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For instance, if you sit down inside your local Tim Hortons, you will discover that the place is carved up and colonized by different groups of people talking among themselves, oblivious to the other groups. This Balkanization is the epitome of the present segregation dilemma facing official multiculturalism.

Britain’s then-prime minister David Cameron argued in 2011 that, “under the doctrine of state multiculturalism we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream.” Germany’s chancellor and the French president have also stated that multiculturalism has failed in its stated mission and must be replaced by something yet to be formulated.

Here in Canada, the debate is buried under the weight of political correctness and electoral calculation. In an election year, any talk about tampering with immigration numbers or multiculturalism is almost equivalent to political suicide.

But when Michael Ignatieff was still a public intellectual roaming the globe, he said the following: “A multicultural Canada is a great idea in principle, but in reality it is more like a tacit contract of mutual indifference. Communities share political and geographical space, but not necessarily religious, social or moral space. We have little Hong Kongs, little Kabuls, just as we once had little Romes or little Lisbons.”

Sadly, that is exactly the opposite of what Pierre Trudeau and other well-meaning intellectuals envisioned as the future of multiculturalism.