Throughout my working life as a Canadian writer, I’ve wondered if it’s possible to create a cohesive national identity without some widely accepted basic content: a language, a mythology, a shared history, a revered cultural inheritance, a cuisine. In general I was dubious, even as claims for a tolerant multiculturalism as Canada’s ID kept growing.
I was influenced by living, in my formative years, in the U.S. and Israel — countries which, like most modern nations, cohered around shared cultural “glues.”
Something beyond hockey and butter tarts. I’m no longer dubious. Yes, I think you can build a hardy national identity with no central content except, paradoxically, the shared commitment to imposing no central content. What persuaded me was the impassioned, energized memorial at a London, Ont. mosque this week, which I attended onscreen. Whether building that kind of national reality is worth the heinous price paid for it is a separate question.
The event was organized and run by a youthful group of Muslim women and men entirely relaxed and in charge, though leaders from every level sat before them. That was a message itself: the creation of this kind of Canada is a historical process that unfolds through generations.
Their parents’ generation came, I’d say, based on the promises of multiculturalism — and were often disappointed and dismayed. (“What my dad didn’t prepare us for,” said one, “was being name-called and having the crap beaten out of us on the way to and from school every day.”) They don’t waste time being surprised, but they’re angry because they know they’re Canadian. They began the memorial with an acknowledgment of Indigenous land claims, since they have the right to apologize for being occupiers, like everyone else.
They’re now attacked mainly on religious grounds versus national, which as a Jew I find ridiculous. I’d call Islam the most universal and accessible of the three “Abrahamic” religions. Any specific charges (misogyny, violence) are absurd, since the major religions are so multifarious that you can find examples of anything and its opposite in all of them. They’re protean.
To state the obvious: these eruptions of hate and carnage are a sign of response to change. This is not the country it was, and they are not a sign of things getting worse. Rather, the hate is a terrified reaction to things getting better, in the sense of inclusive (or, put neutrally, significant) change. We’ve learned, quite brutally, that there will be a price paid for transforming the meaning of being Canadian, but it’s those who won’t accept the changes who now seem most marginalized. They lurk in the shadows, darting out furtively to murder others who walk in sunlight.
As I say, I’ve long wondered if you can build a society able to help people through hard times on what amounts to the absence of a core culture, since that’s what Canada seems to be trying: accept everyone, impose nothing. (With reasonable exceptions.) In fact at this point, efforts to impose tend to stink of racism and exclusion, like Maxime Bernier’s call for a “values test to screen out potential immigrants who share this barbarian [Islamic] ideology.”
It’s as if there are two main alternatives right now: Trump’s MAGA with its rabid nationalism, or inclusiveness, with Canada, amazingly, a major test case. This has nothing to do with examples of unsuccess or hypocrisy, which abound. It’s about the project and having the commitment and stamina to stick with it.
I talked with some students about it this week. One mentioned the U.S. model, the traditional melting pot, while Canada has the mosaic. But another added that a mosaic isn’t easy — it requires work to fit the pieces together, like a puzzle. I hadn’t thought of that; I always pictured the mosaic as pieces piled atop each other, or strewn about the yard: not as deeply stressful labour.
From the start, it wasn’t going to be easy and was going to be costly. Is it worth it? Only those who pay that cost can really say. It’s not fair that there’s still not justice and perhaps never will be, but progress, such as it is, has always been a matter for collectivities and even the species, not individuals.
Just running errands in the mainly Hazara neighborhoods of west Kabul can be dangerous. One day last week, Adila Khiari and her two daughters went out to buy new curtains. Soon after, her son heard that a minibus had been bombed — the fourth to be blown up in just 48 hours.
When his mother didn’t answer her phone, he frantically searched hospitals in the Afghan capital. He found his sister, Hosnia in critical condition with burns over 50% of her body. Then he found his mother and other sister, Mina, both dead. Three days later, on Sunday, Hosnia died as well.
In all, 18 people were killed in the two-day string of bombings against minivans in Kabul’s Dasht-e-Barchi district. It was the latest in a vicious campaign of violence targeting Afghanistan’s minority Hazara community — one that Hazaras fear will only get worse after the final withdrawal of American and NATO troops this summer.
Hundreds of Afghans are killed or injured every month in violence connected to the country’s constant war. But Hazaras, who make up around 9% of the population of 36 million people, stand alone in being intentionally targeted because of their ethnicity — distinct from the other ethnic groups, such as Tajik and Uzbek and the Pashtun majority — and their religion. Most Hazaras are Shiite Muslims, despised by Sunni Muslim radicals like the Islamic State group, and discriminated against by many in the Sunni majority country.
After the collapse of the Taliban 20 years ago, the Hazaras embraced hopes for a new democracy in Afghanistan. Long the country’s poorest community, they began to improve their lot, advancing in various fields, including education and sports.
Now many Hazaras are moving to take up arms to protect themselves in what they expect will be a war for control among Afghanistan’s many factions.
Inside the Nabi Rasool Akram Mosque compound, protected by sandbags stacked against its ornate doors and 10-foot high walls, Qatradullah Broman was among the Hazaras attending the funeral of Adila and Mina this week.
The government doesn’t care about Hazaras and has failed to protect them, he said. “Anyone who can afford to leave, they are leaving. Those who can’t are staying here to die,” said Broman. “I see a very dark future for our people.”
There is plenty for Hazaras to fear.
Since it emerged in 2014 and 2015, a vicious Islamic State group affiliate has declared war on Afghanistan’s Shiites and has claimed responsibility for many of the recent attacks on the Hazaras.
But Hazaras are also deeply suspicious of the government for not protecting them. Some worry that government-linked warlords, who also demonize their community, are behind some of the attacks.
Former government adviser Torek Farhadi told the Associated Press that within the political leadership, “from the top down,” there is a “sorry culture” of discrimination against Hazaras. “The government, in a cynical calculation, has decided Hazara lives are cheap,” he said.
Since 2015, attacks have killed at least 1,200 Hazaras and injured another 2,300, according to Wadood Pedram, executive director of the Kabul-based Human Rights and Eradication of Violence Organization.
Hazaras have been preyed on at schools, weddings, mosques, sports clubs, even at birth.
Last year, gunmen attacked a maternity hospital in the mainly Hazara districts of west Kabul. When the shooting ended, 24 people were dead, including newborns and their mothers. Last month, a triple bombing at the Syed Al-Shahada school in the same area killed nearly 100 people, mostly Hazara schoolgirls. This week, when militants attacked a compound of de-mining workers, shooting at least 10 to death, witnesses said they tried to pick Hazaras out of the workers to kill.
Some of these attacks, deliberately targeting civilians, hospitals and children, could rise to the level of war crimes, said Patricia Gossman, Associate Director of the Asia Program of Human Rights Watch.
Pedram’s organization has petitioned the U.N. Human Rights Commission to investigate the killing of Hazaras as genocide or a crime against humanity. It and other rights groups also helped the International Criminal Court in 2019 compile suspected war crimes cases in Afghanistan.
“The world doesn’t speak about our deaths. The world is silent. Are we not human?” said Mustafa Waheed, an elderly Hazara weeping at the burial of Mina and her mother.
A black velvet cloth inscribed in gold with Quranic verses was draped over the two bodies. Family and friends carried them on wooden beds, then placed them inside the graves. Mina’s father fell to the ground crying.
“The U.S. can go into space, but they can’t find out who is doing this?” Waheed said. “They can see an ant move from space, but they can’t see who is killing Hazaras?”
In the face of the killings, talk has turned to arming Hazara youth to defend the community, particularly in the districts that the community dominates in western Kabul. Some Hazaras say the May 8 attack on the Syed al-Shahada school was a turning point.
It is a significant reversal for a community that showed such hope in a new Afghanistan. After the fall of the Taliban, many Hazara militias gave up their weapons under a government disarmament program, even as other factions were reluctant.
“We used to think the pen and the book were our greatest weapon, but now we realize it is the gun we need,” said Ghulam Reza Berati, a prominent Hazara religious leader. Fathers of the girls killed in the school attack are being told to invest in weapons, said Berati, who helped bury many of the girls.
Sitting on the carpets of west Kabul’s Wali Asar Mosque, Berati said Hazaras are disappointed in the democracy brought by the U.S.-led coalition. Hazaras have largely been excluded from positions of prominence, he said.
Hazaras worry about continuing Islamic State group attacks and about the potential return of the Taliban to power after the American withdrawal. But they also worry about the many heavily armed warlords who are part of the government. Some of them carried out violence against Hazaras in the past, and Hazaras fear they will do so again if post-withdrawal Afghanistan slides into a repeat of the brutal inter-factional civil war of the early 1990s.
One warlord who is still prominent in Kabul, Abdul Rasool Sayyaf, led a Pashtun militia that massacred Hazara civilians during a ferocious 1993 battle with Hazara militias in Kabul’s mainly Hazara neighborhood of Afshar.
Rajab Ali Urzgani became a sort of folk hero in his community as one of the youngest Hazara commanders during the Battle of Afshar — only 14 at the time.
Now 41 and still known by his nom de guerre, Mangol, he returned to Afshar earlier this month with the AP to visit the site. He stopped to give a prayer for the dead at a mass grave where nearly 80 men, women and children killed in the bloodshed are buried. A black Shiite banner flies at the entrance.
Mangol held out little hope for peace in Afghanistan following the withdrawal.
“When the foreigners withdraw, the war will happen 1000%,” he said. “The war will happen like in the past with the different groups, and we will defend our family and our dignity.”
A massacre changes everything. And, sometimes, nothing.
Four years ago, in the face of a Quebec mosque attack that killed six Muslims at prayer, the federal Conservatives closed their eyes and their hearts to the reality — literally — of Islamophobia.
Then-leader Andrew Scheer led the charge against uttering the word Islamophobia. He relied on a pretext of free speech so specious as to be unspeakable today.
What a difference leadership makes — a change of leaders, a change of mind, a change of heart. And another massacre.
Much is being said, now, about how Scheer’s successor, Erin O’Toole, used the word Islamophobia freely and unselfconsciously after this week’s attack against a Muslim family that killed four in London, Ont. O’Toole showed the sensitivity and humanity that were conspicuously absent — in him and his party — back then.
What remains unsaid, however, is that not all Tories were so far behind the times that they were so overdue for change. At the very moment federal Conservatives were playing intemperate word games in Ottawa in 2017, their provincial cousins in the Ontario legislature were displaying tolerance and togetherness in their choice of words.
Then-leader Patrick Brown rallied his Progressive Conservative caucusbehind him to recognize and respect the term Islamophobia, unequivocally and unreservedly, in a legislative vote. How to explain the stark difference between federal and provincial Tories — and the subsequent about-face by O’Toole?
There is no single reason, but there is one common thread: Walied Soliman.
Brown and O’Toole are both close to Soliman, an influential lawyer and persuasive political operator who also happens to be a person of faith. For Soliman, as a Muslim, the massacres were also intensely personal.
“Islamophobia is real,” he wrote on Twitter this week. “Call it out. Call out anyone who doesn’t use the word. Call them out. Shame them. Cut the crap. Enough. If you’ve got a problem using the term you are part of the problem.”
Soliman has known Brown since they were both Young Tories in their twenties, and he later played a key role as Ontario PC chair, helping the party pivot toward broader community outreach. As co-chair of O’Toole’s leadership run, he raised the candidate’s game — and raised money for the campaign.
Soliman tells me he never raised the Islamophobia issue directly with either leader. Perhaps he didn’t have to, knowing that the mere fact that they know him — were thinking about him — might have influenced them.
“They came to their conclusions on their own,” Soliman insists.
But even if he didn’t have to say a word about using the word Islamophobia, they also had to look him in the eye. And they knew what his reaction would be when they said it.
“When they both started talking about it, there was this distinct feeling of happiness that I felt,” Soliman recalls. Even if it took O’Toole a lot longer to find the words, “The first time Erin publicly talked about Islamophobia, it made me very happy.”
It must be said that Soliman himself has been a target for vicious Islamophobia against the backdrop of leadership races and internal policy debates. As chair of the Norton Rose Fulbright law firm — where he has worked with Brian Mulroney, another early champion of tolerance — his high profile attracted slurs about a supposedly hidden agenda for Islamic sharia law.
“I’ve often wondered if my friendships were a burden, that maybe it’d be easier for them if I wasn’t involved, wasn’t a friend,” Soliman muses. But when a person is a friend or a neighbour, he inevitably has influence because “you see them every day, you see their humanity — that’s me.”
The old Conservative word games — the claim in 2017 that Islamophobia was a made-up word because it literally suggests “fear of Islam” — never made sense. Everyone knows what homophobia means to gays who faced discrimination and demonization for centuries, which is why Soliman encouraged Brown to march in a Pride parade.
Not every word must be taken literally. Misogyny means hatred of women, but it is often used interchangeably with sexism, referring to prejudice, discrimination and contempt. The term anti-Semitism is only about 150 years old, but “Jew hatred” goes back centuries and makes the point more powerfully.
The Muslim family killed in London this week had immigrated to Canada from the Islamic State of Pakistan in search of sanctuary. They thought they had found it here, only to be blindsided by bigotry and intolerance, police say, on the streets — on the sidewalk — of an Ontario city.
We live in a time of slogans and slurs. We cannot coexist in a world where words are weaponized or accountability is avoided altogether.
Hate crimes are rising, not falling, but there is a way for us to insulate and inoculate ourselves. It falls to our political leaders to show the way on civility and tolerance, lest we fall victim to the internecine intolerance that we witness in America today.
Democracy alone cannot protect minorities from the perils of majority rule. Only pluralism can preserve our common humanity.
Our leaders must say what needs to be said — on Islamophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism and other forms of racism and discrimination that badmouth the “other.” And that lead to massacres.
Every few years, I feel very vulnerable and unsafe. This is one of those times.
On Sunday, five members – three generations – of a Muslim family went out for a walk on a summer’s evening in London, Ont., anopportunity relished by many Canadians during the COVID-19pandemic. For this family, it was a regular activity before returning home to offer the sunset prayer, according to a neighbour.
Yet this simple act of enjoying nature with one’s family is no morebecause of an act of pure, unadulterated hatred.
While waiting at a stoplight, Madiha Salman, her husband Salman Afzaal, 15-year-old daughter Yumna, nine-year-old son Fayez, and 74-year-old mother-in-law were allegedly rammed by a 20-year-old driver who, according to police and witnesses, deliberately accelerated his pickup toward the family, targeting them because they were Muslim.
Initially, police said the extended family requested to keep the victims’ names private, but the family identified them in a statement Monday.Only Fayez survived. Now an orphan, he is recuperating in hospital.
What kind of world are we living in?
For Muslims, it is unfortunately one where the slow drumbeat of hate-filled violence has become louder. The 2017 Quebec City massacre, in which worshippers were gunned down at a mosque – a place of spiritual refuge – shook all of us to the core.
As a nation, we vowed to fight the scourge of Islamophobia. Muslims wondered if a visit to their local mosque might be their last. Such was, and is, the fear. Enhanced safety features – including screened entries and guards – became the uneasy norm.
Yet this was still not enough back in September, when 58-year-old Mohamed-Aslim Zafis was killed outside an Etobicoke, Ont., mosque by an apparent white supremacist. Mr. Zafis was a volunteer caretaker of the mosque he cherished. On that fateful evening, he sat outside, controlling entry to the mosque in compliance with COVID-19 protocols. The accused perpetrator slipped behind Mr. Zafis, slashed his throat and fled.
Violence is happening all over the country. This year alone, there have been multiple reported assaults in Edmonton, where strangers have threatened Muslim women. In at least five cases, women were pushed, kicked and/or punched in public.
Calgary has similarly witnessed numerous cases of assault against Muslims; three involved women physically attacked in broad daylight because of their hijab. Understandably, the women have been emotionally and physically traumatized.
And now, a family has been killed in London. Is it any wonder why Muslims – especially women – don’t feel safe?
Yet this country is far greater than the hate-filled zealots who seek to intimidate, sow fear and spread the bigotry that fuels them. The outpouring of grief and support from Canadians has been a balm to the shock felt by Muslims across the land.
Since the news came out about the attack, I have received heartfelt messages of support, including the following from my friendand colleague Myriam Davidson: “It breaks my heart,” she wrote. “The best I have is we are here standing with you. There is no place for Islamophobia in our communities – it is despicable. Whenever a synagogue gets attacked – what brings me comfort is when non-Jews speak up, call it out and reaffirm that we are an inclusive society where this is not tolerated. So I’m modelling the best I know how.”
And that is the key: reaching out the best way each of us can. Our society will be stronger for it. While Muslims will rely on their faith for spiritual succour, we will need emotional support from others to overcome our fears and to know that we are valued members of the Canadian family.
There are many ways to help. Some Muslims are fearful to go for a simple walk, so offer to accompany them. Donate to a fund for nine-year-old Fayez. Attend a vigil. Perhaps the most powerful gesture is to simply say, “I am here for you.”
Last week, I was mesmerized by the haunting, powerful rendition of O Canada by Winnipeg folk singer-songwriter Don Amero, accompanied by Elders Wally and Karen Swain, prior to a Habs-Jets playoff game. While Mr. Amero sang, I asked myself: “How does he have the fortitude to sing an anthem of a country whose government, for 150 years, committed cultural genocide against the Indigenous peoples of this land?”
I know I could not. Yet Mr. Amero taught me something that resonates today, which is that the power of love, of resilience, of dignity always conquers bitterness.
We will come together – whether it is to address deep-rooted historical prejudices against Indigenous communities, or contemporary hatred against minority communities. Let us dig deep into the well of human compassion to continuously build a more just, inclusive society.
Contrasting commentaries, starting with Rupa Subramanya, who while providing perspective on racism in Canada and how it also exists between minority groups, downplays the extent of racism and Islamophobia. Noor Javed provides a useful counterpoint on her lived experiences:
As we mourn the family of four Muslim-Canadians who were killed in London, Ont., on June 6, leaving behind an orphaned child, and as it appears that the motive of the alleged killer was hatred toward Muslims, questions are being asked about the extent of racism in this country. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh went so far as to claim that “Canada is a place of racism” and that “Muslims are not safe in this country.” But is Canada really as racist as Singh claims?
There is certainly no question that hate crimes against many minority groups — including Jewish, Muslim and Asian Canadians — have been on the rise recently. Statistics Canada found that police-reported hate crimes increased in 2019 from the previous year, and reports of anti-Asian hate crimes have surged throughout the pandemic.
A 2019 Ipsos Reid poll found that 26 per cent of respondents believed that prejudice against Muslims had become “more acceptable” in the previous five years. This compares to 21 per cent for refugees, 23 per cent for immigrants as a whole and 15 per cent or less for other minority groups, including Indo-Canadians and Jewish-Canadians.
Any evidence that racism is on the rise is deplorable and every racist incident must be condemned in the strongest possible terms. However, Singh does the cause of fighting racism no favours by taking an extreme and exaggerated position that I, as an immigrant and person of colour, cannot agree with. Are there racists in Canada? Sure. Is Canada a racist country? Absolutely not.
By any metric, Canada is one of the most tolerant countries on the planet, and one which I am proud to call home. The 2020 World Values Survey places Canada amongst the most racially tolerant countries in the world, with less than five per cent of those surveyed saying that they would not want to have “people of another race” as their neighbours.
I first experienced racism, not in Canada, but in India and the Middle East, two places where I grew up. I was routinely denigrated by some Indians for having darker skin and by some Arabs for being Indian, dark skinned and not a Muslim. These prejudices can be vicious. The truth is that many people of colour who immigrate to Canada are “racialized” long before they arrive here.
That racism can, and does, exist between people of colour is a reality that’s entirely missing from the discourse on race in Canada, where it’s assumed to be perpetrated solely by old stock white Canadians, with people of colour as their victims. An honest conversation about racism in Canada must acknowledge these complexities, especially given demographic changes driven by large-scale immigration from non-Western countries.
There is ample anecdotal evidence that some immigrants bring the baggage of religion, caste, skin complexion and social class, to say nothing of traditional patriarchal norms that discriminate against women. Such cultural baggage can fuel intolerance operating on many different dimensions simultaneously.
For example, in the United States, there have been allegations of bias against “lower caste” employees in Silicon Valley tech companies that are dominated by “upper caste” Indo-Americans, some of which are being litigated in court. This has led some civil rights groups to petition the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal government agency, to recognize caste-based discrimination as being equivalent to racial discrimination.
We’re not even having such conversations in Canada, perhaps because the culture of political correctness and the woke creed make it impossible to find any faults within any community other than that of old stock Canadians. Yet, any serious reckoning with the problem of racism and discrimination more broadly will have to contend with these other dimensions of bias and bigotry that are swept under the rug.
Sweeping assertions from the far left, such as Singh’s “Canada is a place of racism,” admit no such nuance, when the reality is that Canada has been, and continues to be, a welcoming home for everyone, regardless of race, religion, gender, sexuality or any other identity marker.
Statements such as Singh’s fail to set the stage for a serious discussion about issues of race and identity in Canada, by positing an extreme narrative in which Canada is irredeemably racist and beyond redemption. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In the early morning hours, the day after the most recent terror attack in Ontario, I couldn’t sleep.
It was still dark when I got out of bed and did the only thing that would comfort my heart: I prayed for the Afzaal family — Salman Afzaal, Madiha Salman, 15 year-old Yumna, her grandmother, Talat, and nine-year-old survivor Fayez. The family were intentionally run down by a truck in their hometown of London, Ont., on Sunday as they took an evening stroll in their neighbourhood.
They were the victims of what police are calling an anti-Muslim hate attack.
I cannot help thinking about my own experiences with Islamophobia as a visible Muslim journalist in the so-called “most diverse city in the world.”
Nothing I experienced compares to the trauma faced by the family and friends of the Afzaal family — including Fayez, who will live with this horrific incident and the loss of his family forever. Or the family of Mohamed-Aslim Zafis, who was murdered last year by a neo-Nazi in Etobicoke as he sat outside the International Muslim Organization mosque. Or the children who buried their fathers in Quebec City after the mosque shooting in 2017 — and the many survivors who are still struggling to cope in its aftermath.
But the many incidents of Islamophobia, or anti-Muslim hate as I prefer to name it, that I have faced have weighed down on me over the years. They have affected the career choices I have made. They have impacted my mental health. They have deeply hurt me — and still do.
When I tried to list all the incidents of hate that I have experienced since I became a journalist — both in my job and on a day-to-day basis — I hit 30 before I stopped. I could have gone on.
There is an unspoken code that journalists of colour quickly learn when they start in the profession: if you want to survive in this industry, you must have thick skin.
When I got my first barrage of hate mail as an intern at the Star 15 years ago, and turned to a colleague for support, he looked at my hijab and said: if you want to survive, you will need to have Teflon-like skin. Let the hate bounce off you. Don’t let it stick.
But the truth is, even when you tell yourself it doesn’t impact you, it still does.
Every email in your inbox with someone telling you they hate you because of your hijab.
Every letter calling you a “dirty raghead.”
Every tweet telling you to go back to where you came from.
Every person who walks by and whispers “You’re disgusting.”
Every smear campaign calling you a terrorist.
Every time someone doubts your news judgment because you are a “lying Muslim.”
Every time someone asks if you were a token hire.
Every time you go to the public editor, nearly in tears, when the hate gets too much to bear.
Every time you realize that your colleagues enjoy the luxury of white privilege, their names and skin colour affording them a protection that you have never had — and never will.
I will stop there.
You look for ways to cope. But the hate slowly chips away at you and at the idea that we have been so conditioned to believe: How can this be happening here in Canada, the most accepting country in the world?
Let me tell you: It’s been happening for years. The hate is not new. And neither is the violence.
But the haters have gotten more brazen. More hateful. More organized. More dangerous.
So when the Afzaal family was killed for just being Muslim this week, it broke me.
Years of online hate, of politicians benefiting from anti-Muslim policies, of pundits spewing anti-Muslim rhetoric, of trolls questioning if our pain was even real, has done exactly what it was meant to. It turned people against us. It has led them to hate us so much that they want us dead.
This week, I had a conversation that I never imagined I would have with my children, ages seven and 10. I had feared telling them about the incident, but they saw the cover of the newspaper and asked me what happened in London on Sunday night.
I sat them down, and told them about a beautiful family, who looked very much like our own, who went for a walk, but didn’t make it home.
They looked at my tears, and my hijab, and shared their thoughts: “That’s so scary.” “I don’t ever want to cross a street again.”
And then came the hard questions:
“Who will take care of the little boy?”
“Why would that man do that to them? Could it happen to us?”
The 2017 class at Rotman Commerce arrived at the University of Toronto just as Xi Jinping became China’s President. As they studied, Mr. Xi consolidated power, all while pushing his country toward greater influence overseas. In western countries, views on China have darkened. Only 14 per cent of Canadians view it favourably, a record low, according to a survey conducted by the Angus Reid Institute earlier this year.
But this opinion isn’t shared by China’s best and brightest.
Young Chinese people make up the majority of international students who attend Rotman Commerce. On graduation, they possess a potent set of attributes for any employer: a coveted diploma, language skills and the kind of ambition that brought them to Canada in the first place.
But many have no intention of staying. For them, China is not just home, but a place whose embrace of modernity has created comforts not available in North America – bullet trains, lively cities with a cornucopia of eating choices – while its capital and consumer markets offer opportunity that Canada cannot match.
Chinese students like to joke about Canada as haoshan, haoshui, hao wuliao: nice mountains, nice water, very boring. China is not boring and its air and water are quickly improving, along with its salaries.
In other words, even if China grows less appealing to those outside its borders, it is becoming more desirable to many of its own. John Shi, one of the Rotman Commerce 2017 graduates, recently travelled for the first time to Suzhou. It’s been long considered a secondary centre, but “when I see the way that city has developed – oh my god, I must say it’s really better than Toronto,” Mr. Shi says.
In the U.S., the National Science Foundation tracks the percentage of doctorate recipients who intend to stay. Things have changed there, too. In 2001, 91.4 per cent of PhDs from China intended to remain in the U.S. By 2019, the number had fallen to 79.3 per cent. The remainder expected to return to China.
The rise in the overall numbers of overseas Chinese students has been vertiginous: in 1990, only 2,950 young Chinese went abroad to any country for studies; by 2004, fewer than 115,000. In 2019, more than 140,000 had study permits in Canada alone.
“A lot of these people go out on their own money, on family money — and they’re trying to get an education that will advantage them back in China,” said David Zweig, a professor emeritus of social science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who is writing a book China’s Search For Talent.
Where those students go has significance for Canada and its policy makers. “You can always raise the question: is it to Canada’s advantage to train these people, give them jobs and then they take their skills back to China?” Mr. Zweig said. He sees no reason for serious concern.
But the question he poses also has ramifications for Canadian employers. If those students leave, “in some sense, that’s on us,” said Alexandra MacKay, interim vice dean for undergraduate and specialized programs at Rotman. If students see better opportunities in China, Canadian companies may need to think whether there is a need “to revisit your recruiting model to make this an attractive proposition.”
But the destination students choose also has political significance for China. Unlike many of their fellow citizens, they have the ability to choose. Graduating from a Canadian university places them on a quick track to permanent residency and citizenship.
Where they decide to go, then, is a useful barometer of how the current generation views China.
So how does the Xi Jinping cohort see China, and the world? To find out, The Globe and Mail surveyed 35 students from the Rotman Commerce class of 2017 who were born in China or grew up there. The respondents make up roughly one-third of the Chinese students at Rotman that year. Their answers, and some of their stories, are below.
STARTING OFF
John Shi grew up in Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province, determined to get into the best schools. “I dreamed of going to the top finance university in China. But it’s so hard,” he said. He points to inequalities in the administration of the gaokao, the feared university placement exam. Students can score up to 750 points on the exam, but those marks are not all academic. Authorities can award bonus points to certain categories of people, and the administration of those unearned points meant that Mr. Shi would need to outperform a student in Beijing by 100 points in order to gain entry to a similar university. “The competition is really not that equal,” he says. Canada offered a more equitable academic landscape. So Mr. Shi decided to skip the gaokao altogether. He came to Canada for grade 11.
BUILDING A CAREER
Since the day she graduated, Joanna Li has thought about returning to China. Her family is there. She feels a stronger “bond with China, my motherland” than with Canada. She still eats Chinese food almost every day. But she has hesitated. How could she compete with people back home? With its huge population, “there are many more talents in China. You have people who work as hard as you do, are as smart as you and have more local experience than you – and they have more connections,” she said. Finding a job in China that can match her Canadian salary “is way harder than I expected.” But she has found life in Canada disappointing – when she had a back issue, the wait to get medical attention was long. “I was kind of disappointed by that,” she says. “Because in China, I can easily see a doctor that is one of the best in Shanghai.” She has felt lonely, too, a feeling exacerbated by travel restrictions that have kept her from seeing family during the pandemic. “I’m just looking for a change,” she says. She has joined groups of like-minded students in Canada and the U.S., all looking to move back to China, where life is familiar and work more thrilling. “I can see my life in Canada for the next 10 or 12 years. But at this point, I’m just more excited about a different life in China.”
FINDING OPPORTUNITY
For Simon Liang, the numbers tell the story: China’s population is nearly 40 times that of Canada. Its economy is more than eight times larger. “The market in China is just way greater than in Canada. That’s why I’ve come back to China,” says Mr. Liang, a graduate of the 2016 Rotman Commerce class who is the founder of Queen’s Education Group, an online high school with about 300 full-time students. After graduation, he got a job in Canada long enough to secure a permanent resident card, quitting once that was in hand. He remembers looking up at the Canadian corporate ladder and “I could see exactly where I would land in 20 years – and that is not exciting at all.” Though starting wages tend to be better in Canada, China offers fabulous wealth to those who succeed. More importantly, in Canada, “I can’t prove my value,” Mr. Liang says. In his home country, with its scale and global importance, “I feel like I can have more influence for this world.” China, he says, feels like a place of “unlimited opportunities.”
WEIGHING THE OPTIONS
There was a time when Chinese students would joke about studying abroad as an exercise in dujin — gilding themselves in the golden aura of international credentials. But with 1.6 million Chinese students currently enrolled overseas, a mere diploma is no longer enough. Crystal Lou quickly realized that if she wanted an edge in China, she needed to build meaningful work experience in Canada. Doing so was easy: international student university graduates are eligible for three-year work permits. That quick path to a job was one of the main reasons she came to Canada. She does still contemplate returning to China, where her parents live. China “is growing a lot faster than here. So you probably have more opportunity to go up there versus here,” she says. She won’t apply for Canadian citizenship “until I fully decide I’m staying here.” But as someone who works in private equity, she has also found virtue in Canadian stability. “Here you can value a company based on fundamentals,” she said. “That doesn’t really work in China,” where markets are more prone to influence from politics or investor mania. “For the job that I’m doing, I think Canada fits me better,” she says.
Deciding where to live is “more of a choice between what you really value,” says Emily Wang. In China, things are more convenient: public transit is cheap and near-universal, while powerful apps and mobile payments turn smartphones into remote controls for life. But the work environment can be tough. Some companies, particularly in the technology sector, demand brutally long hours. There is “more competition and maybe more pressure mentally,” Ms. Wang says. Contrast that with Canada, where “I might have more work-life balance, which is something I value.” That’s one of the reasons she stayed after graduation. In Canada, too, she senses greater freedom for the types of open political discussion that can be dangerous in China. But when it comes to personal liberty, “in daily life I don’t feel like there is that much of a difference. I felt pretty free when I was in China, and also here in Canada.” In fact, the epidemic has made China look attractive. While rolling lockdowns continued for more than a year in Ontario, people in China “are all in restaurants and travelling around.”
In the physical sense, Katrina Jiang has lived in Canada for nearly 12 years. But in many ways, she has never left China. She does not pay much attention to news or entertainment in Canada; she doesn’t so much as have a Netflix account. Instead, “100 per cent” of her media intake comes from China: celebrities on Weibo, shows on iQiyi, short videos on Douyin. “I know I have been here for a long time. I came when I was 14,” she says. “But I feel like I’m still connected to China, to Chinese culture and Chinese entertainment.” She feels the disconnect most keenly at work, where she has little to add to conversations about local events or the Blue Jays. She worries that distance from coworkers will limit her career advancement, and is mulling a return home. “I see a kind of ceiling here,”, she says. “In Canada, your soft skills can’t really compete with native speakers. You have to know their culture, you have to know their entertainment, and you have to chat to make connections. It’s hard for us if we don’t grow up in that environment.”
Algorithmic bias is often described as a thorny technical problem. Machine-learning models can respond to almost any pattern—including ones that reflect discrimination. Their designers can explicitly prevent such tools from consuming certain types of information, such as race or sex. Nonetheless, the use of related variables, like someone’s address, can still cause models to perpetuate disadvantage.
Ironing out all traces of bias is a daunting task. Yet despite the growing attention paid to this problem, some of the lowest-hanging fruit remains unpicked.
Every good model relies on training data that reflect what it seeks to predict. This can sometimes be a full population, such as everyone convicted of a given crime. But modellers often have to settle for non-random samples. For uses like facial recognition, models need enough cases from each demographic group to learn how to identify members accurately. And when making forecasts, like trying to predict successful hires from recorded job interviews, the proportions of each group in training data should resemble those in the population.
Many businesses compile private training data. However, the two largest public image archives, Google Open Images and ImageNet—which together have 725,000 pictures labelled by sex, and 27,000 that also record skin colour—are far from representative. In these collections, drawn from search engines and image-hosting sites, just 30-40% of photos are of women. Only 5% of skin colours are listed as “dark”.
Sex and race also sharply affect how people are depicted. Men are unusually likely to appear as skilled workers, whereas images of women disproportionately contain swimwear or undergarments. Machine-learning models regurgitate such patterns. One study trained an image-generation algorithm on ImageNet, and found that it completed pictures of young women’s faces with low-cut tops or bikinis.
Similarly, images with light skin often displayed professionals, such as cardiologists. Those with dark skin had higher shares of rappers, lower-class jobs like “washerwoman” and even generic “strangers”. Thanks to the Obamas, “president” and “first lady” were also overrepresented.
ImageNet is developing a tool to rebalance the demography of its photos. And private firms may use less biased archives. However, commercial products do show signs of skewed data. One study of three programs that identify sex in photos found far more errors for dark-skinned women than for light-skinned men.
Making image or video data more representative would not fix imbalances that reflect real-world gaps, such as the high number of dark-skinned basketball players. But for people trying to clear passport control, avoid police stops based on security cameras or break into industries run by white men, correcting exaggerated demographic disparities would surely help.■
As I reflect on vile attack on five members of the beautiful Azfaal family — Salman, Madiha, Yumna, Talat and Fayez — I was initially deeply angered by how quick some were to use this vile, hate-motivated act of terrorism to confirm their political priors.
And yet.
The fact that the alleged attacker, Nathaniel Veltman, is a young Dutch blond boy who could well have come from my own religious community hit close to the heart.
Now let me be clear. I apportion no blame for this act on Conservatives, religion, or even the Dutch privilege in which I assume Veltman, like me, grew up in. If guilty of this crime, Veltman is a hate-motivated terrorist who committed multiple murders. That would be on him. May the justice system rain down.
And yet.
My reflection called to mind times when, as a religious social conservative, I should have felt more uncomfortable with some of the things my fellow conservatives have said in recent years about terrorism, culture and religion. Times when we too easily crossed lines that conservatives — and religious conservatives in particular — should not have crossed.
The line got crossed when some seemed to weigh their critique of a terrorist act based entirely on the motivation for that terrorist act. To put it another way, they became more interested in combatting terrorism motivated by some beliefs than terrorism motivated by other beliefs. Compare, for example, the disgustingly light-hearted condemnation of the far-right, neo-Nazi terrorist act in Charlottesville by the same populist U.S. president that proposed banning all Muslim immigration as part of an effort to prevent domestic terrorism. Or those who called for a “values test” to root out radical Islam one day — and then stood with a street preacher who flagrantly breaks the law the next.
The line got crossed when we got more concerned with the actions of individuals within the institutions of our liberal capitalist democracy than the ideas underpinning those institutions. As a religious social conservative I hold freedom of religion extremely dear. In my world of competing rights, religious freedom comes out near the top. But that means holding expressions of other religions — like a turban, kirpan, hijab or burka — as dear as holding symbols of one’s own religion. Banning or restricting any of these things should make me deeply uncomfortable. Religious freedom should be religion blind.
The same goes for religious practices. If something is a criminal act, call it a criminal act and treat it as such. If something is a part of one’s religious practice or tradition, leave it at that and leave it alone. Blurring the lines by referring to “barbaric cultural practices” crosses the line. The use of the word “cultural” kind of gives it away.
The line got crossed when some tried to use the power of the state to impose their own religious views. Now let me be clear. I attend a Christian church — honestly, I need it more than most — and I hold my religious views as truth. I’d not be much of a religious person if I didn’t. I don’t go to a mosque, a synagogue, a temple, or a Richard Dawkins book club to practice my religion. Yet I want my public square to have room for all of these, and many more.
The investigation into the horrible attack in London continues. If the early information is confirmed, it appears that Veltman alone is responsible for the hate-inspired terrorism of which he is accused.
But an act this vile, particularly when its perpetrated by a member of your own community also warrants deep reflection.
I spent the afternoon writing down the lines I have crossed. I pray others do the same.
Unfortunate. Perspective of former CPC candidate Jeff Bennett revealing:
Justin Trudeau has made his clearest statement yet on what he will and will not do to stand up against Islamophobia in Canada.
The prime minister says he will call out anti-Muslim crime, using the strongest words possible — “terrorism” — to condemn the killing of a family in London, Ont.
Trudeau will not, however, call out Quebec for the secularism law that has made Muslims feel unwelcome in that province — Bill 21, which forces Muslims to relinquish any religious clothing if they want to work in public professions.
“No,” Trudeau said bluntly on Tuesday when asked whether Bill 21 bred intolerance of Muslims. He talked of how Quebec had a right to make its own laws, how people in Quebec might be having “conversations” and “reflecting” on the law in days ahead, and said his government would be “watching” and “following.”
In other words, not leading.
So, to recap: anti-Muslim sentiment is wrong. Anti-Muslim crime is terrorism. Legislation that denies religious expression to Muslims is something to be discussed, but not by this prime minister or other political leaders.
None of the fine-sounding speeches in the House of Commons on Monday came anywhere near mention of the legislation in Quebec.
“Right now, people are talking to their families and saying maybe they should not go for a walk,” New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh said in an emotional speech. “There are people literally thinking about whether they should walk out their front door in our country.”
Singh was not talking about Bill 21.
Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole spoke from the heart about the nine-year-old child who survived the attack, and what kind of Canada he should be allowed to grow up in.
“He deserves a Canada where Muslim women of faith can wear a hijab without fear of being accosted or harassed in public,” O’Toole said.
He wasn’t talking about Bill 21 either, or his own Conservative party’s dog-whistle record on everything from “veiled voting” to “barbaric cultural practices” in the 2015 election.
What makes the silence so breathtaking is that all of Canada’s political leaders have just emerged from two weeks of hard talk about how governments in the past did too little about racism toward Indigenous people.
They are all collectively, retrospectively sorry that an entire culture suffered at the hands of successive politicians who were not courageous enough to stand up to the widespread racism at the time.
Would Canada’s blotted history be improved if we unearthed a speech of John A. Macdonald saying he was following events closely at residential schools and hoped Canadians were having conversations about them?
The contrast between Trudeau’s strong words in the Commons on Tuesday and his tiptoeing around Bill 21 was striking, and the latter may cancel out the former. The prime minister did allow that he has long opposed Bill 21, but he clearly doesn’t intend to use the weight of his office or his words to change the reality of it.
For real political bravery on Tuesday, one had to look in more out-of-the way places — to London, in fact, where a former candidate for the provincial Progressive Conservative party decided to tell the difficult-to-hear truth of racism in politics.
Jeff Bennett, who ran for the PCs in the 2014 election, recounted in a Facebook post how people in his riding were happy to see that he had replaced the former candidate, a man named Ali Chahbar. Loyal Conservatives in London told Bennett they were relieved that “his name was English and his skin was white.” Bennett remembered how Chahbar had been smeared on local talk radio with talk of sharia law and other nonsense.
Bennett wrote that he was tired of people saying London was better than what happened on Sunday. “Bullshit. I knocked on thousands of doors in the very neighbourhood this atrocity occurred. This terrorist may have been alone in that truck on that day, but he was not acting alone. He was raised in a racist city that pretends it isn’t.”
Bennett came in second in London West in 2014 and has likely abandoned any aspirations to be elected again, given his willingness to tell voters what they don’t want to hear about themselves.
This of course explains the silence on Bill 21 on Tuesday, even as the political leaders are making bold proclamations about intolerance towards Muslims. An election looms, Quebec is a crucial battleground and Bill 21 is popular.
Canadian history has been on trial, rightly, for the past two weeks, and Bill 21 is indeed making its own way through the courts. One wonders how history will judge the failure of political leaders to speak up against that legislation when they could have seized the moment.
History’s purpose isn’t to comfort us, says David Olusoga, although many in the UK seem to think it is. “History doesn’t exist to make us feel good, special, exceptional or magical. History is just history. It is not there as a place of greater safety.”
As a historian and broadcaster, Olusoga has been battling this misconception for almost two decades, as the producer or presenter of TV series including Civilisations, The World’s War, A House Through Time and the Bafta-winning Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners. His scholarship has been widely recognised: in 2019, he was awarded an OBE and made a professor at the University of Manchester. (He is also on the board of the Scott Trust, which owns Guardian Media Group.) Yet apologists for empire, in particular, like to dismiss him as a “woke historian” in an attempt to politicise his work or flatly deny the realities that he points out.
First published in 2016, and made into a TV series the same year, the book charts black British history from the first meeting between the people of Britain and the people of Africa during the Roman period, to the racism Olusoga encountered during his own childhood, via Britain’s role in the slave trade and the scramble for Africa. It is a story that some of Olusoga’s critics would prefer was forgotten.
Hostility to his work has grown since the Brexit vote, shooting up “profoundly since last summer”, he says, speaking over Zoom from his office in Bristol. “It has now got to the point where some of the statements being made are so easily refutable, so verifiably and unquestionably false, that you have to presume that the people writing them know that. And that must lead you to another assumption, which is that they know that this is not true, but they have decided that these national myths are so important to them and their political projects, or their sense of who they are, that they don’t really care about the historical truths behind them.
“They have been able to convince people that their own history, being explored by their own historians and being investigated by their own children and grandchildren, is a threat to them.”
‘You have to have a real tenure in the country to play your ancestors’ … a recreation of the Empire Windrush at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012. Photograph: Lee Jin-man/AP
For Olusoga, 51, this hostility can in part be explained by ignorance. “If you were taught a history that the first black person to put his foot on English soil was stepping off the Windrush in 1948, then this can seem like a conspiracy,” he says.
But there is a deeper issue at play. “If you have been told a version of your history and that is part of your identity, it’s very difficult when people like me come along and say: ‘There are these chapters [that you need to know about].’ People feel – wrongly in my view – that their history is being undermined by my history. But my history isn’t a threat to your history. My history is part of your history.”
When the book was published in 2016, it ended on a hopeful note. Olusoga was writing just a few years after the London Olympics, in which a tantalising view of Britain emerged – a country at ease with its multiculturalism, nodding with pride to the arrival of the Windrush generation in 1948. Black Londoners dressed up as their ancestors for the opening ceremony, “with long, baggy suits, holding their suitcases”, says Olusoga. “You have to have a real tenure in the country to play your ancestors.” That moment, he says, was profoundly beautiful.
But that upbeat note has begun to feel inaccurate – an artefact of a more optimistic time. In the new edition of Black and British, which includes a chapter on the Windrush scandal and last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, Olusoga describes that moment in 2012 as a mirage. The summer afterwards, vans bearing the message “Go home or face arrest” were driven around London as part of Theresa May’s notorious “hostile environment” strategy, aiming to make the UK inhospitable for undocumented migrants. Thousands of people who had lived legally in the UK for decades, often people who had arrived from the Caribbean as children, were suddenly targeted for deportation.
But this movement for racial justice has been met with a severe backlash. In January, Robert Jenrick, the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, said he would introduce laws to protect statues from what he called “baying mobs”. The government’s recent review on racial equality concluded controversially that there was no institutional racism in areas including policing, health and education, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
“I’m really frightened about the future of this country, and frightened about people using forces of race and racism for electoral reasons and not being cognisant about how difficult it is to control those forces after elections have been counted,” says Olusoga. “I’m really frightened about the extent to which people are able to entirely dehumanise people who they deem to be their enemies in this culture war.”
Olusoga was born in Lagos in 1970, to a white British mother and a Nigerian father, moving to his mother’s home town, Gateshead, at an early age. As one of a handful of mixed-race families on the council estate where they lived, they were regularly terrorised by the far right. The violence culminated in a brick being thrown into the family’s home, wrapped in a note demanding they be sent “back”. He was 14. Eventually, the family had to be rehoused.
His early experience of education was also distressing. “I experienced racism from teachers in ways that are shocking if I tell them to young people at school now,” says Olusoga. He was dyslexic, but the school refused to get him tested until he did his GCSEs: “It was the easier story to believe that this kid was stupid because all black kids are stupid.” When he finally got his diagnosis and support – thanks in large part to his mother’s fierce determination – Olusoga went to study history at the University of Liverpool, followed by a master’s degree at Leicester.
Olusoga was confident about having two identities, despite the prejudice he had encountered. He was proud of being a black Nigerian of Yoruba heritage and was perfectly happy being part of his mother’s white working-class geordie tradition. But he has always had a third identity.
“I’m also black British – and that had no history, no recognition. It was presented as impossible – a dualism that couldn’t exist, because whiteness and Britishness were the same thing when I was growing up. So, to discover that there was a history of being black and British, independent from being half white working-class and being half black Nigerian, that was what was critically important to me,” he says. His book does its best to uncover that history, exploring the considerable presence of black people in Britain in the age of slavery, as well as the part played by black Britons in both world wars.
He says that some of the aggression shown towards black historians who write honestly about Britain’s past comes from people who think “this history is important because it gives black people the right to be here”. They hold on to the belief that the UK was a “white country” until the past few decades and refuse to accept evidence that shows the presence of black people goes back centuries. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand what drives him and also why this history is important for black people.
“I don’t feel challenged in my right to be proud to be British,” he says. “I’m perfectly comfortable in my identity. I’ve looked at this history because it’s just exciting to be part of a long story. This comes out of wanting to enrich life, not seeking some sort of needy validation of who I am.”
He found it refreshing to see the UK’s history of empire and colonialism acknowledged in last summer’s anti-racist placards, with one popular slogan stating “The UK is not innocent”. “A generation has emerged that doesn’t need history to perform that role of comfort that its parents and grandparents did,” he says.
As for black people’s experiences in Britain, he says, there is a “hysterical” level of anger if you point out that many have lived in some form of slavery or unfreedom. Recently, historians have uncovered notices of runaway enslaved people or advertisements for their sale. This adds to the evidence that thousands of black people were brought to Britain, enslaved as well as free.
“It brings slavery to Britain and therefore undermines the idea that it doesn’t really matter because it happened ‘over there’,” says Olusoga. “It short-circuits an idea of British exceptionalism. And there are a lot of people for whom that idea of exceptionalism is a part of how they see themselves. I’m really sorry that the stuff I do and that other people do is a challenge to that, but my job is to be a historian. It’s not to make people feel good.”
Olusoga is often accused of pursuing a political agenda. He is asked, for instance, why he doesn’t speak about the Barbary slave trade of the 16th to 18th centuries, in which Europeans were captured and traded by north African pirates. He has a simple response: that he has been trying to get a programme made about it for his entire career and it is finally happening.
He gives another example: “I have been accused literally hundreds of times of ignoring the slavery suppression squadron that the Royal Navy created after 1807.” Its task was to suppress the Atlantic slave trade by patrolling the coast of west Africa. “I think the chapter in Black and British about that is 30,000 words, which is as long as some books.”
What his more extreme critics fail to understand, he adds, is that he is loyal to history and not a political agent. He remains committed to one goal: to uncover the stories of those who have long been deemed unimportant. When he wrote his first book on the 1904-08 Namibian genocide, he went to mass graves where he saw bones sticking out of the ground. “We promised the victims of that genocide that we would be their voice, we would fight for them and we would tell their story – and we use every skill we have to do that.
“I care deeply about people who were mistreated in the past. I care about the names on slave ledgers, I care about the bones of people in Africa, in mass graves in the first world war and in riverbeds in Namibia. I care about them. I think about them when I read the letters, when I look at their photographs and their faces. No one gave a damn about them. That’s my job – to care about them. And I will be ruthless in fighting for them.”
