"Today is a proud day for Sikh Canadians as we see a record number of Sikh MPs serving their country in Canada's Parliament. Punjabi is now the third most common language at Parliament Hill. With four Sikh Canadians serving in Cabinet, including the first Sikh woman, the Prime Minister has made history..."
Showing posts with label Canada and Diversity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Canada and Diversity. Show all posts
04 November 2015
Canadian Jewish News (The CJN): Trudeau reaches out to Jewish group to affirm support for Israel
The new Canadian PM "reaffirmed his expectation for the government to work closely with the Jewish community" during a call with CIJA chair David Cape
18 September 2014
{FREE ENTRY} - Black Canadian Mayoral Debates in Brampton Friday Sept 26 & in Ajax, Durham on Sunday Sept 28 (HELP SPREAD THE WORD)
Source: mass emailing
Good Morning,You are invited to the Black Canadian Mayoral Forum in Brampton on Friday September 26th from 7pmAnd the Black Canadian Mayoral Debate for the Durham Region (Ajax, Pickering, Oshawa & Whitby) on Sunday September 28th from 4pm.We also want to thank you for attending the August 29th Toronto Black Mayoral Forum aired live on CP24 for over 3hrs and segments aired on CTV, CityTV, Global TV, CBC, etc. If you missed this Toronto event you can watch on www.BlackCanadians.com then fill the survey and encourage others to do the same.Invite others, Plan to attend and Remember we are "POWERFUL"Reserve Free Seats and send us your questions http://blackcanadians.com/eventsBrampton Black Canadian Mayoral Forum
Date: Friday, September 26th, 2014
Time: 7:00 pm - 10pmDurham Black Canadian Mayoral Forum
Date: Sunday, September 28th, 2014
Time: 4:00 pm - 8:30pm
06 August 2014
Canadian Institute of Diversity and Inclusion: Community of Practice Events: Addressing Fear and Resistance to D&I.
Source: http://www.cidi-icdi.ca/whats-happening/events/cidi-cope/cope-fall-2014/
Join the CIDI in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal this coming fall for our next round of Community of Practice Events. At the forefront of CIDI’s mission is our commitment to helping Canadian D&I, Human Rights and Equity, and Human Resources practitioners address their most pressing issues. At our premiere Community of Practice Event last year, you told us that leadership buy-in, commitment, and resources were your most pressing issues, so we responded by engaging you in developing the business case toolkit and the strategy toolkit.
Another major challenge you identified is addressing fear and resistance to D&I efforts. Discussions around fear included: fear of saying the wrong thing, fear of self-disclosure, the need to create safe spaces due to fear of discrimination, and fear of dealing with resistance. Discussions around resistance included: hiring managers and middle managers, concerns around “reverse discrimination” and loss of privilege, and a lack of understanding amongst all employees regarding the imperative for inclusion.
For our upcoming Community of Practice Events in this Fall, we’ll provide some thought-provoking pre-reading to get your change-management juices flowing, and ask participants to come ready to tackle some of our toughest challenges as part of our diversity journey: fear and resistance.
Date: Tuesday, September 30th, 2014.
Time: 8:00 am to 10:30 am PT.
Location: Dentons Canada LLP - 250 Howe Street, 20th Floor Vancouver BC, V6C 3R8
Edmonton, AB.
Date: Wednesday, October 1st, 2014.
Time: 8:00 am to 10:30 am MT.
Location: TBD
Calgary, AB.
Date: Thursday, October 2nd, 2014.
Time: 8:00 am to 10:30 am MT.
Location: TBD
Toronto, ON.
Date: Tuesday, October 7th, 2014.
Time: 8:00 am to 10:30 am ET.
Location: McCarthy Tétrault - 66 Wellington St W #5300, Toronto, ON M5K 1E6
Montreal, QC.
Date: Thursday, October 9th, 2014.
Time: 8:00 am to 10:30 am ET.
Location: TBD
8:00 to 8:30 – Networking and Breakfast.
8:30 to 8:40 – Welcome and Update from the CIDI.
8:40 to 8:50 – Setting the Stage.
8:50 to 9:50 – Breakout Working Groups.
9:50 to 10:20 – Report Out.
10:20 to 10:30 – Wrap Up.
10:30 – Session Ends.
Join the CIDI in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal this coming fall for our next round of Community of Practice Events. At the forefront of CIDI’s mission is our commitment to helping Canadian D&I, Human Rights and Equity, and Human Resources practitioners address their most pressing issues. At our premiere Community of Practice Event last year, you told us that leadership buy-in, commitment, and resources were your most pressing issues, so we responded by engaging you in developing the business case toolkit and the strategy toolkit.Another major challenge you identified is addressing fear and resistance to D&I efforts. Discussions around fear included: fear of saying the wrong thing, fear of self-disclosure, the need to create safe spaces due to fear of discrimination, and fear of dealing with resistance. Discussions around resistance included: hiring managers and middle managers, concerns around “reverse discrimination” and loss of privilege, and a lack of understanding amongst all employees regarding the imperative for inclusion.
For our upcoming Community of Practice Events in this Fall, we’ll provide some thought-provoking pre-reading to get your change-management juices flowing, and ask participants to come ready to tackle some of our toughest challenges as part of our diversity journey: fear and resistance.
Event Cities
Vancouver, BC.Date: Tuesday, September 30th, 2014.
Time: 8:00 am to 10:30 am PT.
Location: Dentons Canada LLP - 250 Howe Street, 20th Floor Vancouver BC, V6C 3R8
Edmonton, AB.
Date: Wednesday, October 1st, 2014.
Time: 8:00 am to 10:30 am MT.
Location: TBD
Calgary, AB.
Date: Thursday, October 2nd, 2014.
Time: 8:00 am to 10:30 am MT.
Location: TBD
Toronto, ON.
Date: Tuesday, October 7th, 2014.
Time: 8:00 am to 10:30 am ET.
Location: McCarthy Tétrault - 66 Wellington St W #5300, Toronto, ON M5K 1E6
Montreal, QC.
Date: Thursday, October 9th, 2014.
Time: 8:00 am to 10:30 am ET.
Location: TBD
The agenda for the session is as follows:
8:00 – Doors Open.8:00 to 8:30 – Networking and Breakfast.
8:30 to 8:40 – Welcome and Update from the CIDI.
8:40 to 8:50 – Setting the Stage.
8:50 to 9:50 – Breakout Working Groups.
9:50 to 10:20 – Report Out.
10:20 to 10:30 – Wrap Up.
10:30 – Session Ends.
*Registration Required. **Registration Fee Required for Non CIDI Members. ***Limited Capacity.
CIDI Members & CIDI Guests Register Here
NON CIDI Members Register Here
Who’s Who?
CIDI Members Are:
- Any employee of the following organizations: Accenture, Alberta Health Services, Aon Canada Inc., Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP , Borden Ladner Gervais LLP, CBC Radio Canada, Children’s Aid Society of Toronto, CIBC, CISCO, The City of Calgary, The City of Saskatoon, CN, Davies Ward Phillips and Vineberg , Deloitte, Dentons Canada LLP, Georgian College, Greater Toronto Airports Authority, Home Depot, HSBC, Husky Energy, Hydro Ottawa, IBM, ICBC, KPMG, Loblaw Company Limited, Manulife Financial, McCarthy Tetrault, McDonalds Canada, Microsoft, Morrison Hershfield, Ottawa Carleton District School Board, Ottawa Police Service, PwC, RBC, SAP, Scotiabank, Simon Fraser University, Silverbirch Hotels and Resorts, Sobeys Inc., Sodexo, Stantec, TD Bank, Telus, Toronto Police Service, TransCanada, Upper Canada District School Board, Vancity
- All “paid-in-full” Individual CIDI Members.
CIDI Guests Are:
- Any individual who is not a CIDI Member but has been invited to attend this CIDI Event by an employee of the CIDI and has been instructed specifically to register as a CIDI Guest.
NON CIDI Members Are:
- Any individual who is not an employee of any of the above mentioned organizations and who is not a “paid-in-full” Individual CIDI Members.
Feel free to contact us at anytime to inquire if you or your employer are current standing CIDI Members.
21 July 2014
The Mosaic Institute: Mosaic is now on LinkedIn! Follow us to learn more about our work building a stronger, more inclusive Canada and promoting peace around the world.
Mosaic is now on LinkedIn! Follow us to learn more about our work building a stronger, more inclusive Canada and promoting peace around the world.
14 July 2014
The Mosaic Institute: UofMosaic, our program on university campuses across Canada, launches its first Student Advisory Committee to help guide campus-based peace building initiatives
The Mosaic Institute shared a link.
UofMosaic, our program on university campuses across Canada, launches its first Student Advisory Committee to help guide campus-based peace building initiatives. http://goo.gl/klxji4
How can Canadian youth from diverse backgrounds become global leaders?
How can Canadian youth from diverse backgrounds become global leaders?
12 April 2014
Queer of Gender Profile Submission: Troy Jackson
Source: http://queerofgender.com/post/82321851386/qofg-profile-submission-troy-jackson
Introduce yourself! Who are you? What should we call you?
I’m Troy Jackson a Nova Scotian Afro-Metis Recording Artist, Writer and Performer who resides in Toronto.
How do you identify in terms of gender, sexuality, gender expression, etc?
What are your personal pronouns?
Tell us a little about yourself. What makes you special? What do you do, write, think, speak about or love? What marginalized communities do you identify with?
I am special because I breathe, create and am alive. I survived an almost fatal accident last year from a fall that cracked my skull and eardrum. Coming out of an induced 3 day coma- hooked up to a breathing tube with your arms strapped down shocked me into realizing how special life a breath is. I have been creating things since I was a kid, my family is very animated, artistic storytellers. My love of music was infused into my soul when I feel backwards on the vinyl spinning on the record player from my bunk bed as a child. I have been hearing melodies, vocals and beats ever since. Yes there seems to be a theme of falling here. My fall one story and a half as a kid is another article (LOL).
What words of affirmation do you have for those who are Queer of Gender, specifically those who will find similarities in your experiences to their life?
Sing more! Take up space. Create. Never mind the haters. Manifest magnificent things in the simple everyday. Be lovely to yourself in your words and actions. We all come from Royalty don’t bow to anyone. We are all deserving of love, dignity and respect equally.
We want to promote you! Where can we find you in the world/ on the interwebs?
QofG Profile Submission: Troy Jackson
Introduce yourself! Who are you? What should we call you?I’m Troy Jackson a Nova Scotian Afro-Metis Recording Artist, Writer and Performer who resides in Toronto.
How do you identify in terms of gender, sexuality, gender expression, etc?
I identify as a Gay Man. My gender expression is a mildly flamboyant, gay man who embraces his feminity. I love to mix it up. I am a Gemini and a twin.
What are your personal pronouns?
He/Troy/Honey
Tell us a little about yourself. What makes you special? What do you do, write, think, speak about or love? What marginalized communities do you identify with?
I am special because I breathe, create and am alive. I survived an almost fatal accident last year from a fall that cracked my skull and eardrum. Coming out of an induced 3 day coma- hooked up to a breathing tube with your arms strapped down shocked me into realizing how special life a breath is. I have been creating things since I was a kid, my family is very animated, artistic storytellers. My love of music was infused into my soul when I feel backwards on the vinyl spinning on the record player from my bunk bed as a child. I have been hearing melodies, vocals and beats ever since. Yes there seems to be a theme of falling here. My fall one story and a half as a kid is another article (LOL).
After an almost gay bashing years ago I refocused my “party boy ways” into spoken word cabarets of expression, I healed myself through music and words. “Words can lift you higher or they can bring you down/ Careful what you are saying/Careful who you have around” are words that guide my performance path.
What does your gender and/or gender expression mean to you? Does your gender identity and/or expression play an important part in your life? If so, why?
My gender expression is less about gender and more about expression. What is gender anyway, in a patriarchial society? I believe that one should express themselves however they wish. Gender is fluid.
My gender expression is less about gender and more about expression. What is gender anyway, in a patriarchial society? I believe that one should express themselves however they wish. Gender is fluid.
How does being a part of the marginalized population[s] you identify with affect the way you see gender?
I tend to look at it like this: I am not a member of any minority. I belong to powerful world majorities whom are taking up space, promoting and affirming themselves to make the world a better place through words, actions, art and media and selfies! How we see gender depends on our own life experiences, the culture and society we have grown up in and then ultimately, how we define ourselves.
I tend to look at it like this: I am not a member of any minority. I belong to powerful world majorities whom are taking up space, promoting and affirming themselves to make the world a better place through words, actions, art and media and selfies! How we see gender depends on our own life experiences, the culture and society we have grown up in and then ultimately, how we define ourselves.
What words of affirmation do you have for those who are Queer of Gender, specifically those who will find similarities in your experiences to their life?Sing more! Take up space. Create. Never mind the haters. Manifest magnificent things in the simple everyday. Be lovely to yourself in your words and actions. We all come from Royalty don’t bow to anyone. We are all deserving of love, dignity and respect equally.
We want to promote you! Where can we find you in the world/ on the interwebs?
(Youtube Video: The Batty Boy’s Revenge)
(Youtube: koma)
~*~
~*~
10 April 2014
RCMP: Getting on board
Getting on board
Cst. Troy Derrick, a member in Surrey, B.C., has been skateboarding since he was 10 years old. Credit: Kolby Harris
One member’s passion determined his path
By Sigrid ForbergRelated link
As a young First Nations man, Derrick had several negative encounters with the police in his community that left an impression on him. But when he became an avid skateboarder at the age of 12, he says he found a sense of liberation in the activity and its community.
“I began to embrace skateboarding culture because it accepted me with no questions,” says Derrick. “The only thing that mattered to others was that I liked to skateboard.”
Seeking out success
When Derrick was getting into skateboarding in the 1980s, it had a bad reputation. Although he was never involved in fights, drugs, alcohol or any illegal activity, Derrick and his friends were taunted by their peers and pigeonholed by authority figures.When a serious knee injury prevented him from pursuing skateboarding further, his sister recommended he try something new. Derrick moved south to Vancouver and enrolled in a culinary arts program. In just a few short years, he got his red seal certification and moved to the Gulf Islands, where he worked as a chef.
When he returned to Vancouver a few years later, Derrick found himself working as an assistant in the culinary arts program at the University of British Columbia and then later in Surrey, where he taught young First Nations students.
“I would always tell my students, you have options in this country, you can be successful at anything so long as you put the time and effort in,” says Derrick. “Of course, one of my students eventually says, ‘What about you, Chef Troy? Are you doing everything you can do?’ ”
Taken aback by the question, Derrick asked the student what he thought was the hardest thing a First Nations person could do. “And word for word, he said, ‘Why don’t you become a cop? We all hate them anyways.’ ”
Connected to his roots
That conversation struck a chord with Derrick. Within three weeks, he was at a recruiting session in New Westminster, B.C. And just a few weeks later, he was training hard and preparing to become a cadet.It was at Depot that he really got in touch with the history of his ancestors. With a better understanding of many issues within the First Nations community, coupled with his own personal experiences, he was posted to Surrey, where he serves as the detachment’s First Nations policing member for the Semiahmoo First Nation.
“What struck me about Troy was that he was very committed to his role,” says S/Sgt. Lesli Roseberry, the former district commander for South Surrey. “And he’s never completely given up what he did before, you can tell the skateboarding and even the chef work both still influence him.”
Finding his place
After facing prejudices and racism growing up, Derrick understands what it’s like to be an outsider. And he’s channeled that into his work. Motivated by providing both his service as well as his compassion to the community, he says something just clicked when he became a police officer.“Far too often, we go into these communities telling people what they should be doing to make their lives better, but not asking them what they think will help them out,” says Derrick. “I feel like I understand what my place is now.”
Derrick says he owes that awareness to his early experiences through skateboarding. Kevin Harris, Canada’s first professional skateboarder and Derrick’s childhood hero, adds it’s an activity that teaches perseverance and optimism.
“Once skateboarding is in your blood, you’ll do anything to overcome the obstacles preventing you from skating,” says Harris. “Skateboarding has taught me that if a brick wall comes up in life that you can always find a way around it.”
And although Derrick never imagined himself as a police officer, he plans to make the most of it.
“You only get one crack at this job, so you have to make the most of it while you still can,” says Derrick. “Whatever I’m doing, I don’t want to just make a difference in the community; I want to be that difference.”
Reprinted with permission from the Pony Express (No. 1, 2014).
Cst. Troy Derrick, a member in Surrey, B.C., has been skateboarding since he was 10 years old. Credit: Kolby Harris
One member’s passion determined his path
By Sigrid Forberg
Related link
Growing up with seven other family members in a trailer outside of Prince George, B.C., the last job Cst. Troy Derrick ever pictured himself doing was that of a cop. His dreams back then focused more on a slab of wood with four wheels.
As a young First Nations man, Derrick had several negative encounters with the police in his community that left an impression on him. But when he became an avid skateboarder at the age of 12, he says he found a sense of liberation in the activity and its community.
“I began to embrace skateboarding culture because it accepted me with no questions,” says Derrick. “The only thing that mattered to others was that I liked to skateboard.”
Seeking out success
When Derrick was getting into skateboarding in the 1980s, it had a bad reputation. Although he was never involved in fights, drugs, alcohol or any illegal activity, Derrick and his friends were taunted by their peers and pigeonholed by authority figures.
When a serious knee injury prevented him from pursuing skateboarding further, his sister recommended he try something new. Derrick moved south to Vancouver and enrolled in a culinary arts program. In just a few short years, he got his red seal certification and moved to the Gulf Islands, where he worked as a chef.
When he returned to Vancouver a few years later, Derrick found himself working as an assistant in the culinary arts program at the University of British Columbia and then later in Surrey, where he taught young First Nations students.
“I would always tell my students, you have options in this country, you can be successful at anything so long as you put the time and effort in,” says Derrick. “Of course, one of my students eventually says, ‘What about you, Chef Troy? Are you doing everything you can do?’ ”
Taken aback by the question, Derrick asked the student what he thought was the hardest thing a First Nations person could do. “And word for word, he said, ‘Why don’t you become a cop? We all hate them anyways.’ ”
Connected to his roots
That conversation struck a chord with Derrick. Within three weeks, he was at a recruiting session in New Westminster, B.C. And just a few weeks later, he was training hard and preparing to become a cadet.
It was at Depot that he really got in touch with the history of his ancestors. With a better understanding of many issues within the First Nations community, coupled with his own personal experiences, he was posted to Surrey, where he serves as the detachment’s First Nations policing member for the Semiahmoo First Nation.
“What struck me about Troy was that he was very committed to his role,” says S/Sgt. Lesli Roseberry, the former district commander for South Surrey. “And he’s never completely given up what he did before, you can tell the skateboarding and even the chef work both still influence him.”
Finding his place
After facing prejudices and racism growing up, Derrick understands what it’s like to be an outsider. And he’s channeled that into his work. Motivated by providing both his service as well as his compassion to the community, he says something just clicked when he became a police officer.
“Far too often, we go into these communities telling people what they should be doing to make their lives better, but not asking them what they think will help them out,” says Derrick. “I feel like I understand what my place is now.”
Derrick says he owes that awareness to his early experiences through skateboarding. Kevin Harris, Canada’s first professional skateboarder and Derrick’s childhood hero, adds it’s an activity that teaches perseverance and optimism.
“Once skateboarding is in your blood, you’ll do anything to overcome the obstacles preventing you from skating,” says Harris. “Skateboarding has taught me that if a brick wall comes up in life that you can always find a way around it.”
And although Derrick never imagined himself as a police officer, he plans to make the most of it.
“You only get one crack at this job, so you have to make the most of it while you still can,” says Derrick. “Whatever I’m doing, I don’t want to just make a difference in the community; I want to be that difference.”
Reprinted with permission from the Pony Express (No. 1, 2014).
09 April 2014
Tablet Magazine; Facing a New Wave of French Canadian Nationalism, Quebec’s Jews Stand Their Ground
Source: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/168662/montreal-jews-say-non?all=1
World
On a bitterly cold evening late last month, a hundred or so people ambled in and out of a vernissage of local Jewish artists in the lobby of Cégep du Vieux Montréal, a downtown community college. The show, called “From Where We Stand,” explored how Jewish culture is “defined by its persecution and assimilation” and attracted a mix of religious and secular Jews, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, drinking beer sold for a toonie.
The artwork included a photograph of a man pulling a child on a sleigh across a barren snowscape and an erotic performance piece about conception. But many in the room were less preoccupied with the art than with the poetic irony of a Jewish show being held at the Cégep at all: Less than two weeks earlier, Louise Mailloux, a philosophy professor at the college, prompted a political firestorm after giving an interview with the French-language daily La Presse in which she said she “absolutely” stood by her claim that the added cost of kosher-certified products is essentially a hidden tax levied on Quebec’s unwitting Francophone population for the benefit of Jewish interest groups.
More than one patron at the vernissage marveled at the thought of Mailloux—a candidate for the separatist Parti Québécois in today’s provincial elections—casually strolling through the two-week-long exhibit on her way home from work. Despite demands by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, one of the main organs of Canadian Jewry, that the PQ “disavow” the “kosher tax” conspiracy theory, party leader and incumbent premier Pauline Marois stood by her candidate: “Her writings are eloquent,” Marois said. “I respect her point of view.” (Mailloux did offer a weak apology—“I never wanted to hurt or offend anyone,” she said—a few days later.)
The inflammatory rhetoric was only the latest provocation to Quebec’s Jewish community, which today stands at about 90,000 people, most of them in Montreal. In a gambit to secure control of the provincial legislature—and to deflect attention away from questions about the province’s tanking economy—the PQ has campaigned on legislation that would ban public-sector workers from wearing kippot, hijab, turbans, and other “overt” religious garb while on the job. The chief target of this so-called “Charter of Values” is widely presumed to be Quebec’s ballooning Muslim minority; Montreal, a city of 1.6 million, is home to more than 220,000 Muslims, according to 2011 census figures.
Proponents of the legislation include Jews aligned with the PQ, like Evelyne Abitbol, a Sephardic Jew and former press secretary to Lucien Bouchard, the founder of the federal sovereignty party Bloc Québécois. Abitbol is running as PQ candidate and last week finally acknowledged at a debate—after months of party leaders dodging the question—that Jewish doctors could be fired under the law for failing to remove their kippot. The Coalition Avenir Québec, which also supports the charter, includes two Jews on its list, who have said the religious symbol ban should be limited to authority figures, such as judges, in order to prevent conflict of interest.
The debate over the proposed law has unleashed a wave of anxiety in the Jewish community not seen since the 1970s, when a PQ-led government passed sweeping legislation known as Bill 101, which imposed French as the dominant language of education and commerce across the province. That prompted a wave of emigration by Quebec’s largely English-speaking Jews, fueled by dwindling job opportunities and a general unease with the vagaries of Francophone nationalism.
The response to the charter from some members of the generation that stayed is something akin to battle fatigue. But among the cohort of Jews too young to remember the last round of battles, the legislation has triggered indignation—and a willingness to defend their own Québécois identity. “There’s a sense that we belong here, so we’ll fight for it,” said Zev Moses, the 30-year-old executive director of the online Museum of Jewish Montreal. “We’re not going to get up and leave.”
***
A century ago, Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe flooded into the working-class neighborhoods along the city’s Saint Lawrence Boulevard, including Mile End. Yiddish was Montreal’s de facto third language, after French and English. Jews were tolerated, even by French Canadian nationalists: In 1906, Armand Lavergne, a lawyer and acolyte of prominent nationalist politician Henri Bourassa, helped orchestrate a Jewish exemption from the federal Lord’s Day Act, so business owners could work on Sundays. The National Assembly of Quebec opened its doors to Jews the following year.
But eventually anti-Semitism began to fester, needling its way into French Canada through the Catholic Church—especially among the so-called pure laine, or “pure wool,” Québécois, an extant segment of the population who believe in a distinct French-Canadian ethnicity. Anti-Semitism “was always much higher in Quebec than in the rest of Canada, two or three times as high,” said Irving Abella, a historian of Canadian Jewry at Toronto’s York University and president of the Canadian Jewish Congress from 1992 to 1995.
Francophone nationalism was tied up with Catholic values, and Jewish immigrants were seen as conniving entrepreneurs, social deviants, and Christ-killers, their non-Catholicism a toxic threat to the French Canadian body politic. In her controversial 1994 book The Traitor and the Jew, French Canadian historian Esther Delisle attributed much of the roiling hostility to the chief architect of Quebec nationalism, a Catholic priest named Lionel Groulx who wrote passionate condemnations of Jews throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. “In the rest of Canada there was no major institution behind anti-Semitism,” Abella said. “In Quebec, the Church was a mouthpiece.”
Yet Montreal’s Jews prospered, aligning themselves with the economically prosperous Anglophone community—a move that bred further mistrust among French Canadians who saw their language and culture increasingly marginalized in a majority Francophone province. (Protestant Anglophones also played a part in the discrimination of the first half of the 20th century; English-speaking McGill University, Quebec’s leading academic institution, kept a quota on Jewish students through the 1940s.) As church influence began to recede in the early 1960s, nationalist ideology became grounded in protecting French Canadians’ peculiar cultural and historical identity under the flag of the PQ, which was formed in 1968 by René Lévesque, a former war reporter.
The separatist movement was never formally anti-Semitic. Indeed, Lévesque looked to Zionism as a model for Quebec nationalism. But the sentiment was ingrained among the rural rank-and-file partisans of the PQ. “It’s hard to get rid of so many years of teaching,” said Abella. In 1973, one Francophone union leader reportedly told the Federation of Canadian Arab Societies: “The Jewish population of Quebec enjoys more privileges than any other minority in the world. We don’t want them to poison the air of this country any further.” To some nationalists, Anglophones—Jews among them—were outsiders, deserving of minority status, or worse. The day before the PQ was first elected in 1976, the Montreal-born philanthropist Charles Bronfman was quoted calling party members “a bunch of bastards who are trying to kill us.”
Over the next 25 years, the center of Canadian Jewish life shifted to Toronto, in neighboring Ontario. But the outflow from Montreal abated after 1995, when the last PQ-led referendum on separating from Canada lost by a razor-thin margin of 1.46 percent. In the rousing concession speech that followed, the PQ Premier Jacques Parizeau blamed the narrow deficit on “money and the ethnic vote,” which was widely interpreted to mean Quebec’s Jews. The Francophone establishment summarily condemned the remark, and Parizeau, who was rumored to be drunk during the speech, resigned the next day.
Montreal eventually began to attract even those who had left. Henri Hadida, a 58-year-old photographer at the vernissage, moved with his English-speaking Ashkenazi wife and their two young children 125 miles west to Ottawa, Ontario, in 1991. “All of a sudden, here’s a political movement that’s going to threaten my way of living,” Hadida told me. “It was very reminiscent of what happened in Germany after the war.” But Hadida returned to Montreal in 2006, once his children had grown, lured by the tacit understanding between the city’s Jews and Francophone nationalists—a peace that has now been violated. “What’s occurred with the charter debate,” Luciano Del Negro, CIJA’s vice president for Quebec, told me, “is that this understanding was broken and the community felt it was coming under assault.”
So, the city’s Jews are fighting back. The city’s Jewish General Hospital has said it would flat out defy the charter without seeking an exemption, and community organizations, like the Federation CJA, have been unified in their condemnations of the law. Last month, someone vandalized posters outside the PQ’s offices in Longeuil north of Montreal with swastikas and the words “Don’t touch my kippah” and “Drainville out”—a reference to Bernard Drainville, the minister for Democratic Institutions and Active Citizenship who drafted the charter.
Zev Moses explained to me that the Jewish community, less insular than it was even two decades ago, has shed its protectionist, “circle-the-wagons” mentality. Having grown up under Bill 101, younger Anglophone Jews are more attuned to French language and Francophone culture. And French-speaking Sephardi Jews, who first arrived in droves from the Muslim world following Israel’s Six Day War in 1967, now comprise nearly a quarter of the community. While numbers are imprecise, hundreds of Jews—fleeing another brand of secular anti-Semitism—are believed to have emigrated from France in recent years.
When I met with Moses he rattled off a list of renewal programs that have cropped up in the last five years, from The Wandering Chew, a pop-up supper club that hosts ethnic Jewish theme nights, to Le Mood, a French riff on the Jewish learning conference Limmud. Last month, Moses said, more than 2,000 people attended a pop-up exhibit for his museum. Jewish life is undergoing a “mini-cultural renaissance,” he said, and won’t easily be unsettled.
***
The morning after the Cégep exhibition I met Tamara Kramer, the 37-year-old editor of an “alternative” online Jewish magazine called Shtetl, at a café in Mile End, blocks from Wilensky’s and the St-Viateur bagel shop, both longstanding pillars of Montreal’s Jewish food scene. Young, secular Jews have flooded back into the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, and a Hasidic population encroaches from adjacent Outremont. A friend of mine who lives in the Mile End, but grew up in the heavily Jewish suburb of Côte Saint-Luc, recently recalled her grandmother’s joking disapproval of moving back into an area from which her husband worked so hard to escape.
Kramer, who was in high school during the 1995 referendum, acknowledges that Anglophones—Jews among them—could ultimately respond to a PQ resurgence with their feet. But the likelihood of that happening, in her opinion, is low. Recent polls show that fewer than 40 percent of Québécois say they would vote “yes” in a referendum, and Marois has steadfastly tried to keep the issue far from the campaign trail. “It’s less dark,” Kramer said, comparing this election to the mid-1990s. And the charter, she argues, while a huge and potentially decisive wedge issue, is more provocative than practical. “It feels like theater,” she said, “like: Here [the PQ] goes, trying to get a rise out of us again.”
***
World
Facing a New Wave of French Canadian Nationalism, Quebec’s Jews Stand Their Ground
Rather than follow previous generations to Ontario, Montreal’s young Jews are saying ‘non’ to the Parti Québécois
Tamara Kramer, center, at a live taping of Shtetl on the Shortwave where Montreal bands did covers of Leonard Cohen at his favorite Montreal brunch spot, Bagel Etc.(Courtesy of Tamara Kramer)
The artwork included a photograph of a man pulling a child on a sleigh across a barren snowscape and an erotic performance piece about conception. But many in the room were less preoccupied with the art than with the poetic irony of a Jewish show being held at the Cégep at all: Less than two weeks earlier, Louise Mailloux, a philosophy professor at the college, prompted a political firestorm after giving an interview with the French-language daily La Presse in which she said she “absolutely” stood by her claim that the added cost of kosher-certified products is essentially a hidden tax levied on Quebec’s unwitting Francophone population for the benefit of Jewish interest groups.
More than one patron at the vernissage marveled at the thought of Mailloux—a candidate for the separatist Parti Québécois in today’s provincial elections—casually strolling through the two-week-long exhibit on her way home from work. Despite demands by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, one of the main organs of Canadian Jewry, that the PQ “disavow” the “kosher tax” conspiracy theory, party leader and incumbent premier Pauline Marois stood by her candidate: “Her writings are eloquent,” Marois said. “I respect her point of view.” (Mailloux did offer a weak apology—“I never wanted to hurt or offend anyone,” she said—a few days later.)
The inflammatory rhetoric was only the latest provocation to Quebec’s Jewish community, which today stands at about 90,000 people, most of them in Montreal. In a gambit to secure control of the provincial legislature—and to deflect attention away from questions about the province’s tanking economy—the PQ has campaigned on legislation that would ban public-sector workers from wearing kippot, hijab, turbans, and other “overt” religious garb while on the job. The chief target of this so-called “Charter of Values” is widely presumed to be Quebec’s ballooning Muslim minority; Montreal, a city of 1.6 million, is home to more than 220,000 Muslims, according to 2011 census figures.
Proponents of the legislation include Jews aligned with the PQ, like Evelyne Abitbol, a Sephardic Jew and former press secretary to Lucien Bouchard, the founder of the federal sovereignty party Bloc Québécois. Abitbol is running as PQ candidate and last week finally acknowledged at a debate—after months of party leaders dodging the question—that Jewish doctors could be fired under the law for failing to remove their kippot. The Coalition Avenir Québec, which also supports the charter, includes two Jews on its list, who have said the religious symbol ban should be limited to authority figures, such as judges, in order to prevent conflict of interest.
The debate over the proposed law has unleashed a wave of anxiety in the Jewish community not seen since the 1970s, when a PQ-led government passed sweeping legislation known as Bill 101, which imposed French as the dominant language of education and commerce across the province. That prompted a wave of emigration by Quebec’s largely English-speaking Jews, fueled by dwindling job opportunities and a general unease with the vagaries of Francophone nationalism.
The response to the charter from some members of the generation that stayed is something akin to battle fatigue. But among the cohort of Jews too young to remember the last round of battles, the legislation has triggered indignation—and a willingness to defend their own Québécois identity. “There’s a sense that we belong here, so we’ll fight for it,” said Zev Moses, the 30-year-old executive director of the online Museum of Jewish Montreal. “We’re not going to get up and leave.”
***
A century ago, Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe flooded into the working-class neighborhoods along the city’s Saint Lawrence Boulevard, including Mile End. Yiddish was Montreal’s de facto third language, after French and English. Jews were tolerated, even by French Canadian nationalists: In 1906, Armand Lavergne, a lawyer and acolyte of prominent nationalist politician Henri Bourassa, helped orchestrate a Jewish exemption from the federal Lord’s Day Act, so business owners could work on Sundays. The National Assembly of Quebec opened its doors to Jews the following year.
But eventually anti-Semitism began to fester, needling its way into French Canada through the Catholic Church—especially among the so-called pure laine, or “pure wool,” Québécois, an extant segment of the population who believe in a distinct French-Canadian ethnicity. Anti-Semitism “was always much higher in Quebec than in the rest of Canada, two or three times as high,” said Irving Abella, a historian of Canadian Jewry at Toronto’s York University and president of the Canadian Jewish Congress from 1992 to 1995.
Francophone nationalism was tied up with Catholic values, and Jewish immigrants were seen as conniving entrepreneurs, social deviants, and Christ-killers, their non-Catholicism a toxic threat to the French Canadian body politic. In her controversial 1994 book The Traitor and the Jew, French Canadian historian Esther Delisle attributed much of the roiling hostility to the chief architect of Quebec nationalism, a Catholic priest named Lionel Groulx who wrote passionate condemnations of Jews throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. “In the rest of Canada there was no major institution behind anti-Semitism,” Abella said. “In Quebec, the Church was a mouthpiece.”
Yet Montreal’s Jews prospered, aligning themselves with the economically prosperous Anglophone community—a move that bred further mistrust among French Canadians who saw their language and culture increasingly marginalized in a majority Francophone province. (Protestant Anglophones also played a part in the discrimination of the first half of the 20th century; English-speaking McGill University, Quebec’s leading academic institution, kept a quota on Jewish students through the 1940s.) As church influence began to recede in the early 1960s, nationalist ideology became grounded in protecting French Canadians’ peculiar cultural and historical identity under the flag of the PQ, which was formed in 1968 by René Lévesque, a former war reporter.
The separatist movement was never formally anti-Semitic. Indeed, Lévesque looked to Zionism as a model for Quebec nationalism. But the sentiment was ingrained among the rural rank-and-file partisans of the PQ. “It’s hard to get rid of so many years of teaching,” said Abella. In 1973, one Francophone union leader reportedly told the Federation of Canadian Arab Societies: “The Jewish population of Quebec enjoys more privileges than any other minority in the world. We don’t want them to poison the air of this country any further.” To some nationalists, Anglophones—Jews among them—were outsiders, deserving of minority status, or worse. The day before the PQ was first elected in 1976, the Montreal-born philanthropist Charles Bronfman was quoted calling party members “a bunch of bastards who are trying to kill us.”
Over the next 25 years, the center of Canadian Jewish life shifted to Toronto, in neighboring Ontario. But the outflow from Montreal abated after 1995, when the last PQ-led referendum on separating from Canada lost by a razor-thin margin of 1.46 percent. In the rousing concession speech that followed, the PQ Premier Jacques Parizeau blamed the narrow deficit on “money and the ethnic vote,” which was widely interpreted to mean Quebec’s Jews. The Francophone establishment summarily condemned the remark, and Parizeau, who was rumored to be drunk during the speech, resigned the next day.
Montreal eventually began to attract even those who had left. Henri Hadida, a 58-year-old photographer at the vernissage, moved with his English-speaking Ashkenazi wife and their two young children 125 miles west to Ottawa, Ontario, in 1991. “All of a sudden, here’s a political movement that’s going to threaten my way of living,” Hadida told me. “It was very reminiscent of what happened in Germany after the war.” But Hadida returned to Montreal in 2006, once his children had grown, lured by the tacit understanding between the city’s Jews and Francophone nationalists—a peace that has now been violated. “What’s occurred with the charter debate,” Luciano Del Negro, CIJA’s vice president for Quebec, told me, “is that this understanding was broken and the community felt it was coming under assault.”
So, the city’s Jews are fighting back. The city’s Jewish General Hospital has said it would flat out defy the charter without seeking an exemption, and community organizations, like the Federation CJA, have been unified in their condemnations of the law. Last month, someone vandalized posters outside the PQ’s offices in Longeuil north of Montreal with swastikas and the words “Don’t touch my kippah” and “Drainville out”—a reference to Bernard Drainville, the minister for Democratic Institutions and Active Citizenship who drafted the charter.
Zev Moses explained to me that the Jewish community, less insular than it was even two decades ago, has shed its protectionist, “circle-the-wagons” mentality. Having grown up under Bill 101, younger Anglophone Jews are more attuned to French language and Francophone culture. And French-speaking Sephardi Jews, who first arrived in droves from the Muslim world following Israel’s Six Day War in 1967, now comprise nearly a quarter of the community. While numbers are imprecise, hundreds of Jews—fleeing another brand of secular anti-Semitism—are believed to have emigrated from France in recent years.
When I met with Moses he rattled off a list of renewal programs that have cropped up in the last five years, from The Wandering Chew, a pop-up supper club that hosts ethnic Jewish theme nights, to Le Mood, a French riff on the Jewish learning conference Limmud. Last month, Moses said, more than 2,000 people attended a pop-up exhibit for his museum. Jewish life is undergoing a “mini-cultural renaissance,” he said, and won’t easily be unsettled.
***
The morning after the Cégep exhibition I met Tamara Kramer, the 37-year-old editor of an “alternative” online Jewish magazine called Shtetl, at a café in Mile End, blocks from Wilensky’s and the St-Viateur bagel shop, both longstanding pillars of Montreal’s Jewish food scene. Young, secular Jews have flooded back into the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, and a Hasidic population encroaches from adjacent Outremont. A friend of mine who lives in the Mile End, but grew up in the heavily Jewish suburb of Côte Saint-Luc, recently recalled her grandmother’s joking disapproval of moving back into an area from which her husband worked so hard to escape.
Kramer, who was in high school during the 1995 referendum, acknowledges that Anglophones—Jews among them—could ultimately respond to a PQ resurgence with their feet. But the likelihood of that happening, in her opinion, is low. Recent polls show that fewer than 40 percent of Québécois say they would vote “yes” in a referendum, and Marois has steadfastly tried to keep the issue far from the campaign trail. “It’s less dark,” Kramer said, comparing this election to the mid-1990s. And the charter, she argues, while a huge and potentially decisive wedge issue, is more provocative than practical. “It feels like theater,” she said, “like: Here [the PQ] goes, trying to get a rise out of us again.”
***
Canadian Council of Muslim Women : CCMW Monthly | March 21 2014
Source: mass emailing
CCMW Monthly | March 21 2014
Events and News - March 31 2014
SAVE THE DATE! This year, CCMW's annual fundraiser for scholarships will take place on Sunday, September 28 2014 at North York Novotel, Toronto.
Do you know a Canadian Muslim women in your community who should be recognized for her work? Click here to nominate her as a Woman Who Inspires before May 29.
The Women Who Inspires event raises funds to support promising Canadian Muslim women in their studies. If you are a student or have educational pursuits click here to apply before June 15.
Are you a creative individual looking for an opportunity to showcase your talents and skills at a high profile annual fundraiser? Click here apply to perform before May 4.
CCMW would like to promote products and services from the community. Should you like to set up a table or place an advert in the event brochure, click here to apply before August 3.
Blanketed By Blame, Empowered By Support
Toronto chapter held a workshop on March 5 at the Daniels Centre of Learning to is a skit about a Muslim woman facing abuse and needing help.
On March 6, a media launch was hosted by the Institute of Canadian and Aboriginal Studies (University of Ottawa) and the Canadian Council of Muslim Women's (CCMW) for the "Women in Niqab Speak: A Study of the Niqab in Canada".This is the first study to give voice to Muslim women in Canada who wear the niqab. Dr. Lynda Clarke conducted the study, funded by the Ontario Trillium Foundation. Results are based on 129 responses to a survey, focus groups, and personal interviews with women who wear the niqab.
Key speakers were Dr. Lynda Clarke, Associate Professor of Religion and Islam at Concordia University and Alia Hogben, Executive Director of CCMW and a Member of the Order of Canada.The media launch was part of Professor Salah Basalamah's (Associate Professor of School of Translation and Interpretation) seminar of "The Arabesque of Canadian Islam".
International Women's Day
The Toronto chapter participated on the panel at CASSA's event "South Asian Women Empowering Change" at Malvern Community Recreation Centre.
VAW Community Workshops
The following workshops took place all over Canada:
March 17 - London
March 18 - Edmonton
March 26 - York
March 28 - Kitchener
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