Why is Canada botching the Great War centenary? – Granatstein

2014/04/22 1 Comment

Funny to see how the academics who support the overall thrust of the Government’s change of emphasis on Canada’s historical narrative, particularly the increased emphasis on the military, have started to realize the limitations of the Government’s commitment. Jack Granatstein’s commentary on the commemoration of WW1 and Canada’s role is valid and telling (for his critique of the Government’s cuts to Library and Archives Canada see Who will preserve the past for future generations?:

But the Great War years also changed the homeland. Women relatives of Canadian soldiers got the vote in 1917, and thousands of women left farms and hearths to work in munitions factories that produced a quarter of the artillery shells for British and Dominion forces by 1917. Prohibition cut off alcohol sales; millions were raised in Victory Loan campaigns; income tax came into effect (as a “temporary” wartime measure); and farmers and workers began to organize politically as inflation hit everyone. Above all, conscription in 1917 split the nation, pitting farmers against city dwellers, labour against bosses, French against English. That year’s election, won by the pro-conscription Unionist government of Sir Robert Borden, was the most racist in our history.

We certainly don’t want to celebrate all of these wartime events and changes, but we need to talk about them and learn from them. We need TV documentaries on the war and its battles and on the events, positive and negative, on the home front. We need books, conferences, lectures and displays in our national and local museums. We need to remember.

This requires some modest new funding. There will be a surplus by 2015, and there will be money available – if the government wishes to use it. There will also be the money to ensure that veterans get the help they require. It’s not a zero-sum game.

We really must remember the Great War properly. It was when Canada stood proudly on the world stage for the first time, and it would be a disgrace for the government to shortchange it.

Why is Canada botching the Great War centenary? – The Globe and Mail.

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Holocaust Education: Who will tell the story?

2014/04/22 Leave a comment

Good overview on some of the work the Canadian Holocaust centres are doing on Holocaust eduction given that fewer survivors are available to provide personal testimony:

Eyewitness testimony has played a central role in Holocaust education, says Adara Goldberg, education director of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. The challenge now is to transition to telling their story without them.

For a recent exhibit called Enemy Aliens about Jewish refugees interned in Canada during the war, a curator recorded internees’ experiences, and those voices were the first ones visitors heard upon entering the exhibit. Three of those interviewed died before the exhibition opened, Goldberg says.

The centre, like others across the country, is consulting with survivors on the best ways to use videotaped testimony. “We don’t want to exploit the voices [of survivors]. We want to make sure there is some pedagogical value in what we do.”…

At Toronto’s Holocaust centre, staff are using the 50,000 testimonies, some of them Canadian, recorded by the U.S-based Shoah Foundation. For the generation of digital natives at home with technology, “that’s an automatic point of access,” Phillips says.

The Toronto centre, aided by a grant from Citizenship and Immigration Canada, has begun organizing some of the testimonies into short, searchable sections, and presenting workshops to adult immigrants learning English. Few of the newcomers had much knowledge about Jews or the Holocaust, but they could relate to the stories of persecution and starting over in a new land, and understand what the survivors contributed to Canadian society. “For many of the… students, this was very inspirational,” Phillips says.

Who will tell the story? | The Canadian Jewish News.

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After 40 years, Immigrant Settlement Program needs an overhaul – The Globe and Mail

2014/04/22 Leave a comment

Robert Vineberg, formerly Director General of Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s Prairies and Northern Territories Region, on the need to reform and update settlement services (which are primarily language training). One point that he doesn’t make is the need for better information on how effective some of these programs are. If I recall correctly, former Minister for CIC Kenney was frustrated by the lack of performance information and testing results on language training, a valid concern.

And Vineberg’s wish to essentially broaden settlement services to all and sundry has to be balanced by the need to focus on the groups that need it most, given fiscal realities. And while I can see the merit to provide services to refugees and some temporary foreign workers transitioning to permanent residency, I fail to see the need to provide these services to those graduates of Canadian universities. Surely their Canadian experience and language skills surpass anything settlement could offer?

In updating the Immigrant Settlement Program, the federal government should provide services to those in transition to immigrant status, as well as to those who have become Canadian citizens if they are still in need. It must also develop a new funding model that recognizes the ongoing nature of Canada’s Immigrant Settlement Program instead of treating it as something that could end tomorrow.

After 40 years, Immigrant Settlement Program needs an overhaul – The Globe and Mail.

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Spotlighting a law that stripped U.S.-born women of citizenship

2014/04/22 Leave a comment

Good reminder of some of the past history of citizenship policy, and how people lost their citizenship, in this case due to marriage of an immigrant:

Daniel Swalm was researching his family when he came across a disturbing episode in immigration history. That discovery would lead to a move in the U.S. Senate to apologize for action the nation took more than a century ago.

Swalm discovered that under an obscure 1907 law, his grandmother Elsie, born and raised in Minnesota, was stripped of her U.S. citizenship after marrying an immigrant from Sweden.

Swalm had never heard of the Expatriation Act that required a U.S.-born woman who married a foreigner to “take the nationality of her husband.”

Swalm, who lives in Minneapolis, found out about the law when he stumbled across an alien registration form filled out by Elsie Knutson Moren.

“I could not figure out why Grandma Elsie had to fill one out, because she was born in the United States,” he said.

The law has caught others by surprise, too.

“There are all these people doing their genealogy, and they come across relatives who were declared alien enemies during World War I, and they’re trying to figure out why that would be if they were born in the United States,” said Candice Bredbenner, a history professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Spotlighting a law that stripped U.S.-born women of citizenship – latimes.com.

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Under new rules, rich Chinese should learn French if they want to move to Canada | South China Morning Post

2014/04/22 Leave a comment

One of the perverse consequences of Quebec continuing its business immigration program while the rest of Canada has suspended it. Never liked this “buy a visa” approach and government officials are basically poor at assessing entrepreneurial and business skills:

Whether or not the language exemption is abused matters to Vancouver, since 89 per cent of all investor immigrants supposedly bound for Quebec end up living elsewhere in Canada. Assuming the dispersal rate under the federal scheme holds true for these immigrants too, that means about 59 per cent of all Quebec investor immigrants actually end up living in Vancouver.

As with the axed federal scheme, Chinese millionaires dominate Quebec’s investor immigration scheme, making up 71 per cent of 2012’s applicants.

This habit of rich Chinese to quickly flee their new “home” of Quebec has not gone unnoticed.

In testimony to Parliament’s Standing Committee on Official Languages last June, then Immigration Minister Jason Kenney was scathing.

“I think there is some skimming going on in the programme, whereby Quebec is taking the money of immigrant investors and using it, but the British Columbia taxpayers must pay the price for the social services provided to immigrants selected by Quebec,” Kenney said.

Under new rules, rich Chinese should learn French if they want to move to Canada | South China Morning Post.

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You mean, the free market actually works? vs The Slow Death of Free Speech

2014/04/21 Leave a comment

Funny piece by Tabatha Southey bringing some perspective to those who claim the decline of free speech following the Hirsi Ali Brandeis controversy:

Socrates is not remembered as that guy who, found guilty of corrupting the young minds of Athens, was denied an honorary diploma – but invited to come back to the agora to debate any time.

Galileo is not remembered as the man who claimed the Earth revolved around the sun and, for that sin, was banned from becoming pope.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wasn’t trolled on Twitter for writing One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich – he was exiled. And Lady Chatterley’s Lover wasn’t published instantly, in its entirety, in 1928, then given a lot of uncharitable reviews on Goodreads. Indeed, it wasn’t published unexpurgated in the United Kingdom until 1960.

In short, a little perspective suggests that recent reports of the death of free speech have been greatly exaggerated….

The dystopian world of “political correctness,” of repressed expression and sexuality, not irrationally predicted in the sometimes silly 1980s, never materialized. We’re a gloriously loud, bawdy bunch these days. But a sleight of hand that equates being answered with being “silenced,” dissent with being “bullied,” allows old soldiers of that 1980s culture war to reenact battles and claim the victimhood they once dismissed as the left’s low moral ground….

To be to be less than universally celebrated is to be censored. The ideology that lambasted the “nanny state” whines for a “wet nurse state” and what you smell from those babies is hardly books burning.

You mean, the free market actually works? – The Globe and Mail.

On the other side of the argument, Mark Steyn:

Oh, don’t worry. There’ll still be plenty of ‘offending, insulting or humiliating’ in such a world, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Mozilla CEO and Zionists and climate deniers and feminist ‘cis-women’ not quite au courant with transphobia can all tell you. And then comes the final, eerie silence. Young Erin Ching at Swarthmore College has grasped the essential idea: it is not merely that, as the Big Climate enforcers say, ‘the science is settled’, but so is everything else, from abortion to gay marriage. So what’s to talk about? Universities are no longer institutions of inquiry but ‘safe spaces’ where delicate flowers of diversity of race, sex, orientation, ‘gender fluidity’ and everything else except diversity of thought have to be protected from exposure to any unsafe ideas.

As it happens, the biggest ‘safe space’ on the planet is the Muslim world. For a millennium, Islamic scholars have insisted, as firmly as a climate scientist or an American sophomore, that there’s nothing to debate. And what happened? As the United Nations Human Development Programme’s famous 2002 report blandly noted, more books are translated in Spain in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years. Free speech and a dynamic, innovative society are intimately connected: a culture that can’t bear a dissenting word on race or religion or gender fluidity or carbon offsets is a society that will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast.

As American universities, British playwrights and Australian judges once understood, the ‘safe space’ is where cultures go to die.

The slow death of free speech

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Joseph Heath: How to beat racism

2014/04/21 Leave a comment

More Joseph Heath, this time on racism. Helpful to have so much of his book in the National Post, not sure if this is helping book sales for Enlightenment 2.0 or substituting for them:

… What matters is not so much the differences between individuals but which differences we choose to invest significance in. This is the good news on race. It suggests that the best way to overcome race may simply be to distract people from it. If there is nothing else to attract people’s attention, the set of physical characteristics that distinguish race will be regarded as significant, but this can be overcome by reducing the salience of these characteristics. There is probably nothing we can do to stop people from classifying others into groups and developing animosity toward those whom they regard as belonging to an out-group. Yet even if we are unable to change this basic feature of human psychology, we can develop an effective work-around, by manipulating the environment so that people classify each other in ways that are less socially pernicious. For example, instead of allowing people to fixate on inherited features of individuals — such as skin colour — we could encourage them to focus on arbitrary or symbolic features — like hair style. The advantage of hair style is that it can easily be changed, and so does not translate into permanent disadvantage for any class of individuals.

This may explain why the military and sports teams have been far more successful at creating racial integration than many other institutions in American life. What distinguishes both of them is that they cultivate very intense, particularistic loyalties. There is good reason to think that these forms of group identification simply crowd out the other ones based on race. This can be far more effective than asking people to subscribe to some universalist ideal, one that forces them to overcome or suppress their “groupish” instincts.

From this perspective, the real problem in America is not so much racism as it is race consciousness. (Indeed, to any non-American, the most oppressive feature of intercultural relations in America is not that people are racist, but just that they talk and think incessantly about race, even worse than the way the English talk and think incessantly about class.) And yet this feature of American culture seems to be one that everyone, white and black, conservative and liberal, is involved in a giant conspiracy to sustain and reinforce. This is because most Americans who are progressive on the subject believe that racism must be overcome directly, and that this can only be done by increasing sensitivity and awareness of racial difference. A lot of progressive black politics has done the same, by rejecting the older ideal of a “colour-blind” society and insisting upon the recognition and affirmation of a positive black identity. This winds up being an inadvertent recipe for the reproduction of racism. Even though the intention is to create a positive group identity, its dominant effect is to make race salient as a basis of group identity, which means that it will also, inevitably, become a locus of negative valuation for some.

Joseph Heath: How to beat racism | National Post.

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Why is the UK Law Society throwing its weight behind a regressive form of Islam?

2014/04/21 Leave a comment

More on the UK Law Society’s drafting of guidance of sharia-compliant wills, and the impact this has on already vulnerable women in some Muslim communities:

But this isn’t the whole story: both practically and symbolically the move undermines the axiom that all British people – male and female; gay and straight; Muslim, Christian and atheist – should be equal under the law. As Charlie Klendijan of the Lawyers’ Secular Society explained to me, “The Law Society’s guidance notes have a special influence and prestige. They’re the recognised benchmark of ‘good practice’ for all solicitors, so they have a major impact on how law is practiced in this country. By publishing this guidance note, it has effectively legitimised sharia in the eyes of the legal world.” …

But British Muslims aren’t a single culture with a monolithic faith, and it’s not up to the Law Society to decide which understanding of “sharia practice” is correct. Instead of producing a neutral description of sharia, it has effectively issued a declamation on behalf of a regressive, reactionary version of Islamic jurisprudence that more liberal-minded Muslims fight bravely against.

For an organisation ostensibly committed to the liberal values enshrined in British law to join the theological fray on the conservative side is a cruel blow to reformist Muslims. …

What makes the controversy over these guidelines all the more absurd is their utter pointlessness. The Law Society ought simply to remind its members that their job is to provide legal, not religious, advice: clients looking for guidance on what sharia requires should be advised to consult an Islamic authority of their choice.

The nature of British Islam in not fixed: both moderates like Dr Hasan and reactionaries with their flyblown dogma hope to inherit a greater share of its future. The case continues and continues. Meanwhile is it too much to ask of the Law Society to refrain from taking sides?

Why is the Law Society throwing its weight behind a regressive form of Islam? – Comment – Voices – The Independent.

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In Scotland, separatists love ‘money and the ethnic vote’ – Doug Saunders

2014/04/21 Leave a comment

Doug Saunders compares Scottish inclusiveness and the recent divisiveness strategy of identity politics in the Quebec Values Charter of the PQ. Ironic as the PQ used to have an inclusiveness strategy prior to the shock of the 2007 election when the ADQ (predecessor of the CAQ) became the official opposition by running on identity politics:

Behind many old-school separatist movements lies the late-19th-century concept of ethnic self-determination, which was given half-hearted official recognition in the Versailles Treaty and went on to create considerable bloodshed in the 20th century as former empires and federal countries collapsed into ethnic territorial claims. The uni-ethnic state was never more than an artifice of the imagination, and its legacy is so sad and unsuccessful that few voters are likely to back the creation of a new one. Ms. Marois learned this too late: The majority of potential separatism supporters, it turned out, were interested in economic and political self-sufficiency, but not ethnic solidarity.

Scotland’s separatists figured this out a generation earlier. “The SNP was never happy with ethnic-nationalist types within its ranks. It marginalized them at every opportunity,” says Peter Lynch, the author of a history of the SNP and a lecturer in politics at the University of Stirling.

In the early 1990s, SNP leader Alex Salmond led the most recent major purge of SNP ethnic nationalists. The party banned the right-wing Siol nan Gaidheal (“seed of the gaels”) movement and expelled party members who had joined the radical Settler Watch and Scottish Watch movements. The SNP’s most famous slogan, “It’s Scotland’s Oil,” and its centre-left message of higher social spending financed by petroleum windfall held a lot more appeal than Braveheart-flavoured jingoism. Besides, the Scottish people had become increasingly multihued and multireligious.

In Scotland, separatists love ‘money and the ethnic vote’ – The Globe and Mail.

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Parenting skills put to the test in multicultural society – The Globe and Mail

2014/04/21 Leave a comment

Leah Mclaren on parenting when different views among parents of childhood friends:

Great advice, but what happens when two neighbours strongly disagree on what is morally right?

This is the tricky part. Because while I know I must respect my neighbour’s right to view the human body any way she wants, I also believe she is fundamentally wrong. And while I can usually balance these two conflicting notions in my head, it’s when she attempts to impress her values on my child that I find my tolerance reaching its limit. The same is true for her and bare bums.

Our boys remain best of friends – and that can only be a good thing, both for their own developing characters and for society as a whole. Post-bottomgate, Mohammed’s mother and I have arrived at an uneasy truce over tea and biscuits. Our unspoken agreement is like the unwritten contract that binds any multicultural society. Privately, we will each adhere to our own rules. And in public we will try our best to get along. Even if, like Bart Simpson, we are pretty darn sure the other person is wrong.

Parenting skills put to the test in multicultural society – The Globe and Mail.

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