Helping hand for diversity

Calgary Herald

Thursday, October 26, 2006

It is a very proud day for Canada. The Aga Khan, spiritual leader of the Ismaili Muslims, has announced plans to establish the Global Centre for Pluralism in Ottawa as a tribute to Canada’s success at creating a model multicultural society that welcomes and respects diversity.

“Tolerance, openness and understanding towards other peoples’ cultures” are the words the Aga Khan used to describe the qualities that Canada can teach the rest of the world.

He is right, too, that such a centre is needed as never before in a world that seems endlessly riven down lines of ethnicity, race, culture and religion.

In the drive to develop the global village, the extraordinary diversity of people living in that village was neglected or, at the very least, took a back seat to the focus on the benefits of global trade.

Despite all the talk about our shared humanity in this global world, the inter-cultural, interfaith and inter-ethnic strife is still flourishing.

Canada, too, faces its own challenges in ensuring new immigrants do not fall prey to unhealthy ethnic isolationism that can put our shared values at risk.

The new centre, to be housed in the former Canadian War Museum building, will be a place where people can talk and work together toward goals of peace, respect for one another and pluralism. How apt then, that the War Museum is the site chosen for the new institute, whose goals reflect the ideal that wars should be relegated to history and to things of museums, for an enlightened civilization must work toward an end to conflict.

The institute’s dream of unity in diversity is being realized in Canada. It’s time to invite the rest of the war-weary world to make that dream reality.
© The Calgary Herald 2006