Let’s Talk about culturally sensitive treatments for depression

2018/01/30 Leave a comment

One of the more interesting articles I have recently read and of particular importance given mental health issues is a diverse population:

Each week Dr. Yusra Ahmad, a psychiatrist and clinical lecturer at University of Toronto, meets six to eight women with a range of mental health disorders at a mosque in the city’s west end. She leads them through a program that combines mindful meditation with concrete skills to manage negative thoughts and regulate emotions.

However, this is not your typical mindfulness therapy. Each session began with prayers from the Qur’an and incorporates teachings from Islamic scholars.

She also uses imagery familiar to the women. For example, when leading a session on mindful eating, instead of using the example of a raisin, as she does with other audiences, she focuses on a date. The reason: Dates have an important role in Muslim traditions, enabling the women to relate to meditation techniques on a more personal level.

Dr. Ahmad is among a growing group of mental health experts who advocate a more culturally sensitive approach to treatment for disorders such as anxiety and depression than the conventional “one-size-fits-all” methods that currently apply.

An approach that recognizes Canada’s diversity, these experts argue, should become an integral part of the conversation on mental health, including during events like Bell Canada’s annual Let’s Talk campaign, which takes place on Jan. 31.

Immigrant mental illness

The argument for more culturally nuanced treatments rests, at least partly, on the idea that many Canadians come from a background where mental disorders are stigmatized and associated with hospital treatment for severe disease such as psychosis.

This stigma not only harms the patient, but often the entire family is ostracized.

Take Saira (not her real name), a 31-year old Muslim African-Canadian human resource manager, who was diagnosed last year with an anxiety disorder. Saira recalls being brushed off by friends and family with words like: “What do you have to be worried about, there’s nothing wrong with you.” Or, “you need to pray more.”

Such advice ended up worsening her feelings of isolation and her anxiety, to the point where she had to take health leave from her job.

Saira found Dr. Ahmad’s Mindfully Muslim program by chance on a Facebook group, after exhausting her options with conventional psychiatric treatment and medications. Dr. Ahmad’s six-week mindfulness program, with elements rooted in Muslim and African culture, gave her renewed hope, she says.

The latest data from Statistics Canada shows that in 2012, 16 per cent of Canadians met the criteria for a mental illness diagnosis.

But the Centre for Research on Inner City Health has found that although immigrants have similar rates of mental illness as people born in Canada, they make far less use of mental health services.

Managing difficult memories

Dr. Ahmad is not alone in her campaign to infuse cultural elements into mental health treatment of specific communities. Leysa Cerswell Kielburger, community program leader at The Centre for Mindfulness Studies in Toronto, has collaborated with Sistering, an organization for “at-risk” women in Toronto, to develop a drop-in mindfulness program for Syrian refugee women.

The program brings about 10 women together every week and facilitates a mindfulness program that centres on the trauma of being a refugee. A mindfulness-based cognitive therapy combines meditation with concrete skills to manage your thoughts, such as learning how to observe your thoughts and not to judge them.

The emphasis during the workshops is on managing difficult memories, taking care of the body and easing the stress of being a newcomer to Canada.

The women benefit from the program, Ms. Kielburger says, because they are in the company of others with the same refugee experience.

What’s more, they are able to talk about their experiences in their mother tongue and can access mental health services where they live, rather than in the more conventional but also more intimidating hospital setting.

Dr. Melinda Fowler, a Métis and Mi’Kmaq primary care physician in Winnipeg, approaches mental health treatment with an emphasis on spirituality — which most Indigenous peoples regard as a core tenet for effective treatment of mental illness.

Thus, Dr. Fowler begins each session with a traditional smudging ceremony aimed at developing a connection with her patients, and at helping them connect to their spirituality.

“There is a legacy of trauma, and mistrust of institutions such as health care in the Indigenous community,” says Dr. Fowler. She takes the view that by incorporating Indigenous customs in the management of mental disorders, patients are able to slowly regain a measure of trust in a system that has eradicated many traditional practices that used to be cornerstones of medical treatment in their communities.

Dr. Fowler is also taking her approach to indigenous mental health into the federal prison system. She has started a pilot program among inmates in the Prairie provinces that incorporates traditional ceremonies as well as Indigenous medicines such as weekay root, or wiikenh, a popular antidote for anxiety.

Spirituality in health

Arji Elmi, a social worker and PhD candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, enrolled in Dr. Ahmad’s Mindfully Muslim program as a learning opportunity to improve her skills as a crisis social worker. She says the experience has been transformative in her work.

She often found in the past that religion and spirituality were discouraged in the structured therapy programs offered in crisis centres — due to concerns that patients might feel they were having religion forced on them. Yet for for those Canadians whose spirituality embraces all aspects of their lives it must play an important part in their treatment.

Ignoring the key role of spirituality or religion in a person’s health can deepen the isolation that often leads to mental breakdowns, Elmi says.

Diversity means that therapy must take different forms for different groups, whether it is women discussing their stresses as they farm the land, or of Indigenous ceremonies designed to achieve emotional balance, or Catholic churchgoers filing into the confessional box each week to share their struggles with a priest.

When mental health providers incorporate cultural nuances and engage in community based treatment, they can go a long way towards improving the mental health of the most vulnerable Canadians.

via Let’s Talk about culturally sensitive treatments for depression

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Robin V. Sears: How Jagmeet Singh can teach a lesson on tolerance

2018/01/30 Leave a comment

Interesting and credible advice, including how to handle Air India questions:

Next year, Canada may face a test of our national foundations, that is our commitment to social inclusion and tolerance. Will this fragile consensus survive the bloodletting of a national election when one of the leadership choices is an ambitious Sikh man, in a time when some partisans would stir the embers of racism?

In the naïve euphoria of a “post-racial Presidency,” how many Americans would have predicted an openly racist American president would follow? The Conservative Party has yet to be persuasive about how deeply it has learned the lessons of its disastrous flirtation with Islamophobic racism. The Quebec political elite still needs to acknowledge the black crow feathers dangling from their lips.

The ability to set these boundaries of acceptable discourse falls heavily on one man.

In 2019, Jagmeet Singh faces Obama’s choice. Obama did not run as a black candidate — to the chagrin of many black activists, like his hopeless pastor who almost single-handedly torpedoed his candidacy. He ran first as the candidate of “the outsiders” — by race, by ethnicity, and by class. Later, he became the candidate and the president, of social justice and race. The sequencing was essential to his success.

Jagmeet Singh might consider a similar story arc. He need not present himself as a Sikh candidate, or even as the champion of non-white Canadians: those credentials are given. Until now, even dog whistle racism gets slapped down here.

So Singh can frame himself as the champion of all that we have achieved, the defender of that edifice against any who would undermine it, and the advocate of what more remains to be done to build a discrimination-free Canada. He can be the candidate who frames the debate on these questions — helping to ensure no one is tempted to whisper against Canadian Muslims, or him, on the basis of his skin or his religion.

Those journalists tempted to use the tragedy of Sikh terrorism to humiliate him should remember this: Singh comes from one of the most persecuted, and discriminated against religions in the world. Thousands of young Sikhs have died in recent decades in circumstances that pass no credible legal test.

Some Sikh zealots, as a result, have taken up arms and dreamed impossible independence dreams. This has been a tragedy for one community, Sikhs themselves. There is virtually no sympathy for the Air-India bombers in the Sikh community here — after all, those who died were predominantly their own children and their parents.

What those journalists who taunt Singh, insisting on a condemnation they dictate, need to understand why that stand-alone demand is so offensive. If the question were, “Given the persecution of your community, the destruction of your temples, and the death of thousands of innocent Sikhs in civil conflict, do you understand why some are tempted by terrorism in response?” You would get a resounding, “No!” and then an explanation of why. Singh might want to deliver that cultural history lesson proactively.

He could also deliver a hammer blow to anyone tempted to again try on a racist subtext by speaking out in Quebec. Attacking the slurs against that mostly progressive and socially inclusive community could be powerful. In preparation, quiet discussions with Quebec civic leaders about how to deliver the message, would be valuable in themselves and a powerful signal to Quebecers that he is listening, not lecturing, advocating not admonishing.

He could cite brave Quebec activists’ resistance to anti-Semitism and the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Duplessis era; the fight for civil rights for all Quebecers, by Lesage and Levesque. And he could celebrate the solidarity among Jewish and Catholic and Muslim leaders in Quebec City after the tragedy there. Tomorrow is the first anniversary.

Like Obama, he could acknowledge both the sins of the past, but also Lincoln’s “better angels” — our progress won by courageous Canadians in every generation. Underline the need to continue “bending the arc” of history toward justice.

He can remind Quebeckers and all Canadians of the personal bravery of Baldwin and Lafontaine staring down the Protestant and Catholic bigots among their own clans, creating the space that made a nation like Canada a possible dream.

The Canadian sanctimony that says there is no possibility of a racist nativism here is dangerous. The Ontario Human Rights Commission reported in December that nearly half of recent immigrants and refugees reported incidents of discrimination against them.

So, let’s pray that Jagmeet Singh and progressive Canadians can succeed in framing the discussion of inclusion versus racism as a path forward, not one sliding into Trumpian depths.

Source: Robin V. Sears: How Jagmeet Singh can teach a lesson on tolerance

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One year after mosque massacre, Quebec still in denial about event that traumatized province: Konrad Yakabuski

2018/01/30 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

On the first anniversary of the Quebec City mosque shooting, Quebec is still working through its grief. While those directly affected by the tragedy are still coming to terms with their own loss, much of Quebec remains in denial about the event that traumatized the entire province.

That is why the first anniversary of the Jan. 29 massacre of six innocent Muslims will not be deemed a National Day of Remembrance and Action against Islamophobia. And even many of those who first proposed the idea agree that it’s probably better that way.

“I’m disappointed,” Imam Hassan Guillet told Le Devoir with respect to the Quebec government’s rejection of the proposal put forward by the National Council of Canadian Muslims. “But if it is adopted [amid] discord, quibbling and bitterness, I prefer that it not be adopted.”

That discord and bitterness should prevail in the place of generosity and compassion is not that surprising. While the past year has witnessed thousands of acts of kindness on the part of non-Muslim Quebeckers toward their Muslim brothers and sisters, the shooting thrust into the open a debate that many feared Quebec was not ready to have. They turned out to be right.

Before tempers rose over the proposal for a National Day against Islamophobia, there were flare-ups over proposed government hearings into systemic discrimination and racism, a municipal referendum on a Muslim cemetery near Quebec City and, most bitterly, Bill 62. The latter, adopted last fall, forbids face coverings when receiving or providing public services in the province.

Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard has spent the past year walking on egg shells. His initial reflexes have generally been the right ones, embodying a generosity of spirit that should do Quebeckers proud. But the Liberal Premier struggles with the identity issues that remain the main currency politics in Quebec. The opposition Parti Québécois and Coalition Avenir Québec have managed to portray any gesture toward religious minorities as a sign of weakness, as if the task of combatting prejudice and defending minority rights doesn’t concern all Quebeckers.

Hence, Mr. Couillard must preface any discussion on the topic with a disclaimer. “I repeat, Quebec is not any more racist or different than any other society and we face the same challenges as all societies that have to manage diversity,” the Premier declared last week as he explained why his government would not support the proposal for a day against Islamophobia.

“It’s preferable to mobilize around a day or week of action against racism and discrimination of all kinds, rather than single out one,” he said. “One kind of racism is not worse than another.”

It’s true that Quebec is hardly alone in grappling with how to address discrimination toward Muslims. The debate last year over a House of Commons motion condemning Islamophobia demonstrated the degree to which the issue stirs passions across the country. And almost no European country has avoided the ugliness of a far-right backlash against Muslim immigration.

Still, it is not accusing Quebec of being any more racist than anywhere else to suggest that conflicts involving the province’s Muslim population suffer from the added strain of Quebeckers’ own self-perception as a threatened minority within Canada. Not only does this Québécois minority in Canada speak French, it has embraced a particular brand of secularism that makes room for public manifestations and symbols of cultural Catholicism, but draws the line there.

This creates a clash of cultures that has become increasingly difficult to resolve as newcomers seek to practise their religion in accordance with their constitutional rights, while a culturally Catholic majority worries about a return to the bad old days when religious authorities ruled their parents’ and grandparents’ lives.

The conflict is least visible in Montreal, where diversity is the norm, mixed marriages are common and hijabs, turbans and kippahs are as unremarkable as tuques in winter. But Montreal is not Quebec and Muslim congregations can now be found in more than a dozen smaller communities, from Shawinigan to Rimouski, and from Mascouche to Saint-Hyacinthe. These new neighbours are changing the identities of their communities – for the better, I would argue.

But they are easy prey for the haters. They might once have been easy to ignore. But they have found validation in the echo chamber created by social media and trash-radio hosts. The Quebec City shooting only seems to have emboldened them. The more Muslims seek to assert their rights, the more they push back.

How many anniversaries of Jan. 29 need to pass before Quebec faces up to them?

via One year after mosque massacre, Quebec still in denial about event that traumatized province – The Globe and Mail

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Public service needs better data to measure diversity, says task force

2018/01/29 Leave a comment

I have a mixed reaction to the task force report and its 44 recommendations.

On the one hand, I sympathize with the members in trying to provide practical and implementable recommendations on how to increase inclusion in the public service; on the other, I find so many of the recommendations either ignore or downplay the significant overall progress to date with the employment equity groups, advocate new structures rather than fixing the existing mechanisms, and proposes adding layers onto a public service already having difficulties managing existing obligations.

After all, historic and current numbers suggest self-identification and annual reporting have largely worked for the existing groups, particularly women and visible minorities.

The list itself reads more like a laundry list than a carefully thought out list of priorities.

Of the recommendations (and sub-recommendations), the following strike me as more important:

  1. preparing demographic and WFA (workforce availability) projections to reflect Canada’s diversity;
  2. collecting Census data on LGBTQ2 (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans(gender), queer, and two-spirit)+ people to determine;
  3. the proposed D&I (Diversity and inclusion) lens be developed further as the tool that the public service will adopt to (but the issue of possible duplication with  GBA+ needs to be addressed):a. support cultural transformation in the public service
    b. inform program design
    c. support policy development
    d. design and evaluate practices for people management
  4. the focus on unconscious or implicit bias in training, even if the pilot showed no evidence of bias in hiring, is nevertheless helpful across any number of areas;

The most questionable ones, IMO, are:

  1. reviewing the lexicon for identifying groups to modernize terminology for visible minorities and Indigenous peoples (allow public servants to spend endless amounts of time debating words rather than focussing on practical issues)
  2. developing a methodology to update employment equity WFA (workforce availability) estimates between censuses (too costly and not needed – we can live with the lag);
  3. including in WFA (workforce availability) estimates citizens and non-citizens who are living in Canada (hiring preference is granted to Canadian citizens and why should we set up a system that essentially suggests a greater representation problem than there is);
  4. Greater emphasis on departmental champions (how effective have existing champion networks been at effecting change, are we just adding another layer of talk shops?)

Unsure:

  1. establish a Commissioner for Employment Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, modelled after the Commissioner of Official Languages (more thought needed given the potential high cost – $20 million for OL – against other priorities as well as how it would interact with existing albeit imperfect reporting and mechanisms such as EE,  multiculturalism, disability)

Hill Times article below:

Planning the future of diversity in the public service is not possible with out-of-date data, leaving certain groups unintentionally sidelined, a joint task force studying equity initiatives found, after a months-long examination of inclusion and diversity in the public service.

In its final report released Dec. 11—Building a Diverse and Inclusive Public Service—the joint union-management task force on diversity and inclusion made 44 recommendations surrounding four themes: people management, leadership and accountability, education and awareness, and the consideration of diversity and inclusion.

The demographics of Canada’s population are drastically shifting, but the workforce availability (WFA) estimates, which compare the percentage of minorities in the Canadian population to their percentage in the public service, use data from the census, which is only completed every five years.

Waheed Khan, a member of the Professional Institute of the Public Service (PIPSC) and a co-chair of the task force’s technical committee, said because of the old data, diversity goals could often be drastically skewed.

“Right now, the [estimates say there is] about 12 or 14 per cent visible minorities [in Canada]… but if you look at the current data it is over 22 per cent,” he said, adding that this means deputy ministers may think they’re doing fine if their department is 13.5 per cent, for example.

Projections say the visible-minority population could reach 37 per cent in the future, he said, meaning suddenly 13.5 per cent doesn’t cut it.

The workforce availability estimates also don’t track LGBTQ Canadians or permanent residents working as bureaucrats.

Outside studies indicate that between five and 13 per cent of the population identifies as LGBTQ, but 54 per cent prefer not to disclose their sexual orientation in the workplace for fear of retribution or rejection from their colleagues.

Therefore, the report recommends having WFA estimates updated between the censuses, collect census data on LGBTQ people, track the WFA for non-citizen bureaucrats, and prepare demographic and WFA projections to reflect Canada’s diversity. Departments should then establish diversity goals based on that data.

The task force was created in November 2016 and included representatives from PIPSC, the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers (PAFSO), as well as Treasury Board, Health Canada, and Justice Canada, among others. It had a one-year mandate to study ways to “strengthen diversity and inclusion in the government,” according to the Treasury Board’s website.

Diversity and inclusion policies “enable the public service to leverage the range of perspectives of our country’s people to help address today’s complex challenges,” reads the report, and creativity, problem solving, and innovation are improved with varied perspectives.

Treasury Board is reviewing the report and determining how it wants to move forward with implementation. It did not respond to requests for comment by deadline.

Put people who understand diversity in top roles: report

Leadership and the way people are managed is the start of the shift, said Mr. Khan. The task force spoke to public servants through 20 focus group interviews, as well as an online survey that garnered over 12,000 responses. It also did research on provincial equity initiatives, as well as the Australian and British bureaucracies. There are about 262,000 public servants in Canada.

Establishing a Centre of Expertise on Diversity and Inclusion will help senior management implement policies to foster a healthier work environment, recommended the task force. It would determine better ways to communicate about equity issues; outline possible challenges or barriers; and work with other related groups to ensure consistency within the bureaucracy.

Mr. Khan said those who can manage diverse teams, such as those consisting of men and women, or different racial groups or cultures, encourages equity and so the bureaucracy needs to value that skill. This could be implemented by making it a job requirement, for example.

Equity groups—which include women, LGBTQ sexual orientations, Indigenous populations, those with disabilities, and visible minorities—are often expected to conform with the majority, he said, but good management can reduce the harassment and discrimination they face, allowing them to speak up more often.

“You should also have this intercultural effectiveness as a competency for people who want to move on to managerial positions,” he said, so that power dynamics begin to shift in an office.

Those who are included in the definition of equity groups often face more discrimination, he said.

Along with valuing the management of diverse teams as a skill set, the task force recommended hiring boards and other sources of authority be staffed with people from diverse backgrounds. As well, it recommends the creation of a Commissioner for Employment Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, modelled after the Commissioner of Official Languages. Accountability ensures action, Mr. Khan said.

Hiring practices were a big focus for the task force, said PSAC human rights officer Seema Lamba, who was also on the technical committee, as equity group members often feel they are included or excluded because of their status.

“Respondents don’t necessarily feel that the staffing process that they’ve experienced has been fair or transparent,” she said. “There needs to be more accountability around the staffing process, as well as oversight and monitoring.”

She added that since 2005, Treasury Board has increasingly delegated its authority in overseeing diversity programs, and what PSAC has seen is inconsistency across departments. One department may do a decent job around accommodation, said Ms. Lamba, but others might not.

Blind hiring practices—where any details about a person’s identity are removed—were recommended in the report. The Treasury Board Secretariat began testing name-blind recruitment between April and October in six federal departments, including National Defence and Global Affairs Canada, although 17 departments ended up participating. In a blog post Jan. 23, Treasury Board President Scott Brison (Kings-Hants, N.S.) said the experiment did not uncover bias, but the report notes that participants were aware they were participating in a name-blind recruitment project, which could have affected their assessment.

Diversity and inclusion lens, mandatory training recommended

When someone wants to develop an infrastructure project, such as a bridge, they have to do an environmental impact assessment, said Mr. Khan. It allows stakeholders to understand the effect of their actions and put mitigation strategies in place, if necessary.

A diversity and inclusion lens would do much the same thing for government policies, programs, and people management strategies. That way they can understand how these policies affect different groups.

The lens is an education tool, but the report also recommends mandatory diversity and inclusion training for all new employees and managers, and for equity conversations to be meaningful discussed in other training. Often it’s not that people are trying to be discriminatory toward equity groups, said Mr. Khan, it’s just that they haven’t been educated to understand other perspectives.

via Public service needs better data to measure diversity, says task force – The Hill Times – The Hill Times

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Europe’s multicultural fears hide an integration success story: Doug Saunders

2018/01/29 Leave a comment

While I haven’t read the Bertelsmann report yet, I am familiar with the OECD integration report as it is the best source of international comparisons. The above chart highlights some of the more significant indicators, showing overall a less positive picture for European countries than portrayed by Saunders:

It has become commonplace, in some circles, to seal an argument with a reference to “what is happening in Europe.” Many things are happening in Europe, but you know it isn’t a reference to the Eurovision Song Contest or the Swedish gender-equality laws or full employment in Germany.

No, “what is happening in Europe” implies that whatever collection of bad-news headlines you’ve seen involving bombs and riots and crime gangs and far-out political parties shouting about the collapse of Western civilization, are caused by the presence of darker-skinned Europeans with minority religious beliefs.

That was the non-subtle suggestion when the U.S. President deployed the phrase in one of his tweets last year: “Our country needs strong borders and extreme vetting, NOW. Look what is happening all over Europe.” It’s the subject of popular books such as The Strange Death of Europe by the right-wing British author Douglas Murray, which uses random anecdotes and factoids to persuade the reader that everything was grand and harmonious in Europe – during some non-conflict-dominated era that is hard to find in history books – until those Muslims arrived, at which point “the culture” fell apart. Many of his arguments resemble German author Thilo Sarrazin’s Germany Abolishes Itself, which additionally used long-discredited racial-science concepts to claim that Turks had lowered his country’s IQ.

A version has seeped into more moderate conversations. Many people now believe what British author David Goodhart coined the “Progressive’s Dilemma” – the notion that growing ethnic diversity inevitably erodes civic trust and support for social programs, because we don’t want our tax money going to people not like us. Of course, you have to believe that darker-skinned Europeans are “not like us.”

This all ignores what is actually happening in Western Europe – which is one of the most successful and rapid stories of cultural and economic integration the world has seen.

There certainly are many white Europeans who think their brown-hued neighbours are poorly integrated aliens. The migrant influx of 2015 and 2016 didn’t help – those hundreds of thousands of lost souls stole attention from Europe’s tens of millions of immigrants and minorities, whose stories are entirely different.

We now have very comprehensive data showing just how well-integrated Europe’s minority groups are becoming. Most recent, published late last year, is a big study of Muslim populations by Germany-based Bertelsmann Foundation. It was preceded by an even larger-scale study of integration by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

The German study found that “religious affiliation does not impede integration” in European countries. Not only that, but, as the OECD observed, “integration challenges do not increase with the share of immigrants in the population” – in fact, the countries with the largest immigrant populations tend to have the most total cultural and economic integration.

Immigrants and their offspring in Europe almost exclusively feel loyal to – and connected to – the country where they live; only 3 per cent of German and French Muslims and 8 per cent of British Muslims identify with their countries of ancestry (this is a lower rate than, say, European immigrants in Canada).

And they’re not forming “parallel societies”: Three-quarters of European Muslims spend their free time daily with European Christians, Jews and atheists – and that rate of contact increases with each generation.

Education is where Europe has often lagged: Its school systems often contain built-in incentives for minority children to fall behind or drop out. The Bertelsmann study found that the best educational integration is in France, where only 11 per cent of Muslims leave school before turning 18 (not much more than the ethnic-French population).

Germany and Switzerland, with their rigid and old-fashioned systems, have higher dropout rates – but they make up for this in employment, as immigrant-descended citizens in those booming economies have employment rates identical to the established population. Across Europe, the OECD says, immigrant employment is only three points lower than among the native-born.

Both studies found gaps and shortcomings in some places, especially educational success – but those are caused by European failures in policies and tolerance, not in lack of immigrant ambition.

Notably, both studies found populations who urgently want to be European, not “multicultural.” That’s a big difference: As historian Rita Chin observes in her book The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe, multiculturalism has largely been opposed by Europe’s minorities because of its “surprisingly undemocratic effects” – they’ve seen it as a barrier to integration; as a result, she writes, we now see “former colonials, guest workers, refugees and their descendants … woven into virtually every aspect of European public life.”

That – more than anything else – is what is happening in Europe.

via Europe’s multicultural fears hide an integration success story – The Globe and Mail

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Canada Confronts Growing Tensions Between Its Ethnic Communities | US News

2018/01/29 Leave a comment

Always interested to see how Canada is portrayed in the international media.

While this piece is refreshing in that it provide a more critical look than most, it presents a limited range of views (no matter how much I value the work of the Mosaic Institute).

And could reporters be less lazy in their reporting of hate crimes by looking at trends, not just one year results – the overall numbers have been relatively flat with some variation among groups:

During this past season’s observation of Hanukkah, at least a dozen synagogues and Jewish centers across Canada received the same letter — a sheet of paper bearing the depiction of a blood-soaked Star of David with a swastika in the middle. The message, written in bold black letters, was explicit: “Jews must perish.”

The incidents triggered police investigations across the country and critical declarations by Jewish leaders. But it also revealed blemishes on the social fabric of a country known for its harmony. “… this isn’t something that should upset just the Jewish community, it has to upset every Canadian because that’s not what we stand for, ” Judy Shapiro, associate executive director of the Calgary Jewish Federation, told reporters.

Canadians today find themselves grappling with issues that, from outside of the country, may appear very un-Canadian: reported hate crimes are increasing, some ethnic populations in the country increasingly are critical of how they’re treated by authorities and lawmakers are debating minority protections versus free speech rights.

“We like to hold on to the notion that Canadians value something called multiculturalism or pluralism,” says Pamela Divinsky, executive director of the Mosaic Institute, a Canadian think tank that promotes dialogue within diverse communities. “But there is growing discomfort with differences.”

To be sure, Canada is celebrated for its diversity and multiculturalism. In the 2015 Prosperity Index, put out by Legatum Institute, a London-based think tank, Canada finished first in the personal freedom category thanks to high scores in tolerance and civil liberties. Indeed, most Canadians would agree with the results of this week’s Best Countries survey results that for three consecutive years has ranked Canada as the country offering the greatest quality of life among the assessed nations.

But prominent social justice advocate Bernie Farber summed up today’s Canada by noting recently that relations between the country’s various communities “are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination.”

Statistics Canada recently reported a 3 percent increase in hate crimes from 2015 to 2016, when 1,409 such crimes were reported to police. Jews were the most targeted group (221 incidents), followed by blacks (214 incidents) and members of the LGBT community (176 incidents). While hate crimes account for less than 0.1 percent of overall crime in Canada, government statisticians suspect that two-thirds of such crimes are not reported. They add that reporting rates might vary by population; some targeted groups might be more willing to report hate crimes than others.

Months before the letters addressed to synagogues and Jewish centers were put in the mail, members of the Jewish community reported a handful of other anti-Semitic incidents in the Toronto area, including the appearance of swastikas on the walls of a university classroom and the phrase “Hitler was right!” painted on highway infrastructure.

A year ago, meanwhile, a gunman burst into a Quebec City mosque during evening prayers and opened fire. Six men were shot and killed and 19 others were wounded. The alleged shooter, identified as 27-year-old French-Canadian Alexandre Bissonnette, will stand trial on charges of first-degree murder and attempted murder.

 Vigils across the country expressed support for the Muslim community, but that groundswell was soon overshadowed by heated debate over a proposal in the House of Commons to pass a non-binding motion condemning Islamophobia and religious discrimination. Opponents argue that it will limit free speech or single out Islam for special treatment in Canadian law. Thousands of Canadians signed petitions against the motion and some took part in organized protests, where they clashed with supporters of the motion. It was passed in late March.

The Muslim community, which was the target of 139 hate crimes in 2016, was at the center of controversy again last October, when Quebec lawmakers passed legislation requiring people in that province to uncover their faces when giving or receiving public service. Many Muslims see the law as an attack on women who wear the niqab.

Muslims are not the only Canadians who take issue with how they’re treated by authorities. Many members of the black community believe police discriminate against them. In March 2016, Black Lives Matters members staged a protest outside police headquarters in Toronto, spurred to action by police shootings of black men in two separate incidents. One victim was shot while wielding a hammer and the other was killed while holding a BB gun.

Three months after that protest, the organization’s members brought Toronto’s annual Pride parade to a halt by staging a sit-in on the parade route. Organizers said they were protesting “anti-blackness” by parade organizers and police. Today, blacks are the target of more reported hate crimes in Canada than any group except for Jews.

“There’s an unacceptable gap between the promises we project to the world [as a country] and the realities African-Canadians get to experience every day,” says Canadian human rights lawyer Anthony Morgan. He has written about various attacks on black Canadians, including one in which several nooses were placed in the work area of an assembly plant worker in Windsor, Ontario.

A Hard-Right History in Canada

“There has always been a ripple of hard-right activity in Canada,” says social activist Farber, who is the former CEO of the Mosaic Institute, a Canadian nonprofit organization that promotes diversity. He points to Heritage Front, a Canadian white nationalist organization founded in 1989 and disbanded 15 years later, as an example. But he says that, for the first time in recent history, Canadians who hold such views feel emboldened to act on them and to share them with others. Farber attributes that development, in large part, to Donald Trump.

“When the president of the United Statesmakes common cause with Neo-Nazis, bigots and racists, it gives those people permission to climb out of garbage cans and pursue their hateful business,” he explains. “Unfortunately, it is no longer just street kids who are attracted to white nationalism. We now see articulate university students creating closed Facebook pages and organizing through social media.”

He notes that Bissonnette, the accused Quebec City mosque shooter, was a political science and anthropology major at a nearby university and had reportedly made online statements inspired by extreme right-wing nationalists. He “liked” Facebook pages of several politicians including Trump and far-right French politician Marine Le Pen.

Bissonnette denounced refugees in online posts, and he is not the only Canadian who has expressed antipathy toward newcomers. Last fall, ultranationalists staged a protest at the U.S.-Canada border.

Politicians have condemned attacks against minorities and some community groups have requested more funding and resources for police forces to combat hate crimes. But that won’t fix the problem, says Divinsky of the Mosaic Institute.

“We continue to look at differences as a problem, as something that needs to be managed, controlled, contained and silenced,” says Divinsky. “But we need to shift out mindset and see differences as our best asset. Our country is great place to live. For the most part, we live pretty damn well with our differences,” she adds. “But we must improve on that.”

via Canada Confronts Growing Tensions Between Its Ethnic Communities | Best Countries | US News

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‘One cannot change history’: Israel slams bill that would send people to prison for blaming Poles for Holocaust

2018/01/29 Leave a comment

Rightfully so. Poland continues to decline in recognizing its past and antisemitism. Those who do not acknowledge their history …:

Israeli leaders angrily criticized pending legislation in Poland that would outlaw blaming Poles for the crimes of the Holocaust, with some accusing the Polish government of outright denial Saturday as the world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the proposed law “baseless” and ordered his country’s ambassador to Poland to meet with Polish leaders to express his strong opposition.

“One cannot change history, and the Holocaust cannot be denied,” he said.

The lower house of the Polish parliament on Friday passed the bill, which prescribes prison time for using phrases such as “Polish death camps” to refer to the killing sites Nazi Germany operated in occupied Poland during World War II.

A group of children at the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp on Jan. 27, 1945, just after the liberation by the Soviet army.

Many Poles fear such phrasing makes some people incorrectly conclude that Poles had a role in running the camps. But critics say the legislation could have a chilling effect on debating history, harming freedom of expression and opening a window to Holocaust denial.

The bill still needs approval from Poland’s Senate and president. However, it marks a dramatic step by the country’s current nationalist government to target anyone who tries to undermine its official stance that Poles only were heroes during the war, not Nazi collaborators who committed heinous crimes.

Netanyahu’s government generally has had good relations with Poland, which has been recently voting with Israel in international organizations.

At Auschwitz on Saturday evening, Israel’s ambassador to Poland, Anna Azari, abandoned a prepared speech to criticize the bill, saying that “everyone in Israel was revolted at this news.”

In Israel, which was established three years after the Holocaust and is home to the world’s largest community of survivors, the legislation provoked outrage.

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, noting that exactly 73 years had passed since the Auschwitz death camp on Polish soil was liberated, cited the words of a former Polish president about how history could not be faked and the truth could not be hidden.

“The Jewish people, the State of Israel, and the entire world must ensure that the Holocaust is recognized for its horrors and atrocities,” Rivlin said. “Also among the Polish people, there were those who aided the Nazis in their crimes. Every crime, every offence, must be condemned. They must be examined and revealed.”

Today’s Poles have been raised on stories of their people’s wartime suffering and heroism. Many react viscerally when confronted with the growing body of scholarship about Polish involvement in the killing of Jews.

In a sign of the sensitivities on both sides, Yair Lapid, head of Israel’s centrist Yesh Atid party and the son of a survivor, got into a heated Twitter spat Saturday with the Polish Embassy in Israel.

“I utterly condemn the new Polish law which tries to deny Polish complicity in the Holocaust. It was conceived in Germany but hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered without ever meeting a German soldier. There were Polish death camps and no law can ever change that,” Lapid wrote.

That sparked the Embassy to respond: “Your unsupportable claims show how badly Holocaust education is needed, even here in Israel.”

“My grandmother was murdered in Poland by Germans and Poles,” Lapid responded. “I don’t need Holocaust education from you. We live with the consequences every day in our collective memory. Your embassy should offer an immediate apology.”

To which the embassy retorted: “Shameless.”

Israel’s foreign ministry said the deputy Polish ambassador to Israel had been summoned for a clarification.

For decades, Polish society avoided discussing the killing of Jews by civilians or denied that anti-Semitism motivated the slayings, blaming all atrocities on the Germans.

In this photo provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, people walk on a commercial street in the Lublin ghetto near a sign forbidding entry, in Warsaw, Poland.

A turning point was the publication in 2000 of a book, “Neighbours,” by Polish-American sociologist Jan Tomasz Gross, which explored the murder of Jews by their Polish neighbours in the village of Jedwabne. The book resulted in widespread soul-searching and official state apologies.

But since the conservative and nationalistic Law and Justice party consolidated power in 2015, it has sought to stamp out discussions and research on the topic. It demonized Gross and investigated whether he had slandered Poland by asserting that Poles killed more Jews than they killed Germans during the war.

Holocaust researchers have collected ample evidence of Polish villagers who murdered Jews fleeing the Nazis. According to one scholar at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, of the 160,000-250,000 Jews who escaped and sought help from fellow Poles, about 10 per cent to 20 per cent survived. The rest were rejected, informed upon or killed by rural Poles, according to the Tel Aviv University scholar, Havi Dreifuss.

The memorial issued a statement Saturday night opposing the Polish legislation and trying to put into historical context the “complex truth” regarding the Polish population’s attitude toward its Jews.

“There is no doubt that the term ‘Polish death camps’ is a historical misrepresentation,” the Yad Vashem memorial said. “However, restrictions on statements by scholars and others regarding the Polish people’s direct or indirect complicity with the crimes committed on their land during the Holocaust are a serious distortion.”

Source: ‘One cannot change history’: Israel slams bill that would send people to prison for blaming Poles for Holocaust

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Canadians don’t want an anti-Islamophobia day: [Forum] poll

2018/01/29 Leave a comment

Not surprising given other polling showing anti-Muslim attitudes or fears but in the end, not an issue that should necessarily be decided by public opinion. Demographics also not surprising:

Should Jan. 29 be set aside to combat Islamophobia?

That day — tomorrow —  is the first anniversary of the mass murder at the Islamic Cultural Centre in Quebec City. Six Muslims were killed in this hate crime.

Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders in Canada would like to take a stand against intolerance and see Jan. 29th declared a National Day of Remembrance and Action on Islamophobia.

A recent Forum Poll suggests that many Canadians are against this.

Forum Research polled 1,408 Canadian voters and found half (49%) disapproved of designating such a day. Almost 40% disapproved strongly.

Approval came from only 17% of those polled; strong approval was noted among 7%.

The same number — 7% — say they don’t know, while fully a quarter (26%) neither approve nor disapprove.

So who is on the nay side? That would be older, wealthier men living in the Prairies or Alberta, half with university degrees and 69% of whom support the Conservative party.

Those who approve a National Day of Remembrance and Action on Islamophobia are aged 34 or younger and support the Liberals or the NDP. They are also the least wealthy (26%).

The question asked was: Would you approve or disapprove of a national day of remembrance and action on Islamophobia?

Results based on the total sample are considered accurate +/- 3%, 19 times out of 20.

Source: Canadians don’t want an anti-Islamophobia day: poll

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Le débat identitaire entraîne des dérapages, dit Couillard

2018/01/27 Leave a comment

Indeed:

Messages haineux, auto incendiée, manifestations de La Meute; les incidents à connotation raciste semblent plus fréquents au Québec qu’ailleurs dans un passé récent. Pour le premier ministre Philippe Couillard, cela pourrait être la conséquence d’un débat identitaire plus passionné au Québec que dans le reste du Canada.

On voit des excès de ce type dans le reste du monde. Ils semblent moins fréquents dans le reste du Canada convient M. Couillard. Le débat politique autour de la question identitaire nourrit peut-être cette tension, convient-il.

«On a chez nous un sentiment un peu exacerbé, sur les questions d’identité. C’est toujours un débat important et passionné. Cela a peut-être au Québec un niveau plus élevé» a souligné M. Couillard en marge d’une mission économique en Chine, à la veille du premier anniversaire de la fusillade à la Grande Mosquée de Québec.

Il insiste toutefois : «Le Québec n’est pas une société plus raciste que d’autres. On fait face aux mêmes défis que toutes les sociétés qui ont à gérer la diversité». La montée des crimes haineux «n’est pas uniquement au Québec. Il ne faudrait pas singulariser le Québec comme le foyer de ces activités-là».

La fréquence plus grande de ces dérapages à connotation raciste «est malheureusement le résultat de plus grandes polarisations qu’on voit dans nos sociétés. Polarisations de tous types : économique avec les inégalités, géographique entre les régions urbaines et les autres régions, et identitaire, où chacun se réfugie dans son coin et craint l’autre. Et ce n’est pas unique au Québec», affirme M. Couillard.

Source: Le débat identitaire entraîne des dérapages, dit Couillard

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The cautionary tale of Kellie Leitch: Stephen Maher on populism

2018/01/27 Leave a comment

Good reporting and analysis by Maher:

Still, there is no reason to be complacent.

Pollster Frank Graves, who recently completed a polling project for the Canadian Press to explore the prospects for northern populism, sees a shift in Canadian attitudes about the economy, immigration and trade that could provide an opening for someone like Leitch.

“I think Kouvalis was likely onto something in that this was a more resonant strategy,” Graves said Wednesday. “I think Kellie Leitch was mining a vein of this new ordered-populist outlook, which is expressing itself in the United Kingdom with Brexit and with Trump in the United States.”

Graves polled thousands of Canadians, putting them on a spectrum from open—pro-trade, with positive views on immigration—to ordered. He found a growing group of Canadians—particularly in southern Ontario—who are anxious about their economic prospects, hostile to the elite policy consensus, anxious about immigration and skeptical about the benefits of trade.

The highest scores were in Oshawa, Barrie, London, Hamilton and Windsor, places where many workers have had to leave traditional industrial jobs, much like the rust-belt voters who made Trump president.

The trend has reversed somewhat since 2015, when Justin Trudeau was elected, but Graves believes there is a significant constituency for a populist message, based mostly on economic pessimism. “It begins with economic despair but then mutates into fear of others, nativism, racism,” he says.

In 2002, 68 per cent of Canadians described themselves as middle class. By 2017, it had fallen as low as 43 per cent. Many people feel they are losing ground, and they are not convinced that the elites are looking out for their best interests.
“They say, quite rightly, this didn’t work for us,” says Graves. “We’re pissed off.”

But I don’t think that this means we can expect a Trump-style figure to arise in Canada. It’s hard to put together an anti-trade message that works in a country as dependent on exports as Canada is, and we are likely better at smoothly managing immigration than any other country in the world.

Ford, the most successful populist in recent Canadian history, was politically incorrect but he succeeded politically because he connected with non-white voters.

The Reform Party, which once flirted with anti-immigrant messages, abandoned those ideas and, after merging with the Progressive Conservatives, sent Jason Kenney around the country to connect with ethnic Canadians, a key part of their winning election strategy.

Conservatives who watched the party lose in 2015 after playing with divisive anti-Muslim rhetoric, do not think it is a winner at the ballot box. “For every vote you win that way, how many do you lose?” said one strategist.

There may come a day when anti-immigrant messages help someone like Leitch get ahead in Canadian politics, but her political career is a cautionary tale that ambitious would-be Trumps will ignore at their peril. In that sense, we should be grateful to her for her public service.

Source: The cautionary tale of Kellie Leitch

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