Bouchard & Taylor let it all out

Their report, that is. You can download all 300+ pages of the Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences (CCPARDC) (French only) or the summary (in English and French) of the final report, as well as the research documents commissioned, via: http://www.accommodements.qc.ca/.

Montreal Gazette victim of a hoax?

That’s what Daniel Marc Weinstock, professor of philosophy at the Université de Montréal and member of the advisory committee for the Bouchard-Taylor commission, muses in today’s La Presse. Weinstock tells the paper he has difficulty recognising the report in what the Gazette reported over the weekend and wonders if maybe the paper was taken for a ride. Weinstock is backed up by Rachida Azdouz, a vice-dean at UdM and also on the advisory committee, who thinks that the Gazette’s report most likely distorted the final report’s recommendations.

Excerpt:

« Il faut lire ça avec circonspection. La question linguistique a été mentionnée, mais la façon dont cela a été rapporté est vraiment démesurée », résume Mme Azdouz. « Ce que j’ai lu dans The Gazette était extrêmement distortionné, à un point tel que je me suis demandé si le journaliste n’avait pas été victime d’un canular », de renchérir le professeur Weinstock qui lui aussi avait eu à commenter le projet de rapport peu après Pâques.

Reasonable Accommodation? Not our problem…

Well it’s official:

The Bouchard-Taylor Commission submits its final report to the Québec government

MONTRÉAL, May 19 /CNW Telbec/ – The Consultation Commission onAccommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences (CCPARDC) today officially submitted its final report to the Québec government.

Commission Co-Chairs Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor will make public the report at a press conference in Montréal on Thursday, May 22, 2008. Details of the press conference will be announced Wednesday morning.

On Saturday, the Montreal Gazette broke with exerpts of the report, although without the full list of recommendations that Bouchard and Taylor will put forward. Originally it was reported that the report would be issued on Friday, but has been pushed up one day – most likely in response to the leak and the subsequent calls to just get it over with and release the report immediately to avoid several days of speculation based on the fragments released so far.

Like Gilles Duceppe, I’m going to reserve my final opinion on the report for when it actually comes out. But from what has been released so far, I’m not optimistic. Not that I ever really was: while it’s obvious that as a society we need to make a greater effort to address underlying issues of racism and inequality, going about it through a knee-jerk commission — based on media-hyped incidents of accommodation and an on-the-rise political party making it’s niche in appealing to the fear of immigrants — didn’t strike me as the best plan. But we’ll see what they have to say on Thursday.

For the time being, though, I think it’s important to look at least at how the Gazette has covered it’s exclusive story. And to be honest, it doesn’t look good. What resurfaces again is something I’ve noted a little bit throughout the Gazette’s entire coverage of the commission and the reasonable accommodation debate: while the paper is more than willing to use the controversy to pick up readers and make front page exclusives, they (and what I think is a fairly large segment of the English Montreal population) have refused to recognise that we have a role in how the reasonable accommodation fiasco has played out. We see it again with the weekend coverage. While they received the report without the entire set of recommendations, the major one they do release is that the solution to our provincial dilemma is that Quebeckers need to learn English and get to know Muslisms and Arabs better.

Wait, did I say Quebeckers? I mean Quebeckers of French Canadian descent. You see, the rest of us Quebeckers of English Canadian descent are doing quite well, thank you, not like the Francophones of the province. An excerpt from the Gazette’s editorial:

The roots of the “reasonable accommodation” furor that has gripped Quebec in recent years grow from deep in the soil of French-Canadian insecurity…
Bouchard is a historian, Taylor a philosopher. Together they had no trouble recognizing that “the insecurity of a minority” has been a constant in the history of French-speaking Quebec. Worry about the hijab, the kirpan and so on are, we are told, natural heirs to centuries of anxiety about la survivance. That explains the potent emotions around such questions, emotions that generate “unfounded objections” to some religious and cultural practices.

Oh, those uppity Indians!

Today in La Presse, and on the Cyberpresse site, Denis Lessard signs an article entitled A-30: affrontement appréhendé avec les Mohawks about the Quebec government’s apprehensions over a possible confrontation with Mohawks over the completion of Highway 30 in southern Quebec.

The article is headed by a photo taken during last year’s stand-off betwen Ontario Provincial Police and members of the Six Nations community near Caledonia, Ont. We don’t know if the person, wearing a gas mask, is aboriginal or not, only that a Mohawk flag is flying behind them (image below).

The piece goes on to describe how, after nearly a year of consultations with leaders of the Kahnawake community, construction on the final part of Highway 30 is set to begin. And while the MNA from the area, Jean-Marc Fournier, actually feels the local Mohawk community is in favour of the project because of the jobs and contracts it has created, others in the government, according to Lessard, see ‘flashing red lights’ and a potential for problems.

The thing is, there’s no proof in the article as to why there would be problems, and no response from members of the Mohawk community concerning how they feel about the project. Instead, Lessard proceeds to raise the spectres of the 1990 Oka Crisis and the Caledonia stand-off, without any real reason why we should expect to see any conflict at all. Even more ludicrous is the following:

Déjà, au début de l’été 2007, l’autoroute 30 avait été momentanément bloquée, et les Warriors avaient installé des drapeaux sur la structure du pont Mercier, qui se trouve un peu à l’ouest de la zone sensible actuellement.

Lessard forgets to mention that the actions last summer were part of a National Day of Action called by the Assembly of First Nations. While not all First Nations leaders agreed with the actions, they were hardly spontaneous acts of confrontation. There is no reason to believe that this protest in some way foreshadows any future protests.

What Lessard does point out is that the highway runs through land claimed by the Mohawk nation, and that Andrew Delisle, the chief of the Mohawk Grand Council, has asked the government to come to the table to negotiate aspects of the cigarette trade and online gambling websites based out of Kahnawake. It seems Lessard has seen the letter sent by Delisle: he is able to say it is two pages long and written entirely in English. If there was any kind of threat, we could presume he would mention it, but he doesn’t.

Articles like this are frustratng to read. Not only is it based on so much circumstantial evidence and rumours that it hardly seems newsworthy in the first place, but it plays into a recurring mainstream news stereotype that indigenous communities are irrational and jump for confrontation at the drop of a hat. The result isn’t a better informed public, but one which continues to believe that First Nations communities cannot be trusted.

Citizens stopping SLAPPs

As I recently posted over at Art Threat, Canadian mining giant Barrick Gold has launched a $6 million lawsuit against the small, non-profit Montreal publishing house Écosociété, along with the authors of the recently published Noir Canada: Pillage, corruption et criminalité en Afrique. Noir Canada takes a deep look at the dirty side of Canadian mining operations in Africa, pulling together allegations of various crimes committed, or committed with the support of, Canadian companies, including Barrick Gold. Barrick has taken offence to these allegations – hence the lawsuit that would take Écosociété for more than 25 times what it pulls in a year. You can read more about the actual allegations and the run up to the lawsuit at Art Threat here and here.

As the lead author of Noir Canada, Alain Deneault, and Guy Cheyney, the president of Écosociété, have made clear, they see this as a straight-up SLAPP from Barrick Gold. SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation – lawsuits used by large corporations, or rich individuals, to try to overwhelm smaller critics and opponents who cannot afford fleets of corporate lawyers. Although SLAPPs largely originated in the United States, Quebec has seen a few high-profile cases in the past few years, including a widely-covered suit to silence critics of the proposed Rabaska natural gas port.

There was such outcry over the Rabaska case that the government held public consultations this spring for input on how to formulate a law regulating SLAPPs. The consultation, and proposed regulation of SLAPPs, even garnered support of all three parties in the increasingly acrimonious National Assembly. While the minister of public safety has said he is aiming to introduce legislation before the end of the current parliamentary session, the Barrick Gold suit has pushed SLAPP opponents to redouble efforts to get the bill past sooner than later.

Formed in 2007 in response to the Rabaska case, the satirically named Citoyens, taisez-vous! (Citizens, quiet down!) campaign is asking Quebeckers to join in a letter campaign to call on the government to pass a law as soon as possible, and to include five main points in the legislation (traslation mine):

1. Recognition of the right to public participation;
2. Establishiment of an emergency procedure to deny SLAPPs;
3. Reverse the burden of proof in order to favour victims of SLAPPs;
4. Financial support for vicitms of SLAPPs, reimbursement of expenditures and extra-judicial fees to those whose liberty of expression has been surpressed, and the awarding of punitive damages;
5. The possibility to annul gag orders in out of court settlements.

The full text of the call-out for the campaign and a sample letter are after the jump.

For more information read the fact-sheets from the Ligue des Droits et Liberté or the Mouvement d’éducation populaire et d’action communautaire du Québec.