|
Monday December 20, 2004 |
BACK |
NEXT
NO LECTURES ON HUMAN RIGHTS, PLEASE!
by Angelo Persichilli
THE HILL TIMES
It's become fashionable, even trendy,
here in Canada to lecture Americans on everything under the sun.
I saw it first-hand again
last week in Toronto when a Canadian scolded a member of our federal forces
at a press conference about the American's track record on human rights and
how much better Canada is on this front.
This kind of reaction is
widespread among Canadians, unfortunately. And it's a problem because,
although I have no intention of defending the American approach, most
Canadians who look down their noses at Americans should look at our history
first, before talking about it.
Reactions to the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks events by Americans and Canadians is definitely different:
if anything, it was the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center that
were hit, not Toronto's CN Tower. And this seems to escape many here in
Canada when we judge Americans' reaction.
The difference is huge, and
Canadians have reacted just like Americans when their interests have been
hit in the past.
Canadian history has many
black pages on human rights.
Let's go through them
quickly.
The way we treat our Native
peoples remains a stain on our record one that the United Nations and
other international organizations keep reminding us about. In 1846-48, we
let many Irish refugees die in the Montreal harbour by refusing them entry.
At Grosse Ile we quarantined over 20,000 sick people, in a place that could
host not more than 200. On that island, during the "Summer of Sorrow" we
buried 5,000 Irish immigrants. Others were stopped and many died on
Partridge Island off St. John's, Nfld.
In 1905 we stopped Indian
refugees in Vancouver Harbour, we imposed a "head tax" on Chinese, Japanese,
Ukrainians immigrants, among others.
During the Second World
War, thanks to an order from then prime minister Mackenzie King, we
interned, among others, 3,000 Canadians of Italian origin over 90 per cent
of whom held Canadian passports for three years without a trial and
without any formal charges in camps such as Petawawa (our Guantanamo),
considering them "alien." In the same period the Americans interned "only"
600 citizens of Italian origin. And, the U.S. Congress has already
officially apologized to them. We also turned away boats of Jewish people
trying to flee Nazi Germany.
It's not just our history
that is "stained" because of the failure of our leaders to respect human
rights. In 1970, then prime minister Pierre Trudeau, a politician who was
never into collegial fishing or golfing weekends other Canadian PMs have
enjoyed with U.S. presidents, invoked the War Measures Act in response to
the terrorism perpetrated by the FLQ, whose actions amounted to a drop in
the ocean when compared to the attacks on the twin towers in New York city
in 2001.
Our open-arms philosophy
towards immigrants has always been based on the need for this country for
more manpower; people in real need have always had difficulty getting help.
In 1988, we had to reconvene Parliament to let 67 Indians knocking on our
door in the Halifax Harbour.
Not to mention events in
Somalia in the 1990s and the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the
Deployment of Canadian Forces to Somalia and the book of Peter Desbarats,
Somalia, the cover-up.
This doesn't mean everyone
in our military is corrupt or inept; it only means that we will find bad
apples everywhere and generalizations are a bad tool to judge people and
countries. Our selective memories of the past, shouldn't obfuscate our
national spirit of forgiveness that we profusely apply to our downfalls.
Again, I'm not defending
the American record on human rights and I'm not saying that we do not have
the rights to criticize other countries for not respecting them.
I'm only saying: no
lectures please! |
