Ray: Critical Race Theory’s Merchants of Doubt

2022/08/03 Leave a comment

Important context:

Protests over George Floyd’s 2020 murder were the largest civil rights demonstrations in American history. The brutal footage of officer Derek Chauvin’s suffocating knee on George Floyd’s neck led many white Americans to, at least briefly, acknowledge the reality of structural racism in policing. In response, corporations questioned their diversity policies, “defund the police” became an activist rallying cry, and books on anti-racism became unexpected bestsellers. A narrative arose that America experienced a “racial reckoning” that challenged white racism’s worst excesses.

Conservative media and think tanks, fearing a lost battle in the war of ideas over racism in American life, counter-mobilized. Morality plays need villains, and conservative activists conjured a caricature of critical race theory—a forty-year-old academic framework–as an ominous and pervasive evil. Conservative groups claimed their villain was everywhere—from the federal bureaucracy to elementary schools—and fomented a moral panic over anti-racist education. Pundits credited Virginia Governor Greg Youngkin’s win to his scaring white parents into thinking their children might learn about the nation’s history of white supremacy. Conservative lawmakers have exploited the panic, attempting to remake the educational landscape with banning so-called “divisive concepts” that might make white kids uncomfortable. Propaganda victories are victories, nonetheless. And killing the messenger can destroy the message (if you can’t beat them, ban them). “Facts don’t care about your feelings” has become a conservative rallying cry. But critical race theory’s merchants of doubt, by legislating against accurate teaching of America’s racial history, put their feelings over empirical facts.
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But victories aside, propaganda exposes its proponents’ intellectual bankruptcy. Conservative caricatures of critical race theory are unrecognizable to scholars familiar with the idea. According to the Washington Post, Christopher Rufo, the principal architect of the anti-critical race theory of moral panic admitted his crusade distorted the meaning of critical race theory when he tweeted:

“We have successfully frozen their brand—’critical race theory—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

Incoherence and confusion are virtues for opponents of anti-racist teaching. And Rufo and his fellow travelers are simply updating the misinformation campaigns targeting accepted scholarship that elements of the right have trafficked in for decades. Heedless of both the actual content of critical race theory and the human cost of their panic, conservatives turned to propaganda because the weight of empirical evidence undermines their ideological preferences.

In their classic book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, the historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway outline a series of propaganda campaigns designed to undermine the scientific consensus on many of our most pressing collective problems. Conservative scientists, politicians, and think tanks sowed confusion over the link between cancer and smoking, acid rain’s environmental impact, and civilizational threats over global warming. Conspirators exploited the structure of scientific inquiry—which contains inherent uncertainties—to cast doubt on settled facts. Conspirators also played the media, manipulating the false objectivityof both-sides framing to claim equal time for scientific consensus and quackery. The strategy of sowing confusion works not because anti-empirical claims are correct but because manufactured uncertainty is often enough to bring political action to a halt.

Anti-scientific campaigns, whether focused on acid rain or climate change, often relied upon a close-knit cabal of think tanks, funders, and individual scientists (who sometimes lacked subject area expertise). Corporate profits and individual livelihoods were at risk if facts about the harms of smoking or environmental crisis were acknowledged and regulated. For short-term financial or political gain, anti-science propagandists made progress on long-term collective problems difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. In the meantime, these propagandists profited as the harms from industries they were protecting were passed onto an unsuspecting and credulous public.

Critical race theory’s merchants of doubt use strategies similar to those of previous anti-intellectual propaganda campaigns. And like these prior movements, the moral panic over critical race theory rests on a weak intellectual foundation.

No serious analyst doubts that American society is rife with racial inequality. Yes, there is debate among social scientists about the cause of racial inequality. But the consensus among honest scholars is that racial inequality is a long-standing, complex, intractable, and pressing social problem. The empirical evidence on structural racism and the inequality it produces is massive, overwhelming, and hard to contest. From unemployment to life expectancy, it is difficult to find a domain of American life where Black people aren’t worse off. Critical race theorists developed a flexible set of tenets that showed how often seemingly neutral social processes reproduce racial inequality. And these tenets were so useful they’ve been adopted by scholars of education, public policy, and sociology. Critical race theory’s main principles—that race is a social construction and racial progress is fragile and easily overturned—have substantial empirical support.

Intellectual weakness on race matters doesn’t make the anti-critical race theory campaign any less dangerous. Desperation and ruthlessness born of knowing facts aren’t on their side may make the campaigns more treacherous. Accuracy isn’t necessary to terrify teachers into changing lesson plans and avoiding basic truths about the American past (and present) or mangling lectures to make understanding difficult. Teachers are worried that clear explanations of slavery and Native American genocide may run afoul of the law and have received physical threats for vowing to teach the truth about American history.

I’m hardly the first analyst to connect attacks on critical race theory and prior ignorance promoting campaigns. Several historians have shown the similarities between the Scopes Money Trial—perhaps the paradigmatic case of anti-intellectual campaigns in U.S. history—and the moral panic surrounding critical race theory. Adam R. Shapiro notes that “Darwinism had been around for about half a century,” when it became the object of conservative ire. Shapiro claims that it wasn’t Darwin’s theory, per se, that led to opposition. The scientific consensus around Darwinism was representative of larger cultural trends that worried conservatives. Evolution stood in for a broad swath of economic, cultural, and political changes. The backlash to critical race theory is driven by a similar set of fears of lost white prerogative amidst cultural and demographic change.

Historical connections between the Scopes Monkey Trial and the current moral panic aren’t simply analogies. Christopher Rufo, who has been credited with taking the moral panic mainstream, is a former employee of the anti-evolution Discovery Institute. Perhaps better described as an anti-think tank, the Discovery Institute promotes misinformation around evolutionary theory, arguing that in place of the scientific consensus, schools should “teach the controversy.” Of course, there is little controversy among biologists aside from what the Discovery Institute itself foments. Claiming there is a scientific controversy where none exists muddies the waters, allowing unscrupulous actors to push their political agenda. Conspiracy theories travel in packs, and the Discovery Institute also promotes climate change denial and raises questions about the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Ideas from critical race theory can help explain moral panic. Moral panics are immoral exercises, designed to create group cohesion, target ideological or political enemies, and shape norms. Critical race theorists draw attention to structural racism to find solutions to racial inequality. Critical Race Theorists maintain that structural racism is a profitable political system for the system’s beneficiaries. Finding solutions to climate change and tobacco addition threaten those who benefit from emissions and smoking. And finding solutions to racial inequality threatens those who benefit from structural racism. 2020’s protests put these beneficiaries on notice, so it’s no surprise they responded to defend their interests. Banning teaching about racism is a justification of existing racial inequality and a prelude to producing more. Barring teaching about diversity distorts basic facts about American life and creates the idea that difference is strange or dangerous.

Legislators claim they want to stop divisive teaching and are worried about lessons that demonize white people. But what is more divisive than outlawing basic descriptive facts about American history? Critical race theory doesn’t demonize white people. But by blocking teaching about America’s segregationists, eugenicists, and white citizen councilors, legislators may end up demonizing themselves. Dr. King warned about the dangers of this racial ignorance when he said, “Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.”

Academic knowledge production depends upon good faith and verifiable fact. And when facts about structural racism make their way into the schools, they ban books and threaten teachers. It makes collective problems harder to solve.

Source: Critical Race Theory’s Merchants of Doubt

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , ,

Former MP calls on Parliament Hill security to stop racial profiling

2022/08/03 Leave a comment

Of note:

A former MP who says she was racially profiled by parliamentary security last month is calling on the service to address racism within its ranks.

Celina Caesar-Chavannes said she was questioned by the Parliamentary Protective Service members in June when she tried to access the precinct wearing her parliamentary pin.

The pin, worn by current and former MPs, is meant to grant the wearer access to any building on the parliamentary precinct without having their bags and person searched, she said. But she said security services asked her where she got the pin and tried to do a search anyway.

Caesar-Chavannes was elected as a Liberal MP in 2015 for the riding of Whitby, Ont., but left the caucus in March 2019 and sat as an Independent member until the election that fall.

After she was questioned, Caesar-Chavannes said former New Democrat MP Peggy Nash was able to walk through security without incident.

“Peggy left politics long before I did,” said Caesar-Chavannes. “Nobody’s expecting them to recognize us, but the pin is universal. Security knows what that is.”

Nash was an MP for the Parkdale-High Park riding in Toronto from 2006 to 2008, and regained her seat in 2011 until 2015.

Source: Former MP calls on Parliament Hill security to stop racial profiling

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‘A specific form of anti-Black racism:’ Scholars want Canadian apology for slavery

2022/08/02 Leave a comment

Not unexpected given the growing number of apologies. But as Senator Bernard notes “apology is empty without action.”

The federal government has shifted resources and initiatives towards anti-black racism, both inside and outside government, as have some provinces and parts of the business sector (e.g., BlackNorth Initiative). Legitimate to press for more and faster, based upon an assessment of which approaches are likely to be more effective:

More than a year after Canada proclaimed Aug. 1 as Emancipation Day, Black leaders and scholars are renewing their calls for Ottawa to make a formal apology for the country’s history of slavery and its intergenerational harms.

Author Elise Harding-Davis said Sunday that the federal government’s vote last March to recognize Emancipation Day shows Canadian leaders know that the country’s history of slavery has caused generations of harm to Black people.

To ignore years of calls for a proper apology is “shameful,” she said.

“An apology would mean recognition of the fact that we were enslaved in this country,” Harding-Davis said in an interview. “It would also be an amelioration of the harsh treatment Black people have received and the validation that we have honestly contributed not only to this country, but to the making of this country.”

Emancipation Day recognizes the day in 1834 that the Slavery Abolition Act came into force, thus ending slavery in most British colonies including Canada, and freeing over 800,000 people. Thousands of slaves from Africa were brought against their will to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, as well as to Lower Canada and Upper Canada, which is now Ontario.

In the colony of New France — which became British territory in the 1760s — the majority of slaves were Indigenous, historians say.

The Slavery Abolition Act freed all enslaved people, including Indigenous people, Harding-Davis said, adding: “A determination to free Black people helped free all people, and that’s huge.”

She said she doesn’t feel most Canadians are even aware of the country’s history of slavery.

“It’s just been sidelined and brushed under the rug as much as possible,” she said. “This anti-racism movement that has happened … in the last10 years, but more focused since George Floyd’s death in the United States, has only highlighted that there’s a small awareness that there’s anything wrong with the treatment of Black people in Canada.”

Dalhousie University history professor Afua Cooper said Sunday that she first asked Ottawa in 2007 to apologize for slavery and its harms. The principal investigator for the Black People’s History of Canada project noted that in the meantime, other groups have received apologies for historical harms.

“There can’t be any other explanation except that this is a specific form of anti-Black racism,” Cooper said in an interview. “Black people are not seen as fully-fledged citizens and it’s the federal government’s way of saying, ‘Too bad.'”

Some will argue that an apology isn’t warranted, she said, since Canada was formed in 1867, more than three decades after slavery ended. But Cooper said that reasoning doesn’t hold up, adding that the country formed in 1867 was built from what it was in the years before.

“And OK, how about apologizing to the Black community for things that happened after 1967?” she asked, pointing to examples including segregation, and a 1911 proposal in government that sought to ban Black immigrants from entering the country.

The last segregated school in Canada — in Lincolnville, N.S. — didn’t close until 1983.

Harding-Davis also doesn’t buy that argument. Black people have been subject to marginalization because of laws and practices that allowed and came from slavery, she said.

“The mindset, the beliefs have been left in place,” she said. “We continue to face prejudice and discrimination and longtime disparities, and the government has really done little to nothing to change that.”

Nova Scotia Sen. Wanda Thomas Bernard said Sunday that it is “absolutely” time for a federal apology for the country’s practice of enslaving Black people and its lasting harms, but she said an apology is empty without action.

The question she is asking Canada after last year’s recognition of Emancipation Day is, “What’s next?”

“There’s such a significant need for education, there is such a significant need for us to create greater awareness, but there’s also a need for us to engage in actions,” she said in an interview.

“We really need more engagement from everyone to move forward to walk this path in a more positive way. We need allies to be more impactful, more committed as they go forward, and not just performing allyship.”

The federal Department of Housing, Diversity and Inclusion did not immediately provide a comment upon request.

Source: ‘A specific form of anti-Black racism:’ Scholars want Canadian apology for slavery

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Photos That Helped to Document the Holocaust Were Taken by a Nazi

2022/08/01 Leave a comment

Of interest, and the importance of what is “outside the frame” and context to understanding these and other photographs:

On June 20, 1943, bewildered and terrified families, laden with baggage and branded with yellow stars, were forced into Olympiaplein, one of this city’s most recognizable public squares. Few knew where they were going, or for how long, so they wore their winter coats despite the blazing sun as they registered with the Nazi authorities.

A Dutch photographer, Herman Heukels, moved through the crowd, taking pictures of people who would soon be deported to concentration camps. His images would be the final portraits of many of these people, who were among 5,500 sent that day from Amsterdam to Westerbork transit camp, and then on to “the east.” The vast majority would never return.

Heukels’s photos are some of the strongest visual evidence used by historians to illustrate the Holocaust in the Netherlands, which took the lives of more than 102,000 of the estimated 140,000 Jewish civilians who lived in the country before World War II.

Yet despite their ubiquity in books and films, few people outside of scholarly circles know that these images were actually taken by a Dutch Nazi. He intended to depict Jews in a demeaning light. Instead, he ended up paying stark witness to the atrocities of the Third Reich.

“These are very famous photos, some of the most requested photos in our archive from across the whole world,” said René Kok, a researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. The institute holds an archive of about 30 original Heukels photos from the Dutch Ministry of Justice, which confiscated them as part of his postwar collaboration trial.

In recent months, a deeper sense of Heukels’s beliefs and motivations has emerged from a biography published in Dutch this spring that reveals how an ordinary young man from Zwolle became radicalized as a member of the Dutch Nazi party. The book, by Machlien Vlasblom, a Dutch World War II historian, provides new insights into how Heukels betrayed Jewish people from his town, looted their businesses and property, and recorded their history as a press photographer for the Dutch S.S.

“He captured them at their weakest moments,” Vlasblom said in an interview, “and the way he acted there was rude and brutal. Of course, he put the Nazi ideology into these images.”

How does this new information change the way we might look at these photos? Or how historians might use them, or contextualize them in the future?

The photos are “quite exceptional,” said a NIOD researcher, Kees Ribbens, a professor of Popular Historical Culture and Mass Violence at Erasmus University Rotterdam, because they “show the Holocaust taking place in a very well-known place in the center of Amsterdam. They show how the whole bureaucracy of deportation worked.”

Yet, these are “not innocent images,” said the Amsterdam-based Israeli artist Ram Katzir, who recently used one of Heukels’s pictures as the foundation for a memorial he created for the site of deportations. The artwork, “Shadows,” unveiled on the 79th anniversary of the raid in June, reproduced the shadows of the deportees from the photos, in the exact locations on Olympiaplein where they were last documented alive.

“We had no names of any of the victims,” said Katzir, so he deliberated a lot about whether to include Heukels’s name on the information plaque. In the end, he decided to do so. “It’s a double-edged image; and if you hide that, you hide the role of the collaborator.”

Katzir added, “When you look at the information plaque, you’re standing exactly where the photographer stood.”

In fact, a majority of the surviving images of Jewish persecution in the Netherlands were “made from the point of view of the persecutor,” Ribbens said. These include those by Bart de Kok, a member of the Dutch Nazi Party, known as N.S.B., and a German press photographer, Franz Anton Stapf, who captured some of the last images of Amsterdam’s Jewish community before it was decimated.

Janina Struk, author of the 2005 book “Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence,” said that in the postwar period, photos taken by bystanders, perpetrators and victims were “all kind of mixed together,” and hardly anyone asked who had shot the photos or for what purposes.

“Until quite recently, historians have not really been so concerned about who took the pictures, and why they took them and what they were for,” she said. “It’s been rather historians using pictures as illustrations of a text, rather than being a text themselves.”

In recent years, she added, there has been a greater emphasis on contextualizing the images, explaining how they were made, so that viewers have a better understanding of what they’re looking at — and so people can make better ethical choices about how to present them.

Ribbens said that in learning that Heukels’s aim was to publish his photos in Storm S.S., a Dutch Nazi propaganda weekly (they were never published there), we can think about what he chose to leave out of the frame. In his series, he said, we don’t see the Nazi officials or the Dutch police who were forcibly rounding up civilians.

It doesn’t automatically raise the question: Who organized this, who is responsible for this persecution?” he said. “People show up, and it’s not clear what kind of stress they’re under, why they’re sent here, what choice did they have in leaving their homes, why they didn’t find a hiding place? What was so threatening about it?”

The official policy of the German occupiers was that no images of Jewish people could be published in the “legal” Dutch press, explained NIOD researcher and photography expert Erik Somers. Propaganda newspapers, however, could print such images alongside articles with expressly antisemitic content.

As a result, a high proportion of Holocaust images, both in the Netherlands and elsewhere, were taken by Nazi-endorsed propaganda photographers who had explicit permission to carry cameras, Struk said. Other images came from German soldiers who specifically sought out “souvenir” images of Jews who they thought fit a physical stereotype.

“We know that the Germans used photography as a weapon, and they invested a great deal in propaganda photography,” said Sheryl Silver Ochayon, program director for Echoes & Reflections, an educational arm of Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel.

“Photographs never killed anyone,” she added, “but what photographs can do is they can justify an ideology. If you present your victims as low or passive, or like vermin, you can justify a genocidal plan of action, as the Germans did.”

Vlasblom began her research when a friend from church, Gerard Visser, asked her to look at a box of family letters he had inherited. Although he knew the papers concerned his two great-uncles, Herman Heukels and Jan Heukels, who was also a Nazi collaborator, he said in an interview, “I didn’t really know the family structure, so I didn’t know who sent what to whom or why.”

Not everyone in Visser’s family is pleased that Vlasblom’s book, “We waren supermannen (We Were Supermen),” which also includes information about Jan Heukels, called attention to these two ancestors who were collaborators.

“You hear all the heroic resistance stories from Holland,” Visser said, “but there are people like the Heukels, who really did bad things. I felt that part of a country’s history should also be told.”

Does knowing more about Herman Heukels’s personal biography imply that historians should use these photographs in a different way — or even use them less often?

Somers from the NIOD, the Dutch archive, said these images continue to be a valuable historical source, but the Heukelses’ story underscores the importance of providing context to pictures.

“You have to find out from the beginning the elements of those photos,” he said, “who made the photo and for what purpose, and in what context?”

Struk added, “We need to move away from the idea that a photograph is just a window on the world. It isn’t. It’s a very edited version of what the photographer chose to photograph.”

Source: Photos That Helped to Document the Holocaust Were Taken by a Nazi

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Organ donations remain a hard sell among some groups

2022/08/01 Leave a comment

Of note. Wonder whether this changes for the second generation:

Religions, beliefs, culture, and even local history influence what Canadians — especially immigrants — think should happen to the body after death. These beliefs and traditions surrounding death could impact medical research opportunities. 

In Ontario, medical schools depend on donated bodies to train future medical professionals. ‘Body donation’ involves a whole body given to schools of anatomy for educational and research purposes.

Western University in London, Ont., is among the Canadian universities feeling the impacts of a lack of body donations, reporting that cadaver availability is down by 20 per cent during the COVID pandemic. Medical schools have been scrambling for bodies and even resorting to synthetic alternatives to continue their studies. 

Low supply

Although cadaveric whole-body donations are of utmost importance for medical education, the number of persons who choose to donate bodies remains low.  Organ donors, on the other hand, have more willing participants. According to a survey conducted by Ipsos Reid, 81  per cent of Canadian respondents are willing to donate their organs after death. Although most are willing and support the idea, the survey found that only 54 per cent actually carry documentation that indicates their consent to organ donation and 39 per cent have not discussed with their families their wishes when it comes to organ donation. 

Immigrants in Canada mostly stay clear of whole-body donations, and their numbers hardly make a dent in body supplies. Most of them owe allegiance to their faiths, religious practices and culture which do not encourage body donations.

According to 2017 study, families of immigrants in Ontario are less likely to provide consent for organ donation compared with families of longterm residents (46.4 per cent versus 68.8 per cent). Another study shows that immigrants were much less likely to register for deceased organ and tissue donation in Ontario (11.9 per cent versus 26.5 per cent). The largest numbers of unregistered immigrants were from India, China and the Philippines.

Respect for dead bodies manifests itself in diverse ways in different cultures. According to Nazira Tareen, a prominent community builder and spiritual caregiver of Ottawa’s Muslim community, Muslims do not donate bodies for religious reasons.  

“[The] Quran wants bodies to be interred as soon as possible after death. Islam forbids defilement of the body whether by dissection, removal of tissues or organs. A dead body deserves dignity with a timely burial,” said Tareen.

“We pay spiritual importance to an ‘intact’ body by following the standard practices of shrouding the body with five yards of white cloth and a coffin,” according to Tareen.

Table above shows that families of immigrants were less likely to provide consent compared with families of long-term residents (46.4% [135 of 291] vs 68.8% [1777 of 2582]). It also showcases the number of immigrant families who provided consent to organ donation by region of birth. Table made by Daphné Dossios with data found on Familial Consent for Deceased Organ Donation Among Immigrants and Long-term Residents in Ontario, Canada: A Population-Based Retrospective Cohort Study

Another study with interviews and focus groups about Chinese Canadian beliefs toward organ donation found that among its participants, religion or spiritual beliefs, a lack of knowledge about donation, and generational impressions of organ donation were factors that influenced decisions on organ donation after death. The study notably found that values and beliefs about keeping a body intact after death is a major barrier to organ donation.

“There’s a saying in Chinese that in order to rest in peace, one needs to have everything intact in the body after one is dead. So if you take away something and then it’s considered to be something missing after death, then the person would not enjoy good after death or after life”, explains a participant of Chinese descent, interviewed for the study.

A similar study among Indo-Canadians in British Columbia also found religion and beliefs about dying and death could influence decision-making in organ donation. The study also highlights that Indo-Canadians have little information and are not familiar with the B.C. system of registering as an organ donor, which could constitute a hurdle. According to some participants, language could possibly be another barrier, as presentations about organ donation in B.C. are not provided in Hindi.

Vijay Dhavale, an Indian-born Canadian — who is a four-time recipient of two prestigious Government medals — chose to donate his parents’ bodies to medical colleges (in 2006 and 2009) and also donated his wife’s body in 2019.

Dhavale, who has been in Canada for 49 years and is currently based in Ottawa, is a Hindu. 

“My family believed in being useful even after death. In my will, I have asked that my body be donated for learning purposes.”

Dhavale said his decision to go for body donations was influenced by the example of Sage Dadhchi (a figure in Hinduism) who willingly gave up his life so that Lord Brahma (God of creation in Hinduism) could fashion weapons from his bones to defeat the demons. “In death, I am celebrating life, I want my body to be useful too like the Sage’s.”

In Canada, another challenge often faced by bereaved immigrants is the choice to inter the deceased in the host country or repatriate the remains for burial in the country of origin. Most often parents of immigrant students ask that the bodies are returned to the mother country so that they can conduct the last rites.

Impacting medical education 

The dearth of cadavers is causing a disturbing deficiency directly impacting the quality of medical education in Canada. Practicing on cadavers helps with the sensory modalities — the touch, the feel, the perception of depth.  “Students can listen to theories about the structure of the heart, see pictures of the structure, but it’s not until they hold the heart in their palm that they can really appreciate it,”  according to an anatomy professor at Queen’s University, Dr. Leslie Mackenzie. Queen’s University in Kingston, which actively runs donor campaigns and educates the public, receives 20 to 40 body donations every year. 

The University of British Columbia (UBC) on its website states that more than 1,000 students every year in different medical programs are trained in anatomy using cadavers. During pre-pandemic times, UBC received 80 to 120 human cadaver donations a year, “but programs now receive 50 per cent of that number,” observed Dr. Olusegun Oyedele, associate professor of teaching in the UBC department of Cellular and Physiological Sciences. 

In Canada, bodies can be donated by bequeathing the body to universities across the country. Haley Linklater who oversees the body bequeathal program at the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, London, Ont., confirmed in an email the urgent need for bodies. 

“The University is currently accepting new donors,” Linklater wrote, “We need 100 or more every year to be able to assist in all of our teaching and to contribute to research, but we get a few less than that, usually 75 to 85.” 

Linklater isn’t sure what to attribute to the drop in body donations except for the fear of infection during the pandemic period. In many cases, she found the bereaved relatives desired to have the body available for conducting a traditional rite, and hence they held back on body donations. According to Linklater. In 2021 and 2022 thus far, “we’ve only had 60 to 65 donors.” 

In face of this cadaver shortage, some medical schools are using high-tech mannequins, computer software and digital simulators as an alternative. In 2018 for example, Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU) in Waterloo, Ont., received two full-sized, multi-functional synthetic human models from SynDaver making WLU the first institution in Canada to possess two full-body synthetic humans. As one can read on the company website, “the tissues are [even] a better representation of live tissue than the dead tissue of a cadaver.”

Source: Organ donations remain a hard sell among some groups

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Two years after signing BlackNorth Initiative, majority of companies have failed to make substantial progress on diversity, survey shows

2022/08/01 Leave a comment

Good to see the tracking. Good highlighting of some of the better practices that can be more broadly applied (both for Blacks and other minorities):

Some of the largest companies in Canada that announced high-profile commitments to address anti-Black systemic racism two years ago have made major strides in improving the number of Black employees hired and elevated into executive roles, a Globe and Mail analysis has found.

But those companies remain among a minority of signatories of the BlackNorth Initiative – a 2020 pledge aimed at tackling systemic racism – to make substantial progress toward the diversity goals they committed to meet over five years.

On three prominent metrics – the number of Black employees, Black executives and Black directors – only about 10 per cent of the 481 companies that signed on have reported an improvement in any of those categories over the past two years.

Among 145 companies that responded to The Globe’s survey in the spring of 2022, the median percentage of Black employees increased to 4.8 per cent, up from 3.7 per cent in 2020, before companies signed the BlackNorth pledge.

But 70 per cent of companies that signed the pledge either did not respond to The Globe’s survey this spring about the racial composition of their work force, or said they did not track that data. Thus, improvements in the number of Black and other racialized employees since 2020 were only apparent among the minority of companies that responded to The Globe with detailed data.

“I think it’s safe to say that a low response rate correlates to the slow amount of change that is happening,” said Kike Ojo-Thompson, founder and chief executive of the KOJO Institute, a Toronto-based diversity, equity and inclusion consultancy.

While projects such as the initiative encourage companies to assess themselves and provide external accountability, they also highlight areas in which corporate Canada has yet to improve.

To Dahabo Ahmed-Omer, executive director of the BlackNorth Initiative, it’s no surprise that many companies are slow to make progress. “It’s not just about putting a signature on the dotted line. That’s not what this initiative is about,” she said.

The initiative, a Toronto-based non-profit organization, was founded by Bay Street financier and philanthropist Wes Hall in July, 2020, amid a wave of global Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder of Minneapolis resident George Floyd by a white police officer. Broadly speaking, the initiative encouraged employers to commit to targets to raise the number of Black employees, and to ensure no barriers exist for Black employees trying to advance.

Companies were challenged to commit to a seven-pronged pledge over five years, including promises to have at least 3.5 per cent of board and executive roles occupied by Black people by 2025, and ensure Black student hires make up 5 per cent of the overall intern population of a workplace. Signatories also committed to investing at least 3 per cent of corporate donations in organizations that create economic opportunities in the Black community.

The initiative was swiftly embraced by corporate Canada. Within days of its launch, more than 200 prominent companies, including Rogers Communications Inc., most of the Big Five banks, and multinational heavyweights such as Coca-Cola and Adidas signed on. Many were quick to issue news releases, reiterating their commitments to diversity, and promising to address anti-Black systemic racism within their workplaces.

Over the following 12 months, close to 500 companies of all sizes – including The Globe – signed on. BlackNorth itself expanded – in headcount and the value of corporate donations it received – as it became the pre-eminent entity advising corporate Canada on diversity and equity.

This spring, The Globe surveyed all 481 companies that have signed the pledge to assess progress toward the five-year goals. The survey was similar to The Globe’s survey last yearof 209 companies that signed the pledge in July, 2020.

The Globe asked companies to respond to an 18-question survey based on the seven goals in the pledge, and gave companies roughly six weeks to respond.

The questions were designed to determine how the diversity of the companies’ work forces – particularly the composition of Black employees – has changed since the summer of 2020. The Globe also collected data on the number of Black directors and executives.

The Globe showed some improvement itself in the number of Black executives and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) employees in its work force. Currently, 10 per cent of executive roles are held by Black employees, up from zero in 2020.

The Globe doesn’t track the total number of Black employees, but says 30 per cent of employees are now BIPOC, up from 25 per cent before The Globe signed the pledge in late 2020. However, as a private company with a small board, The Globe does not have a Black board member.

Critically, just 30 per cent of BlackNorth signatories – or 145 companies – responded to The Globe’s survey, significantly lower than last year’s response rate. Twelve additional companies did not respond, but provided separate written submissions on how they worked toward meeting their diversity goals.

Among the companies that responded, many either chose not to disclose numerical data on the racial composition of their organizations, or said they did not track it.

However, almost all the companies that responded, even those that did not last year, said they have established diversity leadership councils and come up with a strategic “diversity and inclusion plan,” which were two requirements of the BlackNorth pledge.

Other key findings of The Globe survey from the 145 companies that responded:

  • The median number of Black employees across those companies increased over the past two years – from 3.7 per cent in 2020, to 4 per cent in 2021, to 4.8 per cent in 2022.
  • The median number of BIPOC employees also increased – from 25.6 per cent in 2020, to 31.9 per cent in 2021, to 33 per cent in 2022.
  • The median number of Black executives increased from 0 per cent in 2020, to 1 per cent in 2021, to 2 per cent in 2022.
  • A majority of companies tracked the number of Black directors on their boards. The median percentage increased from 0 per cent in 2020 and 2021, to 0.5 per cent currently.
  • There was a marked improvement in the number of companies that tracked diversity data since signing the BNI pledge. For example, before signing, just 40 per cent of the 145 companies said they tracked data on the number of Black employees. In 2022, the proportion increased to 60 per cent.
  • 30 companies with more than 5,000 employees – including Manulife Financial Corp., SickKids hospital and HSBC Canada – made significant gains in the number of Black directors. The median number of Black board members was 6.5 per cent in 2022, increasing from 2.35 per cent last year.

The results were, for the most part, better than last year, when a majority of companies made little to no improvement in hiring or elevating the number of Black people, mainly because they did not have the right systems in place to track diversity data.

…

Source: Two years after signing BlackNorth Initiative, majority of companies have failed to make substantial progress on diversity, survey shows

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Jamie Sarkonak: Some are more equal than others, according to Canada’s immigration ministry

2022/07/30 Leave a comment

One of the early mainstream media commentaries on IRCC’s anti-racism strategy (see my earlier post (IRCC Anti-Racism Strategy 2.0: “Energy, Conviction and Courage” [too preachy for my taste]).
While I did not read it the same way as Sarkonak, reflecting my perspectives, reading this reminded me of my experience when working under the Conservative government and Jason Kenney when I was confronted with a very different worldview (shameless plug for Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism).And while many of the specific provisions in the strategy are fairly standard anti-discrimination and anti-racism tools to help identify biases and discrimination, understandable that the framing of them would attract attention as being overly “woke” given the frame of CRT and the “wheel of privilege and power.”

In terms of some of Sarkonak’s specific solutions to IRCC, some are stronger than others. It makes sense to publish approval rates by country of citizenship as differences in approval rates may, but not necessarily, indicate biases. Similarly, monitoring of staff for arbitrary decision-making makes sense pending the development of more AI and other tools that can provide consistent decision making (as Kahneman and others argue in Noise). On the other hand, simply bolstering staff to address backlogs avoids the necessary policy and administrative changes needed to reduce future backlogs.

Sarkonak criticizes tying EX bonuses to DEI and anti-racism and ensuring targeted career development programs for minority staff but these types of policies have been in place for some time in one form or another (I remember in the early 1990s that Global Affairs identified women with potential to address the gender gap with considerable success).

But perhaps one statement in the strategy is the one that would provoke a possible future Conservative government the most, the policies are intended to survive “regardless of changes in government” as it smacks of bureaucratic arrogance rather than a more neutral phrase of something like “establishing the basis for further inclusion:”

In a corporate plan for an anti-racist “systems change,” Canada’s immigration ministry says it isn’t fair to treat people equally regardless of background. Instead, people should be treated according to their level of innate privilege.

In other words, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has embraced critical race theory — or diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), as it’s called in practice — with a plan called Anti-Racism Strategy 2.0. It openly signals a shift to the ideological left.Unfortunately, concerns about racism within IRCC aren’t unfounded. An external review reported dozens of openly racist comments in the workplace. Perhaps the worst allegation was that those within IRCC often refer to African countries as “the dirty 30” — an embarrassing display of prejudice for a department welcoming new citizens into a country that’s supposed to respect the right to equality.

It’s therefore no surprise that the question of racism comes up when rejection rates for applications vary by country. With few explanations from officials, advocates understandably come up with their own: systemic racism. This was the case when study permit applications from Nigeria were found to be disproportionately rejected by IRCC. Elsewhere, critics have correctly pointed out that Canada committed to taking an unlimited number of refugees from Ukraine, while capping Afghan applicants at 40,000.

The solution should be to bolster staff so that applications can be processed in a reasonable time (the immigration backlog is an astronomical 2.7 million) and to enforce workplace rules against instances of racism in the office.The department can also publish approval rates by country of origin, as it does with approval rates for foreign student study permits. If applications from certain countries are being disproportionately rejected, explanations should be offered as to why.

There isn’t a duty to accept an equally proportionate number of immigrants from each country in the world, and it’s quite possible that acceptance rates are lower for some countries simply because more applicants from there aren’t meeting our requirements — that’s not systemic racism, that’s just the fair application of the rules to everyone.

But Canadians have a right to know what’s going on, and the government can’t have its employees acting out of bigotry. Individual immigration officials should be monitored through annual performance reviews to ensure they aren’t arbitrarily rejecting would-be immigrants due to their country of origin. If unfair discrimination is going on, disciplinary action should be taken.

IRCC’s solution is more complicated. Instead of investigating bad managers and disproportionate immigrations outcomes between countries, it’s adopted the explanation of unconscious and systemic racism that stems from critical race theory. Racism isn’t just hatred, IRCC says, but includes unconscious and unintended actions that lead to any discrimination or prejudice against any group. Similar policies have emerged in Canadian public institutions, including schools (where anti-racist material is beginning to be taught to students), universities (where white males are barred from applying for certain jobs), the military (where applications from diverse candidates are prioritized) and even the Bank of Canada (where DEI is to be kept in mind when setting monetary policy).

Equality isn’t fair anymore, says IRCC. Fairness is traditionally thought to involve treating people equally, but it’s been redefined as a matter of outcome. Unfair outcomes happen when a group of people is “overrepresentative” of their population statistics. IRCC’s plan to “eradicate racism in all its forms” is paradoxical, because it requires identity-based discrimination (what we used to call racism) to achieve this version of a “fair” outcome (elimination of racism).

The ministry doesn’t limit this kind of thinking to race, ranking various identity genres according to privilege to help “correct power imbalances.” These include education level, Indigeneity, skin colour, brain structure, sexual orientation and gender.

It’s a dehumanizing way to look at people. Even so, the IRCC wants to permanently embed identitarianism into every aspect of the ministry, “regardless of changes in government.”

The idea is to transform everything from finances and organizational procedure to the relationships between people in the ministry and the way people think and talk. A number of practical goals are set out to achieve this, which will be monitored by report cards.

For management, IRCC wants to tie bonuses and promotions to anti-racist performance.

For staff, identity-specific career development programs will be made to help certain groups get promotions; “Indigenous, Black, Racialized, Persons with Disability, LGBTQ2+ and individuals with intersecting identities” are to be given special attention for staffing. Targeted workshops and focus groups are planned to teach the ministry’s expansive theory of racism within the ranks.

For the actual business of immigration, IRCC plans to fund resettlement initiatives that promote DEI, or the practice of critical race theory. Any community organization that resists will be risking precious grant dollars.

For the millions of people waiting in Canada’s immigration backlog, government commitments to reshape staff thoughts and civic ideology are about as useful as thoughts and prayers. Worse, these changes to the public service are political. Perhaps it sounds nice to those who believe in this version of social justice, but it’s a radical paradigm shift away from the Canadian values of fair procedure and equality.

If these basic values are going to be completely redefined in government, perhaps they should at least be debated in the House of Commons first. Instead, these political changes to the function of government are being made out of public view. The immigration ministry acknowledges they’re being made at the direction of the Clerk of the Privy Council and the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), which have demanded more DEI in the public service.

It sends a bad message to those seeking to come to Canada for equal freedom of opportunity and open debate: Major changes aren’t up for discussion, but are instead the business of the PMO and the unaccountable ministry bureaucrats who write up corporate plans.

Source: Jamie Sarkonak: Some are more equal than others, according to Canada’s immigration ministry

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

Moreau: Êtes-vous caucasien ?

2022/07/28 Leave a comment

More word games than anything else. Whatever the label or term, being able to analyse and understand differences in socioeconomic outcomes between groups, whether by ethnic ancestry, visible or religious minority or affiliation, is important:

Comme on sait, le terme « caucasien » est utilisé depuis plus d’un siècle aux États-Unis pour qualifier la population d’origine européenne. J’ai eu récemment la surprise de le voir également mentionné, à titre d’exemple, dans un formulaire rempli ici à Montréal, où l’on me demandait, comme cela se fait couramment chez nos voisins du Sud, de décliner mon « identité » ethnique ou raciale.

Ce que l’on sait moins, c’est que ce terme étrange, qui réfère à cette chaîne de montagnes située au sud de la Russie, entre la mer Caspienne et la mer Noire, provient des thèses de Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), scientifique allemand qui, à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, distinguait cinq « races » humaines, dont la « race caucasique », autrement dit la « race blanche ».

Pourquoi situait-il l’origine de celle-ci dans le Caucase ? Cela remontait à l’idée selon laquelle l’humanité était née dans la région caucasienne, idée qui découlait notamment d’une lecture littérale de la Bible, où il était raconté que l’Arche de Noé, lors de la décrue qui avait fait suite au Déluge, s’était échouée sur le mont Ararat, donc non loin de l’isthme caucasien. On peut constater au passage à quel point la manière d’établir des « preuves » scientifiques pouvait être en ce temps assez éloignée de celle qui prévaut de nos jours.

Qu’il fut impropre et douteux d’un point de vue scientifique n’empêcha pas le mot « caucasien » de connaître un succès durable et de se retrouver même au coeur d’un imbroglio juridique qui l’amena jusque devant la Cour suprême des États-Unis.

Entre la fin du XIXe siècle et le début du XXe, la possibilité d’être naturalisé citoyen américain avait été restreinte, puis totalement interdite aux immigrants d’origine asiatique (à l’exception des Philippins, puisque les Philippines furent, entre 1898 et 1946, une colonie états-unienne). Elle était donc réservée aux « personnes blanches », ainsi qu’aux Noirs, en raison du Quatorzième amendement adopté au lendemain de l’abolition de l’esclavage lors de la guerre de Sécession.

Un immigrant japonais, M. Ozawa, argua du fait qu’il avait le teint clair pour revendiquer le droit de devenir citoyen. Les juges de la Cour suprême le déboutèrent toutefois, en alléguant que la notion de « personne blanche » renvoyait moins à la couleur concrète de la peau qu’à l’appartenance à la « race caucasienne ». En tant queJaponais, M. Ozawa, ajoutèrent-ils, appartenait à la race « mongole » (autre « race » définie par J. F. Blumenbach) et ne pouvait donc prétendre à la naturalisation.

Ce jugement donna alors l’idée à un immigrant d’origine indienne de se présenter à son tour devant la cour afin de revendiquer le droit d’accéder à la citoyenneté. M. Bhagat Singh Thind avait un excellent argument : dans l’anthropologie de l’époque, les Indiens, en tant qu’« Aryens », étaient en effet classés dans cette fameuse « race caucasienne » ou « caucasique ».

La Cour suprême le débouta cependant lui aussi et, répudiant l’appareil « scientifique » mobilisé quelque temps plus tôt pour repousser l’argument de M. Ozawa, décréta, à l’encontre du demandeur, qu’il fallait entendre « caucasien » dans le sens que donnerait à ce mot un « homme ordinaire », autrement dit comme désignant une personne dont la peau était « blanche », ce que l’épiderme de M. Bhagat Singh Thind n’était pas.

Il fallut finalement attendre 1952 pour que la loi McCarran-Walter supprime, dans le droit états-unien, toutes ces barrières à la naturalisation fondées sur la « race ».

Catégories raciales

Que peut-on tirer comme conséquence de ces deux jugements que résume Daniel Sabbagh, dans un article sur « Le statut des “Asiatiques” aux États-Unis » paru dans la revue Critique internationale, en 2003 ?

Primo, qu’il n’est pas judicieux d’user du mot « caucasien », hormis pour désigner les populations variées de trans et de subcaucasie (Tcherkesses, Tchétchènes, Ingouches, Ossètes, Koumyks, Géorgiens, etc.).

Secundo, que les cours, même suprêmes, ne méritent peut-être pas l’idolâtrie dont elles font l’objet actuellement : les juges, y compris les plus hauts magistrats du pays, étant assujettis eux aussi aux préjugés, aux biais cognitifs, aux passions politiques qui sont ceux de leurs concitoyens et de leur temps.

Tertio, que l’on a beau user de termes qui se veulent scientifiques ou de tous les euphémismes que l’on voudra, les catégories raciales en usage sont toujours incohérentes, voire absurdes.

Quarto, peut-être faudrait-il en déduire finalement que ces supposées « races » ne sont pas un bon moyen de classer les humains.

Quinto, si un jour, on vous demande de cocher la case « caucasien » dans un quelconque formulaire, refusez ; à moins, bien sûr, que vous ne soyez tcherkesse, tchétchène, ingouche, ossète, koumyk, géorgien, etc.

Patrick Moreau est professeur de littérature à Montréal, rédacteur en chef de la revue Argument et essayiste. Il a notamment publié Ces mots qui pensent à notre place (Liber, 2017) et contribué à l’ouvrage collectif dirigé par R. Antonius et N. Baillargeon Identité, « race », liberté d’expression, qui vient de paraître aux P.U.L.

Source: Êtes-vous caucasien ?

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‘Showing his real face’: Outrage at Viktor Orban’s ‘race-mixing’ comments

2022/07/27 Leave a comment

Speaks for itself (former Canadian PM Harper, chair of the International Democrat Union (IDU), of which Orban’s party Fidesz is a member, has been silent to date on Orban’s authoritarian and xenophobic policies):

Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban has long posed as a defender of “western civilisation” against outside influences he deems invasive.

The populist has dismissed multiculturalism as an illusion and argued that Christian and Muslims “will never unite” in a single society – a view he has used as grounds for rejecting refugees and strengthening border control.

Now 12 years into his reign and recently emboldened by the biggest election victory in post-Soviet Hungarian history, the Fidesz party leader has again spoken out against diversity, this time shocking even longtime observers with his comments.

In a speech at Romanian university Baile Tusnad on Saturday, he said: “We [Hungarians] are not a mixed race… and we do not want to become a mixed race,” adding that western European countries could no longer be considered nations due to intermingling among Europeans and non-Europeans.

Opposition politicians recoiled at the prime minister’s segregationist tone. Katlin Cseh of the centrist Momentum Movement party tweeted: “To all ‘mixed race’ people in Hungary, whatever this senseless racist outburst means: your skin colour may be different, you may come from Europe or beyond – you are one of us, we are proud of you.

“Diversity strengthens the nation, it does not weaken it.”

She added: “His statements recall a time I think we would all like to forget.”

Guy Verhofstadt, MEP for Renew Europe and a persistent critic of Mr Orban, said the Hungarian leader was “showing his real face because he knows from experience Europe is too weak to confront him”.

Though Hungary remains in the European Union, the republic’s shift to “illiberal democracy” under Mr Orban has grated against the bloc’s stated fundamental principles of freedom, democracy and equality.

Mr Orban’s Fidesz party has grabbed control of around 80 per cent of independent media in Hungary and was this year warned by the EU to respect the rule of law after trying to force through constitutional changes despite judicial opposition.

Former vice president of the European Commission, Viviane Reading, said she feared Mr Orban’s government planned to use the two-thirds majority it won in the April national elections to claim public support for overruling Hungary’s independent courts.

Though the bloc has moved towards a potential funding cut for Hungary, commissioners are yet to bring anything like the fines imposed on Poland for its breaches of judicial independence.

Besides the views of his opponents, Mr Orban’s comments raise questions for American conservatives charmed by the Hungarian leader’s zeal for Christian dominance, which he punctuates with warnings that all other routes spell western decline.

His Romanian speech came a little less than a fortnight before his scheduled appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference(CPAC) taking place in Texas on 4-7 August, set to be the biggest event in the American right-wing calendar.

The prime minister will share a bill with former US president Donald Trump, right-wing talk show host and former politician Nigel Farage and many of America’s other right-wing darlings including Republican senator Ted Cruz and strategist Steve Bannon, who last week was found guilty of contempt for ignoring a subpoena from the US Congress examining events of 6 January 2021.

Explaining Mr Orban’s invitation to the conference, Matt Schlapp, head of CPAC, said: “What we like about him is that he’s actually standing up for the freedom of his people against the tyranny of the EU.

“He’s captured the attention of a lot of people, including a lot of people in America who are worried about the decline of the family.”

In May, CPAC held its first conference in Europe, choosing Hungary as its host and Mr Orban as a headline speaker.

The prime minister used his speech to promote Hungary as “the bastion of conservative Christian values in Europe” and urged US conservatives to defeat “the dominance of progressive liberals in public life” as he said he had done at home.

The alignment of views appears to have a deep bond between the two conservative movements but experts speculate that it is only superficial and the true appeal of Mr Orban to America’s right-wing lies in his peaceful consolidation of authoritarian power.

Source: ‘Showing his real face’: Outrage at Viktor Orban’s ‘race-mixing’ comments

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Calls to combat Islamophobia prominent in record-setting June for federal advocacy

2022/07/26 Leave a comment

Of note. Reflects the anniversary of the London killings:

Representatives of Canada’s Muslim population were on Parliament Hill in June calling on Ottawa to do more to combat Islamophobia during an advocacy event held on the anniversary of the fatal attack against an Ontario Muslim family.

“That attack forever changed the way that Muslims view their relationships with Canada and the country as a whole, and so we noticed a need for more,” said Fatema Abdalla, the communications coordinator with the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM). “We placed our call for more to be done against systemic Islamophobia, and we’ve been calling for that for many years, but there’s so much more that needs to be done.”

The NCCM led the way in federal lobbying in June, filing 64 communication reports for the month. This was more than twice the number of communication reports contributed by other leading advocacy groups during the month, which included the Grain Farmers of Ontario (GFO), which filed 29 reports, and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), which filed 26.

All but three of the NCCM’s communication reports for last month were for activity on June 6, when the organization’s representatives were on the Hill for a federal advocacy day.

Communities across Ontario held marches and vigils on June 6 to commemorate the lives of a Muslim family killed on the same date last year in London, Ont., On June 6, 2021, Yumna Afzaal, 15, her mother Madiha Salman, 44, father Salman Afzaal, 46, and her grandmother, Talat Afzaal, 74, were killed when a vehicle jumped a curb while they were out for a Sunday walk. Police believe the driver targeted the family because of their Muslim faith.

The youngest son, who family members have asked not to be named, was injured but survived.

Abdalla told The Hill Times that this wasn’t the only attack of its kind in Canada, and referred to the terrorist attack on Jan. 29, 2017, where 27-year-old Alexandre Bissonnette shot and killed six worshipers at a mosque in Québec City.

To help protect Canada’s Muslim population, the NCCM’s representatives are pushing for the Liberal government to develop a national action plan to combat Islamophobia. The plan should include a national support fund intended to help survivors of hate-motivated crimes, and funding to improve security at mosques, according to Abdalla. NCCM members would also like the federal government to create a provision in the criminal code that mandates a special process to deal with hate crimes, including stiffer penalties for violent offenders and a rehabilitation path for specific and relevant offenders.

NCCM representatives met with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Papineau, Que.), Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland (University-Rosedale, Ont.), and nine other federal ministers during the advocacy event on the Hill. The NCCM is represented on the federal lobbyists’ registry by CEO Mustafa Farooq and assistant advocacy officer Amar Abdisamed.

During the advocacy day, Minister of Diversity and Inclusion Ahmed Hussen (York South-Weston, Ont.) announced that Ottawa has begun the hiring process to find a Special Representative on Combating Islamophobia. This announcement fulfilled a Liberal government commitment made in January, according to an NCCM press release from June 27.

Islamophobia is a daily reality for far too many Muslim communities in Canada and around the world, according to Daniele Medlej, the director of communications in Hussen’s office, in an emailed statement to The Hill Times on July 20.

“From the Quebec Mosque shooting to the London attack just last year, we are reminded of the devastating consequences Islamophobia can have,” said Medlej in the email.

Medlej did not provide details on when the federal government is hoping to have filled the role of Special Representative.

In the email, Medlej said the Special Representative will serve as “a champion, advisor, expert and representative” to the Liberal government, and will collaborate with domestic partners, institutions and stakeholders to support Canada’s efforts to combat Islamophobia, anti-Muslim hate, systemic racism, racial discrimination and religious intolerance.

The Liberal government is committed to getting the appointment of the Special Representative right, and will share more details as they become available, she added.

“[The Special Representative] will impact Canada’s fight against Islamophobia by enhancing our efforts, addressing barriers faced by the community, and promoting awareness of the diverse and intersectional identities of Muslims in Canada,” said Medlej in the emailed statement. “Our government stands with, and continues to support, Muslim communities across Canada. We unequivocally condemn Islamophobia, hate and discrimination of any kind.”

Also on June 6, the NCCM welcomed an announcement by Liberal MP Salma Zahid (Scarborough Centre, Ont.), who said she plans to begin public consultations on a private member’s bill that would aim to hold intelligence and justice officials accountable for breaches of the “duty of candour” they have towards the Federal Court. The duty of candour refers to the responsibility that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) officials and Department of Justice lawyers have to present a judge with all the relevant facts, including information that may sway the judge against their request.

Zahid’s announcement followed complaints she has received from her constituents and from racialized Canadians in general about being unfairly targeted by CSIS, as previously reported in The Hill Times.

The NCCM argued in the June 27 press release that violations of the duty of candour by intelligence officials has caused serious and long-term harm to marginalized communities.

June was a record-breaking month for federal lobbying, with 2,587 communication reports in total posted for that month, according to a search of the federal lobbyists’ registry on July 21. June had the highest total of communication reports for that month since at least 2009, which is the earliest that online records are available for June. The previous record for June was 2,468 communication reports filed in June 2021.

Source: Calls to combat Islamophobia prominent in record-setting June for federal advocacy

Filed under Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

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