Archive for the 'Canadian Politics' Category

28
Feb

Safe or unsafe: Designated Countries of Origin

By Emilia Liz Closed
Categories: Canadian Politics

“It don’t really matter to me, baby,
Everybody’s had to fight to be free.
You see you don’t have to live like a refugee
(Don’t have to live like a refugee)
No, you don’t have to live like a refugee
(Don’t have to live like a refugee)
Now you don’t have to live like a refugee
(Don’t have to live like a refugee)

This song, by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, always struck a chord with me (pardon the pun). Petty’s work isn’t the type of music I tend to listen to: give me bouncy British Invasion tunes like Bob Marley’s ‘Buffalo Soldier’ or the Rolling Stones’ ‘Get off of my cloud’ instead. But somehow, Petty’s ‘Refugee’ has stuck with me.

Perhaps it’s because refugees are, and have always been, a burning issue in Canada. Just last December, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney compiled a list of so-called ‘safe’ countries, or in bureaucratic lingo, Designated Countries of Origin. Citizens from such nations can apply for asylum in Canada, but they will only have between 30 and 45 days to prepare their refugee claims rather than the usual 60. If their claim is rejected, they can appeal the decision to the Federal Court of Canada but not to the Immigration and Refugee Board. Finally, those whose quest to obtain refugee status in Canada ultimately fails will be removed from the country.

The purpose of this list, according to Kenney, is to make Canada’s refugee system fairer and more flexible. People who truly need this country’s protection, he says, will receive it more quickly, while those whose applications are refused will be expelled faster. Unofficially, the DCO list aims to pare down the number of individuals seeking refugee status in this country in the first place. In the two months since the plan was implemented, it appears to have borne fruit: refugee applications to Canada have declined by approximately 70% compared to similar periods in the last six years. Jason Kenney himself has pointed out the dramatic drop in applications from nations that have traditionally had a high number of unfounded claims.

The list originally contained 27 countries: 25 from the European Union plus the United States and Croatia. More recently, it was expanded to include eight more, such as Japan, Australia, Israel (excluding Gaza and the West Bank), and Mexico. There seems to be a certain method in the madness of the government’s designation of countries as secure or not. Practically all nations in the industrialized West fall in the ‘safe’ category, as do two industrialized but not Western countries (Israel and Japan) and a Western but still developing one (Mexico). The second largest group of nations on the safe list consists of the ambiguously Occidental nations of Eastern Europe: in other words, the traditionally Catholic or Protestant countries like Slovenia or Estonia as opposed to the Orthodox and less westernized ones like Russia or Romania. Off the list are the entire continent of Africa, practically all of Asia (save Japan and Israel), and every Latin American nation except one.

In many ways, the list makes sense. It may surprise some people, for instance, that in the last while, the largest source of asylum claims to Canada has not been some poor war-torn nation in Africa but Hungary, which most people associate with goulash, not gunfire. The idea of Hungary as a major refugee generator makes me want to scream out à la Michael Corleone in The Godfather, ‘Don’t insult my intelligence!’ The federal government has also wisely left off the list the Caribbean countries, which may appear tranquil and harmonious to most Canadians but whose citizens in some cases face social discrimination, such as homosexuals (I know; a former lover of mine from one of the islands had a gay male cousin whose life there was hell on account of his sexual orientation). It is clear that Kenney and his minions have put considerable thought into their placement of countries on the safe or unsafe list.

On the other hand, I’m a bit more sceptical about calling Mexico ‘safe.’ That is not to say that there are no bogus refugee claimants from that country, or from other turbulent parts of Latin America like Colombia, for that matter. However, to compare Mexico with my previous example of Hungary, Mexico’s murder rate in 2008 was 11.59 per 100,000 inhabitants as opposed to the latter country’s 1.47. Of course, many of Mexico’s homicide victims may be criminals killed by other criminals, but the data strongly suggest that the Mexican government is failing to provide at least some of its citizens the protection they need. The wisest course of action on Canada’s part, in my view, would be to keep a close eye on Mexicans seeking refugee status but not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, and dismiss asylum claimants from that country altogether.

Finally, what will the end results of the DCO list be? One hopes that regardless of what countries are included in it or not, it will achieve Kenney’s stated objective of making our refugee system fairer and more flexible. As a major refugee destination, Canada walks a fine line between on one hand welcoming the world’s oppressed and on the other not allowing ourselves to become the ‘chumps of the world,’ in the words of a conservative friend of mine. Let us hope that our powers-that-be will guide us along that delicate path well.

22
Oct

J. Philippe Rushton: Who Was He Really?

By Emilia Liz Closed
Categories: Canadian Politics and Politics

I remember 1988 as the year of the ‘Rushes.’ The first ‘Rush’ was Anglo-Indian author Salman Rushdie. Although known in Britain for some time, in 1988 he burst onto the international scene with his novel The Satanic Verses. His work earned him a ‘fatwa’ from the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran for allegedly insulting the Prophet Mohammed, praise from leftist crowds (this was before criticizing Islam became politically incorrect), and a spoof in the University of Toronto engineering students’ newspaper called ‘The Satiric Verses,’ which featured the Ayatollah offering Mediterranean and Baltic Avenues to anyone who did away with Rushdie.

The second ‘Rush’ (now deceased, as of October 2 this year) was University of Western Ontario psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton. Like Rushdie, Rushton came into the limelight in 1988, not because of a work of fiction but of what he purported to be a work of science: a paper in the journal Personality and Individual Differences titled ‘Race differences in behaviour: A review and evolutionary analysis.’ The paper stated that Blacks were less intelligent, less law-abiding, and less stable in terms of family formation and dissolution than Whites were. Whites in turn exhibited less intelligence, more rule-breaking, and less family stability than did East Asians, whom Rushton termed ‘Orientals.’ On the other hand, Blacks were more sexually precocious and active than Whites, who for their part were less sexually restrained than Asians.

Not surprisingly, Rushton’s work generated an uproar. He was immediately denounced as a racist. He was even investigated by the Toronto Police and Ontario Provincial Police following numerous complaints of ‘promoting hatred against an identifiable group.’ Ultimately, no charges were laid against him, with Ontario’s then-Attorney General Ian Scott describing Rushton’s theories as ‘loony but not criminal.’ Rushton also appeared in a TV debate with environmental activist David Suzuki.

Philippe Rushton’s theories were full of holes and unanswered questions. His ‘Law of Three’ left out many ethnic groups like South Asians, Pacific Islanders and American Indians (never mind culturally unified but racially diverse groups such as Hispanics!) who could not be easily slotted into his Black-White-East Asian paradigm. As well, many of Rushton’s statements were patently false. One was his claim that ‘Orientals’ were slower to physically mature than Whites (who were for their part slower to mature than Blacks). Scientific studies, though, show that Asian girls experience their first menstrual periods at the same time or even a bit earlier than White European girls: for instance, Japanese women start menstruating at a younger age than those from Scandinavia.

I will let others debate the scientific merits or non-merits of Rushton’s work. I want to address another question: was J. Philippe Rushton really a racist? In common parlance, racism generally refers to the belief that Whites (or White Christians) are superior to all other people: in other words, to White supremacy. Did Rushton actually subscribe to such a philosophy? In ‘Race differences in behaviour,’ he implied that Asians possessed more of what we might view as ‘virtues’ – intelligence, emotional stability, and obedience to the law – than Whites did. In terms of sexual prowess, however, Blacks came out on top, pardon the pun. Whites, far from being a master race, seemed doomed to perpetual mediocrity in Rushton’s mind. He did not openly state whom or what he considered a superior race, but it did not appear to be his own (Rushton was White, born in Great Britain to an English father and French mother).

By extolling the supposed moral superiority of Asians, Rushton veered from many traditional White Supremacists. It is true that, as one commentator stated, ‘even White Supremacists are saying nice things about Asians now.’ Nonetheless, this is hardly a universal phenomenon among racist Whites. Some of them, for example, latched onto the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007 by a young Korean-American man as well as violent Korean movies as reasons for bringing back the Chinese Exclusion Act to the US. On the other hand, Rushton shared many ideas with the old-fashioned ‘White is right’ crowd, like the denigration of Muslims. He stated at a conference in 2009 in Baltimore that Muslims were not only culturally but genetically inferior: they had an ‘aggressive personality with relatively closed, simple minds and were less amenable to reason.’ The notion of Muslims as a ‘race’ might strike one as ludicrous. Just as there are Black, White, South Asian, East Asian and other Christians, the Muslim faith includes a large number of sub-Saharan Africans, inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia, Middle Eastern peoples as well as the majority of the population in Asian countries like Malaysia and Indonesia.

Perhaps J. (the ‘J,’ by the way, standing for either ‘John’ or its French equivalent ‘Jean’) Philippe Rushton should best be remembered as a paradox. Although he stirred fierce debate, he was described by many as a soft-spoken and mild-mannered individual. He was a White man who was beloved by White Supremacists but who, in the words of the website AmIAnnoying, did not ‘put his fellow whites at the top of the hierarchy.’ I will declare straight out that I do not, and never have, adhered to Rushton’s theories. I also found it hard sometimes to determine whether he was an attention-seeker, a lunatic or maybe both. Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, was Rushton mad or simply pretending to be mad? The answer to that question obviously died with Rushton himself. In the end, Rushton was a man who, like the races he failed to include in his three-pronged system, escaped easy classification.

01
Apr

No Longer Married for the Papers

By Emilia Liz 0 Comments
Categories: Canadian Politics

Just over four years ago, I wrote an article titled ‘Married for the Papers’ about the phenomenon of marriage fraud. Marriage fraud is defined as the act of marrying a Canadian citizen or permanent resident for the sole purpose of immigrating to Canada. The Canadian in question is led to believe mistakenly that their so-called spouse truly loves them. In good faith, the Canadian sponsors the foreign national with the intention of starting a new life with them in Canada. Marriage fraud should be distinguished from marriage of convenience, where both parties agree to get married in order to help the foreign partner come to Canada with no attempt to deceive the Canadian spouse.

When I first wrote the article, marriage fraud was a fairly peripheral issue on the Canadian political front. Since then, much has happened. Most recently, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has introduced legislation that would prohibit a spousal sponsoree from sponsoring a new partner for five years if the marriage with the Canadian spouse failed. Kenney has also proposed withholding permanent resident status from spousal sponsorees unless they remained in the marriage for at least two years. If they did not, their legal status in Canada would be revoked, and they would be deported and perhaps even face criminal charges. Both measures are aimed at discouraging would-be fraudulent spouses.

Kenney says he was motivated to enact these laws after holding consultations on the matter and hearing from people who had been hurt by foreigners pretending to be in love with them but abandoning them soon after getting their immigration papers. What may be even worse, if the sponsoree decided to go on welfare, the Canadian husband or wife would be required to reimburse the state for any expenses their erstwhile spouse incurred. Needless to say, Kenney’s two above-mentioned pieces of legislation (imposing two-year conditional residency on spousal sponsorees and preventing them from bringing a new partner to Canada for five years) have been applauded by groups like Canadians Against Immigration Fraud – which incidentally was founded by a man whose son was left in the lurch, so to speak, by a woman he had sponsored to come to Canada.

On the other hand, Kenney’s proposals have not been without criticism. One letter writer to the British Columbia-based paper Indo Canadian Voice condemned the five-year ban on sponsoring a new spouse as an unwarranted interference in people’s personal lives. Some women’s groups and immigrant advocacy organizations say that the two-year conditional residency rule could trap sponsored wives in abusive relationships if they feared ending the marriage would lead to deportation from Canada. (Kenney has said there will be a special provision for sponsored spouses who have been abused.) Whatever one feels about Kenney’s new laws, however, they are likely to pass given the Conservatives’ majority government.

Personally, I believe that Jason Kenney’s desire to eliminate marriage fraud is a commendable one. As I mentioned in ‘Married for the Papers,’ I could have been a victim of marriage fraud myself. Other people, however, have not been so lucky and have ended up emotionally (and often financially) drained after being deceived and ultimately discarded by a person they thought loved them. For example, I once had a colleague I’ll call ‘David’ who had come to Canada after marrying a woman of Finnish descent. At our place of work, David flirted with literally every woman under 30 in sight (maybe because I had a boyfriend, David never tried to approach me). David eventually got his so-called papers, abandoned his Canadian wife, and moved into a small apartment. His wife, from what I heard, was devastated at the loss of the man she was convinced had loved her. When she cried to him about this, he supposedly told her, ‘Well, you can always make love to me.’ It is situations like this that Minister Kenney wants to prevent.

Nonetheless, whether Kenney’s legislation will actually achieve this goal is still an open question. The five-year ban on spousal sponsorees bringing a new spouse to Canada will most likely deter the majority of individuals who might get the idea of marrying a Canadian, obtaining permanent residence here, and then ditching their spouse and sponsoring their ‘true love.’ Few people – both the sponsoree and the one waiting in the wings in the so-called old country – would be willing to wait five years to reunite in a foreign land. For those without a significant other back home, however, two years might not seem too long to stick it out in a loveless (at least on the sponsoree’s part) marriage before being free to call it quits. Take the example of African-American author Terry McMillan and Jonathan Plummer. At the age of 46, McMillan married Plummer, who was in his early twenties at the time, after meeting him on a vacation to his native Jamaica. Their courtship and marriage formed the basis of McMillan’s book How Stella Got her Groove Back and the film of the same name. The marriage ended six years later when Plummer told McMillan he was gay. So two years, while better than nothing, might not be sufficient to discourage some would-be fraudsters.

Finally, would-be sponsors themselves have a role to lay in curbing marriage fraud. Both Minister Kenney and others in the field, such as Italian-Canadian immigration columnist Vilma Filici, have warned Canadians intending to marry a foreign national to be careful. Filici cites a case of an Indo-Canadian woman who was originally prevented from sponsoring a man she had married in India because Canadian immigration officials suspected he was only after the immigration papers. The wife subsequently launched a legal battle and finally succeeded in getting permission to bring her husband here. Upon arriving at the airport, he allegedly went his own way. The woman might have spared herself a great deal of heartache if she had realized that the immigration officials may have had a point. Love is blind, they say, but the neighbours aren’t. Similarly, perhaps Terry McMillan should have asked herself why a man half her age, gay or straight, from a developing country seemed so interested in her. (Then again, I seriously questioned McMillan’s judgement on hearing of her surprise at Plummer’s ‘betrayal’ by having sex with other men after she had helped him start up his own dog-grooming business)

It might be impossible to completely eradicate marriage fraud. But however imperfect, Kenney’s proposals and move to a fight the phenomenon are a step in the right direction.

14
Jan

Is Canada Islamophobic?

By Emilia Liz 0 Comments
Categories: Canadian Politics, Politics and Religion

Last week’s headlines were marked by news of an attack on a mosque in the city of Gatineau, Quebec. The mosque was spray-painted and its windows broken, while two cars in the parking lot were almost torched. After a short period of deliberation, the Gatineau police declared the attack a hate crime. Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney paid a visit to the mosque, stating that the type of bigotry displayed by the vandals had no place in Canada.

The vandalism, and Kenney’s appearance at the mosque, came at a time when relations between the federal government and Canada’s Muslim community were uneasy at best and hostile at worst. A month earlier, the Minister had decreed that Muslim women had to remove any face veils like burkas or niqabs when taking the oath of citizenship. Some Muslims felt that Kenney was making these women choose between their faith and their citizenship. Higher up on the political hierarchy, Prime Minister Stephen Harper angered many Muslim Canadians in September when he described ‘Islamicism’ as the greatest threat to Canada’s security. Critics accused politicians like Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney of appealing to the mainstream Canadian population’s Islamophobia in order to obtain votes. But are Canada, and its government, really as Islamophobic as some allege?

To a certain extent, allegations of pervasive anti-Islamic hostility in Canada have some basis in fact. A recent survey by the Association for Canadian Studies found that only 43% of Canadians had a ‘very positive’ or ‘somewhat positive’ perception of Muslims. In contrast, 70% of respondents had a positive perception of Catholics and Jews and 60% of atheists. According to a similar poll in 2009 conducted by Angus Reid, a mere 28% of respondents held a favourable attitude toward Islam, compared to 57% and 53% toward Buddhism and Judaism, respectively, and 72% toward Christianity. These results suggest that a considerable portion of Canadian society views Muslims and their religion in a fairly negative light, at least in comparison to other belief systems.

It’s also true that much anti-Islamic feeling in Canada is based on ignorance or plain bigotry. For example, honour killing, a crime in which a woman is murdered by her family members for ‘disgracing’ them by having premarital sex, marrying men not of the family’s liking, or even talking to boys, is often described as a ‘Muslim tradition.’ Even in Canada, however, such crimes have occurred not only among Muslims but among Sikhs and, in at least one instance, Hindus (a Sri Lankan father who tried to run over his daughter because she was seeing a man of another caste). Some so-called Islamophobes seem to be against any non-White Anglo-Saxon Protestant immigration whatsoever. An example is a commentator calling him- (or her-?)self PaxCanadiana who runs a website called the Canadian Immigration Reform Blog. True, he or she rails against Muslim immigrants, but he (she) also deplores the entry of Filipinos, Chinese, and even the White – if not Anglo-Saxon Protestant – Portuguese into Canada.

One might therefore ask whether this apparent Islamophobia extends to the Canadian government, more specifically the Prime Minister and his Cabinet. Much was made of Stephen Harper’s remark about ‘Islamicism’ being the greatest threat to Canada. I am not so sure; it seems that problems like home-grown crime (the bulk of which is NOT committed by Muslims), environmental degradation and child poverty are at least as threatening as Islamicism is in the lives of most Canadians. On the other hand, while ‘Islamicists’ by no means constitute all Muslims, the somewhat uncomfortable truth is that there exists a fanatical element in Islam that has no modern-day counterpart in Christianity or other belief systems. Even ‘arch-atheist’ Richard Dawkins admitted that he knows of no ‘Christian suicide bombers’ or ‘major Christian denomination that believes the penalty for apostasy is death.’ Christianity, he said, might serve as a ‘bulwark against something worse’ (he didn’t spell out what that ‘something’ was). And both Dawkins and Harper are old enough to remember the ‘fatwa’ against writer Salman Rushdie by Muslim leaders for his supposedly blasphemous work The Satanic Verses.

It does not appear that Stephen Harper or his Cabinet have anything against Islam or Muslims per se. They participated in an Eid (major Muslim holiday) celebration on Parliament Hill, for example. Furthermore, both Harper and Jason Kenney spoke out strongly against the vandalism of the mosque in Gatineau, Quebec – whereas neither they nor any other federal official, as far as I’m aware, said anything about the spray-painting of a public nativity scene in St. Catharines. Finally, in 2010 Harper bestowed honorary Canadian citizenship on the Aga Khan, leader of the Ismaili Muslim spiritual community.

So back to my original question – ‘Is Canada Islamophobic?’ – with regard to the Canadian government itself and its main leaders, I would have to say no, at least not based on anything they have expressed or actually done. When it comes to the population at large, my response is more mixed. It’s apparent from polls like the above-mentioned Angus Reid survey that many Canadians are hostile to both Muslims and their religion.

Finally, how can this gap be bridged? Perhaps Muslim Canadians can let it be known that practices like honour killing and female genital mutilation are not Islamic traditions and that not all Muslims embrace capital punishment for apostates, for instance. Non-Muslims for their part should avoid lumping all Muslims together as fanatics or automatically labelling abusive husbands/fathers/brothers from the Middle East or South Asian as ‘Islamofascists’ (a term used to describe, ironically, a Lebanese Christian man named Joseph Hawach who kidnapped his two daughters from his ex-wife and brought them to Lebanon). Good fences may make good neighbours, but talking over these fences might make even better ones. Above all, I’d like to see Muslims and Canadians of other (or no) religions see themselves as fellow citizens of our one country.

28
Aug

Jack Layton: A hero of our time?

By Emilia Liz 2 Comments
Categories: Canadian Politics and Politics

On Monday, August 22, 2011, NDP leader Jack Layton died. His death was not completely unexpected: he had earlier been treated for prostate cancer, and he announced just weeks ago that he had developed a new tumour. He had also had a hip replacement, as a result of which he was seen in public using a cane. Surprise or no surprise, though, Layton’s passing was mourned by many, not only by his family but by Canadians of all ages, ethnic backgrounds and even political leanings. He is scheduled to be given a state funeral.

 

Personally, I have never voted for Jack Layton or the NDP for that matter. The times that I have cast a ballot, I’ve fluctuated between the Liberals and Conservatives. I tend to fall in the ‘socially liberal, fiscally conservative’ category, the latter of which does not leave much room for supporting the New Democratic Party. Still, I remember telling a consistently Conservative friend a few months before Layton’s death that regardless of one’s political philosophy, few people could dispute that the NDP leader was a decent and honourable man. My friend agreed.

 

Another thing that could not help but impress the public about Jack Layton was the fact that he managed to do what would have been unthinkable even a year ago: he made the NDP the official Opposition. While the NDP has been elected in various provinces at different times, at the federal level it has basically been relegated to the sidelines. I sometimes wonder whether Bob Rae, once the NDP Premier of Ontario, regrets ‘jumping ship’ to the Liberals now that his former party has more seats than his present one.

 

The NDP’s relative success in the election – I say ‘relative’ because the Conservatives are after all a majority government – was in my view due to several factors. A large number of NDP seats were obtained in Quebec from the Bloc Quebecois. The Quebec separatist movement has always had its highs and lows. The Toronto Spanish-language newspaper El Centroamericano speculates that the movement is losing steam as Francophone Quebecers realize that it might be more difficult for an independent Quebec to be self-sufficient now that its prospective trading partner the United States is currently in the economic doldrums. As a left-wing party, the NDP in a sense filled in the gap for many Quebecers.

 

However, another reason behind the NDP’s newfound success may be its leader himself. Jack Layton certainly came across as a very personable and approachable figure – a reality recognized even by non-NDP supporters like me. In this respect Layton had the edge over his Liberal counterpart Michael Ignatieff, who basically lacked the charisma to win over the people of Canada as a whole. Of course approachability is not the only factor in a candidate’s victory or defeat. If that were the case, the NDP under Layton would have garnered more votes than the Conservative Party under Stephen Harper. Nonetheless, I believe that Layton’s personality played some role in the last election.

 

As well, part of Jack Layton’s appeal lay in the confidence he exuded. This was evident, for example, in his promise even after he was diagnosed with a second cancer that he would ‘be back.’ Unfortunately, he never did ‘come back,’ but for his followers this message still holds. Although I have never been one of Layton’s followers, I join other Canadians in mourning his passing. Canada has lost a great leader. At least we can take some comfort in the fact that he died peacefully at home with his family. Since we all must die one day, the least we can ask is that our death be as tranquil as possible. We shall see who will carry on his legacy.

22
May

Canadian Federal Elections: Why and What

By Emilia Liz 0 Comments
Categories: Canadian Politics and Politics

They may not have received as much attention as Osama bin Laden’s death, but the Canadian federal elections have spawned no shortage of commentary. As expected, the Conservatives emerged victorious. However, contrary to some predictions, Stephen Harper won with a majority government this time. Another surprise: the NDP, under Jack Layton, is now the official Opposition. Although the NDP has been elected at the provincial level before – Ontario, for example, had an NDP government from 1990 to 1995 – on the federal scene it has been basically relegated to the sidelines. Other shocker: the once-mighty Liberals have now fallen to third place. Not so unusual, on the other hand, is the mere one seat obtained by the Green Party (by their leader Elizabeth May) and the absence of any seats whatsoever by the various independent candidates and fringe parties, such as the Christian Heritage Party.

 

Perhaps more important than the “what” is the “why” these elections turned out the way they did. First, the Conservative victory. It may be that despite the Bruce Carson and Bev Oda/KAIROS scandals, Canadians felt that the Tories were the best choice available or, from a more negative angle, the least of three or possibly more evils. Under the leadership of Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, for instance, Canada managed to weather the economic recession relatively smoothly, at least compared to other nations like Portugal, Ireland or Greece. While the above-mentioned scandals may have dissuaded some Canadians from casting their ballots for Harper, many of these people may have simply abstained from voting altogether, thereby failing to give any advantage to the various non-Conservative parties.

 

I also attribute Stephen Harper’s win partly to the fact that Canadians refused to fall for the scare tactics engineered by the Conservatives’ opponents. One such tactic was the attempt to portray the Tories as reactionary Bible thumpers bent on banning abortion and keeping women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. This effort began well before the recent elections. A few years ago, one left-leaning website featured a picture of Gerri Santoro, an American woman who died from an illegal abortion in 1964, lying dead in a motel room, as if to portray what Canadian women would face if Harper remained at the helm. Leaving aside the fact that the most egregious violations of women’s reproductive rights in recent years took place not in a right-wing God-bothering theocracy but in a left-wing officially atheistic state, Communist Romania, where not only abortion but contraception was banned, Harper himself has stated that he has no plans to re-open the abortion issue. Critics have countered that he did raise the matter by failing to include abortion in a federal package for maternal health care in the Third World. But declining to finance a procedure can’t be equated to legally prohibiting it. As an analogy, no government in Canada would stop me from getting breast implants, but no government would pay for them either other than in the case of a mastectomy. Finally, Harper’s supposed pro-life sympathies are belied by anti-choice groups’ characterization of the Prime Minister as “pro-abortion.”

 

The huge sea change in this election was the Liberals’ descent to third place, behind the Conservatives and NDP. Some would sum up the reason for the Liberals’ seeming downfall in two words: Michael Ignatieff. However great an intellectual/author/broadcaster Ignatieff might be, he simply lacked the charisma to win the Canadian public’s favour as a future Prime Minister. The other side of the Liberals’ defeat was of course the rise of the NDP. Part of the NDP’s newfound success stemmed from the support it received in Quebec, where it managed to supplant the Bloc Quebecois in all but a few ridings. Quebec’s turn to the party of Layton was not especially surprising to me, as Quebecers have long held left-wing views on social and economic matters. I also wonder whether some people who might have otherwise voted for the Liberals chose the NDP out of a belief that the latter party has at least had the courage to stand by their principles (many of which, by the way, I do not personally share) while the Liberals in contrast seem to define themselves solely by their status as non-Conservatives.

 

I have to admit that I did not vote in this election. There was no party with which I felt 100% comfortable casting my ballot for, so I simply abstained. Nonetheless, I’m not necessarily displeased by the results of this election. I suppose that if I were forced to vote for one particular party, it would be the Conservatives. Yet the idea of the NDP as a counterbalance to the Conservatives doesn’t strike me as a bad scenario either. At the very least, the outcome of this election could have been worse.

29
Mar

The Limits of Barbarism: Jason Kenney and Honour Killings

By Emilia Liz 2 Comments
Categories: Canadian Politics and Politics

Jason Kenney is no stranger to controversy. As an MP in 2005, he said that gays and lesbians should have the right to marry – to a member of the opposite sex. As Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, in 2009 he imposed a visa requirement on Czechs and Mexicans who wished to visit Canada, a measure that irked immigrant rights advocates as well as tourist operators who worried the measure would hurt their business. Later that same year, he inserted a phrase in the Discover Canada guide for new immigrants which also created a small firestorm. The guide stated that while Canada welcomed immigrants, it did not tolerate “barbaric cultural practices” such as female genital mutilation or honour killings.

 

That statement remains in the recently updated version of Discover Canada. This time, however, the words seem to have caught the eye of Liberal MP Justin Trudeau (son of the late Prime Minister). On a radio talk show, Trudeau took exception to the expression “barbaric” on the grounds that such strong language had no place in a government document and created a barrier between “us” (i.e. mainstream Canadians) and “them” (i.e. immigrants). “Absolutely unacceptable” would have been better, according to Trudeau.

 

Reaction was swift to follow. Kenney’s office said they made no apology for letting immigrant women know their rights. The Minister himself noted that statements like Justin Trudeau’s “undermine public support for multiculturalism” and refused to accept the Liberal MP’s later apology. Conservative MP Shelly Glover demanded that Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff remove Trudeau from his post. Interestingly, NDP Immigration Critic Olivia Chow appeared to take Kenney’s side in the matter, declaring that honour killings were indeed barbaric and that the Discover Canada guide had every right to make that clear. Meanwhile, Ignatieff merely opined that “There’s no such thing as an ‘honour’ killing… only killing, and it’s a crime everywhere.”

 

Outside political circles, the controversy continued to rage. Commenting on a Toronto Sun article about the Kenney-Trudeau debate, one reader accused Justin Trudeau of tolerating the murder of women in the name of multiculturalism. On the other side of the ledger, Kenney and his supporters were slapped with the “r” word – racism. Ottawa Citizen columnist Dan Gardner described Kenney’s rebuttal to Trudeau as part of the Conservatives’ strategy of “he who is not with me is against me.” There was, in short, a great deal of hysteria, and voices of moderation were drowned out or shouted down.

 

As with all hot-button issues – abortion, military intervention in Afghanistan, and so on and so forth – the “barbaric” brouhaha is another case in which arguments on both sides have grains of truth but a lot of distortions as well. Many of those who objected to Jason Kenney’s use of the term “barbaric” appeared unwilling to face the fact that honour killing (that is, the murder of a woman by relatives for having “dishonoured” the family by anything from having pre- or extramarital sex to wearing make-up or suggestive clothing) has no equivalent in mainstream Canadian society. Traditionally in Canada, the treatment of wayward women by their families has consisted of ostracism or disinheritance – not homicide. But good luck in trying to point this out to some of the so-called multiculturalists. For example, when I remarked on a website accusing Kenney of ignoring the abuse of underage girls in Bountiful, British Columbia that no woman in Bountiful had ever been killed, the moderator informed me that I thought domestic violence was an exclusively Muslim problem. I replied that not only had I not even mentioned the word “Muslim” but that the most sexually, physically and emotionally abusive boyfriend I had ever had was a – drum roll – White Christian. Even so, I was reprimanded for my “prejudices.” I soon gave up on the conversation, as it was like holding a rational discussion with a Creationist convinced that the Earth came into being 6,000 years ago.

 

On the other hand, some (small “c”) conservatives – not Kenney himself – engage in their own half-truths as well. For instance, many insist that honour killing is a “Muslim thing.” This is partially true: a number of honour killings have taken place in countries with an Islamic majority as well as among Muslims in Western nations, including Canada (famous example: Aqsa Parvez). Even here at home, however, such murders, or attempted murders, have also been reported among Sikhs and Hindus, like a Sikh woman in British Columbia who was killed by her father for dating a White man or a Sri Lankan girl in Toronto whose father tried to run her down with his van because she was involved with a man of another caste. Some right-wingers also lump in with “honour killings” acts that would more properly be called crimes of passion. One such crime of passion was the murder of Aasiya Hassan by her husband, a television executive in Buffalo, New York, after she told him she wanted a divorce. Though Muzzamil Hassan’s motives and actions do not seem that dramatically different from, say, those of Windsor, Ontario physician Dr. Marc Daniel, who fatally stabbed his ex-wife at the hospital where they worked, the former man’s Islamic religion immediately caused his deed to be slotted in the honour killing category.

 

Still, I have to admit that the Left’s – with exceptions of course, like Olivia Chow – approach to honour killings bothers me more than that of the right. Some supposedly progressive commentators have even expressed sympathy for “honour killers.” For instance, Toronto Star columnist Jim Coyle said that rather than condemnation, the parents of Aqsa Parvez, the Mississauga teen killed by her father and brother allegedly for refusing to wear the hijab, deserve “all the comfort they can get” in their troubled time. Their only fault, according to Coyle, was “caring too much of what other people thought.” Conservative commentator Ezra Levant immediately shot back and asked whether Coyle would have commiserated with Karla Homolka over the death of her sister Tammy. A better question, in my view: would Coyle have had even a glimmer of sympathy for a white-bread Anglo-Saxon man I knew who disowned his daughter for marrying a Black man? While genuine racism undoubtedly played a role in my acquaintance’s reaction to his daughter’s marriage, he very likely was motivated as well by “What would the neighbours say?” My semi-educated guess is that no, Coyle would not have had any sympathy for this man – even though the man did not, as far as I know, even try to physically assault his daughter.

 

Finally, people like Jim Coyle, or even those who deny the essential truths about honour killing (that it doesn’t occur in mainstream North American society, for example), make me wonder whether the Left is really the friend of women it has always purported to be. At times it seems that their solidarity with women gets short shrift when it clashes with other tenets, like a misguided notion of multiculturalism. I am not even saying this out of self-interest: the victims of honour killing are not White women like me or my family members but some of the “women of colour” that multiculturalists and other leftists claim to defend.

 

Jason Kenney has won the public opinion battle so far, at least for now. But we can be sure more is yet to come.

20
Feb

The Kirpan: Yea or Nay?

By Emilia Liz 2 Comments
Categories: Canadian Politics

Religion, sometimes considered a spent force in Canadian society, has recently reared its head again. This time it is not one of the Abrahamic faiths (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) but an Indian-derived one: Sikhism. The incident began in January when a group of four Sikhs was denied entry to the Quebec National Assembly because they refused to surrender their kirpans, the ceremonial daggers that Sikhs are required to carry on their persons at all times. The grounds for the decision to bar the four was ostensibly security, but perhaps Parti Quebecois MLA Louise Beaudoin voiced the real reason when she stated, “Multiculturalism may be a Canadian value, but it is not a Quebec value.”

Reaction was swift to follow. Sikh groups and their advocates pointed out that in 2006 the Supreme Court of Canada recognized the kirpan as an article of faith, not a weapon, and the wearing of the kirpan as part of Sikhs’ freedom of religion under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The word “racism” was thrown around a great deal. On the other side of the argument, the Bloc Quebecois called for a ban on the kirpan in federal Parliament. Some commentators insisted that when in Canada, Sikhs should do as the Canadians do – that is, put away their kirpans. One reader of the Globe and Mail remarked sarcastically that as a person of Scottish descent he should be able to carry the “dubh,” a traditional Scottish knife worn along with the kilt, wherever and whenever he pleased.

The irony of the whole affair was that the four above-mentioned Sikhs were going to the National Assembly to take part in a debate to defend Muslim women’s right to wear the niqab, or burqa, in Quebec government facilities. Addressing both the niqab and the kirpan, Rogers TV OMNI News personality Zuhair Kashmeri (a Muslim) wondered aloud whether we would soon see crosses being burnt outside mosques and Gurdwaras (Sikh places of worship). But is the kirpan debate really a Christian/conservative/White versus non-Christian/liberal/minority issue?

Considering the political parties of those names, it’s difficult to say that we’re looking at a purely Liberal pro-kirpan/Conservative anti-kirpan picture. Just last week, for example, the Quebec Liberal Party voted with their separatist foes on a motion to prohibit the ceremonial dagger in that province’s National Assembly. At the federal level, Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney, a Conservative, defended Sikhs’ right to carry the kirpan, describing the matter as a “non-issue” that was resolved by the 2006 Supreme Court decision.  It should be mentioned that Minister Kenney has not always been so “tolerant” of immigrant groups’ traditions: in the 2009 Citizenship Guide he stated that Canada’s welcoming of newcomers did not extend to “barbaric” practices like honour killings, spousal abuse and female genital mutilation. Nor are the Bloc and Parti Quebecois necessarily right-wing. The current leader of the former party, Gilles Duceppe, was once a trade union negotiator, while as governing power in Quebec the Parti Quebecois promoted universal day care – an anathema to right-wing ideologues who feel women should be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen.

Furthermore, despite Kashmeri’s talk of burning crosses outside mosques and gurdwaras, there is no indication that the ban on the kirpan was motivated by a desire to keep Canada “Christian.” The Quebec separatist movement – at least that which evolved during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and which spawned the Parti and Bloc – was never religious. In fact, the late separatist leader Rene Levesque was an agnostic, and Catholicism did not form the basis of the movement’s concept of Quebec as a society distinct from the rest of Canada.  Similarly, Sikhism does not seem to be a target of Christian fundamentalists: if any non-Christian religion is, it’s Islam, even though in terms of their attitudes towards women’s rights, homosexuality and the death penalty Christian and Muslim fundamentalist views often overlap.

Finally, the idea of the kirpan as a White Christian versus minority non-Christian issue is literally brought to its heels by a letter from Ron Banerjee of the group Canadian Hindu Advocacy. Praising the Quebec National Assembly’s decision not to admit the four Sikhs carrying kirpans, Banerjee states openly that the ceremonial dagger is indeed a weapon and that it has been used as such right here in Canada. He goes on to attack the niqab and hijab (headscarf worn by Muslim women) as well as the Sikh turban. Banerjee then contrasts Muslims and Sikhs’ insistence on wearing such attire with Hindus and Jews’ harmonious transition into Canadian society, calling the latter two communities’ traditions as “conducive to democracy.”

I’m not convinced by everything in Banerjee’s letter. There have been “culture clashes” between Jews and Hindus on one hand and mainstream Canadian society on the other. In a case in Montreal, a Hasidic Jewish synagogue demanded that a nearby YMCA tint the windows of its exercise room to prevent congregation members from seeing scantily clad women inside.  Similarly in Toronto some discussion took place regarding Hindus scattering their loved ones’ ashes in rivers – though Hindu leaders declared their willingness to work with authorities and though the matter was settled peacefully without much fanfare.  It is also true that Sikhs and Hindus have always had an uneasy relationship, both in India itself and overseas.  Still, the fact that a non-white non-Christian voiced his opposition to a Sikh tradition in such stark terms casts strong doubt on the notion of kirpan foes as a bunch of “redneck Reformers.”

I personally don’t have strong opinions on the kirpan either way. Religious freedom – which also includes the freedom not to practise any religion at all – is important; hearing the story of a friend from the former Soviet Union who was prohibited from entering a church makes me appreciate my ability to go, or not go, to any place of worship I want. On the other hand, religious freedom is not absolute. Sometimes it should take a back seat to other values. For example, courts have ordered children of Christian Scientists to receive medical treatment against their parents’ wishes. Security is another value that in some cases should trump religious freedom. For example, an argument for banning the burqa could be made if it became widely used by criminals to conceal their identity.

In the case of the kirpan, is it really a safety risk, as security personnel at the Quebec National Assembly claimed?  Perhaps on one hand its proponents have underplayed its potential for harm while its opponents have overblown its dangers. The kirpan has indeed been used as a weapon. On the other hand, so have everything from glass bottles (which would make me armed and dangerous when I entered a building with a bag of beer bottles I’d collected to return to the Beer Store for ten cents), pens and even the innocent hairpin. I’m not sure whether security is an adequate justification for banning the kirpan in the Legislature.

I don’t have too many problems with the 2006 ruling declaring the kirpan an article of faith. However, I also have to accept the Quebec Legislature’s right to bar the kirpan from their premises. The reality is that multiculturalism as practised in Anglophone Canada has never been well-accepted in Quebec. Nonetheless, I find the Bloc Quebecois’ demand to prohibit the kirpan in the House of Commons a bit arrogant. That is not to say that a ban on the kirpan in federal Parliament should be totally excluded in future; it’s just that I don’t think it should come from a party that doesn’t believe in a united Canada in the first place.

So far I’m satisfied with the status quo vis-à-vis the kirpan: permitted in the Legislature in Ottawa and that of the Anglophone provinces and prohibited in the Quebec National Assembly. This status quo, and my feelings on the matter, could change. I would be interested in hearing my readers’ opinion on this issue.

06
Nov

Naheed Nenshi and the New Canada

By Emilia Liz 6 Comments
Categories: Canadian Politics, Politics and Society

October 18, 2010 was a historic day in the eyes of many Canadians: Canada elected its first Muslim mayor. The mayor-elect in question is Naheed Nenshi of Calgary, a Muslim of South Asian descent. Nenshi, who was born to parents who had fled Tanzania, a country in East Africa to which many South Asians migrated when both regions were under British rule, won 40% of the popular vote following his ‘Purple Revolution’ campaign.

For a large number of people, Nenshi’s victory was indeed a revolution. Indo-Canadian television station OMNI News, for example, compared it to the election of President Barack Obama in the United States two years earlier. OMNI commentator Zuhair Kashmeri saw Nenshi’s win as a sign that mayoralty in Canada was no longer the exclusive domain of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Among the general Canadian population, some suggested that the election of a Muslim mayor in Calgary meant that Alberta might not be the redneck haven it was often portrayed as being. Others noted the irony in the victory of Nenshi in the supposed backwoods of Alberta versus that of (White) right-wing candidate Rob Ford in the reputed bastion of multiculturalism Toronto.

While I understand the South Asian community’s elation, I would like to make my own clarifications. With all due respect to Mr. Nenshi and to Calgary, being elected mayor of a city can’t be equated to becoming president of an entire nation. Canada furthermore has had, and has, non-White mayors. They include Niagara-on-the-Lake Mayor Art Viola, who is of Filipino descent, and the Lebanese-Canadian Mayor of Windsor, Ontario Eddie Francis (note: I personally find it somewhat curious that Arabs are classified as ‘minorities’ by the Canadian government even though many of them – such as dear Mr. Francis himself – are physically indistinguishable from Greeks or Southern Italians). However, Nenshi’s Muslim faith causes him to stand out in a way that Viola and Francis do not. Both Francis and Viola are Catholic. Perhaps Filipinos and Lebanese Christians are Westernized enough to be seen as mainstream: after all, how ‘exotic’ can someone with the name of Art or Eddie be?

Naheed Nenshi’s religion has sparked commentary. Some have wondered darkly whether he might try to impose sharia law on his constituents. This possibility seems fairly remote. For one, Nenshi belongs to a moderate branch of Islam, the Ismailis. Ismaili women, for instance, are allowed to marry non-Muslim men, whereas women in mainstream Islam are not (though Muslim men can wed Christian or Jewish women). Secondly, even if Nenshi were an Islamic fundamentalist intent on bringing sharia to Calgary, as mayor his power to do so would be limited, just as that of Toronto’s Rob Ford – who has been quoted as saying that marriage should be exclusively between a man and woman – to ban same-sex marriage would be.

Finally, what does Naheed Nenshi’s election as mayor tell us about Canadian society in general? Does it mean that racism in this country is a thing of the past? I would say no. On the other hand, Canada does appear to have come a long way, so to speak, from the days when prejudice against groups ranging from the Irish to Ukrainians to Jews to Chinese to Japanese abounded. Also, should a candidate’s faith (or lack thereof) be a factor in deciding whether or not to vote for him or her? Again, I would answer in the negative, unless of course he or she were going to attempt to impose it on others – which Nenshi shows no intention of doing. In the end, all we can hope for is that Nenshi will govern the city and serve the people of Calgary well.

28
Dec

Dreaming of the Queen – Republic vs Commonwealth

By Emilia Liz 4 Comments
Categories: Canadian Politics and Politics

In the summer of 2010 Queen Elizabeth II is scheduled to come to Canada .  Her visit follows that earlier this year of her son Charles and his wife Camilla.  I suspect that the Queen’s visit will garner some coverage in the press but not much attention among the general public.  Unlike her glamorous late daughter-in-law Diana, Elizabeth II doesn’t pique the curiosity of the average person.  Canadians appear to like but not revere the Queen, as exemplified in the attitude of an old Portuguese doctor who in the Toronto weekly Voice wrote that he considered Elizabeth II a genuinely good person yet laughed at the fact she wore hats similar to those his grandmother used to wear.

Though most Canadians don’t seem to have anything particularly against the Queen as an individual, she has increasingly found herself at the centre of a controversy over the institution she represents: the British monarchy.  Some people believe Canada should throw off the final yoke of British colonialism, scrap the monarchy, and become a republic.  Others by contrast feel equally strongly that Canada should remain part of the British Commonwealth – so strongly that they have formed groups such as the Monarchist League of Canada to ensure our country remains under the royal wing.

I myself am fairly agnostic on the issue..  My sense is that if we embraced republicanism tomorrow, life wouldn’t change much, either for better or for worse, in this country.  However, while I’m hardly demanding that Canada go (small “r”) republican, nor would I necessarily fight to keep Queen Elizabeth on as our head of state if there were any serious movement to literally dethrone her.  So I’d like to present the “pro” and “con” arguments, with their relevant counterpoints, for making Canada a completely independent nation or not.

Pro-Republican Arguments

#1 It is wrong that a person holds the position of head of a state simply for having been born into a particular family

From a purely rationalistic standpoint, it does seem both absurd and unjust that due to an accident of birth an individual can have their image placed on a nation’s currency, their initial in court cases (the “R” in “R. v. [name of defendant]” stands for “Regina,” meaning “Queen” in Latin) and their photograph in government buildings.  This absurdity/injustice strikes us as even more untenable if we think that the royals are only human.   A reader of a Montreal-based Italian-language publication put it even more succinctly: the royals obviously have no morality (this was just after the Camillagate tapes and pictures of the Duchess of York topless at the side of a pool came out), so why should they be more exalted than any of us common mortals?

Counterargument: This argument would be more convincing if the royals had any real power.  But several generations now the British monarchs have been mere figureheads.  If the Queen decided she was a pro-lifer, for instance, she would essentially be forced to go about trying to ban abortion the same way the head of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children would: by first swaying the opinion of the general public and from there that of the elected officials.  So the ability of the Queen or whoever succeeds her to influence our everyday lives is fairly limited.

#2 The British monarchy has no place in a multicultural society like Canada today

This argument was made by the above-mentioned Portuguese doctor in Voice. While he personally likes the Queen, he claims that having a member of a British family as Canada ’s head of state makes no sense in a nation where the Governor-General is a Black woman of Haitian descent and where some of our most prominent citizens boast names like Medeiros, Silva, Patel and Suzuki. Canada is a different country from that forty years ago when the majority of Canadians still hailed from White Anglo-Saxon Protestant stock.  So it is time our form of government reflected that change.

Counterargument: Canada ’s demography has indeed changed in the past half-century.  However, other than the special case of Quebec Canada is basically an Anglo-Saxon country culturally speaking.  In the words of Lawrence E. Harrison in his book The Pan-American dream, “anglophone Canada is not really multicultural.  Its bedrock is the same Anglo-Protestant system of values and attitudes that is the cultural foundation of the United States , and it is to this system that successful immigrants to Canada … acculturate.”  This does not mean Canada should remain under the Queen –after all, the United States ditched the British monarchy over two centuries ago without losing its Anglo-Saxon character.  But becoming a republic would not automatically make non-WASPs feel any more at home here.
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