Courting "Our Ethnic Friends": Canadianism, Britishness, And New Canadians, 1950-1970‪.‬

ABSTRACT/RESUME A series of political memos from the 1950s and 1960s reveal in striking detail how the major political parties competed for the allegiance of ethnic minority voters. Political courtship helped integrate new Canadians into civic life, and in particular, into Canada's British parliamentary system with its voting blocs, interest groups, and networks resembling patron-client relationships. The historiography has neglected the foundational contribution of ethnic courtship to this story. In turn, a misunderstood aspect of ethnic integration has been the role of ethnic voices in the flag debate of 1964, when the country is presumed to have adopted a more "inclusive" flag. Some Anglo-Canadian nationalists assumed that immigrants and "ethnics" could not relate to Canada's Britishness. But some could, and the record reveals a complex nexus between ethnic political participation, changes in the symbolic order, and the emergence of multiculturalism.