Lance Roberts and Rodney Clifton (1981) in their article 'Exploring the Ideology of Canadian Multiculturalism' correctly point out that Howard Brotz's (1980) juxtaposition of 'culture' and 'civilization,' while novel, misses the important distinction between 'culture' and 'social structure'. However, Roberts and Clifton themselves do not adequately portray the structural realities of Canadian multiculturalism which they hold to be so crucial. Critical treatises on the concept and policy of multiculturalism, such as those by Roberts and Clifton and Brotz, are long overdue. The Canadian policy on multiculturalism is indeed muddled, and it is so because it was born of political expendiency, not clear thinking. While agreeing somewhat with the general thrust of the Roberts and Clifton critique of Canadian multicultural policy (e.g., that it disregards the structural components of ethnicity), it appears to me that they may have underestimated the degree of 'structural completeness' of Canadian ethnic communities as well as their compatibility with mainstream modern industrial society. Elsewhere, one of the authors (Roberts and Boldt, 1979), in a refreshing treatment of the issue of social structure, has pointed out that merely counting the number of so-called ethnic institutions which an ethnic community can boast ignores the fact that to serve as effective instruments of boundary maintenance, these institutions must be of a certain quality. The idea is that structural completeness is dependent not only upon the number of ethnic institutions which exist but upon the 'tightness' of these structures as well. The argument, which is repeated in the Roberts and Clifton article, is that whatever ethnic institutions exist in Canada tolerate such a range of behavior in their members (i.e., they are 'loose') that they are ineffective guides to individual conduct and cannot prevent cultural assimilation. This conclusion is unconvincing, however, in that characteristically institutions in modern pluralist societies, such as Canada, are 'loose' in the sense that they do not define the precise content of behavior but rather provide general behavioral guidelines. That ethnic institutions should also be 'loose' in the same way is not surprising. Furthermore, one should expect that these ethnic institutions would function as well as any other institutional structures in a pluralist society. Exactly 'how' these institutions work to ensure the maintenance of ethnic cultural distinctiveness is beyond the scope of this discussion, but one is referred to Breton (1964) for explication of the processes involved. In any event, the personal choice allowed to individuals in these circumstances does not serve to somehow eliminate the collective identity of the groups involved. At this point it should be noted that Roberts and Clifton's references to Francophones, native Indians or even Hutterites as 'ethnic groups' are misleading. French Canadians usually are not considered and do not consider themselves to be 'ethnics' even in minority situations; Canada's aboriginal peoples are qualitatively different from 'immigrant' ethnic groups; and the Hutterites are perhaps better understood as an extremist religious sect rather than as an exemplar of Canadian ethnic groups. It may be argued however, as Roberts and Clifton apparently do, that Hutterites represent the best empirical approximation of an 'ideal case' among Canadian ethnic groups resisting assimilation. The 'extremist' nature of this group, then, is seen to vividly provide social observers with valuable organizational lessons as to how all groups genuinely wishing to resist assimilation must be. Yet this assertion misconstrues the very nature of ethnic communities in Canada.