Quebec Hearings on "Reasonable Accommodation"
A series of government-initiated public hearings on cultural differences and immigrant integration began this week in Quebec. FSRN’s Stefan Christoff reports from Montreal.
Immigrants in Quebec have faced a growing political storm throughout the past year, as a Provincial debate on what is referred to as ‘reasonable accommodation’ has attracted international headlines. A series of public hearings will occur throughout the coming months in Quebec, as part of the state commission lead by two Quebec academics who are not new immigrants. Nazila Bettache is with No One is Illegal Montreal. (sound) “Using the term accommodation simply put really, sort of implies to me a hierarchy of identities, where by, the identity the one that has been framed in the mainstream media as the so-called Quebcoies national identity, so the identity of the white settler prevails and the action of quote / unquote, “allowing” the expression of religious or faith based identity that of the quote / unquote “new-comer” is an accommodation to begin with.” Debate on immigration in Quebec reached extremes in the past year, when the rural town of Herouxville passed a resolution which demanded that “new arrivals, abandon the way of life from their countries of origin, as it cannot be recreated” in Quebec. Civil liberties groups throughout Canada slammed the resolution as racist. For Free Speech Radio News, this is Stefan Christoff, in Montreal.
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listen to reports produced for Free Speech Radio News between 2002 - 2012, the flagship Pacifica radio daily news program, these reports were produced in Montreal, but also in Beirut, Lebanon.
putting these reports up for archiving purposes, they address numerous grassroots struggles for justice and against oppression, particularly looking at struggles surrounding migrant justice, also indigenous movements for land and rights, while also struggles against colonialist wars today & the persisting impacts of wars past.
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