Minorities sound off on reasonable accommodations

BY RAFFY BOUDJIKANIAN

raffy.boudjikanian@transcontinental.ca

As he cut up a raw slab of lamb meat for a customer at the small store he runs on the north end of Sources Boulevard, Bashir Ahmed related the story of how a francophone customer had stepped in a few days ago and demanded he speak to her in French.

"I will see you soon," Ahmed said the woman in question told him, mocking the way she pointed at him threateningly, after he attempted to explain to her that his French is not good enough to serve her, and asked her if she could speak English instead.

"But that's the only time I've had a problem with racism," Bashir said.

A Muslim Pakistani who moved to Canada in 1990, Ahmed said he thought little of the reasonable accommodations "crisis" that seems to have gripped Quebec for the last few months, with a government-appointed commission touring the province to ask the public what they think of reasonable accommodations to ethnic minorities and how far they should go, culminating in the publication of a report last Thursday.

"I'm very happy, I'm very comfortable here in Quebec," Bashir explained.

Meanwhile, the report has stirred up some conflicting feelings among members of different minorities. Whereas Shaheen Ashraf, a member of the Canadian Council for Muslim Women, said it was a positive step, Jewish human rights organization B’nai Brith called it well-intentioned but pointed it out that some of its proposed solutions are "overly simplistic and naive."

"It's up to the government now to impose (the report's final 37 recommendations)," said Ashraf, a Pointe Claire resident.

B’nai Brith representative Allan Adel said there are several concrete ways to produce an impact in terms of fostering communication and culture between different ethnic groups, beginning at the public school level. "You can introduce religious courses into the curriculum," he said as an example, saying the new religious and ethics class being introduced next year in Quebec public schools is too generic to fulfil that particular need.

Other possibilities include funding conferences on different minorities and religions, he added, as well as helping schools produce plays and theatres dealing with the same subjects.

Ashraf said beyond the government's approach, both the French-Canadian majority of this province and cultural minorities need to do more in order to ensure a better, more peaceful future for everyone. "You clap with two hands, you can't just clap with one hand," Ashraf said in response to suggestions the Bouchard-Taylor commission is coming down too hard on Quebec's francophone majority in its recommendations.

However, some criticized the very existence of the commission. "Any place that you have to make a committee to establish equal rights is a racist place," said Rowan McKenzie, a black man who runs a tattoo parlour on Sources Boulevard. "You're never going to stop racism in anybody's head," he added, stating that discrimination exists in all cultures to a certain extent. Even programs that are meant to help the advancement of cultural minorities, such as equal opportunity hiring programs, do not really end up achieving much. "They'll hire what they have to (to reach that quota), but they won't go over that amount," he hypothesized.