Siavash Safavi: Canada’s clueless immigration policy will not end well

2024/02/13 Leave a comment

Not one of the most informed critics, inordinately focussed on value concerns, but legitimate reactions to the prevalent ideologies among academics (York U). But concerns about vetting of Syrian refugees are largely unsubstantiated as experience to data has illustrated (Gazan refugees are being subject to even more stringent vetting) but it is natural for those who have fled the Iranian regime to have such views.

And effective vetting for values as he advocates, absent actions or other evidence, is extremely difficult to implement consistently in practice:

I came to Canada as a political refugee. In my home country of Iran, I was arrested, tortured and later received a prison sentence for my student-organizing activities. I had a month to surrender to prison. Instead, I decided to leave the country with the help of a smuggler. I escaped through the mountains, partly on horseback, to Turkey, where I applied for asylum through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

There, I waited one year for my UNHCR approval, despite all the proof and court documents I had provided. After that, I waited another 18 months for Canadian security agencies to vet me. It was a rough time. At age 28, I found myself in a foreign country with a language I barely understood, no money and no family or friends.

It’s popular nowadays for people to feel sorry for themselves and express feelings of victimhood. But I have no complaints. If someone is kind enough to let me into their home for life, they have a responsibility to their family to at least find out if I am honest or not.

I arrived in Canada after 2½ years of living in Turkey.

In 2013, under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canada was accepting around 24,000 refugees a year, and the Canadian middle class was surpassing the U.S. to become the richest in the world. Canada was respected worldwide, and I couldn’t wait to become a patriotic Canadian.

In my second year in Canada, I attended York University. As someone who was arrested for their student activism in Iran, I wanted to enjoy the university experience in a free country. And as a classical liberal, I was intent on familiarizing myself with current western thought in the humanities. So I took anthropology and gender studies.

Both courses taught me that almost all the injustice in the world is the fault of white men, that western ethnocentrism is the cause of most conflicts between East and West, and that all cultures are equal, only different. I remember walking out of the class thinking, “I guess the West had a good run. It was bound to end at some point.”

I was pretty shocked at the views promoted through Canadian universities, and quite horrified to find those ideas metastasizing in the cultural fabric. I’m sensitive to this issue because I’ve lived in countries in which a radical ideology has infiltrated the culture, taken over and ultimately undermined the national interest. It happened in Iran following the 1979 revolution, and again in Turkey with the rise of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Two years after I came to this country, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came to power and declared Canada the first “post-national” state. Soon after, tens of thousands of Syrian refugees were expedited into Canada, and I couldn’t help feeling insulted. It wasn’t just about the 2½ years of my life wasted away in Turkey, it was also because there were serious concerns that the refugees weren’t being properly vetted.

Proper vetting is very necessary when bringing in people from countries whose cultures clash with our own. There are many Iranians who I wouldn’t want in Canada, including the policeman who lashed me in public when I was 19 for allegedly holding hands with a girl in the street, or the judge who ordered the lashing.

This is not about a certain nationality or ethnicity. Cultures are shaped by their geography and their history. Some are more inclusive than others. It doesn’t mean one is necessarily evil. It simply means it holds values that are incompatible with those of some other cultures.

Newcomers are supposed to adopt the fundamental aspects of the culture of their new country, in order to fit in better and help maintain social cohesion. That’s just common sense. In my orientation before arriving in Canada, we were taught not to relieve ourselves in the street. I could have felt offended, but I understood that there might be refugees from countries with different cultures or no indoor plumbing.

For us to live with people from many different places, we need common cultural threads. Even in a multicultural country like Canada, the native cultural threads are the only things that hold society together. Immigrant cultures can add their own pearls and jewels to that thread, but the thread is the base.

When dealing with refugees from countries in which the dominant culture or state ideology differs from our own, we should invest the necessary time and resources to vet each individual properly, to ensure that those who hold extremist views are not admitted. But when the government imports tens of thousands of people from  these countries each year, a few things happen.

The newcomers, many of whom usually do not speak the language well, will feel the need to stick together in close-knit communities, forming a parallel society with a completely different culture to the country they live in. The culture of the old country is promoted and protected in these communities, usually by self-appointed authoritarian leaders through social pressure, or sometimes by force, leaving the people vulnerable to all kinds of corruption.

Their children, who naturally will go through their own identity crisis phase, will go to university and learn that every negative thing their old country’s culture says about their new country is true. So they will grow to resent their new country.

Newcomers in these communities are also easy prey for the criminals and sociopaths in their own communities, because they are not familiar with the law. And since they mostly come from countries with a negative view of authority, they don’t trust the police, so it is much easier to take advantage of them.

Over time, through mass immigration and high birth rates, their numbers grow, and they will be able to impact the political sphere, led by the most radical or corrupt authoritarians who take advantage of them.

Now imagine millions of Canada citizens who believe that all white people are evil and racist, or that Jewish people are a societal virus, or that the LGBTQ+ are demonic and need to be eradicated, or that women should be subservient to men, or, worst of all, that the use of violence is necessary against people who disagree with, or “disrespect,” their culture.

At that point, you risk balkanization. You cannot force people who have nothing in common — or worse, hold animosity toward each other — to share the same country. And owing to the freedoms afforded to people in a country such as this one, it is hard for authorities to combat citizens who despise their adopted country and are looking to undermine it through legal means.

None of us know what the best immigration policy is, but anyone with common sense should be able to see that if you bring in large groups of people in who hate your culture, while at the same time demonize your own country, it is just masochism, not policy, and it will not end well.

Source: Siavash Safavi: Canada’s clueless immigration policy will not end well

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Supreme Court slammed after anti-racism advocates ‘disinvited’ from presentation over posts on Israeli-Palestinian conflict

2024/02/09 Leave a comment

I check the twitter feeds of two of the complainants, “El Jones, a poet, activist and political science professor at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, and DeRico Symonds, director of justice strategy with the African Nova Scotian Justice Institute,” definitely activists, the former particularly so given virtually all of her tweets pertain to Israel/Gaza, but did not cross the line IMO.

The irony, of course, is that practitioners of cancel culture are surprised and outraged when they become victims themselves. A lesson here, one that I doubt will be learned:

…There has been widespread debate in recent months about when anti-Israel sentiment crosses over into antisemitism, and about the boundaries of acceptable political advocacy.

University of Waterloo political science Prof. Emmett Macfarlane, who has written several books on the top court , said it is important to know the details about the online posts that were red-flagged, and that the court’s lack of transparency about the content of those posts is a concern for him.

Even so, he said the Supreme Court of Canada was in a “severe double-bind” from the outset: it faces the same workplace challenges in navigating conflicting views among employees as other Canadian workplaces, and in respecting honest concerns that some people may feel “like they are being discriminated against by virtue of people who have expressed certain views.”

“Layered on top of that,” he said, is the court’s “broader institutional concern with being above reproach politically and being perceived as politically neutral.” Once the court became aware of views that someone tagged as controversial, he said, it was in a “no-win situation.”

“You either proceed and allow all the people to come to speak, and then you could get accused of having a bias by allowing people who have been controversial online to speak, or you do what they did and uninvited people, but then you get accused of bias on the other side.”

Macfarlane said it’s not just a question of “de-platforming” guest speakers, or “the potential for hate speech and all that” — which he said is not easy to grapple with at the best of times — but that the Supreme Court faces the added challenge of being “very sensitive to perceptions that it is being politicized.”

For the anti-Black racism researchers, who noted to the Star that this is Black History Month in Canada, the court erred on the wrong side….

Source: Supreme Court slammed after anti-racism advocates ‘disinvited’ from presentation over posts on Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Filed under Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , , , ,

Journalism schools are failing a generation of students

2024/02/08 Leave a comment

Worth reflecting upon. I have noticed this tendency in some news organizations (including the CBC) and some reporters. The other issue I would flag is the comparative weakness of numeracy and understanding data, in favour of relying on individual stories and anecdotes:

The other day I was rummaging around in my basement and stumbled across a tattered binder from my 2010 Carleton University journalism school days. As I brushed away the dust from my 14-year-old handwritten notes, my eyes were drawn to my very first reporting class lesson. My professor, Norma Greenaway, a Postmedia journalist of 40 years, set out what we journalist hatchlings had to keep top of mind as we put pen to paper for the very first time. We had responsibilities to the reader that we had to remember. I had scribbled down some words in my notepad and underlined them twice: “Be balanced and fair.”

I was reminded of those marching orders last week when, appearing on our Hub Dialogues podcast, TVO’s The Agenda host Steve Paikin said the freshest crop of Canadian journalists had a much weaker devotion to objectivity than their predecessors. Hub editor-at-large Sean Speer asked Paikin whether he had “observed any fault lines or tensions [around objectivity] with the new generation of journalists.”

“Yes,” said Paikin. “This was a major fault line nowadays with the new journalism,” he confessed. This was big. One of the most well-known and respected impartial journalists in Canada was pointing out something my colleagues and I at CBC, CTV, and a variety of other outlets had whispered about over late-night beers for years.

Paikin continued:

“That’s the tradition that I was brought up in. I don’t seek a particular political outcome when I cover an election campaign. I believe there are many younger people nowadays who, because they have been taught this way in journalism schools, believe not only is it their job to figure out which is the best party that ought to govern, but then [to] tailor their coverage accordingly to ensure that the party that they don’t like runs into the roughest time…I think it’s a big problem.”

He went on to add that, as an “old school” journalist, he saw his job as reporting the “objective” facts on the ground. The reader needed to be allowed “to come to his own conclusion.”

Cue online Canadian journalist outrage. “I listened to it twice, I thought I was perhaps having an aneurism,” tweeted Policy Options editor-in-chief Les Perreaux. “Genuinely, at a loss here,” added The Narwhal’s Emma McIntosh. Bubbles burst in newsrooms across the nation. The consensus seemed to be that we should dismiss this sort of critique in its entirety. Nothing to see here. Everything is fine. Move along. 

But there is something there.

For the record, I think Steve likely overstepped. I say this as someone who worked with him for a decade in the mainstream media. Let’s not feed outrage and potential conspiracy. I do not believe that journalism schools are nefariously and intentionally building an army of “big L” Liberal partisan flying monkeys so that they can be released into the sky and dive-bomb Conservative candidates across the country. They are not raising left-wing partisans, or telling them to support left-wing political parties.

However, journalism schools are now developing and encouraging almost exclusively left-wing storytellers, who are most comfortable with progressive storylines, and who often question the value of objectivity. And, at the end of the day, isn’t that almost as bad for Canadian democracy?

In the newsroom: what makes a story?

I have had the privilege of mentoring countless journalism school students and interns for the last ten years, so I have had a front-row seat for this shift in journalistic thinking. I have watched, in real-time, how a new generation of journalists has changed the reasoning around what the purpose of journalism is, whether objectivity matters, and what constitutes a good story. 

Five or so years ago I started noticing that nearly every pitch that came out of their mouths fell within the “social justice” realm. More specifically, pitches were from the new progressive and increasingly orthodox and illiberal perspective. They dealt with various conditions of victimhood, that were not to be questioned but emblazoned on the banner of universal justice.

This is not to say that some of these stories didn’t deserve to be told. They should make up a slice of the journalistic story pie. But…the whole pie?

Stories increasingly fit a mold of “_______ group felt hurt by _______.  Here is their story.” Their coverage increasingly prioritized “lived experiences” over expertise, and “first-person accounts” instead of data. The job was sometimes seen as a way to upend power structures. Truths multiplied. Stories about members of a community could only be told by members of that community. Interns and students were at a loss when it came to finding right-leaning sources. It was rare, if ever, that they suggested a debate-style program. Many weren’t checking their biases at the door. It seemed that some believed it was their job to tell their audience what was wrong, who was in the wrong, and what needed to be done about it, rather than allowing the audience to draw their own conclusions. 

What I could not determine was how much of this was caused by a new generation that saw the world differently, or a new kind of journalism professor in front of the chalkboard. Or whether it was both.

In the classroom: what makes a lesson?

Following the 2020 murder of George Floyd in the United States, the wave of reckoning over racism crossed the border and lapped up against the doors of Canada’s top journalism schools. 

In Toronto, a Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University) journalism student-led committee wrote an open letter claiming “institutionalized racism and discrimination” at the journalism school had “caused trauma for past and present students alike.” More than 200 signatories, many of whom identified as Black, Indigenous, people of colour (BIPOC), and LGBTQ2IA+ said their school “contributed to an unsafe learning environment” that “resulted in perpetuated systemic racism, further traumatizing students and reinforcing the values of discrimination that Ryerson University was built on.” They insisted the idea of objectivity in journalism undermined marginalized experiences. 

Student testimony included in-depth descriptions of alleged microaggressions, anxiety attacks, and tearful moments. The students and graduates called for staff to attend mandatory “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI)” training and “de-escalation, mental health, and empathy” lessons. The journalism curriculum, they insisted, needed to become “equitable, accessible, and decolonized.” If their demands were not met, they said the Canadian media industry would continue to be a product of “perpetuated whiteness and elitism.” If their directions were followed, they insisted, together they and the school would build the next generation of Canadian journalists.

Before the letter had even been released to the press, TMU’s School of Journalism chair Janice Neil and associate chair Lisa Taylor both resigned, saying it was time for a “major reset.” The faculty that remained promised to “transform” their journalism curriculum by enacting as many of the requests as possible, as quickly as possible. They would prioritize the student experience “through a lens of EDI,” expand the “understanding of what journalism is,” and introduce “critical approaches” to reporting classes. They also swore to provide equity training for staff, create “safe space forums” and look into erasing the name “Ryerson” from student paper mastheads.

In Ottawa, racialized students also used this moment to advocate for “institutional change” within a Carleton journalism department they described as a hotbed of white supremacy. An open letter written by 21 journalism students and graduates was published accusing the school of “perpetuating systemic discrimination” against Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour and “deterring them from pursuing careers as journalists.” The letter described “racist slurs” and “microaggressions.” It listed, in detail, harmful situations students said they had experienced, including being mistaken for international students, repeated criticism of accents, and a lack of Black teachers. This group also challenged the idea of journalistic objectivity, which they claimed was an idea invented by “white, straight, cis-male journalists.” Among their list of requirements, the signatories called for all staff to undergo repeated anti-bias and critical race theory training. They also demanded the journalism school start surveying the race of journalism students. 

“The reality is journalists are coming into the workspace not fully understanding the fundamentals of journalism. Activism has crept into their journalism.”SENIOR CBC HOST

How did the adult faculty, composed of veteran journalists, respond to this call for major reform? They endorsed it. The staff acknowledged their role “in the perpetuation of systemic racism in the education of young journalists.” They assigned unconscious bias training for all instructors and armed them with a diversity and inclusion curriculum checklist that instructed them to teach non-traditional views on objectivity. They encouraged staff to enroll in an educational retreat entitled “Theatre of the Oppressed.” They redesigned the first-year courses to ensure they had “a strong central focus on diversity and inclusion.” They said journalists and journalism students must “challenge and dismantle a white supremacist colonial mindset which we have internalized both collectively and individually” at the journalism school and in the industry. They injected “antiracist and decolonial pedagogies” into the curriculum. Overall, the journalism school promised it would practice “anti-racism” and “anti-oppression.” Finally, the faculty expressed how much they valued “lived experience.” For a school that once taught me to use simple everyday language, they were certainly not practicing what they preached in their press releases.

A handful of the changes made sense. Of course the faculty should attract more diverse instructors. Of course minority voices have sometimes been ignored or misrepresented in Canadian reporting. Of course journalism students should be obligated to take a course on reporting on Indigenous Peoples. Of course there should be financial support for racialized students who are struggling financially. 

But you can call out racism and promote diversity without doing it entirely through the lens of the new identity politics.

Politics is the keyword here. Approaches like those referenced above are inherently political. They are regularly and exclusively employed by left-wing thinkers and left-wing political parties. I am sure many of the people using them mean well and believe they are committing real positive change. But, by accepting these demands in the way these schools did—fully embracing, promoting, and teaching this terminology and the issues that come with it—journalism schools send a political message to their students that this is the “correct” and perhaps only way to see the world and tell the stories of Canadians. 

As journalist and podcaster Tara Henley summarized on our Hubs Dialogue podcast last week, “This thinking has dominated the media…It is presented as a moral imperative. ‘If you are a decent person this is how you should think about the world.’ It is not presented as an ideology…[But] this is a political ideology and we are politicizing content.” 

In sum, these schools act like they have cornered the moral market. They end up producing young journalists who struggle to understand or appreciate any competition to the progressive worldview.

This “new journalism” education means students are often not ready to practice their trade in the real world. Yesterday, I spoke with a senior CBC host, who asked to remain anonymous. “The reality is [student] journalists are coming into the workspace not fully understanding the fundamentals of journalism,” they said. “Activism has crept into their journalism. Thankfully vetting and editing by more seasoned staff catch a bunch of it. But it’s there.”

A CTV journalist, also wishing to remain anonymous, recently described it to me this way, “Younger journalists entering newsrooms are often more committed to sticking to their own idealism, than considering a story from every angle,” she said. “They have practised technical skills, but lack news judgement, perspective and are unprepared to be challenged, or to challenge their own assumptions. The result is stories and news copy that lacks critical context or meaningful insight.”

For me, it is all the more egregious given that J-school is about educating the next generation of storytellers. Journalism teachers have immense power and responsibility when it comes to influencing the thinking of their students. On the first day of fall semester, professors are met with near-blank slates—young, impressionable students who have few major points of reference when it comes to the craft of reporting. They are the ones teaching those who will inform Canadians about their country. It should be the professor’s job to encourage students to seek out the full range of perspectives, exposing students to the issues and stories that Canadians on both the Left and Right value. Instead, the message sent to journalism students who consider “right-wing” topics or perspectives is that their kind of thinking is not welcome, and even more troubling, not morally right.  

The future isn’t the brightest for our journalism schools, making a return to reason all the more necessary. Six Canadian journalism school programs recently paused or shut down admissions. Trust in Canadian news has dropped 18 percent in five years. Canadians’ interest in the news has dropped by more than 20 percent in just six years. Jobs are disappearing, with some estimates showing there are less than 10,000 of us journalists left.

While I am sure there are still rational journalism professors out there teaching the craft skillfully and without bias, I am increasingly worried.

Last week, I raised some of my worries with the current director of Carleton’s journalism program Allan Thompson; a man I respect, one who taught me journalism. He’s also someone who has no doubt worked to check his own biases, having twice run for the federal Liberals. Thompson listened politely, didn’t engage with my broader concerns, and graciously invited me to “debate the nature of objectivity until the cows come home.”

What’s to be done?

So, what is to be done? In my own small way I have tried my best to counter some of this as a journalism mentor, offering some selective “unlearning” lessons. I have tried to teach students and interns that truth is not an “orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else”, but a “process of collective discovery”. I have told them that, while perfectly pure objectivity does not exist, as journalists we must identify our biases, check them at the door, and strive for objectivity. I have encouraged them to go out in the field and speak face-to-face with people with whom they disagree. I have told them to go out of their way to ask critical questions of those who share their values. I taught them the advice of my journalism professor Norma all those years ago—to be “fair and balanced.” And that’s the real fair and balanced. Not the ridiculous Fox News slogan.

Consider this my open letter. My “lived experience.”

Source: Journalism schools are failing a generation of students

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Idées | L’exception religieuse du Code criminel canadien

2024/02/07 Leave a comment

Increased focus of debate in Quebec, with Bloc reintroducing a bill to remove this exception (Le Bloc québécois redépose son «projet de loi Charkaoui»). One of my more awkward moments in government occurred while visiting a mosque as part of outreach and finding Charkaoui present.

That being said, making such a change, and implementing it consistently across all religions, would likely be close to impossible:

Ottawa doit impérativement agir pour contrer les propos haineux qui sont à la hausse depuis le début de la guerre au Moyen-Orient. Or, le Code criminel canadien protège les personnes qui fomentent volontairement la haine ou l’antisémitisme, lorsque leurs propos sont exprimés de bonne foi et fondés sur un texte religieux auquel ils croient. 

L’abrogation de cette exception religieuse du Code criminel, qui met d’ailleurs aussi à mal la neutralité religieuse de l’État canadien, semble donc une étape indispensable pour la sécurité et le bien-être des Canadiens.

C’est dans cette optique que le Bloc Québécois a déposé, en novembre dernier, le projet de loi C-367 visant à « colmater » une « brèche complaisante » du Code criminel qui autorise les discours haineux ou antisémites lorsqu’ils sont fondés sur la religion. Malheureusement, ce projet de loi est resté lettre morte, n’ayant même pas été considéré dans l’ordre des priorités du gouvernement fédéral.

Le Bloc québécois vient de relancer le débat en déposant, en ce début de session parlementaire, un deuxième projet de loi pour éliminer l’exception religieuse du Code criminel. Les députés fédéraux seront donc de nouveau appelés à se prononcer sur le sujet.

Rappelons que ce n’est pas la première fois qu’Ottawa fait la sourde d’oreille sur ce sujet. En effet, en 2017-2018, plus de 1500 personnes avaient signé une pétition demandant l’abrogation de cette exception religieuse. La réponse du gouvernement était alors inadéquate puisque la jurisprudence R. c. Keegstra (1990) évoquée pour justifier son refus d’abrogation datait d’avant l’introduction de cette exception religieuse dans le Code criminel en 2004.

L’association des Libres penseurs athées, à l’origine de la pétition de 2017-2028, avait pourtant fait valoir que :

1. Les textes de plusieurs des principales religions du monde comportent des propos qui dénigrent et prônent la haine contre les incroyants, les femmes, les homosexuels ou certains groupes ethniques ou raciaux, des propos qui parfois appellent à la violence, voire à la violence mortelle.  

2. Les religions constituent donc une importante cause de propagande haineuse contre plusieurs groupes.  

3. La liberté de religion des uns ne doit pas avoir préséance sur les droits fondamentaux des autres et ne doit jamais, en aucun cas, menacer ni l’intégrité physique ni la vie des membres des groupes visés par les propos haineux dans ces textes religieux.

Plus récemment, c’est le discours de l’imam Adil Charkaoui, prononcé le 28 octobre 2023 lors d’une manifestation pro-palestinienne près de la Place des Arts, à Montréal, qui a sensibilisé les politiciens à l’égard de l’existence de l’exception religieuse du Code criminel. Ce dernier avait proclamé, en arabe : « Allah, charge-toi de ces agresseurs sionistes. Allah, charge-toi des ennemis du peuple de Gaza. Allah, recense-les tous, puis extermine-les. Et n’épargne aucun d’entre eux ! »

À l’époque, même le premier ministre Justin Trudeau avait condamné les propos de l’imam Charkaoui tout en affirmant, cependant, que le Canada « a déjà des règles très sévères contre l’incitation à la haine, au génocide et à la violence ». 

Qu’attend le gouvernement fédéral pour éliminer cette exception religieuse qui semble protéger de tels discours haineux ? Son inaction à cet égard est d’autant plus étonnante que la lutte contre le discours haineux est une priorité du gouvernement actuel.

Espérons que le deuxième projet de loi du Bloc québécois demandant l’abrogation de l’exception religieuse sera mieux accueilli et fasse partie des priorités du gouvernement pour la session d’hiver 2024.

L’autrice est retraitée de la Commission canadienne des droits de la personne. Elle signe ce texte à titre personnel.

Source: Idées | L’exception religieuse du Code criminel canadien

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , ,

‘To me, it was a prison’: Children held in Doukhobor camp in 1950s set to receive apology from B.C. government

2024/02/07 Leave a comment

Of note:

The B.C. government has offered a $10-million compensation package to people taken from their homes as children 70 years ago due to their parents’ religious beliefs.

The offer was made along with an apology from Attorney General Niki Sharma at a private event in Castlegar today, where she met with members and relatives of the Sons of Freedom Doukhobors who were forcibly removed from their parents in the 1950s.

Many were placed in a former tuberculosis sanatorium in New Denver, B.C., about 150 kilometres east of Kelowna, between 1953 and 1959, where they have testified they received physical and psychological abuse

The Sons of Freedom were a small group within the Doukhobor community, an exiled Russian Christian group that was once known for naked protests and periodically burning down their own homes as a rejection of materialism.

The provincial government will be making a formal apology later this year for its treatment of children from the Doukhobor community in the Kootenays. But the apology is not seen as an entirely positive development.

There may be up to 100 survivors from the Sons of Freedom group, who are now in their 70s and 80s.

Sharma acknowledged the children were “mistreated both physically and psychologically” and that the government’s actions caused anxiety for the broader Doukhobor community.

Lorraine Walton, the daughter of two survivors of the Doukhobor internment and an advocate for the Lost Voices of New Denver group, said her parents’ souls are finally at peace following the apology.

She acknowledged, however, that the compensation being offered by the government was coming far too late for her parents and uncle, who were interned at New Denver for multiple years.

Source: ‘To me, it was a prison’: Children held in Doukhobor camp in 1950s set to receive apology from B.C. government

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Israel and the International Community

2024/02/06 Leave a comment

A reminder to those who casually label Israel’s actions in Gaza genocide of what the court actually ruled:

A critical takeaway from all of this should be that the international community, no matter how much Israelis find it vexing, can serve as an important shield and corroborator for Israel. Leftist protestors were not slowed down one bit by Israel dismissing their overreaching claims of genocide, but those claims are now harder to sustain—even if they will continue apace anyway—in the wake of international law’s highest body declining to order Israel’s operations in Gaza to stop. It was easy to dismiss Israeli gripes about UNRWA as hasbara in the service of a battle against Palestinian refugeehood, but that no longer carries the same weight after UNRWA fired its own employees and many of its largest donors halted its funding. While it is absolutely true that hostility to Israel permeates the U.N. and many international institutions and NGOs always have Israel in their crosshairs, that same international community can vindicate Israel in ways that nobody else can.

On the other side, those who have been screaming about genocide and referencing international law and Israel’s allegedly manifest violations of it at every opportunity should have the decency to revisit their prebaked assertions. I don’t expect that most of the protestors who deploy the genocide charge as if they are noting a fact as straightforward as the sun rising in the east will be swayed by the ICJ or any other evidence that contradicts their convictions, but they should acknowledge that the rug has been pulled out from under them. Israel’s war conduct is not perfect, and there are likely plenty of violations of international law and much objectionable conduct that people can find. But that does not make it genocide, and based on the ICJ’s provisional orders, Israel’s war is both ungenocidal and a legitimate defensive response to Hamas’ illegitimate and indefensible actions. If you want to rely on international law to tar Israel, you need to respect that same international law when it tells you that you are wrong.

Source: Israel and the International Community

Filed under foreign policy, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Ottawa declassifies more details from Rodal report on Nazi war criminals in Canada

2024/02/05 Leave a comment

Of note:

As justice minister in the late 1960s, Pierre Trudeau opposed revoking the citizenship of a naturalized Canadian suspected of murdering 5,128 Jews in Latvia during the Second World War, over concerns about legality and social cohesion, long-redacted memos released on Thursday show.

…The previously redacted sections of Ms. Rodal’s report explore, among other cases, the case of F, from Latvia, a suspected firing-squad captain. He had been convicted in absentia by the Soviet Union. A 1965 memo by the legal division of External Affairs observed that the Soviet Union had requested his extradition to embarrass the Canadian government, but that at the same time, Canada had no reason to doubt the truth of the accusations. If true, the memo says, F was “an ardent Nazi lackey, not only cooperating actively with the occupying German forces but actually serving their Jewish and Gypsy extermination squads.” The memo said Canada had denied requests for extradition in at least four cases.

When the Canadian Jewish Congress asked in 1966 for a re-examination of the legal possibilities for action, a meeting across government departments was held. Two ideas for addressing war criminals were rejected: the revocation of citizenship for failing to disclose details of their past, and therefore not being of “good character” as required in citizenship applications; and retroactive legislation to allow for trials in Canada. There was a caveat: If a major war criminal such as Martin Bormann, who was once suspected of being in Canada, turned up, retroactive laws might be considered.

Mr. Trudeau later wrote, in a memo to Paul Martin Sr., who was secretary of state for external affairs, that nothing in Canadian law suggests a citizenship application is “in the nature of a confessional, requiring the applicant to disclose all prior conduct.”

On the subject of F, the alleged firing squad captain, Mr. Trudeau added that while anxiety in the Jewish community was understandable, “it would be most ill-advised for the government to undertake this venture, which would involve publicly accusing a Canadian citizen of having committed crimes in Latvia in respect of which he has been convicted, in absentia, in Russia.” Such a move, Mr. Trudeau said in a separate memo, could suggest widespread revocations of citizenship ahead.

…..Mr. Matas said Mr. Trudeau has since been proven wrong on his legal concerns, as the courts have allowed the revocation of citizenship for intentional non-disclosure.

Source: Ottawa declassifies more details from Rodal report on Nazi war criminals in Canada

Filed under Citizenship, Holocaust, Revocation Tagged with , ,

Minister O’Regan launches first of its kind pay transparency website: Equi’Vision

2024/02/05 Leave a comment

This is quite an impressive website and analytical tool. Unlikely, IMO, to be of use to most job seekers but likely will be of use to stakeholders, governments and industry associations. Will be interesting in a year of so to get some web metrics on its use:

Every Canadian deserves a real and fair chance at success. Reducing pay gaps and improving representation means knocking down the barriers that hold back marginalized communities in the workplace. In order to do this, we need to know where the gaps are.

Today, Minister of Labour, Seamus O’Regan Jr., launched Equi’Vision, a new website that shines light on the barriers to equity experienced by women, Indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities, and members of visible minorities in federally regulated private sector industries. It provides user-friendly, easily comparable data on workforce representation rates and the pay gaps experienced by members of the four designated groups recognized under the Employment Equity Act. With Equi’Vision, Canada becomes the first country in the world to make this level of information publicly available.

Equi’Vision data is submitted by employers with 100 or more employees as part of their annual reporting to the Labour Program under the Employment Equity Act. Individual employee information, including data related to individual salaries, is not reported or disclosed.

Better information leads to better, more informed decision making. By making this information publicly available, the Government aims to draw attention to the persistent issues in Canadian workplaces that are maintaining pay gaps and preventing representation, so that businesses are encouraged to act upon them.

Reducing pay gaps and improving representation requires all partners – businesses, workers and government – joining together to help create safe and inclusive workplaces for all workers, because that’s where workers are at their best. That’s a good thing for our economy, and for all Canadians.

Source: Minister O’Regan launches first of its kind pay transparency website: Equi’Vision

Direct Link to Equi’Vision: https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/corporate/portfolio/labour/programs/employment-equity/pay-gap-reporting.html

CP link: Federal government launches new pay transparency website for four key groups

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

David Fine: Pushing boundaries? Why would a festival not stand behind its decision to support free expression of ideas?

2024/02/03 Leave a comment

More on the cancel culture in the arts and its uneven application:

Cancelling a challenging and thought-provoking work such as The Runner is no less antithetical to exactly what PuSh rightfully stands for. PuSh originally stood by the production after it had been cancelled by the Belfry Theatre in Victoria, but capitulated when another PuSh invitee threatened to pull his work if The Runner was performed.

The artist, U.K.-based Palestinian Basel Zaraa, was presenting a work titled Dear Laila, which speaks vividly of the Palestinian experience. How inappropriate it would have been if the shoe were on the other foot and Morris had demanded the cancellation of this vital work by a Palestinian artist.

How can one artist can demand a festival remove a work already agreed upon and planned? Why would a festival not stand behind its decision to support free expression of ideas, especially challenging ones dealing with issues that are especially relevant right now?

There was also an open letter signed by “concerned members of Vancouver’s multiracial communities” seeking to pressure PuSh to cancel the play. The letter is a detailed critique of character and narrative, but it goes further, making the shocking claim that the widely corroborated rape and torture of Israeli women were “sensationalistic and unproven allegations of sexual violence by Palestinian fighters.”

Besides seeking to cancel The Runner, the letter also seeks to sanitize the horror of Oct. 7, referring to the Hamas terrorists who committed the atrocities of that day as “Palestinian fighters.”

Denying and sanitizing the horror of Oct. 7 is shocking, and I truly hope that this letter was not instrumental in forming PuSh’s decision, but the letter writers are certainly claiming victory anyway, and that is worrying.

The Runner is not an instrument of Israeli propaganda — in fact it is said to question Israeli policy. It has been described by one critic as “one of the finest plays I’ve had the honour to write about. It unsettles as art should.” Indeed, art should unsettle.

Both The Runner and Dear Laila are exactly the kind of works that should be shown, discussed, criticized and challenged. That’s what makes PuSh vital and relevant. I resist the term “cancel culture” because that is the domain of the reactionary right. This is an attempt to demonize an Israeli perspective, even in the context of a work such as this, which is not meant to glorify  or support Israeli policy. At least as I understand from other comments and reviews. I can’t speak to this directly because I have been deprived of the opportunity to see the play myself.

Vancouver Coun. Sarah Kirby Young shared her intention not to attend PuSh because of the decision. The city of Vancouver supports PuSh and I hope they might have a conversation about policy and censorship. I do not want PuSh to be cancelled. That would be completely hypocritical, but I do hope that parties who support PuSH might encourage a dialogue in the hope that they might review the decision — albeit after the fact — to abruptly cancel a production because another invitee demanded it.

Morris shared his disappointment in a statement on PuSh’s blog: “It’s unsettling when Canadian theatres cannot be a space for the public to engage in a dynamic exchange of ideas. I believe theatre must be a place where contrasting perspectives are programmed and celebrated. Now more than ever, we need to listen to each other, engage in different viewpoints, and find our shared humanity.”

At the same time, he was also unbelievably gracious: ”If removing  The Runner  is the only way Canadians can hear Basel’s crucial voice, then there is value in stepping aside.”

I wish Zaraa and the PuSh Festival might have shown the same grace.

David Fine is a filmmaker in Vancouver. 

Source: David Fine: Pushing boundaries? Why would a festival not stand behind its decision to support free expression of ideas?

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Task force rejects calls for special employment status for Jewish, Muslim public servants

2024/02/03 Leave a comment

Of note. Curious that the report mentioned the Muslim Federal Employees Network (MFEN) but not that of the Jewish Public Service Network (JPSN). Conscious or inadvertent? I made a submission that was not listed, perhaps being deemed not a”comprehensive written submissions.” (Link: https://multiculturalmeanderings.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=56715&action=edit). 

That being said, inclusion of religious minorities would prove a challenge and require religious self-identification and analysis would require deep intersectionality to be meaningful. Census data provides some insights but haven’t had time yet to analyze 2021 data:

Months before the eruption of the Israel-Hamas war ramped up ethnic and religious tensions in many Canadian communities, a government task force rejected requests to recognize Muslim and Jewish public servants as separate groups facing systemic workplace barriers, CBC News has learned.

Muslim and Jewish public servants asked to be designated as employment equity groups under the Employment Equity Act nearly two years ago in submissions to the task force, set up by Employment and Social Development Canada.

CBC News obtained the Muslim Federal Employees Network (MFEN) submission through an access to information request, and the one from the Jewish Public Service Network (JPSN) by asking for a copy.

“The inclusion of religious minorities would provide obligations on behalf of the employer toward removing barriers to religious minorities in the public service, so that they may bring their whole selves to work, including Jews,” says the JPSN’s submission, which also asked that Jews be identified both as an ethno-cultural group and as a religious group under the law.

“Discrimination and socio-economic barriers continue to exist for Canadian Muslims. These barriers will not disappear without intervention,” said the MFEN’s submission. “We recommend that Muslims are added to the Employment Equity Act as a designated employment equity group.”

The Employment Equity Act (EEA) was introduced in 1986 to knock down employment barriers facing four marginalized groups: women, Indigenous people, people with disabilities and members of visible minorities.

The legislation requires that federally regulated employers with more than 100 employees use data collection and proactive hiring to ensure that these groups are not under-represented in their workforces. No designated employment equity groups have been added to the EEA since its creation.

The MFEN and JPSN submissions were prepared in spring 2022, long before the latest deadly conflict erupted between Israel and Hamas in October of last year.

Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan shared the task force’s findings with the media last December, after his office initially received them in April 2023.

The task force said it decided “not to recommend the creation of a separate category for some or all religious minorities at this time,” but encouraged further study.

Jewish, Muslim employees report discrimination

In its submission, the JPSN cited Statistics Canada figures showing Jews were the group most often targeted by hate crimes between 2017 and 2019.

It quoted a B’nai Brith Canada audit in 2021 that reported a “733 per cent increase of violent anti-Semitic incidents.”

In its submission, the JPSN presented anonymous testimony from Jewish public servants. One Jewish employee said they were told they “really bring new meaning to Jews having a lot of money,” after mentioning their background. Several Jewish employees also said they have been called “cheap.”

The submission cited workplace barriers too, such as important meetings being scheduled on religious holidays, excluding observant Jews, or “managers scrutinizing and questioning the validity of leave requests for Jewish holidays.”

The Muslim Federal Employees Network, meanwhile, pointed out that the EEA’s protection for visible minorities won’t protect Muslims.

“There are non-racialized Muslims such as Eastern European Bosniaks, Indigenous Muslims and white converts,” it said in its submission. “In some cases, it may not be possible to determine if someone is Muslim without them disclosing it first. For example, not all Muslim women wear a hijab.”

The MFEN said Muslim federal employees face various forms of Islamophobia. In its submission, it cited reports of Muslim women being subjected to comments “about their ability to do their federal public jobs because they wear a hijab,” and of Muslim men “who are seen to be terrorists and perpetrators of violence.”

It said Muslim federal employees have sometimes struggled to obtain security clearances “because of biases around their countries of origin or their names.”

In its report, the task force did not mention the JPSN’s request, although it cited the MFEN report and two other submissions from the Canadian Council of Muslim Women and the Sikh Public Service Network.

The task force recommended designating 2SLGBTQI+ and Black workers as employment equity groups. It said it had been told by the minister’s office to consider adding those two groups, which allowed it to obtain targeted funding for community consultations.

“In contrast, despite our extensive consultations, we did not receive representations from many of the concerned groups in the broad population beyond the federal public service who wanted us to consider adding religious minorities,” the task force said.

Final decisions on adding more groups to the legislation will be made by O’Regan.

In a statement, O’Regan’s office said it might consider further changes to the EEA.

“These initial commitments are only our first steps in our work to transform Canada’s approach to employment equity,” it said.

The statement said O’Regan “will continue to engage affected communities, including religious minority communities.”

The office said it looks forward to tabling new government legislation but did not offer a timeline.

It said it’s also working to arrange meetings between O’Regan and Amira Elghawaby, the federal government’s special representative on combating Islamophobia, and Deborah Lyons, special envoy on Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism.

Source: Task force rejects calls for special employment status for Jewish, Muslim public servants

Filed under LGBTQ, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

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