I fully agree with Mr Wallace, and I am glad that the distinction between multiculturalism and melting pot has been made, as both are often thought to be the same.
As stated in another thread, I am an immigrant from a strongly republican country with a bloody colonialism history,which I am not proud of, where integration of immigrant has been a failure, yes, I am talking about France. However, I still love France and I hope they will improve their situation, but I am happy leaving here, in Canada. Canadian gave me so many great opportunities that won't have been possible in France, so I owe a lot to Canada.
Thus, I am always uncomfortable to challenge the multiculturalism, as I understand, is part of the Canadian values that of course I respect and do my best to integrate to, furthermore, during my enrollment, I have signed the paper stating that I comply with the multiculturalism values of CF, so I'll do.
However, I think that multiculturalism is a generous concept, an ideal, but sad to say that it has been abused and misused.
My concern: Canada is a huge country, originally built by two countries that have fight against each other for centuries and then further built by immigration from all over the world. To add to the picture, our neighbour is a superpower having an extremely strong identity that is spreading all over the world.
So we sure need ourself a strong identity on which everyone agree, and work from there. I don't see how the multiculturalism can be the foundation of a strong and unified identity and country. I do not believe that you can build a country only on mercantile relationship which I think is the real reason behind the multiculturalism adoption by the politician. We need a common background on values that are beyond a common language, but I might be too conservative and being behind the present social revolution where humans can see beyond our differences.
P.S. I still wish sometime that France had won the war against British, centuries ago, then the present language would be French, making my life easier to write the present post and the former ones too