Multiculturalism Redefined? (#179) « Quebec Culture Blog

2015/02/14 Leave a comment

While I think the writer is over-stating the change in Trudeau’s language (many of the points are stating more explicitly what has been implicit, just as Minister Kenney’s reboot was re-emphasising the integration objective of multiculturalism), nevertheless worth reflecting upon.

And his recognition of the close similarity between multiculturalism and interculturalism is something that more need to acknowledge, as the issue is more what kind of multiculturalism and what kind of interculturalism we believe is most effective:

At first glance, Trudeau’s socio-cultural contractualism, or renewed multiculturalism, or inter-multiculturalism (whatever name you wish to attach to it) does keep the principal traits of multiculturalism as we have known it (which is Canada will let you live your life in peace, and with time you will integrate into society at your rhythm and in your own way, but you may also receive a gentle nudge from time-to-time to encourage you to continue in that process – this is an oversimplistic definition, but it’s tough to otherwise sum it up in one sentence).

However, J.Trudeau seems to be opening the way to “pre-established” integration conditions, aligned with the norms of the environment in which a person lives in Canada.  He is giving immigrants obligations towards these norms and towards groups of people around them which already form the core of society, and towards those with whom newcomers have to live.  It is these last two phrases which conform more to concepts and ideologies of Québec’s interculturalism (those at least which are more apt to be practiced in Québec).   Let me be clear that I am not at all saying that this redefinition is anywhere near elements contained in the deposed proposal for a Québec Charter of Values (which was debated during the winter of 2013/2014).  Even on this point, Québec was not ready or comfortable, as a society, to adopt such a charter in the name of interculturalism (we all saw how the proposal imploded on itself during public debates on the issue).   Justin Trudeau seems to be taking another path, but one which still could hold potential to bridge the publicly perceived distances between multiculturalism and interculturalism.

Kenney’s changes in fact did bring the two closer together.

Multiculturalism Redefined? (#179) « Quebec Culture Blog.

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Max Yalden championed human rights in Canada

2015/02/14 Leave a comment

Bernie Farber’s tribute to Max Yalden:

Max Yalden was the consummate civil servant with a twist: he didn’t suffer fools gladly. He played significant roles in two key areas of Canada’s growth as a nation, as Commissioner of Official Languages (1977-1984) and perhaps his most important posting, as Chief Commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) from 1987 to 1996.

He was a studied man who preferred focused research and facts to educate and make his points. His annual reports in both of his key positions are now the stuff of legend. It was Yalden’s goal while overseeing the Official Languages Act to normalize the transition of Canada from a unilingual state to a bilingual nation and eventually as Human Rights Commissioner into a multicultural entity. While not yet perfect, Yalden’s determined work was largely successful.

And while today we essentially take human and civil rights for granted it was not always so. Hatred, bullying and discrimination were commonplace 30 years ago especially when it came to gay and lesbian rights, the status of women, people with disabilities, as well as faith and minority groups. Max Yalden created a “fence of protection” for minorities in this country by ensuring that the Canadian Human Rights Act was a force for good and a vehicle for change.

He viscerally understood that words had power and that evil words could be fraught with danger for minority groups. He was a strong defender of the now-repealed Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act that gave some authority to the commission to deal with hate speech through the Internet. Yalden saw the regulation as a means to teach about the need for decency and civility as opposed to using the heavy hammer of criminal law to punish those who should know better.

…Max Yalden was a man of uncommon dignity. He understood and had compassion for those who often found themselves without a champion. He became their champion. Much of Canada’s progress in the arena of human and civil rights is a direct result of Max Yalden’s vision, courage and determination.

Today, at a time where anti-terrorism laws are being considered that may further restrict our hard-fought-for human rights, where once again Muslims, Jews and others are the subjects of hate and distrust, we could use a Maxwell Yalden to be our champion.

Max Yalden championed human rights in Canada | Toronto Star.

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Charitable foundation in charge of promoting Canada in Britain in uproar and accusing High Commission of meddling

2015/02/14 1 Comment

Another short-sighted decision and one that reduces discussion and debate (disclosure I once gave a presentation at one of their annual meetings and it was an interesting mix of topics).

And the link between activities and charitable status echoes the choice of Canadian charities being audited by CRA:

The charitable foundation given the job of promoting Canada in Britain is in an uproar after several board members quit this week, accusing the Canadian High Commission of meddling.

Historian Margaret MacMillan and think-tank advisor Diana Carney, the wife of the Bank of England chief, are among the four people who handed in their resignations.

In her resignation letter, Ms. MacMillan said it’s clear the high commission plans to take over the Foundation for Canadian Studies in the United Kingdom with the aim of promoting Canada’s interests as it sees fit.

The foundation’s website says it co-operates with — but operates separately from — the diplomatic mission, which has made financial contributions over the years.

The organization, a British charity with an endowment of about $2.3-million, was set up in 1975 to support teaching, research and publishing about Canada in Britain, as well as foster academic ties and student exchanges between Canadian and British universities.

….It  was once among a handful of foreign charities allowed to issue tax receipts in Canada.

But in Mr. Campbell’s December letter, obtained by The Canadian Press, he advised board members that this status had ended.

He went on to add that the federal government’s decision might change if the foundation also changed.

“I understand from my colleagues in Ottawa that our renewal request would be entertained if the foundation were to expand its mission,” he wrote.

Charitable foundation in charge of promoting Canada in Britain in uproar and accusing High Commission of meddling

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ICYMI: Wesley Wark: Intelligence lessons from France

2015/02/14 Leave a comment

Wesley Wark on the intelligence lessons from the Paris attacks and sensible conclusion:

French intelligence and security agencies are highly experienced with terrorism threats and have particular knowledge and capabilities in the Middle East, North Africa and the sub-Saharan region. But there are lessons to be learned, for France, and for other countries, in the failures of counter-terrorism on display last week. Those lessons point in four directions: perseverance in maintaining a strategic watch on presumed lower tier threats; better technological capabilities; better intelligence sharing at home and abroad; and better external scrutiny.

Wesley Wark: Intelligence lessons from France | Ottawa Citizen.

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Student killings a rallying cry for alienated Muslim Americans

2015/02/13 Leave a comment

A Muslim American Ferguson moment?

Among the millions of posts about the killing, there quickly appeared clear themes. Many users wondered how much more news coverage the killings would have received had it been a Muslim man who’d shot three white students dead. Others asked white Americans to vocally condemn the alleged killer, and make an effort to find out how he became radicalized – a sardonic reversal of something many Muslims complain they are continually asked to do. Many, including some of the victims’ family members, rejected the claim that the killing was prompted solely by a dispute over a parking space, calling it an obvious hate crime.

(It is a testament to the perceived consequences of the phrase “hate crime” that the alleged killer’s wife held a press conference to assure the public that the murders of which her husband is accused were in fact not motivated by hatred for the victims’ religion. In a bit of a non sequitur, she backed this claim by mentioning that many of Mr. Hicks’s posts on Facebook were in support of such causes as abortion and gay rights. She did not mention his many anti-religion posts, but their content suggests one torturous defence may ultimately be that the killings he is alleged to have committed were not hate crimes against his Muslim victims because he hates all religious equally).

In many ways, the volume and tenor of the Muslim American community’s reaction to the killing is similar to the outcry that sparked the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Multifaceted, it is nonetheless a response anchored in the belief that injustices, when perpetrated against victims of a particular minority, are simply considered less serious. But whereas the Black Lives Matter movement drew on hundreds of years of examples, the Muslim-American response is focused almost solely on the events of the past 14 years.

Broadly, the grievances of many Muslim Americans exist in one of two categories – the grand geopolitical outrages over two full-scale wars and their myriad repercussions, and the more immediate, day-to-day frustrations to which belong such issues as the Duke prayer controversy, the uproar over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque in New York City and the spike in accusatory harassment that tends to follow every barbarity committed by terror groups half a world away.

The two categories are related, but for most Muslim Americans, the former is relatively abstract – the chances of any American being shipped off to the Guantanamo Bay detention camps today is essentially nil. But the latter complaints – harassment, accusation, a sense of otherness – are not. And, once extrapolated, such concerns reach their sad apex in the prospect of a hateful neighbour at the front door, gun in hand. Like the killing of Mr. Brown in Ferguson last summer, the murder of the three Chapel Hill students is a single rock that, dislodged, triggers a landslide.

Student killings a rallying cry for alienated Muslim Americans – The Globe and Mail.

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Why don’t we have more female judges? – Macleans.ca

2015/02/13 Leave a comment

Irwin Cotler’s efforts to get more information on judicial appointments (see earlier Tories chastised for lack of racial diversity in judicial appointments, Racial Diversity Gap in the Courtroom, Forget MacKay, a woman’s place is on the bench):

The justice minister’s office explains that in the case of Cotler’s most recent question, there simply wasn’t enough time to do what would have had to have been done to answer Cotler’s questions.

In the order-paper question that Mr. Cotler tabled last December, Q-836, he was asking the department to go back through 21 years of information, a great deal of which would require a manual search of the paper records. The department only has 45 days to answer order-paper questions and there was just not enough time.

It does seem like a rather large project.

Cotler and Liberal MP Sean Casey today released a statement calling for greater diversity on the bench and the questions raised by last year’s controversy—whatever Peter MacKay said or didn’t say—still seem worthwhile. While Ontario publishes information on applicants for judicial publications, we have no such data for federal appointments. At what rate are women applying to be federal judges? How has that rate changed over time? And how has the rate of appointment of women changed over time? Those don’t seem like questions for which it would be unreasonable to expect answers to be somehow procured.

I don’t think this is true.

When I compiled a list of women and visible minorities in provincial legislatures, it only took me a week or so to go through names and photos of provincial legislature members. Going through judicial appointments should not be that time consuming (only an average 69 per year between 2006-12).

Why don’t we have more female judges? – Macleans.ca.

Direct link to the table for 2006-12 appointments:

breakdown (pdf)

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Travailler avec un intégriste: la ministre Weil se ravise

2015/02/13 Leave a comment

Reminds me of a discussion I had with some of my former staff during 2008 Quebec niqab and related debates, and I challenged my staff, who argued for accommodation, would they feel comfortable having a co-worker wearing a niqab? The body language discomfort was palpable:

Kathleen Weil a marché dans les mêmes traces mercredi, lorsqu’elle commentait la conception de son plan d’action pour la lutte au radicalisme, et le projet de loi péquiste sur un observatoire de l’intégrisme. Elle affirmait qu’il y avait de l’intégrisme qui pouvait être soit inoffensif ou soit dangereux, quand les échanges ont alors glissé, à savoir si elle aurait un problème à travailler avec un intégriste dans son propre cabinet.

«Intégriste, ça dépend jusqu’où (sur le plan) religieux, a-t-elle d’abord répondu au cours d’un point de presse en matinée. S’il est rigoriste, mais ne fait pas de mal à personne… C’est ça l’inquiétude pour une société démocratique, c’est la sécurité des gens.»

Elle a alors été appelée par un journaliste à préciser sa pensée, avec un exemple hypothétique d’un collègue qu’elle côtoierait au quotidien, un intégriste rigoriste qui respecte strictement ses préceptes religieux en privé.

«On n’a pas de jugement à porter sur cette personne en autant que la sécurité publique est protégée», a-t-elle confirmé.

Elle a soutenu que l’intégrisme en soi n’est pas dangereux et qu’elle ne connaît pas de pays disposant de plans d’action contre l’intégrisme. Toutefois, à la sortie du conseil des ministres en après-midi, son discours avait changé.

«Ce serait impossible que quelqu’un comme ça se retrouve dans mon cabinet, vraiment impossible», a martelé Mme Weil.

Sa définition de l’intégrisme s’était soudainement étoffée, pour justifier son rejet, et il ne s’agissait plus simplement d’un rigoriste et de ses pratiques religieuses en privé: un intégriste est devenu quelqu’un qui ne partage pas les valeurs démocratiques, qui ne croit pas en l’égalité entre les hommes et les femmes et qui fait la promotion de l’homophobie.

«C’est plus que de la rigueur (sic), a-t-elle justifié. C’est quelqu’un qui conteste la démocratie. C’est ce qui est ahurissant dans ce qu’on entend ces temps-ci. Je réagis fortement à ça.»

L’intégriste est «extrêmement conservateur», a-t-elle poursuivi, et n’a pas une «mentalité moderne». À la première entrevue d’embauche on verrait que cette personne n’a pas une «mentalité ouverte, progressiste».

Selon elle, il y a des gradations jusqu’au fondamentalisme, mais le lexique est «complexe» et elle veut rester simple pour être comprise. «C’est plus important de parler des vraies choses, c’est ce que les gens comprennent, je pense qu’il faut parler un langage simple», a-t-elle dit.

Travailler avec un intégriste: la ministre Weil se ravise | Patrice Bergeron | Politique québécoise.

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Woman asks to be sworn in as citizen as soon as possible after overturn of policy requiring her to remove niqab

2015/02/13 Leave a comment

No freedom is absolute, including freedom of religion, and the judge’s example of a monk not willing to break his silence to state the oath doesn’t wash and doesn’t merit accommodation. People are free to make choices, choices often have trade-offs.

It is one of the requirements of living in The policy didn’t sit well with Ms. Ishaq, a Pakistani national and devout Sunni Muslim, who says her religious beliefs obligate her to wear a niqab. While she did not object to unveiling herself in private so that an official could confirm her identity before taking the citizenship test, she drew a line at unveiling herself at the public citizenship ceremony.

Aaron Vincent Elkaim for National PostZunera Ishaq stands for a portrait in her home in Mississauga on Wednesday February 11, 2015.

“I feel that the governmental policy regarding veils at citizenship oath ceremonies is a personal attack on me, my identity as a Muslim woman and my religious beliefs,” she told the court.

Her lawyers also pointed out that while the Citizenship Act requires people to take the oath, it does not require them to be “seen” taking the oath.

She rejected a government offer to seat her at the front or back of the ceremony so her face would not easily be seen.

In a ruling last week, Judge Keith Boswell said the government’s own regulations require that citizenship judges administer the citizenship oath “with dignity and solemnity, allowing the greatest possible freedom in the religious solemnization or the solemn affirmation thereof.” How is this possible, Judge Boswell asked, if a policy requires citizenship candidates to “violate or renounce a basic tenet of their religion?”

“For instance, how could a citizenship judge afford a monk who obeys strict rules of silence the ‘greatest possible freedom’ in taking the oath if he is required to betray his discipline and break his silence?” he wrote.

The government had argued that the policy was not mandatory and that citizenship judges were free to apply it or not.

But the judge cited internal department emails stating that it was “pretty clear that [the Minister] would like the changes to the procedure to ‘require’ citizenship candidates to show their face … regardless of whether there is a legislative base.”

The judge also cited a media interview in which Mr. Kenney said it was “ridiculous” that a face should be covered during the citizenship oath.

Woman asks to be sworn in as citizen as soon as possible after overturn of policy requiring her to remove niqab

And further faulty reasoning in the National Post editorial:

Lawfulness aside, the probation was always on weak footing both on practical and moral grounds. There are cases where security or identification concerns rightfully trump the religious practice: for example, when taking a driver’s license photo or going through airport security. Muslim women are also sometimes required — on a case-by-case basis — to remove their veils while testifying in court, thereby allowing a defendant to face his or her accuser. No such practical justification has been offered for banning the niqab during a largely symbolic swearing-in ritual.

To be sure, Canadian society is predicated on the concept of equality for all — regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation and so forth — and it’s difficult to reconcile that fundamental value with the custom of members of one sex obscuring their faces in public. Nevertheless, Muslim women in Canada are free to wear — or not to wear — a niqab while shopping at the grocery store, teaching a lecture or simply walking down the street. To prohibit them from wearing a face covering during a citizenship oath is as illiberal in its way as requiring them to wear one. It is an arbitrary application of a pointless ban, and the court was right to strike it down.

National Post View: Court was right to strike down niqab ban during citizenship ceremony

Not surprisingly, the Government will appeal the ruling. Not by accident, PM Harper makes announcement rather than CIC Minister Alexander, in Quebec, as noted by John Ivison: Harper’s ‘offence’ at niqab ruling part of larger strategy to steal Quebec from the NDP):

Speaking at an event in Quebec on Thursday, Harper said the government intends to appeal the ruling.

“I believe, and I think most Canadians believe that it is offensive that someone would hide their identity at the very moment where they are committing to join the Canadian family,” he said in Victoriaville, Que. “This is a society that is transparent, open, and where people are equal.”

Harper says Ottawa will appeal ruling allowing veil during citizenship oath

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ICYMI: Lutte au terrorisme: Québec doit agir et rassurer les gens, dit Gérard Bouchard

2015/02/13 Leave a comment

Gérard Bouchard on radicalization and security, and advocating for stronger anti-hate speech laws:

«Je pense que c’est important qu’il agisse maintenant, ne serait-ce que pour rassurer la population. La population est inquiète et elle a de bonnes raisons de l’être», a commenté l’historien et sociologue de l’Université du Québec à Chicoutimi.

M. Bouchard était de passage à Québec avec l’autre coprésident de la Commission, Charles Taylor, pour formuler des recommandations à la commission parlementaire qui se penche sur la future politique à adopter en matière d’immigration.

Il a convenu que l’équilibre à trouver entre l’adoption de mesures musclées de prévention d’actes terroristes et le respect des droits individuels, tels que définis dans la charte québécoise des droits et libertés, s’annonçait pour être un exercice complexe et difficile pour le gouvernement.

«Quelles sont les mesures qu’on va mettre en oeuvre, qui respectent le droit, qui sont conformes à notre charte, et qui, en même temps, vont être suffisantes pour repousser la menace terroriste? Ce ne sera pas facile», a-t-il conclu.

Parmi les instruments envisagés, il se montre ouvert à l’idée d’amender la charte pour préciser l’interdiction de tenir des propos haineux au Québec.

«Le discours contre la haine pourrait être plus explicite, à son avis. On pourrait être plus affirmatif, en termes juridiques.»

Lutte au terrorisme: Québec doit agir et rassurer les gens, dit Gérard Bouchard | Jocelyne Richer | National.

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Germany’s xenophobic anti-Islam movement shocked the world. Then, it defeated itself

2015/02/12 Leave a comment

Good analysis of why Pegida has become weak:

Only a few weeks ago, Germany’s Pegida movement attracted tens of thousands of supporters every Monday and was on its way to become a political power.

Then, however, things started to go poorly for the German anti-Muslim protesters.

Authorities canceled one of the marches due to a terror threat, briefly after the attacks in Paris. Then, it was revealed that Pegida’s leader, Lutz Bachmann, had posed as Hitler. Bachmann said he would resign, but then he changed his mind. Instead, Pegida’s more moderate organizers left in protest and founded a new, more moderate movement that has so far failed to attract substantial support.

By Feb. 9, the number of Pegida supporters in Dresden had dropped from 25,000 (Jan. 12) to 2,000. Monday’s march could mark the beginning of the end of a movement that shocked domestic and foreign observers with its loud, anti-Islam message, but also with the more hidden, xenophobic and sometimes openly racist remarks of its supporters.

Why did Pegida lose so many supporters so quickly?

1. Infighting within Pegida’s leadership.

2. National opposition was too strong, and the gains of the movement were minimal.

3. Many Pegida supporters wanted to voice local criticism, and were shocked when they found themselves on international front pages.

4. Similar, smaller protest marches in other cities failed.

5. The protesters could not agree on a common agenda.

6. Furthermore, neo-Nazis dominated several Pegida offshoots.

Germany’s xenophobic anti-Islam movement shocked the world. Then, it defeated itself. – The Washington Post.

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