March 2005

Out with the old ...
(Toronto Star, Mar. 23)
TBen Sennik saw the lights illuminating the baseball diamond and assumed a game must be in progress. He was right.

But instead of the grand old game, the diamond had been appropriated by a dedicated group of cricketers, driven to the dirt because the perfect, grassy pitch usually required just wasn't available.

Cultural shift takes aim at British Columbia
(Vancouver Sun, Mar. 23)
TBy the time Canada celebrates its 150th birthday in 2017, British Columbia will have the largest proportion of visible minorities of any province in the country, according to a new study by Statistics Canada.

Visible majority by 2017
(Globe and Mail, Mar. 23)
TThe number of visible minorities in Canada is expected to double by 2017 and form more than half the population in greater Toronto and Vancouver, according to new projections that highlight the country's growing diversity.

Communities hope boycott leads to change
(Edmonton Journal, Mar. 21)
TEDMONTON - On a Saturday night last month, Patricia Gross accompanied her friend and classmate Isabel James to a round dance on the Saddle Lake reserve, about 215 kilometres northeast of Edmonton.

Tragedy smeared all Sikh-Canadians
(Toronto Star, Mar. 18)
TDuring the two decades between the horrendous crime and tragedy of the downing of Air-India Flight 182 in 1985 and this week's verdict on the trial of the two accused of the outrage, my beard has gone from jet black to snow white.

Dream of founding Sikh state lives on
(Globe and Mail, Mar. 17)
TThe burning passion for revenge against the Indian government, allegedly the motive for the 1985 Air-India terrorist attack, has cooled over the years.However, the dream of an independent Sikh state called Khalistan that accompanied the cries for revenge lives on.

Big league bigotry
(Xtra, Mar. 17)
TLast month federal Justice Minister Irwin Cotler expressed concern that opponents of the Liberal government’s same-sex marriage legislation were receiving big bucks from rightwing groups in the US.

Police said to be cool to racial-profiling report
(Globe and Mail, Mar. 17)
TA secret Justice Department report that calls racial profiling by police and security services ''a high-profile and pressing issue'' has reportedly excited protests from police and border-security officials, who want it rewritten or scrapped.

A step toward better native housing
(National Post, Mar. 16)
TMillions of Canadians take the right to buy and sell their own home for granted. Yet on Canada's reserves, where land is held communally, aboriginals have been systematically denied this fundamental economic right for generations. In this second of her four-part series, Tanis Fiss explains the benefits of Certificates of Possession, a mechanism some reserves have adopted in response to Canada's obsolete native land-use policy.

Beauty contest sets off Muslim debate
(Toronto Star, Mar. 14)
T"Swing your hips. I need lots of oomph, '' commands choreographer Sajeev Sharma.

A Korean father's lesson on raising cane
(Globe and Mail, Mar. 12)
TVancouver — The father of the 16-year-old North Vancouver high-school student waited for his son to respond before delivering each blow with the cane.

Keep Islamic law out of Canada, Quebec politicians urge
(Montreal Gazette, Mar. 11)
TIslamic law has no place in Quebec or the rest of Canada, a provincial cabinet minister and several MNAs said yesterday.

Canada's immigrant challenge
(Globe and Mail, Mar. 11)
TIt is easy to despair of Canada's immigration system, of its chronic failure to meet its targets, of the tens of thousands of dollars spent processing each refugee claim, of the backlogs and the lawyers and the accusations of favouritism that crop up.

Ottawa feared political abuse of entry permits for athletes
(Globe and Mail, Mar. 10)
TAn immigration provision that allowed Sikh athletic clubs to obtain permits to bring Indian athletes into Canada was temporarily shut down by the federal government in 2003 after concerns that the permits were being misused by Liberal MPs for political ends, The Globe and Mail has learned.

Natuashish: What to do
(Globe and Mail, Mar. 10)
TJohn Gray's article movingly describes the Innu's appalling mistreatment at the hands of the government and the church. However, Mr. Gray's conclusion that the “disaster of Davis Inlet and Natuashish . . . is that nobody knows what to do” is a copout.

Natuashish: Back to square one
(Globe and Mail, Mar. 8)
Now that disastrous reports from the Labrador village of Natuashish are again making news, think for a moment about Georg Henriksen and the remarkable picture he painted of what may have been North America's last genuinely nomadic people.

'Honour killings' hide racist motive
(Toronto Star, Mar. 8)
TIt took merely five hours for a British Columbia jury last Friday to convict Rajinder Atwal for the brutal murder of his 17-year-old daughter, Amandeep. Driven by his inability to accept Amandeep's decision to pursue an interracial relationship, the incensed patriarch thrust his knife into his defenceless daughter four times.

Arar fights for right to see secret evidence
(Globe and Mail, Mar. 5)
TThe commission investigating the Maher Arar case wants to postpone a legal battle with the government about the disclosure of secret evidence concerning Mr. Arar's deportation to Syria in 2002.

Bookies need a day off
(Xtra, Mar. 3)
TCanada’s gay and lesbian bookstores have long been at the forefront of the struggle for freedom of expression. For decades Little Sister’s Bookstore in Vancouver has been battling Canada Customs (recently renamed Canada Border Services Agency). In 2000 the Supreme Court Of Canada agreed that Little Sister’s had been targeted by Customs, and told it to clean up its act. Toronto’s Glad Day Bookshop has fought censorship on many fronts, including a recent successful challenge to the censorship power of the Ontario Film Review Board (OFRB).

Meth & HIV panic
(Xtra, Mar. 3)
TA scare or something to be scared about? News from New York about a man diagnosed with a new drug-resistant strain of HIV that progresses rapidly into AIDS has left gay men, particularly those who use recreational drugs, wondering if the stakes have changed.

Death of a secret lover
(Globe and Mail, Mar. 3)
TVancouver — They met in Grade 10 science class and fell in love: a dangerous move, it turned out, for the young British Columbia couple whose backgrounds were worlds apart. Prosecutors say the doomed love affair would eventually lead 17-year-old Amandeep Atwal to a suburban Vancouver hospital, with four fatal wounds.

February 2005

Time to look at our own discrimination at home
(Indo-Canadian Voice, Feb. 26)
TEach time we, as visible minorities, are discriminated against, we cry out discrimination! We take the issue and make it our business to fight against discrimination. Leaders take up the cause and appeal to governments to make laws, or rather, uphold laws that will deal with those who practice discrimination.

Residential schools ADR process slammed
(First Perspective, Feb. 2005)
TRecent revelations that the government of Canada has budgeted millions of dollars to hire private investigators to determine the validity of residential law-suit claims while simultaneously denying small claims of some survivors have incensed aboriginal leaders and residential school survivors accused the government of "unconscionable delays" in compensating victims of abuse.

Police shooting deaths of aboriginal men heighten tensions
(First Perspective, Feb. 25)
TThe shooting deaths of a First Nations man on the Norway House Cree Nation (NHCN) by an RCMP officer during an arrest on January 5 and the shooting death of 29-year-old Nisga'a Gerald Chenery by two Vancouver City Police officers on December 26 has raised tensions between the police and the aboriginal community once again.

Court finds Zundel can be deported
(Globe and Mail, Feb. 25)
THolocaust denier Ernst Zundel can be deported immediately as a danger to Canadian security, a Federal Court of Canada judge has ruled.

No tradeoff on smoking ban
(Regina Leader-Post, Feb. 23)
TPremier Lorne Calvert is worried about the impact the fight over smoking in the province may be having on race relations.

A second scandal in Natuashish
(National Post, Feb. 19)
TLast Monday, this column bemoaned the fate of the Davis Inlet Innu, a Labrador community so awash in poverty and substance abuse that the government moved it wholesale to the newly constructed town of Natuashish in 2002. A CBC investigation has shown that hundreds of millions of dollars later, Natuashish is now itself awash in poverty and substance abuse, a replica of Davis Inlet in all its tragic pathologies.

Charkaoui wins bail release
(Toronto Star, Feb. 18)
TMONTREAL—It was the call they feared might never come.

We need African-centered schools
(Share, Feb. 10 )
TThere has been a great deal of discussion about how our children function in the public schools they attend. The suggestion of Black-focused or African-centered schools has been put forward as a solution to counteract the high dropout rate our children experience.

It's not always about colour
(Toronto Star, Feb. 8)
TI survived 13 years in Ontario's "white" school system, and sometimes I wonder how I did it.

Province rules out black-only schools
(Toronto Star, Feb. 4)
TAmid growing local controversy, the Ontario government says racially segregated schools aren't in the cards.

The case for black schools
(Toronto Star, Feb. 4)
Debates on the collection of race-based data by the Toronto District School Board reflect competing visions of education in Ontario. But to what extent will these statistics reinforce negative stereotypes, ignore or address low student performance, or simply blame individual educators?

January 2005

From placards to picket fences
(Globe and Mail, Jan. 29)
TWhen Toronto's Glad Day bookstore decided to throw in the towel on its struggles against censorship this week, after nearly two decades of fighting governments and bureaucrats for the right to import and sell gay and lesbian books and videos, there was inevitable talk across the city's gay community of an era coming to an end.

It's missions possible for Indian expatriates
(Toronto Star, Jan. 29)
TWhen Babu Nair came to Canada two years ago he forgot his chequebook in Bangalore. Pankaj Lilani overlooked an electrical bill in Mumbai. Surendra Goindi had no time to close a bank account in New Delhi.

Metis fighting over implementation of right to harvest
(First Nations Drum, Feb. Winter 2005)
TTwo of Canada's largest Métis organizations have denounced their prospective provincial governments over the implementation of their rights to harvest wildlife as prescribed by the Supreme Court of Canada in last September's landmark ruling that established Métis harvesting rights as equal to other constitutionally recognized aboriginal peoples.