This has been quite a spring. True,
there have been some familiar on-going
stories of wars. There are periodic
reminders that conflict goes on with
Russian-backed rebels in Ukraine,
reinforcing my sadness at the failure of
the Organization for Security and
Cooperation on Europe to contain it.
Ever larger swaths of Iraq are reported
as falling under the sway of a
retro-visionary pre-medieval caliphate
that is somehow attractive to
disenfranchised youthful Westerners.
(What can I say? In my youth many
of my peers tried to sell me on the
wonders of communism. The world would
end in a worker paradise of equality --
enforced by totalitarianism.)
For June 20th, World Refugee Day, UNHCR
told us that Syrian refugee numbers
passed the biggest previous refugee
group – Afghanis. (I think this is wrong
– Palestinians are still the biggest
group of refugees, but they don’t fall
under the UNHCR.) However, I spent the
warm sunny morning of World Refugee Day
walking with refugees around the
agencies of Toronto’s eastern downtown
including: the Centre for Victims of
Torture; Neighbourhood Legal Services;
and, Sojourn House among others. We
called for speedy family reunification
procedures.
Bill C51, the so called anti terrorism
law which allows CSIS to snoop freely,
passed. Ironically this undermines the
rights stemming from the Magna Carta,
whose 800th anniversary began this
spring. The revisions to the Citizenship
Act also passed. So, although I
became a Canadian citizen many years
ago, I am now a second-class citizen who
can be stripped of citizenship and
deported to the UK – unlike native-born
Canadians.
On May 6 the world surprised me. Alberta
elected Rachel Notley and an NDP
government. This is indeed that same
Alberta that is famous for never-ending
Tory government, renowned as home of the
former right wing Reform Party, and the
base of ultra conservative Prime
Minister Stephen Harper. Rachel defeated
a PC party lead by a former Harper
government minister. The first 3 bills
she put before the Alberta legislature
are related to her campaign promises and
are right on what I (and Albertans) see
as improving fairness: increase
corporate tax so corporations share the
tax burden pain with individuals; remove
corporations and unions from election
funding; begin a progressive tax beyond
the present flat tax at annual income
levels of $125,000. And there are plans
to review oil royalties and to get into
policies like carbon tax or cap, and
trade that will moderate oil use and
hence climate change. Wow – in Alberta!
June 2nd saw the chair of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, Justice
Murray Sinclair, make public the final
report summary and 94 recommendations. I
was shocked. I thought I knew about the
residential schools and the abuse, but
it was worse than I had assumed. A
few days before the release of the final
report, Beverley McLachlin, the chief
justice of the Supreme Court made the
news saying that Canada attempted to
commit "cultural genocide" against
aboriginal peoples. I was surprised by
the strong language, but I think she’s
right. The residential schools were a
deliberate attempt to take children from
their culture and raise them in another
– British symbols, language … the whole
works. Then there was more than the
stories of sexual abuse that I knew of,
abuses that left many traumatized. I did
not know an aim had been to have the
schools pay for themselves. So there was
forced child labour. There was poor food
and there were food shortages. Six
thousand children died. Then there are
the on-going accounts of poor aboriginal
lands, poor water supply, poor
education, poor health care … and so
on.
Some of the recommendations I don’t
understand in detail – modifying parts
of the criminal code, making changes to
education and health care and the like.
They are important. I surmise they are
aimed at getting rid of second-class
status. Before, I was coming to
understand the notion of being a treaty
people with the aboriginal peoples and
looking into those treaties we share and
what we agreed to do. But there is a key
request – new to me and not pushed by
the media – the call for us all to use
the UN Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples:
43. We
call upon federal, provincial,
territorial, and municipal governments
to fully adopt and implement the United
Nations Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples as the framework for
reconciliation.
44. We call upon the
Government of Canada to develop a
national action plan, strategies, and
other concrete measures to achieve the
goals of the United Nations Declaration
on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
And
then Spring went out with a depressing
“bang.” The evening of June 17, 2015 a
mass shooting took place at Emanuel
African Methodist Episcopal Church in
downtown Charleston, South Carolina. The
church is one of the United States' oldest
black churches and has long been a site
for community organization around civil
rights. Nine people were killed, including
the senior pastor, Clementa C. Pinckney, a
state senator. A tenth victim was also
shot, but survived.
A young white male, later identified as
Dylann Roof, was captured the morning
after the attack. The shooting appears to
have been a hate crime and an act of
domestic terrorism by a white supremacist.
A black woman called it a contemporary
form of lynching. The historian Judt (see
my article Oct 2011) saw a residual
problem from the 20th century as les
exclus, the excluded. He is thinking of
the people in the deserted European former
steel towns, people left behind by an
economy that has moved on, taking its well
paying-blue collar jobs. He is thinking
from his European background. And Piketty,
see December 2014 article, warns of the
social stress that comes with a weakening
middle class as the super rich become
super richer. After the bank failures
there are general social tensions from job
losses and a smaller middle class. The
Charleston scene throws in two additional
elements: a gun-toting culture and a white
supremacy history with systems and
rhetoric that linger on. In the US, the
reality is that the blacks were and remain
the dominant excluded group, although a
few blacks can be seen to be less excluded
than blacks historically were. With a
racism and white supremacy backdrop the
blacks are “the problem”. The community is
not all saying “we have a dream” – Martin
Luther King Jr.’s vision and the
equivalent of the Nelson Mandela vision of
a South Africa in which all South Africans
can thrive. And in a culture that is
telling hosts of mythical stories in which
solitary males take on the bad guy or the
evil empire, it’s not hard to see what
comes next. How many more can act that
way?
Well, quite a Spring has ended. Despite
the petitions, rights restricting laws
from the federal government passed.
Conflicts continue out there in Europe and
the Middle East. And there are yet more
Syrian refugees. At the same time I’ve
seen a dizzying provincial government
change in Alberta. I’ve been challenged to
reconcile with native peoples. I’ve seen
racism and les exclus come together in a
horrible act of terrorism in Charleston. I
hope inequality will be addressed as
Piketty foresaw would be necessary for
social stability. And maybe we should all
remember - “we have a dream …”
