Jason Kenney on life after Ottawa and uniting Alberta’s right [comments on ethnic vote and Leitch]

2016/09/30 Leave a comment

Worth noting:

Q: Within the Conservative party, you were known as someone who connected with multicultural voters. But most recently, support for the party has melted away in those communities. What do you think is going on there?

A: I would challenge that assertion: it has not melted away. When we started this project in the 2004 election, the Conservative party was at just over 20 per cent of support of new Canadians, and by the 2011 election we were at about 42 per cent—a higher share of the vote than of native-born Canadians. We are the only centre-right party in the world of whom that is true. But I never had the hubris to imagine that we would have a kind of permanent lock on the plurality of that share of Canadian electors. I think what we’ve done through our hard work in cultural communities is to create a competitive political environment. No longer can any party, such as the Liberals, take for granted the support of new Canadians or cultural communities, as though they are some kind of a passive vote-bank.

Q: With the federal Conservative leadership race, you’ve made a few critical comments about Kellie Leitch’s immigrant-values test proposal. What’s your take on the screening people have to go through?

A: I have an enormous amount of experience in this area as multiculturalism minister for 10 years, then being minister of immigration responsible for screening and selection, and minister of citizenship. I find her approach to be disingenuous. I don’t think she’s ever thought deeply about these questions. She never raised these questions in Parliament, in public, in caucus or in cabinet. She seemed only to latch on to this as a theme after her campaign was circulating some questions on an online poll that was probably designed to generate email addresses. I just find the whole approach a bit slapdash. What concerns me is that these are extraordinarily sensitive questions that must be addressed with a great deal of nuance and prudence. Having said that, I do believe there is absolutely space for legitimate debate in a liberal democracy about immigration selection, screening and integration.

Q: You previously spent a lot of your time touring and campaigning with multicultural groups, and now you’re visiting smaller, rural areas in Alberta that must be a lot more homogeneous. What are you taking from those communities and hearing from people?

A: Rural Alberta is a lot less homogeneous than it used to be, partly because of my immigration policies. You go to a lot of small communities in rural Alberta and you’ll find a degree of diversity that probably hasn’t existed in terms of immigration for a century—you’ll find the Filipino grocery store, and the African Pentecostal church and maybe a mosque. Albertans are pro-immigration; they’re also pro-integration. In my years in this province I cannot recall more than a handful of expressions of xenophobia or nativism that I’ve encountered. It’s the land of new beginnings and fresh starts—it is rare Albertans who trace their roots here back more than a generation or two. It’s extraordinarily welcoming.

Source: Jason Kenney on life after Ottawa and uniting Alberta’s right – Macleans.ca

For the full, non-edited, comments on Kellie Leitch, see

Jason Kenney on Kellie Leitch’s values test

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

For Affirmative Action, Brazil Sets Up Controversial Boards To Determine Race: NPR

2016/09/30 Leave a comment

Orwellian. Self-identification is the only way, even if it risks some “gaming:”

Siqueira considers himself to be mixed race, known in Brazil as pardo, or brown.

“I consider myself to be a very typical Brazilian and I’ve always been very proud of it. In my dad’s family, my grandfather is black, my grandmother has Indian and white roots. And on my mother’s side they are mostly white, mostly Portuguese,” he said.

How he defines himself matters because he was required to self-identify on his application. In 2014, the government introduced a quota system for federal jobs. The affirmative action regulations require that 20 percent of all government positions be filled by people of color – either black or mixed race.

The problem came once the announcement of the appointments was made public.

People started investigating the background of who had gotten the slots. They got into Siqueira’s Instagram, his Facebook feed and they sent his personal photos to the government.

“A lot of people sent pictures saying, ‘Oh, this dude is white, he’s a fraud,'” Siqueira says.

Job Offer Put On Hold

People basically said he was gaming the system, lying about who and what he is to get one of the jobs. The backlash shocked him. He said he hadn’t even considered the quota system. He just put down what he considered himself to be.

But the controversy wouldn’t go away. The government was getting so much flack that it put Siqueira’s offer on hold.

And then the government went a step further.

In response to the outcry, they set up a kind of race committee to review his case, and a few others.

He was asked to present himself to a panel of seven diplomats in a room who would decide if he was really Afro-Brazilian, as he claimed.

They asked him a bunch of questions such as, “Since when do you consider yourself to be a person of this color?”

And then it was over.

What they decided was that he was not pardo, or mixed race. No explanation. No discussion. So he decided to sue.

And that’s when this story gets even more complicated. Because in order to “prove” that he was Afro-Brazilian, his lawyers needed to find some criteria. He went to seven dermatologists who used something called the Fitzpatrick scale that grades skin tone from one to seven, or whitest to darkest. The last doctor even had a special machine.

“Apparently on my face I’m a type four. Which would be like Jennifer Lopez or Dev Patel, Frida Pinto or John Stamos. On my limbs I would be type five, which is Halle Berry, Will Smith, Beyonce and Tiger Woods,” he said.

Like most people he has different skin tones on different parts of his body. But in none of these tests did he come out as lighter skinned.

He says the whole thing struck him as completely bizarre because identity, he says, is made up of more than just physical characteristics.

But this wasn’t just an isolated incident.

Mandatory For All Government Jobs

A few weeks ago, these race tribunals were made mandatory for all government jobs. In one state, they even issued guidelines about how to measure lip size, hair texture and nose width, something that for some has uncomfortable echoes of racist philosophies in the 19th century.

Source: For Affirmative Action, Brazil Sets Up Controversial Boards To Determine Race : Parallels : NPR

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Playboy and the False Normalization of the Hijab: Maajid Nawaz

2016/09/30 Leave a comment

Nawaz provides historical perspective to wearing of the hijab, contrasting liberal and conservative perspectives, which will provoke discussion and debate:

As a reforming secular liberal Muslim, I do not endorse the gender-discriminatory body-shaming and moralizing of the hijab. I will fight fiercely to protect anyone’s right to wear this medieval flag of female “chastity,” but that doesn’t mean I think the wearer is right to do so. Let us not ban the hijab, but let us not glamorize it either. I prefer leaving that to religious conservatives who are fixated on nudity, “modesty,” and female “honor.” This is a conservative, not liberal, view of the human body. Such illiberal, regressive-left promotion of religious conservativism—only for Muslims mind you—is nothing short of exoticized Orientalism rehashed.

 The assumption made by some liberals is that the “authentic” Muslim woman is the hijab-wearing one, while non-hijabis are seen as Westernized, inauthentic Muslims. Likewise, the religious-conservative Muslim assumption equates concealing the female form to “modesty,” as if a woman who shows her hair or reveals her figure is somehow immodest.

This is a not-so-subtle form of bigotry against the female form, and it has real consequences, including rising social-conservative attitudes across Muslim communities around gender and sexual freedom. In too many instances across Muslim-majority societies, including those embedded in Europe, this “modesty theology” has led to slut-shaming of women who do not cover. Worse yet, it can lead to so-called honor killings.

Many non-Muslims simply assume there is only one—conservative—way of being Muslim. But we Muslims are no longer this distant and native “other” that liberals and conservatives can visit once a year to share a bit of falafel.

We are born and raised among you, and Islam is therefore now firmly native to our societies. So judge us by the same progressive standards you reserve for everyone else. We Muslim reformers have to be able to demand the same progressive rights within our communities that are enjoyed by everyone else. Your intervention and interaction with Muslims’ intra-religious debate around these issues is not neutral. A civil war is raging within our communities about the future of Islam for Muslims.

Liberal Muslim theologians such as Britain’s Shaykh Salah al-Ansari, Dr. Usama Hasan, and Pakistan’s Javaid Ghamidi, argue that the hijab is not a religious duty (fard) at all. And that is how it used to be.

Up until the 1980s, the female body was not shamed out of public view in Muslim-majority societies. But from the ’80s onward, theocratic Islamism began replacing Arab socialism as the ideology of resistance against “the West.” This struggle against the “other” necessitated defining what is “ours” and what is “theirs”—and women, of course, were deemed “ours.”

Suddenly, women’s bodies became the red line in a cultural war against the West started by theocratic Islamism. A Not Muslim Enough charade was used to identify “true” Muslims against “Western” stooges. Religious dress codes became a crucial marker in these cultural purity stakes. Any uncovered woman was now deemed loose, decadent, and attention seeking. In short, aligned to the “Western enemy.”

Back to the Playboy shoot: The admirably entrepreneurial Noor Taguri advises younger girls who look up to her to “stay fearless and remember that everything you want is just outside your comfort zone.”

My advice to Noor is: I hope you do the same, sister. Do look up the late great Egyptian feminist Huda Sharawi who truly stepped out of her “comfort zone” when, in 1923, she shocked Muslims everywhere by removing her hijab publicly for the first time.

Within months Muslim women the world over were encouraged to shed this gender-discriminatory medieval throwback to “modesty.” Those were the days when genuine Western progressives supported genuine Muslim feminists.

 Source: Playboy and the False Normalization of the Hijab – The Daily Beast

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

Italy’s ‘Cultural Allowance’ For Teens Aims To Educate, Counter Extremism : NPR

2016/09/29 Leave a comment

Interesting approach.

One of the best initiatives of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship gives every new Canadian a one-year pass that provides free access to over 1,000 cultural and historical sites.:

Few things inspire more loathing in the hearts of high school students than the words “extra homework.” But as Florence Mattei hands out a pamphlet to her homeroom class at the Southlands School in Rome, she tells them they may want to give this assignment a chance.

“Who would like to read what it’s about?” she asks the room full of 18-year-olds.

A senior named Alessio translates from Italian into English: “For the people born in 1998 there is a 500-euro bonus that you can spend on cultural things, such as going to the cinema, visiting museums and this kind of stuff.”

He stares at the page in disbelief. But it’s true. Starting this month, Italy is offering its 18-year-old residents the equivalent of $563 to spend on culture, from concert tickets, books and museum admission to other qualifying events.

To get the money, they need to register online and download an app.

“Do we want to try?” says the teacher. “Yeah? So get your phone.”

Youth unemployment in Italy is nearly 40 percent in a country that’s been struggling economically for years. So the free cash is a welcome surprise for teens like Daniele Montagna, who knows where he is going to spend his first.

“On the concert of JB — Justin Bieber!” he rejoices.

And he can. The program doesn’t distinguish between pop culture and highbrow culture.

 Combating extremism

The Italian government is hoping the program will educate kids born in Italy as well as integrate a growing population of foreign residents, dissuading alienated youths from following radical Islam.

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi first announced the so-called Culture Bonus last November after the Paris massacre, when Islamist terrorists killed 130 people inside a theater and outside on the streets.

“They destroy statues, we protect them,” he said in a speech at the time. “They burn books, we’re the country of libraries; they envision terror, we respond with culture.”

But some question whether exposing young Muslims to, say, Lady Gaga will really endear them to Western culture.

“There is a chance that Lady Gaga is exactly what’s going to make somebody angry,” says Barak Mendelsohn, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and an expert in combating extremism. “That doesn’t mean that they buy into your values. We’ve seen radicals trying to take advantage of the welfare state, funding themselves while building bombs.”

He points to the Paris attackers. French authorities estimate they collected more than 50,000 euros in unemployment benefits — even while at least one of them had a job.

“They don’t have any ideological obstacle in taking money from Western countries,” Mendelsohn adds.

Source: Italy’s ‘Cultural Allowance’ For Teens Aims To Educate, Counter Extremism : Parallels : NPR

Filed under Citizenship, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Bias Isn’t Just A Police Problem, It’s A Preschool Problem : NPR

2016/09/29 Leave a comment

Worth reading in terms of just how embedded implicit bias is:

New research from the Yale Child Study Center suggests that many preschool teachers look for disruptive behavior in much the same way: in just one place, waiting for it to appear.

The problem with this strategy (besides it being inefficient), is that, because of implicit bias, teachers are spending too much time watching black boys and expecting the worst.

The Study

Lead researcher Walter Gilliam knew that to get an accurate measure of implicit bias among preschool teachers, he couldn’t be fully transparent with his subjects about what, exactly, he was trying to study.

Implicit biases are just that — subtle, often subconscious stereotypes that guide our expectations and interactions with people.

“We all have them,” Gilliam says. “Implicit biases are a natural process by which we take information, and we judge people on the basis of generalizations regarding that information. We all do it.”

Even the most well-meaning teacher can harbor deep-seated biases, whether she knows it or not. So Gilliam and his team devised a remarkable — and remarkably deceptive — experiment.

At a big, annual conference for pre-K teachers, Gilliam and his team recruited 135 educators to watch a few short videos. Here’s what they told them:

“We are interested in learning about how teachers detect challenging behavior in the classroom. Sometimes this involves seeing behavior before it becomes problematic. The video segments you are about to view are of preschoolers engaging in various activities. Some clips may or may not contain challenging behaviors. Your job is to press the enter key on the external keypad every time you see a behavior that could become a potential challenge.”

Each video included four children: a black boy and girl and a white boy and girl.

Here’s the deception: There was no challenging behavior.

While the teachers watched, eye-scan technology measured the trajectory of their gaze. Gilliam wanted to know: When teachers expected bad behavior, who did they watch?

“What we found was exactly what we expected based on the rates at which children are expelled from preschool programs,” Gilliam says. “Teachers looked more at the black children than the white children, and they looked specifically more at the African-American boy.”

Indeed, according to recent data from the U.S. Department of Education, black children are 3.6 times more likely to be suspended from preschool than white children. Put another way, black children account for roughly 19 percent of all preschoolers, but nearly half of preschoolers who get suspended.

One reason that number is so high, Gilliam suggests, is that teachers spend more time focused on their black students, expecting bad behavior. “If you look for something in one place, that’s the only place you can typically find it.”

The Yale team also asked subjects to identify the child they felt required the most attention. Forty-two percent identified the black boy, 34 percent identified the white boy, while 13 percent and 10 percent identified the white and black girls respectively.

The Vignette

The Yale study had two parts. And, as compelling as the eye-scan results were, Gilliam’s most surprising takeaway came later.

He gave teachers a one-paragraph vignette to read, describing a child disrupting a class; there’s hitting, scratching, even toy-throwing. The child in the vignette was randomly assigned what researchers considered a stereotypical name (DeShawn, Latoya, Jake, Emily), and subjects were asked to rate the severity of the behavior on a scale of one to five.

White teachers consistently held black students to a lower standard, rating their behavior as less severe than the same behavior of white students.

Gilliam says this tracks with previous research around how people may shift standards and expectations of others based on stereotypes and implicit bias. In other words, if white teachers believe that black boys are more likely to behave badly, they may be less surprised by that behavior and rate it less severely.

Black teachers, on the other hand, did the opposite, holding black students to a higher standard and rating their behavior as consistently more severe than that of white students.

Here’s another key finding: Some teachers were also given information about the disruptive child’s home life, to see if it made them more empathetic:

[CHILD] lives with his/her mother, his/her 8- and 6-year old sisters, and his/her 10-month-old baby brother. His/her home life is turbulent, between having a father who has never been a constant figure in his/her life, and a mother who struggles with depression but doesn’t have the resources available to seek help. During the rare times when his/her parents are together, loud and sometimes violent disputes occur between them. In order to make ends meet, [CHILD’s] mother has taken on three different jobs, and is in a constant state of exhaustion. [CHILD] and his/her siblings are left in the care of available relatives and neighbors while their mother is at work.

Guess what happened.

Teachers who received this background did react more empathetically, lowering their rating of a behavior’s severity — but only if the teacher and student were of the same race.

Source: Bias Isn’t Just A Police Problem, It’s A Preschool Problem : NPR Ed : NPR

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

Discrimination isn’t ancient history. A new museum shows the truth of that [Museum of African-American History]

2016/09/29 Leave a comment

The debate over group specific narratives and museums, versus a more horizontal approach. There is place for both:

“Perhaps,” said Barack Obama on the museum portico on opening day, “it can help a white visitor understand the pain and anger of demonstrators in places like Tulsa and Charlotte . . .  It reminds us that routine discrimination and Jim Crow aren’t ancient history, it’s just a blink in the eye of history. It was just yesterday. And so we should not be surprised that not all the healing is done. We shouldn’t despair that it’s not all solved.”

“A great nation does not hide its history,” said George W. Bush, under whose administration was raised the majority of the half-billion dollars that the new museum’s construction consumed. “It faces its flaws and corrects them. This museum tells the truth that a country founded on the promise of liberty held millions in chains.”

…“So much African-American history has been erased, stepped over, or labelled as not in the picture,” Gloria Powell told Maclean’s on opening weekend. She was 85, a retired nurse and nursing educator from Sacramento, Calif., who spent her working life in Harlem.

“Most of the Caucasian population, and a huge section of the African-American population, do not have any idea of our history,” Ms. Powell said. “We were people who were brought here. We didn’t come here to escape religious persecution, we were lifted from our land and our homes and our families. If you become educated about who we are, you will find that you guys no longer need to be afraid of us.”

But there is another dimension to the opening of the African-American museum, which, like the National Museum of the American Indian a few blocks closer to the U.S. Capitol, advances the fragmentation of the Smithsonian into an archipelago of separate-but-equal edifices a sort of institutional apartheid. Across 14th Street, the National Museum of American History retains only a handful of objects related to African-Americans, including jazzman Dizzy Gillespie’s cantilevered trumpet, a photo of hair-care entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker, and—removed from all context and potency—a lunch counter from Greensboro, N.C., that once was at the nucleus of the integration struggle.

Backed by such celebrities as Eva Longoria and Emilio Estefan, a commission to study the potential creation of the National Museum of the American Latino has been endorsed by Congress, and a man named Sam Eskenazi, formerly of the (non-Smithsonian) United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, has been lobbying for a decade for a National Museum of the American People to celebrate waves of immigration.

“All the Smithsonian museums are artifact-driven,” Eskenazi told Maclean’s, brandishing endorsements from groups representing dozens of ethnic groups from the Albanians to the Welsh. “My model is story-driven. My museum covers everybody.”

Source: Discrimination isn’t ancient history. A new museum shows the truth of that. – Macleans.ca

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Canada’s racial divide: Confronting racism in our own backyard

2016/09/28 Leave a comment

Interesting long read in the Globe.

Excerpt pertains to data gaps. However, some of the gaps listed do not exist – Census/NHS data on economic outcomes is detailed as are educational outcomes, as is employment equity data in governments. Visible minorities can be broken down by the major groups, and ethnic origin provides more detail (for some of the data, see my Multiculturalism in Canada: Evidence and Anecdote Overview Deck (December 2015).

However, the points regarding health and incarceration are valid:

Part of the problem is that it’s hard to figure out, with much precision, what’s going on. Unlike the United States, where race-related data is routinely collected on everything from jobless rates to university-graduation rates, Canada “cannot tell its own story,” says Arjumand Siddiqi, associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, who has lived and worked in both countries.

She hit a wall in 2007, when she wanted to test if race-based health inequalities varied in different societies. Most of the research at the time relied on U.S. data.

While working at the University of North Carolina, she began to analyze a joint Canada/U.S. survey of health. When she accessed the data from Canada, however, detail on race was suppressed (for privacy reasons, she was told). All she could glean was information on people who were “white” or “non-white.” She couldn’t determine whether health outcomes within racial groups varied.

“We’re left with a muddy picture. We are left not knowing whether there is a problem that is specific, widespread, changing over time, whether we need to be doing more or less with some groups.”

Health care could use more accurate information. One paper last year that looked at ethnicity and breast cancer noted that data about race or ethnicity “are rarely collected” in a systematic manner in Canada’s health-care settings.

That data deficiency “certainly does not mean that ethnoracial inequalities do not exist in Canada; indeed, lack of data often limits the ability to accurately and adequately identify health inequalities and inequities,” wrote Dr. Aisha Lofters of the University of Toronto.

In Halifax, Dr. Britton, who has four degrees, including a doctorate, has found that a dearth of data on African Nova Scotians has hurt efforts to push for racial equity in the province. “With no data being collected, what does that mean? No funding” to address specific health issues in communities.

Researchers have hit similar roadblocks trying to analyze employment outcomes, incomes or wealth by race.

One missing piece of the puzzle is jobless stats on indigenous reserves, which the government doesn’t collect on a monthly or even yearly basis. Another piece is about wages. A widely reported study released last week in the U.S. – which found the wage gap between white and black Americans is worse today than in 1979 – isn’t currently possible to conduct in Canada, says Sheila Block, senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

In the justice system, data is lacking on the ethnicity of homicide victims and fatalities from police encounters.

People are often grouped as “visible minorities,” in the justice system. The catch-all term is “problematic,” noted U of T’s Akwasi Owusu-Bempah in a 2011 report entitled Whitewashing Criminal Justice in Canada. Lumping people together “obscures racial differences by averaging groups that are overrepresented with those that are underrepresented.”

The absence of detailed data may be hiding inequalities that, ultimately, harm police effectiveness and hurt community relations, he said.

Source: Canada’s racial divide: Confronting racism in our own backyard – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

Monarchy over multiculturalism, says Leamington mayor

2016/09/28 Leave a comment

Questions for the mayor: just how much do we spend on multiculturalism? Just how much do we spend on the monarchy? And are the two incompatible? And what exactly does it mean to be Canadian? Only from Scotland or Great Britain?

As the royal tour makes its way through Canada, one southwest Ontario mayor is calling on Canada to scrap its current multicultural policies and focus on ties to the monarchy.

In a Facebook post Sunday, Leamington, Ont., Mayor John Paterson responded to a post criticizing the monarchy:

wdr-Screenshot-John Paterson

The original Facebook post appears to have been deleted by the poster Dharmesh Patel. But a viewer shared a screen capture with CBC News in Windsor.

When CBC reached Patel, he said he’s not personally offended by Paterson’s comments and the two remain friends. He said he believes the money spent on hosting Prince William and Kate could be better spent elsewhere.

Patel said his parents came to Canada in the 1970s and they are proud Canadians.

Paterson stood by his Facebook comments Monday, telling CBC he welcomes new Canadians from around the world. But he expects them to conform to Canadian culture.

“If you’re going to come to Canada and swear allegiance to Canada, which includes an allegiance to the monarchy, then be Canadian, that’s all I’m saying,” Paterson said. “Don’t force us to change our ways. Come to Canada and be Canadian.”

Source: Monarchy over multiculturalism, says Leamington mayor – Windsor – CBC News

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

PCC: Chris Alexander reconnaît le besoin de réhabiliter son image

2016/09/28 Leave a comment

Will be a challenge:

L’ancien ministre Chris Alexander reconnaît qu’il devra «absolument» réhabiliter son image s’il se présente comme candidat dans la course à la direction du Parti conservateur du Canada (PCC).

«La dernière campagne ne reflétait ni ma vision du pays ni la réalité de ce que nous (les conservateurs) avons accompli dans le domaine de l’immigration et de la citoyenneté», a-t-il soutenu.

«Je compte donc pouvoir clarifier les choses», a poursuivi M. Alexander en entrevue téléphonique avec La Presse canadienne, confirmant du même souffle qu’il a bel et bien l’intention de briguer la direction du parti.

Celui qui a perdu son siège en octobre dernier a été vivement critiqué après avoir présenté la promesse électorale conservatrice d’instaurer une ligne de dénonciation pour signaler des cas présumés de «pratiques culturelles barbares».

Cette annonce lui a collé à la peau.

Regrette-t-il d’y avoir pris part? L’ancien député ontarien ne le dit pas clairement.

 «Était-ce la bonne annonce pour ce jour, pendant la campagne? Probablement pas», a-t-il offert.

«Je regrette de n’avoir pas eu de l’influence sur l’ordre du jour de notre campagne, et je pense qu’il y a pas mal de gens qui partagent mes regrets», a poursuivi M. Alexander.

Celle qui était à ses côtés pour cette annonce, Kellie Leitch, avait subséquemment exprimé des regrets, mais la sincérité de cet acte de contrition a été remise en question après que la députée eut mis de l’avant sa proposition de filtrer les «valeurs anticanadiennes» des immigrants.

Cette suggestion, formulée dans le cadre de la course à la direction du PCC, a été comparée par les candidats Maxime Bernier et Michael Chong à la charte des valeurs élaborée par le Parti québécois.

À l’autre bout du fil, Chris Alexander abonde dans le même sens.

«Ce n’est pas une copie exacte, mais je vois un certain parallèle avec l’initiative échouée du Parti québécois, et je vois aussi certains échos du discours de Donald Trump aux États-Unis», a-t-il exposé.

Lui-même est en désaccord avec l’idée de Mme Leitch, car «c’est une façon de jouer sur les peurs des gens», et par ailleurs, «le Code criminel et nos lois reflètent (déjà) nos valeurs canadiennes».

Et le Parti conservateur ne devrait pas verser à nouveau dans ce type de discours qui a plombé ses chances de se faire réélire, estime M. Alexander, un ancien diplomate âgé de 48 ans qui a été ambassadeur du Canada en Afghanistan.

«On a fini par se faire percevoir comme un parti et un gouvernement non accueillant (pour les) immigrants, renfermé dans un discours assez négatif sur la sécurité et sur certains autres aspects de nos politiques d’immigration», a-t-il soutenu.

Chris Alexander compte annoncer s’il se lance dans la course à la direction avant le premier débat entre candidats. La joute oratoire, en anglais, aura lieu le 10 novembre à Saskatoon.

Source: PCC: Chris Alexander reconnaît le besoin de réhabiliter son image | Mélanie Marquis | Politique canadienne

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Douglas Todd: Niqabs: The paradoxical world of Zunera Ishaq

2016/09/27 Leave a comment

Interesting interview with Zunera Ishaq, the woman at the heart of the niqab citizenship controversy:

How did it come to pass that the so-called “liberal” media, and prominent Canadian feminists, championed the 29-year-old suburban Toronto woman who insisted on wearing in a civil ceremony one of the world’s most provoking symbols of patriarchy?

What background was missing from the debate over the niqab?

I was able to obtain Ishaq’s responses to some of these questions this week.

Ishaq told me she respects Mulcair and Trudeau for defending her niqab, and for standing for multicultural “choice” and tolerance.

She went out of her way to say she also respects Harper, “who created all the mess. He was following his conscience.”

Our telephone conversation revealed a woman who inhabits a world of paradoxes, which the Oxford Dictionary defines as “seemingly absurd or self-contradictory propositions.”

On one hand, the famous 29-year-old Sunni Muslim sounded libertarian and morally relativistic, emphasizing “every person is free to live in a way in which he or she feels is right.”

On the other hand she also seems the opposite. She is ultraconservative on segregation of the sexes, homosexuality, abortion, obeying Islamic commands and women being “unclean” during menstruation.

As niqabs become more common in Canada — a regular sight on campuses, including the University of B.C. — it’s worth understanding the apparent contradictions associated with defending this stark symbol of gender inequality.

Since Ishaq was often portrayed as standing up for all Muslim women, it’s important to note hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world, and the majority of the 1.1 million Muslims in Canada, disapprove of the niqab.

Ishaq said she respects the many Muslims who disagree with her. That includes the imam at another Metro Toronto mosque who, not knowing she was present, criticized her for insisting on wearing the niqab.

Women rarely wear the niqab in most Muslim-majority countries, where scarves covering the hair or no headdress are more common. Niqabs have been banned in some Muslim countries, because they were used in crimes and terrorist attacks.

Ishaq’s religiously torn homeland of Pakistan, which she and her family were preparing this week to visit, is one of the few countries where Pew Research found support for the niqab, with 32 per cent saying women should cover their faces.

Only a few hardline Muslim leaders, including in Saudi Arabia, require women to wear long black abayas and press for them to cover their faces.

“Saudi Arabia has chosen that law,” Ishaq said, in one of repeated references to the supreme value she places on “choice,” including at the political level.

“I would not say that it’s wrong. I would not say it’s exactly right in Islam. So I would not like to comment.”

She agreed Islamic tradition advocates only personal “modesty.” And she acknowledged nothing in the Qur’an mandates women covering their faces.

“I do not feel that Muslim women who do not wear the niqab are lesser than me. What I’ve done is my choice, another opinion.”

Ishaq also called homosexualitya “choice,” which goes against the predominant understanding among gays and lesbians.

“Being a Muslim, it’s my view that homosexuality is not the right thing. But I have to tolerate it, without discrimination and without hatred. I have no issues with people who are homosexual. That’s their choice. But I definitely do not think it’s right.”

Source: Douglas Todd: Niqabs: The paradoxical world of Zunera Ishaq | Vancouver Sun

Filed under Citizenship, Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →