It incorporates notions of cultural pluralism, special needs, and more recently, anti-racism as a means to change attitudes. Underlying these is the pervasive sense of cultural harmony which overlooks the prime goals of equality of opportunity and equality of condition. Culture is seen as a set of more or less immutable characteristics, attributable to different groups of people. These are used to identify people and often produce stereotypes, contrary to intention. It is a driving force animating a significant group of individuals united by common tongue and sharing the same customs, habits and experiences.
Native people are neither united by indigenous language nor customs and habits.
It is this unifying experience of conflict with and uneasy accommodation to mainstream culture that unites the minorities. Past ideological formulas for making sense of a different social environment in precolonial America or post-colonial India offer little useful guide to coping with Canadian challenges apart from giving a sense of dignity to contrast with the low status in the country of adoption. The cultural baggage of immigrants is continually examined for what is useful and meaningful in the new society and some aspects discarded as being culture-specific to another place and time. The outcome of this process amounts to a new ethnicity that has little in common with the reified notion that official multiculturalism intends to preserve nor is it identical with melting into a dominant mainstream. The extension of welfare state provisions together with the much more diverse ethnic and occupational composition of immigrants since the late 1960's have created a new ethnicity in Canada.