Multiculturalism is a neologism, a term recently invented to describe something for which there was no previous satisfactory description. It was coined and developed in Canada in response to political pressure from minority cultures, especially the Ukrainians and other Slavs. The official formulation of ‘two founding nations’ (British and French) left other cultural groups feeling that they had been overlooked, despite their important presence especially in western Canada. The ‘Bi-Bi’ report (the Canadian Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism of 1970) in volume four considered ‘the contribution made by the other ethnic groups to the cultural enrichment of Canada and the measures that should be taken to safeguard that contribution’. While there would be only two official languages, multiculturalism was designed to cater for a multiplicity of other cultures, including those long-established as well as those of more recent immigrants.

From the beginning, Canadian multiculturalism accepted that cultures had relevance beyond the immigrant generation. This was not so obviously the case in Australia, where responsibility for multiculturalism has rested for all but nine of the past thirty years with the Immigration Department. The Canadian Commission researched two questions: