The description struck a chord with me. As the child of two Jewish Americans of Eastern European descent, I have often looked elsewhere (to the U.S., Israel, Europe) and felt the strange arbitrariness of nationality, felt it to be very unreal indeed.

Mr. Bissoondath suggests that the unreality of our Canadianness flows from ignorance: we lack identity as a nation because we have no connection to our past. But what if, in trying to forge a deeper connection with this place, our past is not our friend, but our enemy? What if to know Canada's history - not the feel-good, heroic version, but the messy, often wrenching truth - is to know that one's inclusion in this country has only ever been skin deep?

For many Canadians, particularly those not of British or French descent, that is exactly what they would find if they looked at the nation's past, and even much of its present. Canada has forged an identity grounded in a lie. The lie holds that we possess an essential national character beyond our common history of stolen land and immigration; that we are not, in fact, a nation of proud mutts, outcasts and adventurers.

This is the lie of the "Two Founding Nations" paradigm, the one at the centre of Canada's national discourse, the one at the heart of the unity debate and the persistent squabbles about what and who is really Canadian. The late Robert F. Harney, an historian and professor of ethnic studies at the University of Toronto, wrote that in our narratives of how official multiculturalism came to be, there is, "A sense of the intrusion of the ethnic groups into an antique struggle between the real Canadians/Canadiens." French language czar, Camille Laurin summed up this phenomenon when he spoke of Canada as a "fully formed nation" which immigrants could join, but not alter.

The idea of an essential, unchanging Canada, needing protection from the intrusive, alien hordes, has been present throughout our history and has fuelled some of our most shameful national policies. The drive towards ethnic purity was behind the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923 that radically restricted Chinese immigration to Canada until 1947. For three decades, this drive caused Native children to be seized from their homes and placed in the care of white families, a practice that reached its peak in the so-called "Sixties Scoop." And it resulted in rigged medical examinations that kept many African-Americans out of Canada before World War I, in the "none is too many" policy toward Jewish refugees during the Holocaust, and in the internment of 21,000 Japanese Canadians during the Second World War.

More recent examples abound, signalling to minority Canadians that they are here only on a guest pass. It's not just Jacques Parizeau, and his revealing "we know who we are" remark on referendum night. A similar xenophobia reared its head in the tantrums thrown over the wearing of turbans in the Legion and RCMP, and, more recently, in the debate over whose god, if any, has a place in the Canadian Constitution. It's there, too, in the way we whine about the "brain drain" to the United States, while exiling countless Ph.D.'s from India and Africa to the front seat of our urban taxi cabs, refusing to recognise their credentials.

This painful history of small and large exclusions is the reason Canada lacks the common ground of "we," to use Mr. Bissoondath's term. Too often, the "we" splinters into "us" and "them" at the first sign of trouble. For the first half of this century, Canadian opinion and policies on immigration were torn between the need to populate and develop this vast country and the equally pressing need to appear to be protecting an ethnically pure Canada. Is it any wonder that many ethnic minorities, subjected to such duplicity, remain tentative about whether Canada is their true homeland?

If many Canadians feel a superficial connection to their chosen country, it may be because they have never really been invited to go deeper - to enter the closed club of essential Canadianness still largely defined by the ups and downs of Anglo-French and East-West relations. Thinking people respond to half-hearted or fair-weather inclusion the only way that makes sense: by building and defending safe, comfortable enclaves.

The true flaw of multiculturalism is not that it encourages segregation, but that it helps disguise it by allowing our political elites to point to colourful displays of officially sponsored ethnicity as evidence that we, as a nation, have outgrown our colonial mind-set. Multiculturalism is not "paying people to maintain their foreign roots," as its critics suggest, it is a pay-off: paying ethnic groups to stay out of the way. By encouraging the creation of walled-off ethnic theme parks, the gatekeepers of Canada's keep the competition occupied and protect their turf.

If official multiculturalism has failed, it is because we have tried to accomplish the impossible: to embrace diversity while clinging to old notions of ethnic superiority. As a result, multiculturalism in Canada is little more than marketing.

It needn't be so. Canada is the result of boats, not birthright. Our past is a collection of pasts; without this diversity, there is no Canada. There is no essential "Canadianness" that we have somehow misplaced, buried in our forgotten glorious past. All that is there is Britain and France - more dreams of elsewhere. This is it, right in front of us: the steady stream of immigrants who have chosen to come here and the people whose land it was before we arrived.

The possibilities for fusing a future culture out of that past are indeed both challenging and glorious. But to do so, our schools need to teach the stories of the Poles and Ukrainians who settled the Prairies, the Italians who constructed our cities, the Chinese who built the transcontinental railway, the black Loyalists who helped settle Nova Scotia, and the Japanese who developed the West Coast fisheries. These stories should not be presented as syrupy morality plays about our open doors and compassionate hearts, however. They should be told the way they actually unfolded: as the history of a country that wanted to enjoy the benefits of cheap foreign labour without being infected by the corrosive influences of "alien" cultures.