Why the PQ isn’t so eager to celebrate the Brexit vote: Martin Patriquin

2016/06/30 Leave a comment

Worth reading – some uncomfortable truths by Patriquin:

First, there’s history. Britain has long been the subject of fevered nationalist nightmares, and the antagonist in Quebec’s narrative of subjugation and suffering. There are real, live human beings in the province who believe this country remains Britain’s useful idiot in the latter’s war with France, fought nearly 260 years ago. Most Quebec nationalists have dialed back on the lingo since the days of White Niggers of America. But in the nationalist mindset, the idea that Britain might be slave to anything is absurd at best and an insult at worst.

Second, there’s demographics. Several polls foundsupport for the “Yes” side in the 2014 Scottish referendum to be highest among younger age brackets. The ruling Scottish Nationalist Party was favourable to increased immigration, and a sizeable swath of Scotland’s cultural communities supported exiting the U.K.

Scottish nationalism was young, inclusive, and above all relevant to every facet of society. For the PQ, this example was worth celebrating because it was what the Parti Québecois used to be, and what it could aspire to.

The Leave campaign was a reflection of what the Parti Québécois has become. As the Financial Times (amongothers) demonstrated, the biggest support for the Leave campaign came from older, less-educated rural voters. In the 2014 election, the PQ attempted to target this very demographic in Quebec with its so-called “Quebec values charter,” which aimed to strip religious symbols from the heads, necks and lapels of anyone receiving a government paycheque.

The PQ suffered the worst electoral drubbing in its history, and has spent much of the last two years trying to forget the failed experiment. Endorsing the successful Leave campaign would only remind people of nationalism’s darker impulses.

Lastly, there is the gong show that is post-Brexit U.K. The PQ has long suggested, as the Leave campaign did repeatedly throughout the campaign, that separation would be a painless affair. It hasn’t been. Britain’s credit rating has been downgraded, its economy sent into a tailspin; billions of dollars of capital have been wiped out.

Even if this is a temporary hiccup, there remains the social factor. During the campaign, a man shot Labour MP Jo Cox dead on the street while yelling “Britain First.” Reports of hate crimes increased by 57 per cent in the 36 hours following the Brexit vote, according to Britain’s National Police Chiefs’ Council. And while this too may be another of Britain’s temporary miseries, history suggests racial scapegoating only increases in times of economic strife.

No wonder the PQ has kept mostly quiet. Britain’s Leave campaign is a win it doesn’t need.

Source: Why the PQ isn’t so eager to celebrate the Brexit vote

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Why the anti-abortion movement is embracing gender equality

2016/04/21 Leave a comment

Martin Patriquin nails it:

No pro-choice type himself, former Prime Minister Stephen Harper was at least pragmatic enough to stamp out any anti-abortion rumblings emanating from the socially conservative recesses of his party.

But gender equality is another story entirely. While we may be a cautious bunch on the issue of abortion, we Canadians are wildly, flamingly liberal on equality of sexes—94 per cent in favour of it, according to but one recent poll.

Pro-life types have cannily glommed onto sex-selective abortion as a means to demonstrate the evils of the pro-choice narrative run amok. They’ve rebranded the practice “gendercide,” and one politician amongst the ranks has attempted (unsuccessfully) to introduce a motion condemning it. They’ve appointed more female spokespeople. Twenty years ago, women who received abortions were murderers. Today, they are more likely to be victims.

It’s part of what University of Ottawa researchers Kelly Gordon and James Saurette call the “pro-woman” rhetoric of the anti-abortion movement. “Anti-abortionists have been losing since 1969 [when the Canadian government liberalized abortion laws],” Gordon told me recently. “They’ve been viewed as being very anti-woman. This is a strategic shift. Concentrating on sex-selective abortions is a far more sympathetic discourse.”

Enacting a law against sex-selective abortion would be folly. In India, a country of 1.2 billion, there were all of 20 convictions between 1994 and 2010, according to the government report. But then, preventing sex-selective abortions isn’t the goal of pro-lifers in this country; prohibiting abortion outright is. Gender equality is just a useful vehicle to this end.

A useful vehicle, and a Trojan horse. Restricting reproductive rights would be far easier with an existing law banning what amounts to an aberration of the practice. By draping itself in the flag of gender equality, the anti-abortion movement is rehashing a debate it lost long ago. It’s a savvy and cynical move, and should be recognized as such.

Ultimately, of course, the way to curb sex-selective abortions is roughly the same as curbing the frequency of abortions in general—not through legislation, but education. This country’s long-diminishing abortion rate is the best testament to this fact.

Source: Why the anti-abortion movement is embracing gender equality

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Refugees and the long political journey: Martin Patriquin

2015/12/15 Leave a comment

A reminder, as if needed, just how much can change with new political direction, and the ideology and values of the previous government’s restrictive approach. Must read:

Given all this, I asked Vassallo, a 27-year CIC veteran, why the Canadian government took so long to get comparatively few suffering souls to this country. “I can’t answer that, it’s a political question,” he said, with a hint of a smile.

Unfortunately, Vassallo is right, and his non-answer is a reminder of what happens when a life-or-death issue of refugees gets fed into the cauldron of partisan politics, then further distilled by an at times ugly election campaign. In a sense, the machinations by which potential refugees are sorted and selected should be as apolitical as, say, getting one’s license renewed. Yet as the previous Conservative government demonstrated, there was a distinct attempt to shape and direct the work of its civil servants here and overseas when it came to the victims of the crisis in Syria.

Last January, Stephen Harper’s government announced plans to bring in 10,000 Syrian refugees over three years. Yet several months later, only about 10 per cent of this number had been admitted—in part, it seems, because of a directive from Harper’s office itself that attempted to halt the screening process. At the time, it was presented as a security measure “to ensure the integrity of our refugee referral system,” as Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander put it at the time.

Numerous sources, including one with first-hand knowledge of the processing of refugees, said the directive was less about security than about ensuring that Christian minorities took precedence over Muslims. “You got the feeling they were trying to cherry pick religious minorities,” one source said. (Syria, which is majority Sunni Muslim, has a sizeable Christian minority.)

It took the picture of Alan Kurdi, whose lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach, for the government to slacken the reigns somewhat. Because Kurdi’s family was trying to reach Canada, the political intonations on the Harper election campaign were profound. On Sept 10, eight days after the picture made headlines worldwide, the government waived the stipulation that “resettlement candidates” must provide information regarding why they fled their country of origin.

“Going forward, unless there is evidence to the contrary, visa officers will be able to presume those fleeing the conflict meet the definition of a refugee, which will make processing faster,” reads a CIC briefing document.

There is a certain irony in this. The  government to first make a significant security-related change to the processing of refugees—arguably making it easier for Syrians and Iraqis to make it to these shores—was that of the ostensibly security-first, tough-on-terror Stephen Harper. And he did so as a political calculation, out of fear of losing an election.

Meanwhile, the “security concerns” that supposedly prevented the Harper government from increasing the numbers of refugees brought to Canada were seemingly a partisan mirage. “There have been no shortcuts to the process. They’ve accelerated it in the sense that they’ve sent over additional personnel,” Tim Bowen, chief of operations for Canadian Border Services Agency, told me. According to CIC staff, this includes the addition of some 500 officials deployed overseas to help with the effort, including between 50 and 70 visa officers.

Thankfully, there is a happy ending. First and foremost, refugees are finally arriving. Secondly, the Conservatives are critiquing the effort exactly as they should: on purely financial grounds. The refugee resettlement program will cost $671 million. It is a huge amount of money, and Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel promised to hold the government to account. “It is one thing to inspire Canadians, it’s another thing to be accountable to them,” she said.

That Rempel said as much without a fear-mongering whisper about “security concerns” shows how far the party has come in two months.

Source: Refugees and the long political journey – Macleans.ca

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The two faces of the Syrian crisis: a toddler and a tech titan, earlier fears of Vietnamese refugees

2015/11/21 Leave a comment

Anne Kingston, on the different images we have of refugees and how that reflects on us:

That a dead toddler and a tech titan have become the faces of one of the world’s worst refugee crises is telling. Where the Daily Mail and their ilk rely on dehumanizing refugees, those who are sympathetic have wound up making them unrealistically ultra-human. Most refugees, no matter where from, are not adorable small children. And odds are low that they or their progeny will revolutionize technology, create neat products people the world over clamour to buy, or contribute billions to the economy. They usually end up working jobs beneath their training and education. Some end up driving taxis, which is what Steve Job’s biological father did.

We search for unifying image to make sense, to rally around. But which images resonate with us says a great deal. One of the emblematic images from the Paris attack was the “Paris for Peace” symbol, the spontaneous illustration by a French artist. The other is a haunting photograph  by Associated Press photographer Jerome Delay of a body lying on the sidewalk outside the Bataclan Theater covered by a blanket, illuminated by lamplight. It is also a powerful tribute to humanity. All that is known about this unnamed person is that only hours earlier he or she was enjoying life in a jubilant crowd listening to music, before, in a  flash becoming a victim of  life’s circumstance. All we know that he or she was human, which in the end is all that should matter.

Source: The two faces of the Syrian crisis: a toddler and a tech titan – Macleans.ca

And Martin Patriquin reminds of the parallel worries that existed with Vietnamese refugees:

Of course, no system is perfect. Nothing is. All we can do is rely on historical precedent. Despite widespread concerns, neither increased criminality or a communist insurgency accompanied those 60,000 Vietnamese refugees. Today, Canada’s Vietnamese population stands at about 220,000—less than a third of the National Citizens’ Coalition’s dire prediction. Among them are politicians, writers, artists and Olympians. If this is anyone’s nightmare, it’s Chairman Mao’s.

Syria undoubtedly poses a security risk. Yet it takes a particularly blinkered sort of logic to come to the conclusion that its people are terrorists in waiting. Again, a bit of history: Canada has accepted roughly 2.5 million refugees and immigrants over the last 10 years alone, according to Statistics Canada data. The country’s Muslim population has doubled every one of the last three decades. And yet the two Islamist terrorist attacks, including that on the Parliament buildings last year, were perpetuated by born-and-bred Canadian converts to that religion.

No, Syrians are running because they are desperate. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights data, close to 200,000, including 20,000 children, have been killed since 2015—the vast majority by the Syrian regime. If it isn’t the regime they are fleeing, it’s the hundreds of armed groups that constitute the rebellion against it. Time only means more bloodshed. Right now is the worst time to be thinking the worst of Syria’s myriad victims.

The fault with fearing refugees

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An Arab festival, a headless clown, a sword—cue the outrage

2015/11/07 Leave a comment

Martin Patriquin on the humour of the Festival du Monde Arabe de Montréal:

The festival team did so by adopting a particularly ballsy theme for this year’s festival. The FMA has never been particularly anodyne; last year’s theme was “Folies Métèques,” which translates roughly to “dirty immigrant follies.” This year’s theme goes further with  “Hilarus Delirus,” an apparent double entendre meaning either hilarious delirium or delirious slave (Hilarus was a gladiator owned by the Roman emperor Nero). The idea is that laughing  through anything—up to and including decapitation—is the best revenge against one’s decapitators, figurative or otherwise.

The festival itself further destroys the cliché that Arab culture is a desert of bloody austerity. If the headless clown wasn’t enough, consider the accompanying video by Lynda Thalie, a Montreal singer who originally hails from Algeria. It is a five-minute carnival of painted faces and naked flesh set to Arab strings­—a Muslim fundamentalist’s nightmare, performed by an Algerian woman. The lineup also includes Iraqi-Montrealer rapper Narcicyst, who is as outspoken about Islamic fundamentalist regimes as he is of what he sees as the West’s enabling of them.

The festival’s theme also exposes another unspoken truth: that the critiquing of religious fundamentalism is most visibly the domain of non-Arabs. It makes it all too easy for apologists of, say, the murder of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists to to wrap themselves in the veil of Muslim persecution. The FMA’s headless clown lays waste to this specious argument. It is heartening to see Arabs—namely, the Muslims, Berbers, Christians and Jews who comprise the FMA team—critique the very same fundamentalism. (An important aside: the clown bleeds words and musical notes, not blood.)

Quebec has had a tumultuous few years in regards to Muslims and other religious minorities. After the Parti Québécois’s electoral attempts to remove all religious symbols from the bodies of its public servantsin 2013, the newly elected Liberals went to another absurd extreme, by introducing a bill that many legal experts say would make it illegal to critique any organized religion. Both are shoddy in their own way. Thankfully, both failed to become law.

By laughing through his own misery, the headless clown is a reminder that the best line of attack against fundamentalism isn’t through laws or government decrees. It’s as simple as embracing the culture and deriding the extremists who would dare try to smother it.

Source: An Arab festival, a headless clown, a sword—cue the outrage

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Mulcair, the niqab and ‘a dangerous game’ – Patriquin

2015/10/05 Leave a comment

Patriquin gets it right:

It’s gross stuff, reminiscent of the Parti Québécois identity campaign of 2014, and it deserves to be shouted down. Tonight, finally, one of the leaders did just this. Tom Mulcair’s statement during the fifth and final election debate on those few square inches of face-covering cloth deserves to be quoted in its entirety.

“The way Mr. Harper says it, it’s like there are people here that are pro-niqab. No one here is pro-niqab. We realize that we live in a society where we must have confidence in the authority of the tribunals, even if the practice is uncomfortable to us. If a journalist says something that is uncomfortable to me, I still support his right to say it. Mr. Harper, you are playing a dangerous game of the kind I’ve never seen in my life.”

Since the outset of the campaign, the NDP leader has been dogged with accusations of political pandering—of changing his message depending on the audience. Yet here he was in Quebec, the NDP’s power base and the place where anti-niqab sentiment is at its highest, saying exactly what much of his electorate doesn’t want to hear.

….But back to Mulcair. In the throes of the 2014 Quebec election, when the Parti Québécois introduced a bill that would ban religious head coverings of all sorts from Quebec’s civil service, it was Trudeau who denounced it as an unseemly electoral gambit. Mulcair remained largely silent. “We don’t want to give ammunition to the separatists,” his aide told me at the time.

The PQ ended up losing the election. As it turned out, the scapegoating of religious minorities wasn’t boffo electoral fodder after all. Quiet then, Mulcair was anything but tonight, giving Conservative and Bloc attempt to capitalize on fear the full-throated condemnation it deserves. Mulcair is nothing if not calculating, and perhaps he has calculated that the niqab isn’t nearly the electoral millstone some of his opponents hope. That is a hell of a gamble. It is also an honourable one.

Source: Mulcair, the niqab and ‘a dangerous game’ – Macleans.ca

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Adil Charkaoui: The angriest man in Montreal

2015/05/29 Leave a comment

Good in-depth piece by Martin Patriquin on Charkaoui:

So: is Quebec’s self-appointed Muslim spokesperson a simple teacher? Or a dangerous enabler of radical Islam?

Charkaoui effectively wears two hats, says scholar Amghar, and is skilled at tailoring his message for whomever is listening. “Charkaoui’s discourse in combatting Islamophobia isn’t dangerous. He isn’t calling for attacks in Quebec or Canada, and he knows he can’t invoke or invite terrorism or jihad, because Canada’s political context wouldn’t allow for it,” Amghar says. “But there is a sort of split in his personality. His point of view is that it’s totally normal and legitimate that there are groups like [Islamic State] and al-Nusra Front in Syria, if only to fight against Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship, and for the creation of an Islamic state.”

This double-edged existence—part conciliation, part outrage—is on display on Charkaoui’s own websites. Following the arrests of the 10 would-be jihadists in Montreal this month, Charkaoui’s east-end Muslim community centre quickly published a concerned news release. “The Islamic Community Centre of East End Montreal would like to remind that it takes the question of radicalization very seriously, and reiterates its commitment to contribute to the harmonious integration of the Muslim community in Quebec and Canada,” it reads.

Related: Maclean’s On The Hill politics podcast on terror arrests

Just a few hours later, Charkaoui’s Collective Against Islamophobia issued its own release. The tone was markedly different. “Ten arrests! It’s an unexplained phenomenon that leaves us skeptical, just as the government is adopting harsh security laws like [anti-terror legislation] C-51!” it reads, in part. “What is sure, this can only benefit one governing political party: the Conservatives!”

Give him this: Denouncing radicalism and the arrest of alleged radicals on the same day takes chutzpah that only Adil Charkaoui, with all his apparent contradictions, could muster.

Adil Charkaoui: The angriest man in Montreal – Macleans.ca

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For the Parti Québécois, bad habit dies hard

2015/02/02 Leave a comment

Martin Patriquin on the PQ internal politics regarding the resurrection of the Values Charter and related positioning:

The introduction of Drainville’s charter proposal in the fall of 2014 unleashed one of the more divisive chapters in recent Quebec political history. In one example, Quebec actress and pro-charter spokesperson Janette Bertrand said the province needed such a thing because Muslim doctors allowed women to “die faster.” It was all for naught for the PQ, pollster Claire Durand notes. “The charter was never strong enough to drive votes to the PQ. What drives votes in the Gaspé is the price of lobster, not whether a woman wears a hijab at the licence bureau.”

The charter’s lack of electoral oomph suggests the PQ’s return to identity politics is something bigger than crass politicking; perhaps the party has truly realized the limitations of its appeal to immigrants and non-francophones. At any rate, Drainville’s foray has the support of several sovereignist tenors, including Gilles Duceppe. The former Bloc Québécois leader criticized Drainville’s original charter during the last election campaign. He has since changed his mind.

“I think we need a charter,” Duceppe says. And because the Liberal government relies on the votes of religious minorities, Duceppe says only the PQ is poised to pursue the goal of state secularism. “Already, the ethnic vote isn’t very strong with the PQ. They come here from troubled countries, and they don’t want further problems,” he says. “They didn’t come to Canada for the weather.”

For the Parti Québécois, bad habit dies hard – Macleans.ca.

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Charlie Hebdo harsher with Christianity than Islam

2015/01/12 Leave a comment

Martin Patriquin on Charlie Hebdo:

My point here isn’t only that Charlie Hebdo is an equal opportunity offender of religions, a fact repeatedly borne out in the magazine’s archives. It’s also this: over the years, Charlie Hebdo has been far harsher with Christianity than it has with Islam. Catholic organizations have sued the magazine 13 times, and only once by Muslim groups. That the magazine was both firebombed (in 2011) and its staff attacked and killed (2015) by apparent adherents of Islam only speaks to Charlie Hebdo’s central point: it’s not the religion that’s the problem—though there’s that too—but its  most extreme adherents. “French Muslims are sick of Islamism,” read the first cover sell in one issue.

French society might well be anti-Islam. Muslims, who make up 12 per cent of the country’s population, account for about 60 per cent of its prison population. Many of Paris’s infamous banlieues are petri dishes of relative poverty and exclusion. French politicians, eager to curry to the public’s favour, have been far too quick in appealing to its baser fears; Nicolas Sarkozy’s outright burqua ban is but one example of this.

But Charlie Hebdo is hardly a reflection of this hate. In fact, when it wasn’t pillorying him for being an image-obsessed, pro-American patsy, Charlie Hebdo was at its best when it pointed out in brilliant and profane Technicolor how Sarkozy was guilty of scapegoating Muslims and the Roma for the sake of an election. Here is one example.

There’s a sad irony for you: far from being anti-Islam, Charlie Hebdo was perhaps the loudest defender of those who practice it.

Charlie Hebdo harsher with Christianity than Islam.

And in the same vein, on Arun with a View, commentary on the content of Charlie Hebdo by someone who has read it on and off over the years:

… The fact is, CH is on the left, targets all religions—but not their believers—in equal measure, and aims its main fire at politicians, and particularly the right (and, above all, the Front National). CH comes out once a week, i.e. 52 times a year. A handful of its issues—less than a dozen—over the past decade have had cover cartoons mocking radical Islamism (not Islam or Muslims). A drop in the bucket in terms of what CH has published. And most of these cartoons have been pretty good actually. Witty and on target.

A few in the inside pages—which could only be seen if one purchased the issue, as CH puts almost nothing on its website—were in poor taste (and the cover cartoon from last October on the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram—which was situated in the context of the then French debate on family allowances—was definitely in very poor taste), but, taken as a whole, could in no way be taken as denigrating to Muslims qua Muslims. And then there’s the actual content of CH’s columns and articles, which absolutely no CH detractor mentions (as they have most certainly never read any). I will defy anyone to find any of these—published at any point over the years—that could in any way be considered racist or Islamophobic.

On Charlie Hebdo, bigotry, and racism

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The truth about race, the police and Ferguson – Macleans.ca

2014/11/28 Leave a comment

Sobering look at the enduring prevalence of racism, and how engrained attitudes are:

Yet, a look at the research suggests the problem of police officers killing unarmed black men is not all about white police forces. In 2002, University of Chicago psychology professor Joshua Correll published The Police Officer’s Dilemma, a landmark study testing racial bias. Correll and his team devised a video game-type experiment in which test subjects were shown images of black and white males, some armed, some not. The subjects had to decide when and when not to shoot.

The results speak for themselves. “Participants fired at an armed target more quickly if he was African American than if he was white, and decided not to shoot an unarmed white target more quickly than an unarmed African American target.”

Here’s the kicker, though: Correll found little difference in the willingness or not to shoot between black and white test subjects. In 2007, he replicated the study with actual police officers, and came to a similar conclusion: A young black male is as likely to be a target of a black police officer as his Caucasian partner.

….In a sense, Michael Brown was victim to the most deadly demonstration of how black males (and blacks in general) are less likely to be given the benefit of the doubt. Even if his life doesn’t end at the hands of a cop, a black youth will face myriad examples of as much throughout his life.

Statistically, as a recent Kirwan Institute study suggests, he is more likely to be singled out as aggressive, mean and/or intellectually deficient for similar behaviour than a white kid. Should he enter into the justice system, he is more likely to be charged with a greater crime than someone with lighter skin; even if he isn’t, the black kid is more likely to be treated more harshly by judges and jurors.

Several studies have shown how blacks are more likely to be sentenced to death when their victims are white; yet another shows a correlation between death penalty sentences and typically black features. In America, the darker your skin and the fuller your lips, the higher the likelihood you will be sentenced to die for your crimes.

The truth about race, the police and Ferguson.

Much more serious than Barbara Kay’s piece:

Barbara Kay: Ferguson is the exception, not the norm in U.S. race relations

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