While I always have mixed thoughts about ethnically (or religiously) based schooling given that it can hamper integration, understand the pressures particularly with First Nations.
It will be important to have some long-term evaluations of this school’s effectiveness, not just in terms of graduation rates (important, where I expect improvement) but 10 years post-graduation in terms of employment and income:
Twenty-five years ago, Shannon Judge was an indigenous student in a Barrie high school where sports teams were named the “Redskins.”
A generation earlier her mother, from Wasauksing First Nation near Parry Sound, wasn’t allowed to speak her first language of Ojibwe at the elementary school she attended on her reserve.
Today, Judge’s two children are finally breaking the cycle at First Nations School of Toronto. Raven, 9, and Rayne, 8, are part of a new era of indigenous education that teaches them through the lens of aboriginal experience and history.
Thanks to their school, both children now speak Ojibwe with their grandmother, which has inspired Judge to take lessons too, provided by volunteers through the school. Morning smudging ceremonies and daily 40-minute language and culture classes with an elder are part of their routine.
“I feel like my kids are getting something from school that’s not only education, but a connection to their history and identity that empowers them and gives them a sense of worthiness,” says Judge.
As of this month, students will have the option of keeping that connection until they graduate from Grade 12, following the school’s long-awaited move from its cramped quarters at Dundas Street Public School.
The move to the spacious building — site of the former Eastern Commerce Collegiate, which closed in 2015 due to falling enrolment — means that beginning in September, First Nations School will introduce a new high school grade each fall. The new Grade 9 class next September will become the first graduates in 2021.
That will make it Ontario’s first publicly-funded school to offer aboriginal education from kindergarten through Grade 12.
“The dynamics have changed,” principal Jonathan Kakegamic said following the Jan. 10 opening on the six-acre property, also home to the Aboriginal Education Centre run by the Toronto District School Board.
The kids, currently in kindergarten through Grade 8 and from all over the city, were beside themselves to see all the space, inside and out. Instead of eating breakfast and lunch in a crowded classroom, they now have a cafeteria, along with their own gym and an auditorium.
“I’m just excited to be here,” says Kakegamic, who moved from Thunder Bay last August to become principal. “It’s an honour to be part of this new era.”
Attendance has already risen to 131 students from 96 in September and the new site will accommodate 600.
Kakegamic and others in the community stress that expanding to secondary school is critical to reducing high dropout rates among indigenous students, who often feel lost in a larger system that doesn’t teach their perspective and history.
A number of articles I found particularly interesting over the past few weeks.
Starting with Joe Friesen of the Globe’s overview of how increased numbers of urban Indigenous peoples are shaping our cities, particularly but not exclusively in the Prairies:
Look around Winnipeg’s downtown and it’s clear the city is in the midst of a demographic shift. In the elevated walkways that offer shelter from the legendary winds, it seems roughly half the people shopping, walking or stopping to chat, are indigenous. In fact, more than 70,000 residents identify as aboriginal. Like many the other cities with a growing indigenous population, Winnipeg has seen more than its share of racially charged conflict, but the signs of an increasingly prominent indigenous community are apparent.
Storefronts in Winnipeg’s downtown now bear messages of greeting in indigenous languages, ranging from Cree to Dakota, Michif and Inuktitut, distributed by the local business association. At the University of Winnipeg, students who began their studies this year are now required to take a course on indigenous peoples and culture. A community group is petitioning to rename a street in Ojibwe. The national aboriginal broadcaster, APTN, headquartered on Portage Avenue, plans to expand to the United States. On the main street of the predominantly aboriginal North End, Selkirk Avenue, once the heart of the city’s Eastern European communities, schools of social work and urban studies from the province’s two largest universities offer off-campus degree programs for indigenous students, producing a stream of graduates and nourishing a growing middle class.
Every home game for the NHL’s Winnipeg Jets now opens with an announcement recognizing that the MTS Centre is located on Treaty One land, and the homeland of the Métis Nation. It also pledges that the Jets ownership, True North Sports and Entertainment, is committed “to a spirit of reconciliation for the future.” Winnipeg’s mayor, Brian Bowman, is Métis. In the provincial legislature, speculation about who might lead the Official Opposition has swirled almost exclusively around several indigenous contenders.
Winnipeg is the largest of the 28 cities across Canada where the indigenous population has reached the symbolic threshold of 10 per cent of the broader community (including those rounded up from 9.5 per cent and higher), according to the 2011 National Household Survey.
Just 10 years earlier, in 2001, there were only 17 communities with indigenous populations of that size. The list will almost certainly grow once the results of the 2016 long-form census are available, and not just because indigenous people living off-reserve were among the groups considered at risk of being undercounted in 2011. First Nations and Inuit people tend to have higher fertility rates than the rest of the population: In 2006, it was 2.7 children per woman for Inuit women and 2.4 for First Nations women, compared to 1.8 for Métis women, and 1.6 for the population overall.
The city with the highest proportion of indigenous people in Canada is Prince Albert, Sask., a community of roughly 35,000 located 140 kilometres north of Saskatoon. It’s considered a hub for many Northern communities, including 12 nearby First Nations reserves in the Prince Albert Grand Council. Over the decade, the city’s indigenous population grew by 37 per cent, far faster than growth in the city overall.
On the city’s police force, a little less than 40 per cent of officers self-identify as indigenous, and the chief of police is Métis. One member of the eight-seat city council is Métis, and in the last election there was an indigenous candidate for mayor, though he did not win, the city manager, Jim Toye, said.
“The relationship with First Nations is very important to us,” Mr. Toye said. “This is their lands that we are operating on.”
He said the city acknowledges the Treaty relationship at public gatherings and, in its 2016 cultural plan, recognizes its history as a meeting place, known by its Cree name Kistahpinanihk, long before European arrival. The city officially defines itself as a multicultural community with indigenous roots.
As I start to think about my update to Multiculturalism in Canada: Evidence and Anecdote with 2016 Census data, I plan on using more economic, social and political data at the municipal level to help me incorporate this development.
Next, a good long read by Doug Saunders arguing that 1967 marked the emergence of the new Canada, driven largely by the changed and increased diversity by post-war immigration:
Yet to look back from Canada’s 150 th year is to realize that this feeling is not just solipsism: 1967 is the hinge upon which modern Canadian history turns and, in certain respects, the key to understanding the challenges of the next half-century.
Today, we live in the country shaped by the decisions and transformations of 1967, far more than by the events of 1867. Anniversaries are usually symbolic moments of reflection, but Canada’s hundredth was a very real bid to create an almost entirely new country, and, to a large extent, it succeeded. If you spend some time immersed in the Canada of a few years before 1967, and then in the Canada of a few years after, you feel like you’ve visited two countries – the former still colonial, closed, dependent, paternalistic and pretending to be homogeneous, a place whose sleepy streets you’d have to leave if you wanted to make something of yourself; the latter a country of self-invention and iconoclasm, a North American place whose several peoples began to build something much bigger, more complex, but also safer and more educated and urban, and something entirely their own.
Pierre Berton, the historian, famously referred to 1967 twenty years ago as “The Last Good Year” – a book title that appealed to a nostalgic belief in a placid antediluvian Canada that even he admitted had never existed. The centennial euphoria, he argued, gave way in later years to “the very real fear that the country we celebrated so joyously … is in the process of falling apart.”
There’s a better way to express that thought: After the centennial, we started to confront seriously the schisms and divisions and gross inequities that had been masked before beneath a patina of colonial gloss. We would have, over the next 50 years, two secession crises, a battle over our North American economic identity and a hard-fought political reawakening of our indigenous nations. Yet, these were the crucial struggles of becoming a real country, of finding a governing mechanism and a common culture to bring together those long-disparate peoples.
Let me make the case, then, that 1967 was Canada’s first good year. We should spend this year celebrating not the 150 th year of Confederation, but the 50th birthday of the new Canada.
But let me also make the case that our conventional story about the birth of second-century Canada is largely wrong. We like to believe that starting in the late 1960s, a series of political decisions, parliamentary votes, court rulings and royal commissions descended upon an innocent, paternalistic, resource-economy Canada and forced upon it an awkward jumble of novelties: non-white immigration, bilingualism, multiculturalism, refugees, indigenous nationhood, liberation of women and gays, the seeds of free trade, individual rights, religious diversity.
But the explosions of official novelty that were launched in and around 1967 weren’t a cause; they were an effect of profound changes that had taken place in Canadians themselves during the two decades after the war, in their thinking and their composition and their attitude toward their country, in Quebec and English Canada and in indigenous communities.
Canada was not remade by the decisions of 1967; it was reflected by them, for the first time. What began in 1967 was official Canada beginning to catch up with the real Canada. And that is also the lesson to be carried forward to 2017: Canadians tend to be ahead of their institutions, and every few decades it is time for a dramatic catching up, like the explosion of adjustment we saw in ‘67.
A War of Symbols
…Consider the ripples of change that took place on the day of my birth, as the centennial bash roared on.
Eight hours after I was born, the directors of the Canadian National Exhibition filed into a banquet hall for their annual luncheon. The exhibition’s president, W.H. Evans, asked them to remain standing to sing the national anthem – and then chaos ensued, as half the audience broke into God Save the Queen before the pianist had struck the first note of O Canada. A debate over Canada’s true national anthem, begun in 1964, had been winding its way through a special House of Commons-Senate joint committee all year and filling the media with debate. It wouldn’t fully be resolved until a law was passed in 1980, and many people (especially in Toronto) still considered the British national anthem “official.”
National symbols remained subjects of heated contention in 1967. The flag debate had officially been resolved two years earlier with the choice of the Maple Leaf, but defenders of the old colonial Red Ensign remained outspoken in Parliament, the press and even at Expo 67. Everything about the way Canada represented itself to the world was up for grabs.
But something deeper was taking place, involving not just the symbols but the realities they represented.
The postwar decades were defined by large-scale decolonization around the world: Across Africa, Asia and the Americas, scores of countries were freeing themselves from centuries of control by European masters, and struggling, sometimes violently, to find ways to represent and govern themselves as independent entities. People were learning to think of themselves not as colonial subjects but as autonomous individuals within self-created states.
In that light, 1967 can only be seen as the apex of Canada’s postcolonial moment. The wars over symbols were one small manifestation of a larger shift.
It’s worth remembering how new this all was. We still remained, in important ways, a colony. In 1967, Canadian citizenship had only existed for 20 years – before January 1, 1947, everyone in Canada was a British subject and had to travel with a United Kingdom passport. But it still didn’t quite exist: That 1947 law creating Canadian citizenship declared in its main clause that “a Canadian citizen is a British subject” (this would remain in place until 1977).
That idea was still hotly defended by many in the Ottawa of 1967: The Progressive Conservative leadership still opposed Canadian citizenship, and the flag, and the anthem. There was still a sizable political faction in Canada who supported the idea that all Canadians were simply a slightly different, less important flavour of British people.
But the great majority of Canadians had moved on – or moved in – and you could see the centennial struggling to catch up with them.
Two, Three, Many Canadas
The morning of my birth, opposition leader John Diefenbaker (still sitting, anachronistically, in the House four years after his prime ministership had ended) denounced prime minister Lester B. Pearson for having declared the previous week that “we are a nation of two founding peoples” (in French, the prime minister went further and called them “nations”).
Mr. Diefenbaker considered this a catastrophic blow to a country he had always insisted was purely British: “Adoption of the two-nation concept,” he explained to his fellow MPs that day, “would lead to the breakdown of confederation.” But he was swimming against his own party’s tide: a few days earlier, a Progressive Conservative policy conference had gone further than the Liberals by concluding that Canada should be seen as a federal state “composed of two founding peoples (deux nations), with historic rights, who have been joined by people from many lands.”
In other words: A hundred years into Confederation, the leader of the official opposition still did not seem to believe that French Canadians existed. The notion that Canada contained more than one language and people was still hotly contested in some circles.
But that era was ending fast. A day later, Ontario Premier John Robarts would announce that his province was to build a system of French-language secondary schools. This was not an act of expansive idealism: He was recognizing the reality of a population, including millions of Francophones outside of Quebec, who were no longer capable of seeing themselves, or their children, as subjects of a homogenizing foreign ruler.
These debates sprawled across Canada’s newspapers and TV screens all year. Everyone taking part in them knew there was a looming transformation about to take place. There was a name for it: “Bi and Bi,” the household name for the mammoth Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, the largest and most powerful government inquiry Canada had seen. It had been established by Mr. Pearson in 1963 to find a way to address growing Quebecois disenchantment with a Canada that tended to ignore its French fact, and was widely expected to endorse some version of the “two nations” model so hotly discussed that week.
On Oct. 8, 1967, it released its first report – a national event almost rivalling Expo in its media and political attention. And to the great surprise of many, the idea of Canada as two peoples and nations was not its most dramatic proposal – though it certainly did call for a fully bilingual country. That was expected. What was not expected was the very large part of the report, and the subsequent reports over the next two years, devoted to what the commission’s original mandate had called “Other Cultural Groups.” People who were neither British nor French in identity or origin had become a significant share of the Canadian population during the 20 th century.
And while the commission was clear in calling for two official languages, it found a Canada that could no longer be described as having merely one or two or three founding “peoples,” “nations” or “races” (a term still used to describe English and French communities in 1967). Its implication, not quite spelled out, was that Canada was becoming a place that could no longer be defined by its colonial origins.
Over the next several years, that reality would become impossible to ignore. So that when, in 1971, prime minister Pierre Trudeau first used the word “multiculturalism” to define Canadian policy, it was not simply a political ploy to defuse French-English rivalries and rising separatist sentiment (though it was certainly that). It was an inevitable, and perhaps even somewhat late, recognition of what Canada had already been for a long time.
While I would argue that it was a mix of the underlying realities and conscious political decisions that resulted in these changes, not just these realities as other countries were less successful in managing this transition, the contrast is clear.
Lastly, a good primer for Americans trying to understand Canadian immigration and related policies, and their relative success in integrating newcomers by Paul May in the LA Times:
To a lot of commentators, Canada looks like a sanctuary for progressive thinking on immigration, an exception to the nativist wave sweeping the United States and Europe.
A recent cover of the Economist put a maple leaf crown on the Statue of Liberty and proclaimed Canada “an example to the world.” Famously, on election day, the Canadian immigration website crashed because of the number of Americans reportedly considering a move to their northern neighbor as Donald Trump won the presidency. Year after year, polls show that Canadians are, by far, more open and more optimistic about immigration than the citizens in any other Western country.
But such optimism is perhaps easier to achieve in Canada than in other nations: For historical and geopolitical reasons, Canada does not have to cope with the same immigration challenges as the U.S. and Europe.
To start, Canada has pursued a much more selective immigration policy than the United States or any western European country. It accepts far more immigrants legally than most Western nations, but under a policy designed primarily to dovetail with the economic interests of the nation.
In consequence, Canada accepts far fewer immigrants on the basis of family ties than in the U.S., for example, and the proportion of skilled immigrants is much higher. Further, the country sets a higher education standard for immigrants than the U.S. (which is in turn more demanding than Europe). This more-selective immigration policy is likely to lead to fewer integration problems and easier access to jobs.
Canada’s selectivity is helped by its geographical position. It does not share a border with a country where wages are much lower (as the U.S. does with Mexico), and it isn’t next door to unstable regions (as Europe is to North Africa and the Middle East). The result is that few undocumented migrants move across the country’s southern border, as is the case in the U.S.; and few migrants land on its shores by boat, as in Europe.
The points system and geography also have a noticeable effect on where Canada’s immigrants come from.
Official data show that the leading countries among foreign-born residents in Canada are the United Kingdom, China and India. In the U.S., 28% are Mexicans and 24% are from other Latin American countries. In Europe, foreign-born residents originate mainly from the Muslim world (in the Netherlands, for instance, Turkey, Suriname and Morocco; in France — Algeria and Morocco). Consequently, Canada does not have to deal (at least not on the same scale) with the complex problems associated with integrating newcomers from a rural and conservative Muslim background into a highly secular environment.
Not that Canada hasn’t welcomed Muslims. Between November 2015 and November 2016, it resettled more than 35,000 Syrian refugees; most European countries have been much more reluctant to extend permanent status to these immigrants. But again, Canada can and does exert a great deal of control over the process.
Wab Kinew emphasizes a more reconciliatory approach, one that recognizes better the complexity of identities and belonging:
…Today my friend Joseph Boyden is the one in the centre of our circle being stripped of an identity. Though his disrobing is happening in the feedback loop of social media instead of a traditional arbour, as with the man at the sundance, many of the questions asked are legitimate.
Joseph Boyden will be changed by this. He owes some of our friends apologies for apparently misleading them. Media outlets will lose credibility if they present his as the voice of indigenous peoples. When he promotes his next book, he will be asked about his identity and this episode.
Already some non-indigenous readers are asking if they should read his work. His novels remain powerful. But they were always the work of a talented outsider. Even if he is Anishinaabe, he is not a member of the nations he wrote about – the Mushkegowuk, the Huron, the Haudenosaunee. Recognizing the distinctions will inform readers. So, yes, read Joseph Boyden. But also read authors who have lived a more indigenous experience.
The indigenous community also has questions to consider. First, why did we so quickly embrace someone who has long said he has little biological connection to us?
Our community hungers for reasons to celebrate, so when a brilliant artist claimed us, we claimed him. I am not sure this cost us much. While he should not accept award money meant to encourage writers who experience the very real challenges of growing up indigenous in Canada, his success did not prevent a half-dozen indigenous authors from releasing bestsellers in the past few years.
The second, and perhaps more important question, is what does it say that many of us have so quickly turned on him?
I am reminded of the man at the sundance. It could not have been easy, but he has returned year after year since his shaming. In the countless ceremonies since, all participating have repeated the prayerful Lakota words Mitakuye Oyasin (all my relations). The Anishinaabe and other peoples recite similar maxims. These axioms articulate the belief that every being is related to one another.
If we are to live this ethos, then perhaps the issue of how Joseph Boyden gained access to our circle does not matter as much as the fact he is present in our community now.
His place among us was built by writing about, giving back to and befriending us. Some, such as myself, continue to claim him. I can not give him a status card or confer on him the right to identify as Anishinaabe. But I can tell you if he keeps coming back, he will have a place in our circle.
I say this wishing he behaved differently. I want him to rescind the UBC letter, apologize for his comments about missing and murdered women, and be direct with us about his ancestry. If he is not native, he should confess. If he has one ancestor generations back, he should explain who they were.
Not long ago, a Lakota grandmother and I were teasing each other about that man from the sundance. “He’s your relative.” “No, he’s your relative,” we said to one another. But when the conversation turned to the now ailing man’s health the woman surprised me with her genuine sadness. The man was imperfect. He made us cringe sometimes. Yet, he was still a part of us.
There is room in our circle for everyone, even those who do not behave as we would like. We include them not just to make our circle bigger. We love one another as relatives because it frees our hearts from hurt and allows us to embrace the goodness in each of us. When we do that, we are stronger.
On first glance, the inclusion of the smudging ceremony in the school’s curriculum would seem to breach this prohibition on state support for religion. If it is objectionable and a breach of the Charter’s freedom of religion for a school to include the Lord’s Prayer as part of its opening exercises, then surely it must also breach the Charter when a school involves its students in a smudging ceremony. The equation of these practices, though, is too simple and fails to understand why the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in the public schools is objectionable and why the smudging ceremony has been included in the school’s curriculum.
It is important to remember that the Port Alberni school is not affirming or supporting the smudging ceremony as a spiritually true practice — as the correct way to worship the divine. The school’s purpose is to introduce students to some of the practices of the local indigenous community.
The courts have accepted that a school may teach students about different spiritual traditions. The parent’s objection, then, must be that the students are being exposed to the practices of only one spiritual tradition — that indigenous practices are being given some form of preference in the schools.
But there are good reasons for this apparent preference. The report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has helped Canadians to see more clearly that the dominant culture in Canada did not simply ignore the cultural/spiritual practices of the First Nations, but actively sought to suppress those practices through residential schools and other means. Exposing public school students to a few of these practices is a small start in the process of acknowledging the presence of First Nations and the injustices committed against them.
A parent who believes that it is immoral or wrongful for her children to participate in an indigenous spiritual ceremony should be able to request an exemption from participation. The parent, though, should not be able to prevent the school from introducing other students to the cultural and spiritual practices of the local indigenous community.
Seems like reducing the costs to encourage and facilitate more indigenous and visible minority police makes sense, and ensuring comparable incentives to address representation gaps (SVPM has only 6.7 percent visible minority police officers, compared to the 20 percent of its population):
Tout étudiant québécois, autochtone ou non, peut emprunter la voie normale et obtenir un diplôme d’études collégiales (DEC) en techniques policières en trois ans sans avoir à assumer des droits de scolarité. Mais le programme, très couru, est fortement contingenté. En pratique, seul le programme d’AEC réservé aux autochtones, une voie rapide pour des étudiants qui, bien souvent, n’ont pas fréquenté le cégep, peut leur permettre d’accéder à l’ENPQ afin de devenir policiers et poursuivre une carrière dans une force autochtone ou une autre.
Les autochtones ne sont pas les seuls à avoir accès à cette voie rapide. Il existe un autre programme d’AEC en techniques policières, au cégep de Maisonneuve, pour les étudiants issus des communautés culturelles. La Sûreté du Québec et le Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) embauchent ces diplômés afin que la composition de leurs effectifs soit plus représentative. Or, tandis que les autochtones paient le gros prix, l’AEC en techniques policières réservée aux étudiants des communautés culturelles est gratuit.
À l’ENPQ, les autochtones continuent toutefois de payer le gros prix par rapport aux autres étudiants. Au lieu de 27 000 $, les étudiants non autochtones assument des droits de scolarité d’environ 8000 $.
Au cégep d’Alma, 14 étudiants autochtones suivent les cours de l’AEC en techniques policières. Pour trois d’entre eux, leur conseil de bande a payé la totalité des droits de scolarité. Deux autres ont reçu de 2000 $ à 3000 $, tandis que neuf étudiants ont dû se débrouiller autrement, s’adressant à leur famille et contractant un prêt auprès d’une institution financière, a indiqué Patrick Girard.
Selon lui, les étudiants autochtones font les frais d’une partie de bras de fer entre Ottawa, qui a créé le programme des services de police des Premières Nations en 1991, Québec et les Premières Nations. Le gouvernement fédéral assume 52 % de la note et Québec, le reste. Or en 2012, le gouvernement Harper a décidé de geler sa contribution, ce qui a depuis exercé d’importantes pressions sur les budgets des corps de police autochtones aux prises avec un alourdissement de leur charge de travail.
La situation est différente pour les étudiants autochtones qui parlent anglais. C’est au collège Ellis, une institution privée sise à Drummondville, que l’AEC leur est offerte à un coût variant entre 18 000 $ et 20 000 $. Selon le coordonnateur du programme, Daniel Guillemette, ce sont essentiellement des Cris et des Inuits qui suivent la formation. Or leurs gouvernements assument tous les frais, a-t-il précisé. Cris et Inuits ne dépendent pas du programme fédéral : ils peuvent compter sur la Convention de la Baie-James.
Depuis qu’Ottawa a décidé de geler son financement, l’Assemblée des Premières Nations du Québec et du Labrador (APNQL) se plaint du sous-financement des corps policiers autochtones au Québec. Certaines communautés ont menacé de fermer leur service de police pour forcer la Sûreté du Québec (SQ) à prendre la relève.
En 2015, il existait au Québec 20 corps policiers autochtones qui desservaient 44 communautés et comptaient 401 policiers, selon les données citées par Patrick Girard. De son côté, la SQ emploie un petit nombre de policiers autochtones : ils étaient 27 en 2015, un de plus que deux ans auparavant.
More on Val-d’Or and its relations with its Indigenous communities:
Like many mining towns across northern Canada, Val-d’Or, pop. 31,862, is close geographically to a number of First Nations communities.
And people here say the allegations have strained relations between the town and the local Algonquin and Cree populations. Some Indigenous people are even calling for a boycott of the municipality for events and meetings.
If you say it three times, does it suddenly appear?
But the provincial legislature seems reluctant to discuss racism.
Parliamentary reporters in Quebec City noticed last week that both Public Security Minister Martin Coiteux and Native Affairs Minister Geoffrey Kelley refused to endorse the concept of “systemic racism” when asked about Lafontaine’s findings.
They preferred instead to speak of “social issues” or a “larger perspective” that needed to be considered.
That reticence was shared by members of the opposition. François Legault, leader of the Coalition Avenir Quebec, said he didn’t “like the word ‘systemic.'”
As for the Parti Québécois, Indigenous affairs critic Alexandre Cloutier would only say that the events in Val-d’Or raised the question of whether systemic racism was an issue among Quebec police. He left reporters guessing about the answer.
Ghislain Picard, chief of the Assembly of the First Nations of Quebec and Labrador, attributes this reluctance to talk about systemic racism to the government’s opposition to an independent inquiry into the relations between indigenous Quebecers and police.
‘A government in complete denial’
To date, the Liberals have been steadfast in their refusal to hold such an inquiry. They maintain it would simply rehash the work of the federal inquiry into murdered and missing Indigenous women, which has promised to look into the Val-d’Or allegations.
“They have refused from the beginning to acknowledge that there is systemic racism,” Picard said of the Quebec Liberals. “This is a government in complete denial.”
Indigenous leaders, though, have not been the only members of civil society pushing the government to take a sustained look at systemic racism.
A group called Québec Inclusif, based in Montreal, has also called for a public commission on institutional discrimination. They have the backing of the small progressive party Québec Solidaire and several prominent intellectuals.
While the government has indicated it is receptive to the group’s concerns — which include discriminatory hiring practices — it has yet to respond to their specific demand.
Is there, perhaps, a reason other than political stubbornness for ducking the question of systemic racism?
Our system of laws is designed to hold individuals -— people or corporate entities — responsible. The problem with systemic racism is that there is no Oz behind the curtain, pulling the strings.
The arc of the moral universe
Responsibility for such types of injustice don’t lie with one person, advocates suggest.
Structural injustice, the American philosopher Iris Marion Young once wrote, “is an unintended but unjust consequence of the actions of millions of differently positioned individuals … all usually acting on normal and accepted rules.”
Their argument is that confronting systemic racism may entail accepting that some of our most trenchant social problems are not anyone’s fault, but everyone’s faults— some more than others, to be sure, but each of us, if only a little.
The Indigenous leaders of Val-d’Or, and their advocates, have proposed a smaller step, one they nevertheless believe will help bend the arc of the moral universe back towards justice.
“We issue a message to the Quebec population to believe these women,” Michel said, after her meeting with the Crown prosecutors in Val-d’Or.
“Show these women, these victims, that there is someone, somewhere, who believes them.”
Harder to achieve than it sounds but still striking. As to the comment of the frustrated applicant, there is a distinction between the role of a public servant and an activist:
The Liberals’ vaunted support for First Nations, Métis and Inuit job-seekers appears to be absent in the government’s own hiring practices.
Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada went on a hiring spree this year — and so far there are relatively few Indigenous workers among the lucky recruits for stable, full-time jobs.
In a 1996 written agreement with First Nations, the department promised to “make every reasonable effort” to hire one Indigenous employee for every two new job vacancies.
But for more than two decades officials have failed to deliver, often arguing that hiring freezes tie their hands or that there are no suitable or willing Indigenous candidates for jobs that do come open.
The Liberal government of Justin Trudeau has since opened the jobs spigot, with plans to hire 278 people in the department this fiscal year alone to help administer new water-quality and infrastructure programs, among others. Another 184 jobs will be created in the following three years.
‘Extremely frustrating’
But of the 117 new workers hired so far, just 21 are self-identified Indigenous people.
That works out to 18 per cent, far fewer than the long-standing promise of 50 per cent. It’s even lower than the current makeup of the department’s 4,100-member workforce, which is about 30 per cent Indigenous.
“For me it is extremely frustrating, not just as an individual who is more than qualified and looking for a career,” said a First Nations woman with two degrees who has repeatedly applied without success for full-time work at the department.
“But on a larger scale, I find it frustrating for all Indigenous people and for Canada as a whole. Here we have a new government that talks about a nation-to-nation relationship and engagement and all that good stuff.
“But wouldn’t the best way to start that process be to hire more Indigenous staff who are passionate about working with the government and their people to bridge gaps and make positive changes?”
CBC News has agreed to withhold the identity of the woman because she worries any publicity will damage her job prospects.
A spokeswoman for Carolyn Bennett, the minister responsible, confirmed the 50 per cent hiring target still stands, as the government works on “advancing reconciliation” with Indigenous people.
Understandable reactions but equally understandable that the government chose to give priority to regional representation and bilingualism.
However, it will be more important to assess the diversity of future appointments to the lower courts, which I expect will include visible minorities and Indigenous peoples (as did with the initial 15 appointments).
The Liberal government may have made history by nominating a Newfoundlander to Canada’s top court — but disappointed advocates say a more critical opportunity has been missed to add racial diversity to Canada’s predominantly white judiciary.
“It’s another white male . . . It’s the exact thing we’ve been doing for years,” said Koren Lightening-Earle, president of the Indigenous Bar Association, adding she would have been “borderline happy with any person of colour.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Monday that Justice Malcolm Rowe from Newfoundland and Labrador has been nominated for the Supreme Court of Canada. If formally named to the court, it will be a historic first for the province.
However, scholars and aboriginal jurists had hoped Trudeau’s new selection process might set aside the constitutional convention of regionally based appointments, and focus on putting an aboriginal or black judge into the job.
Lightening-Earle said while Newfoundlanders and Labradorians have waited a number of decades for a representative on the court, aboriginal Canadians have deeper historic claims to a place in the judiciary.
“They (Newfoundland and Labrador residents) have been waiting a long time, but we’ve been waiting a little bit longer,” she said.
Lightening-Earle said in a telephone interview a rare opportunity has been missed, and indigenous lawyers are wondering why they bothered applying to the government’s advisory board for the position.
A report in Policy Options magazine estimated earlier this year that just one per cent of Canada’s 2,160 judges in the provincial superior and lower courts are aboriginal, while 3 per cent are racial minorities — prompting a Dalhousie University law professor to describe the Canadian bench as a “judiciary of whiteness.”
Robert Wright, a black social worker who has served on a Nova Scotia board that recommends judicial appointments, said the announcement is a disappointment given the Trudeau government’s earlier signals it might adjust the system.
“There are an increasing number of Canadians who . . . are not caught up in what I call the historical regional nature of the various Canadian identities we used to focus on,” he said in a telephone interview from Halifax.
Wright argues the principle of diversity that lies beneath appointing people from different regions needed to be shifted to recognize the increasing number of Canadians from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds.
He said as a black Nova Scotian he would have been content to see a black person from any part of the country elevated to the bench, and he also would have been very pleased if an aboriginal judge was appointed.
Wright and Lightening-Earle say the country is losing out on the opportunity to gain from indigenous perspectives on everything from constitutional issues to sentencing to the factors that lead to crime.
Jeffery Hewitt, a legal scholar at the University of Windsor, said he doesn’t accept arguments that there may be a lack of qualified candidates.
“Tell us who applied. Give us the list. Talk to us about . . . whether there were any indigenous people in there?” said Hewitt, a Cree who has provided legal advice to First Nations.
A spokeswoman for the federal Justice Department said the independent advisory board that recommends candidates to the prime minister’s office “will be reporting on this information one month from (an) appointment.”
Hewitt said he’s hopeful that going forward, the Liberals will make more appointments to the superior courts in the provinces.
In Quebec, the Policy Options study noted three visible minority judges out of more than 500, despite bar society figures showing more than 1,800 of its roughly 25,000 lawyers identify themselves as being from visible minority groups. The province said it doesn’t keep figures.
In Ontario, one of the few provinces where the judicial advisory body keeps figures on the lower court appointments, there were 24 visible minority judges out of 334 judges, even though one quarter of the province’s overall population identifies as a visible minority.
There are no visible minorities on the bench in Newfoundland and Labrador, which by constitutional convention was the likeliest province to be tapped for the next Supreme Court of Canada appointment.
Interesting points about how stories are selected or not, and the biases and influences at play:
Indifference, though, is something more pernicious, and much more difficult to deal with.
Because what’s the point of continuing to talk about something if even people of goodwill aren’t listening?
Insist too much on educating readers and viewers against their will, and they tune out, the way they reacted to overzealous, didactic coverage of the Meech Lake Accord in the late 1980s.
The fact is, editors at news organizations are alive to audience biases and apathy, and have baked them into their editorial choices for as long as journalism has existed.
The elders of our craft deliver speeches to rookies about “news judgment,” making it sound like acquired wisdom, something that develops only after years of experience and sober reflection on important issues.
But really, news judgment is a slipperier thing, freighted with ethnocentrism, tribalism, nativism and the assignment of value to life based on an understood, but undiscussed, hierarchy.
In choosing stories and laying out pages at newspapers decades ago, I quickly learned that one dead Canadian anywhere (even more so, a white Canadian), equalled two or three dead Americans, which in turn equalled 10 or 15 Brits or West Europeans, which in turn equalled 30 or 40 dead East Europeans, who were probably white and maybe even Christian, but came from unpronounceable places, and so forth.
At the very end of the list were Africans, or, say, Bangladeshis. They had to perish in very large numbers indeed to merit any notice.
…But Indigenous people, I’m afraid, haven’t rated very highly on that unspoken hierarchy. Canadians evidently do not consider Indigenous people proximate — and the less proximate the subject, the more indifferent the audience.
As the missing and murdered inquiry will no doubt conclude, police also prioritize cases they believe are of most interest to the public; in a way, they exercise news judgment of their own.
And it’s a safe bet that in turn, predators choose targets that are low priorities for law enforcement: to wit, Indigenous women, especially if they happen to be sex workers, are not only the most vulnerable among us, but the least protected.
So, indifference can also be lethal. And now we have those damned computer apps to remind us constantly of its stubborn, passive presence.
Interesting and significant. Of note that opposition is highest in the two provinces with the largest percentage of Indigenous people, Saskatchewan and Manitoba:
The majority of Canadians are open to designating seats for the country’s indigenous people to boost their representation in Parliament and on the Supreme Court.
They are divided, however, when it comes to how that representation would be achieved.
When asked about hypothetically designating a specific number of seats for indigenous representatives in the House of Commons, Senate or Supreme Court, one-third backed the idea; one-third opposed, and one-third said it “depends” on how it was done or were unsure.
Maryantonett Flumian, president of the Institute on Governance (IOG) , said the nearly 30 per cent who said they could support quotas depending on how they are handled suggests an “openness” among Canadians and a significant shift in attitude.
“We don’t have comparative data but I … think these numbers represent an evolution in public opinion and in the minds of many Canadians. I would bet that we wouldn’t have had those responses five years ago and that attitudes have evolved that far.”
She also said Canadians seem to recognize that we can’t fix the country’s relationship with indigenous peoples “with good intentions (only) — they have to be in the positions driving it.”
Scott Serson, a former deputy minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, said the survey suggested Canadians are more open today than when a group of seven organizations conducted a major survey of non-aboriginal Canadians in 2014.
That survey was conducted by Environics as a baseline to track changing public attitudes towards reconciliation. It found Canadians increasingly recognize the historic and current challenges indigenous people face, with many indicating support for reconciliation and finding solutions.
“We have always said that First Nations must be at every table where decisions are being made that affect us, including the cabinet table, the boardroom table, the Supreme Court of Canada and beyond,” said Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde.
“I am encouraged that many Canadians have confidence in the ability of First Nations leaders, and support the need for us to be fully involved in setting the path forward as partners.”
Emmett Macfarlane, a political scientist at the University of Waterloo, called Canadians’ openness to increased indigenous representation in government a “turning point” in attitudes.
He said the intense media attention around the Truth and Reconciliation Report into the residential school system, coupled with the Idle No More movement and the inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women, have all helped increase Canadians’ knowledge and understanding.
“This is an important development that puts them at the top of mind for non-indigenous people. It’s a bit of a surprise because it’s a departure from historical norms where non-indigenous Canadians have not given a lot of thought to indigenous Canadians.
…According to the survey, 46 per cent of Canadians support more indigenous representation while 16 per cent are opposed. Nearly 30 per cent responded with “depends” how it was done and nine per cent had no opinion.
The level of support, however, divided along East-West lines.
Support to expanding representation was strongest in Eastern and Central Canada, especially in Quebec where 56 per cent said they supported the idea. Opposition was most evident Manitoba and Saskatchewan where 26 per cent were opposed.
The survey asked Canadians who opposed expanding indigenous representation to give reasons for their objections. The most common reason, given by 35 per cent of them, was that all Canadians are equal and no group should be given preferential treatment.
About 10 per cent said indigenous peoples are adequately represented; nine per cent said they were over-represented; nine per cent said they were irresponsible and might abuse the system, and that representation should be based on qualifications not background.
About 28 per cent offered no specific reasons for their objections.
Multicultural Meanderings 