Tag Archives: Multiculturalism

| Uncategorized

Bouchard-Taylor Commission legitimizes xenophobia

The news stories coming out of the Commission on Reasonable Accomodation (or whatever it’s official name is) have really been eye-opening. It’s no secret that we have paranoid xenophobes here. But this commission, going around the province (starting with small rural towns and ending in Montreal) seems to be legitimizing it.

Suddenly, it’s no longer taboo to express an irrational, paranoid fear of immigrants flooding in to take over your country. To suggest that a few dozen quiet immigrants with cloth over their faces settling in a town hundreds of kilometres away is going to somehow radically alter the way of life in a place that is 96% Catholic might have once been considered ignorant racism. But now that the commission is coming along, it’s giving these lunatics a forum in which to express their paranoia.

Tonight in a park, as I watched a free movie screening, one of the spectators shouted at the end, complaining that the film was not in French and that Quebec is a French-only province. The man was clearly off his rocker, and the crowd stayed silent in response. The young moderator of the evening, in an attempt at diplomacy, repeated an invitation to a post-screening party in the province’s official language, but the man was still yelling as she spoke in his tongue. He wasn’t interested in accomodation, he just wanted to yell.

Now if that same man were to walk into a commission hearing room and give those opinions into a microphone, suddenly it would become news. It would get into the newspapers, and would require acknowledgment and analysis.

I realize I’m generalizing here, but normal people have better things to do with their lives than attend these hearings. It’s the unemployed crazies who want someone to blame for their crappy lives that come to these town halls and blame immigrants they’ve never seen or met.

Perhaps there’s no alternative to this. We’re dealing with questions of morality, and that requires public consultation. But it still irks me that we’re giving an open mic to racist, xenophobic extremists and pretending like their opinions are justified.

| Montreal, TV

CJNT: Multicultural American celebrity news

Once upon a time, Montreal had a low-budget multi-ethnic television station whose mission it was to provide a space where allophones could communicate. The station was called CJNT, and broadcasted over the air on channel 62.

Then the channel was acquired by a media company, which was in turn acquired by CanWest/Global. CanWest forced the station to declare bankruptcy, and has been egging the CRTC to allow it to reduce its ethnic content to put more commercially viable programming on instead.

The latest sad move in this direction came in April, when CanWest announced that its CH stations would be rebranded as “E!” entertainment (read: celebrity gossip) channels. That change took effect last Friday, and the channel’s been running all sorts of “E!” programming from the U.S. network ever since.

But what about its commitment to 60% multicultural programming? The channel still runs its multicultural shows, many during prime-time (the CRTC rules require this). And in between, they provide E! celebrity gossip shows dubbed in other languages. Now you can hear about Britney Spears in Portuguese!

Not only is celebrity gossip bad in and of itself, but to take a channel designed to give a voice to those who can’t get access to commercial airwaves, and use that channel (to the extent allowable by law) to broadcast unimportant information about people who have so much television coverage that they take great pains to limit it…

Kind of ironic, don’t you think?

Needless to say, the only reaction this change has gotten in the blogosphere is bad: “Tripe.”

| In the news

Your manner of dress offends me

The third in Jeff Heinrich’s series Identities today talks about what rules should be for minorities.

The poll of 1,001 Quebecers, which the Gazette is milking as much as it can out of, has somewhat predictable answers concerning whether women should be allowed to weir veils when teaching students, whether non-Christian religious symbols should be allowed in schools and whether non-Christians should be allowed time off work to pray. One third of the province is on one side of the debate, one third on the other, and the rest sway depending on the specific issue.

To give you an idea of how ludicrous this debate is getting, take a look at this:

About the only thing they are willing to concede is hijabs in public. Two in three – 66 per cent – think it’s OK for Muslim women to dress like that.

So in other words, a third of Quebecers think it should be illegal for women to wear scarves over their heads in public.

The minute the government starts imposing a dress code on the public is the minute I start looking for jobs in Ontario.

The article also includes a few interesting tidbits at the end, including the realization that more than half of Quebecers think the media is exaggerating the debate — more than twice the figure for political parties.

| Blogosphere, In the news, Navel-gazing

Everything you clearly don’t know about the Islamic veil controversy

The Gazette today began its five-day series Identities about reasonable accomodation, and their timing couldn’t have been better. The Bouchard-Taylor commission is beginning its public consultation tour of the province (Montreal is the last stop on their trip at the end of November), and a pair of conflicting rulings have been issued concerning the rights of Muslim women to wear veils in upcoming provincial and federal by-elections.

Continue reading →

| In the news, Montreal

Do gays have to be so … gay?

Every year after the Gay Pride Parade, some prude writes in to the newspaper complaining that the sexual flamboyancy is offensive and shoving the thick, throbbing gayness down everyone’s throats is obscene.

This year is no exception. The token prude is Shamus Birch (the same Shamus Birch who’s “every mother’s dream for a son-in-law” and found Jesus after he was stupid with his virginity? Nah, that guy’s in Britain), who is totally not a homophobe, but says gays “should stick to the old-fashioned way: Earn the respect and recognition on a person-to-person basis, not as an overdone circus demonstration.”

(UPDATE: A brief but well-thought-out response in Wednesday’s paper, and another one in Friday’s)

Ah, remember the good old-fashioned days? When gays were shunned, blacks were slaves, and everyone died of tuberculosis by the age of 40? Why can’t we have those back?

Well, blame Theo Wouters and Roger Thibault. Remember them? They’re the old gay couple in Pointe-Claire who were harassed by their neighbours for being gay. This was back in 2002 when gayness wasn’t as cool as it is now.

The Quebec Human Rights Commission has awarded them $10,000 from the kids who teased them.

Quote Wouters:

“I don’t think that a bunch of morons can chase us out. I mean, the black people, if they hadn’t stood up, they’d still be in the same position, and we feel for us, it’s the same way.”

Oh gay. It’s the new black. A flamboyantly-coloured new black. And apparently it’s distracting to some people.

| Media, Slow News Day

Just because it’s Facebook doesn’t make it news

Why is “someone expresses opinion about recent events on Facebook” always considered news? Yeah, there are Facebook groups (actually I found only one that has more than a few members) denouncing the rumoured Immigration Canada decision to discourage the traditional Sikh family names Singh and Kaur for new immigrants (a decision which the government clarified later wasn’t actually the case). But there are more members in the group demanding that the Spice Girls do a show in Montreal.

When was the last time a paper petition with 500 signatures got this much attention?

| On the Net

Hate will cure our country

There are those in Canada (outside Quebec) who believe the best solution to the issue of Quebec separation is to simply let it happen. These people, tired of being asked to learn French in order to work in the federal government, think allowing Quebec to separate will turn Canada into the English-speaking-only paradise it is meant to be.

The website Canada Divided represents one of these groups. They think all Quebecers are francophones and all francophones are separatists. Without them, they argue, language purity can be achieved. French is not part of the “Canadian identity” and somehow represents “ethnic segregation” (a xenophobic website denouncing segregation — now that’s balls).

The website is pretty bare, just a web forum and some links to videos. The videos are posted to YouTube, including:

  • This one where a skinhead oppressed anglophone seems to think that the only people hired to bilingual public-sector jobs in this country are unilingual francophones
  • This one which warns that the media (which, as we all know, is part of a giant Jewish francophone conspiracy) is ignoring the growing threat of multiculturalism against our fine country.
  • This one points out for all us stupid people that the French civil code, which Quebec law is based on, is actually COMMUNISM, and that Quebec is secretly annexing the rest of Canada.
  • This one notes that all our health care funding issues are a direct result of the government wasting money promoting bilingualism.

Honestly, it’s really hard not to invoke the obvious comparisons that come to mind. Couldn’t they at least have picked a non-bald guy and had him speak in front of a non-black background, maybe have him smile a bit?

| In the news, Montreal

Three deaths for $40

I don’t know what’s saddest about this story (The Gazette has a less-conclusionary article):

  • That an ethnic cabbie’s fear of being racially profiled led to him keeping information about (apparently) accidental deaths to himself
  • That guilt from this led to him committing suicide
  • That the lack of any family or friends in the city led to him not being discovered for months after his death
  • That just about every story mentions that the two dead Americans were “adult” “models” as if that mitigates matters at all
  • That a $40 unpaid cab fare led to a chase through a field late at night and eventually three deaths
  • That this story makes sense at all, and the actions, while perhaps not all justified, seem understandable
  • That the first question that comes to mind about this is “who takes a $40 cab ride to Laval to go to an after-hours club?”
| Business, Media, Montreal, TV

CJNT: America is a culture, right?

It seems Global’s second network of stations they don’t know what else to do with is being rebranded. Starting in September, CH stations (including Montreal’s CJNT-62) will become E! Yes, that E! Only it’s E! in Canada.

This is significant for a number of reasons, the most distressing of which is that CJNT is supposed to be Montreal’s ethnic station, but because ethnic programming isn’t a money-maker, the station was bought out by a company which was in turn bought out by CanWest/Global. They petitioned the CRTC to agree to only 50% ethnic programming during prime time, and though they were denied that request, they still have quite a bit of U.S. network programming in their prime time schedule.

So what was once a struggling 100% ethnic programming station (albeit one that only broadcast for about 12 hours a day) will now include programming that Canadians clearly need on an over-the-air channel: Celebrity gossip and second-rate U.S. network TV shows.

They even have a video with Ryan Seacresty good ness (he even mentions our country’s name!)