Zeinab Merai, Sada al-Mashrek
In part 1, voices opposing Bill 96, which is supposedly about underpinning French in Quebec, were echoed. Additionally, author Arnold August shared his own experience, as a trilingual Quebecker and internationalist scholar, with Sada al-Mashrek.
In this part, arguments against Bill C-11 and Bill 21 are presented, and the award-winning investigative journalist’s interpretations in relation to the bills are complemented.
Bill C-11: Tighter censorship
Trudeau’s Liberals might pass Bill C-11 – the Online Streaming Act – to authorise the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to “regulate” online content. Critics worry the bill might impose much wider censorship on digital-media platforms than the one that exists today and might as well result in a loss of jobs.
However, Premier Francois Legault’s government is just fine with the bill, arguing it will provide “protection and promotion” for cultural content. But too much censorship has already been exercised. On Twitter, for example, one can now read “warnings” like: “The following media includes potentially sensitive content” for content that’s not graphic or obscene, but that goes against war-moguls’ narratives, like “videos showing Ukrainian soldiers torturing and executing captured Russian soldiers,” as August points out, “or the Zionist-apartheid-occupation army’s daily violent ethnic cleansing and cold-blooded murder of Palestinians.”
A recent stark account of censorship that’s practised already (even before the bill is finalised) against Montreal Professor Michael J Carley has been highlighted by August, who is a Contributing Editor for The Canada Files and a member of the International Manifesto Group. August writes that “Starting on March 23, Canadian state-owned French-language media, Radio-Canada (RDI), and private French-language media outlets in Quebec, launched a campaign to sanction a University of Montreal professor. The campaign then spread to a Toronto daily and even into the US…”
August delineates that it has been “intended to leave out the fact that Carley is a professor of history with more than 50 years of research and publishing on Soviet and Russian foreign policy. He has done extensive research in Russian archives and seeks to explain Soviet perspectives from a Russian vantage point. There are few people working today in any language who have done as much work on interwar Soviet foreign policy.”
August argues that RDI’s tone “demonstrates an increasingly ugly attempt to keep the US-Canada-NATO narrative on the Ukraine-Russia conflict as airtight as possible. I have rarely seen such an effort made to impose a blanket media blackout. It is the sort of atmosphere that prevails when a country is at war, and Canada is indeed now at war with Russia, using Ukraine as proxy.”
The investigative journalist points out that Carley was a member of the University of Montreal Centre for International Studies and Research (CÉRIUM) but “was dropped unceremoniously with the stroke of a pen by the director of that centre, simply on the basis of the RDI article…”
The outspoken author therefore urges “the necessity for the University of Montreal and the Canadian public to showcase Professor Carley’s expertise, and to continue resisting pressures to sanction him and deny his right to freedom of speech, not to mention academic freedom…”
August believes that it is “very disappointing” for him as a Quebecois “to find that our French-language state media has sunk so far into the abyss of US talking points.” (Full article here: https://www.thecanadafiles.com/articles/ukraine-russia-sanctions-against-a-pro-russian-professor-from-the-university-of-montreal-or-freedom-of-speech)
Such incidents seem particularly ironic when Quebec is considering Bill 96 to “to reinforce French and the identity of the province.” A better reinforcement of the identity of the province would mean accepting no foreign pressure, such as that led by NATO, to censor academics. Yet August humorously anticipates such censorship measures to backfire, “They can, perhaps in the future time, label my Twitter account as pro-Iranian, so what? I will get more support from the world. If they put me on a blacklist with regards to Israel, so be it. We’re not going to be intimidated by Trudeau, the Canadian government, Zionists, and especially not by the middle of the roaders.”
Bill 21: Banning religious wear
It is no secret that the rate of hate crimes, especially against Muslim women, has been heightened since Bill 21 was first debated. But nothing has stopped Legault from enacting the bill in the name of secularism and forcing many to consider moving out of the province, even when there is shortage of teachers, among others.
A survey conducted by researchers from McGill and Concordia in March reports that “more than half of the students who took part in survey on Law 21 say they’ll leave Quebec to find work.” The researchers say the “respondents reported increased harassment, hostility, and negative sentiments since the religious-symbols ban was implemented.”
Associate Professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill co-author of the study, Elizabeth Elbourne, notes that “many students shared their deep distress at witnessing the impact of the law’s passage on their classmates, family members, friends and fellow students.” (Complete report here: More than half of students who took part in survey on Law 21 say they will leave Quebec to find work | Newsroom - McGill University)
Asked whether this form of “reinforcing the identity” of Quebec, including Bill 21, could be meant to distract Quebeckers from asking questions about Quebec’s government policies and Canadian foreign policy, August agrees, “This whole controversy with regards to laws on the wearing of Islamic-tradition dress is a diversion. Why didn’t they just leave it as it was? The Quebec government and the media should not follow the US-led demonisation of people of Mohammedan beliefs – the beliefs of Islamic culture and religion, which is part of the US-led “War on Terror”, a euphemism for subverting all opposition to US hegemony. There was no need for this.”
August points out that some might justify such laws “as a result of conflicts, but these controversies only come about as a result of the overwhelming mainstream media, coming from the US, Canada, France or wherever against the Arab people, and within that context, of course, against the religion.”
At the end of the day, Quebeckers and Canadians need to move on; their lives, livelihoods and wellbeing have already been hindered by the pandemic and the related restrictions long enough. They can’t be forced into other unneeded everyday challenges; it would give them a hard time and delay them from stabilising their lives.
You can find Arnold August on Twitter: @Arnold_August and me: @Zeinab_Merai.
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