Daniel R. Meister

Daniel R. Meister is a Canadian archivist and historian whose research examines immigration, multiculturalism, racial discrimination, and whiteness in modern Canada. The Racial Mosaic: A Pre-history of Canadian Multiculturalism studies the decades before multiculturalism became federal policy and asks how earlier ideas of cultural pluralism were shaped by settler colonialism and racism. McGill-Queen’s University Press released it during 2021 within the Rethinking Canada in the World series. The book follows three influential public intellectuals: Watson Kirkconnell, Robert England, and John Murray Gibbon. Meister shows that their support for preserving selected immigrant cultures had strict racial boundaries and largely privileged European groups. His biographical method connects intellectual arguments to universities, railways, broadcasting, government programs, and public celebrations where the mosaic metaphor circulated. Meister works in archives and holds adjunct academic appointments in history and political science in New Brunswick. The Racial Mosaic therefore joins archival scholarship to a direct reconsideration of the historical assumptions beneath a familiar account of Canadian diversity.