Social Policy in Ontario

‘Canadian values’ conceal Canadian violence

Posted on September 23, 2016 in Inclusion Debates

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TheStar.com – Opinion/Commentary – Discrimination looks much more attractive when made up in the cosmetic of apparently neutral and universal values
Sept. 22, 2016.   By AZEEZAH KANJI

Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch believes potential immigrants to Canada should be screened for “anti-Canadian values,” some examples being “intolerance towards other religions, cultures and sexual orientations, violent and/or misogynist behaviour and/or a lack of acceptance of our Canadian tradition of personal and economic freedoms.”

For a population supposedly defined by its exceptional tolerance, Canadians have taken to Leitch’s proposal with remarkable enthusiasm. A recent Forum Research poll found that two-thirds of Canadians support screening immigrants for their values.

Canadian politicians once proclaimed the necessity of keeping out the “Africans and the Asiatics” (Prime Minister John A Macdonald), or the “lower races” that would “debase” Anglo-Saxon civilization (Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King). In the era of multiculturalism, “anti-Canadian-ness” has become the new criterion of exclusion. Discrimination looks much more attractive when made up in the cosmetic of apparently neutral and universal values.

But the values inquisition is hardly neutral or universal. In other places where such screening was implemented — the Netherlands and the German province of Baden-Wurttemberg, for instance — the tests were particularly directed at immigrants from Muslim countries. Leitch has denied her recommendation is aimed at any specific group, but it is clearly Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians who occupy the crosshairs.

For example, so-called “honour killings” (a label applied exclusively to murders committed by brown-skinned men) are regularly decried as anti-Canadian, while other intimate femicides are not — although all surely qualify as “misogynist behaviours.”

Never mind that “research does not indicate there is any greater risk of violence for Muslim women than for women in other communities who are similarly socially located,” as feminist lawyer Pamela Cross noted in a 2013 report on violence against Muslim women in Canada. (According to Leitch, who was Minister for the Status of Women in the former Conservative government, there have been 13 “honour killings” in Canada since 2004. In the Canadian population as a whole, one woman is killed every six days by her partner.)

“When the actors involved are immigrants of colour, we label behaviour that we consider problematic as ‘cultural,’ and understand this term to mark racial or ethnic identity,” observes Leti Volpp, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “In contrast, when a white person commits a similar act, we view it as an isolated instance of aberrant behaviour, and not as reflective of a racialized culture. Under this schema, white people are individual actors; people of color are members of groups … The result is an exaggerated perception of ethnic difference that equates it with moral difference from ‘us.’”

“We” are defined by the best of what we think we are, while “they” are defined by the worst of what we think they are.

Like the “barbaric cultural practices” tip-line that Leitch was previously associated with, the suggestion that immigrants need to be screened for repugnant values pretends that violence and intolerance are strange and foreign things in Canada. Sexism, homophobia, and bigotry are imagined to be evils brought into the country by dangerous outsiders, rather than problems deeply rooted in Canadian cultural soil.

But it is amnesic to claim that “violent behaviour” and “intolerance of other cultures” are anti-Canadian, when Canada was founded through the genocide of this land’s indigenous peoples — rationalized by the demonization of indigenous societies as “backwards” and “uncivilized.”

It is hypocritical to claim that “misogyny” and “intolerance towards other sexual orientations” are anti-Canadian, when indigenous women and girls and queer people have been particularly targeted by colonial violence for centuries. (Leitch persistently refused calls to hold an inquiry on missing and murdered aboriginal women during her tenure as Minister for the Status of Women.)

It is disingenuous to claim that robbing people of their “personal and economic freedoms” is anti-Canadian, when the state continues to authorize the theft and destruction of indigenous lands for the sake of industrial projects, such as the tarsands and the Site C dam.

Canada is built on what Leitch calls anti-Canadian values; there is no need to look outside the borders to find them. The problem is not that the barbarians are at our gates. It is that we think the world can be divided into those who are barbaric and those who are not.
Azeezah Kanji is a legal analyst and writer based in Toronto.

< https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2016/09/22/canadian-values-conceal-canadian-violence.html >

Tags: featured, globalization, ideology, immigration, multiculturalism

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