Some People Are "Special"

Squeaky wheels and so forth:

A federal cabinet minister asked the chair of a Senate committee to speed up the study of a Bloc Québécois private member’s bill aimed at protecting supply management from any new international trade negotiations but he refused, saying the government had no business telling the Senate what to do.

 

Read: protecting QUEBEC's dairy industry from international trade negotiations.

 

 

Who invited them in, Quebec?:

Anglophone media have reported on the suspension of 11 teachers from Bedford elementary school, in the very multicultural and immigrant-rich Montreal neighbourhood of Côte-des-Neiges. This came after the Ministry of Education found a “toxic environment” at the francophone school.

But anglo media either soft-pedalled or (in CBC’s case, amazingly) completely ignored what has made the story so politically relevant: The allegedly “toxic” teachers were apparently Arab Muslims.

According to a 90-page report from the ministry’s investigations department, witnesses reported “a strong influence on the community environment” exercised by teachers who “reportedly frequent a community centre and a mosque located in the neighbourhood.” It said that members of the mosque sometimes intervened on occasion to ensure the school’s education model was in line with their preferred “cultural model.”

“Members of the (community) centre created a Facebook page … on which they denigrated the teaching at Bedford School,” the report found. Community centre members also once “allegedly burst into the school, yelling at the teacher and then heading to the office,” where staff “had to call 911.”

The investigation mentions in particular stories that “many teachers at Bedford School … speak Arabic among themselves.” (This affair activates Quebec nationalists’ concerns about Islam and languages other than French in almost equal measure.)

“According to the witnesses, it is difficult to integrate into the (Arabic-speaking) group, particularly because it is impossible to understand conversations between some members of staff,” the report found.

The report accuses teachers in the school’s “dominant clan” of serial dishonesty. “Protecting their honour is a priority and is done to the detriment of honesty,” it finds. “Investigators were able to observe on several occasions that some teachers use lies to get out of embarrassing situations, even in situations where the lie is blatant.”

Witnesses spoke in particular of “lies” deployed “during interventions on the language spoken in the school. Teachers deny having spoken Arabic or Kabyle (a Berber-Algerian language) when they are caught in the act.”

From the students’ perspective, features of this toxic environment allegedly include severe neglect of special-needs pupils, what you might call old-school teaching methods (belittling and yelling at kids, slamming rulers on desks, etc.) and just a crummy overall experience, at best.

This all backs up reams of reporting by Montreal radio station 98.5 FM, which broke the story back in 2022. Why it took so long for everyone from the school board to the minister to respond is one of the key questions in play. Whatever was happening at that school — and other schools are now implicated in similar fashion — the “toxic environment” allegations have been more than borne out.

Many Quebec nationalists see a far bigger issue here than a few Montreal schools, however.

“We see here the effects of the mass immigration that we have been experiencing for at least 30 years,” highly influential commentator Mathieu Bock-Côté wrote in Le Journal de Montréal. “We should have realized this in (the separation referendum of) 1995, when the monolithic vote of immigrant communities aligned with the English-speaking community led to the defeat of the Yes camp by a few thousand votes.”

“We need to talk about the Islamization of Quebec,” Bock-Côté concluded, before moving on to a much less serious issue — but one that’s perhaps even more disturbing.

 

 

If we can just silence differing opinions, that MIGHT take the heat off of dysfunctional communities and the people who live in them:

“Overall, the goal of denialism is to protect the colonial status quo,” said Carleton, who is an assistant professor of history and Indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba.

He also said some media outlets have been used to spread this disinformation.

That includes misrepresenting the number of children who died from tuberculosis in the schools by saying a lot of people at the time died from the disease, and leaving out the fact the federal government’s policies exacerbated the impact of the illness in residential schools through overcrowding, poor nutrition and a lack of proper sanitation and ventilation.

 

(Sidebar: yes, but all of that is true. It is - what some people call - factual.)

**

The are an estimated 40,000 indigenous children currently in Canada's child welfare system. While the nation has tied itself into knots trying to apologize and compensate indigenous people for the 150,000 children who attended residential schools over the course of a century, nearly 40,000 indigenous children are still in government care. I imagine future governments will feel obliged to compensate them as the cycle continues.

Since the 1990s, the solution to every indigenous issue has been to pour more tax dollars into the system and to hand control directly to the chiefs and councils on indigenous reserves. So far that strategy has led to mass corruption and housing and water shortages on reserves. Unemployment is rampant, poverty is rampant, people die at a younger age than those on reserves and they suffer from crime rates that make inner city levels look peaceful and safe by comparison. Not only that, but the people on reserves have become so socially and economically distressed that 40,000 of their children are now wards of the state.

So what solution is the government proposing?

They wanted to give $47.8 billion to indigenous people for child welfare programs on reserves. This is after the government already settled with indigenous people for $23.3 billion in 2023 to compensate them for having taken children into care in the past. The total comes to $1.77 million for each and every indigenous child in government care right now.

The funds are to be managed by indigenous reserves themselves as they take over the child welfare programs.

What could possibly go wrong?

Indigenous chiefs from across Canada gathered in Calgary last week to discuss the latest waterfall of funds being offered to ease their social ills. They determined that the offer of nearly $1.8 million per child wasn’t enough and rejected it.

Indigenous advocates still claim child welfare on reserves is underfunded.

Will it ever be enough?

No, it won’t.

Decades of tossing funds at indigenous reserves while never holding them accountable for the use of the funds has led to a class of entitled chiefs and advocates who have no concept of personal accountability and can’t look at solving any problems beyond holding their hands out for more funds. They will never be satisfied and they will never solve the problem.

The problem is the racial apartheid system of reserves. We could increase funding to the reserves a thousandfold, they still would be enclaves of socioeconomic misery. There is no situation where we can separate a race of people, put them in isolated places, and make them 100% dependent upon welfare where it would work out well for the residents of these places. Yet we keep trying.

 

One must ask who benefits from this never-ending cycle of cash and victimisation and who does not.