Martin Patriquin: Fears multiculturalism will doom Canada are unwarranted

In 1994, Neil Bissoondath published Selling Illusions, an excoriation of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, which at that point was a couple decades old. Bissoondath railed against what he saw as “the superficial and the exhibitionistic” nature of one of the country’s defining policies.
The multiculturalism portrayed in Selling Illusions reduces visible minorities to cultural pastiches —“A dash of colour and the flash of the dance,” as Bissoondath puts it. In