt a blow to their sense of identity and led them to question whether they were ever ethnic at all. In addition to examining the history of a rarely-studied group, this paper explores changing notions of what has constituted immigrant success, and looks at one group's struggle to adapt to the larger society's shifting visions and values surrounding ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an organizational analysis of the immigration and ethnic diversity debate as articulated by the Quebec government through its ministère de l'Immigration. Both structural and discursive transformations of the ministry are examined, and the two are set in the larger socio-political context of the times. The ministry mandated to regulate matters of immigration in Quebec has undergone a number of transformations throughout the thirty-four years of its history, from the ministère de l'Immigration du Québec (MIQ:1968-1981) to the ministère des Communautés culturelles et de l'Immigration (MCCI:1981-1993), to the ministère des Affaires internationales, de l'Immigration et des Communautés culturelles (MAIICC' 19931996) and finally, to the ministère des Relations avec les citoyens et de l'Immigration (MRCI:1996-). Both nominal and structural changes have marked these transformations. The thesis of this paper is that Quebec's ambivalence to immigration and diversity is reflected in, and symbolized by, the various transformations of its ministry. The paper examines the linguistic and structural nature of the changes, outlines the major issues of Quebec's immigration debate, and briefly compares the historical trajectory of Canada and Quebec's official visions of pluralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the work of the SPCUM as it tackles the on-going street gang issue in Montreal. The paper is divided into six sections, beginning with a brief description of the nature of the study and the methodology used. The second section presents the theoretical framework and the main concepts employed, namely "racialization" and the "typification/ stereotype dilemma." Section III presents the police definition of street gangs and a short history of the phenomenon. Section IV analyzes the racialization process and the significance of ethnicity for understanding street gangs, discusses "multi-ethnic" and "Quebecois" gangs, and goes on to examine the typification/stereotype dilemma faced by Montreal police officers. Police intervention strategies are outlined in section V, and finally, the paper concludes with section VI, highlighting some of the important daily challenges facing police in a multi-racial/ multi-ethnic urban centre like Montreal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how collective action and memory are constructed through the objective and subjective experiences of racism by second-generation Haitian youths in Quebec. It examines the influence of struggle, political currents and American "heroes" on the increasingly diasporic representations that these young people make of their history, their identity and their place in Quebec society. To "explain" their immediate social experience, they selectively appropriate fragments of history and memory taken from different cultural groups. This paper presents data from a sociological intervention carried out with a group of youths from Montreal-North, as well as certain elements taken from individual interviews with young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the determinants of ethno-religious intermarriage in Quebec over a century as an indication of integration in a province where minority/majority relations are distinct from the rest of Canada. Drawing on previous work by Kalmijn and others outside of Canada, we distinguish between cultural preferences and structural factors and continue a long tradition of such studies within Canada by using the manuscript censuses. We use data from 1881 (entire census), 1911 and 1941 censuses (newly available CCRI samples), to examine ethno-religious intermarriage among couples who were married at the time of the census for three successive generations thirty years apart. Using multilevel analysis we try to distinguish between the role of individual level determinants such as the ethno-religious identity, knowledge of French and English, level of education and immigrant status as well as characteristics of the areas in which these couples lived, such as type of milieu (rural and urban), sex ratio and degree of cultural diversity, separately for men and women. We confirm the importance of contextual variables both on their own and in addition to spouses' characteristics. The models are relatively stable over the entire period and point to the importance of structural factors as well as the ethnic diversity of the area at the contextual level; cultural preferences also play a role, most especially among the Jewish. British Catholics (mostly Irish) show a particularly high propensity to marry across language and religious lines, reflecting their special position in Quebec society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview of the Latin American population in Canada based on data extracted from the 2011 census and from a survey conducted in 2013 with an oversample of Latin American immigrants, as well as from other sources. It deals with the ways in which Latin Americans are categorized and how they self-identify in Canada--with the U.S. reality as a point of reference--and with a focus on Latin Americans' cultural attitudes and values in a Québec-rest of Canada comparative perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers of Bartholomew O'Brien, innkeeper and broker of silver, offer a fresh look at Montreal's Irish Catholic community in the 1840s. His interventions illustrate the way an individual navigated an "ethnicized" social network and circulated resources between the market economy and the gift economy, spheres that Ferdinand Tönnies termed the Gesellschaft and the Gemeinschaft (1887). In a city embarked on the revolution of steam power, the two circuits were braided together, and, despite the obsolescence of Tönnies' original formulation, the distinction reveals some persistent features of the invasive nature of capital and human responses to its perennial re-structuring of the urban economy. When the market faltered, each of the several ethnic communities worked to buffer its members through a personal web of trust. The evidence is based on archival sources: O'Brien's own correspondence and daybook, parish registers, and leases and loans conserved in notaries' repertories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That immigration leads to the emergence of ethnic neighborhoods in North American cities is not a new phenomenon in urban geography. New arrivals often participate in the development of local economies by creating small businesses to serve the needs of their compatriots. They also participate in the transformation of centrally located neighborhoods in large cities. The emergence of the Polish neighborhood on Roncesvalles Street in Toronto and the Jewish neighborhood of Côte-des-Neiges in Montreal exemplify this pattern. However, the importance of ethnic economies in such neighborhoods has gone largely unexplored. This paper examines the relationship between geographic location, immigrant entrepreneurs and the role of small ethnic businesses in two Canadian urban areas: Côte-des-Neiges in Montréal and Parkdale in Toronto. Data from interviews with local businesspeople in these two areas are used to examine the pertinence of the concepts of ethnic/open and ethnic/closed markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular and academic discourses perceive Quebec's approach to pluralism, called interculturalism, as being very different from Canada's multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is seen as fragmenting; interculturalism as dialogical and unifying. Yet the hallmark policies of both governments are, in fact, very similar in their approach to cultural pluralism. In policy terms, interculturalism and multiculturalism strike a similar balance between individual fights, the accommodation of cultural difference, and the promotion of social cohesion. Why, then, is there this divergence between perception and policy? Unpacking both, this paper fosters a more accurate understanding of the terms of the multiculturalism/ interculturalism debate. It argues that in this case, demographic and historical contexts as well as national mythologizing are more important in explaining popular and academic discourse than substantive policy differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the challenges ethno-religious diversity poses to urban planning practices and the role of local governments in managing diversity at the neighborhood level. In the province of Quebec, municipalities are responsible for all matters relating to urban planning, including the production of an urban plan and the adoption of legal tools (bylaws) to implement its orientations. Within this general framework, how are changing cultural and religious needs and demands accommodated? How do local social dynamics contribute to shaping municipal responses to diversity? Two case studies involving the expansion and remodeling of Hassidic synagogues in a Montreal inner city area serve to illustrate the roles of local dynamics and social players as well as municipal responses to culturally specific requests pertaining to urban planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last thirty years, Quebec, through immigration, has experienced the emergence of an increasing presence of ethnic minorities. This paper has two objectives. The first is to document historically the evolution of ethnic diversity brought about by a century of immigration. The second part attempts to answer the question, "How has ethnic diversity produced a "third force," thus provoking a redefinition of "Who is Québécois." Indeed, Quebec ethnic-based nationalism is becoming questionable in the face of increasing pluralism. Ethnic diversity is propelling both Quebec society and its polity toward a more civic-based nationalism.(n1) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]