Indigenous names can be reclaimed on passports and other immigration documents: Ottawa

2021/06/16 Leave a comment

Of note. Will be interesting to see take-up among Indigenous peoples:

First Nations, Inuit and Métis people can reclaim their Indigenous names on passports and other government documents, the federal government has announced.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) said Monday that the change will include things such as travel documents and citizenship certificates, adding that the service will be provided free of charge for five years.

Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino said the use of traditional names is intrinsic to Indigenous languages and cultures, as well as to identity and dignity. He said the decision is in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) call to action 17, which referenced passports.

But the department decided to go further to include a host of other documents, Mr. Mendicino said, adding that the work will be done with Indigenous leaders and communities to ensure the process is smooth.

“Our names are among the first things we receive,” he said. “They’re individualized, unique. They speak to our past, honouring those who came before us, and reflect our family’s history. Naming children is a profoundly important tradition across many different cultures and communities. The traditional names given to Indigenous children carry deep cultural meaning. Yet, for many First Nations, Inuit and Métis people, colonialism has robbed them of these sacred names.”

Indigenous children who were taken from their families and forced into the residential school system also had their names stolen from them, Mr. Mendicino said, pointing to the testimonials of survivors in the TRC’s final report.

IRCC said it is working on two other calls to action, including an update of the Citizenship Guide that will include the role Indigenous peoples played in the development of Canada and an amendment to the Oath of Canadian Citizenship that will refer to the rights of Indigenous peoples and treaties. Last week, a bill designed to amend the Citizenship Act to change the oath of citizenship passed third reading in the Senate. It is now awaiting royal assent.

In the past two weeks, Ottawa has faced pressure to further advance reconciliation in Canada after Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc First Nation in B.C. said it had discovered the remains of 215 children, former students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, in unmarked graves. The finding touched off vigils and commemorations and demands that provincial governments and the federal government do more.

On Monday, Ottawa also announced appointees to the new Office of the Commissioner of Indigenous Languages. Ronald Ignace will serve as the commissioner, with Robert Watt, Georgina Liberty and Joan Greyeyes as directors. The office will support Indigenous people to ensure their languages can be shared and spoken for years to come.

The federal government said the directors and commissioner were selected for their knowledge and understanding of Indigenous communities, cultures and languages.

“We celebrate this day where we breathe new life into all of our Indigenous languages for the future,” Dr. Ignace said. “Our languages will no longer stand in the shadow of other languages here in our land. Let us always honour our Indigenous languages.”

Source: Indigenous names can be reclaimed on passports and other immigration documents: Ottawa

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New Zealand apologizes for 1970s raids on Pacific people

2021/06/16 Leave a comment

Of note, reflecting similar experiences of Indigenous peoples and others in many countries:

Aupito William Sio recalled the terrifying day during his childhood when police officers holding German shepherd dogs turned up at his family home before dawn and shined flashlights into their faces while his father stood there helpless.

Now the minister for Pacific peoples, Sio and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced Monday the government would formally apologize for an infamous part of the nation’s history known as the Dawn Raids.

It’s when Pacific Island people were targeted for deportation in the mid-1970s during aggressive home raids by authorities to find, convict and deport overstayers. The raids often took place very early in the morning or late at night.

Sio became emotional as he and Ardern discussed the apology at a news conference.

“We felt as a community that we were invited to come to New Zealand. We responded to the call to fill the labor workforce that was needed, in the same way we responded to the call for soldiers in 1914,” Sio said.

But he said the government then turned on the Pasifika community when it felt those workers were no longer needed.

Ardern said that at the time, people who didn’t look like white New Zealanders were told they should carry identification to prove they weren’t overstayers, and were often randomly stopped in the street, or even at schools or churches. She said Pacific people were often dragged before the courts in their pajamas and without proper representation.

“Not only were they targeted, they were targeted using a process and a practice that was really dehumanizing, that really terrorized people in their homes,” Ardern said.

She said that when computerized immigration records were introduced in 1977, they showed that 40% of overstayers were either British or American, groups that were never targeted for deportation.

“The raids, and what they represented, created deep wounds,” Ardern said. “And while we cannot change our history, we can acknowledge it, and we can seek to right a wrong.”

In Sio’s case, he said his family were legal residents who owned the home but a couple of his father’s nephews from Samoa were staying with them and were taken away by the police without their clothes or belongings, and later deported.

He said the nephews had been working at a factory and their visas had expired. He said they had been preparing to go home and wanted to do a few more overtime shifts before they left. Sio said his father helped advocate for them to get back their clothes and money so they could leave New Zealand with some measure of their dignity intact.

The formal apology will be held at a commemoration event on June 26 in Auckland. The apology doesn’t come with any financial compensation or legal changes, but Sio believes it is an important first step. He said the trauma is still fresh for many and it’s good to address the issue and prevent such a situation happening in the future.

Ardern said it’s just the third time the government has made such an apology.

The previous apologies were for imposing a entry tax on Chinese immigrants in the 1880s and for introducing the deadly influenza pandemic to Samoa in 1918, which killed more than one-fifth of the population.

Source: New Zealand apologizes for 1970s raids on Pacific people

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Singh’s blunt message about racism reflects mood of Canadians

2021/06/16 Leave a comment

Of note – one take:

Already exhausted — and, in some parts of the country, angry — from a pandemic that’s left 26,000 dead, disturbing events of recent weeks have added to Canadians’ emotional burden.

First came a groundswell of emotion when news broke that the bodies of 215 Indigenous children had been located in unmarked graves on the grounds of the now-closed Kamloops Indian Residential School. Then came an outpouring of anger and grief in response to the Islamophobic murder of four members of a family in London, Ont., and more grief later, when their flag-draped coffins arrived at their funeral.

The usual sombre speeches were made — salves to help Canadians recover from the terrible events. But not every political leader was encouraging Canadians to move on. At a community meeting in London, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh spoke with anger.

Later, in the House of Commons, Singh forcefully added a new idea to the debate. “Some people have said, ‘This is not our Canada,’ ” Singh told MPs.

“But the reality is, this is our Canada. We can’t deny it. We can’t reject that, because it does no one any help. The reality is: Our Canada is a place of racism, of violence, of genocide of Indigenous people.”

Singh may be sensing a widespread mood. In an opinion poll Leger released last week, 57 per cent of Canadians said the Kamloops graves made them “question the whole moral foundation that Canada has been based on.”

Singh’s message probably won’t be positively received by “official Canada,” the network of government leaders and businesspeople who run the country. If this is a place of racism, violence, and genocide, they helped to create and perpetuate it.

But their dominance of Canadian identity seems to have been overtaken recently by the everyday experiences of previously ignored people.

The deaths and burials at residential schools were known by Indigenous families, but news media didn’t tell those stories. Nor is the frustration with ongoing racism, and fear of violent racists, new in Canada. Many Canadians live with both every day.

These are the experiences of what political science calls the “subaltern” classes of society — groups who have no say and no command in politics or business. And they certainly don’t decide the meaning of their country. Not usually, anyway.

Subaltern society is divided into identities, each pushed to the margins of political discourse, isolated from each other, and without the common networks, culture, or political language to tell a common and unifying story. That now seems to be changing.

“This is our Canada” isn’t just a demand to look objectively at Canada’s past; it’s a call to disparate people to find a new moral basis for their country.

A good political leader can sense and express the mood of the country. But what’s more rare is a politician who can shape it, which appears to be what Singh is doing by weaving together the everyday experiences of racism, fear, violence, and economic struggles.

If we’re re-evaluating Canada, as it seems we are, Singh may play a significant role in redefining it. It’s impossible to know if new ideas will help the electoral prospects of Singh’s New Democrats; the Liberals may well seize the momentum.

But something has changed. We know we can’t continue as if nothing happened, and it seems voices previously at the margins are now telling the story of what did.

Tom Parkin is a social democratic columnist and commentator based in Toronto who has worked for the NDP in Saskatchewan and Ontario.

Source: Singh’s blunt message about racism reflects mood of Canadians

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To tackle hate-motivated crimes, Canada’s justice system needs to change

2021/06/15 3 Comments

Of note even if the proposed solutions are modest and unlikely by themselves to make a significant difference although encouraging minorities and others to increase reporting would be a good step:

As Muslim chairs of police boards in Ontario, we are sadly familiar with hate-motivated crimes, and with the reality that no country is immune. Police services across Canada have been grappling with these issues for some time, and we are vividly aware that we cannot look away from the hatred that stole the lives of four fellow Canadians who died simply because they were walking while Muslim.

While the particulars of criminal investigations cannot be released, London Police Services were clear that our beloved community members were murdered and targeted for their Islamic faith. As hard as that is to hear for many Canadians, the truth is this is not a singular event. Islamophobic incidents happen all the time in Canada.

In the City of London and Peel Region, both of which are home to diverse communities with large numbers of racialized citizens, police-reported hate-crime numbers have remained consistent over the last few years. According to Statistics Canada, London’s numbers rose by more than a third from 2015 to 2019, and in four of those five years, the city’s rate per 100,000 population was higher than the national average. In 2019, London police reported that Black, Muslim, Jewish, Middle Eastern and LGBTQ2+ peoples constituted the five most targeted groups for hate crimes. In Peel, meanwhile, crimes motivated by race or nationality increased by 54 per cent from 2018 to 2020, with Black and South Asian people being the most targeted by race or ethnicity. Muslims and Jews experienced the most targeting based on faith.

Yet, despite these numbers, our justice system continues to have an incredibly high threshold for anyone to be prosecuted under hate-related laws, and as a result, it is not achieving its desired aims. There remains no specific definition of a “hate crime” in the Criminal Code as a chargeable offence, and what is laid out only provides a judge the ability to hand down harsher sentences based on his or her ruling around a given perpetrator’s motivations. In Peel, only a third of the Criminal Code offences designated by police as hate- or bias-motivated crimes resulted in Criminal Code charges in 2020.

This outdated model emboldens hateful behavior while doing little to dissuade perpetrators, which in turn normalizes their hate-filled rhetoric and actions. Perpetrators such as Alexandre Bissonnette, for instance, have reaped the benefit of loopholes such as concurrent sentences; Mr. Bissonnette murdered six people in Quebec City in 2017, yet serves time for only one murder. We cannot let this injustice continue in the case of the family killed in London, Ont.

Reporting mechanisms are also a challenge. Far too often, verbal threats and assaults are not brought to the police because victims don’t feel like they’ll be taken seriously, simply don’t want the trouble, or are concerned that their reporting will only further agitate the perpetrators, putting the victims and their families at further risk. This means that any hate-crime numbers are almost certainly underestimated, masking the magnitude of the problem.

Earlier this week, community leaders called for action at the vigil for the family killed on the streets of London, but political gesturing and posturing won’t be enough to help prevent the next hate-fueled mass murder. We must name hate for what it is, stare it down, and work with the affected communities to prioritize change over pandering for votes. All parties must work together to get tougher on hate and extremism. We must end the minimization and denial that has become commonplace in our system and in our discourse. Our politicians and legislators can get the ball rolling by changing hate-crime laws to better protect victims who do report, while holding those responsible maximally accountable.

We must also work with our communities to increase the reporting of such crimes so that we can both identify and engage the perpetrators and provide victims with a sense of safety and support. In addition, our laws must also reflect our society’s values and priorities. If hate crimes are difficult to prosecute and carry minimal odds of conviction, this sends the wrong message.

It’s time to take bolder action against anti-Muslim hate, and all other forms of hate and bigotry that continue to terrorize our communities. It’s time to arm our justice system with the necessary tools to root out hatred, and to hold accountable those who perpetrate hate crimes. It’s time to remind far-right extremists and terrorists that our country will not tolerate their hate-motivated crimes and rhetoric. The human cost of our inaction would be too great to bear.

Javeed Sukhera is the chair of the London Police Services Board and an associate professor of psychiatry and paediatrics at Western University. Ahmad Attia is the chair of the Peel Police Services Board and the CEO of Incisive Strategy.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-to-tackle-hate-motivated-crimes-canadas-justice-system-needs-to-change/

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Sears: Canadian Muslims’ anguished demand: how many more times?

2021/06/15 Leave a comment

Reads as overly “triumphant” given that the solutions are neither simple nor easy. But yes, the political presence of all major political leaders, the regrets of Conservatives regarding “barbaric cultural practices” are significant signals of changing social norms (even if not much evidence in right-wing media):

What a difference a year makes.

It seems unlikely that the massive nationwide reaction to the murder of a Muslim family in London, Ont. a week ago tonight would have been as deep and all-embracing before the death of George Floyd. His death, and the global revulsion to it, forced new lessons on all of us about the depths and costs of systemic racism.

This week, impressively, the majority of those demanding change were not Muslim. Also remarkable was the sight of every political leader from every level of government at the London vigil. They all underlined that there is simply no political space anymore for even dog-whistled racist tropes in our politics. Stephen Harper was the last politician to suffer for his 2015 campaign’s sleazy racist whispers. Premier Kenney, who blamed South Asians’ cultural practices for the spread of COVID in their communities, seems likely to be the next.

A European friend reminded me recently that we should be proud that we are the only nation in the developed world where there is zero traction for a racist or anti-immigrant political party. It is a feature of our politics that we should celebrate. We saw it again this week.

American politicians’ declarations of their nation’s “exceptionalism” cause many Canadians to twitch. Barack Obama’s bizarrely ignorant claim that his victory could only have taken place in one country made many of us shout “not true!” at our screens. So, it is with some trepidation I suggest that there are few places in the world where an entire nation will leap immediately to the defence of a wounded Muslim community and demand action from all their politicians.

What we cannot pat our collective back for, however, is success in fighting the visible rise in calls for violence from white supremacists. Incited from the depths of the social media swamp, we can no longer deny the cancerous growth of racial hatred. We find it in members of our military and police services, in too many hospital and LTC workers and on too many city streets. We cannot excuse our political leaders for their continuing incompetence and failure to take even the most basic steps to block racist attacks.

As one sign at the London vigil demanded, “How Many More Times?” Neither the prime minister nor Premier Ford embraced the call for an emergency national summit to create an action agenda, despite their powerful rhetorical performances that night. Nothing effective was done after the mosque murders in Quebec City. So far, the political response to the Afzaal family’s murder has been promises to write another cheque. A more severe application of criminal justice is not the answer. Harsh punishment following the next attack will do nothing for the dead victims.

The fundamentals to rolling back racism are well known. They start with frequent public acknowledgment of our reality by leaders in every institution. Delivering stories of the power of communities devoted to inclusion and diversity, beginning at the elementary school level. Heavy consequences for social media platforms that grant safe harbours to this poison on their sites. (Removing hate speech after an attack is not good enough, Facebook.) Every one of us confronting the slurs we see and hear too often. And yes, using the law to hammer the attackers.

The politician most certainly facing humiliation is the one who falls behind their own voters in understanding an urgent need for change. The response of Canadians — first to the residential schools graves and now to this attack — makes it very clear that voters are in a mood to punish political laggards failing to deliver effective barriers to racism.

As we go to the polls a few months from now, our politicians had better have a program of effective steps to fight this building crisis. Voters will demand of every party: “How will you fight systemic racism and protect our neighbours — now? It is unacceptable in our Canada that those wearing turbans and hijabs, Asian Canadians and Canadians of colour are terrified of a Sunday evening walk.”

Source: Canadian Muslims’ anguished demand: how many more times?

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Paris: The discovery of the unmarked graves brings us face to face with our suppressed history

2021/06/15 Leave a comment

Erna Paris’s book, Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History, inspired the Canadian House of Commons motion to apologize, on behalf of the government, to survivors of Canadian residential schools

Good commentary, with an appropriate caution regarding erasing history.

Money quote:

“But history neither begins, nor ends. It is a cumulative record of people, events and changing ideas that cannot be buried. It can only be managed – with factual truth, contextual understanding and a commitment to change direction. This will be best accomplished by adding interpretative material to disputed monuments to enhance a layered comprehension of our country’s less-than-honourable past.

We are again reminded that the forced assimilation of devalued peoples will always fail, for humans cannot change their inner selves the way a snake sheds its skin. In his 2008 statement, former prime minister Stephen Harper said, “The apology today is founded upon … the recognition that we all own our own lives and destinies, the only true foundation for a society where peoples can flourish.””

Two Solitudes. That was the title of Hugh MacLennan’s famous 1945 book about the chasm between Quebec and the “Rest of Canada” – a fault line that has been negotiated continuously since the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759. But what if there were three solitudes all along, the third being the Indigenous nations that were suffering cultural decimation far below the radar of most Canadians? I was born and raised in Ontario and never heard, or read, a word about residential schools during close to two decades of schooling. Textbooks referenced the original Indian wars, but what happened to the Indigenous populations as the entity known as Canada emerged was obscured.

Over the past two decades, Canadians have gradually learned the fate of the 150,000 children who were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in residential schools run by often abusive religious authorities, mainly Catholic. The purpose of the schools was to forcibly assimilate the children by all means possible – language, dress, culture – and to be in breach of the rules was to court punishment. We now know that the children living in these 139 institutions were underfed, that many were subject to sexual assault, and that disease, neglect and abuse killed at least 6,000 of them.

On June 11, 2008, the government of Canada mounted a moving spectacle to apologize for the treatment Indigenous Canadians had received. The apology was meant to be a symbolic turning point. It even had a follow up: a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose primary goals were to acknowledge and record the residential school experience, including its consequences; to provide emotional support for individuals wishing to come forward with their stories; and to educate the Canadian public about this previously occulted history.

The broadcast sessions of the TRC were affecting. But there was a structural flaw: they included no accountability for what had occurred. The Stephen Harper government had carefully excluded legal culpability from the Commission’s formal mandate. The TRC would “not hold formal hearings, nor act as a public inquiry, nor conduct a formal legal process…”

What this meant was that the perpetrators – primarily the Catholic churches – were paradoxically allowed to behave like social workers, comforting the survivors as they completed their personal testimony. Yes, individual bishops had issued apologies, but the Catholic Church, the Vatican, had not, and no one was accountable. How much more compelling it would have been had Canadians been allowed to watch the upper echelons of the clergy testify about what they knew about gross breaches of human rights and possible criminal behaviour, even if the original perpetrators were dead? The Harper government may have rightly feared evidence that Canadian governments knew about these abuses and did nothing. It is to be noted that as early as 1907 a lawyer who conducted a review of the schools told Duncan Campbell Scott, then deputy superintendent-general of Indian Affairs, “Doing nothing to obviate the preventable causes of death brings the Department within unpleasant nearness to the charge of manslaughter.”

Fast forward to June, 2021, and more words of remorse by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. A radar search had uncovered the remains of 215 children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School and it is widely assumed that there are thousands more elsewhere.

The discovery of the bodies of maltreated nameless children has unleashed a cascade of grief among Canadians, as though the truth of what was revealed at the TRC hearings has only now become visceral. The deaths of children abused and neglected by their caregivers touches a chord. That this continued for a century in our land of “peace, order, and good government” has elicited outrage that will be assuaged only by a process of accountability. A group of Canadian lawyers has already asked the International Criminal Court to investigate the Vatican and the Canadian government for crimes against humanity. According to Asad Kiyani, assistant professor of law at the University of Victoria, there might also be grounds for domestic prosecutions for manslaughter.

In my own study of five countries that had to confront shame-producing historical truths, Canada may be unique. Unlike those who participated in authorized attacks on devalued minorities, or watched as bystanders, then struggled to create a narrative of who they were in light of what was done, Canadians were kept in the dark by successive governments that opted to efface history by means of isolated residential schools and sanitized text books. Today, there is little, if any, debate in this country about the need to make substantive amends. This does not absolve us from knowing that what was done to Indigenous children was done in our names, nor does it erase the reality of continuing racism – a prolongation of the 19th-century attitudes that produced the schools in the first place. There has been progress since the TRC issued its report in 2015, but in light of what we have recently learned, we must put pressure on government and the churches to provide all requested documentation to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. Anything less than full disclosure will be seen as stonewalling.

Unsurprisingly, the question of what to do about monuments that honour those who initiated human rights abuses has intensified. A statue to the 19th-century educator, Egerton Ryerson, who helped create the residential school system and is the namesake of a Toronto university, was torn down earlier this week. Just days earlier, a picture circulated of a statue of Sir John A. MacDonald being carted away in Charlottetown, looking not unlike the French monarch, Louis XVI, in a tumbrel en route to the guillotine. There are persuasive arguments for removing the late Ryerson, although, to his credit, he was also known for promoting free education. But we, too, should be careful about excising history. Although he operated according to the repugnant “White Man’s Burden” ideology of his age, MacDonald was the lead figure in the creation of Canada and our first prime minister. To “remove” him is to reject the origins of a shared country. The French revolutionaries also believed they could sluice away history: they even devised a new calendar, starting with Year One. In our own day, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama fantasized that the Cold War victory of liberal democracy indicated “the end of history.”

But history neither begins, nor ends. It is a cumulative record of people, events and changing ideas that cannot be buried. It can only be managed – with factual truth, contextual understanding and a commitment to change direction. This will be best accomplished by adding interpretative material to disputed monuments to enhance a layered comprehension of our country’s less-than-honourable past.

We are again reminded that the forced assimilation of devalued peoples will always fail, for humans cannot change their inner selves the way a snake sheds its skin. In his 2008 statement, former prime minister Stephen Harper said, “The apology today is founded upon … the recognition that we all own our own lives and destinies, the only true foundation for a society where peoples can flourish.”

These were fine words, but words will no longer suffice.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-discovery-of-the-unmarked-graves-brings-us-face-to-face-with-our/

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In Australia, a New Look at Immigration: ‘It’s About Our Friends’

2021/06/15 Leave a comment

Another example of how the personal trumps the official narratives by highlighting inhumanity (as was the case with Alan Kurdi or the Kamloops residential school deaths):

The 3-year-old girl was born in Australia, in a tiny town called Biloela, far from the big cities of Sydney and Melbourne. But her parents were asylum seekers from Sri Lanka and living in a country that heavily discourages illegal migration, so the government sent them to a faraway island while deciding their fate.

This week the girl, Tharnicaa Murugappan, returned to mainland Australia, but not for the reason her family had hoped — she was medically evacuated to Perth, where she is now battling a blood infection in a hospital after a lengthy illness. Supporters of the family say she was given only painkillers for nearly two weeks at the remote government detention facility while her fever rose, and she now suffers from pneumonia, which led to her blood infection.

Tharnicaa and her family, often called the “Biloela family” among Australians, are the most high-profile asylum seekers in Australia. In a country that is inured to criticism from international human rights organizations over its “draconian” immigration policy, the detentions of Tharnicaa and her older sister have drawn outrage.

Tharnicaa’s illness has renewed calls for the family to be released from detention and prompted candlelight vigils and protests across Australia. Over half a million people have signed a petition demanding the family be returned to Biloela, a town of about 5,800 that is 260 miles northwest of Brisbane. Politicians from both sides have called for the family to be released from detention while maintaining support for the hard-line immigration policies that put them there. Karen Andrews, the home affairs minister, has been so inundated with calls about the case that her voicemail specifies that anyone wanting to speak to her about it should do so in writing.

The Murugappan family — mother Kokilapathmapriya Nadesalingam, father Nadesalingam Murugappan, Tharnicaa and her 6-year-old sister, Kopika — are the only people held in the Christmas Island detention center, which is 1,000 miles north of the Australian mainland. The two sisters, who both were born in Australia, are the only two children currently being held in immigration detention in Australia. Unlike the United States, Australia does not automatically grant citizenship to children born in the country, and the two girls are ineligible as the children of “unlawful maritime arrivals.”

The case is unusual in that the small rural town of Biloela, which has been leading the fight to get the family back, is a politically conservative place. But when the family was whisked away by immigration officials in 2018 after their claims for asylum were rejected and their temporary visas expired, locals weren’t thinking about politics. This case “wasn’t about politics or asylum seekers, it was about our friends,” said Simone Cameron, a Biloela local and friend of the family.

The family has been held on Christmas Island since 2019, as they fight government efforts to deport them to Sri Lanka.

Late last month, supporters of the family said, Ms. Nadesalingam and Mr. Murugappan started raising concerns with International Health and Medical Services, the private company that provides health care for the Christmas Island detention center, after Tharnicaa developed a fever on May 24. Requests for antibiotics were ignored, and the family was only given over-the-counter painkillers and a fact sheet about common flu symptoms, even as her fever increased and she started vomiting.

Tharnicaa was hospitalized on Christmas Island on June 6, according to the supporters. The next day, she was evacuated, along with her mother, to a hospital in the mainland city of Perth. She is recovering, but doctors are still trying to find the cause of the infection.

“It was the pure negligence of them not actually giving Tharnicaa antibiotics that led to her developing pneumonia,” a family friend, Angela Fredericks, said in a phone interview on Thursday. She added that the family had to “beg and fight” for Tharnicaa to be evacuated to the mainland.

In previous statements, Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews has defended Tharnicaa’s treatment, saying she was evacuated to Perth as soon as it was recommended. International Health and Medical Services did not respond to requests for comment.

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Plaidoyers pour plus de juges issus de la diversité

2021/06/15 Leave a comment

Of note (diversity has increased significantly under the current government):

Plusieurs postes de juges étant à pourvoir, le gouvernement Trudeau devra faire plus de place à la diversité dans la magistrature, plaident deux associations d’avocats en immigration au Canada. Le manque de diversité est particulièrement criant à la Cour fédérale, où à peine le tiers des 43 juges, y compris le juge en chef et la juge en chef adjointe, sont des femmes et où les minorités visibles se comptent sur les doigts d’une seule main.

« C’est étonnant. D’autant plus que 85 % des dossiers de la Cour fédérale sont en lien avec l’immigration », dit Guillaume Cliche-Rivard, président sortant de l’Association québécoise des avocats et avocates en droit de l’immigration (AQAADI).

Pour lui, il est indéniable que ces dossiers d’immigration « sont imprégnés du bagage culturel, personnel et historique des personnes qui se présentent devant la justice » et que les tribunaux doivent être plus « représentatifs de la société canadienne moderne ». « C’est pourquoi l’AQAADI croit aussi que la myriade de postes vacants de juges des cours fédérales devraient être pourvus par des personnes appartenant à ces groupes minoritaires », lit-on dans la lettre qu’elle a envoyée au ministère canadien de la Justice.

Cet avis est partagé par l’Association canadienne des avocats et avocates en droit des réfugiés, qui a également enjoint par écrit au ministre de la Justice, David Lametti, de faire une plus grande place à la diversité au sein de la magistrature. À l’automne dernier, des dizaines d’associations juridiques et de groupes de défense des droits des minorités ont aussi envoyé une lettre au procureur général du Canada appelant à ce que les postes judiciaires actuellement vacants à la Cour fédérale soient pourvus par des juges de couleur.

Depuis 2016, et par souci de transparence, le Commissariat à la magistrature fédérale est tenu de publier des données sur les nominations et les candidatures ventilées en fonction du genre, de la diversité et des compétences linguistiques. Entre les dernières élections d’octobre 2019, où le gouvernement Trudeau a été reconduit, et octobre 2020, 60 nouveaux juges ont été nommés, dont 65 % (39) étaient des femmes et 43 % (26) étaient autochtones, issus de minorités visibles, de groupes ethniques ou culturels ou de la communauté LGBTQ. Le quart (15) des juges disaient maîtriser les deux langues.

Même s’il est toujours possible de faire mieux, Andrew Griffith, ex-directeur de ce qui est aujourd’hui Immigration, Réfugiés et Citoyenneté Canada, qui s’est intéressé à la question dans des articles pour l’Institut de recherche en politiques publiques, souligne cette amélioration. Il appelle à constater tout le chemin parcouru depuis 2016, où les femmes et les minorités visibles étaient encore bien moins présentes.

Toutefois, ce chercheur à l’Institut canadien des affaires mondiales reconnaît qu’il y a peu de diversité à la Cour fédérale, une situation qu’il n’arrive pas à expliquer. En 2016, à peine 30 % des juges de la Cour fédérale étaient des femmes, mais depuis que le gouvernement Trudeau est au pouvoir, la majorité (52,6 %) des juges qui ont été nommées sont des femmes, selon sa propre compilation mise à jour en avril 2021.

Ce progrès est moins notable pour les minorités visibles et les Autochtones. Le pourcentage de minorité visible était d’à peine 2 % en 2016 et, depuis, environ 8 % des juges nommés appartenaient à cette catégorie. Paul Favel est le seul juge autochtone, sur 43 au total, à la Cour fédérale, et le deuxième dans l’histoire de cette cour.

« Entre diversité et francophonie »

Guillaume Cliche-Rivard soutient que cette ouverture à la diversité ne devrait toutefois pas se faire au détriment de la langue française. « La petite tension qu’on a, c’est qu’on est pris entre diversité et francophonie. On veut favoriser l’accès à des minorités, mais pas au détriment du français, c’est une position difficile. Et on sait qu’un faible pourcentage des juges fédéraux maîtrisent suffisamment le français pour tenir des audiences », dit-il.

Me Cliche-Rivard souligne qu’il y a environ deux ans, il a plaidé devant la Cour suprême et qu’il l’a fait en français. Or, il n’a pas eu le sentiment que les juges anglophones pouvaient tout saisir de son argumentaire. « Je n’ai pas eu l’impression que j’avais été bien compris des juges anglophones. » La ministre responsable des langues officielles, Mélanie Joly, a promis de proposer une réforme de la loi sur les langues officielles d’ici la fin 2021 et s’est engagée à obliger le bilinguisme pour les juges de la Cour suprême.

Pour son dernier tour de piste, le président de l’AQAADI, qui tire sa révérence après un mandat de trois ans, n’a pas seulement voulu interpeller le gouvernement Trudeau sur la nécessité de diversifier la magistrature : il souhaite aussi lui rappeler ses devoirs en matière de protection des réfugiés.

Peu après le dépôt du budget de 2019, Justin Trudeau avait soulevé un tollé en donnant l’aval à une nouvelle stratégie frontalière visant à empêcher les demandeurs de chercher l’asile au Canada s’ils ont déjà présenté au moins une demande semblable dans certains pays, dont les États-Unis. « Même les conservateurs n’étaient pas allés jusque-là », souligne Me Cliche-Rivard, encore en colère à propos de cette mesure.

Soulignant certaines avancées, l’avocat rappelle néanmoins que c’est sous l’actuel gouvernement libéral que les délais pour obtenir une résidence permanente sont de plus de 27 mois, qu’un demandeur d’asile peut être entendu en audience plusieurs années après son arrivée au Canada et que des réfugiés peuvent attendre plus de trois ans avant d’être enfin réunis avec leurs enfants restés dans le pays d’origine. « Et que dire du nombre de dossiers de travailleurs qualifiés du Québec. Il y a encore beaucoup de gros problèmes », conclut Me Cliche-Rivard.

Source: https://www.ledevoir.com/societe/610629/justice-plaidoyers-pour-plus-de-juges-issus-de-la-diversite

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

The attack in London did not occur in a vacuum. It is a reflection of my city – and of Canada

2021/06/14 Leave a comment

Money quote:

“Every Indigenous issue is our issue. Every anti-Asian hate crime, every Islamophobic attack, should be seen as a crime against all of us. Every Black life lost senselessly is interconnected. Our colonial past is still affecting us in our everyday lives, making it easier for some to live, while others continue to suffer.”

A strong reminder of the need to focus on the commonalities of prejudice, discrimination and racism, that sometimes get lost in the legitimate concerns and fears of individuals and communities:

They were killed within walking distance of where I live. A Muslim family, out for an evening stroll.

I walk the same path they took, pray at the mosque where they prayed and even attended the same high school as the daughter. These faces I have seen as I grew up in this community – gone.

Heartbroken? Yes. Shocked? No.

London is my home. But hate, racism and Islamophobia have a deep history here. The Ku Klux Klan established a presence in London in 1872, sowing their hate within the fabric of our city. Fast forward to 2017, when an anti-Islam protest was initiated in this city by the Patriots of Canada Against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA); roughly 40 members and supporters attended. London has been and still is a hot spot for right-wing extremism, Islamophobia and white supremacist activity.

Growing up in northwest London, my family was one of the few visible Muslims in our neighbourhood. Our home and car were targeted and vandalized monthly. Each time we would just wash off the yolk and clear away the shells, but the stench and fear remained. My parents were always putting on a brave face for their children, playing it down by telling us that it must just be some mischievous kids on the block. After reporting this to the police a few times we gave up, as nothing came of it. But I knew it worried them. They never wanted me to travel alone, especially at night. We had conversations about how the way I looked made me a target, how I needed to be more careful than other kids.

Years before Yumna Afzaal walked the halls of Oakridge Secondary School, my friends and I faced severe opposition from parents – and even some staff – who didn’t want us to create a safe space for Muslim students to practise their faith. This is my London, my Canada.

If we deny that we have a problem, then we will never address the root cause. This is not a lone attack or an incident that occurred in a vacuum. It is a reflection of our city and our country as a whole. Nor are Islamophobia, Indigenous rights, anti-Black racism and antisemitism separate problems. They are all a part of structures created from a colonial past. One that has benefitted from divide-and-conquer policies and depended on “othering” those who are different.

If Canada calls itself a mosaic, then that mosaic is under attack by those who want to destroy it with our blood.

Yet, there is always hope. Thousands attended the vigil at the London Muslim Mosque on Tuesday. People from all walks of life came out to show solidarity to the Muslim community – strangers assuring us, “we are with you, you are loved.”

Just as it took the support of one teacher to stand up as an ally and support the Muslim students at Oakridge Secondary School when I attended all those years ago, what this community needs right now is you. Every Londoner, every Canadian, needs to be an ally. Stand up against the overt aggression but also, perhaps more importantly, against the microaggressions and other forms of racism you have ignored for far too long in your daily lives. Do you speak or act differently when the person looks different than you? Do you politely ignore the racist, Islamophobic, antisemitic, anti-Asian or anti-Indigenous comments you hear from your colleagues, your extended family, your political party? Letting those seemingly big and little things go has brought us here, to this.

I have to commend Jeff Bennett, a former Progressive Conservative Party candidate for London West, for calling it out as it is. “We must take stock of the part we play,” he wrote in a widely shared Facebook post. “No more saying, ‘Oh grandpa is not really racist. He was just raised differently.’ Well that ‘differently’ is not okay. Canada has a racist, unacceptable history. It’s time we call it out, own it and take action.”

Every Indigenous issue is our issue. Every anti-Asian hate crime, every Islamophobic attack, should be seen as a crime against all of us. Every Black life lost senselessly is interconnected. Our colonial past is still affecting us in our everyday lives, making it easier for some to live, while others continue to suffer.

I hope my neighbours in London choose to stand up in solidarity and take action. I hope you all do.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-attack-in-london-did-not-occur-in-a-vacuum-it-is-a-reflection-of/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Globe%20Opinion&utm_content=2021-6-11_17&utm_term=The%20attack%20in%20London%20did%20not%20occur%20in%20a%20vacuum.%20It%20is%20a%20reflection%20of%20my%20city%20–%20and%20of%20Canada&utm_campaign=newsletter&cu_id=Rqd6QY2S4RGuLkori%2FBTxpYjpobGjy%2F8

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

Report from Alberta Anti-Racism Advisory Council takes aim at justice system, education and health-care layoffs

2021/06/14 Leave a comment

Of note. Bit odd weighing in on healthcare outsourcing but legitimate to note the disproportionate  impact falls on women and visible minorities:

Mandatory anti-racism training for the province’s police, prosecutors and judges and more content addressing systemic racism in the K-12 curriculum are among recommendations proposed by the Alberta Anti-Racism Advisory Council in its long-awaited report.

Released Friday, it calls for an in-depth education on the impact of hate incidents for all Justice Ministry staff, and to see K-12 students learn about the historical roots of racism and its impact on the present-day.

Source: Report from Anti-Racism Advisory Council takes aim at justice system, education and health-care layoffs

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

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