Working site on citizenship and multiculturalism issues.
2025/07/30 2 Comments
My latest analysis of the data, 2008-24. This year I have broken the data into three periods: Harper government, Trudeau government pre-pandemic, and Trudeau government post-pandemic and the ongoing increases save for anti-Muslim hate crimes post-pandemic.
The two key comparison slides are below:
2025/07/30 Leave a comment
Not surprising, along with similar erosion of Jewish Canadians sense of belonging given rise in anti-semitic and anti-Israel demonstrations and incidents. Sad fraying and inability to have cross-community conversations as former antisemitism envoy Lyons pointed out:
…Elghawaby said the grief felt by Muslim-Canadian families over the suffering of loved ones in Gaza is being compounded by a sense that Ottawa isn’t doing enough to prevent the suffering, despite issuing “very clear statements” on the situation.
“‘Devastated’ is not even strong enough a word to describe how people are feeling,” she said.
“[These are] their loved ones, their family members, who are starving, who are continuing to face bombing and displacement, and who are just desperate – desperate for this to end.”
On social media, Elghawaby wrote that the fear felt by Canadians with family in the region grows “with each day that passes without meaningful action towards upholding international humanitarian law.”
In the interview, Elghawaby said she doesn’t have the mandate or enough detailed information to say whether Canada is doing enough. She said she can only convey the feeling widespread in Muslim and Arab communities that Ottawa is dropping the ball.
“How can it be – is what people are asking me – that international humanitarian law is violated in this way, and nothing is actually happening, or not enough is happening?” she said….
Source: Lack of action on Gaza eroding Muslim-Canadians’ sense of belonging, envoy says
2025/07/28 Leave a comment
Valid comments on lack of consistency in approaches:
…In response, there have been some notable efforts to address the antisemitism scourge. Both the federal government and some local municipalities have enacted or proposed bubble zone legislation designed to create a safe perimeter around places of worship, schools, hospitals, and other vulnerable institutions. Some universities and governments have adopted much-needed guidelines to combat antisemitism and promised to enforce them more aggressively.
More is required, but those responses appear to have shifted the discourse from disbelief to efforts to silence and thwart initiatives to protect the community. It often starts by insisting that the Jewish community is not only unable to judge what constitutes antisemitism, but that it actively engages in its weaponization. It is hard to think of any other group that is not only denied its own ability to identify harms but is painted as acting nefariously when it does so.
When the issue does break through, the efforts to protect the Jewish community are then silenced by framing them as undermining the rights of others. For example, bubble zone initiatives are frequently criticized as an affront to freedom of expression, despite being carefully drafted and modelled on similar laws that have been upheld by Canadian courts as constitutional.
Similarly, antisemitism guidelines on campus have been derided as chilling freedom of expression. These institutions have long histories of adopting extensive regulations to protect women, visible minorities and Indigenous groups, even going so far as to identify and guard against micro-aggressions. But the same approach seemingly does not apply to the Jewish community, who instead face charges that protecting their rights would come at the expense of the rights of others.
In fact, even political views on the founding of the State of Israel or expressions of support for Zionism, which as former prime minister Justin Trudeau noted “is the belief, at its simplest, that Jewish people, like all peoples, have the right to determine their own future” runs the risk of being labelled as “racist” in today’s educational environment, thereby silencing the perspectives.
As the rise in antisemitism has become too pronounced to ignore, there have been some important efforts to chronicle it and call for action. But what has been missing is an examination of its day-to-day effects, which has placed the safety and well-being of an entire community, from grade school to seniors’ homes, at risk. Those effects will become less visible if all that is left is the sound of silence.
Source: Michael Geist: When it comes to antisemitism, the sound of silence is loud in Canada
2025/07/28 Leave a comment
Stay tuned. Arguably, many Trump administration figures could start with a better understanding of the US constitution and history:
The new director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) stirred a debate after he said that the present US citizenship test is easy and can be memorised. The US citizenship test, officially known as the Naturalisation test, is an examination that an applicant has to take to become an American citizen.
The test is not for green card holders unless they are applying for citizenship. Joseph Edlow, the new director of USCIS, said that since the tests are too easy, the Trump administration is planning to bring back the 2020 version of the test.
For the test, applicants have to submit a former N-400 seeking naturalisation. They would be required to pass a background check and meet residency tenure, along with other requirements. After this, they will have to attend an interview where they take two tests: One is an English test, and the other is a civic test.
Source: US citizenship test too easy? Trump bringing back 2020 naturalisation format
2025/07/26 Leave a comment
Of note:
For years, Marianne Hirsch, a prominent genocide scholar at ColumbiaUniversity, has used Hannah Arendt’s book about the trial of a Nazi war criminal, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” to spark discussion among her students about the Holocaust and its lingering traumas.
But after Columbia’s recent adoption of a new definition of antisemitism, which casts certain criticism of Israel as hate speech, Hirsch fears she may face official sanction for even mentioning the landmark text by Arendt, a philosopher who criticized Israel’s founding.
For the first time since she started teaching five decades ago, Hirsch, the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, is now thinking of leaving the classroom altogether.
“A university that treats criticism of Israel as antisemitic and threatens sanctions for those who disobey is no longer a place of open inquiry,” she told The Associated Press. “I just don’t see how I can teach about genocide in that environment.”
Hirsch is not alone. At universities across the country, academics have raised alarm about growing efforts to define antisemitism on terms pushed by the Trump administration, often under the threat of federal funding cuts.
Promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the definition lists 11 examples of antisemitic conduct, such as applying “double standards” to Israel, comparing the country’s policies to Nazism or describing its existence as “a racist endeavor.”
Ahead of a $220 million settlement with the Trump administration announced Wednesday, Columbia agreed to incorporate the IHRA definition and its examples into its disciplinary process. It has been endorsed in some form by Harvard, Yale and dozens of other universities.
While supporters say the semantic shift is necessary to combat evolving forms of Jewish hate, civil liberties groups warn it will further suppress pro-Palestinian speech already under attack by President Donald Trump. …
Source: A Columbia genocide scholar says she may leave over university’s new definition of antisemitism
2025/07/25 Leave a comment
Dispiriting. But kudos for Lyons for opening sharing her frustrations and critiques regarding the silence of business and faith leaders. Most despairing comment to me was this reference to silos:
“Lyons told The Canadian Jewish News that Amira Elghawaby, the federal government’s special representative on combating Islamophobia, tried to work with Lyons on fighting hate, citing an apparently shelved plan to visit provincial education ministers together.
“Neither my community, nor her community, were happy all the time to see us in pictures together,” Lyons said. “There were often people who just simply didn’t want me participating in respectful dialogues, or wouldn’t come into the room.””
Ottawa’s outgoing envoy for tackling antisemitism is accusing Canada’s business sector and civil society of failing to call out a rising tide of hate against Jews and other minorities.
In an extensive interview with The Canadian Jewish News, Deborah Lyons also said she could not get a meeting with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre during her nearly two-year term.
In a statement sent to The Canadian Press, the Conservatives said that Lyons was “powerless” in her job.
Lyons resigned early in her term as Canada’s special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism. She said her decision reflected her “despair” over the growing gulf in society over violence in the Middle East and the failure of many Canadians to find common ground against hate.
“People were listening and hearing on different frequencies, and so we just were not connecting,” said Lyons. “That was where the big despair comes from.”
She said her work wasn’t made any easier by the silence of corporate leaders “whom I asked many times to stand up,” and by faith leaders who seemed to keep quiet on the suffering of people from other religions.
“I was incredibly disappointed with business leaders,” she said.
“We have a tendency to want to blame politicians all the time, but where have the faith leaders been? Where have the priests and ministers and rabbis and imams and so forth (been)?”
Lyons said that some community leaders did ask for her help in finding the right words to speak out against hate — because they feared that they would offend one community if they stood up for another.
“I’ve been really quite amazed — and often become quite despondent and despairing — about the fact that it was hard to get people to speak up. To speak with clarity, to speak with conviction,” she said.
“The mark of a country is not the courage of its military. It is the courage of its bystanders.”
The Canadian Press has requested an interview with Lyons but has not yet had a response.
Lyons told The Canadian Jewish News that Amira Elghawaby, the federal government’s special representative on combating Islamophobia, tried to work with Lyons on fighting hate, citing an apparently shelved plan to visit provincial education ministers together.
“Neither my community, nor her community, were happy all the time to see us in pictures together,” Lyons said. “There were often people who just simply didn’t want me participating in respectful dialogues, or wouldn’t come into the room.”
She said that indicates a “weakening” in the ability of both Canadian society and the broader western world to stand for common human values.
Lyons said she lacked the energy at times to bridge that gap.
“I held back from having some discussions, because I knew there was going to be animosity, or I wasn’t going to be welcome in the room. It disappoints me,” she said.
Lyons said she could not get a meeting with Poilievre despite requesting one and having a cordial chat with him during an event.
“I tried to meet with Mr. Poilievre when I was in the job, and in the end I got a response that he was too busy to meet with me,” she said.
In a statement attributed to Conservative deputy leader Melissa Lantsman, the party did not dispute Lyons’ version of events.
“While communities face increasing threats, vandalism, intimidation and violence over the last 20 months, the Liberals deflected responsibility to a powerless envoy,” says the statement.
“We are ready to meet with the government at any point, because they’re the only ones with the power, the tools and the responsibility to do something — and they have done absolutely nothing to date.”
Statistics Canada reported this week a slight increase in police-reported hate crimes in 2024 compared with a year prior, and a very slight drop in those against Jewish people, who remain the most targeted group in Canada.
Lyons accused all three levels of government of failing to adequately co-ordinate their responses to hate, saying that issues like car theft or tariffs are seen as more tangible.
She said Prime Minister Mark Carney seemed engaged and requested a meeting with her, though she added it was not possible to meet with him before the July 8 date of her departure.
Lyons said she is leaving her job three months early not for health reasons but rather to restore “a little bit of the joy back into life” through retirement.
She said she would have liked to continue, but described the envoy role as more difficult than her stints as ambassador to Afghanistan and Israel.
“It was without question the toughest job I ever did.”
2025/07/25 Leave a comment
Good take:
…Yes, there is hypocrisy here. It’s a bit much to hear that it’s vitally important for Chip and Joanna Gaines to reject two gay dads (and their children!) from Christians who are also all in on Donald Trump. A gay couple on reality television is a bridge too far, but supporting a thrice-married man who was featured on the cover of Playboy magazine and was once good friends with Jeffrey Epstein is not?
But in another way, they’re not hypocrites at all: They’re budding authoritarians, and for authoritarians, a principle like “tolerance for me and not for thee” is entirely consistent. Authoritarians, after all, are supposed to rule.
When you possess a burning sense of certainty in your moral vision, intolerance is always a temptation. If you give your opponents a platform, won’t that lead some people astray? If error creates injustice (or worse, leads people to the gates of hell), why should error have any rights?
Think of the sense of entitlement here. On one hand, evangelicals say, “How dare you discriminate against us in the workplace,” and then turn around and tell a fellow evangelical couple, “You’re betraying us unless you discriminate against gay men at your job.” Evangelicals aren’t a superior class of citizen. We don’t get to enjoy protection from discrimination and the right to discriminate at the same time.
In times of religious and political conflict, I turn to two very different historic figures — the Apostle Paul and James Madison. In what might be some of the most ignored verses in the New Testament, Paul warned early Christians against imposing the same moral standards on those outside the church as those inside.
“I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people,” Paul said in 1 Corinthians, “not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world.”
“What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church?” Paul asks. “Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. ‘Expel the wicked person from among you.’”
One of the fundamental problems with the American evangelical church is that it so often gets that equation exactly backward. It is remarkably permissive of abusive Christian individuals and institutions — especially if those individuals or institutions are powerful or influential — even as it can be remarkably hostile toward those people outside the church.
Evangelicals then compound the problem by viewing with deep suspicion and mistrust those people who blow the whistle on church misconduct while revering those people who are “bold” and “brave” enough to focus their fire on everyone else.
Paul’s words represent basic Christianity. Jesus himself admonished his disciples to remove the planks from their own eyes before trying to remove the “speck of sawdust” from someone else’s, and he warned that “you will be judged by the same standard with which you judge others.”
This doesn’t mean that we can’t or shouldn’t make moral judgments, but rather that we should do so with extreme humility, focusing on addressing our own flaws first.
But that’s a command to believing Christians. How should we all deal with disagreement on fundamental matters?
In Federalist No. 10, Madison wrestled with the question of how to create a lasting republic that would invariably include a broad range of competing factions. It’s easy for us to look back at the founding and dismiss its diversity by comparison to our own. After all, the founders were mainly a collection of relatively privileged Protestant white men.
That statement is true, but incomplete. Early America was remarkably diverse by the standards of the day. The religious complexity of early America was its own small miracle. When Europe encountered similar divisions, it descended into the Wars of Religion and drenched itself in blood.
The Wars of Religion are ancient history to us, but they were much more present in the Colonial era. The Wars of Religion were as recent to James Madison as World War I is to us, and they were destructive on a vast scale. The challenge of genuine religious diversity was very much on the founders’ minds.
How do you live in a pluralistic republic without abandoning your core convictions? Madison admonished us not to yield to two related temptations. Don’t try to diminish liberty and don’t try to establish uniformity of opinion.
Instead, he said, the answer was to “extend the sphere” of the republic, to “take in a greater variety of parties and interests.” In this circumstance, “you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.”
The sphere of the American republic extends to conservative evangelicals and to gay dads. It includes people who believe every word of the Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit and those who think it’s no more credible than a comic book. One of the beauties of our culture at its best is that no side of the American divide has to abandon any of its core convictions to enter the public square or to engage in the stream of American commerce….
2025/07/22 Leave a comment
More on ill-advised naming decisions:
…Sankofa Square is the obscure new name for Yonge-Dundas Square, the one-acre public space at the corner of Yonge and Dundas streets, right across from the Eaton Centre. Sankofa Day, its organizers tell us, is another name for the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition.
In 2021, the city government decided to erase the name Dundas from the square bearing his name. It was a time when statues were being toppled and historical figures cancelled in the name of social justice.
Henry Dundas was a leading British statesman of the Georgian era. His critics say he was responsible for delaying the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. His defenders say he was a sincere opponent of slavery who orchestrated a tactical delay in parliament to pave the way for eventual abolition.
City councillors brushed aside these complexities and voted to rename the square, though not the street (which would be too expensive). Various new names were kicked around. One suggestion was Lightfoot Square, after the iconic singer who played many times at Massey Hall around the corner. But, no, that would have been too easy.
Instead, the city struck a committee: the Recognition Review Community Advisory Committee, in fact. After what the group that runs the square calls “two years of careful work,” it announced its choice. Yonge-Dundas Square would become Sankofa Square.
Torontonians were understandably bewildered. They still are. What or who is Sankofa? The square’s website explains that “Sankofa (SAHN-koh-fah) is a Twi word from the Akan Tribe of Ghana that loosely translates to, ‘go back and get it.’” The phrase “encourages learning from the past to inform the future.”
A-ha. Not surprisingly, the name has failed to catch on. Does anybody ever say, “Meet you at Sankofa Square?”
The name has no connection to Toronto or its history. Worse, after the name came out, critics pointed out that the Akan people themselves once kept and traded slaves. Awkward….
Source: A party to celebrate a mistake
2025/07/21 Leave a comment
…These days, the people who most often compliment my spoken English are Uber drivers from the Middle East or South Asia. Go figure. When I tell them I’ve been in Canada for more than 50 years, they understand. And then we move on to other topics, learning a little about each other’s life experience.
I have been at the other end as well. Once in Petra, Jordan, I came across a local girl – no more than 10 or 11 years old – who was selling postcards and trinkets to tourists. Her English was impeccable; her diction divine. I couldn’t help but remark how well she spoke English, and asked her where she learned to speak so well. She pointed to a collection of buildings, beyond the surrounding hills. I could see satellite dishes. “BBC,” she said. I was amazed at her intelligence and ability to absorb linguistic skills.
Language expectations can lead to comical situations. At one of my daughter’s soccer matches, the opposing coach was yelling instructions at his players in a thick Scottish brogue. I could barely understand a word. A fellow parent concurred. We both laughed at the imaginary scenario of a brown woman (me) yelling, “Speak English!” at a Caucasian male.
Not everyone sees these exchanges as innocuous. As Mr. Harris, the Liberian youth advocate, alluded, the main issue is the set of low expectations behind the compliment. Even though well-intentioned, it can be viewed as a “microaggression” – a term popularized by Columbia psychology professor Dr. Derald Wing Sue to describe “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioural or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory or negative attitudes toward stigmatized or culturally marginalized groups.”
To be honest – and I speak only for myself – I haven’t figured out how sincerely complimenting my language skills is hostile, derogatory or a reflection of negative attitudes. As for expectations, the most important are those that I place on myself – not those held by others. And if someone appreciates my language skills, why not simply accept a simple act of kindness?
I do know that in our attempts to avoid offending sensitivities, we sometimes close the door to simple, personal communication that can actually strengthen common human ties. And if there are misunderstandings, these can be cleared up without causing too much fuss. Let’s have a bit more faith in the better side of human nature.
Source: I’m not offended when people praise my spoken English
2025/07/19 Leave a comment
Nice post on the use of language. Plain language vs legalese:
When Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote her ringing dissent in the case of Trump v. CASA, which severely curtailed the ability of lower courts to serve as a check on unlawful executive orders, she wanted to make abundantly clear the danger of what she regarded as a “seismic shock” to American legal norms. “Courts must have the power to order everyone (including the executive) to follow the law — full stop,” she wrote. She continued, in a voice dripping with sarcasm, “The majority sees a power grab — but not by a presumably lawless executive choosing to act in a manner that flouts the plain text of the Constitution. Instead, to the majority, the power-hungry actors are … (wait for it) … the district courts.”
Social media platforms exploded with outrage.
One user asked, in apparent disbelief, “Did Ketanji Brown Jackson actually pop that stupid little ‘wait for it’ gag in a SCOTUS opinion?” Another said the dissent “single-handedly degraded 235 years, four months, and 25 days of SCOTUS precedent.” The worst of them turned the justice’s language back on her as a weapon. “Ketanji Brown Jackson is … (wait for it) …” — well, I won’t repeat the insult here, but for good measure, commenter added, “full stop.”
Her critics were right to note that Justice Jackson was doing something unusual. And it wasn’t just those examples. She peppered the whole dissent with expressions like “Why all the fuss?” “Do not take my word for it,” “Here is what I mean,” and the assessment — again with unmistakable sarcasm — “That is some solicitation.”
You won’t find anything like that in Marbury v. Madison.
What’s striking about Justice Jackson’s turns of phrase is that they employ what we typically regard as oral language — spontaneous, spoken words — in an extremely serious written text. That choice and the blowback it encountered are a chance to consider the arbitrariness and narrowness of the conventions dictating how legal opinions should be written. The expectation that their language be timeless, faceless and Latinate is a matter of custom, not necessity. “Why all the fuss?” indeed.
Justice Jackson is, at 54, the second-youngest justice on the court. She was raised in the 1980s, a time when America’s writing culture was getting markedly less hidebound. Waving aside the hats and girdles and stuffy dance steps of old, the counterculture had shown America how to let its language hang out, too. A new, looser style of writing allowed a play between the oral and the written, and the result enriched the culture rather than impoverishing it.
I can’t speak for Justice Jackson, but that shift had a big impact on a great many people who grew up in that era’s wake. It definitely had a big impact on me. I write in what I hope is a conversational style. Like Justice Jackson, I have sometimes been scolded for it by people who would prefer that I write “with a tie on,” as it were.
Justice Jackson isn’t the only writer to experiment with mixing orality into rarefied texts. Saul Bellow reveled in the highflying lexicographic richness of the English language, but then every so often paused for a fillip of the colloquial. In “Seize the Day,” he describes a character in language so precise and vivid that it verges on poetry: “And in the dark tunnel, in the haste, heat, and darkness which disfigure and make freaks and fragments of nose and eyes and teeth, all of a sudden, unsought, a general love for all these imperfect and lurid-looking people burst out in Wilhelm’s breast. He loved them. One and all, he passionately loved them.” Just a bit later, Bellow renders the character’s thoughts, and he does so in the baggier structure of speech: “That’s the right clue and may do me the most good. Something very big. Truth, like.”
Key is the “Truth, like,” approximate and slangy, the way that the character would really talk and think. In its immediacy and urgency, oral language pulls us in, makes us listen once we have sat still. Weaving it together with a more formal written style is Bellovian jazz.
Back to Justice Jackson. Behind all the harrumphing is an assumption that language that is accessible cannot also be precise. But Justice Jackson’s own words show that this assumption is mistaken. “It is odd, to say the least,” she wrote, “that the court would grant the executive’s wish to be freed from the constraints of law by prohibiting district courts from ordering complete compliance with the Constitution. But the majority goes there.” The second-sentence shift to spoken language conveys fervor, urgency and concern, but it doesn’t lessen the scalpel-like precision of the first sentence. And its “Oh-no-you-didn’t!” informality heightens the sense that this is not a remote matter of merely academic interest.
And, as always, orality grabs your attention. Think about how much less powerful her point would be if she stuck to more traditional, formal language such as “the majority ventures this regardless.”
The evolution of language always encounters resistance, and sometimes outrage. When the word “ain’t” appeared in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary in 1961, purists freaked out — and The Times demanded its removal. That response didn’t age well, and neither does the hue and cry over Justice Jackson’s impassioned attempts to convey a sense of urgency. Call it Jacksonian jazz, if you like. But calling it stupid is just nastiness — full stop.
Source: Listen Up. Ketanji Brown Jackson Is Speaking to You.
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Multicultural Meanderings 