Diversity Our Strength

Toronto's first motto was "Industry, Intelligence, Integrity." The city's first mayor, William Lyon Mackenzie, a guy who pretty much had these three qualities in droves, came up with it. He'd previously run a newspaper highly critical of the ruling establishment, became a successful elected representative, and went on to lead a whole-ass rebellion against the British colonial government in the years after his mayoralty.

Anyway, since 1998 the city's motto is "Diversity Our Strength," from when the near-in suburbs amalgamated into the city. But the concept has shown up more than once in Canadian history.

As diversity has gone from a mostly agreed-upon good thing to more of a dog whistle for the reactionaries and revanchists, I've listened a little more closely when I come across it. To that end, I want to share this quote from 1865, as legislators debated the merits of a potential Confederation that would finally be achieved a couple years later.

George-Étienne Cartier [Montreal East, Attorney-General East]—The next question to be considered, therefore, by those who had set to work to discover a solution of the difficulties under which we had laboured was; what was the best and most practicable mode of bringing the provinces together, so that particular rights and interests should be properly guarded and protected? No other scheme presented itself but the Federation system, and that was the project which now recommended itself to the Parliament of Canada. Some parties—through the press and by other modes, pretended that it was impossible to carry out Federation, on account of the differences of races and religions. Those who took this view of the question were in error. It was just the reverse. It was precisely on account of the variety of races, local interests, etc. that the Federation system ought to be resorted to, and would be found to work well.

(Province of Canada, Legislative Assembly, Parliamentary Debates on the Subject of the Confederation of the British North America Provinces, 8th Parl, 3rd Sess, 7 February 1865; emphasis added.)

Cartier had also spent part of the late 1830s in exile for his role in Lower Canada's rebellion against the colonial government, just like William Lyon Mackenzie did. Both men eventually returned to Canada and went on to serve in Parliament. Mackenzie died a few years before Confederation, while Cartier became its 'Father.'

This quote is an unexpectedly resonant prelude to what became Toronto's official motto more than a century later. True then and true now, I say.