Stéphane Dion was elected leader of the Liberal Party of Canada on December 2nd 2006. Few people expected his victory. He arrived at the Montreal leadership convention as the fourth placed candidate, holding only sixteen percent of elected delegates, and his campaign spent a million dollars less than Bob Rae’s. On top of that, his convention speech ran over time and his microphone was cut off before he reached the end.
Dion won by being everyone’s second choice. Front-runner Michael Ignatieff was polarizing while Bob Rae was considered dead in Ontario. Stéphane Dion was a candidate everyone could live with. He was also a candidate delegates could feel proud voting for because he was perceived as having more moral fibre than simply political horse sense. Choosing Dion was a slap in the face to all those like Jack Layton who had claimed a few months earlier that Dion was "a man of principle and conviction and therefore almost certain not to be elected leader of the Liberal party."
Stéphane Dion was not the first choice of his fellow Liberal MPs, most of whom supported Michael Ignatieff. His strongest supporters in the months leading up to the Montreal leadership convention were in the Press. Dion was officially endorsed by the Montreal Gazette and by the Globe and Mail, who described him in an editorial as “arguably the most courageous Canadian politician of his generation.” Other newspapers praised Dion’s courage and integrity. Even Le Devoir, a Québec paper with sovereignist leanings, wrote that “Dion is the candidate who, in the course of the leadership race, made among the strongest contribution of ideas.” Le Devoir only chose Michael Ignatieff because of his sympathy for Québec nationalism.
In late January 2007, less than two months after Stéphane Dion’s leadership victory, the Conservative Party rolled out a series of now infamous attack ads that sought to portray Dion as a weak leader. The ads featured clips of Michael Ignatieff and Ken Dryden criticizing their party’s environmental record in a leadership debate. Dion was then shown answering “This is unfair!” and “Do you think it’s easy to make priorities?”
The Conservative ads were unfavourably received by the Canadian public. A Harris-Decima poll published on February 7th at the end of the ad blitz showed that fifty-nine percent of Canadians who had seen the ads found them unfair, while only twenty-two percent found them fair. The media were also unanimous in their criticism. Even journalists at the right-wing National Post found the ads morally questionable.
Polling agencies detected a small shift in voting intentions from the Liberals to the Conservatives in the aftermath of the negative ad campaign. Nanos Research and Harris-Decima put the two parties in a statistical tie, while Strategic Counsel gave the Conservatives a slight lead. However, considering that the nearest confidence vote was at least a month away, and that the Liberal Party still enjoyed higher levels of support than in the previous election, it would have been difficult, at the time, to call the negative advertising campaign a success.
But that’s exactly what the media did. Soon after the ads started playing, journalists began to suggest that Stephane Dion was being “redefined in the eyes of Canadians”. Just as the Conservative ads had alleged, they explained Canadians were unsure about Dion’s leadership skills and that Dion needed to present an ‘alternative vision for the country.’ Public opinion polls, once again, did not back these claims up. But no matter. In a few short weeks, Stephane Dion went from being “arguably the most courageous Canadian politician of his generation” to a “weak leader unable to lead his party.
After the negative ads, everything Dion did was reported through the lens of ‘weakness’ and ‘lack of leadership’. His refusal to make personal attacks in Question Period became a sign of his inability to lead. When he presented, in November 2007, his ‘30-50’ plan to cut poverty which was meant to provide the alternative vision for Canada the media had been asking for, his plan was dismissed by journalists as ‘too intellectual’ and ‘difficult for Canadians to understand’. Journalists started finding problems that no one had ever noticed before. For instance, they decided that Canadians could no longer understand his English, even though they had managed fine during the leadership campaign and the ten years he spent previously as a cabinet minister. When Dion, to much applause from economists, published his ‘Green Shift’ – laying out his strategy for making individual and corporate tax burdens depend more on their carbon consumption and less on their income, , journalists decided that he would never be able to sell it. ‘Ah, they sighed mournfully, ‘in this age of 30 second sound bites Dion’s Green Shift doesn’t stand a chance against the well-oiled Tory machine.’
Stephen Harper, during the same period, was running into situations that seriously put his ethics into question. In Question Period he was routinely offensive, and he handpicked ministers to dodge questions aimed at him, which they often achieved by insulting Opposition members. During the ‘Statements by Members’ period, which immediately precedes Question Period and is in principle reserved for declarations by MPs about local issues affecting their ridings, Conservative backbenchers were instructed to read vicious statements about Dion to destabilise him. In May 2007 it was discovered that the Conservative Party had given all of its MP who were chairing House of Commons Committees a 200 page handbook providing them with guidance on obstructing and manipulating committee proceedings.
The Prime Minister’s media image was strangely resilient despite these repeated ethical transgressions. It almost seemed as if his viciousness in the House of Commons and his well-documented efforts to exert control over the media only contributed to his image of ‘competence’ and ‘strength’. Even when Conservative Party headquarters were raided by the RCMP at the request of Elections Canada, some journalists seemed to conclude that the any illegal scheme only highlighted the Prime Minister’s strategic brilliance and desire to win.
There are many legitimate reasons to criticize Stéphane Dion’s leadership of the Liberal Party. He was not a good communicator and even less of an inspirational figure. He seems to have been a terrible fundraiser and he also showed poor political judgment on many occasions. For example, he waited until the last possible minute to name Jocelyn Coulon, a dour although highly accomplished academic, as Liberal candidate for the 2007 Outremont by-election: Coulon was handed the task of defeating in a few short months the NDP’s charismatic Thomas Mulcair who had been campaigning all year. But Stéphane Dion is exactly the type of politician journalists claim to want. He is undeniably competent, principled, and, as the Globe and Mail wrote, courageous. He made the environment a priority and presented policies that, even if they were hard to sell, certainly had in mind the good of country.
The media is full of contradictions. Journalists lament the paucity of intelligent political debate but dismiss policies with the slightest trace of complexity as ‘too difficult to understand.’ It never occurs to them that they should be trying to make them understood. The media bemoans Canada’s pathetic environmental record, but goes on to criticize Stéphane Dion for being naïve enough to believe that he could sell a carbon tax in tough economic times. So-called pundits appeal for more decorum in the House of Commons, and then go on to say that Stéphane Dion looks weak in Question Period. Journalists deplore the lack of talent in Canadian politics, contrasting our leaders with Barack Obama and his team of highly accomplished cabinet ministers, but at the same time they call Stéphane Dion a ‘nerd’ and smear him with articles titled ‘Is Dion’s trouble his ear, or his head?’ (Greg Weston, London Free Press) and phrases like ‘If Mr. Dion were any weaker, he'd need a blood transfusion’ (Margaret Wente, The Globe and Mail). Then they are surprised that talented people don’t go into politics. The media cries out for more integrity in politics, yet most newspapers endorse not the man whose integrity was never in question, but the one whose mind is often described, with a mix of respect and fascination, as Machiavellian.
The media covers politics like a sporting event. It covers the politics of politics, judging leaders not on their ability to govern, but on their ability to win. It’s well known just how much the media influences on our perception of politicians. Journalists, after all, are our eyes and ears: our main link to what is being said on Parliament Hill and of getting the information we need to make rational political choices. Journalists, therefore, have a responsibility to cover politics in a coherent manner. If they ask for integrity, they must support a politician who demonstrates it, even if that politician wears glasses and speaks English with an accent. If they ask for comprehensive policies and serious debate, they must find ways to make complex policies accessible to Canadians who don’t follow politics.
The fact is that there’s no one to cover the media like the media. If they lament the modern media culture, they must change it.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Multiculturalism
I've been away for the past three weeks, so here's a very long post to make up!
Canada has been officially multicultural since 1971 and this policy has been subject to controversy since inception. Canadian multiculturalism, as it is usually described, is a vision of our society as a mosaic of ethnic groups, each of which have their own culture and traditions. This contrasts with the model found in most European countries of a single, historically-rooted national society and the American model of an ever evolving melting pot. In accordance with our policy of official multiculturalism, immigrants who settle in Canada are encouraged to preserve their culture and traditions, notably by forming cultural organisations with fellow immigrants of the same ethnic origin. Federal and provincial governments award millions of dollars in grants every year to such organisations, and also support festivals and public events that celebrate the cultural heritage of New Canadians.
Multiculturalism has always been criticized on multiple fronts. Many people purport that a policy which encourages immigrants to preserve the traditions of their motherland and to seek out fellow immigrants of the same descent inevitably encourages ghettoisation and discourages integration into mainstream society. Others, most notably in Quebec, would prefer a more traditional vision of Canadian society that recognizes the cultural primacy of the three founding peoples. They believe that immigrants should be encouraged to assimilate into the established cultures – principally Quebecois and English Canadian- and to let go of their former traditions. Many Quebecois are also hostile towards multiculturalism because they believe it reduces their own cultural nation to an ethnic group like any other. They say that, since Quebecois culture and the French language is spoken by a minority in North America and therefore under threat, the national government should not be encouraging the development of rival ethnic communities in the province.
But if we look at our country objectively, giving weight to statistics rather than anecdote, it is hard to avoid concluding that these objections are little more than scaremongering.
Canadian cities are among the most diverse in the world, providing their residents with a high general standard of living and employment. Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto, which absorb roughly 70% of the 250 000 immigrants admitted to Canada each year, have consistently maintained a median income comparable to the provincial median, moderate unemployment and a relatively low rate of crime. Of course, immigrants are not evenly distributed throughout these cities. As has traditionally been the case around the world, immigrants of same descent tend to group together and many neighbourhoods therefore have a high proportion of immigrants of same ethnic origin. But since the standard of living is generally high, it is not accurate to say that our cities are becoming ghettoised.
There are admittedly a handful of areas –the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver and the Jane and Finch corridor in Toronto being the most notable- that have a high proportion of immigrants and which are also beset by serious social problems. The situation in these neighbourhoods gets a lot of media coverage, and rightly so, but we sometimes forget how small they are. Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside has less than 20 000 residents. Jane and Finch has roughly 85 000. To put things in context, Canada has welcomed 3.5 million immigrants in the past 15 years. There are far more New Canadians living in Richmond, a municipality in metro Vancouver in which 65.1% of the population belongs to a visible minority and the average income is only slightly below the provincial average, than in the Downtown Eastside. There are far more immigrants who have settled in Markham, an affluent town of roughly 275 000 people in the GTA where most residents are foreign-born, than in the Jane and Finch corridor.
Information released by the Correctional Service of Canada indicates that visible minorities are not over-represented in Canadian prisons. In fact Asians, who make up the bulk of new immigrants, are significantly under-represented. This contrasts sharply with the situation in France, a staunch advocate of immediate assimilation, where it is estimated that between 60 and 70% of prison inmates are from immigrant families and a similar proportion are Muslim. It also contrasts with the situation in the United-States, home of the melting pot where Hispanic males are incarcerated at a per capita rate six times that of white males.
In Canada it is not the immigrant population that is over-represented in jails, but the aboriginal population. The irony is undeniable. Roughly 20% of offenders incarcerated in the Canadian penitentiary system are of Aboriginal ethnicity, despite the fact that First-Nations only represent 3.8% of the Canadian population. Native Canadians suffer from many of the problems that are associated with immigrants in Europe and Afro-Americans in the United States. The employment rate of Native Canadians is around 70% while the employment rate of non-Natives is above 80%. The Caledon Institute of Public Policy published a study showing that 58% of Aboriginals on reserve between the ages of 20 and 24 haven’t finished high school.
In contrast immigrants and, most importantly, their children, are actually among the best educated Canadians. The immigration selection process places great weight on education, so it is perhaps not particularly surprising that immigrants are, on average, better educated than Canadian born citizens. Significantly, however, a study by University of Ottawa professor Miles Corak (based on 2001 census data) showed that this advantage is replicated in the second generation. In other words, the children of immigrants (even those without a university degree) are better educated than the children of parents who were born in Canada. Second-generation immigrants are also more ambitious. A 2006 study revealed that 78% of visible minority immigrant youths hope to complete at least one university degree, while only 59% of non visible minority youths born in Canada expressed this objective. This is not the case in most other countries, where children of immigrants typically don’t do as well at school as native-born children. Canada has the distinction of being one of only three countries in the OECD where second-generation immigrants scored higher in primary school than native-born children in math and reading tests.
It’s tempting to claim that New Canadians are struggling to integrate mainstream society on the basis of a few highly publicized anecdotes and polls that claim to measure the national pride level of immigrants. The fact that second-generation immigrants are doing so well at school, coupled with the low crime rate of visible minorities and comfortable standard of living in most immigrant communities shows that, actually, Canada isn’t having serious difficulty with integration. Is this thanks to multiculturalism or despite it? Who knows and, frankly, who cares? Whatever we’re doing is working, and as common wisdom would suggest ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’.
Many people argue that Canada isn’t nearly as multicultural as it claims. And certainly the policy of multiculturalism often seems to correspond more to rhetoric than to actual practice. Sixty-nine percent of Canadian say that immigrants should “integrate and become part of the Canadian culture,” rather than “maintain their [own] identity.” Equally significantly, our governments also spend far more money and energy on the protection of Francophone and First-Nations communities than on the preservation of immigrant cultures. The province of Quebec rejects multiculturalism in favour of an approach that gives primacy to French. The federal government allows it to virtually run its immigration policy, with the result that 60% of immigrants who settle in Quebec are now francophone.
A 1994 study by University of Toronto sociologists Jeffrey Reitz and Raymond Breton found that language retention of third-generation immigrants was less than 1 per cent both in multicultural Canada and in the melting-pot United States. This is as good an indication as any that it doesn’t really matter what integration policy government chooses to follow, because this doesn’t seem to influence the 99% assimilation rate. The only thing we should acknowledge about assimilation in Canada is that it seems to run more smoothly than in most other western countries. Most European countries also have reasonably powerful far-right parties that are openly racist and committed to the expulsion of immigrants. In Canada, there is no far-right. Australia, the U.K., France, Belgium and the United States have all had serious riots in the past 20 years involving thousands of people, all caused by poor relations between the immigrant community and the rest of society. And although there was a riot in North Montreal on the night of August 10, 2008 involving a few hundred people that was viewed as a reaction to suspected racial profiling by the Montreal police force, this is small potatoes in comparison to the civil unrest that has been experienced in most other western countries.
So maybe multiculturalism is a good thing after all. Or maybe welcoming immigrants successfully is simply part of who we are.
Canada has been officially multicultural since 1971 and this policy has been subject to controversy since inception. Canadian multiculturalism, as it is usually described, is a vision of our society as a mosaic of ethnic groups, each of which have their own culture and traditions. This contrasts with the model found in most European countries of a single, historically-rooted national society and the American model of an ever evolving melting pot. In accordance with our policy of official multiculturalism, immigrants who settle in Canada are encouraged to preserve their culture and traditions, notably by forming cultural organisations with fellow immigrants of the same ethnic origin. Federal and provincial governments award millions of dollars in grants every year to such organisations, and also support festivals and public events that celebrate the cultural heritage of New Canadians.
Multiculturalism has always been criticized on multiple fronts. Many people purport that a policy which encourages immigrants to preserve the traditions of their motherland and to seek out fellow immigrants of the same descent inevitably encourages ghettoisation and discourages integration into mainstream society. Others, most notably in Quebec, would prefer a more traditional vision of Canadian society that recognizes the cultural primacy of the three founding peoples. They believe that immigrants should be encouraged to assimilate into the established cultures – principally Quebecois and English Canadian- and to let go of their former traditions. Many Quebecois are also hostile towards multiculturalism because they believe it reduces their own cultural nation to an ethnic group like any other. They say that, since Quebecois culture and the French language is spoken by a minority in North America and therefore under threat, the national government should not be encouraging the development of rival ethnic communities in the province.
But if we look at our country objectively, giving weight to statistics rather than anecdote, it is hard to avoid concluding that these objections are little more than scaremongering.
Canadian cities are among the most diverse in the world, providing their residents with a high general standard of living and employment. Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto, which absorb roughly 70% of the 250 000 immigrants admitted to Canada each year, have consistently maintained a median income comparable to the provincial median, moderate unemployment and a relatively low rate of crime. Of course, immigrants are not evenly distributed throughout these cities. As has traditionally been the case around the world, immigrants of same descent tend to group together and many neighbourhoods therefore have a high proportion of immigrants of same ethnic origin. But since the standard of living is generally high, it is not accurate to say that our cities are becoming ghettoised.
There are admittedly a handful of areas –the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver and the Jane and Finch corridor in Toronto being the most notable- that have a high proportion of immigrants and which are also beset by serious social problems. The situation in these neighbourhoods gets a lot of media coverage, and rightly so, but we sometimes forget how small they are. Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside has less than 20 000 residents. Jane and Finch has roughly 85 000. To put things in context, Canada has welcomed 3.5 million immigrants in the past 15 years. There are far more New Canadians living in Richmond, a municipality in metro Vancouver in which 65.1% of the population belongs to a visible minority and the average income is only slightly below the provincial average, than in the Downtown Eastside. There are far more immigrants who have settled in Markham, an affluent town of roughly 275 000 people in the GTA where most residents are foreign-born, than in the Jane and Finch corridor.
Information released by the Correctional Service of Canada indicates that visible minorities are not over-represented in Canadian prisons. In fact Asians, who make up the bulk of new immigrants, are significantly under-represented. This contrasts sharply with the situation in France, a staunch advocate of immediate assimilation, where it is estimated that between 60 and 70% of prison inmates are from immigrant families and a similar proportion are Muslim. It also contrasts with the situation in the United-States, home of the melting pot where Hispanic males are incarcerated at a per capita rate six times that of white males.
In Canada it is not the immigrant population that is over-represented in jails, but the aboriginal population. The irony is undeniable. Roughly 20% of offenders incarcerated in the Canadian penitentiary system are of Aboriginal ethnicity, despite the fact that First-Nations only represent 3.8% of the Canadian population. Native Canadians suffer from many of the problems that are associated with immigrants in Europe and Afro-Americans in the United States. The employment rate of Native Canadians is around 70% while the employment rate of non-Natives is above 80%. The Caledon Institute of Public Policy published a study showing that 58% of Aboriginals on reserve between the ages of 20 and 24 haven’t finished high school.
In contrast immigrants and, most importantly, their children, are actually among the best educated Canadians. The immigration selection process places great weight on education, so it is perhaps not particularly surprising that immigrants are, on average, better educated than Canadian born citizens. Significantly, however, a study by University of Ottawa professor Miles Corak (based on 2001 census data) showed that this advantage is replicated in the second generation. In other words, the children of immigrants (even those without a university degree) are better educated than the children of parents who were born in Canada. Second-generation immigrants are also more ambitious. A 2006 study revealed that 78% of visible minority immigrant youths hope to complete at least one university degree, while only 59% of non visible minority youths born in Canada expressed this objective. This is not the case in most other countries, where children of immigrants typically don’t do as well at school as native-born children. Canada has the distinction of being one of only three countries in the OECD where second-generation immigrants scored higher in primary school than native-born children in math and reading tests.
It’s tempting to claim that New Canadians are struggling to integrate mainstream society on the basis of a few highly publicized anecdotes and polls that claim to measure the national pride level of immigrants. The fact that second-generation immigrants are doing so well at school, coupled with the low crime rate of visible minorities and comfortable standard of living in most immigrant communities shows that, actually, Canada isn’t having serious difficulty with integration. Is this thanks to multiculturalism or despite it? Who knows and, frankly, who cares? Whatever we’re doing is working, and as common wisdom would suggest ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’.
Many people argue that Canada isn’t nearly as multicultural as it claims. And certainly the policy of multiculturalism often seems to correspond more to rhetoric than to actual practice. Sixty-nine percent of Canadian say that immigrants should “integrate and become part of the Canadian culture,” rather than “maintain their [own] identity.” Equally significantly, our governments also spend far more money and energy on the protection of Francophone and First-Nations communities than on the preservation of immigrant cultures. The province of Quebec rejects multiculturalism in favour of an approach that gives primacy to French. The federal government allows it to virtually run its immigration policy, with the result that 60% of immigrants who settle in Quebec are now francophone.
A 1994 study by University of Toronto sociologists Jeffrey Reitz and Raymond Breton found that language retention of third-generation immigrants was less than 1 per cent both in multicultural Canada and in the melting-pot United States. This is as good an indication as any that it doesn’t really matter what integration policy government chooses to follow, because this doesn’t seem to influence the 99% assimilation rate. The only thing we should acknowledge about assimilation in Canada is that it seems to run more smoothly than in most other western countries. Most European countries also have reasonably powerful far-right parties that are openly racist and committed to the expulsion of immigrants. In Canada, there is no far-right. Australia, the U.K., France, Belgium and the United States have all had serious riots in the past 20 years involving thousands of people, all caused by poor relations between the immigrant community and the rest of society. And although there was a riot in North Montreal on the night of August 10, 2008 involving a few hundred people that was viewed as a reaction to suspected racial profiling by the Montreal police force, this is small potatoes in comparison to the civil unrest that has been experienced in most other western countries.
So maybe multiculturalism is a good thing after all. Or maybe welcoming immigrants successfully is simply part of who we are.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Angliciser Montréal
Le conseiller municipal montréalais Nicolas Montmorency vient de lancer une campagne pour rebaptiser la rue Amherst. La rue tient son nom du Baron Jeffrey Amherst, commandant-en-chef des armées britanniques qui est connu, entre autres choses, pour avoir tenté d'exterminer des populations autochtones en distribuant des couvertures infectées par la variole.
Nicolas Montmorency soutient qu'il est «tout à fait inacceptable qu'un homme ayant tenu des propos soutenant l'extermination des Amérindiens soit honoré». Peut-être a-t-il raison, mais si on devait apppliquer ce même principe à toutes les rues du Québec, il y en aurait des centaines à rebabtiser. Tous les villages ont bien leur avenue Frontenac (et il y existe aussi un certain château) malgré le fait que Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac ait mené une guerre sans merci aux Iroquois.
Evidemment, Montmorency ne veut pas repabtiser la rue Amherst à cause des propos que le général Amherst a tenu au sujet des autochtones au 18ème siècle. Il veut repabtiser la rue parce que Amherst est un nom anglophone. Il a d'ailleurs fondé un groupe Facebook qu'il a nommé 'Francisation des rues de Montréal / Rue Amherst'.
Dire qu'au 21ème, il y a encore des élus qui perdent leur temps à franciser des rues dans des quartiers anglophones (la rue Amherst est dans Ville-Marie). Le moment est venu pour M. Montmorency et ses copains de passer au prochain sujet.
Nicolas Montmorency soutient qu'il est «tout à fait inacceptable qu'un homme ayant tenu des propos soutenant l'extermination des Amérindiens soit honoré». Peut-être a-t-il raison, mais si on devait apppliquer ce même principe à toutes les rues du Québec, il y en aurait des centaines à rebabtiser. Tous les villages ont bien leur avenue Frontenac (et il y existe aussi un certain château) malgré le fait que Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac ait mené une guerre sans merci aux Iroquois.
Evidemment, Montmorency ne veut pas repabtiser la rue Amherst à cause des propos que le général Amherst a tenu au sujet des autochtones au 18ème siècle. Il veut repabtiser la rue parce que Amherst est un nom anglophone. Il a d'ailleurs fondé un groupe Facebook qu'il a nommé 'Francisation des rues de Montréal / Rue Amherst'.
Dire qu'au 21ème, il y a encore des élus qui perdent leur temps à franciser des rues dans des quartiers anglophones (la rue Amherst est dans Ville-Marie). Le moment est venu pour M. Montmorency et ses copains de passer au prochain sujet.
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