Quen Chow Lee, lead plaintiff in lawsuit over Chinese head tax, dies at 105

2017/10/23 Leave a comment

Good story about her life and activism, not to mention the role activism plays in shifting positions:

Quen Chow Lee, one of three immigrant litigants who led a class-action lawsuit against Ottawa over its discriminatory Chinese head tax, has died. She was 105.

Born in China in October 18, 1911, Lee was nicknamed “Nooey Quen” — meaning women’s rights in English.

Her toughness helped her overcome war, poverty, a 14-year separation from her husband, and the drawn-out legal battle for government redress, said her son Yew Lee.

“She was a tough lady, determined, committed and stubborn, someone who had a strong sense of justice,” said Lee. “Yet, she was a very loving mother and grandmother.”

A native of Taishan, Chow Lee married to Guang Foo Lee in 1930, when he returned to China from Canada to find a wife. He was born in 1892, also in Taishan, and paid a $500 head tax in 1913 to come to Canada.

After the marriage, Lee only stayed two years in China because Canadian laws then made Chinese people pay another $500 head tax if they were out of the country for too long. He left behind his wife, pregnant with a third child, and two kids.

Between 1885 and 1923, the Canadian government collected a total of $23 million from some 81,000 people under the various forms of the Chinese Immigration Act.

Because of the Second World War and the civil war in China, Chow Lee and her children lost touch with her husband for almost 14 years.

Chow Lee raised the children on her own until after the repeal in 1947 of the Chinese Immigration Act, which had effectively banned Chinese immigration to Canada for more than two decades. Although Chinese wives could now join their husbands in Canada, most had to wait patiently before the family saved enough money for the fares.

“I’ve endured so many years of hardship. We had no money and nothing to eat,” Chow Lee said in the 2004 documentary, In the Shadow of Gold Mountain, by Karen Cho. “Some women remarried farmers from faraway just to survive . . . but I didn’t want to because of my children.”

Chow Lee arrived in Canada with her three children after Christmas in 1950 and settled in Sudbury, Ont. where the family ran a number of restaurants: the Capitol Café, the Star Restaurant, the China House Restaurant, the Empress Tavern and Lee’s Palace.

After her husband passed away in 1967, Chow Lee once again was left to raise her children on her own — now five of them, with the two youngest ones born in Canada.

Growing up, Yew Lee said his mother would pull out a piece of paper from a leather-and-brass box and just looked at it. It was his father’s head tax certificate.

“She kept it in a steamer trunk above the restaurant. She would pull it out many many times. We knew something was wrong and the paper was significant,” Yew Lee recalled. “She always felt the injustice had to be righted.”

Chow Lee was already retired in her late 80s when the family got in touch with the Chinese Canadian National Council, which had spearheaded the redress campaign. She immediately volunteered to be one of the lead claimants of the class-action lawsuit representing the head-tax-payers’ widows.

Chow Lee would travel in her wheelchair to fundraising events and rallies between Toronto and Ottawa to raise public awareness about Canada’s racist past against the Chinese.

“We approached many head-tax-payers and families to sue the government, but many turned down because they were ashamed of it and didn’t want to talk about it. But Mrs. Lee needed no convincing,” said Avvy Go, one of the lawyers involved in the lawsuit. “She was a true inspiration for all of us.”

Although the lawsuit was ultimately dismissed and subsequent appeals were denied, it set into motion talks with the government that ended in an official apology at the House of Commons on June 22, 2006.

Chow Lee was in the audience when then prime minister Stephen Harper apologized in Cantonese to the Chinese-Canadian community.

“Even though we didn’t win the lawsuit, Mrs. Lee never gave up hope. She never had any regret,” said Go. “She used her suffering to propel her to fight injustice and challenge the government head on for its treatment of the Chinese. She was a model not only for the Chinese, but all Canadians.”

Source: Quen Chow Lee, lead plaintiff in lawsuit over Chinese head tax, dies at 105 | Toronto Star

Filed under Historical Recognition, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Why Canada’s Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence is in the wrong department 

2017/10/23 Leave a comment

Phil is a friend of mine and I have great respect for the work he did while in government and the analysis and commentary he is doing outside.

His logic is sound in having community engagement and deradicalization outside of Public Safety, to distinguish the security function and  community support/resilience-building. As Phil and I have discussed, in theory, Canadian Heritage would be a good home for all the reasons he lists.

But with respect for the people who work in Canadian Heritage, the department, as constituted, is not equipped to provide strong leadership in this area given its focus on its core mandate.

The area that could have possibly taken this on – multiculturalism – has been largely decimated following the 2008 transfer to then CIC (IRCC) and return back to Canadian Heritage in 2015:

First of all, kudos to the Trudeau government for its commitment to the Canada Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence (CCCEPE—that name is way too long, however). The $35-million over five years is an excellent start and, although details are wanting, the government sees the new office  as a leadership post for Canada’s efforts.

This move represents a significant shift in Canada’s prevention of violent extremism approach from the purely hardline emphasis of the Harper government to a more inclusive and more comprehensive one under the new regime. As I have said before, we will always need the hardline tool, but we need to do more in early intervention and counter-radicalization.

One question remains: where should this new office reside? When I was still with the federal government it was housed where it is now, within Public Safety Canada. In some ways, it should stay there if for no other reason than  that department has experienced and capable staff who were part of the amazing success of the shortened efforts under Harper.

But in other and more important ways it should be moved to another department. Let me try to explain why.

Aside from getting a brand new start and being able to put the unfortunate mistakes of the previous government behind us, the biggest drawback to leaving Canada’s Prevention of Violence strategy with Public Safety lies with the very nature of that ministry. Public Safety Canada is the umbrella department for CSIS, the RCMP, Correctional Services Canada and the Canadian Border Services Agency. All these are staffed by dedicated and professional people but they have one underlying commonality: they are all enforcement/punitive agencies. The Prevention of Violence strategy needs to be seen as an opportunity to occur before people engage in activities that are the remit of CSIS and the RCMP in order to work. We have seen in other places like the U.K. with its PREVENT program (which is housed within that country’s version of Public Safety) that communities associate PVE with intelligence gathering and enforcement, whether or not that is what is happening.  Having a ministry responsible for the national spy and law enforcement agencies run PVE creates a stigma that can hamper even the best efforts.  If communities do not feel comfortable and have issues of trust with certain partners, they will not want to participate.

What if the government were to put the new office under the Heritage portfolio? PVE is all about providing communities with the tools to foster Canadian citizenship and reject the empty and violent promises of groups like Islamic State. It is about being or becoming Canadian. Another aspect is the debate over narratives. I have long argued that we need to move away from “counter narratives” to “alternative narratives.” Alternative narratives are an important part of PVE—what better place to locate them than within Heritage, the department that helps foster the Canadian narrative? Our narrative is so superior to that of the Islamic State that if this were a boxing match the referee would have called the fight years ago.

Of course, those with lots of experience in PVE, especially the RCMP which has a longstanding and robust outreach program, would be asked to lend its assistance and best practices. Other partners could also contribute. Canada is—or rather was—a world leader in PVE and many countries look to us for models on what to do. We don’t need to reinvent it, we just need to tweak it to make it better.

At the end of the day it may not matter where the government decides to put PVE. Only time will tell. I am glad to see that those in the centre already recognize some important aspects on how to implement their strategy (tailor the approach to match local conditions, acknowledge that the government does not have the credibility to do PVE, etc.).  Evaluation and measurement of what works and what doesn’t will be critical.  Lots of people put their hands out when government funding is provided and the centre has to ensure that the right people are getting that money. The important thing is that it cultivate good relations with the communities it hopes to work with for the best answers to violent radicalization and extremism are to be found there, not in a government policy brief.

Source: Why Canada’s Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence is in the wrong department – The Hill Times – The Hill Times

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with , , ,

She didn’t find much multiculturalism in Canada’s official archives — so she made her own

2017/10/21 Leave a comment

A good and valuable initiative:

If Canada is truly multicultural, why are images of the immigrant experience missing from our official archives? When Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn searched through the records at the National Film Board, the CBC, and Libraries and Archives Canada, she saw a striking lack of diversity in the images she found.

“To my great disappointment, it was really difficult to find forms of representation, but more importantly to see how multiculturalism could have changed over time,” she says.

The experience was part of the impetus behind Hoàng Nguyễn’s ongoing cross-Canada project The Making of an Archive. The project takes a step forward this month in Vancouver and Richmond, where immigrants and their families are invited to bring their family albums to be digitized and added to Hoàng Nguyễn’s community archive.

An image from The Making of an Archive. (Casey Wei)

The idea for the project was also sparked by Hoàng Nguyễn’s discovery of an old photo album belonging to her father, who immigrated to Canada from Vietnam in the 1970s. She was moved by the images she saw of her father as a young man — organizing potluck dinners, going camping with friends and engaging in political activities.

“I saw images of him from the mid-70s, active with his student association, organizing and protesting in front of the parliament and saw him not only as the model minority but really as a citizen with political agency occupying the public sphere,” she says.

As the first country in the world to officially declare itself multicultural, says Hoàng Nguyễn, Canada should be doing a better job of recording the immigrant experience and the various waves of migration that shape our nation’s identity. Family photos, she says, offer an intimate window into the lives of newcomers.

An image from The Making of An Archive. (Maiko Tanaka)

“Typically people of colour that are coming to Canada have these photographs at home in the attic, in their cupboards, in the garage or wardrobe collecting dust,” she says. “I see those as historical documents that capture a particular moment of coming to a new country and how they deal with their daily life.”

Hoàng Nguyễn, who grew up in Montreal and currently lives in Stockholm, Sweden, began the project in 2014 with several digitization sessions in Toronto in collaboration with Gendai Gallery. Donors bring their family albums to have them scanned and are interviewed about the images to capture their context. They keep the original versions and also get copies of the scans.

Histories of migration also come with a lot of histories of trauma as well. People coming from places of war or places of political instability, their stories are more difficult — and there’s a sense that I need to be careful in how I’m receiving and accepting these images.– Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, artist

​Hoàng Nguyễn hopes the act of digitizing will bring new life to people’s old family snapshots.

“They’ll have JPEGs now, so they’re able to share with their relatives and friends again and be able to revisit their histories and reactivate the materials that they have,” she says.

The project also aims to create a more complex image of multiculturalism in Canada. With other scholars and archivists — such as the Royal Ontario Museum — developing an interest in family photography, Hoàng Nguyễn says, a richer and more complex picture of the country is coming to light.

An image from The Making of an Archive. (Leila Meshgini)

Sometimes that picture has dark undertones. Family dinners, schoolchildren and community events are the subjects of many of the photos Hoàng Nguyễn has collected so far, but some belong to people who had fled conflict or extreme poverty.

“Histories of migration also come with a lot of histories of trauma as well,” she says. “People coming from places of war or places of political instability, their stories are more difficult — and there’s a sense that I need to be careful in how I’m receiving and accepting these images.”

The Making of An Archive is a multi-layered, ongoing project that includes a planned book of photos and essays to be published in the spring through grunt gallery and released in conjunction with an exhibition about social movements at the Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver.

Source: She didn’t find much multiculturalism in Canada’s official archives — so she made her own | CBC Arts

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New to Canada, struggling to find work: Integration programs

2017/10/21 Leave a comment

Role of the community colleges in integration:

It is no coincidence that Canadian colleges go to great lengths to welcome and prepare immigrant students for school and work.

Immigration is key in helping soften the effects on the labour force of the aging population, an important element of long-term economic growth, according to the Conference Board of Canada’s report, A long-term view of Canada’s demographics, released in October, 2016.

Bridging, pre-arrival, and other programs and services are particularly important for immigrant students, who, compared with international students (those in the country on study permits but who also may apply to immigrate to Canada), tend to be older, have more extensive education and work backgrounds, and are also permanent residents, notes Alex Irwin, director of George Brown’s School of Immigrant and Transitional Education (SITE).

Along with the one-year college teachers training program that Ms. Shokry and Mr. Kabir have completed, SITE offers bridging programs in nursing and construction management.

Among other Canadian colleges with prominent immigrant programs and services is Red River College, which has campuses in Winnipeg and other areas of Manitoba, and this year has nearly 1,360 immigrant students who are permanent residents.

“Our goal is to support immigrants to Manitoba with a holistic approach throughout their entire student life cycle, and we have a large suite of programs and services across different departments and areas to work toward this goal,” Nora Sobel, manager of diversity and intercultural services at Red River, said in an e-mail interview.

Red River recruits students from other countries to aid in boosting Manitoba’s skilled labour shortages, the school’s website says. In the spring, for instance, the college launched a pathway program to construction skills, starting with 20 students from countries such as Syria, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Also on campus, Red River’s Diversity and Intercultural Services department helps organize the annual welcome party for immigrant and international students, and offers services, including financial aid information sessions.

Many programs don’t just delve into the fine points of the jobs themselves; they also give immigrant students insight into the “cultural norms and social cues in the workplace,” notes Mr. Irwin.

He gives this example: “The Canadian workplace can be seen as more casual, but there are a lot of social clues we take for granted that have to be learned if you’re new to the country, like what to call your boss. Calling someone ‘sir’ may not be appropriate in Canada.”

Prominent among pre-arrival programs is a one-day orientation and information session called Planning for Canada, which is offered free, both online and in person, in countries including India, China and the Philippines.

The federally funded program was launched in October, 2015, and is jointly run by the Canadian Immigrant Integration Program (CIIP, a program of Colleges and Institutes Canada) and Canadian Orientation Abroad (a program of the International Organization for Migration).

Planning for Canada has teamed with dozens of organizations (including the YMCA, the Immigrant Access Fund, and employment, tourism and nursing interests) as well as colleges that help students to plan their journeys to Canada.

Partner colleges include Red River, George Brown, Bow Valley College in Calgary, Vancouver Community College, and Parkland College, with campuses in Saskatchewan.

One goal of Planning for Canada is to “dispel any misunderstanding or misconceptions earlier in the [immigration] process,” says CIIP director Holly Skelton.

She says a bulk of immigrants are chosen to come to Canada based on their high levels of academic achievement, yet one common misunderstanding is that credentials earned in another country will be recognized fully in Canada.

“We’re there to provide a reality check and provide information they need to take action right away, before they come, so they can hit the ground running and don’t waste time,” says Ms. Skelton.

Source: New to Canada, struggling to find work – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Immigration, Integration Tagged with , ,

Quebec ban on face coverings a blatant violation of religious freedom: David Butt

2017/10/21 Leave a comment

At some point in time, the ban will be successfully challenged:

With Halloween imminent, people turn their thoughts to the good-natured duplicity of costumes. But there is a much darker duplicity afoot as well. Under the mask of pursuing “social cohesion” the Quebec legislature has passed a bill denying women the right to receive public services while wearing a veil for religious reasons. The law is a blatant violation of religious freedom guaranteed by the Charter of Rights, an exercise in oppression of a socially vulnerable minority and gender discrimination to boot. Quite a litany of legal lapses in one bill.

Our Charter protects religious freedom regardless of whether our beliefs are shared by a majority, a minority or nobody. It matters not if others think our sincere religious beliefs benign, wacky or offensive. The freedom to believe as we choose is protected nonetheless. To understand what is so wrong with this new law one must first accept, difficult as it may be, that people who hold religious beliefs we dislike intensely are just as free to hold them as we are to hold our own. Embracing diversity can be hard and challenging work.

Some religious practices can be limited by government. But the government must tread lightly. The limits must be reasonable and carefully tailored to pursue legitimate social objectives. For example, a religious belief that prohibits being photographed cannot exempt the believer from a driver’s licence photo: Driving is necessarily heavily regulated, so anyone wishing to drive must have a proper licence.

The Quebec government ban on veil-wearers receiving government services pursues no legitimate social objective and is not carefully tailored to anything. How does a Muslim woman quietly riding a public bus create any harm, or risk of harm, to the broader public good? She doesn’t. Nor is there any harm flowing from a Muslim woman using a library, visiting a hospital ER or getting a building permit from City Hall. So there is no valid objective pursued by denying these services to Muslim women who wear a veil.

Wherever photo ID is required, briefly lifting a veil to confirm identity is indeed a legitimate ask by those providing government services. But this new law goes far beyond such reasonable limits on religious freedom. The veiled woman might properly be required to lift her veil to use a photo-ID bus pass. But she should not have to keep the veil off for the entire bus ride. So the law is not carefully tailored either. It is a vastly over-reaching intrusion on freedom of religion.

If the Charter of Rights so obviously dooms this law to oblivion, why would the Quebec Legislature pass it in the first place? In fact, democracies function rather well on a certain degree of tension between legislatures and courts, which protect fundamental freedoms. Legislatures fulfill basic democratic norms by enacting laws conforming to majority views. The Quebec Legislature has done so here, where public support for the law hovers around 87 per cent. And it is for courts to do the politically unpalatable, but necessary, work of striking down bad laws that violate the minority rights of those lacking sufficient numbers for political clout. Such tension can be healthy in a vibrant democracy committed to both democratic rule and minority rights.

But the Quebec government doesn’t get off so lightly here. If we look at why people are so strongly and viscerally opposed to women wearing veils, we will see that the Quebec government is catering slavishly to the meanest urges of the voting mob, stooping to the lowest depths of democracy.

Behind much visceral opposition to veils is unwarranted fear of the unfamiliar. Veils make women perpetually unfamiliar in a shallow visual sense, and this allows the unreflective among us to wrongly build the irrational bridge from unfamiliarity to loathing. Sadly, that is what the Quebec government has encouraged. Anyone making the effort to know veil wearers will of course discover a rich humanity that whether agreeable or disagreeable, reduces wardrobe choices to near irrelevance and invisibility.

Also behind much opposition to veils is the infuriatingly persistent social tendency to tell women what their choices mean, and then impose that meaning on them. The Quebec government is paternalistically telling women that even their most thoughtful, sincere and highly individual religious choice to wear veils categorically denotes nothing more than mean-spirited rejection of the community that sustains them. And the government is then punishing these women for sending the message the government has told them they are sending. This is oppression, pure and simple.

At Halloween, the Quebec legislature has rejected treats in favour of a mean-spirited, insidious trick. Let us hope the courts will not be fooled by the legislature’s poorly crafted disguise.

Source: Quebec ban on face coverings a blatant violation of religious freedom – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

‘Problematic’ and a ‘dog’s breakfast’: Quebec face-covering ban panned by authors of landmark report [Bouchard and Taylor]

2017/10/21 Leave a comment

Always worth listening to Bouchard and Taylor:

A new Quebec law purported to deal with secularism and the accommodation of minorities is being called a “dog’s breakfast” of contradictions by one of the authors of a landmark study of the issue.

The other author of the study says it would be “problematic” in its application by health-care and transit workers.

In their 2008 report, sociologist Gérard Bouchard and philosopher Charles Taylor offered solutions aimed at assuaging concerns about the erosion of Quebec identity while respecting the rights of minorities.

The Liberal government’s Bill 62 on religious neutrality, passed in Quebec’s National Assembly on Wednesday, aims to address some of the recommendations laid out in their report.

However, speaking separately, both men say it misses the mark.

“It’s a bit surprising that a law that purports to be about secularism reduces it to one dimension — religious neutrality — and doesn’t explore separation of church and state, equality of religions and belief, freedom of religion,” Bouchard told Radio-Canada’s morning radio program Gravel le matin.

Bouchard pointed out that the law does not address the crucifix still hanging at the National Assembly.

Taylor had an even more scathing assessment. In an email, he called it “excessive and badly conceived, in fact, contradictory.”

The bill represents Quebec’s latest attempt to address the question of religious neutrality.

The separation of church and state is viewed as a central pillar of Quebec society, but successive governments have struggled to implement guidelines on what this should look like on a daily basis — with neutrality and secularism running up against religious freedom.

How will law be applied?

Bill 62 extends to municipal services, meaning Muslim women who wear a niqab or burka wouldn’t be able to take out a book from the library, visit the doctor or take the bus or Metro.

The guidelines on how the law should be enforced won’t be ready until next summer. The law also provides for exceptions to be made on religious grounds, though exactly how that would work is unclear.

All this makes the law’s application “problematic,” Bouchard said.

“A woman with a covered face who presents herself at the hospital emergency room, we’re not going to send her home if it’s life-threatening,” he said.

“Another scenario, the bus stops in winter and it’s –30 C, and the woman with a niqab is there with her two small children. Will the driver leave her on the curb?”

The union representing workers at Montreal’s public transit authority, the STM, has already said its members don’t want that responsibility, while civil rights advocates say the law infringes on freedoms enshrined under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

In an email, Taylor pointed out that the province justified the law for safety, communication and identification reasons.

But, he said, none of those are at stake when someone takes a bus or is treated by a doctor in hospital.

“It’s a dog’s breakfast,” Taylor said.

Source: ‘Problematic’ and a ‘dog’s breakfast’: Quebec face-covering ban panned by authors of landmark report – Montreal – CBC News

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A cultural policy that overlooks multiculturalism [media focus]

2017/10/21 Leave a comment

George Abraham, publisher of New Canadian Media, on the need for broader and more diverse journalism (disclosure: I assisted George and New Canadian Media during its early years):

For a multicultural country, we have a rather monocultural media landscape. Our newsrooms and media organizations no longer reflect their audiences.  Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly missed an opportunity to make a policy intervention that would have at least nudged some reform.

Canada’s multicultural media has been decimated in recent years.  There were budget cuts in multicultural programming at the Rogers-owned OMNI Television. A promising media enterprise that published a string of multicultural and community newspapers went under in 2013. It was ironic that the Mississauga-based Multicultural Nova Corporation was being subsidized by the Italian government. These and other outlets help Canadians weave a shared narrative around what it means to be Canadian, at a time when our “ethno-cultural” (to use a favourite expression of bureaucrats) makeup is rapidly changing. Our ethnic media remain as fragmented and resource-strapped as ever.

“Canada’s ethnic and third-language communities do not have access to enough news and information programming in multiple languages from a Canadian perspective,” the chairman of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) Jean-Pierre Blais said in May.

The fact is, Canada is rapidly changing before our eyes, but we continue to sleepwalk through this transformation.

While media organizations and journalism schools appear to have given up measuring the representation of minorities in newsrooms (the last credible industry-wide study was in 2004), the government is aware that this lack of representation is a major handicap for new immigrants. A June 2014 study titled “Evidence-based Levels and Mix: Absorptive Capacity” (bureaucratese for how well Canada integrates its immigrants) stated categorically: “There is no clear commitment to achieving diversity in Canada’s newsrooms or in Canadian news content.” (The study was commissioned by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, and it was released under the Access to Information Act.)

The government’s new cultural policy did little to shift the conversation to the emerging media players who are redefining journalism for a new era. It failed to state the obvious: a shrinking cohort of media organizations that have monopolized national discourse are headed for irrelevance, because neither their audience nor their newsrooms are reflective of Canada at large.

This lopsided media structure means that folks like me don’t get to tell our own stories on our own terms. Somebody else uses the lens of their lived experience to interpret our immigrant stories. A cultural and content policy written in 2017 ought to have been much more mindful of this shift – roughly 40 percent of Canadians are either foreign-born or the children of immigrants (the bulk of them have Asian roots, like Jagmeet Singh). The minister should have outlined specific goals to foster and sustain the kind of journalism that reflects a new Canada where the rise of a sardar (turbaned Sikh) is not a leap of faith, but a fact of life.

I write this as somebody who is well aware of the perils of “government support.” Not all governments are benign actors. In Dubai, the owners of the newspaper where I once worked found themselves on the wrong side of the ruling family. We had a dedicated “reporter” whose job was to relay diktats from the government to the editor. At another outlet in Doha, the newspaper was owned by the country’s then foreign minister. It was my job as managing editor to walk the gauntlet between censorship and shackled freedom. The country even had a director of censorship, who subsequently became the editor-in-chief of an Arabic language newspaper.

Not all journalists welcome government support. The Canadian nonprofit media organization that I run has lost editors who couldn’t live with any form of government funding. We’ve viewed these grants – including those from the Canada Periodical Fund – as seed money for an enterprise that serves the collective public good. I’d like to think that we exist because we fulfill a need. Joly missed an opportunity to signal a shift of tax dollars towards content that enables new players to take advantage of gaps in the marketplace of ideas.

I also know first-hand that editors and newsroom managers are loath to take the bold steps that will change the demographics of their newsrooms. There’s a lot of lip service being done out there and little concrete action. The cultural industries policy statement could have made a big difference by offering incentives to correct this imbalance and foster the growth of alternative media platforms that cater to niche markets.

Instead, the headline coming out of the policy statement was focused on Netflix and its promise to make investments in Canadian productions, as if this would in some way feed this country’s desperate need for a new narrative and a new conversation. Entertainment seemed to take precedence over journalism in the policy announcement, although both embody the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell the rest of the world.

However, fact is more important than fiction. Facts are sacrosanct and the need of the hour. The phenomenon of “fake news” can only be addressed by true and tested journalism. The opinions of Canadians need to be shaped by solid, on-the-ground reporting done by journalists who are embedded in their communities and share the lived experience of the places they call home. This includes newcomer journalists who offer unique perspectives about their communities and are informed by the day-to-day trials that immigrants face in buying or renting homes, finding employment, enrolling their children in schools and becoming full members of the society around them. There is a public interest in ensuring that their voices are heard, not just through niche media and ethnic platforms but also in legacy newsrooms.

The federal government has rightly supported Canadian culture and content since the days of the Massey Commission in 1951. A Canada of 35 million people, or an imagined one of 100 million, will live or die on the ties that bind its people together. Old-fashioned journalism ought to be the bedrock of a more globalized, more multicultural Canada.

Source: A cultural policy that overlooks multiculturalism

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Exorciser ses démons | Michèle Ouimet’s reflections on 10 years after the Bouchard-Taylor hearings

2017/10/20 Leave a comment

Good column by Ouimet, 10 years after the Bouchard-Taylor hearings, and the risks and rewards of having such open testimonies:

On l’oublie, mais la commission Bouchard-Taylor sur les accommodements raisonnables a été immensément populaire. Déversoirs des frustrations des Québécois, ses forums, pris d’assaut, étaient diffusés en direct à la télévision. C’était en 2007, avant la folie des réseaux sociaux.

Madeleine Poulin, ex-grande reporter à Radio-Canada, jouait le rôle de modératrice. Elle a sillonné les 17 régions du Québec et entendu les 764 témoignages.

L’entreprise était audacieuse, pour ne pas dire téméraire. Quand les gens prenaient le micro, Madeleine Poulin n’avait aucune idée de ce qu’ils allaient dire. Il n’y avait pas de filtre, pas de filet de sécurité, pas de pré-entrevue, rien.

« On leur donnait la parole sans savoir ce qu’ils allaient dire, m’a dit Madeleine Poulin. En direct, à la télévision. Je n’avais jamais vu ça. C’était un stress constant. Les commissaires [Gérard Bouchard et Charles Taylor] n’étaient pas très conscients de ce que ça représentait. Ils ne comprenaient pas la force de la télévision, encore moins les risques du direct. »

Environ 50 000 personnes étaient rivées à leur téléviseur pour écouter ce que monsieur et madame Tout-le-Monde avaient à dire. Un succès monstre pour RDI.

Un forum aussi ouvert est sans précédent dans le monde occidental, souligne Solange Lefebvre, titulaire de la Chaire de recherche en gestion de la diversité culturelle et religieuse à l’Université de Montréal.

« Une consultation publique sans filtre sur des sujets aussi explosifs ? C’était certainement hasardeux. »

– Solange Lefebvre

Il s’est dit quelques folies, sans oublier les antisémites et islamophobes de ce monde qui se ruaient sur le micro pour cracher leur venin.

Un homme a dit en parlant des immigrants : « Sacre ton camp et n’oublie pas de ramasser tes guenilles et tes ordures avec toi. »

Un autre a raconté : « J’ai vécu un an en Égypte parmi les musulmans, je les ai endurés, pis là, je m’aperçois que je dois les endurer encore. »

« Qu’est-ce qu’on va faire quand les Inuis [sic], au nom de leur religion, vont vouloir fumer le calumet de paix dans des endroits publics ? » a demandé un hurluberlu.

Du grand n’importe quoi.

Sans oublier ceux qui étaient hors sujet.

« Je suis rendu à 50 ans, je suis célibataire. Pas par choix. J’ai juste ça à dire. »

Heureusement.

Certains membres des minorités culturelles n’étaient pas en reste : « Je n’ai jamais lapidé ma femme », a précisé l’un d’eux.

Pourquoi ne pas les avoir interrompus ?

« Les commissaires voulaient que ce soit un grand exercice démocratique, une libération par la parole, a répondu Madeleine Poulin. C’était important qu’il n’y ait pas de contraintes. »

Les commissaires auraient-ils dû condamner les propos racistes ? J’ai posé la question à la chercheuse Solange Lefebvre.

Long silence au bout du fil, suivi d’un soupir. « C’est difficile. […] C’est pas pour rien qu’on a de la misère à décider du format de la commission actuelle sur le racisme. C’est la marmite identitaire, la marmite raciste, la marmite du ressentiment. »

Les médias ont souligné à grands traits les travers et les propos xénophobes, burlesques et racistes. Infoman en a même fait une anthologie.

Réduire la Commission à ces propos grotesques est injuste. Elle a permis au monde ordinaire d’exprimer son opinion, d’avouer ses peurs, de se défouler et d’apprendre ce qu’est un hijab et un niqab, préalable important pour avancer. Vider son sac pour mieux construire, une sorte de passage obligé.

Il ne faut pas oublier le contexte explosif. À l’époque, le Québec était survolté. Les cas d’accommodement raisonnable, souvent loufoques, faisaient les manchettes. C’était une course, chaque média cherchait le cas le plus croustillant pour faire sa une, allant des fenêtres givrées du YMCA à la cabane à sucre qui avait retiré le porc de son menu pour donner satisfaction aux musulmans, en passant par le code de vie d’Hérouxville qui précisait que les femmes ne pouvaient être ni lapidées ni brûlées vives.

Les accommodements étaient accordés à gogo, selon l’air du temps ou l’humeur des gestionnaires qui ne savaient plus à quel saint se vouer.

Alors oui, il s’en est dit des niaiseries à la commission Bouchard-Taylor, thérapie collective oblige.

Mais il n’y a pas eu que des niaiseries. Bien au contraire.

Les journalistes Valérie Dufour et Jeff Heinrich ont couvert toutes les séances de la Commission. Ils ont publié un livre peu de temps après, Circus quebecus.

« Des madames comme ma mère déposaient des mémoires à Sept-Îles, Québec, Saint-Jérôme, m’a expliqué Valérie Dufour. Elles disaient toutes la même affaire. Elles avaient peur que le port des signes religieux fasse régresser les droits des femmes. C’était très intéressant et pas si laid que ça. »

« Les mêmes thèmes revenaient souvent, a-t-elle ajouté : la peur des autres, la peur de perdre quelque chose, la peur de donner un privilège à quelqu’un. »

Le Québec avait besoin d’exorciser ses démons, nul doute là-dessus.

***

Où en sommes-nous, dix ans plus tard ? Avons-nous reculé ? Avancé ? Sommes-nous plus tolérants ? Faut-il lancer la pierre aux médias ? Ont-ils jeté de l’huile sur le feu ?

Il en sera question demain lors d’un colloque de l’Université de Montréal qui se penchera sur le Québec post-Commission.

À la fin des travaux, Charles Taylor avait dit : « On a beaucoup appris, mais on est encore plus confus qu’auparavant. »

Dix ans plus tard, a-t-il raison ?

Source: Exorciser ses démons | Michèle Ouimet | Michèle Ouimet

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Quebec law banning face coverings is neither neutral nor constitutional: Emmett Macfarlane

2017/10/20 1 Comment

Good assessment by Macfarlane:

The Quebec National Assembly has passed Bill 62, legislation introduced by the Liberal government that bans public workers and anyone receiving public services from wearing the niqab or any other face covering.

Although it is described as imposing a duty of religious neutrality on public servants and people using government services, the new law is neither neutral nor constitutional. It is impossible to reconcile this law as anything other than the targeting of a minority group, a slightly narrower spin on the now perennial Quebec debate over the wearing of (non-Catholic) religious identifiers.

Much like past proposals by the former Parti Québécois government under Pauline Marois, the law here is defended on the grounds of Quebec secularism, but it is a perversion of secularism, which would normally see the state refuse to adopt or sanction particular religions over others. Instead, the version of secularism to which Quebec’s political class seems to adhere is simply anti-religion, and more specifically, religions not reflected by the giant cross hanging in the National Assembly.

Protections under the Charter

It is this systemically discriminatory aspect of the bill which will fail to meet constitutional muster under the Charter of Rights. For not only does the bill violate the freedom of religion guarantee, it undoubtedly violates the Charter’s equality rights protections as well. The ban takes effect immediately, but detailed guidelines for exemptions – specifically, religious accommodation – apparently will not materialize until next July. In the meantime, the government better hope no Muslim woman wearing a niqab is prevented from accessing government services, for the law is unlikely to survive a court challenge.

No doubt the government has attempted to shield the law from precisely this sort of legal challenge. The ban applies to all face coverings, not just religious ones. But rights are held by individuals, and where it may be constitutional to force someone to remove a winter scarf or a pair of sunglasses, governments must justify imposing limits on religious freedoms like wearing the niqab.

Niqab

You will not see the Supreme Court sailing into the text of the Bible or Qur’an to determine which religious practices are “legitimate” requirements and which are not. The test is whether a rights claimant has a sincere belief. (Luc Lavigne/Radio-Canada)

It is at this point that some readers might object: “the niqab is a cultural affectation, not a religious requirement!” But courts in Canada do not engage in theology when ascertaining whether someone’s religious freedom has been infringed. Religions are not monolithic, and adherents have a diversity of viewpoints on all sorts of religious rules and practices. You will not see the Supreme Court sailing into the text of the Bible or Qur’an to determine which religious practices are “legitimate” requirements and which are not. The test is whether a rights claimant has a sincere belief that their religion requires particular practices or traditions.

So what justification does the government have for this law? The justice minister has cited reasons of communication, security and identification. You will be forgiven for wondering if you missed the news about a rash of nefarious people riding public transit lately, for it is unclear what security-related issues are actually at stake. As for identifying people using public services, there haven’t been any issues when people legitimately do need to show their face, such as when obtaining driver’s licenses.

But let’s stipulate that courts will accept this rationale as a pressing and substantial purpose for limiting people’s rights (courts normally accept any reasonable-sounding government purpose). The crucial question will be whether the ban minimally impairs the rights in question, and the clear answer is no.

There is no reason, security or otherwise, that anyone needs to see anyone else’s face on the bus. Especially in Canada with its pesky winters. To meet the Charter’s requirements, the benefit of a law needs to outweigh the harms imposed, and here religious freedoms will be violated for entirely illusory benefits.

There is one other common objection to this analysis, and that relates directly to why the government might have a legitimate reason to ban niqabs specifically: that niqabs are themselves oppressive, as Muslim women may be forced to wear them by their husbands or fathers or even their broader communities.

Banning women from the bus

Proponents of this view like to present a niqab ban as the feminist policy. But it is telling that some people will argue they are defending women, while defending the state telling women what they can or cannot wear. It is also unfortunate for this particular brand of “feminist” that Canadian women who wear the niqab have explained their own reasons for choosing to wear it and most have denied they are being forced. It is at best patronizing, and at worst xenophobic, to pretend that all of these Muslim women in Canada are suffering from a lack of personal agency in this regard.

It is also worth noting that if any of these women are oppressed, subject to such misogynistic control by their husbands or fathers, the effect of the law will not be to free them from their shackles but instead will be to simply ban them from using the bus.

The state cannot impose freedom by restricting it.

Source: Quebec law banning face coverings is neither neutral nor constitutional – CBC News | Opinion

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Square and Pinterest’s newly released employment data reveals a lack of diversity in top ranks – Recode

2017/10/20 Leave a comment

More tech industry numbers:

Square, a rising payments company, had only one person of color — an Asian man — in its 11-member executive ranks as of last year, according to newly available data.

Founded and run by Jack Dorsey, the company has a market value of $12.5 billion and had a total net revenue of $1.7 billion last year.

At another end of Silicon Valley, four of the eight executives at social media company Pinterest were people of color — two Asian males and a man and woman each of two or more races.

23andMe, a DNA testing company, was the only firm of approximately 20 top tech companies that have recently released such data that had an executive lineup near gender parity. Eight of its 17 top employees were women. Even so, only one of the 17 was a minority.

The lack of diversity among the upper ranks of these companies is consistent with other tech companies, and highlights the ongoing issue within Silicon Valley of bringing in leadership that isn’t white and male.

This new data comes from an ongoing project by the nonprofit Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. The project aims to create transparency about gender and race among Silicon Valley companies

The study shows for the first time the diversity stats for seven Bay Area tech companies: Square, Pinterest, 23andMe, Clover Health, MobileIron, Nvidia and View.

Using the data collected by Reveal, Recode looked at the top ranks of tech companies that have made their government diversity data public. We analyzed the racial and gender composition of executives or senior level managers, defined as people who “direct and formulate policies, set strategy and provide the overall direction,” according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (Note: The Reveal data and analysis doesn’t include the Seattle-based Amazon, but we’ve added it in. We left out Clover Health from our analysis due to a possible mistake in their data.)

The data from these companies reflect the lack of racial and gender diversity elsewhere in Silicon Valley.

Twitter, for example, had no blacks or Latinos among its 47 executives. Of Amazon’s 105 executives in 2016, just one was Latino and none were black.

Facebook’s 496 executives were some of the most diverse, with 7 percent, or 35 people from underrepresented minorities, specifically executives who are not white or Asian.

Companies with more than 100 employees are required by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to fill out an annual survey that identifies the race and gender of their employees in 10 different employment categories, from laborers to chief executives.

Source: Square and Pinterest’s newly released employment data reveals a lack of diversity in top ranks – Recode

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

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