Contemporary democracies live in the shadow of 9/11 and the war on terror that followed. The attacks toppled not only the twin towers in Manhattan but also established ways of thinking about the core concerns of the state. John McCoy traces the impact of the security agenda on a highly sensitive policy domain in his Protecting Multiculturalism: Muslims, Security, and Integration in Canada. His central purpose is to assess “how Canadian multiculturalism and Canadian Muslims have fared in our highly securitized contemporary climate” (3).

The scope of the book is much broader than a narrow reading of the title might suggest. Much of the text provides an overview of the evolution of conceptual and policy debates in the field of racism, multiculturalism and integration. This breadth is designed to highlight the interaction between pre-existing approaches to diversity and the security agenda. According to McCoy, existing patterns of xenoracism and multiculturalism shaped the national security responses to 9/11 across Western democracies, but the security agenda also represented a stress test of the resilience of multicultural approaches to diversity.

The book is organized in three groups of chapters. Chapters 2–4 track the evolution of the idea of race in the social sciences and introduce the concept of xenoracism, a contraction of xenophobia and racism denoting non-colour-coded racism, which is relevant here, as Muslims are highly diverse in racial, ethnic, linguistic and cultural terms. This set of chapters also introduces Canadian Muslims and explores their experiences with xenoracism. Chapters 5 and 6 concentrate on the “crisis” of multiculturalism, the shifting balance between integration and assimilation in many countries, and whether Canadian experience is exceptional in the wider global context. Chapter 7 then drills down into the security agenda and the emergency politics it has spawned. Here we learn about international approaches to security, especially the British model, which was influential in Canada. We also track the Canadian policy response: the Anti-terrorism Act (2001), with its increased powers of surveillance, arrest and detention; and the Combating Terrorism Act (2013), which reinstated provisions related to preventive arrest and investigative hearings that had lapsed under a sunset clause in 2007. Finally, chapter 8 summarizes the conclusions and provides a set of recommendations.

McCoy relies on both qualitative and quantitative evidence. The primary source is the large body of secondary literature in the field, and the book draws on the views of many leading scholars in the debates. This is supplemented with data from the Ethnic Diversity Survey (2002) and two surveys of Muslims in Canada conducted by Environics in 2011 and 2016. More importantly, the book presents original material drawn from semistructured interviews conducted between 2010 and 2017 with 23 leaders in the Canadian Muslim community, as well as a second sample of 13 policy officials from government agencies involved in immigration and multiculturalism programs. The interviews with Muslim leaders, in particular, were critical to McCoy's interpretation.

The interpretation offered by McCoy is, at heart, fundamentally optimistic about the resilience of Canadian multiculturalism and Canadian Muslims. McCoy sees Canada, in comparison with other democracies, as an outlier, still committed to the goals of multiculturalism. In his view, the celebration of diversity at the heart of the Canadian national identity has protected multiculturalism, allowing it to withstand the stress test generated by global anxieties and pressures. Canadian Muslims have also weathered the storm. “While the Canadian Muslim interviewees viewed societal-level discrimination as an issue, it was generally viewed as a secondary problem; Canadian society was seen, on the whole, as a welcoming multicultural society” (215). Moreover, his Muslim respondents were enthusiastic about Canadian multiculturalism programs as an approach to diversity.

McCoy is not blind to the dangers that remain. His Muslim interviewees were deeply troubled by the discourse and policies of the Conservative government headed by Stephen Harper and worried that Canada might not be permanently immune to nativist and racist politics. For McCoy, the biggest danger lies in the potential securitization of immigration and integration policies. “When we get right down to brass tacks, it is security, specifically the securitization of Muslim communities that is the driving force behind the assimilationism and the failure of the multiculturalism narrative in Western Europe” (210). He believes that, so far, Canadian authorities have exercised their extensive powers more cautiously than their counterparts in Britain and other democracies and that integration programs in this country are less intertwined with the security agenda than elsewhere. Nevertheless, the danger remains that the Muslim population, as a whole—rather than specific individuals—will be defined as a source of risk.

There is much to admire here. Protecting Multiculturalism provides a sophisticated overview of the conceptual and policy issues at the intersection of race, multiculturalism and security policies. It integrates understandings generated by scholars in the field with understandings drawn from lived experience by Muslim leaders. Inevitably, there are limitations. The book is clear that it does not deal fully with the distinctive experience in Quebec. In addition, critics of multiculturalism will not find a deep engagement with their contention that multiculturalism's focus on cultural inequality deflects attention from the economic inequality suffered by many racial minorities. Defenders of multiculturalism may regret the tendency to limit the assessment of multiculturalism policy to the program of grants to community groups. This tendency leads quickly to the conclusion that the multiculturalism program has been hollowed out by successive governments and that all we are left with is symbolic discourse. Maybe. However, the multicultural approach was always much broader than the grants program, and a comprehensive assessment would be more complex. For example, to what extent does the Supreme Court draw on Section 27 of the Charter—the multiculturalism clause—when ruling on cases rooted in ethnoreligious difference? What has been the impact of the multiculturalism requirement in the Broadcasting Act for the images of Canada that appear on our television screens? Given McCoy's final recommendation about the importance of education, what does current educational research say about the status of multiculturalism in the curriculum of Canadian schools?

Despite its limitations, Protecting Multiculturalism is a refreshing contribution to our understanding of diversity and multiculturalism in Canada. McCoy admits that “some will think this assessment optimistic, even wildly so” (209). Such optimism may seem unfashionable in contemporary social science, but McCoy does not flinch from his core conclusion, and his book is stronger for it. His assessment is likely to become a pole in our ongoing multiculturalism debate, and his optimism may even prove infectious.