Éthique et culture religieuse: contre tous les dogmatismes | Le Devoir

2017/01/17 Leave a comment

Good defence of the Quebec ethics and religious culture course by Christine Cossette who teaches it:

Je dis aussi à mes élèves que le doute fait partie de la foi et la rend plus intelligente en l’éloignant des dogmatismes. La foi n’est pas une évidence ; elle doit se soumettre constamment à l’esprit critique. Je la présente donc non pas comme une instance qui dit quoi penser, mais plutôt comme celle qui donne des outils pour mieux penser sa vie. C’est alors que la religion est au service de l’homme et non le contraire.

Ce que le volet Culture religieuse m’autorise à faire, c’est de mettre en lumière le nécessaire travail d’exégèse sur les textes sacrés. En étudiant par exemple la question de l’origine de la vie, je vois le darwinisme et j’analyse le contexte d’écriture des récits de la Genèse qui peuvent, s’ils sont lus mot à mot, mener à de l’obscurantisme. Mes élèves comprennent donc que, dans ces textes, scientifiques et bibliques, deux discours se côtoient mais ne s’opposent pas et qu’un scientifique peut donc être croyant ou non.

Le cours d’ECR m’offre aussi l’occasion de parler de la spiritualité qui est la commune condition humaine (qu’on soit religieux ou pas). En effet, l’être humain n’a pas nécessairement besoin de se lier à une quelconque divinité pour vivre de valeurs qui le grandissent. La spiritualité appartient à l’homme dans son humanité la plus profonde, précisément parce qu’il porte en lui un mystère qui le dépasse. L’occasion est belle ici de parler de ceux qui ont ouvert d’incroyables chemins d’humanité grâce à leur foi, à leur générosité ou à leur réflexion philosophique.

La mondialisation, avec ses limites et ses grandeurs, nous oblige à réfléchir sur l’avenir de l’humanité : comment en arriver à sauver un espace de dialogue entre chacun de nous ? Le combat n’est plus à faire entre les athées et les croyants, mais bien entre les esprits ouverts et les esprits dogmatiques qui, eux, prétendent connaître la Vérité. Or, on sait que le dogmatisme se cache autant dans le monde religieux que dans l’univers anti-religieux. « Pour mener ce combat pour la liberté et pour la tolérance, dit Comte-Sponville, nous avons besoin de faire la paix entre croyants et incroyants, de nous allier contre notre ennemi commun, qui n’est pas la religion, qui n’est pas l’athéisme, mais qui est le dogmatisme. »

Le cours d’ECR me permet de proposer cet espace de réflexion pour une humanité plus respectueuse des uns et des autres. Il me donne cette possibilité aussi de présenter ce que l’orthodoxe Olivier Clément appelle le « noyau de feu » de chacune des grandes religions en mettant en lumière ce qui les unit. Après tout, n’est-il pas honnête de dire que d’autres avant nous ont laissé des trésors pour vivre en humanité ?

J’aime donner ce cours. J’estime qu’il contribue à former des citoyens justes, courtois et à l’esprit critique. Mais je suis fatiguée de lire toutes les inepties qu’on peut en dire. Je rêve du jour où, enfin, ses détracteurs se donneront la peine de lire, non pas les cahiers d’exercices, mais bien le programme tel qu’il a été pensé, tout en précisant qu’il devrait être un peu plus balisé pour obliger ses professeurs à toujours plus de rigueur à travers l’apprentissage de fondements philosophiques, historiques et théologiques.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

No exceptionalism please, we’re Canadian: Mark Kingwell

2017/01/16 Leave a comment

Good piece against Canadian smugness:

Here’s the basic argument. Canada, unfettered by what Michael Ignatieff condemned as “ethnic nationalism,” has carved out a whole new way of being a country.

It is post-national. Its banking system is centralized and immune from wacky market fluctuation. Its health-care system is impeccably public. And above all, its immigration policy is tolerant and open-minded, making for the truly multicultural polity that provokes the world’s envy.

Now, far be it for me to dispute this vision. In fact, it is so familiar that some of us have been touting it lo these many long years. Back in 1999, I wrote a book that defended Canada’s postnational advantages and suggested we should be proud of our transcendence of the tired narratives of identity based on bloodline or ideology. I wasn’t the only one: Richard Gwyn and John Ralston Saul, plus a few other familiar names, made their own versions of the argument.

Right now, the advocates are slightly younger (and cooler) Canadian intellectuals, such as Stephen Marche (in The Walrus) and Charles Foran (in The Guardian). In a country as small as this one, it can be no surprise that I count these two men as friends. It happens that I also claim friendship with Andrew Potter, a former graduate student, who mocked Mr. Foran’s Guardian article on his Twitter feed, even as he is about to convene a serious conference on the topic of exceptionalism that features still more friends.

To repeat: It’s a small country. Maybe that’s the true exceptionalism in play here? Anyway, stories about how we are unique, paired with push-back replies, feel to me like those predictable-as-the-weather Canadian weather stories, where writers deplore the inability of once-staunch Canadians to deal with cold and snow. Were we ever really so robust that -30 C temperatures and a blizzard were just, you know, a lark? I doubt it.

I likewise doubt the new tales of exceptionalism, which have the feeling of a national theodicy. You remember the idea: Theodicy is the claim that God’s will is inevitably working itself out in this world, never mind all signs to the contrary. We may confront vast stretches of misery and suffering, but that is all part of the plan! As the refrain goes, paraphrased from the philosopher Leibniz, everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds!

After the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which devastated the city and killed thousands of innocents, Voltaire was moved to lampoon this sad, evil idea. His satire Candide (1759), a kind of proto-novel, remains one of the essential texts in the literature of enlightenment and good sense. The young protagonist, Candide, is a devotee of the new Leibnizian philosophy; his outrageous misfortunes, bravely borne, eventually force a change of mind.

Canadian exceptionalism is the new Leibnizian philosophy. The reasons for this are instructive, even if the argument itself is suspect.

We might note, first, that the term itself is tainted – another borrowing from the expansive republic to the south. U.S. exceptionalism is the covering-law theory that assumes the United States, different from all other countries, can do no wrong and brook no objection. Mr. Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” (#MAGA) is just the most recent expression of this perpetually self-renewing delusion.

Worse, though, is the self-congratulation contained in the position. Don’t get me wrong: This is a great country, and I would not choose to live anywhere else. But I don’t think we Canadians have any special purchase on justice, diversity or fellow feeling. This is not the best of all possible countries, as recent arrivals and indigenous peoples will certainly attest. We are as rife as anyone else in intolerance, bigotry and ignorance.

Unless and until we confront these facts about our political life, tales of exceptional virtue will continue to strike a sour note. Sorry, friends.

Source: No exceptionalism please, we’re Canadian – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Niqabs make witnesses more truthful? Not so fast, says critique of landmark Canadian study 

2017/01/16 Leave a comment

Strikes me as a valid critique but look forward to debate and further research:

A team of researchers schooled in deception has cast doubt on a landmark Canadian study which found that the wearing of niqabs actually improves courtroom truth-telling.

A critique of the study published this week claimed there were so many “limitations” to the niqab study that any move by the Canadian justice system to adopt its findings would be “naıve and misinformed” and could cause “irremediable harm to the judicial system.”

“The benefits of paying less attention to witnesses’ and lawyers’ facial expressions are neither theoretical nor empirically grounded arguments,” read the critique, published in Psychiatry, Psychology and Law and written by Vincent Denault, a lawyer and co-director of the Montreal-based Center for Studies in Nonverbal Communication Sciences.

Last year, a study out of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology directly challenged Canada’s Supreme Court ban on witnesses testifying while wearing a niqab.

The study, published in the journal of the American Psychological Association, had women don niqabs and tell lies while being questioned on camera. Then, volunteers were asked to judge the women’s truthfulness as compared to liars who weren’t wearing veils.

The results were that the veiled women were less likely to get away with lying.

“People were focusing on what the women are saying, rather than what they look like,” lead researcher Amy-May Leach told the National Post in July.

Most notably, Leach added at the time that “the courts were incorrect.”

The critique by Denault, which was co-written with deception psychologists in France and the U.K., criticized Leach’s methodology, asserting that the degree of truth detection may not have been as dramatic as depicted.

“The experimental setting improved the lie detection ability of the participants above chance, but the improvement is very weak,” wrote Denault in an email to the National Post.

But the main thrust of the paper was how the Leach study did not accurately replicate courtroom conditions.

For one thing, liars in the study were given only two minutes to craft false testimony, while under Canadian law a witness can practise their testimony for months.

The liars were asked “open-ended questions” rather than having to cope with the leading questions that would have been posed in a real cross-examination.

The women in Leach’s study were cast as impartial witnesses to a crime, when in reality most courtroom lying comes from either plaintiffs or defendants.

And the study only tested how a visible face affected truth-telling. “The function of witnesses’ and lawyers’ facial expressions goes well beyond the issue of lie detection,” it read.

Source: Niqabs make witnesses more truthful? Not so fast, says critique of landmark Canadian study | National Post

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Supreme Court to rule in immigrant’s revoked US citizenship – The Washington Post

2017/01/16 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to watch in the context of a Trump presidency. Similar issue as with respect to Minister Monsef’s country of  birth controversy: was it material to her family being accepted as refugees and later as citizens?:

The Supreme Court says it will hear an appeal from an immigrant who was stripped of U.S. citizenship for lying about the circumstances that brought her to this country.

The justices said Friday they will review lower court decisions that upheld a criminal conviction against Divna Maslenjak of Ohio. The conviction automatically revoked her citizenship.

The issue for the justices is how important her false statements were to her application to become an American citizen. Lower courts have disagreed about the standard.

Maslenjak is an ethnic Serb from Bosnia. She and her family were granted refugee status in 1999 and settled near Akron in 2000. She became a citizen in 2007.

She initially told immigration officials her husband had not served in the Bosnian Serb military.

Filed under Citizenship, Multiculturalism, Revocation Tagged with ,

DNA analysis proves Arabs aren’t entirely Arab

2017/01/14 Leave a comment

Fascinating genetic analysis showing just how much populations are ‘mixed up’:

Through DNA analysis, the project is answering people’s questions regarding ethnicity, race, and the overall origins of the human population and how we came to populate the Earth.

The Genographic Project lists a group of reference populations, where the typical national of each country is described according to genetic makeup. These are based on hundreds of DNA samples and advanced DNA analysis. Four Arab countries were part of the reference population list.

Here are some surprising discoveries on the genetic makeup of these four Arab nationalities.

Note that the Genographic Project only listed four Arab nationalities in their reference populations, which is the basis of this article. 

Egyptians are only 17% Arabian …

Did you know that native Egyptians’ genetic makeup is 4 percent Jewish diaspora?

Typically, an Egyptian native’s genetic composition is 68 percent North African, 17 percent Arabian, 4 percent Jewish diaspora, and 3 percent from Eastern Africa, Asia Minor and Southern Europe each.

The link to North Africa dates back to when ancient populations first migrated from the continent, which they did through the northeastern route on their way to southwest Asia.

The spread of agriculture led to further migrations from the Fertile Crescent back into Africa as did the spread of Islam from the Arabian peninsula in the 7th century.

Kuwaitis are 7% African …

Native Kuwaitis’ genetic makeup is: 84 percent Arabian, 7 percent from Asia minor, 4 percent North African and 3 percent from East Africa.

Ancient migrants passed through the Middle East when journeying from Africa to Eurasia. Some migrants loved the region so much they decided to stay, developing genetic patterns that were passed down to other generations.

The smaller components from Northern Africa and Eastern Africa may be due to the Arab slave trade, from the 8th to the 19th century.

Lebanese are actually 14% Jewish diaspora …

Lebanese natives’ genetic makeup is the most diverse of all four Arab nationalities.

Typically, a Lebanese natives is 44 percent Arabian, 14 percent Jewish diaspora, 11 percent North African, 10% from Asia minor, 5 percent Southern European and 2 percent Eastern African.

Ancient migrants passed through the Middle East when journeying from Africa to Eurasia. Some of these migrants settled in Lebanon, developing genetic patterns that transcended generations over time.

The Silk Road added genetic patterns from the farther north and east.

Tunisians are only 4% Arabian …

Natives of Tunisia have a pretty interesting genetic composition. They are 88 percent North African, 5 percent Western European, 4 percent Arabian and 2 percent from Western and Central Africa combined.

Historically, Tunisia’s location on the Mediterranean Sea contributed greatly to its broad genetic diversity.

The Arabian component came about with the arrival of agriculture from the Middle East as well as the spread of Islam in the 7th century.

Did you know these non-Arab countries actually have some Arabian genes?

1. Georgia: 5 percent

2. Iran: 56 percent

3. The Luhya people of Kenya: 2 percent

4. Natives of Madagascar: 2 percent

5. The Northern Caucasus (including Dagestanis and Abkhazians): 9 percent

6. Tajikistan (Pamiri mountains): 6 percent

7. Sardinia: 3 percent

8. Southern India: 2 percent

9. Western India: 6 percent

10. Indonesia: 6 percent

11. Ethiopia: 11 percent

12. Ashkenazi Jews (Jews who originated in Eastern Europe): 10 percent

Source: DNA analysis proves Arabs aren’t entirely Arab

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Peter Keleghan tells a personal tale of Canadian immigration with new documentary

2017/01/13 Leave a comment

The power of personal stories and narratives:

Peter Keleghan, one of Canada’s busier actors, is the creator and narrator of a highly personal documentary called Once an Immigrant, which will have its premiere Thursday on CBC’s documentary series Firsthand. Keleghan – known for his performances in The Newsroom, Slings & Arrows and Street Legal – is our on-screen guide, revealing the saga of how his own family fled Europe and landed in Canada.

Early in the course of the project, Baggage was one of the working titles under consideration. Chatting with me at a Toronto café the other day, along with his collaborator, director Michael McNamara, Keleghan explained what Baggage means. “It’s the stuff immigrants to Canada have to leave behind – what they had been through in their country of origin.”

Such as: racism, sexism, religious persecution, homophobia.

“The lack of all that,” he says, “is what Canada is about.”

Firsthand has replaced a previous CBC series, Doc Zone, which had been a home for general-interest documentaries. Unlike Doc Zone, Firsthand puts the emphasis on point of view and personal perspective. Once an Immigrantis an example of what the series is intended to achieve.

“We are a land of immigrants,” McNamara says. “It’s one of the things that separates us from the rest of the world.”
As the husband of Leah Pinsent, Keleghan has a father-in-law, Gordon Pinsent, who became an immigrant to this country, moving from Newfoundland before it became part of Canada. And Peter’s two children (born in Los Angeles from a previous marriage) were delighted to settle in Canada.

Keleghan describes the film as a cautionary tale. “I loved Meryl Streep’s speech at the Golden Globes,” he says. “We live in an era when Trump – a bigot, racist and misogynist who mocks disabled people – can be elected and become the so-called leader of the free world. And when you look at all the disruption in the rest of the world, you see a swing to the right happening with Brexit and Trump and what’s happening in Europe. It could easily happen here. We have to be very vigilant about protecting Canada’s inclusiveness and progressiveness.”

Suddenly, the unthinkable becomes thinkable. Could there ever be a wall along the world’s longest undefended border preventing immigrants from sneaking into the United States from Canada?

Source: Peter Keleghan tells a personal tale of Canadian immigration with new documentary – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Talking to In-laws Can Be Hard. In Some Languages, It’s Impossible. – The New York Times

2017/01/13 Leave a comment

Learn something new every day about the interplay between family relationships and language:

In-laws may be universally intimidating, but in some cultures, the deference paid them rises to a whole new level, at least linguistically.

A geographically widespread practice known as avoidance speech, or “mother-in-law languages,” imposes strict rules on how one speaks — or doesn’t — to the parents of a spouse, with daughters-in-law typically bearing the brunt of such limits.

In parts of Africa, Australia and India, some societies restrict the words a person can say after marriage. Some cultures have even barred all direct communication with parents-in-law.

Some married women who speak the Kambaata language of Ethiopia follow ballishsha, a rule that forbids them from using words that begin with the same syllable as the name of their father-in-law or mother-in-law.

This rule can complicate a conversation, but there are workarounds. Certain basic words in the vocabulary come in synonymous pairs. “One is the normal term, used by everybody; one is the term used by women who are not allowed to say that word,” said Yvonne Treis, a linguist at a French research institute, Languages and Cultures of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Euphemisms are another frequent solution: If the word “ox” is taboo for a wife to say, she may refer to “the one that plows” instead. The Kambaata language also has a word akin to “whatchamacallit” in English, useful in a pinch as either a noun or verb when no other alternative is available.

Avoidance speech is also practiced by speakers of some of the Bantu languages of southern Africa, including Xhosa and Zulu. Married women are forbidden from using their father-in-law’s name, or any word that has the same root or similar sound.

Bantu speakers often get around this restriction by borrowing synonyms from other languages spoken nearby. Some linguists think that is how click consonants found their way into Bantu speech: in words borrowed from Khoisan languages, which use clicks extensively.

In parts of India, a daughter-in-law is not allowed to use words that begin with the same letters as her in-laws’ names, requiring her to use a parallel vocabulary.

Avoidance speech was a common feature of many aboriginal languages in Australia. The custom has largely faded in some areas, but it is still widely practiced in the Western Desert region and Arnhem Land, according to Claire Bowern, a professor of linguistics at Yale.

Avoidance speech can be more of a two-way street in Australia, with restrictions applying across genders and generations. There are aboriginal cultures where a man and his mother-in-law are forbidden to directly address each other.

Filed under gender, Multiculturalism Tagged with

Marissa Mayer and the Failure of Trickle-Down Empowerment – The Daily Beast

2017/01/13 Leave a comment

Valid commentary by Erin Gloria Ryan on how the focus on those at the top, their successes and failures, often overshadows the overall context, realities, and class:

Mayer may not have identified as a feminist, but men who hate women sure celebrated her stumbles as though she was. A curious amount of schadenfreude followed any announcement of a problem at Yahoo. It seems her existence rubbed some observers the wrong way. And some who would have legitimate reasons to critique her work seemingly shied away, out of fear of being roped in with those who would howl about a woman being happy and successful no matter what her job, or how good she was at it.

This combination of voices—idiotic critique from those who would hate something no matter what, combined with reticence on the part of the thoughtful to offer useful critique from a place of good faith—is something that seems uniquely zeitgeisty, especially when it comes to powerful women. And, in that sense, Mayer’s rise and fall stands out as something that makes more sense than most things that have happened in the last 12 months.

In recent years, there’s been an upswell in corporate feel-good feminism. The type of feminism that means well but tends to focus on fighting the battles and celebrating the victories of only the most privileged among women, whether or not those women believe in those principles. The type of feminism that envisions that the collective action of all feminists will push women up the ladder one at a time, and that she, upon reaching the top, will reach down and pull more women up behind her.

It seems feminists want so strongly for a woman to be a visionary CEO, a tech genius, a president that they’re able to overlook glaring flaws, that they’re unwilling to critique or to be tolerant of honest critique from others. We want superheroes; we’ve got plain old human beings.

It can be tough to tease out legitimate skepticism of the work of women like Marissa Mayer from misogyny; misogyny has been practicing blending in for years. But it’s also silly to pretend that trickle-down feminism, that which trusts those at the top will somehow benefit those at the bottom in any tangible way, is a tenable focus for advocates of gender equality. Nobody can lift that many bootstraps on her own. Even with Alibaba money.

Source: Marissa Mayer and the Failure of Trickle-Down Empowerment – The Daily Beast

Filed under gender, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Muslim Girls in Switzerland Must Attend Swim Classes With Boys, Court Says – The New York Times

2017/01/12 Leave a comment

Good in-depth report on the decision and the accommodations that were offered, along with other examples where European countries are inflexible on accommodation issues.

Overly rigid approach IMO:

In 2008, school officials in Basel, Switzerland, ordered a Muslim couple to enroll their daughters in a mandatory swimming class, despite the parents’ objections to having their girls learn alongside boys.

The officials offered the couple some accommodations: The girls, 9 and 7 at the time, could wear body-covering swimsuits, known as burkinis, during the swimming lessons, and they could undress for the class without any boys present.

But the parents refused to send their daughters to the lessons, and in 2010, the officials imposed a fine of 1,400 Swiss francs, about $1,380. The parents, Aziz Osmanoglu and Sehabat Kocabas, who have both Swiss and Turkish nationality, decided to sue.

On Tuesday, the European Court of Human Rights upheld the Swiss officials’ decision, rejecting the parents’ argument that the Swiss authorities had violated the “freedom of thought, conscience and religion” guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights, which the court enforces.

“The public interest in following the full school curriculum should prevail over the applicants’ private interest in obtaining an exemption from mixed swimming lessons for their daughters,” the court found.

The case was the latest to pit freedom of religion against the imperative of social integration, and to raise the question of whether — and how much — a government should accommodate the religious views of Muslim citizens and residents, many of them immigrants.

The ruling could set an important precedent in other cases in which religious and secular values or norms come into conflict.

The decision comes as Europe has been struggling to integrate migrants, many from majority-Muslim countries where religious and social mores, particularly around gender and sexuality, can be at odds with liberal and secular norms of the societies where they have sought refuge.

Far-right political parties with anti-immigrant bents, from the National Front in France to the Danish People’s Party in Denmark and the Swiss People’s Party in Switzerland, have argued that too many Muslims have not managed to assimilate.

In May, the authorities in the canton of Basel-Landschaft — which is next to the canton of Basel-Stadt, where the swimming case occurred — ruled that two Syrian immigrant brothers, who studied at a public school in the small town of Therwil, could not refuse to shake their teacher’s hand on religious grounds. Their refusal to do so had provoked a national uproar.

The challenge of integrating immigrants has spilled over into culture, and, at times, helped fan a simmering culture war. In Denmark, pork meatballs and other pork dishes that are popular staples became part of a debate on national identity last year after the central Danish town of Randers voted in January to require public day care centers and kindergartens to include the meat on their lunch menus.

Supporters of the proposal said that serving traditional Danish food such as pork was essential to help preserve national identity. Critics said the proposal did nothing more than stigmatize Muslims, who had made no attempts to ban pork from school menus.

Germany was shaken during New Year’s Eve in Cologne in 2015 when young men, many of them of North African origin, committed sexual assaults during the street celebrations there. The attacks became an uncomfortable symbol of the challenges of integration in the country.

In France, the clash between secularism and religious conservatism came into sharp relief this summer when nearly 30 towns, mainly in the country’s southeast, introduced burkini bans, suggesting that the garments impinged upon French culture and way of life.

In the case of the swimming classes in Switzerland, the authorities ruled that lessons mixing boys and girls were an important part of the school curriculum; they did allow that the girls could apply for an exemption on religious grounds, but only if they had gone through puberty, which was not the case for the daughters of Mr. Osmanoglu and Ms. Kocabas.

The parents argued that even though the Quran does not require girls’ bodies to be covered until puberty, “their belief commanded them to prepare their daughters for the precepts that would be applied to them from puberty” onward, according to the court’s summary of the case.

The decision, by a chamber of seven judges, did not dispute that the denial of the parents’ request interfered with their religious freedom, but it emphasized that the need for social cohesion and integration trumped the family’s wishes. The court also noted that schools play “a special role in the process of social integration, particularly where children of foreign origin were concerned,” and that, as such, ensuring the girls’ “successful social integration according to local customs and mores” took precedence over religious concerns.

The parents have three months to appeal the court’s decision. Representatives of the family could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

In Switzerland, politicians and civic groups across the political spectrum welcomed the ruling, calling it an important validation of the supremacy of secularism and the rule of law, even as some Muslims complained that it reflected growing intolerance for religious minorities.

“The swimming pool verdict unfortunately is what we expected,” Qaasim Illi, a board member of the Swiss Central Islamic Council, wrote on Twitter. “Tolerance toward the religious is diminishing throughout Europe.”

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Supreme Court of Canada appeal on expatriate voting rights – February 16 schedule

2017/01/11 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see if the SCC accepts federal government arguments that the case is now moot given the provisions in Bill C-33. Unlikely that their will be any change due to the Cabinet Cabinet shuffle and the replacement of Maryam Monsef by Karina Gould, the new Minister for Democratic Institutions:

A federal law barred Canadians from voting in federal elections if they have lived abroad for more than five years. In Gillian Frank, et al. v. Attorney-General of Canada, two Canadian academics at Ivy League universities say that law violated the constitutional right of all citizens to vote. One judge of the Ontario Court of Appeal agreed, saying the law turned them into second-class citizens, and that even federal prisoners have a constitutional right to vote; but two judges said the government had put a reasonable limit on that right, because expatriates don’t live with the daily consequences of their voting decision. The Liberal government has since introduced a law to repeal the legislation barring voting from abroad, but it has not passed yet. The government argues the case is now moot; the court has not decided yet whether it is.

Source: A preview of the Supreme Court of Canada’s winter session – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →