Coren: Peace is possible in Israel and Palestine — if enough genuinely want it

2023/10/18 Leave a comment

Money quote:

If I had the ability I would silence the Islamists, the Jew-haters and the predictable Marxists who know nothing of humanity; as well as the fundamentalist Israeli settlers, the extreme Zionists, who care for nobody other than their cause, those diaspora Jewish people who are more extreme than most Israelis and their right-wing Christian friends who want to fight the end times war to every last Jew and Arab.

Well said:

I’m a Christian priest with three Jewish grandparents. So, to an antisemite I’m a Jew. Even worse, I’m an infiltrator, trying to destroy the church from within. Believe me, when I’m attacked on social media that abuse becomes abundantly and repeatedly clear.

My family fled Russian pogroms in 1900, then lived in the east-end of London during the threat of pre-war fascism. They had direct, physical confrontations with Nazis.

I’ve also visited Israel and Palestine numerous times for 40 years and have dear friends on all sides of the debate. I studied there, lived there, and unlike so many sudden and instant experts, genuinely understand the region, its history and complexities.

Because of this I refuse to play the sordid game of triumphalism and exclusive truth, will not stand with Israel or with Palestine and won’t utter platitudes and simplistic slogans about a situation that demands so much more than that. If I stand with anything, it’s justice and peace. Let the extremists roar but I will not be moved.

There are simultaneous truths that have to be made clear and they really aren’t so difficult. First, the Hamas slaughter of the innocents was barbaric and grotesque. To refuse to condemn it, let alone condone it, is a moral outrage. No relativism, no excuses, no infantile radicalism. Just explicitly reject rape, infanticide and the murder of blameless people.

Second, the open wound of injustice toward Palestine and Palestinians remains and until that is addressed there can be no lasting solution. Of course, there are lies and distortions, of course the local as well as the super powers are hypocritical and exploitative and of course the Palestinian leadership has often been disastrous. But none of that changes the reality of the Palestinians losing their homes and homeland.

Third, while Israel’s campaign in Gaza may well destroy Hamas as a threat, it will come at the cost of countless innocent lives and will also achieve little if anything in the long run. Revenge is not policy, and an Israeli child killed by a blood-lusting terrorist is little different from a Palestinian baby pulled from the rubble after an Israeli missile attack. It will create another generation of young people eager to martyr themselves to attack Israel, it will alienate world opinion, but most of all it will bring further agony to a people already living in appalling conditions.

If I had the ability I would silence the Islamists, the Jew-haters and the predictable Marxists who know nothing of humanity; as well as the fundamentalist Israeli settlers, the extreme Zionists, who care for nobody other than their cause, those diaspora Jewish people who are more extreme than most Israelis and their right-wing Christian friends who want to fight the end times war to every last Jew and Arab.

They hold the edges of a great net and caught in it are the mass of ordinary Israelis and Palestinians. I’m not naïve, not inexperienced in the ways of conflict and tribal bitterness, but I also know that most on both sides want to live in dignity and safety and are willing to make the compromises that are vital if anything of value is to be achieved. I’ve seen it repeatedly and know it can happen. My God, it won’t be easy, but then little that is worth achieving ever is.

Just a few weeks ago I sat in a small house in Belfast with a man whose father had been shot dead by a paramilitary gang. The murdered man wasn’t involved in politics, just of a different religion to those who killed him.

For many years my host had wanted revenge, then he gave up, then he devoted his life to peace and reconciliation. Now he lives in a country where there is a peace nobody ever thought remotely possible. Actually, it always is. Even in Israel and Palestine. If enough genuinely want it.

Rev. Michael Coren is a Toronto-based writer. @michaelcoren

Source: Coren: Peace is possible in Israel and Palestine — if enough genuinely want it

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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

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

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 , , ,

Heintzman and MacQuarrie: Dialogue on public service more important than ever

2023/10/17 Leave a comment

Of note:

Given the state of the world these days, the recent announcement by Clerk of the Privy Council John Hannaford creating a “task team” of deputy ministers on the values and ethics of public service may seem frivolous. 

But we believe the clerk’s initiative is significant with the potential to influence the quality of our democracy for a generation.  

Canada’s public service is an important national institution, one of the key pillars of our parliamentary democracy. As we watch the erosion of democratic institutions elsewhere, the condition of our federal public service, and the quality of its democratic vocation, should concern all of us.

The clerk’s initiative recognizes that recent events show the federal public service faces some major performance challenges that call for a new effort of renewal. To make wise choices for renewal, you must know who you are, what a public service is for, and what it should be. Without this conscious awareness, a public service can easily fall short of its distinct standards of professionalism and service

The clerk’s initiative recognizes that recent events show the federal public service faces some major performance challenges that call for a new effort of renewal. To make wise choices for renewal, you must know who you are, what a public service is for, and what it should be. Without this conscious awareness, a public service can easily fall short of its distinct standards of professionalism and service.

Hannaford’s announcement comes exactly 30 years after the creation of a celebrated task force on public service and ethics under the leadership of John Tait, the former federal deputy minister of justice. The “Tait Report” set the agenda for public service values and ethics for a generation.

But times change. Every decade brings its own issues which challenge a public service to rediscover its distinctive identity as a “compass” (the clerk’s word) to guide direction for the future. He has asked the new task team to lead a “broad conversation” on how to bring the public service’s values and ethics “to life within a dynamic and increasingly complex environment.”

We think there are three conditions for the team’s success.

First, the “conversations” with public servants and others must take the form of what the Tait Report called “honest dialogue” about problems like these, among other things:

  • Performance: the federal public service has recently lost its reputation for providing timely, citizen-centred service to Canadians;
  • Trust: the civil service no longer enjoys the automatic trust and legitimacy that is essential to our democracy;
  • Boundaries: the public service has not yet acquired or sought the tools for drawing a line between the values and accountability of elected and non-elected officials, as recommended by the Gomery Report and others;
  • Accountability: public service leaders do not appear to take accountability for their own shortcomings, including the enormous expansion of the public service over the last decade and declining efficiency, and; 
  • Technology: the civil service has notoriously mismanaged implementation of digital technology, and has not yet brought public service values seriously to bear on public servants’ use of social media and artificial intelligence.

These are the kinds of real problems the task team’s “conversations” with public servants and others should openly confront if its work is to have legitimacy. 

Second, this dialogue should not be rushed. Nothing will be accomplished by simply repeating the public service’s stated core values. To recover their motivating power and urgency, public service values must reemerge from honest dialogue, modelled by the task team itself, about the problems at hand.

Third, the “conversation” must go beyond the public service to include parliamentarians. This is the unfinished business from the Tait Report. Tait recommended a dialogue about public service values should engage ministers and MPs, leading to a new “moral contract between the public service, government and Parliament of Canada.” The state of the federal public service is not just a concern for the government of the day. The quality and honesty of its advice and its ability to deliver programs and service efficiently and effectively are important to us all.

The current federal political context makes this kind of dialogue—about the kind of public service we need to support our parliamentary democracy—more urgent than ever. Now is the time. And the Clerk of the Privy Council has just set the table.

Ralph Heintzman and Catherine MacQuarrie are former senior public servants, and both served as head of the federal government’s Office of Public Service Values and Ethics.

Source: Dialogue on public service more important than ever

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Canada’s change to its Roxham Road deal is called a ‘shameful downgrading’

2023/10/17 Leave a comment

Of note. The Temporary Foreign Workers Program is economic, not humanitarian:

The federal government has been accused of downgrading its commitment to welcome 15,000 “humanitarian” migrants that it agreed to in exchange for closing down the land border to asylum seekers.

Instead of accepting 15,000 migrants on humanitarian basis, Ottawa now said 4,000 of the spots will be allocated to temporary foreign workers while the other 11,000 spaces — for permanent residence — are restricted to Colombians, Haitians and Venezuelans.

“It is a shameful downgrading of our commitment to refugee protection in the Western Hemisphere. We are deeply disappointed with the government’s backpedalling on already insufficient targets for refugee protection,” said Gauri Sreenivasan, co-executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees.

“Let us be clear, the temporary foreign worker program is not a humanitarian program. It is one designed to fulfil Canadian economic needs. It only affords temporary access and is marred by its own serious rights violations.”

In March, Ottawa and Washington expanded the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement across the entire shared border — not just at the official ports of entry.

In doing so, they closed a loophole that had been used by irregular migrants to cross from one country into the other, through unguarded border crossings such as Roxham Road in Quebec, to seek asylum.

Following the announcement, a joint statement said Canada would bring in an additional 15,000 migrants on a humanitarian basis from the Western Hemisphere over the course of the year to expand safe, regular pathways as an alternative to irregular migration. (Canada had set a target of 76,305 permanent residence spots for refugees and protected persons in 2023; the 15,000 will be on top of that.)

“We couldn’t simply shut down Roxham Road and hope that everything would resolve itself,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters at a news conference then.

“At the same time, we continue to be open to regular migrants, and we will increase the number of asylum seekers who we accept from the hemisphere — the Western Hemisphere — in order to compensate for closing these irregular crossings.”

Earlier this week, advocates who were already upset with the arrangement were shocked when Immigration Minister Marc Miller released further details about the new resettlement initiative.

Starting this fall, the permanent-residence pathway will be newly available for up to 11,000 Colombian, Haitian and Venezuelan migrants in Central or South America or the Caribbean. To qualify, they must have extended families in Canada, who are either a citizen or permanent resident.

The Canadian relative must be at least 18 years old and sign a statutory declaration that they will provide supports to the applicant to help their settlement and integration, such as helping them find housing, enrolling children in school, and registering adults for language classes.

While the humanitarian pathway has yet to open for application, immigration officials said they are on track to bring in the additional 4,000 temporary foreign workers from the Americas.

The 15,000 new arrivals would not have to meet the United Nations refugee definition — as those arriving at Roxham Road often sought to — and the Immigration Department has not clarified what the standard of humanitarian need would be.

“This is a far cry from the protection that was promised to refugee claimants when Roxham Road was closed and it is not acceptable,” said Sreenivasan.

“We urge the government to at the very least stick to their original commitment and ensure all 15,000 arrive to permanent safety in the country.”

The Immigration Department said the humanitarian program is open only to Colombian, Haitian and Venezuelans because they make up the largest volumes of irregular migrants fleeing ongoing violence and political unrest in the continent.

Those from other nationalities, it said, can still come under the temporary foreign worker program and the so-called Economic Mobility Pathways Pilot, which grants permanent residence to skilled refugees abroad if they have a Canadian job offer.

“Safe and regular migration pathway are alternatives for irregular movements, which are often dangerous ways to move across borders, where people are made vulnerable by criminal gangs and put in terrible humanitarian situations,” said department spokesperson Mary Rose Sabater.

“By providing access to regular pathways, including through existing temporary foreign worker streams, more people have access to safe migration opportunities to work in Canada.”

Sabater said the yet-to-open humanitarian program will close one year after launch or when 3,500 applications representing up to 11,000 migrants have been approved.

Source: Canada’s change to its Roxham Road deal is called a ‘shameful downgrading’

Filed under Humanitarian, Immigration Tagged with , ,

Canadian immigration update: August 2023

2023/10/17 Leave a comment

Latest monthly update. Highlights:

Two-thirds of permanent residents were former temporary residents, mainly reached a new high, mainly from International Mobility Program and the Post-Graduate Work Program. Year to date: Permanent Residents: 338,000 out of which 189,000 are former temporary residents.

Among temporary residents, the greatest growth is with respect to the International Mobility program, recently driven by “Research, educational or training programs,” over one-third of total IMP. Year to date: 605,000. The number of international students also increased dramatically (school year), year to date: 475,000.

Asylum claimants remain high, year to date: 85,000, the majority of which are inland claims, perhaps reflecting relaxed visa requirements and vetting. 

The number of new citizens remains strong, largely driven by virtual ceremonies being the default option (ill-advised IMO). Year to date: 338,000. 

Visitor visas issued year to date: 1,293,000.

Filed under Citizenship, Immigration 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 ,

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