Mending or Patching Over Inequality? The Substance of Multiculturalism under Canada’s Liberal Government Since 2015

Under Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party, in power since 2015, Canada did not make an unambiguous turn to the left. Rather, Liberal policies in the realms of (1) multiculturalism, (2) immigration, including temporary migration, (3) refugee and asylum seekers, as well as (4) naturalization and citizenship are clearly located at Canada’s neoliberal settler colonial centre where multiculturalism forms a significant part of the country’s ‘common sense’ values and hegemonic ideology alongside intensifying social relations of inequality in practice. For each realm, we establish a benchmark by summarizing policies under the Harper Conservatives (2006–2015). We then detail continuity and change under the Trudeau Liberals. The latter rekindled the social imaginary of an ‘open door’ politics and multicultural accommodation, but their immigration, citizenship and even refugee policies continue to favour individuals with capital and human capital while ignoring classist, racist, and gendered consequences. While the Conservatives strove to compensate for neoliberalism’s consequences—loss of solidarity, increase of social inequality—by means of a rhetorical re-communitarization of citizenship, the Liberals engage in discourses of diversity in lieu of ‘substantive multiculturalism’ as tool for redressing market-based inequalities through the extension of civil, political and social rights.