sliced bread #2

Some look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not.

Friday, June 30, 2006

diversity in Canada

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This Canada Day weekend, in light of recent events, it might be worthwhile to ask what it's like to be part of an ethnic minority in Canada.

The experience may depend hugely on where you came from originally, what you look like, how the media view you and whether your ethnic community has a voice in the political arena. The Diversity in Canada survey, conducted among 3,000 Canadians 15 years of age and over in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver between June and August 2005, took a closer look at how major ethnic groups perceive their treatment by the most powerful institutions of society: police, courts, employers, media and government.

In addition to immigrants' strong attachment to Canada, the poll also shows that they view Canada's respect for legal rights, security and safety, health care, cultural diversity and education system as much better or somewhat better than their birth countries.

But there are several clouds on the horizon.

Underemployment, discrimination and lack of cultural and political representation are immigration flashpoints reflected in the poll. The lack of recognition for foreign-trained professionals has made a cliché out of the Toronto taxi driver with a PhD. Employment is ranked as the most important issue governments should address among immigrants here less than 10 years. Although not a dominant sentiment among visible minority groups, a worrisome 37 per cent say they have personally experienced discrimination. About 50 per cent of visible minorities feel the mainstream media present negative stereotypes of many people from racial or ethnic minorities.


These issues seem all the more poignant in light of a heated argument I got into with a friend about — ironically — the World Cup. Part of the implication in the exchange was that persons who do not have ethnic roots in countries participating in the tournament — i.e., me — should not comment on the sport of football. Sounds like some of the rantings of one Don Cherry — an icon of Canadian xenophobia if there ever was one.

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Wednesday, June 28, 2006

it's not about how... it's about who...

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"It's not about playing beautiful football. It's about getting a result. I watched the Ivory Coast in their first game against Argentina, and I thought, 'This is a wonderful team. They play beautiful football.' And now they're home, watching us."
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Tuesday, June 27, 2006

the Italian job

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Another questionable call in this World Cup showed Italy the way to the quarter-final yesterday, giving the Italians a penalty kick that Francesco Totti converted for the 1-0 win as time expired. Moments earlier, Italy's Fabio Grosso was dribbling a few strides from the goalmouth when Lucas Neill slid in front of him. The Italian cut in Neill's direction and tried to leap clear, but tripped over the defender's back.

To the amazement of the Socceroos, Spanish referee Luis Medina Cantalejo immediately ruled it a penalty with 12 seconds remaining in extra time. Totti, a second-half substitute, sent his penalty kick high and to the right of goalkeeper Mark Schwarzer, who guessed correctly but couldn't stretch far enough to stop it.


But when exactly is a free kick direct or indirect?

According to the "Laws of the Game", a free kick is direct when a player:

  • kicks or attempts to kick an opponent
  • trips or attempts to trip an opponent
  • jumps at an opponent
  • charges an opponent
  • strikes or attempts to strike an opponent
  • pushes an opponent
  • makes contact with the opponent before touching the ball when tackling
  • holds an opponent
  • spits at an opponent
  • handles the ball deliberately

If any of these offences are committed by a player inside their own penalty area, then it's a penalty kick. An indirect free kick results when, in the opinion of the referee, a player:
  • impedes the progression of an opponent (obstruction)
  • plays in a dangerous manner
  • prevents the goalkeeper from releasing the ball from his hands

At most, Neill was guilty of "impeding the progression of an opponent" (i.e. obstruction) which is an indirect free kick. Penalties are a result of direct free kick deserving fouls, which was hardly the situation in this case. Check the replay.

The Aussies got screwed... talk about an Italian job!


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Saturday, June 24, 2006

victim politics

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It has become fashionable to apologize, and this is particularly true with respect to historical wrongs which, since they involve actions of others, long dead, and hence are free of any personal culpability, are apologies that are inherently easy to make. We have seen Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, apologize for British indifference to the potato famine of the 1840s. On the other hand, Mr. Blair has steadfastly refused Archbishop Desmond Tutu's demand that he apologize for Britain's role in the "immoral" Iraq war. Former Canadian PM Brian Mulroney apologized to Japanese-Canadians in 1988 for their internment during the Second World War, and offered a settlement costing taxpayers $422-million. However, Mr. Mulroney has yet to apologize for putting Canadians through the wrenching and divisive national debate over the Meech Lake Accord.

Now, Stephen Harper has stood in the House of Commons and apologized for the Chinese head tax that was established in 1885 under the Conservative government of Sir John A. Macdonald, and last collected 62 years ago under the government of William Lyon Mckenzie King. Mr. Harper also announced the government would pay financial compensation and fund programs totalling $35-million.

There is no doubt that the head tax was racist, and its use to try to limit Chinese immigration was shameful. It is not, however, equivalent to the plight of the ethnic Japanese in Canada during the Second World War. It was an unfortunate episode in Canadian history, of which there are many. To deal with these issues, the government of Canada has established a pot of money, appropriately called
Acknowledgment, Commemoration and Education. However, the government is not so awash in tax dollars that it can begin to pay compensation for everything.

Victim groups are swarming to this pot as bees to nectar. According to government records released to the Winnipeg Free Press, Ukrainians want $12.5-million for their internment during the First World War. The Germans want $12.5-million, too. The Italians want $12.5-million for the internment of 700 men during the Second World War. The Sikhs want $4-million, the Croats $2.8-million, and the Jews $2-million for being barred from immigrating to Canada between 1923 and 1945. African Canadians and Doukhobors want another $7-million for unspecified grievances.

Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson, rare among journalists, has counted 13 such groups, and rightly sees Ottawa's surrender to the CCNC as flipping open Pandora's box. When ACE took shape, Simpson wrote, it "quickly attracted lineups of groups claiming victimization and demanding their share of the pot: Ukrainians"
already given some compensation for their internment in the First World War "Italians, Germans, Croatians, Chinese, Sikhs, Jews, blacks. Others are sure to follow."

Stephen Harper has made a huge and costly mistake
it is stupid, divisive and, emphatically, fresh discrimination, since it "discriminates" against other groups that demand similar treatment. History is never black and white — except for the approved Canadian version, which is increasingly a narrative of oppressors and oppressed. A mari usque ad mare, we are a group of victims united only by our collective sense that, somehow, somewhere, Canada has done us wrong. I believe the general principle enunciated by Pierre Elliott Trudeau holds true: we, as Canadians, can only aim to be just in our own time.


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Wednesday, June 21, 2006

what a good legal education is worth

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On June 19, 2006 the Board of Governors of York University approved a three-year tuition fee schedule to commence in the 2006-07 academic year. This new fee structure will replace the original fee structure approved by the Board for Osgoode in June, 2004. Pursuant to this new fee schedule, fees for entering students will increase by 8% annually and fees for students continuing in the LLB program will increase by 4% annually.

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Monday, June 19, 2006

on pride and conformity

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today is the official kick-off of Toronto's Pride Week... the theme this year is "Fearless"... is Joseph Briante just that, or did he expect too much "freedom" or "diversity" from his corporate masters?
When Joseph Briante sent an emotional e-mail last week to more than 100 fellow lawyers at the Vancouver office of Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP, he wrote that he wanted to put an end to a "barrage of uninvited comments" about his sexuality and colourful wardrobe. Instead, the 31-year-old associate became an Internet sensation overnight as his furious digital rant and New Age ramblings ricocheted through law firm inboxes and blogs around the world. By the end of the week, the e-mail had been so widely circulated that Mr. Briante's story landed on the Vancouver Province's front page with the headline: "I got in trouble for being a snappy dresser . . . and too gay!"

A spokeswoman for Faskens said Mr. Briante handed in his resignation Thursday night and the national law firm issued a press release announcing it had hired an independent expert to investigate the harassment allegations. The Faskens spokeswoman said the firm takes the accusations "very seriously."

It is doubtful that the outcome of the probe will ever see the light of day because of employee privacy issues. But what has landed with a screeching thud in the public spotlight is the very inconvenient reality that major law firms, for all their expertise in human rights and labour law, are still struggling to calibrate their conservative cultures to adapt to diversity, including homosexuality, among their employees.

Gay activists interviewed said working conditions at major law firms have improved in recent years, but many middle-aged gay or lesbian lawyers have been reluctant to openly discuss their sexuality until they are made partners for fear that their careers or access to interesting case files might be cut off by disapproving senior partners or firm clients.

Much less reticent is the younger generation of law school graduates and associates who are increasingly forthright about their sexuality and workplace rights. As Faskens learned with Mr. Briante, the younger generation's candour can set them on something of a collision course with staid major firms. "I used to tell students that they shouldn't give any clues about their sexuality on their résumés unless they were certain that the person reading it would be receptive. Today I get attacked if I say that," said Doug Elliott, a prominent Toronto litigator and president of the International Lesbian and Gay Law Association.

Now, young gay lawyers are "much more in your face" with potential employers. While such honesty is "refreshing," Mr. Elliott said it can present career hurdles. "Things are improving slowly, but big Bay Street law firms are struggling with diversity. . . . There is still this residue from the past that demands conservatism in the big firms. The only thing they want you to stand out in is billable hours."

In an interview, Mr. Briante said he stood out at Faskens because he wore vibrant pastel shirts, edgy suits and has an effervescent personality. At Faskens, Mr. Briante said he found that individuality was not an asset: "There was an unwelcoming environment for people who are not cookie-cutter lawyers." For legal watchers sensitive to the cultural nuances of the top law firms, the irony of Mr. Briante's story is that Faskens has long been regarded as a "gay friendly" firm. Under the leadership of famed litigator Walter Williston, Faskens was known as early as the 1970s as a firm that welcomed a variety of lawyers, including, one partner said, a handful of gay partners.

Ken Smith, a Vancouver-based lawyer and noted defender of gay legal rights, said while there is much more openness in the profession, most lawyers he knows at big firms do not come out until after they have been made a partner. "There is still a glass ceiling at the partnership level for gay lawyers."

— JACQUIE McNISH, Globe and Mail (2006/06/14)

We can certainly keep trying to "open up" the legal profession, but in some sense, there will always need to be a consideration of the level of professionalism that is projected by lawyers — that is, after all, one of the foundations of our legitimacy. Skin colour, religious attire, signs of sexual orientation, and the like are not guideposts for professional appearance. Professional dress, on the other hand, is. In my view, pastel shirts and edgy ties are on the same vein as purple hair and nose rings — it simply doesn't work in the corporate world.

On one hand, it's unfortunate that "professional appearance" can be used as code language for other more discriminatory attitudes. If it's in fact the case that Briante was a victim of discrimination based on his orientation, then he should have pursued the appropriate complaint mechanism, within the firm or with the provincial human rights tribunal. On the other hand, the very headline used by The Province and Briante's own comments only serve to maintain the stereotype that all gay/bisexual people have to look colourful and "fabulous" and/or be paragons of style and fashion.

I'm more concerned about being perceived as a serious professional.

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Friday, June 16, 2006

the beautiful game

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The rather worn cliché that sport is war without guns, that our support and loyalty to our teams and nations is our modern-day expression of our tribal roots, happens to be true. If fundamentalists would just play sports instead of assassinating tennis players for wearing shorts, no doubt they'd spend less time flying planes into buildings.

Last week, the biggest sporting event on Planet Earth kicked off in Germany. The World Cup makes the Olympics look like an elementary-school sack race, and inspires a more passionate following than global jihad. Soccer is being hailed as the true ambassador of Olympic spirit — less specialist, less corrupt, less phony than the actual Olympics.

Soccer "closes the schools, closes the shops, closes a city and stops a war," the lead singer of U2 says in those lush Irish tones as your giant HDTV fills with images of children in war-torn rubble playing keep-me-up and women in burkhas having a kick around in front of the secret police. The World Cup is undoubtedly about more than just soccer: it is geopolitics laid bare. Hooligans abound, but ask your average soccer-nut to defend his sport of choice and he'll look at you tearfully before launching into a poorly articulated explanation about how "soccer is a universal language, a symbol of the essential unity of mankind, an expression of our global harmony, and all that kind of stuff."

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Thursday, June 15, 2006

What say the reeds at Runnymede?

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Today is the anniversary of the Magna Carta, the English charter signed by King John on June 15, 1215, at Runnymede. The King -- who had just lost in battle against his English barons -- promised to respect his subjects' rights and agreed to be bound by the rule of law. In 1911, Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem about the momentous occasion.

At Runnymede, at Runnymede,
What say the reeds at Runnymede?
The lissom reeds that give and take,
That bend so far, but never break,
They keep the sleepy Thames awake
With tales of John at Runnymede.

At Runnymede, at Runnymede,
Oh, hear the reeds at Runnymede:
"You musn't sell, delay, deny,
A freeman's right or liberty.
It wakes the stubborn Englishry,
We saw 'em roused at Runnymede!

When through our ranks the Barons came,
With little thought of praise or blame,
But resolute to play the game,
They lumbered up to Runnymede;
And there they launched in solid line
The first attack on Right Divine,
The curt uncompromising 'Sign!'
They settled John at Runnymede.

At Runnymede, at Runnymede,
Your rights were won at Runnymede!
No freeman shall be fined or bound,
Or dispossessed of freehold ground,
Except by lawful judgment found
And passed upon him by his peers.
Forget not, after all these years,
The Charter signed at Runnymede."

And still when mob or Monarch lays
Too rude a hand on English ways,
The whisper wakes, the shudder plays,
Across the reeds at Runnymede.

And Thames, that knows the moods of kings,
And crowds and priests and suchlike things,
Rolls deep and dreadful as he brings
Their warning down from Runnymede!
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Tuesday, June 13, 2006

alternative dispute resolution

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Faced with the inability of bickering attorneys to resolve even the most innocuous scheduling questions without his intervention, a Florida judge ordered the two to meet on the steps of the federal courthouse and resolve their latest quarrel by playing "one (1) game of 'rock, paper, scissors.'"

Judge Gregory A. Presnell of Orlando ordered the unusual measure, which he characterized as "a new form of alternative dispute resolution," after the two Tampa attorneys had proven unable to agree upon where to hold a deposition, even though both of their offices are just four floors away in the very same building in Tampa. The Solomonic ruling comes in an insurance dispute filed last September by Avista Management against Wausau Underwriters Insurance Co.

Defense attorney D. Lee Craig, of Butler Pappas Weihmuller Katz Craig, proposed holding the deposition in his office, but plaintiffs' attorney David J. Pettinato of Merlin Law Group wanted it to take place at the court reporter's office down the street. Characterizing the disagreement as "the latest in a series of Gordian knots that the parties have been unable to untangle without enlisting the assistance of the federal courts," Judge Presnell ordered each attorney, "accompanied by one paralegal who shall act as an attendant and witness," to play the dispositive round of RPS on June 30. The winner of this engagement shall be entitled to select the location of the . . . deposition," he ruled, so long as it was within Hillsborough County.

In an interview, plaintiff's lawyer Pettinato says, "I'm going to comply with the court's order to the letter." Defense lawyer Craig did not respond to a phone message, while Judge Presnell, 63, who was appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 2000, declined comment.

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Saturday, June 10, 2006

come on England!

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You're the first in my life
To make me think that we might go all the way
And I want you to know that we're hanging on

They'll come and yes they'll try to break us down
But we know that we cannot lose
If we keep moving forward and don't look back

With the world at your feet
There's no one you can't beat
Yes it can be done
With the world at your feet
There's no height you can't reach
This could be the one

It's calling, it's calling you now
You know it's going to be our time
Cause the world is at your feet
Yes the world is at your feet

We're still hanging on
Like stars in the sky burning bright
Seen by a billion eyes
Know I want you to know
They're all turned your way

You'll lift it up with one proud kiss
There's nothing else that feels like this
So lift your arms and everyone sing

With the world at your feet
There's no one you can't beat
Yes it can be done
With the world at your feet
There's no height you can't reach
This could be the one

It's calling, it's calling you know
You know it's going to be our time
Cause the world is at your feet
Yes the world is at your feet


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Tuesday, June 06, 2006

time to toss the salad and melt the pot

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If Canada is the world in one place, as it proudly claims, what kind of a place is it becoming? In the troubling aftermath of 17 Toronto "terrorism" arrests, the answer is both dramatically different and depressingly familiar.

Just for a moment, turn a few hundred years of Western civilization on its head and presume the teenagers and men appearing in court today are not innocent but guilty. Should that eventually emerge as the legal rather than emotional judgment of peers, this country, led by its federal government, faces tough and lasting introspection.

Why? Because all those charged are Canadians, no more, no less.

That's pivotal because this is a domestic problem with offshore roots, not just a foreign problem manifesting itself at home. If the allegations are true and the plot more than a fantasy that became a conspiracy, we are under attack from ourselves.

After last year's London transit bombings, Britain faced the same wrenching realization that the enemy, by virtue of a tolerant culture and ethnic mosaic, is inside the wire. That makes resistance so much more difficult than demonizing strangers before sending troops to fight a distant war. Most of all, it means scrutinizing a complex mix of policies to determine if something is broken internally and urgently needs to be fixed.

What led to the weekend arrests isn't new and is only different in detail. Once again, those who have lived here long enough to distance themselves from inherited hatreds and imported conflicts allegedly found those passions irresistible. It's a familiar pattern that repeats with almost every immigrant wave. Among others, the IRA and Tamil Tigers found this country ripe for militant fundraising while constant Middle East violence continues to divide Canadian Jews and Canadian Arabs. Usually the worst results of those activities explode over there. But from time to time, as they did in the 1985 Air-India bombings, they implode here with devastating impact.

What's different now is that the danger zone has expanded beyond state-based conflicts into the no-compromise extremes of beliefs. Along with making it easy to tar the many with the actions of a few, it makes it attractive to assume the fault line runs through one community instead of across Canada. In pursuing multicultural tolerance, Canada has been negligent in reinforcing essential, common-denominator values. Most of those are self-evident: human rights, the rule of law and the understanding that one person's freedom ends where another's begins. These are all-defining and remain easily powerful enough to make this country a magnet.

But what's slipped through cracks is that being Canadian requires a commitment passed from generation to generation. Stripped bare of rhetoric and religion, politics and ethnicity, citizenship requires putting the national interest first. To their shame and often for partisan advantage, politicians have been blinking when influential communities and interest groups fall below the threshold of what it means to hold a share in a nation of 33 million. As this weekend's events compellingly argue, that blindness is not sustainable.

In celebrating its differences, Canada must also protect the values that map the perimeter of its shared and evolving space. Along with all levels of government, every community leader, group and ethnic fragment shares responsibility for deciding what is acceptable and exposing what won't be tolerated.

Canada chose long ago to be the world in one place and, happily, that choice is not reversible. But the tougher decisions remain ahead for a country that must forge cohesion as immigration continues to rise and becomes even more diverse.

— JAMES TRAVERS, Toronto Star (2006/06/06)
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Monday, June 05, 2006

innocent until proven guilty

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on the arrests of terrorism suspects in Ontario this weekend...

"Every person charged with an offence is presumed to be innocent, unless and until Crown counsel has proven his/her guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The indictment is only a formal accusation or charge. It tells the person charged what specific crime Crown counsel alleges that the person charged committed. The charge is not evidence. It is not proof of guilt. The presumption of innocence means that the accused starts the trial with a clean slate."


Suppose, just suppose, that one or more of the 17 charged yesterday with terrorism is innocent. This is not the common assumption. I suspect most Canadians assume that Ontario was in great danger from terrorists, that police nipped this danger in the bud and that all of the 12 adults and five young people they arrested are guilty.

All of which may be true. Terrorists do exist. There is the terror we don't think about, committed by nation states under the rubric of security sweeps or targeted reprisals. And there is the terror we do think about, the terrorism of misguided individuals, loons, right-wing militias or Al Qaeda and its Islamist acolytes. Militant Islamists have committed outrages in the United States, Indonesia, Spain and Britain to counter what they see as the crimes of these countries against Muslims. There is no obvious reason to assume that similar criminals won't try the same thing here.

All of which is to say that the Mounties may be absolutely correct when they say they stopped the 17 from using homemade detonators and three tonnes of fertilizer to blow up as yet unspecified targets in southern Ontario. There may indeed have been a terrorist conspiracy that involved what the RCMP assistant commissioner Mike McDonell yesterday referred to as "training areas," where militants tramped about in big boots, cooked on outdoor barbecues, built bombs and used a wooden door for target practice. That's the implication from the evidence shown to reporters yesterday.

Or it is possible that the only thing that these bits of evidence prove is that a group of young men went somewhere where they tramped around in big boots, cooked on barbecues, played soldier and generally acted like jerks — which young men are occasionally wont to do. The three tonnes of ammonium nitrate allegedly purchased was, as McDonell said, three times the amount used in the Oklahoma terror bombing of 1995. But, as he also said, farmers routinely buy three tonnes of ammonium nitrate "every day." They use it for fertilizer, not bombs.

In short, we don't know much yet about what these men and boys were trying to do. We don't know if this series of arrests, called Operation O-Sage by the Mounties, pre-empted the kind of actions that in the United Kingdom led to last year's bombing of the London subway by otherwise unremarkable young Britons.

That's one possibility. It's certainly the explanation favoured by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who yesterday praised the police.

What we do know about Operation O-Sage is that the RCMP, as well as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, have been tracking the suspects since 2004. We also know that at least some of their neighbours knew police were watching them. Presumably, some of the suspects did, too. If the alleged conspirators knew they were under surveillance, it seems odd that they continued along merrily with plans to make explosives. But perhaps they are not bright terrorists.

Or perhaps they are not terrorists at all.

With luck, we will get these answers at trial. This time at least, Canada has chosen to deal with alleged terrorists in the proper way, by charging them with criminal offences and allowing the case to come to court — in Canada.

During the next few days, much will be written and broadcast on the 17. Their lives will be re-examined through the prism of the arrests as reporters try to retrace the steps that allegedly led them to violent jihad. Unnamed security sources will leak details designed to bolster the police case. Families and friends will proclaim the innocence of those charged.

Take it all with a grain of salt. We know that police arrested people. We know they seized some materials — all legal — that can be used to make explosives. So far, we don't know much else.

— THOMAS WALKOM, Toronto Star (2006/06/05)
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Thursday, June 01, 2006

misled by multiculturalism

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One recent Friday, I attended an Iranian Canadian event in Toronto where I was, perhaps, the only non-white, non-Iranian among the 1,000 immaculately turned out guests. When I asked friends at the table why there were no black, Chinese or Arabs at the event, I drew blank stares of bewilderment. Unsaid, but easily understood in the silence was the answer: "Why would a Chinese Canadian or an Indian Canadian be interested in an Iranian event?" So, I pushed the envelope further and asked: "If you feel a black or Chinese Canadian would not understand Iranian issues, why do you feel white Canadians would? Are they better disposed to grasp international issues than, say, an Arab Canadian?"

The interesting part of the evening was the reaction of a white Canadian MPP, who shared our table. She was quite taken aback by my candour and admitted: "I had not noticed the absence of these communities until you pointed it out."

Of course, this celebration of ghettoization is not the exclusive preserve of Iranian Canadians; other communities have mastered their own marginalization with equal enthusiasm, if not more. Earlier that week, I had attended a Tamil Canadian event, where, too, the situation was the same. Only Tamil Canadians and white Canadians were invited. No Arabs, no Iranians, no Chinese were among the audience; my presence being the anomaly. When I raised the same issue with my Tamil hosts, they, to their credit, were far more willing to accept the fact that they had overlooked the issue out of neglect.

This strange relationship of Canada's ethnics with the dominant community raises the question: Is this segregation a legacy of our colonial past, the rise of identity politics or the direct result of institutional multiculturalism? Why is it that whenever the Chinese or Pakistani or any other ethnic minority organizes events, the only other community invited to participate is the dominant white community?

Canada's ethno-cultural communities, who celebrated the advent of multiculturalism in the 1960s, are today increasingly cynical about it. One harsh view of multiculturalism comes from fiery Italian-born constitutional lawyer Rocco Galati, who scoffs at the institution, calling it "the bone thrown to us dogs by the English and French masters." Galati suggests the institution has benefited only a very small number of organizations, which, he says, "extol the virtues of this nonsense for their own limited financial gain to the detriment of the equality and dignity of the rest of us." Dismissing any benefits of multiculturalism, Galati says, "What we have in Canada is multisegregation
de facto, and regrettably de jure."

Rocco Galati's cynicism may offend some, but there is no doubt that not only have the dominant communities of Canada successfully segregated us into our sometimes prosperous ghettoes, they have had near full co-operation by leaders of these communities. No wonder, whether it is Iranians or Tamils, they, like all other ethnic communities, feel they need to relate only to the mainstream community, not share their issues with fellow citizens from other racial minorities.

In this era of identity politics, where people are being pushed into religious and racial silos, multiculturalism can very easily provide fertile soil for nurturing our primitiveness, rather than celebrating reason and our common humanity.

Nobel Prize-winning author Amartya Sen, who as a child had to flee Pakistan for India to escape Hindu-Muslim carnage in 1947, has touched on this subject in his new book,
Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. Sen suggests that we, as human beings, cannot be classified simply in racial or religious compartments, arguing that we are all what we make of ourselves, not just what we inherit from our parents. He writes: "Our shared humanity gets savagely challenged when the manifold divisions in the world are unified into one allegedly dominant system of classification — in terms of religion, or community, or culture, or nation, or civilization ..."

It is time for ethnic minorities to take the next step forward in building a civic society based on respect, dignity and social justice. It is time for Indo-Canadians to interact with Arab Canadians, not only at nomination and leadership bid meetings of prominent white politicians, but to get to know each other as fellow Canadians. It is time for Iranian Canadians to attend the Harry Jerome Awards for black Canadians. That would be a multiculturalism true to the concept's original spirit.

Otherwise, we risk creating a fragmented nation, divided into 21st century tribes, segregated into silos, easily manipulated. While I value diversity, I am tired of celebrating it. What I truly wish to celebrate is our common humanity, not our tribal loyalties and affinities.

— Tarek Fatah, Toronto Star (2006/06/01)
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