Just Thinking about a Just Society
Today, I heard from a group of panelists on the CBC that it was improper to apply tests based on a Western worldview to determine if foreign-born Canadians returning from visits abroad were, in fact, who they said they were. This is because a Somali lady (Suaad Hagi Mohamud) who had been visiting relatives in Kenya could not answer questions such as, ‘When is your son’s birthday?’ and ‘What are the stops on the subway that you pass on your way to work?’.
Officials decided that she looked too unlike her passport photo to be allowed to board the plane in Nairobi, so she was subsequently denied passage to Canada and detained for several months in Kenya. Fortunately for her young son, as soon as it was determined by medical tests that she was the lady who had lived in Toronto for ten years without knowing the name of the lake the city is on, or the name of our mayor not to mention the prime minister, she was brought home. When interviewed she seems fluent in English and rather articulate. She is now pursuing a multimillion dollar lawsuit against the government. So she’s smart, too.
The point made by the radio brains trust this morning was that new Canadians ought not to be judged by Canadian social norms that assume a Western understanding of the world, if it means giving up, for example, their traditional ways of measuring birth dates in favour of our Gregorian civil calendar. Surveys have indicated that large numbers of new Canadians do not know the answers to questions based on such Canadian cultural norms. Apparently, quite a few non-immigrant Canadians can’t answer them correctly, either. One question officials ask in order to verify an identity is: ‘What is the full name of your child’s teacher?’ That stumps me, but I am hopeless with names.
Anyway, that conversation prompted me to think back to an interview on CBC radio sometime in 1990, when Pierre Trudeau was talking to Peter Gzowski about Thomas Axworthy’s new book: ‘Towards a Just Society: The Trudeau Years’. I recall I was driving through Waterloo at the time and I pulled off the road to listen. Whatever you may think of Trudeau and his politics, you couldn’t deny he had a vision for Canada.
If Trudeau didn’t coin the term ‘just society’, he was the architect of the Canadian version of it, which was to be built on The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This bill of rights forms the first thirty-five sections of the Constitution Act (schedule ‘B’ of the 1982 Canada Act.). Among its provisions it upholds the freedom of religion and conscience, language rights (including the education of French and English minorities in their mother tongue), and assures the protection of Canada’s multicultural heritage.
This has helped Canada to become a more welcoming place, comparatively speaking, to immigrants from diverse backgrounds, who form the ever-expanding and colourful ‘cultural mosaic’ of this vast land. It is not necessary for newcomers to immerse themselves in the culture of the founding nations (France and Great Britain). Because of our Constitution they are able, some would say encouraged, to keep their practices, religious beliefs, values, and laws even, rather than adapt to the way of life of the white Europeans who came here first (or second, really). This brings with it its own type of issues, and Canadian media frequently cover topics like Shar’ia law and whether religious obligations to wear certain clothing takes precedence over regulations for health and safety (turbans versus hard hats or crash helmets, for example), or even ‘honour’ killings in Canada.
In the news recently was the dropping of charges of polygamy against Winston Blackmore and James Oler of Bountiful, B.C., the latter accused of having four wives and the former, 19. It seems that a conviction under the Criminal Code, which prohibits marriage to more than one person at a time — although that person can be of either sex in Canada — was far from certain in the case of these two men who were leaders of their factions of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in British Colombia. They presumably could claim that their charter rights to freedom of religion permitted them as many wives as their faith group allowed for.
MacKenzie King got it bang on when he said that in any civilised society private rights should cease when they become public wrongs. We have a Criminal Code that trumps religious freedoms, or ought to. If we don’t like it, then we may collectively elect to office a government to bring in new legislation, otherwise we allow individuals to cock a snook at the rule of law.
Whether individual rights and freedoms trump collective ones, especially those of governments or ruling classes, is scarcely a matter for heated debate in developed Western democracies like Canada, where we assume citizens can stand up against their governments when their rights have been trampled on. This is not the case for most of the inhabitants of this planet. Louise Arbour, the Canadian former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, found it impossible to make the case for intervention in human rights abuses in places like Northern Uganda and Chechnya. Most governments around the world continue to hold themselves to very different standards of individual rights, freedoms and obligations, from those expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights even now, more than 6o years after it was adopted and proclaimed by the United Nations.
I suppose what we are experiencing in Canada is the pain we ought to expect as we are trying to give birth to a ‘just society’ where minorities will never be under the heel of a majority. Nothing like Kristallnacht will ever happen in Canada, we are led to believe. The truth is, however, that we cannot proclaim justice within a society, or create a just society by decree, no matter how well-intentioned and clever the politicians. Perhaps today’s concern for social justice by individuals, churches and other organisations will take us farther along the road towards a truly just society than our Charter can.
Governments must put into place the legislative framework of a society that is ordered towards justice and equity for all, and especially protecting its most vulnerable members, but surely we are fooling ourselves if we believe that by enacting legislation and forming commissions our just society will one day appear. No more can we grow an inch in height by thinking about it, or so I’ve read. If we define social justice in one sense as the putting-right of wrongs done, then such justice came to the beaten-up, stripped and robbed traveler lying on the road to Jericho through an individual act of generosity and kindness by a Samaritan, universally called ‘Good’ ever since. Government was not involved; a neighbour was.
More broadly, if social justice means anything to me, it means that I am my brother’s keeper and the neighbour of everyone I encounter. And so are you. The cloth of our Canadian ‘just society’ is still woven from the threads of our individual acts of justice, love and mercy, just as it always has been. And the same is true in every country in the world, whatever its form of government.