Under the cover of normalcy, on July 7, 2005, the heart of London was bombed and dozens of people were killed by young Muslim men who had grown up in the same environment as their victims. The process of acculturation — at British schools and, one presumes, local pubs or Soho restaurants — had failed, and Britons were left wondering how a cluster of radicals dedicated to terrorism and to distant ideologies could spring from the nation they all share.

In another sign that all is not well in the world’s diverse cities, four months later the outskirts of Paris went mad. On the night of October 27, French police chased a group of teenagers who had ventured out of their mostly Arab and African neighbourhood into the leafy suburb of Livry-Gargan. The pursuit turned deadly when three of the youths hid in a power-generation facility and two of them were electrocuted. Within four hours of this tragic accident, the streets of Clichy-sous-Bois (and adjacent communities) erupted in violence. In scenes reminiscent of Detroit and Los Angeles during the 1960s race riots, over 9,000 cars and 200 buildings were torched. France has been on edge ever since. An orchestrated attack by a terrorist cabal had besieged London, but in France something equally ominous had occurred: entire neighbourhoods of poor and alienated immigrants had protested their sense of isolation and disenfranchisement in a binge of wanton destruction.

Six weeks after the French riots, halfway around the world, roughly 5,000 white Australians took to the beaches of Cronulla, a suburb of Sydney, to attack people of Middle Eastern origin. Organized through text messaging and the Internet, this was a planned assault by aggrieved whites demanding, essentially, a return to Australia’s whites-only immigration policy. The country had abandoned this openly exclusionary approach to immigration in 1973 and today Australia, along with Canada, has the most aggressive per capita immigration targets in the world. Prior to last November’s outbreak of sectarian violence, Australia also had a growing international reputation for peaceful integration. The thugs who descended on Cronulla, obviously, did not endorse this national self-image.

Canada has long considered itself immune to violence rooted in ethnic divisions. By enshrining multiculturalism in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms and by promoting policies of inclusion, the argument goes, our country has created a peaceable kingdom and a model for how to manage diversity. Will Kymlicka, a Queen’s University professor of philosophy and one of Canada’s foremost authorities on multiculturalism, states that while the “actual practices of accommodation in Canada are not unique, Canada is unusual in the extent to which it has built these practices into its symbols and narratives of nationhood.”

Before the 2006 election campaign got under way in earnest, Joe Volpe, Canada’s minister of Citizenship and Immigration, sang the praises of Canadian multiculturalism, established an immigration target of 1 percent of the total population (a level equal to Australia’s and triple that of the United States), and announced a goal of attracting 340,000 immigrants per year by 2010.

With an aging workforce, declining birth rates, and concerns about retirement pensions, one might expect generalized support for increased immigration. But research conducted in 2005 by my polling and market-research firm, the Strategic Counsel, suggests that Canadians are far from sanguine about the country’s increasing divers ity. Fewer than half of those surveyed believe that Canada is currently accepting “the right amount” of immigrants, and among the remainder the overwhelming view is that we are accepting “too many” rather than “too few.” Forty percent also express the view that immigrants from some countries “make a bigger and better contribution to Canada than others.” The breakdown is disturbing: almost 80 percent claim that European immigrants make a positive contribution, the number falling to 59 percent for Asians, 45 percent for East Indians, and plummeting to 33 percent for those from the Caribbean.

In his landmark investigation, Multiculturalism: The Politics of Recognition, philosopher Charles Taylor points out that equal treatment often requires treating people in a “difference-blind fashion” — that is, “the other” must be respected in his or her historical and cultural fullness. But, when asked what the focus of multicultural policy should be, 69 percent of Canadians say immigrants should “integrate and become part of the Canadian culture,” rather than “maintain their [own] identity.” To some extent, it seems that Canadians, like their brethren in Europe, Australia, and elsewhere, have had their fill of multiculturalism and hyphenated citizenship.

While visitors often marvel at the multicultural mix evident on our city streets, there is growing evidence that Canada’s fabled mosaic is fracturing and that ethnic groups are self-segregating. In 1981, Statistics Canada identified six “ethnic enclaves” across the country, i.e., communities in which more than 30 percent of the local population consisted of a single visible minority group. According to a recent StatsCan report, titled “Visible minority neighbourhoods in Toronto, Montréal, and Vancouver,” that number had exploded to 254 ethnic enclaves by 2001. Not all of these communities are poor — for example, Richmond, British Columbia, and Markham, Ontario, whose Asian populations top 50 percent, are middle to upper-middle class — but an alarming number of them consist of people whose incomes fall far below the Canadian average. Despite good efforts and well-intentioned policies, poverty and disenfranchisement in Canada are becoming increasingly race-based.

In Toronto, after a run of black-onblack violence and the random Boxing Day murder of fifteen-year-old Jane Creba, poverty advocates and ethnocultural groups insisted that unequal access to jobs, a lack of community-based programs, and racism were plaguing the black community, especially its young men, who, seeing no future, were lashing out. While politicians treaded gingerly around the notion of racebased violence, on the streets and in homes anxious city dwellers were saying enough was enough, demanding tough justice for anyone caught with a gun, and asking whether young black men would ever be capable of integrating into mainstream society.

When, it appears, dramatically disenfranchised groups — whether they be in East London or on the periphery of Paris or in Toronto — cease to have a stake in, or feel responsible for, their country’s civic culture, they are at risk of turning to violence. Over the coming years, Canada’s ability to accommodate diversity is sure to become a central issue. As is the case in England, France, and other advanced liberal democracies, national unity in Canada is threatened by the growing atomization of our society along ethnic lines.