Re-Inventing The World

She came, she interviewed, she drew conclusions, she departed. With some measure of triumph, we can assume. Well armed with damning statistics and perceptions that no amount of common sense could ever dispel. Canada will now be brought to the attention of the damning comments of the UN Human Rights Council. Serves us right, actually, for our complacency, our belief in ourselves as enlightened, rational and fair as a society, struggling to accommodate our entire range of pluralist social traditions within the larger Canadian social contract.

We have sinned, unforgivably, institutionally, for our government has and continues to accommodate the needs of visible minorities to ensure they are embraced and as entitled as the rest of Canadian society. Our sin lies not in attempts to encourage inclusivity and a greater public role for visible minorities, at least commensurate with their numbers, but in naming them 'visible minorities'. This identifying nomenclature is seen by the UN's Human Rights Council as a troubling indication of racial profiling, an insult to those whom it identifies for statistical purposes.

Now, Gay McDougall, the UN's Independent Expert on Minority Issues has departed Canada, satisfied that she has completed her mission to identify problems in integrating and respecting minorities that Canada has obviously failed to succeed with. She has, she stated, discovered "significant and persistent problems" that exist within minority communities, some of whose representatives appear to have confided to her investigatory ear that their needs "have not been adequately responded to by government and to which solutions of long-term nature have not been found".

Ms. McDougall's interviews, moreover, with federal, provincial and territorial governments, appeared not to have convinced her that those representatives are sincere in their efforts to satisfy the needs of Canada's minority communities. For her interviews with minority communities in her data-collecting mission to produce a report to be presented to the UN's Human Rights Council, have produced damning evidence to the contrary. Which she might wish to run by her colleagues from Angola, Egypt, Nigeria, China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Cuba. To get a sense from them about human rights.

Of course she wouldn't really want to antagonize them, either, nor to visit them anytime soon, to determine how advanced their internal human rights agendas happen to be. Or their treatment of minority rights, or religious tolerance, or equality of women, or tolerance of political dissent, that kind of thing. It's safe and easy to have a look at a country like Canada, an advanced and enlightened society, a politically stable democracy, to bring it for censure to the Human Rights Council - alongside Israel, for example, whose perennial censure in that same Council chamber has become a seasonal rite of vituperative, ritualized hatred.

Canada's constitutional guarantees, independent judiciary, elected Parliament, enlightened civil society and free press count as nothing, beside the 'negative' experiences related to her by some members of African- and Asian-Canadian communities who report their disappointment in Canadian public schools inadequately addressing the curriculum to reflect their own histories and heritage and culture, and their contributions to Canadian society. What a truly sad reflection of misplaced entitlements; rather than accepting and living within a society that has welcomed them, some members of hyphenated communities feel that society should adapt itself to their cultures and traditions.

And Ms. McDonald can be satisfied that her mission has been accomplished, much as she pre-determined it would be. She may eventually, occasionally, get around to visiting those countries of the world whose human rights realities are truly debased, and where minorities are truly vulnerable and preyed upon in a most atrocious way, but she will doubtless find reason to applaud their attempts to foster better relations between the sum of their parts, if they are adequately reflective of her purpose.