[PHOTO] Thanksgiving from the TRL

Thanksgiving from the TRL
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

This unusual display of colourful vegetation lies in front of the Yonge Street entrance of the Toronto Reference Library.

[META] Blogroll Additions

Welcome Johnny Pez's blog and Mathieu Helie's Emergent Urbanism to the ranks!

[LINK] Two World AIDS Day links

For this year's World Aids Day, I'd like to point to the links roundups by the Pagan Prattle and < a href="http://feeds.towleroad.com/~r/towleroad/feed/~3/HwmWK_YTaT8/world-aids-day-light-for-rights.html">Towleroad. May this plague be swiftly contained and ended as soon as possible: we've lost too much.

[LINK] "Al-Jazeera English network cleared for Canada"

After far too much controversy, Al-Jazeera's English-language network can finally be viewed in Canada as a digital channel.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) gave its thumbs-up to the Qatar-based international news service Al-Jazeera English, which is headed by former Canadian Broadcasting Corporation senior executive Tony Burman as managing director.

The CRTC slapped no conditions on the approval for Al-Jazeera English, in contrast to 2003 when it green-lit the Arabic-language al-Jazeera service for Canadian carriage, but ordered cablers and other content carriers to edit out violence or potential hate messages.

No Canadian content carrier has yet taken up the expense, or bother, of editing the Arabic Al-Jazeera service as a condition of carriage.

"Despite concerns expressed by certain parties, there is nothing on the record of the current proceeding that leads the commission to conclude that AJE would violate Canadian regulations, such as those regarding abusive comment," the CRTC said in its Thursday ruling on Al-Jazeera English.

The CRTC received around 2,600 public comments in support of the carriage application by Al-Jazeera English, with only 40 parties expressing opposition, the regulator said.

It only makes sense. Canada does carry Fox News, after all, and holding Al-Jazeera responsible for what callers on call-in shows say strikes me as excessive.

[DM] "On migration and justice"

I've a post up at Demography Matters that touches briefly on the question as to whether or not the best way to deal with the illegal and exploitative networks facing migrants might be to legalize those migrants already at work. It's a thought experiment since borders are certainly going to remain, but your thoughts on this question would be welcome.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the Roma diaspora to Canada and punishing the sending countries

A recent article in the Toronto Star about the first generation of Roma children in the Toronto school system, Louise Brown's "Roma children perplex local educators", made me think.

They are Europe's Least Wanted – reviled for their unorthodox ways, hounded by white supremacists. Now the sudden arrival of Roma "gypsies" in Ontario has teachers here grappling to connect with some of the most perplexing students in the world.

With no English, limited education and an often shaky regard for school, the wave of Roma children give fresh urgency to the term "at-risk." Schools across Toronto and Hamilton, caught largely by surprise, are rushing to educate staff, hire more ESL teachers and find Hungarian and Czech interpreters for everything from report cards to welcome kits.

"We've got major problems with this wave of students and we need help – we've had more than 100 kids show up this fall and our staff are scrambling," said Trustee Irene Atkinson at a recent crash course on Roma culture organized by the Toronto District School Board, one of several this fall in Toronto and Hamilton.

"We need to develop curriculum for Roma teenagers in Grade 10 who are working at a Grade 4 to 6 level," she said.

Brown notes that there are serious problems of integration, both among the Roma children and among the Roma parents as well as in the education system.

Puzzled teachers say many Roma children seem unfamiliar with routines such as the school bell. Some plunge into fist-fights, show little respect for teachers, ignore homework and skip school for days at a time, even in elementary grades.

Not all feel this way; more than 25 Roma parents jammed into a breakfast meeting Friday at Queen Victoria Public School to learn, through a Hungarian interpreter, about the report cards and parent-teacher interviews coming next week.

But Czech translator Jan Rotbauer also was asked to visit a Scarborough grade school Friday to translate for Roma parents the importance of sending children to school each day.

"I have done this many times because teachers are asking for help," he said. "Roma parents do love their children, but education has not been high on the priority list."

Oft-cited Roma "traditional values" may well be the cause. At least as important as vicious, the systemic discrimination that would effectively prevent the Roma from integrating even if these values did exist. See

"It is one of the reasons we came; our children were being treated badly in the Czech Republic because they are Roma," said Katarina Polyakora, through translator Rotbauer. Her children are in Grades 3 and 8 at Precious Blood Catholic School in Scarborough.

"Our younger child has darker skin and was called racial slurs like Blackface – even the teacher would sometimes rip up her artwork," said Polyakora, whose family came here in February from the Czech Republic seeking refugee status.

"Our older child has lighter skin, so they did not discriminate against him until they discovered he was Roma, and then they kicked him off the school soccer team," she said.

"But here in Canada, the children are friendly. Everyone is friendly. It is a multicultural country."

and

"It's been six weeks and I'm starting to notice an improvement; less talking to each other, less fighting and better attendance," said Reutter.

There now is a waiting list for LEAP classes across Toronto fuelled by the arrival of Roma refugee claimants, said program coordinator Betty Ann Taylor.

"Roma children don't face gaps in their learning," she said. "They face craters."

Roma parents back home have also faced accusations of pushing their children into street crime rather than schooling. Rotbauer chose carefully which documentary he showed during a recent sensitivity session for about 100 teachers.

"The National Geographic one was okay, but a BBC documentary about Roma parents putting children out to rob people at ATM machines? I thought it was too negative and not balanced."

Such highly charged cultural baggage should not matter to Canadian schools, said Paula Markus, coordinator for English as a Second Language at the Toronto District School Board. "Our job is to help children who, through no fault of their own, have had gaps in their prior schooling, whether it's from war or persecution," she said.

"One student wrote the most touching composition about how great it is they're not beaten up in Canada just for being Roma.

"That's why people come here."

Roma have been subjected to vicious discrimination in education and employment facing Roma, never mind unpunished hate crimes, even in such nominally liberal countries as the Czech Republic and Hungary to say nothing of the rest of post-Communist Europe. That's a fact.

As a Canadian, I favour admitting people fleeing persecution. At the same time, I'm hostile to the idea of countries exporting their unwanted ethnic minorities to Canada because they won't tolerate said minorities in their homeland. That's one reason why the visa requirements for citizens of the Czech Republic, discouraging as they may be for Roma refugee claimants, appeal to me: they send a clear signal to the Czech government and the Czech people that there are consequences to the racism that they tolerate. It's unfair to the Roma, of course, and therefore shouldn't occur for their sake, but nevertheless the visa requirement has a certain appeal to it.

[URBAN NOTE] Maple Leaf Gardens and Ryerson

The Maple Leaf Gardens, the historic home of the Toronto Maple Leafs but abandoned for a decade once they decamped for newer grounds, has been saved.

The Canadian government, a local university and Loblaw Cos (L.TO), the country's biggest supermarket chain, said on Tuesday they will spend C$60 million ($57.5 million) to transform the downtown building, opened in 1931, into a retail and recreation complex.

Maple Leaf Gardens was home to the Toronto Maple Leafs until the team moved to the more modern Air Canada Centre near the Lake Ontario waterfront in 1999.

It became an always sold-out hockey institution during the Depression when games were broadcast across the country on radio. Later it was home to Hockey Night in Canada television broadcasts on Saturday nights.

The Leafs won the Stanley Cup, the NHL championship trophy, 11 times while they played there, the last one in 1967.

After its facelift is completed in 2011, the revamped Gardens will feature a new ice rink for Ryerson University teams, an athletic centre for Ryerson students and a supermarket on the ground floor.

"We needed to do something special with Maple Leaf Gardens," Loblaw Executive Chairman Galen Weston told a news conference on Tuesday. "This is a great example of how business, academia and government can work together to deliver a great result."

Loblaw bought the arena from Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment in 2004.

Maple Leaf Gardens was built during the Depression by then Leafs owner Conn Smythe at a cost of C$1.5 million. Tickets for the opening night game between the Leafs and the Chicago Blackhawks ranged between 95 Canadian cents and C$2.95.

Since then it has hosted Elvis Presley, the Beatles on three occasions, and the 1972 Summit Series between Team Canada and the Soviet Union's national hockey team.

This project is but one component of Ryerson University's aggressive expansion, west to Yonge Street--the site of the flagship store of the Sam the Record Man has been bought and the building demolished and north along Church Street. Ryerson, a decade and a half old as a university, seems determined to be entirely the equal in prestige and in land area as the older University of Toronto.

[LINK] "When things fall apart"

There's still a bit less than a half-hour left, so there's time for me to post a link to this powerful article by Alice Welbourn via Open Democracy's Livejournal feed, "When things fall apart".

I met some very special people in this bizarre parallel world of Oxford we all inhabited. We know of Philip Pullman’s parallel world of the Northern Lights but this was – and is – another parallel world there of ordinary people to whom an extraordinary thing had happened – an HIV diagnosis – which had changed our lives forever and which we dared not share with anyone. If we had survived a train crash or a bomb attack, God forbid, all arms of support would have been there for us. But we hadn’t. We had HIV. Of course, the human spirit being what it is, extraordinary resilience emerged and I was touched by so many whom I met. There were the wonderful team at OXAIDS, for a start, and the Bishop of Oxford and Mrs Harries, who opened up their home for us for a retreat day each summer. There was the lovely Kim, an elf-like creature, a young former drug user from Scotland, who had moved South, with the huge courage to break away from her friends and the drugs, to kick her habit and start a new life working with horses, which she loved. But then she realised that a legacy of those days had come with her, in the form of HIV. She soon slipped away and died and I found myself in a lonely cemetery somewhere in the West Country questioning the senselessness of her loss. There was a lovely African couple, highly able students in Oxford, full of life and laughter. Then AIDS caught up with them. He died suddenly first, and a year later she too was gone and I found myself at her funeral also, full of devastated mourners, not sure again who knew what and daring therefore to say nothing. There were wonderful gay young men who had grown up struggling with their sexual identity, who had faced the rejection of their families through being gay, now having the double rejection of HIV to deal with. They too just wasted away and died. There was Dave, of Body Positive. He died too and I just couldn’t manage to go to his funeral – we all kept wondering which of us would be next.

These events forced me to address and deal seriously with the really big questions facing all of us in our lives, no matter who we are or where we come from. These questions included: who am I? who are we? what is life about? what is death about? what are gender, sex, our belief systems, our values, our relationships with those around us about? But then slowly I began to rebuild my life, realising that I needed to be there for my older children, that maybe I wasn’t meant to give up just yet, that maybe there was something very important to be learnt from all these experiences. Even though those years were so deeply painful, with all our otherwise perhaps unlikely friendships across new overlapping circles quickly getting torn up by the roots through sickness, rapid deaths, and just too many funerals, there was still a shared sense of wonder amongst us of this unreal journey into reality that we were all making together, deeply aware as we were of our shared borrowed time, our shared mortality, our shared humanity.

[. . .]

All of us in the world are dying, from the day that we arrive in this world. But most of us spend most of our lives imagining that death will never happen to us. We fear death and dying and the suffering that they will bring. Those of us with children especially quite naturally weave all the magic that we can into our lives, to protect ourselves from death before they have grown up, and to protect them from death also.

But I think many of us agree that this diagnosis, maybe especially because it is one which we have experienced in secret, gives us a sudden and immense new perspective on reality. It has made me realise how fragile life is and to try to treat each day and each relationship with far more care.