Race

  • Unmasking the Match Lighting Mob

    Don Hutchinson asks who has fuelled church burnings across Canada, and notes Indigenous leaders from coast to coast have been most stalwart in condemning the two dozen arson attacks.

    Mainstream media lit a fuse, and churches are burning. Nearly two dozen to date and a greater number have been vandalized with graffiti, paint-dipped handprints, and splatter.

    Some congregations have accepted acts of vandalism as a visual lesson on t...

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  • Questions Unasked About Indigenous Deaths

    Peter Stockland brings a journalist’s mindset and hometown origins to his analysis of media coverage around the finding of Indigenous children’s bodies in Kamloops, B.C.

    Melissa Mollen-Dupuis and I don’t know each other but we appear to share similar thoughts on the journalism around Kamloops, B.C. and the discovery of an unmarked grave containing remains of Indigenous children.

    In an interview with Montreal’s Le...

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  • Facing the Root of Racism

    It's human failure that allows racism to run rampant in Canada, writes Peter Stockland, and it's human atonement—rather than erasure—that can build a better future.

    Should Stockwell Day have lost two plum corporate board posts and been kicked off CBC as a commentator this week for disagreeing with the idea that Canadians are racists? No.

    Unlike the disgraced Don Cherry last year, Day did not indulge in a racist ...

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  • Gun Control: Right Trumps Rights

    “The NRA has achieved its victories not by threats of insurrection but through the classic methods of democracy: debate, dialogue, lobbying and electioneering. Its source of strength lies not in the weapons its members own or carry, but in the votes they cast and the arguments they make,” he adds.

    David Cole makes a convincing case, worth bearing in mind as the presidential race erupts, that American gun violence is at heart a function of democracy at its best. “The NRA may ...

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  • Our Neighbours' Eyes

    When the art came in, I scrutinized it for subliminal naughtiness—most illustrators are eternal 11-year-olds—and quickly approved it. Soon afterward, a Jewish woman in our research department stopped me in the corridor. The drawing had landed on her desk. She held it up. If she had recited a three-volume treatise on what was wrong with the picture, she could not have communicated more than her tone of voice and six simple words. Clearly, she did not think “this” was right. As soon as I looked at it, I shamefacedly understood why.  To my enduring embarrassment, it was a classic caricature of the proverbial hook-nosed Jew looking shifty—or was it pushy?—under a cartoon rabbinical hat. I was simultaneously flummoxed and firmly convicted. Yet I had a firm conviction that the artist responsible—we’d known each other for years—was genuinely ignorant of the unintended anti-Semitic slur. Indeed, when I contacted him he was appalled and apologetic, easily as embarrassed as I had been by the unwitting wrong. 

    Years ago, I commissioned an illustration for a magazine piece on intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles.

    When the art came in, I scrutinized it for subliminal naughtiness—most illustrators are eternal 11-year-olds—and quickly approved it. Soon afte...

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  • Turn your back to them

    It says something that Quebeckers, when faced with a PQ party that offered the religious cleansing of the civil service (just for starters), opted instead to run into the arms of a party so deep in charges of corruption it makes the expulsatory end of a sewer rat smell like a spring daisy. The PQ is dead, long live the Québécois!

    The bitter, nasty, and bigoted campaign run by the Parti Québécois has ended in complete and abject failure.

    It says something that Quebeckers, when faced with a PQ party that offered the religious cleansing of the civil service (just for starters), ...

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  • The York University Question: It's not about sex—it's about the law

    All of these characterizations are, in my opinion, wrong. Here's why. There is no question of, nor threat to women's equality rights in the accommodation request of an online university student. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

    There has been much talk about York University's decision to accommodate the religion...

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  • Leadership Involves Loss

    Gideon Strauss, a native of South Africa, where he served as an interpreter for the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission under Archbishop Desmond Tutu, writes on the way we remember Nelson Mandela's life.

    Editor's note: This piece was published yesterday in Fieldnotes Magazine, a publication of the Max De Pree Center for Leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary. Rep...

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  • Two Postcards from Canada's Switzerland

    A) Wisdom from friend and Convivium magazine contributor Alisha Ruiss: B) A recent walkabout reflects my building sense of bewilderment:

    Two postcards from Canada's Switzerland, where "neutrality" now means the Québec government will employ its monopoly on the use of force to knock all hats off all heads almost equally.

    A) Wisdom from friend and Convivium magazine con...

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  • Not Entirely Convinced

    The source of Steven Chua's article was an event in a downtown Vancouver pub. Another patron sitting near Mr. Chua glowered at him, as did the waitress. Mr. Chua inferred the hostility came from him being with a Caucasian companion. "That's the thing with racial tension in places like Vancouver, it's so subtle," Mr. Chua writes. "No one goes out in the open denying service or slinging disparaging remarks at anyone."

    Last Friday, a young British Columbian published a short essay in the Globe and Mail's Facts and Arguments sec...

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  • Hard-Won Religious Freedom

    — Jason Kenney (@kenneyjason) January 21, 2013 The prospect of having harboured terrorists can certainly take the wind out of your sails. With allegations from Algeria that Canadians were part of the band of Islamist militants who attacked a natural gas plant in Algeria, we find another welcome opportunity to check ourselves. But if the allegations by the Algerian prime minister prove true, these would not be the first Canadian terrorists. In fact, the first terrorist convicted in Canada lived in the seemingly placid suburb of Orleans, Ontario. I have friends that live very nearby. It was pretty alarming to find out that Momin Khawaja was constructing detonating devices in his bedroom and his family had a shooting range in the basement.

    Can't begin to understand those who turn their backs on Canada to embrace the death cult of jihadi extremism,eg these 2 bit.ly/XswU8a

    — Jason Kenney (@ken...

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  • What Parliament Thinks but Cannot Say

    As it happens, I have never thanked God for Jeffrey Simpson, unless Heaven groups the venerable Globe and Mail columnist in the same category as dry toast for breakfast or warm milk for insomnia. In our current issue of Convivium magazine, my colleague Father Raymond de Souza playfully chides Simpson for a very silly late 2012 column on politics and religion, but does grant that the Globe's long-time Ottawa writer is both respected by, and important to, the capital's ruling elite.

    As a new year's commitment, I have obliged myself to thank God for a minimum one new thing that happens each week.

    As it happens, I have never thanked God for Jeffrey Simpson, unless Heaven groups the venerable Globe and Mail columnist in the ...

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  • Careless Politics

    The tragic death of B.C. teenager Amanda Todd is a poignant reminder of the power of words. Words such as "punch her," "nobody likes you, and "I hope she dies next time" were uttered to her in person and via Facebook. Her YouTube video, a modern day suicide note, consisted of nothing more than words on cue cards. Those words and her story were powerful—painfully and heartbreakingly powerful. Minister Broten was quoted as saying Ontario's new anti-bullying law (Bill 13) "is about tackling misogyny . . . Taking away a woman's right to choose could arguably be one of the most misogynistic actions that one could take."

    "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me." If only that were true.

    The tragic death of B.C. teenager Amanda Todd is a poignant reminder of the power of words. Words such as "punch her," "nobody likes you, and "I hope she die...

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  • White Bread Liberalism is Stale

    The city of Gatineau—best known for hosting Canada's Museum of Civilization and a host of public servants—has recently released a "values guide" for new immigrants. The guide is a veritable smorgasbord of helpful advice for new immigrants to ensure that they assimilate—sorry, transition—into Canadian society. On the one hand it's hard to dismiss outright the idea of such a document. I would like to know the various traditions and practices of the city I'm moving to too. It's hospitable.

    Things like this give liberalism a bad name.

    The city of Gatineau—best known for hosting Canada's Museum of Civilization and a host of public servants—has recently released a ...

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