Khan: Ontario’s keffiyeh ban dares to define the scarf’s meaning for everyone, Regg Cohn: Israel and the UN have allowed the kaffiyeh. Why does Queen’s Park need to ban it?

2024/05/08 Leave a comment

More commentary. Not in favour of this kind of one-off decision. If the legislature chamber is going to allow this, it needs to revise the policy to allow symbols with significant political meaning in a consistent manner:

….The ban is a betrayal of the ideals of the Emancipation Act that Mr. Arnott proudly co-sponsored – namely, upholding the “ongoing struggle for human rights.” After calling on independent MPP Sarah Jama to leave the House for wearing a keffiyeh, he sent an official to deliver the message in person. In an iconic photo, a white man leans over the desk of Ms. Jama, a Black woman clad in a hijab and a keffiyeh, and seated in a wheelchair. Let’s hope the Ontario Black History Society, recognized in the Emancipation Day Act, chronicles this shameful event and sends a letter of protest to Mr. Arnott.

Ontario MPPs had two opportunities to reverse this ban by unanimously voting against it. Yet Robin Martin and Lisa MacLeod, two PC MPPs, supported the ban,keeping it in place. It’s reminiscent of the case of the town of Saint-Apollinaire, Que., in 2017, when 19 naysayers were enough to nix plans for a Muslim cemetery run by the Islamic Cultural Centre, which also operated the Quebec City mosque where six worshippers were massacred just a few months before. That vote was rooted in ignorance and prejudice. Plus ça change.

Premier Doug Ford says he personally opposes the keffiyeh ban. But by declining so far to put forward a government motion to end it, he is failing to stand firmly for the basic human rights of all Ontarians. Now it’s up to the rest of us to strive toward a just society with human dignity at its core.

Source: Ontario’s keffiyeh ban dares to define the scarf’s meaning for everyone

From Martin Regg Cohn:

…Put another way, if it walks and talks like a political protest, it’s a protest. When so many people of all backgrounds suddenly don the Palestinian kaffiyeh, it’s no longer merely cultural or sartorial but political.

Yet even if the Speaker was speaking the truth — and Stiles was surely straining credulity by claiming the kaffiyeh isn’t political at this point — Arnott made the wrong call. Technically, he’s right, but practically his ruling was unenforceable and unsupportable.

Which is why no party leader supported him last month — not just Stiles but her Green, Liberal and Progressive Conservative counterparts asked him to reconsider. Yes, even Premier Doug Ford, mindful of a hard-fought byelection last week with many Muslim voters, echoed the NDP’s call.

The Speaker reminded them all that he is merely their servant, and that they are free to overrule him. But when MPPs were asked to give unanimous consent to permit the kaffiyeh, a number of Tories demurred, leading to the present standoff….

Source: Israel and the UN have allowed the kaffiyeh. Why does Queen’s Park need to ban it?

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Regg Cohn: Peel school board should learn a lesson in controversy over Nakba Day

2024/04/19 Leave a comment

Peel SB has a habit of controversial policies and stands. Money quote: “A better way for educators to navigate modern times and historical legacies would be to always remain mindful of unity in diversity — and the reality of complexity. Find ways to bring people together rather than drive them apart:”

Nakba Day is coming to schools in two of Ontario’s biggest cities.

Not familiar with the term?

It takes place on May 15, the day after the anniversary of Israel’s founding day in 1948 — not celebrating but commiserating over the Jewish state’s creation.

Al-Nakba is an Arabic term that translates as “the catastrophe.” Yasser Arafat, in his heyday as head of the Palestinian Authority, declared it an official day of mourning across the West Bank and Gaza in 1998.

Now, the Peel District School Board is bringing it from the Middle East into schools it controls across the GTA — in Brampton, Caledon and Mississauga.

The revelation of Peel’s preoccupations has stirred fresh controversy — including demands that the board rescind its move and counterdemands to keep it in place. That very controversy tells the story of why it’s such a bad idea to keep bringing back the world’s problems to the modern multicultural metropolis that is Greater Toronto.

To be clear, there is not much about Nakba Day that is contentious for Palestinians or disputed by historians. It marks the undeniably catastrophic impact of Israel’s creation on hundreds of thousands of people whose lives were ended or upended in 1948.

How you see the world’s epochal events — and historical terminology — depends on who you are, where you live and when you’re talking.

When the late Arafat belatedly proclaimed Nakba Day, I was the Star’s Middle East correspondent, watching him work hand-in-glove with Israel. Their shared goal was two states for two peoples.

Today, on the streets of the GTA, you don’t hear protesters talk much of two states. You’ll hear slogans such as, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — implying a new Palestinian state should displace the old Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, dismantling the so-called colonial enterprise they believe Israel to be.

The world has changed, and political agendas have changed with them. Which brings us back to the Peel school board.

As part of its multicultural mission, it has a committee that curates a long list detailing “days of significance” for “secular and creed-based days.” It begins with Canada Day last year and ends with Boxing Day this year.

In between those bookends, the list catalogues celebrations of relevance and reverence in chronological (not spiritual) order — Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Bahaism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Wicca, Christianity and so on. And then there are worldly listings for Emancipation Day, Labour Day, Literacy Day and the like.

Since Canada Day is top of the list, let’s consider the Canadian context.

Some bemoan any recognition of Confederation, condemning it as a celebration of colonization; some have absented themselves from July 1 fireworks events in solidarity with Indigenous critics. That said, I cannot imagine the Peel school board voting to recognize a Canada Catastrophe Day on July 1, for it would surely spark disagreement and disunity.

That tension — between celebration and condemnation — reminds us that the creation of one nation can easily diminish another people at home and abroad. The point is that it should be possible to be both pro-Canada and pro-Indigenous, pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian, to be mindful and respectful of people on both sides, all sides.

As for Israel, it emerged from a vote of the United Nations, which partitioned the Holy Land into two nations, Jewish and Arab (retaining special status for Jerusalem). History tells us that Arabs rejected that compromise, and the resulting catastrophe was undeniable; historians have also documented episodes of ethnic cleansing, although Arab minorities endured in Israel and gained citizenship.

In the aftermath, Nakba Day makes perfect sense in Palestinian schools, but it is surely misplaced in Peel schools. For unless the board is about to declare a day of celebration for the creation of Israel on May 14 — and I don’t see it on the list, nor do I foresee it down the line — why must Peel pick a side?

When the UN General Assembly decided in 2022 to formally mark Nakba Day — three quarters of a century after birthing the state of Israel — Canada joined many nations in opposing the gesture. What qualifies Peel’s school board to reach the opposite conclusion?

A better way for educators to navigate modern times and historical legacies would be to always remain mindful of unity in diversity — and the reality of complexity. Find ways to bring people together rather than drive them apart.

Source: Peel school board should learn a lesson in controversy over Nakba Day

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Regg Cohn: India’s anti-Muslim citizenship law is discriminatory and disappointing — but not surprising

2024/04/04 Leave a comment

One of the better articles on the law:

…Modi’s BJP followers (and their historical antecedents) argue they are not merely throwing off the yoke of British colonial rule, which retreated in 1947. No, his supporters insist they are uprooting — decolonizing — a more enduring form of historical domination by India’s Moghul conquerors who imported Islam centuries ago, long before the British era.

That is one of the complications of the decolonization paradigm — the push for purification can easily go further back in time. People can keep peeling back layers of colonization and conquest until they reach their target, which is why Modi’s Hinduization movement is less concerned with the idea of white supremacy than Islamic hegemony.

There’s yet another conceptual challenge for Hindutva’s critics (of which I am one). India is far from alone in embracing religiosity or ethnicity as the measure of who shall qualify for citizenship or be disqualified, who will be welcomed with open arms or herded into closed camps.

Israel is increasingly criticized for religious discrimination for granting automatic sanctuary to Jewish immigrants under its Law of Return, enacted after its founding in 1948 (in the post-Holocaust era when Jews still faced pogroms in parts of Eastern Europe and persecution much of the Middle East). That Israel, as a Jewish state, privileges Jews is one of the reasons many critics claim “Zionism is racism.”

Yet it is a curious double standard. For India is only the latest in a long line of countries that prioritize religion in a way that Canadians — who welcome people of all faiths — perhaps cannot fathom.

Religion has been the raison d’être of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Lebanon has kept its Palestinian refugees in camps since they fled their homes in 1948, long restricting their permitted occupations lest an influx of Sunni Muslims alter the country’s delicate religious balance — or compete for coveted jobs (after protests, those restrictions were partly eased in recent years).

Bhutan, a little-known kingdom nestled in the Himalayas along India’s northern border, has long been seen as a Buddhist paradise despite its mistreatment of Hindu refugees fleeing strife in neighbouring Nepal (shunting them into camps for years without letting them settle, for fear of changing the kingdom’s ethnic makeup). Germany has long recognized ethnicity for citizenship, regardless of place of birth — granting automatic status to those with German blood who “resettle” in Deutschland.

Against that backdrop, India’s new discriminatory citizenship law is surely disappointing, but hardly surprising — and assuredly not unique. It merely reminds us of the complexity of ethnic identity and religious rivalry around the world — and how historical grievances are so easily transformed into political grudges and legal cudgels.

Source: India’s anti-Muslim citizenship law is discriminatory and disappointing — but not surprising

Filed under Citizenship, Religion Tagged with ,

Regg Cohn: Justin Trudeau’s point man says he’s ‘not naive’ as he tackles Canada’s surging immigration numbers

2024/03/27 Leave a comment

Good profile and assessment:

Marc Miller is doing what no other immigration minister has done in recent history.

He’s letting fewer temporary residents come to Canada in the short term. While planning for more immigrants in future.

Barely a year after taking over the immigration and refugee portfolio, Miller is steering a controversial course correction to avert an unplanned and unmanageable surge in temporary residents. By capping overseas student visas, and dialing down foreign work permits, he is reasserting control over uncontrolled trend lines.

Miller says Ottawa will set temporary resident targets

Immigration Minister Marc Miller announces that for the first time, Canada will set targets for the number of new temporary resident arrivals to the country. The federal government plans to decrease the number of temporary residents to five per cent of the population over the next three years, down from the current 6.2 per cent. (March 21, 2024)

Inaction is no solution, Miller told the Democracy Forum at Toronto Metropolitan University.

If he hadn’t stepped in, the country faced “exponential” growth and “exploitative” conditions for vulnerable foreigners, while exacerbating the affordability fallout from a crowded housing market.

“It’s undeniable that the volume has caused an impact on affordability,” he told me and our co-host, Anna Triandafyllidou, the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at TMU (Disclosure: I’m also a senior fellow at TMU’s Dais, which sponsors the Democracy Forum).

Miller is mindful of business becoming “addicted” to the “pitfalls” of cheap foreign labour. He is also wary of post-secondary campuses becoming addled and distorted by foreign students who pay extortionary tuitions for substandard educations in partnership with private “puppy mills” — his preferred ministerial malapropism for so-called diploma mills.

The minister is unusually candid for a politician caught in the middle of competing interests and conflicting impulses, navigating the recent ups and downs of immigration policy. In his previous portfolio, Miller served as the prime minister’s point person on Indigenous issues; now as before, he helms a ministry of complexity that requires humanity — from the campuses of Ontario to the refugee camps of the world, while navigating rival political camps in Ottawa.

If he hadn’t acted, “uncapped, we were seeing potential increases of the student numbers … to 1.4 million next year.”

But these distortions didn’t come out of nowhere. He blames “systemic underfunding, particularly in Ontario, of post-secondary education.”

The fallout isn’t just affordability but asylum problems. When foreign students are squeezed for high tuition, living in cramped quarters and getting sometimes “crappy” degrees, they increasingly resort to refugee claims — 10,000 over the last three years.

“We were in the process of creating our own home-generated asylum crisis, largely within the responsibility of the provinces,” Miller argued. It was time, “after a number of warnings, for provinces to act, to take responsibility over their education system.”

Why did it take so long?

Ottawa will “step in if the provinces don’t assume that jurisdiction and clean up some of the mess in their own kitchen,” he warned.

The federal minister is clearly frustrated by Ontario’s inattention and inaction. And he is irritated by “garbage” suggestions from Ontario that it was blindsided by his two-year cap on new international permits.

“It simply isn’t accurate,” he shot back. “There were a number of warnings that were issued quite publicly by me, but also … privately through our officials.”

While balancing federal-provincial jurisdictions on student visas, Miller must juggle the demands of business interests to tackle labour shortages, while also navigating the roadblocks to resettlement of foreign refugees. Refugee and immigration policy, like Canada’s foreign policy, is often driven by domestic and diaspora interests.

Miller acknowledges a program to help Palestinians fleeing the fighting in Gaza has been a “failure” by numbers — barely 14 have made it out, compared to fully 300,000 Ukrainian refugees now in Canada. But he says it’s unfair to compare the barriers erected at a border crossing — controlled by both Israel and Egypt — with the open channel from Ukraine’s western borders.

He’s not surprised that some are “pissed off” by the program’s “very limited success.” Yet no other country has gone as far as Canada in trying to help Gazans relocate.

“I don’t think there’s any just middle in any of those debates — there’s a lot of trauma, there’s a lot of hurt.”

But he remains optimistic that Canadians can strike a balance between competing interests at home and abroad, without falling into the polarized politics that now plague the U.S. and Europe. Canada’s major political parties, like most voters, understand that an aging population benefits from regular immigration targets rising to 500,000 people a year.

“I can’t deny the winds that are blowing against immigration,” he mused. “But we’ve generally been good as parties in avoiding a huge xenophobic debate on immigration.

“Frustration can be whipped up in many ways. Politicians do have responsibilities, and it would be terrible to have an election on the backs of some of the most vulnerable people in the world, but also some of the most vulnerable people in Canada. But I’m not naive to think that it can’t happen.”

Source: Justin Trudeau’s point man says he’s ‘not naive’ as he tackles Canada’s surging immigration numbers

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Regg Cohn: How shamelessly has Doug Ford ground down Ontario’s colleges and universities? Let me count the ways

2024/02/14 Leave a comment

Excellent analysis, including how colleges are treated differently than universities and the resulting incentive for their more rapid growth in international students:

The education of Doug Ford comes at a high price.

Not for him — the premier is doing just fine.

But under his stewardship, post-secondary education has spiralled from crisis to catastrophe. It is a disaster of Ford’s own making, with implications that go far beyond Ontario’s colleges and universities.

Here’s the problem with the premier’s post-secondary playbook: He’s been playing with other people’s money — a shell game — while gambling on the outcomes.

What looked like a good deal for Ford has become a bad bet for the entire province. The chaos over surging foreign enrolments on campus, amped up by the premier, has created panicky headlines.

But if you dig a little deeper, the crisis has also created an unsavoury windfall for the province: A “head tax” on foreign students, on top of a shell game for colleges, which together buff up the provincial treasury by hundreds of millions of dollars.

That’s on top of the savings for Ford’s Progressive Conservatives by freezing funding for higher education in Ontario at a time of rising inflation (disclosure: I’m a senior fellow at Toronto Metropolitan University and also at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy).

Upon taking power in 2018, Ford ordered every post-secondary institution to cut tuition by 10 per cent — without making up the shortfall. Those fees have been frozen ever since, while government funding stagnated year after year — inflation be damned.

Ontario’s colleges, left to fend for themselves after the tuition cut and freeze, were encouraged to make up the difference by recruiting high-paying foreigners with abandon. The inflated cash flow propelled all but one of Ontario’s 24 colleges into sudden surpluses worth more than $660 million in 2022.

Conveniently, that windfall benefited Ford’s Tories because the colleges’ balance sheets show up on the books of the provincial treasury. That’s a sweet deal for Ford and his surplus-addicted finance minister, Peter Bethlenfalvy.

But the province’s universities, most of which resisted the temptation to feast on foreign students — are now in dire financial straits, with 10 of 23 now running deficits.

Happily for Ford’s Tories, those university deficits are seemingly not the province’s problem — neither fiscally nor politically. That’s because any university’s red ink doesn’t show up on the province’s balance sheet, since they are deemed autonomous institutions (unlike colleges which report directly to the government).

It’s an accident of history that manifests as an accounting quirk. But it amounts to a handy political payoff for the premier.

Moreover, Ford’s Tories have been shamelessly milking foreign students with a de facto “head tax,” which is dressed up as an international “recovery fee” for every warm body lured to Ontario. It’s not a massive amount — more than $140 million a year — but it’s profiteering all the same.

Campuses are at the breaking point. Communities are at the boiling point over housing shortages exacerbated by an unplanned foreign influx.

Forced into action by the province’s inaction, the federal government imposed a cap on foreign students and work permits last month. With cascading abuses, Ottawa had little choice but to act — Ontario broke the system, and now Queen’s Park has to take responsibility for fixing it.

The boom will fall especially hard on Ontario, which already fills 51 per cent of the permits with only 39 per cent of the population. And it will hit universities harder than colleges and private educational institutions, which cornered an outsized share of permits driven by a strategy of greedy growth.

Will the government play hardball with universities when it comes to those scarce international permits, in order to protect the foreign cash flow of colleges who are already Ford’s preferred partners for his policy of promoting the skilled trades?

Last year, it seemed the premier had seen the light. The Tories set up a fancy-sounding Blue Ribbon Panel on Post-secondary Education that quickly focused on fixing the distorted bottom line with straightforward advice:

Stop cutting tuition and stop freezing funding.

“The sector’s financial sustainability is currently at serious risk, and it will take a concerted effort to right the ship,” its report warned in November.

The outside panel recommended a one-time tuition hike of five per cent in 2024-25, followed by increases of two per cent (or higher, tied to inflation) thereafter. By the panel’s calculations, it would take a tuition increase of 25 per cent to make up for lost monies — politically unpalatable, so it urged the Ford government to increase funding by about 10 per cent with subsequent increases of at least two per cent (plus inflation).

Its report urged the government to confront its growing addiction by moving to “reduce or eliminate the student recovery fee for international students paid by colleges,” amounting to $750 a year.

Ford’s reaction? Pull out the populist playbook:

“I just don’t believe this is the time to go into these (Ontario) students’ pockets, especially the ones that are really struggling, and ask for a tuition increase,” he told reporters last month, calling instead for more “efficiencies.”

Let’s not confuse efficiencies with distortions. By profiting from the penury of post-secondary institutions — boosting his own bottom line while starving universities and contorting colleges — Ford is giving the province a costly lesson about false economies.

Source: How shamelessly has Doug Ford ground down Ontario’s colleges and universities? Let me count the ways

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Regg Cohn: Blame Doug Ford for turning a blind eye to student immigration abuses

2024/01/29 Leave a comment

Reminder of the Ontario government’s role in exacerbating the problems:

….

There’s plenty of blame to go around — federal and provincial, Liberal and Tory, public and private, educators and entrepreneurs.

What makes Poilievre’s public musings so amusing — or laughably unserious — is his political gamesmanship about all those gaming the system. The Conservative leader stressed that visa seekers “are not to blame for (Miller)’s incompetence.”

By posing so earnestly as a protector of foreigners, Poilievre is being too clever by half. While some innocent foreigners might be misled by middlemen, many other migrants know precisely what they’re up to by leveraging student visas to get a job, not an education.

Let’s not insult the intelligence of voters or visa holders about motives. Any approval process based on rules and regulations is open to manipulation — not least an immigration, accreditation and visa system anchored in an overcomplicated federal-provincial framework of overlapping jurisdictions where people fall through the cracks (and seek cover).

Post-pandemic, all that pent-up demand for catch-up visas led everyone to lower their guard, not least the previous immigration minister, Sean Fraser. As his successor, Miller repurposed the term “puppy mills” to describe the fly-by-night immigration and education workers that operate “on top of a massage parlour.”

Henceforth, each province will be assigned work permits in proportion to its population. Ontario will be especially hard hit, as it already fills 51 per cent of them with less than 39 per cent of the population.

The problem has been a long time in the making, but the Ford government had eyes only for traditional puppy mills — the ones that breed puppies — when it announced a crackdown last month: The Preventing Unethical Puppy Sales Act, or PUPS Act, will impose a minimum fine of $10,000 for breeders in the business of abusing animals when it is debated in the legislature next month.

But there’s been no similar alarm or alacrity so far from Ford’s Tories when it comes to outfits that exploit foreigners and dupe our own governments.

While Quebec and B.C. have gotten out ahead of the student visa issue, Ontario allowed problems to fester. On Ford’s watch, an entire industry has arisen — an education-immigration complex akin to the old military-industrial complex that raised alarm bells in America decades ago.

There was easy money — lots of it — to be made off of affluent foreign students, and Canadian universities or colleges understandably wanted a piece of the action. But you can have too much of a good thing when a surge of overseas students overwhelms classrooms, campuses, communities, housing and job markets.

A few universities and most colleges got greedy — counting on high-fee foreign students for one-third or even one-half of their tuition revenues. Meanwhile, Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government got stingy.

Five years ago, Ford’s Tories announced a 10 per cent cut in tuition for domestic students, and have kept them in the deep freeze ever since, while keeping overall subsidies unchanged even as more local students showed up in class. No wonder so many public colleges responded to those foregone revenues by counting on foreign students to make up the difference — leaving them vulnerable to precisely the kind of crackdown coming from Ottawa.

…We set targets, see trends, change course and plug the gaps. This is a country that will always need immigrants, always look after refugees, always benefit from foreign students, always need to learn from its mistakes — federal but also provincial and, yes, institutional — without pressing buttons or yanking chains.

Source: Blame Doug Ford for turning a blind eye to student immigration abuses

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Regg Cohn: Who says we need to choose between Palestinians and Israelis?

2023/12/14 1 Comment

Good and needed commentary. Binary over simplifies. Hopefully Gondek can treat this as a learning moment:

…

Put simply, to be anti-Zionist today is to be anti-Israel. To be anti-Israel is to show antipathy to all those Jews who believe Israel is a sanctuary and ought not to be a cemetery for Jews.

As to the larger question of whether or not an anti-Zionist is antisemitic, rest assured it is problematic for most Jews. Slogans matter, just as words matter, countries matter, people matter.

Appearances matter, and so do no-shows. It is telling that Her Worship the mayor of Calgary worships at the altar of indifference to Israel, but another current slogan comes to mind:

Happy Hanukkah

Source: Who says we need to choose between Palestinians and Israelis?

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Regg Cohn: Canadians who seek justice in the Israel-Hamas war should choose their words — and their targets — very carefully

2023/11/13 Leave a comment

Of note. Money quote:

“We used to say that the world needs more Canada.

It can now be said that Canada does not need more Middle East — neither the madness nor the menace.”

Across Canada, protesters are raising their voices for their rival truths on both sides of the Middle Eastern divide. But two harsh realities await:

First, Canadians can’t stop the endless bloodshed in Gaza and Israel from here.

Second, they quite possibly can start a new conflict on the home front — pitting Canadians against Canadians on the streets of Toronto.

That would be the worst possible legacy of the latest war.

In Sunday’s Star, I wrote at length about the continuing war against peace, based on my own journalistic journey covering the front lines in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. Today, the conflict is closer to home.

Tensions are rising here just as they are around the world, notably in European countries where antisemitism and Islamophobia are two sides of the same debased coin. The difference is that Canadians aren’t habituated to so much intolerance and incitement.

Today, demonization is the common denominator.

Antisemitism is being normalized. Islamophobia is being legitimized. And xenophobia is being Canadianized.

Please don’t close your eyes to it, for it is in plain sight. If you can’t feel it — in the air, on the streets and online — then you have lost all feeling.

In my last article, I described how far-right Jewish settlers and inciters undermined the peace process in Israel with an assassination and occupation; how Hamas and Islamic Jihad acted not merely as terrorists but rejectionists, blowing up the peace process with suicide bombs targeting civilians.

Never underestimate the ability of extremists and extreme voices on both sides to hijack the agenda — two tails wagging two warring dogs.

I worry that something similar is happening here in Canada — not with weapons of war, just the weaponizing of words. Some are using social media and megaphones to drive a wedge of division.

Debate is good and democratic. Protests are core to the fabric of freedom and petitions are part of our history.

However, hate speech isn’t protected — antisemitic or Islamophobic attacks can be prosecuted. When a synagogue is hit with Molotov cocktails in Montreal, or a mosque in Ottawa is smeared with feces, it’s against the law.

Small comfort. I worry as much or more about the rhetoric that is perfectly legal yet utterly hostile, if not inciteful.

I’m not pining for a country that bans harsh words or uncomfortable ideas. But it is painful when I see people validate or celebrate protests that devalue what their fellow Canadians hold dear.

I don’t expect every protester to be a model of modulation. I’m not counting on every social media monger to show moderation.

But when it feeds bigotry and bullying, we are moving into perilous territory. There’s a fine line between protesting for peace and provoking a war of words.

That line has been crossed in recent weeks.

Those protesters who seek justice should also show judgment — in choosing their words and their targets. When they criticize Israeli actions over there, and then single out Jewish Canadians over here, it sends a chill here at home that Jews everywhere are fair game.

When crowds chant outside the Jewish Community Centre at Bloor and Spadina (on their way back from a nearby protest), it transmits an unmistakably antisemitic signal across the city that Jews are somehow interchangeable with the Israeli consulate. When protesters yell slogans outside restaurants allegedly to call out Jewish or Israeli connections — intending only to intimidate and berate those trapped inside — it sends an ominous message across the country.

Boycotts are blunt instruments at the best of times. This is the worst of times.

Shall our universities ban books or appearances by bestselling Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, one of his country’s harshest social critics, because of his origins? Should Canada follow the lead of Lebanon and other Arab countries in banning Wonder Woman movies because its leading woman, Gal Gadot, is Israeli?

Beware such sophistry, for it is a slippery slope.

Obviously it is possible to criticize Israel without being antisemitic — as I did and I do. It is also possible to be anti-Zionist without being anti-Jewish — though it is not as simple as it sounds.

For if Zionism is truly racism, and Israel is transparently racist, would we say the same of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan — carved out as the explicit homeland for Muslims during the 1947 partition of the subcontinent, a place where blasphemy still triggers a death sentence and church bombings remain rampant?

Polling shows most Canadian Jews are broadly supportive of Zionism and the existence of Israel (setting aside illegal settlements). So it is hardly surprising that chanting Zionism is racism, or that Israel is an abomination — and calling for its elimination — would raise alarm bells (just as attacking Ukraine’s right to self-determination would trigger anxiety among Canadians with family ties to that country).

Righteous sloganeering is the wrong way to bring people together. Without humility, there is no empathy.

We have already seen violent and hateful incidents in Canada and the U.S. against Jews and Muslims. We have already heard people claiming that pro-Palestinian protesters should be doxxed or deported for speaking out, or listened as Canadian Jews were accused of dual loyalties for having strong opinions.

Instead of reaching out across the divide and joining hands, too many Jews and Muslims can only see themselves as the bigger victim — oblivious to the other — both in the Middle East and now in Canada. But in any competition for victimhood, there are no victors — it doesn’t work over there, and it won’t help over here.

It is not too late for Canadians to regain their footing, recover their balance, reclaim their compass. But we all need better filters.

Campus excesses are today magnified by social media and then amplified by mass media — distorting the dialogue further. An echo chamber has been transformed into a boxing ring where people take their best shots to provoke the worst instincts among cheering throngs.

Instead of joining hands, we have moved to finger-pointing and flag-waving. I wince when I see the Israeli and Palestinian flags affixed to cars whose drivers honk furiously for their rival tribe or team — as if this deadly conflict were a World Cup soccer competition for the loudest fans.

In a world of conflict and ignorance, Canada can remain a country of coexistence and tolerance. At a time of political polarization, Canadians must show the path to pluralism and remain a role model for multiculturalism.

I wake up with a heavy heart when I think of the bloodshed across the Middle East now — as I did in the past for the hundreds of thousands of souls that have died in the countries I’ve covered as a foreign correspondent. But when I wake these days to what is slowly unravelling in Canada, I hear unmistakable echoes — and yes, echo chambers — from my time abroad.

Which makes my heart even heavier.

We used to say that the world needs more Canada.

It can now be said that Canada does not need more Middle East — neither the madness nor the menace.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/canadians-who-seek-justice-in-the-israel-hamas-war-should-choose-their-words-and-their/article_8b42ba0a-ee70-59cb-9a40-7125c887c51d.html

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Regg Cohn: Doug Ford hits a new low by using immigrants to sell his Greenbelt scheme

2023/08/23 Leave a comment

Of note:

Doug Ford is peddling a risky strategy to save his political skin, and it’s not pretty.

It goes like this:

Unless we gut the Greenbelt, we can’t construct all the homes needed for waves of new immigrants and refugees.

And unless we build all that new housing urgently, resentment will build up rapidly against all those newcomers.

Day after day, as the premier digs himself into a deeper and deeper political hole, he repeatedly raises the alarm: If you block the bulldozing of protected lands, you risk a popular backlash.

Far better to let me unravel the Greenbelt than allow my opponents to undermine tolerance for immigrants and refugees — which will surely happen if anyone thwarts my controversial new housing plan. Unless you let me chew up those protected lands, we will all choke on a housing shortage that is somehow the fault of foreigners.

If Ford’s fanciful scenario sounds over the top, the unpleasant reality is that he has hit a new low. Just listen to how Ontario’s premier keeps drumming up support by whipping up fears of an unaffordable foreign influx:

“Failing to act threatens to erode Canadians’ so-far unwavering support for immigration,” Ford claimed on Aug. 9, the day the auditor general delivered a damning report of his government’s political interference in gifting Greenbelt lands worth $8.28 billion to “favoured” developers.

He used the same phrasing again two days later, reading from the same Teleprompter: “Failing to act threatens to erode our unwavering support for immigration.”

Again on Monday, in a highly touted speech to municipal leaders from across the province, the premier repeated his gut-the-Greenbelt-or-else warning: “Failing that would threaten to erode Canadians’ unwavering support for immigration.”

Over and over, again and again, Ford purports to be raising the alarm in his role as a guardian of social cohesion. But if tolerance is truly his goal, the premier is playing with rhetorical fire.

It’s not a dog whistle. It’s a bullhorn being blown from Ford’s bully pulpit.

The premier’s comments this week to the Association of Municipalities of Ontario were especially unseemly and unsettling. His speech brought back memories of Ford’s performance in early 2018, when he told an audience of northern mayors that he wanted to put Ontarians to work first, before ever letting in foreigners who might take their jobs.

Back then, Ford’s parochial pitch fell flat in front of a more worldly audience of northerners, who well understood the massive demand for talented foreign doctors and nurses, teachers and preachers, traders and tradespeople in their rapidly depopulating cities and towns. But it took a while for the premier to catch on.

Again in 2018, Ford turned his wrath on “illegal border-crossers,” picking a fight with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by claiming, wrongly, that “this mess was 100 per cent the result of the federal government.” It was an attempt to whip up resentment then, just as he risks fanning prejudice now.

Let’s be clear about the housing squeeze, the Greenbelt gambit and the foreign factor. No matter how many times Ford tries to connect the dots and paint by numbers, he is making it up as he goes along.

As much as Ford keeps pointing to future immigration levels as justification for his action, the truth is that the housing shortage long predates it. Even as the premier continually cites the Greenbelt giveaway as the prerequisite to building new homes, the reality is that his own housing advisory task force (and the auditor) argued the precise opposite.

In fact, there is more than enough land that can be repurposed to meet the government’s building targets without cannibalizing protected lands. In any case, the auditor’s report notes that the government had already met its specific housing targets last October, a full month before it suddenly went back to the well by targeting the Greenbelt.

There is no shortage of land in the region, just a paucity of political will and economic ambition. There is, however, a shortage of skilled labour today that will grow more acute in future, which explains the need for rising immigration targets.

Historically, there has been a remarkable political consensus on the benefits of immigration for a small population in a big country. That’s not to say that asking questions about the right level of immigration should be taboo.

But an elected leader must be mindful of his musings lest he legitimize the blaming and scapegoating of outsiders for our own internal miscalculations and misconceptions. Our housing shortage remains a homegrown problem, and our affordability challenges are not about foreigners.

The environmentally and agriculturally sensitive lands that form a protective cordon against uncontrolled urban sprawl are neither the problem nor the solution — just a distraction and a temptation. Which is why this Progressive Conservative government is playing a dangerous game by pretending we cannot afford to preserve the Greenbelt without fracturing societal tolerance toward newcomers.

This premier has vowed never to back down on his scandalous rezoning of the Greenbelt — a bonanza that is benefiting developers with billions of dollars in windfall profits. The least he could do is stop using immigrants and refugees as fodder for his speeches.

Source: Doug Ford hits a new low by using immigrants to sell his Greenbelt scheme

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She’s a former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. How can she be so oblivious?

2023/07/18 Leave a comment

Good question, echoed in Globe editorial:

The plight of the “Two Michaels” might seem a distant memory for most Canadians.

Yet barely two years after China released these two high-profile hostages from prison, Canadians have reason to fear a repetition of Beijing’s strong-arm tactics — through the heavy hand of Hong Kong.

Where once Canadian citizens on the mainland were considered fair game for domestic hostage-taking — notably Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor — now it is Hong Kong dissidents seeking sanctuary in Canada who are being targeted for bounties both exorbitant and extraterritorial.

For a reward of $1 million in local currency (about $170,000 in Canadian funds), Hong Kong has put a rapacious price on the heads of those who dare to defy its will — and that of its mainland masters. Once a colonial outpost of the British crown, handed back to Beijing in 1997 with a promise of autonomy and democratization, this port city has since reincarnated itself as a vassal of the old Middle Kingdom.

Hong Kong’s chief executive, John Lee, boasted that these activists will be “pursued for life,” presumably to the death. In Beijing, where the draconian and anti-democratic National Security Law was first conceived and imposed from a distance, spokesperson Mao Ning accused Canada and other Western nations of “meddling” by “providing a safe haven for fugitives.”

Beijing once protested bitterly over the arrest of accused Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou at the Vancouver airport, per the terms of an extradition treaty with the U.S. Back then, China lambasted the arrest as an exercise in extraterritoriality, only to use its own territory for the incarceration of our two citizens as leverage for Meng’s eventual release.

Ottawa has already repudiated Hong Kong’s hostile act, saying it was “gravely concerned.” But there is more Canada can do.

And there is even more that one especially high-profile Canadian should do to help.

As a former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Beverley McLachlin is known as the “Right Honourable” — an honorific reserved for those who serve at the very highest levels. Upon her retirement in 2017 from Canada’s highest court, she leapfrogged across the Pacific to an appointment to Hong Kong’s highest court, the Court of Final Appeal.

Even at the time, it struck me as a curious cross-pollination of Canadian jurisprudence with Hong Kong’s intolerance. When I spoke briefly with McLachlin — after she accepted one of the innumerable awards conferred upon her for a distinguished career on the bench — she seemed unfazed by my prediction that she would soon find herself in an impossible position.

I told her I had covered Hong Kong’s struggling democracy movement for seven years, and later watched the narrowing margin of manoeuvre as Beijing went back on its written promises. Did she know what she was getting into?

McLachlin gave me a polite hearing, but she had already reached a career decision. Her verdict was not open to appeal.

The subsequent unravelling of Hong Kong’s system of law could not have been worse. What began as a crackdown followed by a suffocation has become an eradication of democracy.

Yet all these years later, McLachlin serves indefatigably — if not faithfully — on Hong Kong’s highest court, insisting that she is doing her duty to law and order even after the law has been weaponized and distorted into a tool of disorder and repression. Our retired chief justice argues she is a bulwark against arbitrary rule, yet in reality she is a fig leaf for autocracy.

Two other foreign judges recruited to a similar role on the high court have long since bailed out, concluding that the system was broken beyond repair. The two British judges resigned in early 2022 when the writing was on the wall.

McLachlin resisted, persisting in her view that “The court is completely independent and functioning in the way I am used (to) in Canada the courts functioning.”

That seems an awfully obtuse, legalistic and sophistic view of the reality of democracy inside and outside the courtroom. McLachlin seems oblivious to the way in which China and Hong Kong use the prestige of her position to camouflage their malfeasance on the streets of their territory — while imposing extraterritoriality on her home country of Canada.

Ottawa has traditionally opposed foreign overreach on our soil, and should single out this brazen overreach — which encourages bounty hunters to apprehend people on our territory. Other Western nations went further by singling out the “transnational” abuse of authority.

A more fitting riposte to such extraterritoriality would be to renounce extradition to Hong Kong once and for all. Canada suspended its extradition treaty when the national security crackdown began, but it should go further by abolishing it entirely.

There cannot be any pretence of legal co-operation with Hong Kong when there are such flagrant abuses of legal norms at home and abroad. Not when there is a lifetime bounty on Hong Kong’s expatriate democracy dissidents if they can be caught here, so soon after the “Two Michaels” were incarcerated by those who call the shots in Beijing.

That conclusion should be self-evident to Canada’s foreign ministry. That reality should also provoke self-reflection by Canada’s freelancing former chief justice.

Source: She’s a former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. How can she be so oblivious?

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