The federal government introduced the Canadian Multiculturalism Act in 1987. Its wording states the ideal: "to recognize all Canadians as full and equal participants in Canadian society." People's ethnic heritage and distinct cultural expression are celebrated while their citizenship within Canada is also proclaimed. The aim is to seek greater human understanding among people of different ethnic groups. This is a distinctively Canadian innovation for social equality. It remains to be seen if it will succeed beyond a single generation of good will.

Many Canadians do not think that Multiculturalism has succeeded. Many feel stuck in an ethnic group that leaves them out of the mainstream of Canadian society. Thus, the term "hyphenated Canadian" is well known. It signifies, for example, a Chinese-Canadian, whom the wider Canadian society might still regard more as Chinese than as Canadian. Those who feel most comfortable calling themselves Canadian are White people whose ancestors immigrated to Canada before 1900, usually from the United Kingdom and France, occasionally from other countries of Western Europe.

Also concerned by the term Multiculturalism are the French-speaking people who inhabit the province of Québec, the largest Canadian province in area. Of Québec's total population of about 7 million, 81.5% or 5.7 million are French-speaking (about 800,000 other French-speaking people live in all the other Canadian provinces and territories).

These people, who call themselves Québecois, think of Canada more in terms of two founding peoples, French and English. Their struggle is to maintain a balance between themselves and the rest of the country. Of course, Native people disagree with this point of view as strongly as they do with Multiculturalism. Why? Well, because the first concept (two founding peoples) entirely neglects to acknowledge the prior existence of Native people in northern North America, and the second concept (Multiculturalism) renders Native people only equal to all other cultural groups. Moreover, both concepts tend to ignore the radical distinctions among groups of Native people, who have thirty-three different languages and nearly as many different cultures.