Terrorism Comes Home

Recently I have had the pleasure and privilege of working with a Syrian family that arrived in Canada from Jordan about a month and a half ago.  Myself and the volunteers I work with are tasked over the next year to help them settle into Canada.  I will tell you that it is not easy – while these families get lots of support, they don’t get any luxuries and are essentially living in poverty.  We aren’t creating touching Tim Hortons commercials here – it’s a lot of work on both sides and it’s not always smooth. But ultimately it is rewarding because Canada is trying to provide them a place of safety, a place of refuge, a place where they can raise and educate their children while their own country falls apart. Through fits and starts they are making progress.

I haven’t gotten to know the family well yet, but from what I have learned, they have gone through stuff that you and I can only imagine.  I will safely say that none of the people that will read this blog post have ever had their homes destroyed or had close civilian family members killed in war – but they have.  They are the faces and the emotion behind the statistics and facts that are the Syrian war.  While they feel safe here there are still the loved ones left behind in Syria that are effectively trapped in a failed state with extreme violence and so there is still a burden they carry that includes a whole lot of worry and angst.

Earlier today Leanne and I were at the family’s house helping them with some furniture.  Outside the family’s sons were playing hockey with some sticks that they were recently given. At one point, they called upon their Syrian neighbour to drop the ball for a faceoff. It was a beautiful classic piece of Canadiana.  Each of the boys has already been out skating with their school and for all we can tell, they are adapting well.  Through all of the stuff they have been through, they are still able to experience joy in our country and frankly I feel blessed to have seen it first hand.

This experience juxtaposes jarringly with recent events.  Trump’s racist policies with his Muslim ban has spawned outrage across the US and Canada.  In Canada, it also spawned our worst character trait – smugness – to rise up.  We think we are better than the States because we would never enact such a policy and better yet, we open our arms up to refugees.  It can be nauseating to be honest.

And then tonight happened.  A Canadian terrorist opened fire in a mosque outside of Quebec City and killed a number of people.  The perpetrators likely killed more Muslims in one act of violence than Islamic terrorists have killed Canadians over the last 15 years. And our smugness disappeared and now we must face a reality that we are not as good as we think we are.  The fact is, we can’t be smug because we need to be vigilant.  The fact is, this kind of violence was enabled in large part on a disturbing reality that has been building for years.  The Stephen Harper Conservatives ran with a platform that featured the Barbaric Cultural Practices Hotline and a vendetta against Niqabs and nearly won the election.  Kellie Leitch, with the assistance of her scum bag campaign manager Nick Kouvalis are running a campaign for the Canadian leadership based on thinly veiled racism masked through a Canadian Values Test for newcomers to Canada.  Quebec had the Bouchard Taylor Commission that focused attention on growing intolerance in Quebec and subsequently brought out the worst of Quebec society in public hearings.  Ezra Levant has a small but loyal following despite the crap he continually spews.  People set fire to a mosque in Peterborough.  I have seen examples of casual racism from people I am acquainted with on Facebook who live in Kamloops.

What I am saying is that Canada is not immune to racism and yet we often turn a blind eye to it.  It is tempting to blame the terrorism experienced in Quebec City on Trump, but we need to own this or else nothing will change. We must not treat this as an isolated incident but rather a culmination of events leading to this.

This brings me back to the family I have the honour of working with.  They were brought to Canada so that they could be safe, raise a family, and hopefully prosper.  While my exposure has been limited, they have enriched my life and they will enrich our community in due time. This may be an overreaction but my concern is that we, Canada, promised them safety – can we keep this promise in lieu of tonight’s events?  Can we tell them not to be fearful when people, terrorists, can go into a mosque and shoot people at prayer?  How do we ensure that our Muslim community must not live in fear?

 

 

Thoughts on the Women’s March and where do we go from here?

It was inspiring today to see photos of women’s marches throughout the world including in Kamloops in resistance to the ideas of the newly inaugurated President Trump.  His ideas are based on misogyny, intolerance and racism and hauntingly dangerous.  His toxic mix of lack of intelligence, ignorance, and thin skin combined with the power he know wields is dangerous for the world.  The women’s march was a welcome course correction perhaps slightly modifying the scary trajectory things are on, even if temporarily and providing an ounce of hope that things might not be that bad.  The march was impressive in its size (bigger than the inauguration), its scale (global on all the continents), its diversity, and its message (peace, love, unity, not fear and division). I will admit though, it left me wondering where do we go from here.  For as great as the march was, it will be but a small footnote in history in comparison to that which it is protesting against unless it results in meaningful action.

While the great fear is what will happen in the United States and what the United States will do to the rest of the world through its carelessness, we must remember that Canada, and Canadians are not immune to acting like Trump and his followers.  We should not be naive. Stephen Harper nearly got elected with a platform of isolating Muslim people.  Kellie Leitch, with the assistance of her campaign manager Nick Kouvalis is running for the Conservative leadership based in large part on a platform based on thinly veiled racism.  Racism still exists in Canada. Institutionalized racism still exists in the treatment of Indigenous peoples (see the inequality in education funding as one example). Our smugness can blinds us to a reality that is not flattering.   While we must allow people to express their thoughts and opinion, we must also not give air to those opinions that are based in prejudice.  Heck, Don Cherry is still allowed to be on public television and he has been espousing bigotry for the last 30 years.  Hopefully the women’s march will provide an awakening to Canadians that we must always strive to be better.

So where do we go from here?  I am reminded of my friend Kathy Sinclair’s posting on Facebook the night of the election and her commitment to action:

‘I will fight. I will work tirelessly for the promotion of peace and social justice and good and welcoming of all in this world. In whatever small way I can. I may not be American, but I can do something.’

Kathy is right, we can probably do something.  Seeing the women’s march today made me think of what I can do.  Here are some thoughts:

• I will attempt to gain a better understanding of the experience of Indigenous people, LGBTQ people, people living in poverty, people in the Black Lives Matter movement, various minorities, and other people that have lived through different forms of marginalization.  The internet can be a giant cesspool of crap but it can also be an inspiring and educational place to hang out and learn about what’s happening outside of our day to day existence and enables us to get the first person experience. For instance, while Gord Downie’s Secret Path project is important, there are many Indigenous people that have shared their lived experience in residential schools – those are the voices that we should be listening to.
• I will continue to support the arts in our community because the arts provides exposure to a diversity of people and of thought and they can create joy and they can cause reflection.   I can point to watching plays, movies and TV shows and listening to different kinds of music as fundamentally changing my viewpoint on certain issues and shifting my thinking and perspectives.
• I will support a strong public education system because it’s through education that we enable creative and critical thinkers to evolve. While I don’t have kids in the system, I am in a place where I can support initiatives that help with kids educational experience, particularly in some of our schools that are not as well off.
• I will remind myself that I am a citizen first, taxpayer second.  Taxpayers always seem to be angry while citizens are actively engaged in issues beyond dollars and cents.  Citizens want to make their communities better; taxpayers want to lessen the impact on their pocketbook.
• I will try to be more community-minded and participate in initiatives that improve my community.
• I will try to create an online presence through this blog and social media that is constructive.  I have been guilty of not doing this.

This list is not exhaustive and it’s not perfect.  It may not even ultimately be useful.  But it is a starting point.  I would love to hear what others are thinking on this.

Trump may be the beginning of the end but if we distract him long enough on Twitter, we might have a fighting chance of righting the ship.

 

Reflections on growing up in poverty

Recently I have been reflecting a lot on the issue of poverty. In particular I have been thinking of my own experience growing up in poverty and wondering what factors led to me escaping poverty.

To provide you with some background I was the lone child of a single mom who was unable to work throughout my childhood. While she was diagnosed with narcolepsy, what she really had was pronounced clinical depression that, given the medical system’s understanding of mental illnesses at the time had her misdiagnosed and improperly treated for much of my childhood. Money came from Ontario’s Mothers Allowance program (welfare by a different name) and we lived in a small one bedroom, cockroach infested apartment – the building’s occupants included a hodgepodge of drug dealers, drug takers, welfare recipients, and single moms. I grew up in a small manufacturing town where poverty seemed to be all around.

So what helped in my journey out of poverty? First and foremost, while we had a poverty of income, I never experienced the more damaging poverty that can occur, which is a poverty of love and care. Despite the challenges my mom faced, I was always sure that she loved me and was in my corner. I never went hungry and I always had a home.

While love and care were vital, I realize there were some other things that helped including:

1. The Mothers Allowance program provided income stability. It wasn’t ever enough as we never had enough money to make it to the end of the month but it is interesting to note that the Mothers Allowance rates in Ontario in the 80s and 90s are not much different in absolute terms than what rates are currently in BC despite significant differences in cost of living and the impacts of inflation. It allowed us to live in the same apartment building for my whole life (my mom still lives there after 38 years). While the apartment building was sometimes sketchy, it was relatively safe and we didn’t ever have to move meaning I never had to switch schools.

2. We had other support – I was fortunate growing up, my mom had the same boyfriend for pretty much my whole childhood. Not only did he provide stability, he was able to provide us some financial support from time to time from his income. My aunt and uncle and their family also lived in town and I was able to hang out at their house from time to time and we also got financial support from them from time to time. In fact we lived with them when we first moved to Trenton. My mom also got me involved with the Big Brothers/Big Sisters Program and I had a big brother for much of my childhood who had a pretty big influence on me, particularly in terms of providing me a male role model. My mom was also able to get me into sports, particularly hockey, soccer and eventually golf (which was actually really cheap for a junior) which was vital to me developing other social connections and having another positive outlet for my energy.  In essence, the village reared the child and I was fortunate to have good people around me.

3. Education – access to education was very important for me to getting out of poverty. I was fortunate to start with, I excelled in school and generally enjoyed it so I didn’t need to be pushed to go. My mom also emphasized doing well in school – she had high expectations for me and I don’t know if it were ever in doubt in her mind and eventually my own that I would go to university despite any financial challenges we had – it never seemed out of reach and perhaps my naivety led to me having a $33,000 debt at the end of things but it was a pretty solid investment. Importantly there were also good programs for kids living in poverty to aid them in getting their education. Another often overlooked education support was that there was a bus to my elementary school every day and we lived across the street from my high school. Getting to and from school was really easy. I can’t overestimate how important this was for me – due to my mom’s misdiagnosed depression, getting out of the house on time was a challenge for her. I don’t know what would have happened if a school bus wasn’t provided that took me to my elementary school – it was probably a similar circumstance for many other kids living in my apartment building.

There are many other things that helped me emerge from poverty but these were the pretty important ones. You can also see some key themes from this. At an overarching level I was given a foundation from which I could succeed. I was lucky that I had a loving and caring mother and despite some of her challenges, she never faced issues with dangerous addictions and was relatively stable in her own way. In addition, there was great stability in income, educational support, positive social connections, and housing. Related to this was the fact that government support, while not enough, was more generous, because it is not enough for the government support to be stable, it also has to be adequate to pay for food and shelter and ensure that kids living in poverty have access to a good education.

This is a brief recap of my experience with poverty.  There is a tendency, as with most things, to try to homogenize experiences with poverty in order to develop policy and actions.  While the stats and the big picture is always important, it is just as critical that individual stories of poverty are told and successes and failures of poverty abatement are understood.  This is particularly important as many of the people that are shaping policy and programs do not have a lived experience with poverty.