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May be we’re not so different from the US (Cardozo)

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January 25, 2021

May be we’re not so different from the US (Cardozo)

By Andrew Cardozo

Maybe we’re not so different from America when it comes to race
By ANDREW CARDOZO JANUARY 25, 2021

Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021.

Bad America and all those extreme, right, white supremacists storming Capitol Hill. Thank God, it’s all there and not here in Canada. Well, that’s what we like to think. But think about some folks in Canada too, writes Andrew Cardozo. Screen capture courtesy of CBC NEWS
OTTAWA—Bad America and all those extreme, right, white supremacists storming Capitol Hill. Thank God, it’s all there and not here in Canada. Well, that’s what we like to think. But think about some folks in Canada too.

Derek Sloan, the former Conservative Member of Parliament who sought the leadership of the Conservative Party, winning a considerable 14 per cent of the vote, and after months of supporting all manner of far-right causes, was finally expelled for receiving a $131 donation from known white supremacist Paul Fromm.

Then there’s the little sausage man from Winnipeg who crashed through the gates at Rideau Hall last July in a pickup truck full of ammunition. What brought him to Ottawa? The day before his gate crashing, as the Ottawa Citizen called it, there was a demonstration on Parliament Hill organized by Maxime Bernier and his far right party. Protesters wore yellow jackets and others held placards accusing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of treason, among the other extremist allegations. Yes, the same Bernier who lost the Conservative Party leadership by a hair and whose path to political leadership was similar to Donald Trump’s.

There’s also Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet who made slightly icky comments about Transport Minister Omar Alghabra saying in a press release, “questions arise” from Alghabra’s former role as head of the Canadian Arab Federation and his possible “proximity” to the “political Islamic movement.” So Blanchet kind of heard some people asking questions, but wasn’t asking the questions himself. It’s odd to make such baseless allegations, especially when Blanchet said his blood ran cold last summer when he was accused of anonymous allegations of sexual harassment. Surely then, he, more than most, can be expected not to engage in sleazy rumour mongering, and so brazenly. Unless he thinks there is an element out there who like this kind of racial innuendo. Leaders make conscious choices about when to push the line, and every time they do, they take our politics down a notch forever.

There’s also the group known as the Proud Boys, a major player among white supremacists in the U.S. The group was founded by a Canadian and has active members here in Canada, including, most notably, in the Canadian Armed Forces. That’s something to be proud of.

In March of last year, the completely unarmed Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam was violently tackled to the ground, beaten and bruised, during a check for validity of a licence plate. He was charged for resisting arrest which was soon dropped. It’s hard not to compare this RCMP action, with the RCMP actions taken with the sausage man who had a truck full of ammunition on the grounds of our head of state and head of government. His white-glove treatment included an hour of chit-chat before he was arrested. Surely, it was one of the most serious breaches of security in Ottawa and hard not to notice the difference in treatment between Indigenous Chief Adam and white sausage man.

And by the way, why did a Bloc member in June refuse unanimous House consent for an NDP motion for a review of systemic racism in the RCMP?

The list goes on: the gunman who shot five Canadians Muslims while at prayer in a mosque in Québec City; the growing presence of far right, anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups in the Armed Forces and elsewhere is a concern to law enforcement in Canada, although they themselves are not clearly free of such blemishes.

These examples are about overt and shameless racism. Systemic or polite racism isn’t even the issue here—like the fact that our seniors care system is almost 100 per cent dependent on underpaid personal care workers of colour and immigrants who get minimal pay and no job security, and no one cares.

Here’s one way to see it. We were founded in a manner based on inclusion of white people with origins in England and France (the “old stock” Canadians), to the exclusion of Indigenous peoples, referred to by other terms, even though they were here first and the Crown in far away England had issued a proclamation recognizing their rights in 1763 and signed treaties with them.

From the 1960s on, we have been trying to gradually become a better society and we have been making headway with rights for Indigenous peoples, bilingualism, gender equality, and multiculturalism. That headway, coupled with significant non-white immigration, is challenging the cultural structure of dominance and subjugation. Equality is not comforting for all, nor supported by all. This breeds a pushback, a backlash, a white lash.

We can either find ways to divide people and pit people against each other or we can bring people together. In America, it’s the Trump versus the Biden way, and the Biden way has just started last week. We need to think hard about how we avoid the Trump way here.

Andrew Cardozo is president of the Pearson Centre, and co-editor of The Battle Over Multiculturalism.