Nadeau: L’insulte fasciste

2022/10/18 Leave a comment

Of note:

Le mot « fasciste » est de retour sur toutes les lèvres. Pour parler du monde dans lequel nous vivons désormais, convient-il encore ? Nombreux sont ceux qui, de plus en plus, voient dans la situation présente des correspondances avec les crises successives qui plombèrent les années 1930. Est-il anachronique de penser qu’un passé peut revenir nous hanter sous une forme recomposée ?

Au fil du temps, l’étiquette « fasciste » s’est décollée de la bouteille où on a mélangé trop de réalités politiques différentes. Aujourd’hui, ceux qui sont les plus susceptibles de faire sortir les mauvais génies de cette bouteille en refusent l’étiquette. Ils la savent infamante, c’est-à-dire de nature à les déconsidérer en société.

Il serait naïf de croire que le fascisme est mort avec Hitler dans un bunker ou au crochet de boucherie où fut pendu le corps de Mussolini. La guerre n’était pas terminée que bien des adorateurs des droites radicales — lesquels n’avaient pas toujours le Duce et le Führer comme modèles — cherchaient déjà à la faire regermer, plantant ses vieilles idées délétères en de nouveaux terreaux.

George Orwell prévenait que le fascisme reviendrait sur la place publique en portant un chapeau melon et un parapluie roulé sous le bras, selon l’image de l’homme respectable en son temps. Au Canada, le leader fasciste Adrien Arcand lui donnait en quelque sorte raison. Les crânes rasés, les uniformes et les démonstrations de force appartenaient au passé, disait Arcand après-guerre. L’avenir de l’extrême droite dépendait désormais de sa capacité à se parer des apparences de la respectabilité, prévenait-il. À cette fin, il fallait la présenter cravatée, puis trouver à investir les médias pour se faire valoir ainsi endimanché.

Le ridicule et la naïveté des antifascistes, clamait Pier Paolo Pasolini, étaient de continuer de traquer l’extrême droite dans ses formes anciennes. Le fascisme avait muté à mesure que la société de consommation prenait de l’expansion, plaidait-il à raison.

Comme le ridicule ne tue pas plus d’un côté ou de l’autre du spectre politique, les esprits de droite les plus radicaux exigent aujourd’hui d’être exonérés de l’étiquette de fasciste, sous prétexte qu’ils ont changé de costume. Ils ne précisent pas qu’ils ont bel et bien conservé, au creux de leurs poches et dans la doublure de leur veste, un même fond d’idées.

La Hongrie d’Orban, habituée de piétiner les droits démocratiques, est enthousiaste au possible devant les avancées de Georgia Meloni, la nouvelle tête de la droite radicale italienne au passé fasciste avoué. Vincenzo Sofo, une des figures fortes de Fratelli d’Italia, le parti de Meloni, est le mari de Marion Maréchal, l’égérie de l’extrême droite française, par ailleurs petite-fille du fondateur du Front national. Sa tante, Marine Le Pen, a multiplié par le passé les révérences de son parti, le Rassemblement national, envers le régime autoritaire de Poutine. En Suède, contre toute attente, l’extrême droite a refait son nid. Au Brésil de Bolsonaro, la dictature des militaires et ses bourreaux sont célébrés. Tout ce beau monde s’est montré ravi des pirouettes antidémocratiques proposées par Trump. Ces mouvements se portent assistance mutuelle, dans une sorte de fraternité d’idées qui n’a nul besoin d’organisations dûment constituées pour être constatée.

Les néofascistes se présentent comme des anticonformistes valeureux bravant les élites. Dans les faits, ils défendent encore et toujours la même vieille hiérarchie sociale. Les inégalités, ils les tiennent pour naturelles, tel un simple reflet du mérite individuel. Dans leur univers brutal et darwinien, où la loi du plus fort règne, chacun est livré à la merci de ses propres malheurs. Et tous sont vendus à l’illusion qu’il faut se battre les uns contre les autres pour survivre.

Ces régimes d’idées qui veulent en finir, une fois pour toutes, avec les modèles de la social-démocratie, favorisent une fiscalité à l’avantage des puissants, en prenant pour bouc émissaire les immigrants. Devant le paravent d’un nationalisme doctrinaire, l’obsession de l’immigration est ramenée à l’avant, comme aux heures les plus sombres des années 1930. La menace fabulée d’un « grand remplacement » habille désormais le vieux mannequin de la xénophobie la plus obscène, comme pour détourner l’attention du catastrophique démantèlement progressif des services publics et de menaces planétaires autrement plus profondes.

Les ayatollahs du nationalisme identitaire ont sans cesse à la bouche les mots « culture » et « civilisation ». Jamais pour autant on ne les entend parler plus de cinq secondes de littérature, de théâtre, de danse, de cinéma, de patrimoine, ni du fait d’ailleurs que l’écrasante majorité des artisans de ces sphères sont opposés à leurs pensées carrées. Jamais on ne les entend rappeler que cette civilisation, certes chrétienne, occidentale et aristocratique, a été aussi cosmopolite, qu’elle a produit la pensée critique, que son histoire a été traversée de puissants appels à l’égalité, la justice, la démocratie, l’humanisme, la tolérance. Ce versant les laisse indifférents.

Au nom d’un ressentiment populaire contre les élites qui pillent allègrement la terre, les néofascistes séduisent. Ils jouent pourtant double jeu. D’une main, ils flattent la chèvre au cou tandis que, de l’autre, ils arrosent le chou. Leur rébellion de surface, qui souffle sur les braises d’une grogne générale, ne remet jamais en cause le système économique et sert l’autorité de ceux qui en sont déjà les maîtres.

Les néofascistes s’assurent de prendre le relais de l’ordre établi, en promettant de le pousser plus loin. En se laissant de la sorte porter au pouvoir, au gré de la peur et du ressentiment, ils entendent parvenir à piloter à leur tour un système néolibéral déjà hégémonique, lui offrant tout au plus un supplément d’âme avec ses appels opportunistes à la nation, seule forme de fraternité qui les émeut. Et à vouloir mieux foncer sur cette vieille voie, ils nous conduisent tout droit à un renouveau du pire.

Source: L’insulte fasciste

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Et si le discours de la CAQ nuisait à l’intégration des immigrants?

2022/10/12 Leave a comment

Obviously:

Le discours de la Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) sur les immigrants fait usage d’un vocabulaire alarmiste et de propos faux, qui le rendent défavorable à l’intégration des nouveaux arrivants au Québec. En effet, son discours attribue à la population immigrante des stigmates répulsifs au processus qui fait de l’étranger une partie intégrante de la société d’accueil. D’abord, disséquons le discours pour ensuite présenter le défi auquel fait face le Québec en matière d’intégration des immigrants.

Le chef de la CAQ, François Legault, a affirmé au cours de l’été dernier que l’immigration serait un facteur de la « louisianisation » du Québec. Or l’histoire ne permet pas de faire une telle hypothèse. En effet, la Louisiane française, vaste territoire d’Amérique du Nord, faisait partie de la Nouvelle-France entre les XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Sa « louisianisation » s’est faite non pas par des immigrants, mais de l’intérieur, par des échanges de territoires entre colonisateurs français, espagnols et anglais. Ruinée par la guerre de Sept Ans (1756-1763), la monarchie française céda une grande partie de la Louisiane aux Espagnols, puis, au début des années 1800, le premier consul Napoléon Bonaparte céda définitivement aux États-Unis la partie restée française.

Selon d’autres propos tenus par le chef de la CAQ, l’immigration conduirait la « société québécoise au suicide ». Or l’histoire du peuple canadien-français, puis québécois, est faite de lutte, de résistance, de résilience, de solidarité et de sa capacité à rester lui-même par l’assimilation de nombreuses influences venues de l’intérieur et de l’extérieur. Ce qui fait la vitalité du Québec, écrit Fernand Dumont dans Raisons communes, « tient à une plus étroite proximité avec l’existence réelle des gens d’ici en même temps qu’à une plus grande ouverture aux quêtes extérieures ».

Ailleurs, M. Legault fait un lien entre immigration et violence. Cette affirmation doit être relativisée si l’on considère les données sur la criminalité au Québec de l’Institut de la statistique du Québec (2021) et celles de l’Enquête sociale générale sur la sécurité de Statistique Canada (2014). Lorsqu’on considère les types de violence (agression sexuelle, vol qualifié, voies de fait, etc.) commis ou subis par la population immigrante et la population non immigrante, les taux d’incidence sont tantôt similaires tantôt différents. On ne saurait donc faire un lien direct entre immigration et violence.

Quant à Jean Boulet, ministre sortant de l’Immigration, il a déclaré pendant la récente campagne électorale que « 80 % des immigrants s’en vont à Montréal, ne travaillent pas, ne parlent pas français ou n’adhèrent pas aux valeurs de la société québécoise ». Une telle affirmation ne concorde pas avec la réalité, comme l’a démontré Le Devoir. Elle relève sans doute du sens commun ou de préjugé.

Au total, le discours de la CAQ n’est que la stigmatisation des immigrants. Celle-ci peut produire au sein de la population une représentation sociale négative de l’immigrant puis finalement compromettre l’altérité. Or dans une société pluriethnique, la relation humaine est fondamentalement basée sur l’altérité, c’est-à-dire sur le rapport à l’étranger. Lorsque les discours politiques au sein de cette société tendent à encourager la recherche des similitudes avec l’étranger, celui-ci est inclus dans la société, et son intégration est effective. Réciproquement, lorsque les discours recherchent surtout des différences, l’étranger risque d’être exclu de la société d’accueil. C’est la posture que la CAQ a adoptée durant la campagne électorale.

Le Québec est une terre d’accueil d’immigrants qui viennent de partout dans le monde. Pays d’expression française dans un océan anglophone, le Québec a un grand défi : être une société qui garde son identité nationale (par sa langue et sa culture) tout en étant une société qui devient de plus en plus pluriculturelle. Je crois que le Québec est capable d’élaborer et de construire un modèle d’intégration dans la perspective de ce qu’il est, de son projet de société particulière, en y incluant des étrangers qui arrivent et qui deviennent aussi de nouveaux citoyens. Dans les discours ambiants sur l’immigration ailleurs dans le monde, la spécificité du Québec est d’être une société plutôt réceptive au discours inclusif.

Source: Et si le discours de la CAQ nuisait à l’intégration des immigrants?

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We are much safer here, say Indians in Canada

2022/10/12 Leave a comment

Of interest. Reader experiences, of course, may vary:

As India witnesses an alarming rise in cases of hate crimes racism, and vandalism across North America, students and Indians in Canada say they feel much safer and that there is no rise in crimes against them.

“There is no rise in crime against Indians in Canada. It is extremely peaceful. Overall, it is much safer in Canada for Indians than it was in the previous century when our forefathers came. Canada is a peaceful nation,” Balbir Gurm, community activist and founder of Network to Eliminate Violence in Relationships, told IANS.

The New Delhi-Ottawa ties have been under duress lately due to the recent vandalisation of Hindu properties and religious shrines, hate crimes, and a referendum to garner support for the secession of ‘Khalistan’ from Punjab in India.

Last month, the BAPS Swaminarayan temple in Canada was defaced with anti-India graffiti, and in July, a statue of Mahatma Gandhi at a Vishnu Temple in the Richmond Hill neighbourhood of Canada was desecrated.

Indian-origin Sikh Joti Singh Mann, a radio host based in Brampton, was attacked by three people in August this year, and Kartik Vasudev, a 21-year-old student from Uttar Pradesh, was shot dead in Toronto as he stepped out of a metro station in April.

Echoing Gurm’s views, Sara Wasson (name changed), a student of Brock University in Ontario, said that she “feels much safer in Canada than in India. This is such a peaceful country with fun-loving and helpful people”.

“This is a friendly country. At 20, I have a job here and I am not dependent on my family to pay for my university education. Canada makes me feel independent and confident, and I am happy to be here,” said Ashwin Malhotra, a student who works part-time at a departmental part-time at a departmental store in Ontario.

There are over 622,000 foreign students in Canada, with Indians numbering 217,410 as of December 31, 2021, according to figures released by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).

A recent report by Bengaluru-based research firm Redseer Strategy said that as many as 217,410 Indian students applied for Canadian education in 2021.

“What we are seeing is an aberration and not the norm. I feel that overall racism is decreasing in Canada against Canadians of Indian-origin. Today we can vote, be MPs, own property, and become members of any profession we choose,” Dr Gurm said, highlighting that the majority of Canadians are very accepting of all peoples.

“Everything’s peaceful here. No commotion happening here, seriously. Also, the Bhagavad Gita Park thing is a misunderstanding,” Divya Shankaran, who permanently moved to Canada three years back, told IANS. 

While there was much hue and cry over vandalism of a sign board at a park in Canada’s Brampton that has been named Bhagavad Gita Park, the Mayor of the town clarified saying that the cops had investigated the matter and it was just a matter of “maintenance and reprinting work”. 

Though there is no country-wise break-up of the numbers, Indians are the top immigrant group to take up residence in Canada this year. 

In 2021, nearly 100,000 Indians became permanent residents of Canada as the country admitted a record 405,000 new immigrants in its history, according to an Economic Times report. 

During 2021-2022, over 210,000 permanent residents also acquired Canadian citizenship, the report said. 

Source: We are much safer here, say Indians in Canada

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McWhorter: A Language Test That Stigmatizes Black Children

2022/10/11 Leave a comment

Good example of a systemic barrier:

It can be hard not to notice that a suspiciously large number of children, of seemingly normal human linguistic capacity, are officially designated as language impaired. In 2019, two researchers set out to determine just how common this phenomenon is. Examining nationwide data, they found that each year, 14 percent of states overrepresent the number of Black children with speech and language impairments.

Just what does “language impaired” mean, though? Much of the reason this diagnosis is so disproportionate among this group and has been for decades is that too many people who are supposedly trained in assessing children’s language skills aren’t actually taught much about how human language works. And it affects the lives of Black kids dramatically.

The reason for that overrepresentation is that most Black children grow up code switching between Black English and standard English. There is nothing exotic about this; legions of people worldwide live between two dialects of a language, one casual and one formal, and barely think about it. Many Germans, Italians, Chinese people, South Asians and Southeast Asians and most Arabs are accustomed to speaking different varieties of language according to different forms of social interaction. So, too, are Black Americans. Black children, along the typical lines of bidialectal contexts like these, are much more comfortable with the casual variety of Black speech, only faintly aware that in formal settings there is a standard way of speaking that is considered more appropriate. Black English grammar is often assumed to be slang and mistakes. But it’s actually just an alternate, rather than degraded, form of English compared to the standard variety.

Here are the kinds of phrases that so many Black kids know and use effortlessly, phrases that are richer than standard English in many ways: “He be singin’”; “He done sung”; “He had sung and then he had gone quiet.” All three sentences are examples of how Black English expresses shades of actions in ways that standard English leaves more to context. “He be singin’” refers to someone singing regularly; you wouldn’t say that if someone were singing right in front of you. “He done sung” doesn’t simply refer to the past but to the fact that his having done so was something of a surprise, or something people urgently needed to know. Used on verbs one after the other in sequence instead of in the past-before-the-past pluperfect way that we use it in standard English, “had” in Black English indicates that one is telling a story; it is a narrative marker. None of this is broken. It is just different.

Now, suppose a kid raised in this dialect were asked on a test: “This bird is blue. What about this one?” “It red” would be marked wrong. Never mind that putting it that way is the way one would do it in the most standard version of Russian. If the kids tested see a girl with scissors and say “The girl cuttin’” instead of “The girl is cutting,” they are not just doing what Tolstoy would have thought of as normal but evidencing signs of linguistic impairment, as it is called.

The test asks the kid: “This is Jack. Whose dog is this? It is ______.” The kid may say “Jack dog” — in Black English, it is permissible to leave the possessive “-’s” out. Hence the late Black comedian Robin Harris’s classic routine about his girlfriend’s children saying, “Dem Bebe kids!” Apparently Harris had a linguistic impairment?

Imagine 7- or 8-year-old Black kids asked to repeat the sentence “My mother is the nurse who works in the community clinic.” If they happily say, spontaneously expressing it in the English they are most comfortable with, “My mother the nurse work in the community clinic,” they could be marked as linguistically deficient.

You don’t have to imagine this. Many of these questions are right from the CELF (Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals)-5 test, which is commonly used to assess children for disability status. And while the test includes modified scoring guidelines for students who may not have grown up speaking standard English, many test administrators do not abide by them. And even when they do, it can sometimes lead to underidentification of true language impairment when those test administrators cannot distinguish between language differences and language deficits. (This would help explain why the researchers also found that an estimated 62 percent of states underdiagnose Black children with these impairments.)

Tests like this one tend to be central to assessments of children as language deficient. The CELF-5 is used quite often. The dialect issue has been shown to be of key importance in overdiagnosis, which isn’t surprising given that, as Professor Catherine Crowley, from the program in Communication Sciences and Disorders at Columbia University’s Teachers College, tells me, in one subtest of the exam, 20 out of 33 of the constructions in the CELF-5 are used differently in Black English.

Imagine something else: If Black English were standard and a test asked white kids: Which is correct? “He ain’t be wearing that kind of shirt” or “He don’t be wearing that kind of shirt”? What would they answer? By the established parameters of Black English — and again, it is important to note that there are established parameters; this isn’t just slang — the correct answer is the second option. In that alternate universe, missing the distinction could get kids sent to a specialized classroom where they wouldn’t be taught according to their abilities.

I remember my mother, a child psychologist, talking as far back as the 1970s about Black kids being treated as linguistically deficient for being bidialectal; she resisted diagnostic tests as a result. Yet here we still are. Tests like this stay in place.

There are many areas in which I remain skeptical of the systemic racism analysis — for example, I am unconvinced that it’s systemic racism to require social workers to perform well on standardized tests. However, these speech evaluation tests imposed on children are something else. They can shunt kids away from mainstream opportunity when they have done nothing but grow up immersed in Black English as their linguistic comfort zone. Being born Black makes you more likely to suffer this abuse, whether it means your language impairment requiring special attention goes undiagnosed or your perfectly fine Black English is labeled a problem. Growing up with nonstandard English in general, as one study demonstrates about Filipino kids growing up in the United States from early childhood, can also lead to similar results.

It won’t do. But linguists can only have so much effect here. I have spent three decades listening to educators, psychologists, other linguists and speech pathologists giving talks about this lack of fit between speech evaluation tests and linguistic reality, and little seems to change except people in education circles being aware of and dismayed by the problem. Speech pathologists seeking to meaningfully participate in antiracism must start not just questioning but resisting en masse these outdated tests that apply a Dick-and-Jane sense of English on real kids who control a variety of coherent and nuanced Englishes.

Yes, all kids need to learn standard English in order to be able to access mainstream sources of achievement, not to mention to be taken seriously in specific contexts. This may not be fair. But the idea of standard English as a menacing, racist “gatekeeper” (which I have covered here) makes for good rhetoric yet will help no one in the real world. Certain dialects will be treated as standard as inevitably as certain kinds of clothing are considered more fashionable than others.

But for kids to be designated as linguistically deficient right out of the gate, based on notions such as that if they don’t always use the verb “to be” they don’t understand how things are related, makes no sense. It constitutes a dismissal of eager and innocent articulateness. And as such, it is an arrant and thoughtless injustice that must be stopped.

Source: A Language Test That Stigmatizes Black Children

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Diversity Minister condemns CRTC for not severing ties with consultant under fire for tweets

2022/10/11 Leave a comment

Needed but questions remain regarding how Canadian Heritage and CRTC decisions to provide funding to the Community Media Advocacy Centre were made. Recommended by officials (“activists on a pension”) and/or pushed by the political level:

Diversity Minister Ahmed Hussen says he is “surprised and disappointed” by the federal broadcasting regulator’s decision not to ban an anti-racism organization that employs Laith Marouf, a consultant who has been widely condemned for a series of derogatory tweets about “Jewish white supremacists” and francophones.

The Minister made his comments on Friday to the Commons heritage committee, which had summoned him so he could explain how his department’s anti-racism unit had granted the organization, called the Community Media Advocacy Centre, a contract to run an anti-racism project in which Mr. Marouf was to play a key role.

CMAC has been paid over $500,000 to participate in proceedings held by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Canada’s broadcasting regulator. Most of the money was provided by the Broadcast Participation Fund, an independent body set up by the CRTC to administer payments to public-interest groups taking part in those proceedings.

The Broadcast Participation Fund told The Globe and Mail in a statement on Friday that it was “currently reviewing the CMAC matter.” The fund is paid into by broadcasting companies, which have no influence over who receives the money.

Opinion: Ahmed Hussen demands to know how someone else let his government partner with an apparent antisemite

A spokeswoman for the CRTC said on Thursday that the regulator would not ban CMAC from its proceedings because it would be inappropriate “to establish lists of parties that may or may not participate.”

At Friday’s committee hearing, Mr. Hussen told MPs that he had been warned by Liberal MP Anthony Housefather about Mr. Marouf’s offensive tweets on July 19th or 20th – a month before the Minister spoke out publicly.

Facing sharp questioning from MPs, the Minister admitted that the Heritage Department’s vetting process failed when it decided to pay $133,000 to CMAC to run the anti-racism project.

Mr. Hussen apologized to Jewish and francophone communities, which he said Mr. Marouf has “continuously attacked with his hateful comments.”

He said it was “completely unacceptable” that “this individual fell through the cracks” and was approved to run a government-funded project. The Heritage Department, which he said approved the funding before he became Diversity and Inclusion Minister, has now cancelled the initiative and is asking CMAC for its money back.

“The antisemitic, hateful and xenophobic comments made by Laith Marouf … I condemn them in the strongest possible terms,” Mr. Hussen said. “The fact that the Community Media Advocacy Centre received federal funding while employing Mr. Marouf is unacceptable and should quite frankly never have happened.”

CMAC describes itself as a non-profit organization supporting the “self-determination of Indigenous, racialized and disabled peoples in the media through research, relationship-building, advocacy and learning.”

Mr. Marouf denies he is antisemitic or racist. He said in an interview that CMAC is currently in discussions with the Heritage Department about the contract. CMAC and Mr. Marouf had already started the project when it was terminated.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in August that the government has launched a complete review of funding for CMAC. He added that it was unacceptable “that federal dollars have gone to this organization that has demonstrated xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism.”

Mr. Hussen told MPs that CMAC would be blocked from applying for any future funding. He said he has introduced tighter vetting procedures for such contracts, including an obligation to check social media profiles for hateful speech. And he said his department’s contracts now include a clause that allows them to be terminated if hate speech comes to light. He said he has paused all new departmental contracts until more checks are made.

Jewish groups, including the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre, called on the CRTC to follow the government’s lead in severing ties with Mr. Marouf and CMAC, and to ban the organization from taking part in regulatory proceedings.

“Laith Marouf’s hateful statements should have disqualified him, and CMAC, from access to any government funding, let alone to money from an anti-racism program,” said Shimon Koffler Fogel, president of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. “It is imperative that the values promoted by the government be reflected in the orientation and work of their partners outside government.”

Conservative MP Kevin Waugh told the heritage committee that CRTC chairman Ian Scott and Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez should both be summoned to appear before the committee to explain their organizations’ links to CMAC.

Rachael Thomas, a Tory MP, and Melissa Lantsman, deputy leader of the Conservative Party, issued a statement saying “Canadians deserve answers” from Mr. Rodriguez.

Source: Diversity Minister condemns CRTC for not severing ties with consultant under fire for tweets

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Paul: Ninety Years Ago, This Book Tried to Warn Us

2022/10/08 Leave a comment

Lessons and warnings from history:

The power of some classic realist novels, like Zola’s “Germinal” and Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” lies in the way they wholly capture their era. Others endure because they continue to feel remarkably prescient, like Eliot’s “Middlemarch” and William Dean Howells’s “A Hazard of New Fortunes,” which took on the perils of surviving financially in Gilded Age New York.

Then there are novels that are simultaneously very much of their time and yet almost clairvoyant about the future.

Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel “The Oppermanns,” which is being rereleased this month with a revised translation of James Cleugh’s original by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Joshua Cohen, is one of those books. It’s been nearly 90 years since its publication, but reading it now is like staring into the worst of next week. It’s all there: The ways in which a country can lose its grip on the truth. The ways in which tribalism — referred to in “The Oppermanns” as “anthropological and zoological nonsense” — is easily roused to demonize others. The ways in which warring factions can be abetted by the media and accepted by a credulous populace.

The novel reads like a five-alarm fire because it was written that way, over a mere nine months, and published shortly after Hitler became chancellor, only lightly fictionalizing events as they occurred in real time. In “Buddenbrooks” fashion, the story follows the declining fortunes and trials of a family, the German Jewish Oppermanns, prosperous merchants and professionals, as they scramble to hold on while fascism takes hold of their country. It’s a book that fairly trembles with foreboding and almost aches with sorrow.

“How do you know when to sound the alarm?” asked Cohen, who also wrote an introduction to the new edition, when I reached him by phone on book tour in Italy. It’s easy to slam someone for overreacting, he explained. But we would do well to remember the instances in which a strong reaction is justified: “There’s an enormous bravery that comes with writing about the present, an enormous risk and an enormous thrill. You have to ask yourself: ‘What if I’m wrong?’ And also: ‘What if I’m right?’”

Feuchtwanger was willing to place that bet, working off fury as well as considerable access to journalistic, governmental and undercover sources within Germany. But unlike much overtly political fiction, his book is imbued with all the humor, humanity and sweep of a 19th-century epic. The result, Fred T. March noted in his 1934 review in The Times, “is addressed to the German people, who will not be allowed to read it, urging them to open their eyes. And it is addressed to the world outside bearing the message, ‘Wake up! The barbarians are upon us.’”

Consider the misbegotten assumptions Feuchtwanger took on then that continue to threaten today:

Populist ignorance cannot prevail in an enlightened world. Just as New Yorkers scoffed at the idea that Donald Trump, lead buffoon of the tabloid ’80s, could be taken seriously as a presidential candidate, so do the bourgeois intelligentsia of “The Oppermanns” chortle over “Mein Kampf,” a work they find impossible to reckon with in the land of Goethe: “A nation that had concerned itself for centuries so intensively with books, such as those they saw around them, could never allow itself to be deceived by the nonsense in the ‘Protocols’ and in ‘Mein Kampf.’”

Direct engagement confers legitimacy. When Edgar Oppermann, a doctor, faces antisemitic attacks in the newspapers, his boss advises silence. “The whole of politics is nothing but a pigsty. Unless one cannot help doing otherwise, one should simply ignore them. That’s what annoys the pigsty crowd most.” To confront the forces of illiberalism is only to sully oneself, Edgar believes. Those in the press who propagate such lies “ought to be put into an asylum, not brought before a court of law.”

Technology will out disinformation. At each turn, the Oppermanns and their milieu have trouble believing that propaganda will take hold. “How could they expect to get away with such a monstrous, clumsy lie?” Gustav Oppermann, the central figure in the novel, asks himself after the Nazis blame the burning of the Reichstag on communists. “Nero might have put over such cheap stuff in burning Rome. But things like that were impossible today, in the era of the telephone and printing press.” Of course, the era of Twitter and TikTok has shown that advances in technology still amplify falsehoods.

If you ignore it, it will go away. In the novel, two bourgeois Germans foresee a grim future but fall back on complacency. One describes the first world war as “only a curtain-raiser” with “a century of destruction” to follow, predicting, as he puts it, “a military power beyond conception, a judiciary power with severe, restrictive laws and a school system to educate senseless brutes in the ecstasy of self-sacrifice.” His companion merely replies: “All right, if that’s your opinion. But perhaps you’ll have another cognac and a cigar before it happens.”

It’s up to the next generation. The novel’s most tragic figure is the teenage Berthold Oppermann, a student guilty only by ethnicity and familial association. Berated by a Nazi schoolteacher for delivering an allegedly anti-German paper, Berthold says he is “a good German” and refuses to apologize. “You are a good German, are you?” his Nazi teacher sneers. “Well, will you be so good as to leave it to others to decide who is a good German and who is not?” While classrooms today are a far cry from those in Nazi-era Germany, one needn’t reach far for contemporary parallels, with students increasingly operating in an atmosphere of fear and conformity — of their peers, depending on location, on the right or the left — while the adults too often abdicate responsibility, whether out of complicity or fear.

The situation was inevitable. In the Oppermanns’ world, escalating problems are viewed as uniquely German, unique to their time and to a particular regime. “Our opponents have one tremendous advantage over us; their absolute lack of fairness,” explains a lawyer at one point. “That is the very reason why they are in power today. They have always employed such primitive methods that the rest of us simply did not believe them possible, for they would not have been possible in any other country.”

Wrong again.

As for Feuchtwanger, the same year that “The Oppermanns” was published, the German Jewish author was stripped of his citizenship and had his property in Berlin seized and his books burned. He was banned from ever publishing in Germany again.

By the time the book was published, Feuchtwanger had already settled in France, where he was later imprisoned following the German invasion. He ultimately escaped to the United States, where he lived for the last 17 years of his life.

Is this still the same country where he’d find refuge?

Source: Ninety Years Ago, This Book Tried to Warn Us

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Nicolas: Legault’s win reveals a Quebec split in two

2022/10/07 Leave a comment

Good overview and interesting parallel between the Harper years and Legault:

Montreal is an island. This is a geographical fact, but now more than ever, it is also a social and political reality. Montreal is an island of red and orange, floating in an endless ocean of blue. Or so it appears, if you looked at the electoral map of Quebec the morning after the last provincial campaign.

Urban and rural voting habits tend to differ across the country – not just in Quebec. But a new phenomenon is at play here. Not so long ago, when the Liberals and the Parti Québécois were the dominant forces in Quebec politics, neither could find a pathway to a majority without a decent representation in the metropolis.

Even Maurice Duplessis, who ruled over Quebec with an iron fist during the 1940s and 50s, used to hold more ridings in Montreal than Premier François Legault now has. This is saying a lot, given that there were fewer ridings in the city, and fewer ridings overall back then.

Last Monday night, it felt accurate to speak of a tale of two Quebecs. The differences between Montreal and the “régions” have always existed, as have those between young people and their elders, French Canadians and Quebeckers of other origins. But the divisions seem to have been exacerbated by the province’s recent political debates. There is now Mr. Legault’s Quebec, and the Quebec of those who struggle to see themselves represented in his Coalition Avenir Québec party’s nationalism. Big city dwellers, immigrants and their families, anglophones and young people more generally are struggling to find their place under Mr. Legault’s leadership.

In 2018, Mr. Legault’s CAQ managed to form a majority government with only two members of the National Assembly on the island, both minor players in his caucus. The Premier, who is, interestingly enough, originally a Montrealer himself, knows he doesn’t need Montreal to govern. And it shows.

At the beginning of this first mandate, Mr. Legault put forward Bill 21. The ban on religious symbols for judges, police officers and teachers panders to Quebeckers who hardly, if ever, come in daily contact with religious diversity – while only bearing real, negative consequences for those who do. If this tension between small town and urban Quebec wasn’t already obvious, Mr. Legault stressed it after the adoption of the law. “In Quebec, this is how we live,” he felt necessary to say. To whom, one might ask, if not predominately Montrealers?

In the first year of his mandate, Quebec’s Minister of Immigration also attempted to cancel 18,000 permanent residency applications, mostly coming from newcomers who were already living in the province. The government was forced to backtrack after an intervention by the courts, but many of the applicants caught in this political storm still had to start their permanent residency process all over again, and wait years to get approved. The immigration file, once again, disproportionally affects Montreal.

During the pandemic, Mr. Legault imposed a curfew that disproportionally affected families crammed in small, urban apartments deprived of backyards. The consequences of his policy on the most vulnerable in Montreal did not move him. We learned, after the worst of the crisis was over, that Montreal’s public-health authority had had a difficult relationship with the province on a number of issues. No one was surprised.

And this year’s debate around the adoption of Bill 96, which strengthens the province’s language legislation, also implicitly frames Montreal as a problem. There’s hardly anyone in Quebec who doesn’t understand the vulnerability of French in North America. Yet not all Quebeckers agree on the best means to ensure French continues to thrive.

Those who are in daily contact with linguistic diversity – predominantly Montrealers, once again – are concerned with the sections of Bill 96 that could hinder the human rights of Quebec’s linguistic minorities. For several CAQ supporters, however, opposing parts of Bill 96 is to oppose Quebec, period. The exclusive discourse has made many in the Montreal region feel more isolated and rejected than ever.

In this context, it is not surprising that on Monday night, Mr. Legault’s CAQ made inroads everywhere, except Montreal. During the campaign, some of the Premier’s comments on immigration generated a lot of commentary – and frankly, outrage.

The day after he linked immigration to violent extremism during a press conference, Mr. Legault apologized.

After his Minister for Immigration, Jean Boulet, falsely claimed 80 per cent of immigrants don’t speak French and don’t work, Mr. Legault apologized again.

When addressing the Montreal Chamber of Commerce, the Premier argued that welcoming more than 50,000 immigrants to Quebec a year would be “suicidal.” And during the last weekend of the Quebec campaign, Mr. Legault told journalists, who were asking him about the critiques he had received for his comments, that he would not apologize for defending French and “Quebec values.”

Then on the night of the election, he insisted in his victory speech that he will be the Premier of “all Quebeckers,” including those of “all regions,” and “all origins.”

Confused? You are not alone. Will those who have been deeply wounded by his campaign declarations accept this week’s olive branch? It would have been more likely if Monday’s victory speech had not been preceded by his track record of the past four years.

What’s next for that “other Quebec” – the one that doesn’t see its values represented in some of the CAQ’s nationalism, essentially urban Quebec, diverse Quebec and younger Quebec?

On Tuesday morning, many blamed the first-past-the-post electoral system for the lack of representation at the National Assembly. It is also worth mentioning that ridings in the Montreal region tend to include more voters than those in remote areas. This is because with each review of the electoral map, authorities hesitate to compensate ever-growing urbanization with a widening of the already-gigantic territory of rural ridings.

The easier solution would be having more than a 125 MNAs sitting at the National Assembly. This might help reduce the distortion in how votes are weighted, as least while the Legault government remains firm in its resolve to not embark on an electoral reform.

Another way forward is to essentially remain patient. The CAQ’s base is mostly strong in the 55-plus cohort. As younger generations – and the different notion of “Quebec values” they tend to put forward – increase their weight in the electorate, the political order in the province is bound to shift as well.

That generation is already better represented in the province’s municipal leadership. Big city mayors have played an important role during the campaign, for example, in putting the issues of climate change adaptation and public transportation on the political agenda.

In the next four years, opposition to Mr. Legault will be present, but greatly underrepresented at the National Assembly. It will also be found, however, in city leadership, and most probably in civil society, as well as among Quebec’s culture and media personalities.

Like the unnamed resistance that emerged in urban, central Canada during the majority Harper years, you might see an informal coalition working to push to bring the values of The Other Quebec – big city dwellers, immigrants and young people – to the forefront.

Source: Legault’s win reveals a Quebec split in two

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Embedded Bias: How medical records sow discrimination | New Orleans’ Multicultural News Source

2022/10/06 Leave a comment

Of interest and unfortunately not all that surprising.

One of the benefits of electronic data hospital records, at least the ones I have in Ottawa, is that I see my doctor notes.

Not sure how widespread these systems are but they do provide needed medical information on a close to real time basis as well as hopefully reducing discrimination given increased public accountability and transparency.

But during my various times at the hospital for my cancer treatments, I became very aware of just how privileged I was compared to other patients in terms of education, income and language:

David Confer, a bicyclist and an audio technician, told his doctor he “used to be Ph.D. level” during a 2019 appointment in Washington, D.C. Confer, then 50, was speaking figuratively: He was experiencing brain fog — a symptom of his liver problems. But did his doctor take him seriously? Now, after his death, Confer’s partner, Cate Cohen, doesn’t think so.

Confer, who was Black, had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma two years before. His prognosis was positive. But during chemotherapy, his symptoms — brain fog, vomiting, back pain — suggested trouble with his liver, and he was later diagnosed with cirrhosis. He died in 2020, unable to secure a transplant. Throughout, Cohen, now 45, felt her partner’s clinicians didn’t listen closely to him and had written him off.

That feeling crystallized once she read Confer’s records. The doctor described Confer’s fuzziness and then quoted his Ph.D. analogy. To Cohen, the language was dismissive, as if the doctor didn’t take Confer at his word. It reflected, she thought, a belief that he was likely to be noncompliant with his care — that he was a bad candidate for a liver transplant and would waste the donated organ.

For its part, MedStar Georgetown, where Confer received care, declined to comment on specific cases. But spokesperson Lisa Clough said the medical center considers a variety of factors for transplantation, including “compliance with medical therapy, health of both individuals, blood type, comorbidities, ability to care for themselves and be stable, and post-transplant social support system.” Not all potential recipients and donors meet those criteria, Clough said.

Doctors often send signals of their appraisals of patients’ personas. Researchers are increasingly finding that doctors can transmit prejudice under the guise of objective descriptions. Clinicians who later read those purportedly objective descriptions can be misled and deliver substandard care.

Discrimination in health care is “the secret, or silent, poison that taints interactions between providers and patients before, during, after the medical encounter,” said Dayna Bowen Matthew, dean of George Washington University’s law school and an expert in civil rights law and disparities in health care.

Bias can be seen in the way doctors speak during rounds. Some patients, Matthew said, are described simply by their conditions. Others are characterized by terms that communicate more about their social status or character than their health and what’s needed to address their symptoms. For example, a patient could be described as an “80-year-old nice Black gentleman.” Doctors mention that patients look well-dressed or that someone is a laborer or homeless.

The stereotypes that can find their way into patients’ records sometimes help determine the level of care patients receive. Are they spoken to as equals? Will they get the best, or merely the cheapest, treatment? Bias is “pervasive” and “causally related to inferior health outcomes, period,” Matthew said.

Narrow or prejudiced thinking is simple to write down and easy to copy and paste over and over. Descriptions such as “difficult” and “disruptive” can become hard to escape. Once so labeled, patients can experience “downstream effects,” said Dr. Hardeep Singh, an expert in misdiagnosis who works at the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Houston. He estimates misdiagnosis affects 12 million patients a year.

Conveying bias can be as simple as a pair of quotation marks. One team of researchers found that Black patients, in particular, were quoted in their records more frequently than other patients when physicians were characterizing their symptoms or health issues. The quotation mark patterns detected by researchers could be a sign of disrespect, used to communicate irony or sarcasm to future clinical readers. Among the types of phrases the researchers spotlighted were colloquial language or statements made in Black or ethnic slang.

“Black patients may be subject to systematic bias in physicians’ perceptions of their credibility,” the authors of the paper wrote.

That’s just one study in an incoming tide focused on the variations in the language that clinicians use to describe patients of different races and genders. In many ways, the research is just catching up to what patients and doctors knew already, that discrimination can be conveyed and furthered by partial accounts.

Confer’s MedStar records, Cohen thought, were pockmarked with partial accounts — notes that included only a fraction of the full picture of his life and circumstances.

Cohen pointed to a write-up of a psychosocial evaluation, used to assess a patient’s readiness for a transplant. The evaluation stated that Confer drank a 12-pack of beer and perhaps as much as a pint of whiskey daily. But Confer had quit drinking after starting chemotherapy and had been only a social drinker before, Cohen said. It was “wildly inaccurate,” Cohen said.

“No matter what he did, that initial inaccurate description of the volume he consumed seemed to follow through his records,” she said.

Physicians frequently see a harsh tone in referrals from other programs, said Dr. John Fung, a transplant doctor at the University of Chicago who advised Cohen but didn’t review Confer’s records. “They kind of blame the patient for things that happen, not really giving credit for circumstances,” he said. But, he continued, those circumstances are important — looking beyond them, without bias, and at the patient himself or herself can result in successful transplants.

The History of One’s Medical History
That doctors pass private judgments on their patients has been a source of nervous humor for years. In an episode of the sitcom “Seinfeld,” Elaine Benes discovers that a doctor had condescendingly written that she was “difficult” in her file. When she asked about it, the doctor promised to erase it. But it was written in pen.

The jokes reflect long-standing conflicts between patients and doctors. In the 1970s, campaigners pushed doctors to open up records to patients and to use less stereotyping language about the people they treated.

Nevertheless, doctors’ notes historically have had a “stilted vocabulary,” said Dr. Leonor Fernandez, an internist and researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Patients are often described as “denying” facts about their health, she said, as if they’re not reliable narrators of their conditions.

One doubting doctor’s judgment can alter the course of care for years. When she visited her doctor for kidney stones early in her life, “he was very dismissive about it,” recalled Melina Oien, who now lives in Tacoma, Washington. Afterward, when she sought care in the military health care system, providers — whom Oien presumed had read her history — assumed that her complaints were psychosomatic and that she was seeking drugs.

“Every time I had an appointment in that system — there’s that tone, that feel. It creates that sense of dread,” she said. “You know the doctor has read the records and has formed an opinion of who you are, what you’re looking for.”

When Oien left military care in the 1990s, her paper records didn’t follow her. Nor did those assumptions.

New Technology — Same Biases?
While Oien could leave her problems behind, the health system’s shift to electronic medical records and the data-sharing it encourages can intensify misconceptions. It’s easier than ever to maintain stale records, rife with false impressions or misreads, and to share or duplicate them with the click of a button.

“This thing perpetuates,” Singh said. When his team reviewed records of misdiagnosed cases, he found them full of identical notes. “It gets copy-pasted without freshness of thinking,” he said.

Research has found that misdiagnosis disproportionately happens to patients whom doctors have labeled as “difficult” in their electronic health record. Singh cited a pair of studies that presented hypothetical scenarios to doctors.

In the first study, participants reviewed two sets of notes, one in which the patient was described simply by her symptoms and a second in which descriptions of disruptive or difficult behaviors had been added. Diagnostic accuracy dropped with the difficult patients.

The second study assessed treatment decisions and found that medical students and residents were less likely to prescribe pain medications to patients whose records included stigmatizing language.

Digital records can also display prejudice in handy formats. A 2016 paper in JAMA discussed a small example: an unnamed digital record system that affixed an airplane logo to some patients to indicate that they were, in medical parlance, “frequent flyers.” That’s a pejorative term for patients who need plenty of care or are looking for medications.

But even as tech might amplify these problems, it can also expose them. Digitized medical records are easily shared — and not merely with fellow doctors, but also with patients.

Since the ‘90s, patients have had the right to request their records, and doctors’ offices can charge only reasonable fees to cover the cost of clerical work. Penalties against practices or hospitals that failed to produce records were rarely assessed — at least until the Trump administration, when Roger Severino, previously known as a socially conservative champion of religious freedom, took the helm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights.

During Severino’s tenure, the office assessed a spate of monetary fines against some practices. The complaints mostly came from higher-income people, Severino said, citing his own difficulties getting medical records. “I can only imagine how much harder it often is for people with less means and education,” he said.

Patients can now read the notes — the doctors’ descriptions of their conditions and treatments — because of 2016 legislation. The bill nationalized policies that had started earlier in the decade, in Boston, because of an organization called OpenNotes.

For most patients, most of the time, opening record notes has been beneficial. “By and large, patients wanted to have access to the notes,” said Fernandez, who has helped study and roll out the program. “They felt more in control of their health care. They felt they understood things better.” Studies suggest that open notes lead to increased compliance, as patients say they’re more likely to take medicines.

Conflicts Ahead?
But there’s also a darker side to opening records: if patients find something they don’t like. Fernandez’s research, focusing on some early hospital adopters, has found that slightly more than 1 in 10 patients report being offended by what they find in their notes.

And the wave of computer-driven research focusing on patterns of language has similarly found low but significant numbers of discriminatory descriptions in notes. A study published in the journal Health Affairs found negative descriptors in nearly 1 in 10 records. Another team found stigmatizing language in 2.5 percent of records.

Patients can also compare what happened in a visit with what was recorded. They can see what was really on doctors’ minds.

Oien, who has become a patient advocate since moving on from the military health care system, recalled an incident in which a client fainted while getting a drug infusion — treatments for thin skin, low iron, esophageal tears, and gastrointestinal conditions — and needed to be taken to the emergency room. Afterward, the patient visited a cardiologist. The cardiologist, who hadn’t seen her previously, was “very verbally professional,” Oien said. But what he wrote in the note — a story based on her ER visit — was very different. “Ninety percent of the record was about her quote-unquote drug use,” Oien said, noting that it’s rare to see the connection between a false belief about a patient and the person’s future care.

Spotting those contradictions will become easier now. “People are going to say, ‘The doc said what?’” predicted Singh.

But many patients — even ones with wealth and social standing — may be reluctant to talk to their doctors about errors or bias. Fernandez, the OpenNotes pioneer, didn’t. After one visit, she saw a physical exam listed on her record when none had occurred.

“I did not raise that to that clinician. It’s really hard to raise things like that,” she said. “You’re afraid they won’t like you and won’t take good care of you anymore.”

Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente. This story also appeared on The Daily Beast.

Source: Embedded Bias: How medical records sow discrimination | New Orleans’ Multicultural News Source

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UK Home secretary pledges to crack down on ‘unexamined drive’ towards multicultural Britain

2022/10/06 1 Comment

Trying to change the channel after a disastrous mini-budget? Even more hardline that previous home secretaries. But again, a reminder that visible minorities and immigrants have diverse views:

In a sweeping speech which pledged to regain control of Britain’s borders and fight back against left-driven “identity politics”, Suella Braverman also said police in England will be given “all the powers necessary” to stop guerilla demonstrations and jail participants – and added that officers should never “take the knee” – a symbolic gesture against racism – or take part in any protests themselves.

Speaking at the Conservative Party Conference, Ms Braverman said she would create legislation to allow the government to send back refugees who crossed the Channel on small boats, or arrived in the UK helped by people smugglers, without giving them a chance to apply for asylum.

She told a fringe event at the conferrence earlier that it would be “her dream” to see a newspaper front page with a photo of a plane taking off to Rwanda with asylum seekers on board.

Unveiled earlier this year to heavy criticism, the scheme would send refugees who arrive in the UK and are considered “inadmissible” – ie have not arrived on a government-sanctioned scheme – to the African country, where they will stay if their application is granted.

“We cannot allow a foreign court to undermine the sovereignty of our borders,” she said, referring to a last-minute move by the European Court of Human Rights to stop the first plane of refugees from taking off in June. “We need to find a way to make the Rwanda scheme work.”

She said Britain needs to “cut down on the numbers” of migrants in the country, saying the current system was not “meeting the needs of our economy”.

“We mustn’t forget how to do things for ourselves,” she said. “There is absolutely no reason why we can’t train up enough of our own HGV drivers or fruit pickers. The way we build a high skilled high wage economy is by encouraging businesses to invest in capital and domestic labour not relying wholly on low skilled foreign workers.

She insisted that it was not “racist”, or “xenophobic or bigoted” to tackle immigration.

“This is the best place on earth to come and live,” she said, adding that her own parents had emigrated to the UK from Kenya and Mauritius. “But I feel that we are losing sight of the core values and the culture that made it so. The unexamined drive towards multiculturalism as an end in itself, combined with the corrosive aspects of identity politics, has led us astray.”

Ms Braverman also warned that the “left are attacking our profound elemental values”, to replace them with the “poison of identity politics”.

“When this poison seeps into the public sphere, it distracts our public servants from doing their real job,” she said. “And that’s why it’s not only wrong for the police to take the knee. It is wrong for them to join in with political demonstrations. It is wrong for biologically male police officers to strip search female suspects. And it’s not just that pandering to identity politics is a huge waste of time. They need to stick to catching the bad guys.”

Source: Home secretary pledges to crack down on ‘unexamined drive’ towards multicultural Britain

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Government moves to dismiss class-action suit filed by Black civil service employees

2022/10/06 Leave a comment

Of note – jurisdiction grounds:

The federal government has filed a court motion calling on a judge to dismiss a class-action lawsuit filed by Black civil service employees on jurisdictional grounds.

The proposed class action — launched in December 2020 — accuses the federal government of systemic racism, discrimination and employee exclusion. It alleges that, since the 1970s, roughly 30,000 Black civil services employees have lost out on “opportunities and benefits afforded to others based on their race.”

The statement of claim says the lawsuit is seeking damages to compensate Black federal employees for their mental and economic hardships. Plaintiffs also are asking for a plan to diversify the federal labour force and eliminate barriers that employment equity laws have been unable to remove.

But a motion filed on behalf of the federal government this week says the court doesn’t have jurisdiction over the case and the claim should instead be pursued through labour grievances.

The motion says that all related claims should fall under either the Federal Public Sector Labour Relations and Employment Board or the Canadian Human Rights Act.

A statement from the Treasury Board of Canada, which oversees the federal workforce, said the government is working to create an inclusive and diverse public service but the issues brought forth in the class action shouldn’t be addressed in court.

“There is an existing process to deal with harassment and discrimination in the public service,” the statement said, adding that the government’s position is consistent with previous government responses to class actions.

Nicholas Marcus Thompson is executive director of the Black Class Action Secretariat, the group that filed the suit. He said he is “extremely disappointed” by the government’s motion.

“[The government] has acknowledged these harms and now they’re moving to strike the entire claim, to deny workers their day in court,” Thompson told CBC.

Thompson disputed the government’s suggestion that the claims could be dealt with as labour grievances.

“These systems are not equipped to address systemic discrimination, and within them … there’s inherent biases. The systemic discrimination exists in all of the institutions,” he said.

NDP MP Matthew Green called the government’s motion “callous” in a tweet on Tuesday.

“They’ve been working to dismiss the harms they have caused through perpetrating anti-Black racism within the public service for decades,” he said.

Group files UN complaint

Last week, the secretariat filed a complaint with the United Nations Commission for Human Rights Special Rapporteur on racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.

“With this complaint, we are elevating Canada’s past failures and failure to act in the present to an international body,” Thompson told a press conference in Ottawa last Wednesday.

Thompson said the secretariat hopes the UN special rapporteur investigates its claims and calls on Canada to meet its international obligations to Black employees by establishing a plan to increase opportunities for Black women in the government and develop specific targets for hiring and promoting Black workers.

In response to the UN complaint, Mona Fortier, president of the Treasury Board, said that far too many Black Canadians still face discrimination and hate.

“The government is actively working to address harms and to create a diverse and inclusive public service free from harassment and discrimination. We passed legislation, created support and development programs and published disaggregated data — but know there is still more to do,” Fortier said in a media statement last week

Source: Government moves to dismiss class-action suit filed by Black civil service employees

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