Emanuel: The Moral Deficiencies of a Liberal Education

2023/10/18 Leave a comment

Unfortunately, valid concern:

We have failed.

When a coalition of 34 student organizations at Harvard can say that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” and students at other elite universities blame Israel alone for the attack Hamas carried out on Israelis on Oct. 7 or even praise the massacre, something is deeply wrong at America’s colleges and universities.

Students spouting ideological catchphrases have revealed their moral obliviousness and the deficiency of their educations. But the deeper problem is not them. It is what they are being taught — or, more specifically, what they are not being taught.

Certainly, not all students wear these moral blinders. But the fact that many students do, and that they are at some of the nation’s leading colleges and universities, should be a cause for profound concern across higher education.

Those of us who are university leaders and faculty are at fault. We may graduate our students, confer degrees that certify their qualifications as the best and brightest. But we have clearly failed to educate them. We have failed to give them the ethical foundation and moral compass to recognize the basics of humanity.

The Hamas massacre is the easiest of moral cases. The attackers intentionally targeted and killed over 1,000 civilians. They killed babies and children, people attending a concert, and people from Thailand, Nepal and more than a dozen countries who could hardly be responsible for the decades of Israeli-Palestinian violence, as if that could be any justification. And then these same gunmen took civilian hostages, with the explicitly articulated intention to use them as deterrence and, if that failed, to execute them.

This case offers an unambiguous base to elucidate clear, shared moral principles. It’s what the ethicist John Rawls calls reflective equilibrium. The clarity of this easy example helps identify principles that allow us to wrestle through harder cases like how much an army is required to do to reduce and avoid collateral civilian deaths.

Ethics are rarely either/or. It is possible to condemn the barbarism of Hamas and condemn the endless Israeli occupation of the West Bank. So, too, is it possible to condemn the treatment of women and the L.G.B.T.Q. community in Arab lands and the attempt by right-wing Israeli politicians to neuter Israel’s Supreme Court. But without the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, and to recognize the fallacies of moral equivalence, students won’t be able to marshal the nuanced reasoning and a careful assessment of responsibility required in times like these.

We in the academy need to look more deeply at how it is possible that so many undergraduates, graduate students, law students and faculty at our nation’s finest colleges and universities could have such moral blinders.

We need to ask ourselves: What is in our curriculums? What do we think it means to be well educated? What moral stands are we taking? The timidity of many university leaders in condemning the Hamas massacre and antisemitism more generally offers the wrong example. Leaders need to lead.

As a bioethicist, I support requiring students to take ethics classes. Some universities — mainly Catholic institutions, including Georgetown — still do. Having a two-course ethics requirement — one about general ethics and one about some specific area, such as military ethics, environmental and bioethics, ethics of technology, ethics of the market or political ethics — would be invaluable.

But ethics classes alone are insufficient to help students develop a clear moral compass so that they can rise above ideological catchphrases and wrestle intelligently with moral dilemmas.

Instead, colleges and universities need to be more self-critical and rethink what it means for students to be educated. For the last 50 years, with a few exceptions, higher education has been reducing requirements. At the same time, academia has become more hesitant: We often avoid challenging our students, avoid putting hard questions to them, avoid forcing them to articulate and justify their opinions. All opinions are equally valid, we argue. We are fearful of offending them.

This flies in the face of what a “liberal education” should be. Liberal education should be built around honing critical thinking skills and moral and logical reasoning so students can emerge as engaged citizens. The American Association of Colleges and Universities has described a liberal education as one that “empowers individuals with core knowledge and transferable skills and cultivates social responsibility and a strong sense of ethics and values.” This certainly is not the full vision, but even with this definition, it is very hard to recognize that what we are now offering as a college education meets even this standard.

There are many ways to construct a curriculum so we can certify graduates as “educated.” Starting in 1947, as a new era dawned after what it identified as “social upheaval and the disasters of war,” M.I.T. undertook a review of its curriculum, re-examined the almost 90-year-old principles that had guided its approach and imposed changes that emphasized the importance of the humanities and social sciences. The review committee saw among M.I.T.’s missions the preparation of each student “for the moral and ethical burden relating not only to his own acts but to the acts of which he is a part” and the “cultivation of the spirit of free inquiry and rejection of interdiction and prejudice.”

All universities need to echo that today.

Creating a curriculum must be a collective effort that engages all members of our colleges and universities. College presidents and professors should stop focusing on endowments and fund-raising, tuitions and the earnings of our graduates. We must focus on the core mission: figuring out what it means to graduate educated people. In turn, this requires us to articulate and justify what we think education is so that we never again have our students make patently uneducated and alarmingly immoral declarations.

When you enter into Harvard Yard through the Dexter Gate, an inscription says, “Enter to grow in wisdom.” On the way out, the lettering reads, “Depart to serve better thy country and thy kind.” Princeton’s informal motto is “in the nation’s service and the service of humanity.” Unless we provide a liberal education with strong moral and ethical foundations as the center of our work, students will never grow in wisdom, to the detriment of our country and humanity.

Source: The Moral Deficiencies of a Liberal Education

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Hinsliff: The British hard right will exploit this war to claim multiculturalism has failed. They are wrong

2023/10/18 Leave a comment

Of note:

It is many years since I heard Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, sung. But the haunting sound of British Jews singing it inside a synagogue at the weekend stopped me in my tracks. Not everyone on the video clip that popped up on my phone seemed to know all the words. But perhaps that partly reflects who is seeking the comfort of collective worship in these frightened days.

Secular Jewish friends who once barely thought about their Jewish identity talk of feeling jolted into doing so now, while profound differences of opinion over the current Israeli government are momentarily bridged. The terrorists who murdered and abducted teenagers at a peace rave, or idealists drawn to live in kibbutzim near Gaza because of their support for cross-border peace projects, didn’t care after all how they voted or what they believed.

But neither, of course, will the fire raining down on Gaza now necessarily be able to distinguish between the views of Palestinian civilians caught beneath it; whether they full-bloodedly supported Hamas or had their reservations, or whether they were only in the strip visiting relatives (like the trapped and terrified parents-in-law of the Scottish first minister, Humza Yousaf). In peace you may choose a side but in war it chooses you. And now the consequences of those choices reverberate across a world that has never been more intimately connected.

War enters all our living rooms more than it once did for many reasons, from the unfiltered immediacy of social media – where images of headless bodies too graphic for mainstream publication are now ubiquitous – to the explosion of travel, work and study overseas that means a surprising number of Britons will feel their memories stirred by names or places in the headlines. But perhaps most intimately of all, the heightened emotions of war cascade down through diaspora communities, tied via family and friends to what is happening thousands of miles away but also fearful now of reprisals at home. Domestic tensions can arise in any conflict, of course. But the added risk in this one is that they could be actively stoked for cynical ends.

Already the British hard right is seizing on images of pro-Palestinian rallies across Europe, or diatribes by wannabe student politicians to proclaim the supposed grand failure of multiculturalism, or the idea that society is enriched by different groups being able to maintain their own religious and cultural traditions (within the confines of the law). What price that richness now, they sneer? To see anyone celebrating murder is obviously horrifying. Yet so, in its way, is some of what this ghoulishness unleashes in return.

“This is where multiculturalism leads – civil war. We cannot have different people, with different cultures living side by side without conflict,” tweeted Nick Buckley, self-styled independent candidate for Manchester’s next mayor. Britain First, an extreme rightwing party banned from Twitter until Elon Musk took over the platform, put it more bluntly: “Enoch Powell was right #riversofblood.” Where mainstream critics of multiculturalism used to argue that there were better ways of living alongside each other in a pluralistic world, its new opponents bellow that no such world is possible; that mass immigration has broken the west, and that citizenship should be revoked from those already here if they express unacceptable views. The twisted irony of this argument that Islamic and non-Islamic worlds cannot peacefully cohabit is that it’s the one jihadis make, too.

What happened in Israel feels like another 9/11 not just because of the terrifying death toll but because these unspeakable acts seem calculated to destabilise and confound wider society. The beheadings and the burnings, the sadistic atrocities filmed and uploaded for the world to see, are Islamic State-style tactics used as IS once used them, not only to project this conflict worldwide but to trigger the kind of primal emotions that make it hard to reason or think straight. But since that is the reaction Hamas wants, it is the one we must not give them.

Britain is, lord knows, not perfect. It struggles with the same challenges as every other liberal democracy, not always successfully. But it is still also a country where a Hindu prime minister can wear a kippah and join Hebrew prayers at a time of Jewish mourning, profoundly moving many who do not share his politics. It’s a country where a Muslim mayor of London who has managed these last days with exemplary grace can break bread in a kosher restaurant in Golders Green one day and visit the London office of a charity working in Gaza’s hospitals the next; where the wife of the Scottish first minister, Nadia El-Nakla, can speak emotionally of her fears for her parents’ lives while introducing a motion to the SNP’s conference that both unequivocally condemns the Hamas attacks and calls on Israel to respect international law in response.

These things too are multiculturalism in action; and so is the sound of British Jews singing another country’s anthem in their chosen place of worship, for reasons with which anyone can instinctively sympathise. The true richness of diversity is its capacity to build a new depth of understanding, a sensitivity to our neighbours, and an ability to hold sometimes painfully conflicting thoughts and feelings simultaneously in mind which helps us navigate a complex world. A politics that fuels division and hate leads ultimately only to fragmentation. But in our flexibility, our fluidity, lies Britain’s national strength. We will need it in the days to come.

  • Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Source: The British hard right will exploit this war to claim multiculturalism has failed. They are wrong – The Guardian

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How French immersion inadvertently created class and cultural divides at schools across Canada

2023/10/18 Leave a comment

Relevant class analysis. Longer term implications both in terms of class and cultural divisions, as well as interest in French compared to other non-official languages:

Up until a decade ago, Blake Street Junior Public School was an English-only school that sat on a street populated mostly by public housing buildings in Toronto’s east end. The kids who lived there and attended Blake primarily came from low-income and racialized families.

New families to the gentrifying community – many of them white and upper-middle class – avoided the local school, citing Blake students’ performance on standardized tests, a controversial but popular yardstick for measuring how “good” a school is. They found ways to enroll them in schools nearby, in much whiter and more affluent neighbourhoods.

In 2015, enrolment at Blake was so low the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) contemplated shuttering the school. But then things turned around. In less than a decade, the school’s population swelled by 70 per cent, from 229 to 388, almost all of that growth owing to the introduction of a new French immersion stream in 2014.

Although it was recent immigrants from French-speaking African countries that first pushed for the program at Blake, those who raced to register for it were mostly wealthier and predominantly white parents from the wider area.

TDSB data show the change seen at Blake is a city-wide phenomenon: White students are overrepresented in French immersion, as well as students from families with very high socioeconomic status who have Canadian-born, university-educated parents.

According to Statistics Canada, the same thing has historically been seen in most provinces. And in total, French immersion enrolment across the country has grown from 261,450 students in 1997-98 to 482,769 in 2020-21, the latest year for which data is available.

While this trend has been decades in the making, governments, school boards and parents are finally taking action on equity issues surrounding French immersion programs, and grappling with its future.

In New Brunswick, Canada’s only officially bilingual province, the government attempted to address access issues by removing the full-day French immersion program in favour of half-day French instruction for all anglophone students – an initiative they cancelled earlier this year after a massive pushback from parents.

At the same time, in 2022, Canada set a record for the most immigrants welcomed in a single year, and one in four residents now reports a mother tongue other than English or French. This has prompted demand in some jurisdictions for immersive teaching of languages besides the two official ones.

Ultimately, in keeping with how a group of mothers originally brought French immersion to the country, parents – who now wield more power than they ever have in the choices offered in public schools – could be the chief determinants of what bilingual education looks like in the country in the years to come.

The roots of French immersion go back to October, 1963, in the Quebec community of Saint-Lambert. There, three anglophone mothers got together to discuss how their children – all of whom attended English schools – could improve their French.

The women organized extracurricular programming and summer camps based around what was then a controversial approach: having a teacher exclusively speak French to students who were anglophones. The program was soon implemented by the local school board and then began to spread across the country.

The adoption of the program was initially slow. But in the last quarter-century, as the potential benefits of the program became known, enrolment exploded. Studies suggested learning multiple languages at a young age could stimulate cognitive development, and parents believed French immersion could also be a ticket to greater career opportunities.

But after decades in practice, it’s become clear the lofty promises of French immersion didn’t always stand up to scrutiny. In most school boards, demand has outstripped supply when it comes to recruiting qualified teachers who are fluent in French. Special education resources have also been limited for students in French immersion, which has meant many children with learning disabilities often transfer out of the program and into an English one where they can get better support.

The rate of attrition increases as French immersion students move through the grades. Many drop out after elementary school, and by the time they reach high school, where there is often a wider course selection in English, plenty of others abandon the program. And then there’s been a wider growing concern over whether French immersion – which in many communities has come to be seen as an elite program for keener learners – is driving segregation within schools and communities.

At Toronto’s Blake Street Public School, part of the fallout of its demographic changes has been losing its status as a “Model School” – a designation in the TDSB that brings additional funding to 150 schools based on a mix of factors, including median family income, the percentage of families on social assistance and the number of single-parent families. Among other benefits, Blake’s Model School status gave it breakfast and snack programs, subsidies for school trips, a thriving chess program, visits from theatre groups, and in-school eye and dental exams.

Some saw Blake’s descent on the Model Schools list as a triumph rather than a loss. Bringing in French immersion also brought in more affluent families, which in turn “fixed” the school; this was how it was framed by parents to Meaghan Phillips-Shiner, the co-chair of Blake’s school council. But as long as the public housing was on the same street as Blake, she pointed out, the 150 to 200 families that needed extra support through the Model Schools program would be there.

“The data gets saturated because now we have all these other people there. But those kids’ needs haven’t gone away,” she said.

It became known that the families who lived on the street were beginning to feel intimidated by or resentful of the outsiders who now outnumbered them, says Mohammad Yousuf, who serves as a representative for the TDSB’s Parent Involvement Advisory Committee and whose daughter attends the school. Because he’s an Indian immigrant and his wife is visibly Muslim, he says racialized and immigrant parents have been candid with them about feeling like “second-class citizens” at the school.

He predicts the loss of Model School status this fall will only widen the chasm. “The divide between rich and poor, whites and non-whites will be bigger, stronger,” he said.

The changes at Blake have reverberated in the wider community. Laurette Jack, who is Black and has worked at Eastview Neighbourhood Community Centre just down the block from Blake for 23 years, saw it early on.

For the longest time she’d worked primarily with the population living on the block, a mix of Afro-Caribbean, West African, North African and Chinese kids. About 60 to 100 who lived in the social housing complex accessed the centre’s programming. Now, there are maybe only five to 10 kids who are “Blake Street Kids” as she calls them – the vast majority are “gentrified community kids.”

As the French immersion population grew and Blake’s Model School status was under threat, then-principal Jennifer Zurba made it clear at school council meetings that this was something all families should be concerned about.

The call to action prompted serious self-reflection in Valerie Laurie, the council’s former co-chair. When she first heard that some families in the area felt “the French stream parents were taking over,” she bristled. She didn’t put her two kids in French immersion to segregate them from racialized or poor kids, she says, but it was undeniable that it was a byproduct of her choice.

“I think it’s super amazing when I hear my kids speaking French to each other at home … it makes me warm and fuzzy. But that shouldn’t take away a food program from my neighbour’s kid. It’s hard to justify,” she said.

Ms. Laurie and others on the school council – the majority of them French-immersion parents – formed an advocacy group to petition the school board to overhaul the way it determined its Learning Opportunities Index (LOI), the calculation that decides which schools get Model School status. They proposed that LOI be calculated separately for the two streams, as they believed it would be clear that many English students came from families in need.

In a recent report, the TDSB said it was reviewing the way it calculates LOI and is planning public consultations as part of this process. This work is scheduled to begin this fall and a revised policy will be presented to the board of trustees for final approval in winter 2024.

Still, the advocacy work hasn’t smoothed over all tensions.

Ms. Zurba, who has moved to be principal at a different school, said she understands why it’s difficult for families who have been in the neighbourhood for years to trust the parents who are advocating for them now. The long-time families, she says, “have seen firsthand what the change in the community has been” and thinks it can’t be easy to witness the French immersion families who once walked past Blake embrace the school now that it’s home to a desired program.

Many parents who send their kids to French immersion don’t want any changes to the program, which was recently witnessed in New Brunswick, where the provincial government tried to scrap French immersion.

Micah Peterson’s wife initially worried about enrolling the couple’s children in French immersion at their local school in Saint John. She had never attended the program herself and wondered if she’d be able to help her kids with their homework.

Mr. Peterson lent a reassuring voice: He thrived as a French-immersion student despite having anglophone parents. And he shared the research with his wife that showed studying multiple languages can enhance a child’s brain development.

The Petersons enrolled six of their seven children in the program. They plan to send their youngest there, too.

So when Mr. Peterson learned last fall that the New Brunswick provincial government had planned to replace French immersion with a program where all anglophone children entering kindergarten and Grade 1 would spend half their day learning French and the other half in English, he was appalled – and joined the fight against the plan.

The government argued that the proposed changes would allow more students in the country’s only official bilingual province to graduate high school with at least a conversational level of French.

“It’s not a streaming program for a small portion of our students. It’s for all of our students,” Education Minister Bill Hogan said at the time.

In January, Mr. Peterson and more than 300 others attended a government-run public consultation session in Saint John on the future of the program. Every speaker who addressed the room spoke in opposition to the government’s plans to eliminate the French-immersion program.

“If you want high-quality French-speaking people that are going to be joining the government, that are going to be doing things that are exciting, that are going to become French-immersion teachers … you think they’re going to be able to do that when you cut it in half? That’s ridiculous,” Mr. Peterson said at the session.

Mr. Peterson’s voice was among thousands across the province that spoke up against the changes proposed by Premier Blaine Higgs. In consultations held by the province, parents filled conference rooms in Bathurst, Moncton, Saint John and Fredericton to strongly voice their opposition to the government’s plan. They crowded virtual town halls. And they flooded social media with a campaign to save the French-immersion program.

It proved too much for the government. Or, depending on your perspective, just the right amount.

In February, New Brunswick backtracked on its plan. It was a shift that highlighted the power that parents – in this case, New Brunswick’s anglophone community – increasingly hold in the public education system, particularly those with children in French immersion and other optional programs of choice.

“I think it’s a positive example of people coming together and making their voices heard and advocating for what they want,” said Kaitlyn Gillis, a mother of two who attended a public consultation session in Fredericton.

Successive governments, she said, have fiddled with the province’s French-as-a-second-language programs. In 2008, they moved the entry point to French immersion from Grade 1 to Grade 3. It was then moved back to Grade 1 in 2017 under then-premier Brian Gallant.

If it weren’t for the forceful voices of hundreds of parents in New Brunswick, Ms. Gillis believes families would once again be thrown for a loop.

Since the 1990s, there’s been an undeniable shift toward a public school system that caters to the wishes of parents, said Université de Saint-Boniface education professor Corinne Barrett DeWiele.

“The parents are saying, ‘yes, we want French immersion in New Brunswick and yes, we want it to start in Grade 1 and don’t take that away from us,’ ” said Prof. Barrett DeWiele, who is also a former principal of a French-immersion school.

In 2017, a similar scene played out at the Halton Catholic District School Board in southwestern Ontario. The school board had looked at phasing out the French-immersion program as it grappled with a shortage of qualified teachers. Parents pleaded with trustees to save the program. Others considered leaving, which would mean less funding for the board. In the end, trustees saved the program.

In a research paper published two years ago, Prof. Barrett DeWiele described publicly funded French-immersion education as a paradox: Its benefits are meant to be universally accessible but end up unequally distributed as a result of demand outstripping supply. The tendency is for parents of middle and upper socioeconomic status, who tend to have more free time and thus are more involved, to realize the benefits of French immersion for their children and to pursue it more frequently than the rest of the population, she wrote.

To Mr. Peterson, taking away French immersion in an attempt to avoid streaming is like eliminating Advanced Placement courses, or high-level science classes students take in preparation for university. He believes school boards should be expanding their language offerings further rather than limiting them in the name of equity.

“We should be able to splinter kids out into their interests and they should be able to pursue that with ferocity,” he said.

While French immersion may be the program of choice among many families, in some corners of the country, change is afoot.

In Edmonton, for instance, other languages from Mandarin to Arabic and Spanish are carving out a place in the public education system, a reflection of the changing demographics of the city.

Carolyn Wang chooses to drive her children 14 kilometres to southwest Edmonton each day so they can attend Parkallen School’s Chinese (Mandarin) bilingual program, where half of the day’s instruction takes place in the second language.

“I had already chosen the fact that, you know what, I am sacrificing the next seven years to drive my kids to and from school for their education,” Ms. Wang said. “I already had my heart set on sending them.”

In the Edmonton Public Schools division, there are just as many students enrolled in bilingual programs as there are in French immersion. Almost 5,000 students attended bilingual programs in the last academic year, and 4,300 studied French immersion. Other school boards in Canada are expanding language programs as well. The Winnipeg School Division, for example, started a Filipino bilingual program in one of its schools this fall with 11 kindergarten and Grade 1 kids enrolled. It also offers bilingual programs in Cree, Ojibwe, Ukrainian, Hebrew and Spanish.

Ms. Wang is herself a graduate of the Chinese (Mandarin) bilingual program, which Edmonton piloted in the early 1980s. She credits the program with allowing her to receive a federally funded postgraduate scholarship to study at China’s Xiamen University.

In her first job, she beat out other applicants because the company appreciated her language skills. “The opportunities are endless,” said Ms. Wang, who is also president of the parent-driven Edmonton Chinese Bilingual Education Association.

In the Edmonton school division, the French-immersion program and the half-day ones have been around a similar amount of time. French was introduced in 1974. The Hebrew language followed a year later, then German in the late 1970s, and Arabic and Chinese in the early 1980s. The Spanish bilingual program rolled out in 2001.

Valerie Leclair, the division’s supervisor of programs and student accommodation, says new programs are introduced if there is sufficient demand from families and enough space in schools to accommodate students. She says that parents often want their children to learn more about their culture and language in a school setting – an extension of what happens in the home. Ms. Leclair heard from some parents that learning Chinese or Spanish was important because it was the “language of business,” meaning there were future career paths for children.

Ms. Leclair is unclear what the proliferation of other languages means for French. The number of students studying a second language, whether it’s French or Mandarin, has been steadily climbing. However, the French-immersion program still garners more interest from families than other languages, she says.

Ms. Wang appreciates that Canada’s official languages are French and English, but she wonders whether other languages will soon be seen as equally important on a job application, especially in government. Her eldest child’s class is not only made up of Chinese-Canadian students, but children who are white, South Asian and biracial.

“I understand their standpoint,” she said of employers who prioritize knowledge of French. “But I feel that they are minimizing the opportunities that could come from the people they could employ.”

For now, she’s content with her children being able to converse with elders, and preserving their language for another generation. “I feel that French immersion is a fabulous program, don’t get me wrong,” she said. “There’s definite benefits to that.”

However, when she looks at her children and which second language she thinks will open a few more doors in their future, she’s doesn’t mince words about how she feels about the Mandarin bilingual program: “It was an easy choice.”

Source: How French immersion inadvertently created class and cultural divides at schools across Canada

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Canada’s envoy on the Holocaust departs and has a final warning

2023/10/18 Leave a comment

Of note. Lyons good replacement given her extensive experience:

Former Liberal cabinet minister and global human rights advocate Irwin Cotler exited his role Monday as Canada’s special envoy on Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism with a warning: hatred against Jews is the “canary in the mine shaft” of human evil.

Cotler said his three years in the role have seen a marked escalation of antisemitism around the world. He cited the hate flourishing on social media, rising numbers of people who hold antisemitic beliefs, and an increase in hate crimes being carried out against Jews.

The attack last week in Israel by the militant group Hamas must also be understood to have global implications for hate, he said.

He called the organization, which Canada and other countries consider a terrorist group, not just an enemy of the Jewish people but of Palestinians as well.

“It’s an enemy of peace itself,” he said.

“And that’s what we’re up against, and regrettably, the Palestinian people end up being human shields and end up themselves being hostages to this murderous terrorist, antisemitic group, letting us understand once again that while it begins with Jews, as we say, it doesn’t end with Jews.”

Cotler has now passed the baton for the role to Deborah Lyons, who has been both Canada’s ambassador to Israel and also the head of the United Nations’ mission in Afghanistan.

“Our world is hurting. We’re a little bit broken. And we are hurting,” she said in her inaugural remarks at a press conference Monday.

“But as we make our way together, through this permeating sense of helplessness, I know that as Canadians, with our wonderful leaders, we will come together, we will see the challenges, and we will face that incredible work that needs to be done.”

Lyons said she’ll emphasize antisemitism education, both on university campuses and in the corporate sector, as well as ensuring more robust data collection to help improve the safety and security of the Jewish community. She also called upon faith leaders and politicians to do their part.

“Please unite us and inspire us through your actions to continue to build that diverse and inclusive Canada, which all your constituents deserve,” she said.

Lyons was asked Monday what, as a non-Jewish person, she brings to the job, and she pushed back saying that all Canadians have a role to play supporting one another.

“What I bring to this job is a commitment as a Canadian.”

The Liberal government created the special envoy role in 2020, following through on previous commitments to international Holocaust remembrance efforts. Lyons is the second person to hold the job, after Cotler. Her’s is a two-year appointment.

The announcement she is taking over from Cotler came at the start of a two-day conference in Ottawa organized by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs on fighting antisemitism.

Former Conservative cabinet minister and Alberta premier Jason Kenney, among the speakers Monday, said that while for now there is cross-partisan consensus in Canada around the moral need to combat antisemitism, there is a blunt reality: the Jewish community is small, and must remain vigilant.

“Do not take for granted the positions being expressed here in Ottawa today,” he said.

“You must redouble your efforts intelligently to build coalitions across the pluralism of this country and to be voices of clarity and courage.”

Source: Canada’s envoy on the Holocaust departs and has a final warning

Filed under Antisemitism, Holocaust, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Howard Anglin: What did you think they meant by ‘decolonization’ anyway?

2023/10/16 Leave a comment

Painting an overly broad brush but nevertheless interesting take on the differences among individuals and groups on how they use the term:

Just as Parliament’s recent reminder of the complexities of the Eastern Front and the existence of “literal Nazis” gave Canadians reason to reconsider our casual use of that term in day-to-day debate, perhaps the live-streaming of a 21st century pogrom will make our leaders and our media think twice before blithely tossing around words like “racist” and “hate” to describe merely disapproved beliefs.

As Orwell once said of the word “fascism,” these words have become so devalued by over-use in our political phony-wars that they often seem to have no meaning except to signify “something not desirable.”

Shielded from most of the world’s problems, we have become too comfortable describing minor offences in terms that have truly vile referents in the world beyond our shores. An obvious example this week is the term “decolonization,” which has been eagerly adopted by Canadian governments, universities, elementary schools, libraries, bookstores, and even coffee shops. Most people who implement these policies probably think of “decolonization” as something benign like the inclusion of more representative works and stories from underrepresented—and in Canada especially Indigenous—voices. If that is all it means, and if “representation” doesn’t become an excuse for sacrificing intellectual rigour and aesthetic quality (and it shouldn’t and needn’t), then it is a good thing.

Within this broad majority, however, I would distinguish between those who are earnestly working to bind our society together and tend sensitively to old wounds, and those who go further, embracing the symbols of the revolutionary counter-culture while turning a blind eye to its real-world implications. Among the latter are the sort of people who wear Che Guevara t-shirts to show that they are the “good guys,” not because he took sadistic pleasure in shooting reactionary peasants and boasted that “Hatred is the central element of our struggle! Hatred … so violent that it propels a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him [a] violent and cold- blooded killing machine.” They don’t mean that Che, of course, if they’ve even bothered to learn who he was.

Beyond this majority, there is a smaller group for whom the idea of “decolonization” has a harder edge. They welcome it as a chance to turn the tables on our country’s historically-dominant European majority, not by supplementing our traditional symbols with new ones but by disparaging them as shameful and displacing them. These are the people who saw the burning of churches two summers ago and took pains to explain why the (often Indigenous) congregations had it coming. They are motivated by a retributive impulse that is often indistinguishable from revenge (or in the case of the white progressives who make up much of this class, masochistic self-flagellation). Unfortunately, this group is the movement’s avant-garde. Their energy and ideas drive and direct the policies in practice, while the well-meaning are carried along because they don’t have the words or courage to distinguish their good intentions from this destructive agenda.

But as we learned this week, there is buried within this last group a hardcore faction that would go even further. When they talk about decolonization, they mean it literally, with all its blood-soaked consequences. Symbolic change won’t cut it for them; they want action. They are the ones who read Frantz Fanon’s Damnés de la terre(and Sartre’s revolting introduction) not with the detached pose of most Western progressives but with lurid visions of incarnadine vengeance. They read things like “Violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect” and they don’t just believe it intellectually, they howl for it viscerally, palpably, urgently.

Twitter has exposed them as cheerleaders of rape and infanticide, of “literal racism,” and “literal hate.” Sure, they were tweeting from the safety of their faculty lounges with the security of tenure and they might not be so sanguine about murder when it isn’t mediated through a small screen, but this much was clear: they saw the same images that sickened and revolted normal people and their first reaction was to justify and celebrate them. They rushed into the digital public square to explain that the shooting of young people attending a “peace” concert was an act of “anticolonial resistance,” they denied that settlers were “civilians” (and so off-limits for targeted killing), and they wondered, rhetorically, what everyone thought the words “[p]ostcolonial, anticolonial, and decolonial” meant? It’s a question their colleagues should be thinking hard about today, especially those with “settler” in their bios.

It was a revelatory moment. Perhaps these armchair Amins and tenured Tourés have spent so long insisting that “words are violence” that they can no longer tell the difference between a micro-aggression and a massacre. Perhaps they have spent so much time in a world of relative truths that they can’t bring themselves to accept the objective reality of evil when it bares its fangs. And perhaps we collectively bear some of the blame for this. Our schools, businesses, and governments have ignored or indulged them for so long that they may have believed, with good reason, that there would be no consequences for airing their zealotry this time too. But now that we’ve seen it, we should not forget it. We need to make sure they play no further role in shaping Canadian social policy. They have done far, far too much damage already.

Source: Howard Anglin: What did you think they meant by ‘decolonization’ anyway?

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with

Jamie Sarkonak: Multicultural ‘awareness months’ fail to raise awareness

2023/10/16 Leave a comment

Unfortunately, she has a point. But they are important to specific communities and provide opportunities for political announcements and events.

Was essential part of the job when working at multiculturalism, drafting press releases and ministerial and other speeches and talking points:

October is Women’s History Month. It’s also Latin American Heritage Month. And German Heritage Month. And Canadian Islamic History Month. And 2SLGBTQQIA+ History Month (though this has not been recognized by the federal government — yet). Some provinces recognize this to be Canadian Library Month.

It’s a fairly busy time in our modern update to the old liturgical calendar. Instead of numerous saintly feasts, we get cultural awareness months, remembrance days and the like. Paradoxically, there are now so many of these observances that they don’t seem particularly worth observing at all. Everyone is special, so no one is.

Who actually celebrates these things? I don’t. October, to me, is simply “Halloween Month.” For the most part, these events — which don’t come with the benefit of time off, as statutory holidays do — seem to be an opportunity for corporations to market themselves and for public-sector communications staff to have something to write about.

In the federal government, efforts to fill the multicultural calendar are fairly recent. A 2017 list of Canada’s “important days” marked only 26 special events (back then, October’s only observance was Women’s History Month). In 2023, that number has more than doubled to 62, with many of the additions recognizing some flavour of cultural heritage. The number of LGBT-related observances on the list went from zero to six, indicating a new significance for the once under-the-radar demographic.

The list of “commemorative days” on the federal government’s website picks and chooses what to highlight, which makes it a decent gauge for identifying the priorities of whoever is in the driver’s seat. Other observances have been officially designated, but they aren’t on the list.

Examples include the obscure National Hunting, Trapping and Fishing Heritage Day in September and Pope John Paul II Day in April, both of which were established in 2014. Also established in 2014 was Lincoln Alexander Day, which actually did make the cut for the current federal government’s calendar. It celebrates the first Black member of Parliament (Alexander had many other achievements).

Why an emphasis on identity? Probably because of our national multiculturalism policy. Government departments and Crown corporations are beholden to the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, which states that Canadian policy involves the “recognition and appreciation of the diverse cultures of Canadian society” — hence, awareness months.

In their annual accountability forms to prove to Canadian Heritage that they’ve been adhering to the multiculturalism policy, departments must provide examples of actions taken to “promote and celebrate the historical contribution and heritage of communities of all origins to Canadian society.”

In its latest set of responses, CBC explained that it complied with the law by observing Asian Heritage Month, National Indigenous History Month and Black History Month. The Bank of Canada noted the same occasions, with the addition of Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Canadian Heritage dutifully carries out Parliament’s instructions to grow the list of observances. Irish Heritage Month and Emancipation Day (celebrating the abolition of slavery) were the “two new commemorative date initiatives” of 2021.

“These commemorative dates present an excellent opportunity for Canadians to learn more about the richness of the cultures and the historical contributions of these communities, and reflect upon both the proud moments in our history as well as the darker moments, to better shape our futures,” the department wrote in its annual report. “The Government of Canada looks forward to celebrating these new dates which play an important role in raising awareness of the richness of Canada’s cultural diversity.”

That is, the more calendar days celebrated, the better we’re upholding multiculturalism.

Holocaust remembrance and the end of slavery mark historical events of significance — they make sense to recognize. It’s important to keep memories of the Canadian past alive. In a similar vein, there’s a day dedicated to the first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, and a day dedicated to a Swedish man who became Canada’s first honorary citizen for helping save more than 100,000 Jews from Nazi persecution. These additions to the calendar are worthwhile.

But broader heritage celebrations seem odd to build the national calendar around. Black History Month, one of the older awareness months intended to highlight stories that often went untold, seemed much more significant back when it was fairly unique. Now, it’s lost in the crowd.

Going forward, the list can still grow. We still lack heritage months celebrating the English (though we have one for the Irish), the Spanish (though we have one for the Portuguese) and the Japanese (though we have one for the Philippines). There are months that celebrate Jewish, Islamic and Hindu heritage — but nothing for the Buddhists or Christians.

More days could be added, which would be consistent with government policy. But to what end? As the calendar grows, the significance of each day shrinks. Anyway, happy Halloween Month.

Source: Jamie Sarkonak: Multicultural ‘awareness months’ fail to raise awareness

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Rioux: Terroriste, mais encore…

2023/10/14 Leave a comment

Of note:

Ce n’est pas un hasard si le mot razzia nous vient d’Algérie. Depuis le Moyen Âge, Arabes et Ottomans menèrent des razzias ininterrompues sur les côtes méditerranéennes, où ils capturaient des otages qui étaient ensuite vendus comme esclaves, jetés dans des harems ou réduits aux travaux forcés.

Ce n’est pas un acte de guerre, mais une razzia à la puissance mille qu’a perpétrée le Hamas le 7 octobre dernier en pénétrant dès l’aube en territoire israélien pour « tuer du Juif » et assassiner plus d’un millier de militaires, de civils, de femmes et d’enfants confondus. Sans oublier de rafler une centaine d’otages qui serviront de boucliers humains, de monnaie d’échange ou de chair humaine dans des exécutions diffusées sur les réseaux sociaux afin de terroriser les mécréants.

Ceux qui font profession d’aveugles n’y verront qu’un attentat de plus dans la longue histoire du conflit israélo-palestinien. Nous sommes pourtant devant le pire carnage commis depuis 1945 à l’égard de civils juifs, assassinés pour la seule raison qu’ils étaient juifs. Sur leur chemin, les djihadistes ont abattu 260 jeunes qui participaient à la rave party Supernova. Quand ils ne les ont pas égorgés ou violés. Des fous de Dieu surgis d’un autre âge face à l’insouciante jeunesse mondialisée de Tel-Aviv, le contraste ne pouvait être plus étourdissant. Pour nombre de juifs, dont le secrétaire d’État Antony Blinken, cela n’évoquait rien de moins qu’un pogrom.

Certes, cette offensive poursuivait aussi des objectifs politiques. Il s’agissait de torpiller les accords d’Abraham, qui étaient sur le point de réconcilier diplomatiquement Israël et l’Arabie saoudite. Une alliance particulièrement inquiétante pour l’Iran, principal soutien du Hamas. Notamment parce qu’elle montre que juifs et musulmans peuvent vivre en harmonie, comme l’illustrent les 150 000 Israéliens qui visitent chaque année les Émirats arabes. Autre vision intolérable pour le Hamas, car le moindre signe de réconciliation signerait son arrêt de mort.

Ce carnage n’a donc rien à voir avec la cause nationale palestinienne, et encore moins celle d’un État indépendant. Il s’inscrit au contraire dans la lignée des grands attentats islamistes du 11 septembre, de Charlie Hebdo et du Bataclan.

Le mot terrorisme, que la prude CBC et l’extrême gauche française se refusent à prononcer, est d’ailleurs largement insuffisant pour désigner cette organisation islamiste, antisémite et totalitaire qui tient Gaza sous sa férule. Ses crimes vont bien « au-delà du terrorisme », pour reprendre les mots du bédéiste Joann Sfar. Car le Hamas n’a rien d’un banal mouvement de libération qui aurait commis quelques attentats. Créé en 1988, il est la branche palestinienne des Frères musulmans, nés en Égypte dans les années 1920, qui ont notamment soutenu l’alliance entre Hitler et le grand mufti de Jérusalem. Ici, l’oumma remplace la nation, l’islamisme le nationalisme, et le califat l’État démocratique.

Radicalement opposé aux voix libérales palestiniennes — que les Frères musulmans ont d’ailleurs souvent éliminées physiquement —, le Hamas n’a jamais eu d’autres buts que d’islamiser la société palestinienne et d’empêcher que ne s’impose une direction laïque soucieuse des intérêts nationaux de son peuple. « La mort sur le chemin de Dieu est la plus éminente des espérances », proclame sa charte fondatrice qui stipule aussi que « la bannière d’Allah » doit flotter « sur chaque pouce de la Palestine ». L’État palestinien ne pouvant être, à la rigueur, qu’une étape avant l’expulsion complète des Juifs de la région.

L’idée qu’avec le temps, le Hamas deviendrait un interlocuteur sérieux apparaît aujourd’hui comme un leurre. Cette organisation a toujours agi afin de faire capoter toute perspective de paix et de création d’un État palestinien. C’est ce qui faisait dire au journaliste israélien Stéphane Amar, que nous avions interviewé à Tel-Aviv, en 2016, que « le rêve des deux États est mort depuis longtemps ». Il ne pourrait renaître que le jour où Israël, seule démocratie du Moyen-Orient, trouverait un interlocuteur qui ne souhaite pas son extermination.

Nous avions alors constaté sur place combien la seconde Intifada, avec ses attentats kamikazes contre les civils, avait achevé de tuer tout espoir de paix, anéantissant du coup la gauche israélienne depuis longtemps ouverte au compromis. Tant que l’islamisme dominera le mouvement palestinien, la théorie des deux États demeurera un mythe. Quel État dans le monde souhaiterait la création à ses frontières d’une théocratie doublée d’un État terroriste ?

Les véritables défenseurs du peuple palestinien aujourd’hui ne sont pas ceux qui, trop heureux de s’en laver les mains, renvoient dos à dos les potentats du Hamas et le gouvernement démocratiquement élu de Benjamin Nétanyahou. Ce sont ceux qui combattent l’islamisme dans l’espoir que renaisse un jour un leadership palestinien digne de ce nom.

Le temps de juger les graves erreurs de Nétanyahou viendra bien assez vite. On peut compter sur le peuple israélien pour cela. Comme pour exiger une riposte ciblée et proportionnée. Mais, pour l’instant, constatons que la guerre que mène le Hamas pour détruire Israël n’a rien d’une lutte nationale et tout d’une guerre de civilisation.

On pourrait rêver d’un autre combat. Mais on ne choisit pas ses ennemis. C’est eux qui nous choisissent.

Source: Terroriste, mais encore…

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with ,

Kheiriddin: The ‘decolonization’ movement will condemn us to the brutality of our past

2023/10/14 Leave a comment

Valid commentary on the limits of “settler colonial” and decolonization language. Assume NDP MPP Jama is not going to leave Canada despite being “a politician who is participating in this settler colonial system.”

While history is always being reviewed and revised, that it is different from being erased, as we have to know the past in order to bring about a better present and future:

After 24 hours of outrage, Ontario NDP MPP Sarah Jama has apologized.

On Tuesday, Jama posted on Twitter that she was “reflecting on my role as a politician who is participating in this settler colonial system, and I ask that all politicians do the same. #FreePalastine (sic).” This was followed by a lengthy statement in which she condemned Israel, where, she said, “For 75 years, violence and retaliation rooted in settler colonialism have taken the lives of far too many innocent people.”

This earned her a rebuke — but not a demand for resignation — from NDP Leader Marit Stiles. Jama now says that she understands “the pain that many Jewish and Israeli Canadians, including my own constituents, must be feeling.” But as of Thursday morning, her original post remains up, and Jama remains in caucus.

Jama’s statement illustrates the absurd lengths to which the “decolonization” movement has been taken. Today, the word “decolonization” has lost all meaning. It has become a trope for overthrowing whatever order someone finds offensive.

Decolonize Palestine of Jews. Decolonize Canada of white people. Decolonize language of words that might cause offence. Decolonize the math curriculum of Eurocentric “ways of knowing.” Never mind that much of modern mathematics was developed by Arabic mathematicians — history doesn’t matter, only dogma does.

But history does matter. And in modern times, a lot of it is revisionist. It fails to note that many of the colonized people of today were once colonizers themselves, and vice versa. Jews may be considered settlers in Israel by some people in 2023, but they were subject to thousands of years of oppression there, including by the Roman Empire, the Crusaders and the Ottoman Empire.

As a result, the Jewish people became scattered throughout the world, and had no haven to flee to when Adolf Hitler dragged six million to the gas chambers, before finally being allowed to return to their ancestral homeland.

In North America, the descendants of Irish Catholics would be considered “settlers” by Indigenous people. But Catholics in Ireland were displaced by British and Scottish settlers in the 1600s, setting off centuries of conflict, the partition of Ireland and Northern Ireland and the Troubles, which claimed over 3,500 lives at the end of the last century.

In Canada, Quebec francophones would also be considered “settlers” today, despite themselves having been conquered by the British at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and spending 200 years seeking to become “maître chez nous” (masters in our own house), mostly but not exclusively by political means.

Canada’s First Nations were also both conquered and conquerors. Over the past 500 years, Indigenous people were systematically colonized by Europeans, who moved into their territories, waged war on them and eradicated their traditional way of life through the reserve system, the pass system, residential schools and other means.

But before the Europeans arrived, Indigenous nations made war on each other, engaging in both guerrilla tactics and sophisticated battles. The Haida Nation routinely conducted slave raids down the West Coast. The Iroquois Confederacy warred with the Huron-Wendat. War was as much a part of Indigenous societies as it was in other parts of the world.

Today, few people talk of these things: Indigenous peoples are portrayed as harmonious and peace-loving, while non-Indigenous people are seen as aggressive and violent. But we should talk about them, and in light of what’s happened in Israel, maybe we finally will.

Human history is a miserable river of blood, and all our ancestors bathed in it. We will never erase the sins of the past. All we can do now is move forward and decide what we will and will not tolerate today and in the future.

We can choose to stand for the principles of human rights and dignity. We can stand for equality of races and sexes. We can stand for the rule of law and democracy. We can say never again will we force children into slavery, or “re-education,” or murder them in their beds.

These concepts, it should be noted, are not “colonial.” As African political philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò writes in his brilliant work, “Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously”: “The problem is that many of our decolonizers too easily conflate modernity and westernization.”

For example, he rejects the argument that capitalism is colonial and discusses how colonialism actually blocked the economic aspirations of millions of Africans. Táíwò does not reject things such as western legal systems and the scientific method simply because they were not derived from African thought. He argues that to do so implies that colonized people have no agency and cannot decide for themselves what path to follow.

The colonization lens has become a trap that pits group against group, nation against nation. It ignores the common principles that led to the recognition after the Holocaust that war was not “a continuation of politics by other means,” as Carl von Clausewitz famously put it, but something to be avoided. If we’re ever going to put a stop to the cycle of violence, we must first stop dividing ourselves into “colonizers” and “colonized” and recognize that we are all just one thing: human beings condemned to sharing space with each other.

Terrorism, such as the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas last weekend, doesn’t make the world a better place. It won’t create an independent Palestine. It won’t lead to progress of any kind, for anyone. All it does is drag us back to the brutal past from which humanity has striven for centuries to escape.

Source: The ‘decolonihttps://apple.news/AjKtDEd9rQ0qMsa39ekIv5Qzation’ movement will condemn us to the brutality of our past

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Globe editorial: The right way to deal with a Nazi memorial

2023/10/14 Leave a comment

Sensible:

The question, then, is what to do about those monuments that glorify what should be a shameful moment for the men who served in the Waffen SS and cause for sombre reflection by Canadians, particularly the Ukrainian community?

…

Source: The right way to deal with a Nazi memorial

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Douglas Todd: Foreign-student dreams being crushed in greedy Canada

2023/10/13 Leave a comment

More on exploitative education industry practices for international students, with complicity among governments, education institutions (particularly private), consultants and others.

Not convinced, however, that “taxpayers would be willing to spend more on higher education to support domestic students and protect foreign students from being taken advantage of:”

The record number of international students in Canada is an “asset that is very lucrative,” according to Immigration Minister Marc Miller.

And he’s not kidding. With Canada’s official foreign student numbers at 800,000, and CIBC bank economist Benjamin Tal informing the Liberal cabinet the actual figure is more like 1.3 million, it’s often boasted people on study visas bring about $30 billion a year into the country.

Much of that lucre in Canada, put together by wealthy and middle-income families around the world, goes toward more than 1,600 Canadian public and private learning institutions. The rest is funnelled into the wider economy, including the pockets of big-city landlords.

But a prominent Vancouver businessman and educational philanthropist, Barj Dhahan, who works in higher education in both India and Canada, uses the word greedy to describe the organizations and individuals raking in windfall profits from international students.

The co-founder of the Canada India Education Society, which collaborates with the University of B.C. and Punjabi organizations to educate thousands of students and nurses in India, said he hears stories each week from families of foreign students about how Canada is exploiting and even abusing them.

“They come here because they’ve been sold a dream. And their dreams are dashed,” Dhahan said.

Many international student are upset, or even in despair, when they discover Canadian rents are extreme, their schooling is often shoddy, especially in small private schools, tuition fees are four to eight times that of domestic students, decent jobs are hard to get and their chances of becoming Canadian citizens are low.

Last week, it was learned through access to information that, in 2021, Ottawa’s Immigration Department conducted a survey of 3,700 international students, which found an overwhelming 87 per cent plan to apply for permanent residence in Canada. That’s a spike from 70 per cent in 2020.

Vancouver immigration lawyer and researcher Richard Kurland, who obtained the internal government survey, said there is no way that many aspiring foreign students will be able to obtain coveted citizenship, since there is intense competition for spots.

Given that many families around the planet have literally “bet the farm” to finance their children’s education abroad in hopes they will get immigrant status, Kurland, a frequent adviser to Parliament, believes Canada has a moral obligation to warn of the likelihood of crushed expectations.

The reputation of Canada, and its educational system, is being damaged both here and abroad, says Dhahan, who is also founder of the $45,000 Dhahan Prize for Punjabi Literature and a major contributor to international programs at UBC, Carleton University in Ottawa, and other institutions.

In addition to questioning the cost and quality of education at Canada’s often-tiny private colleges and language schools, most of which rely almost entirely on foreign nationals, Dhahan is appalled tuition fees for foreign students have soared at many of the country’s large public universities.

Dhahan points, for instance, to how UBC now frequently charges a foreign student seven times more than a domestic student. For instance, one year in UBC’s undergrad arts program costs an international student about $45,000, while the rate is $5,800 for a domestic student. The price tag on other programs can be much higher.

Tuition fees for international students are also exorbitant, he said, at most public and private colleges, where students from India are by far the biggest cohort of international students. Chinese students make up the largest group of international students at universities.

Given that many Canadian universities and colleges don’t want to rely so heavily on foreign students to survive, Dhahan believes taxpayers would be willing to spend more on higher education to support domestic students and protect foreign students from being taken advantage of.

Dhahan said it’s disturbing that a lot of foreign students whose parents are not rich are being encouraged by immigration consultants here and abroad to sign up for six-month programs at some of Canada’s more than 900 private schools, mainly so they can gain a work permit.

“Canadian governments have no policing resources to monitor how many actually study, or how many stay in Canada beyond the six-month program,” Dhahan said. “There is no determination as to who leaves and who stays.”

Since the vast majority of foreign students want to eventually become Canadian citizens, Dhahan and Kurland say they are vulnerable to victimization by seedy employers.

Some desperate students, according to Dhahan and recent reports, are paying employers kickbacks worth tens of thousands of dollars to fill out a government form called a labour market impact assessment, which allows them to work longer in Canada so they can apply for permanent resident status.

Listening to troubled families and students over the years, Dhahan has also heard many variations on news media reports about landlords taking advantage of foreign students.

“I would say the reputations of our world-class public colleges and universities are being tarnished right now.” Good quality public institutions are being lumped together with dubious private ones, Dhahan said. And both, he said, are often demanding “rapacious” and “unjust” tuition fees.

In a reference to the West’s past history of colonialism, which often led to the exploitation of the people of developing nations, Dhahan said: “It’s colonization all over again. Just in a different way.”

Source: Douglas Todd: Foreign-student dreams being crushed in greedy Canada

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

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