Mawlana Hazar Imam addressed the prestigious 10th annual LaFontaine-Baldwin Symposium in Toronto this evening. He was accompanied at the event by Prince Amyn and Prince Rahim.

“What the Canadian experience suggests to me is that identity itself can be pluralistic,” said Mawlana Hazar Imam before a packed audience at the Royal Conservatory's Telus Centre for Performance and Learning. “Honouring one's own identity need not mean rejecting others. One can embrace an ethnic or religious heritage, while also sharing a sense of national or regional pride,” explained Hazar Imam.

The theme of pluralism was well suited to a lecture named for Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin, whom Saul said “set in place everything that [is] best about Canada today.” Known as the 19th century architects of responsible government, their Great Ministry of 1848 was described by Saul as the “first democratic government of Canada.”

“It invented, really, the organised ethical idea of Canada, and the pluralistic idea of Canada,” extolled Saul – “Canada at its best.”