Salam Alsaadi

Palestinian-Syrian writer, residing in Canada, and is currently pursuing a PhD in political science at the University of Toronto.

The fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected racialized communities and immigrants, putting them at greater risk of getting sick and dying from the virus, highlights their position at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy in Canadian society. Economic, social, and health disparities appeared to mirror the ethnic and cultural ‘diversity’ that is often celebrated in official rhetoric and the media.

In the mainstream Canadian narrative, ethnic diversity is positively connoted, a source of pride in the country. There has been little recognition of how this diversity intersects with economic, social, and health inequality. Hardly a speech by Justin Trudeau passes without the cliché, “diversity is our strength.” Diversity is presented in a simplified, propagandistic form, as mosaics and colours , that adorn the Canadian identity with no social and economic repercussions. Once Syrian refugees land in Canada, for example, they go on to become Canadian citizens, Trudeau contends proudly. At the airport, they are fused into one imagined, benevolent identity — their diversity fades out. Similarly, all social and racial disparity between the “newcomers” and their Canadian counterparts vanishes.

This rhetoric, not confined to the official narrative, is also  noticeable among insignificant  numbers of racialized and immigrants communities, including the Arab community in Canada. Members of the latter engage in eulogizing discourse and in promoting an imagined, romantic image of their new country and their young, handsome prime minister. This image was reinforced by Donald Trump, the seeming complete opposite of Justin Trudeau.

This appreciation is not entirely without merit. After all, a large number of those immigrants come from countries of extreme poverty, limited opportunities, fragmented societies, and stifling tyrannies. Canada’s federal political system, based on liberal democracy and political rights for both individuals and groups, is praiseworthy in many respects.

The problem, however, is that this particular facet seems to dominate discussions about Canada within these communities and it is often essentialized as a fixed,  core identity that displaces other ‘identities.’ One of these facets is the social and health disparities that have surfaced during the epidemic. Another is Canada’s foreign policy regarding the Middle East. Yet another is the censorship and media bias regarding certain topics.

The obsession with the official narrative about Canada ignores  some extremely dark chapters in the country’s history as a settler colonial state that practiced institutionalized discrimination against Indigenous peoples for a long time. This heinous chapter is not a distant history, undeserving of attention, as some might think. The last residential school — in which Indigenous children were forcibly taken from their families, erasing their culture and identity — closed in 1996. This was part of a deliberate cultural and political genocide that targeted the existence of the Indigenous  population. The state forcibly displaced these communities, targeted their leaders and banned them from practicing their language, customs, and rituals.

This is not to say that Canada has an opposite ‘wicked’ identity that we seek to reveal here. The immigrant community, and especially the Arab community, should grapple with the fact that Canada does not have a singular, essential identity, wicked or benign. Canada’s ‘identity’ changes with the agency of diverse actors, with shifting political and economic conditions, and in constant interaction with international politics. The ‘good’ that is felt or imagined today by certain immigrants is not inherent in Canada, nor is it a longstanding legacy. We, the ‘newcomers,’ may lose it at any time.

Realizing that does not require going back to the distant past. Many remember, some vividly, the years of former Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, who preceded Justin Trudeau in power. During his tenure, the Canadian political system appeared to immigrants less open and less tolerant, and to Muslims particularly, hostile. These communities were reconstructed as a security threat and experienced an immense pressure that originated at the top but later came from society as a whole, through growing distrust and suspicion.

This was not a problem solely made of the Conservatives and Stephen Harper. The Liberal Party is the one that introduced the Anti-Terrorism Act in 2001. That controversial act expanded powers of the government and of the Canadian security service, allowing for secret trials, preemptive detention, and expansive security and surveillance powers, all incompatible with international human rights conventions, but also with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms itself.

This violation of human rights did not remain abstract. The Syrian-Canadian Maher Arar was arrested in the United States in September 2002 on his way home to Canada from a family vacation. The US government, in collaboration with intelligence services in Canada, suspected him of being a member of Al Qaeda. They deported him, not to Canada, the passport on which he was travelling, but to Syria, where he was detained for nearly a year and tortured before being released through the efforts of his determined wife, not those of the Canadian government. One needs to ask how Maher Arar, a telecommunications engineer and a Canadian citizen, residing in Canada since 1987 before his arbitrary arrest, abruptly lost his rights as a Canadian citizen and was downgraded to a security threat by the state.

Canada has thus changed and with it changed the image of the immigrant community. The official narrative constantly constructs and reconstructs these communities. At times, they appear as outsiders; a drain on public resources and a threat to the country’s white, Christian identity. At other times, they are a rainbow on the state’s billboards, across Justin Trudeau’s speeches.

Just a few years ago, Canada was not as we know it today; it has and will continue to change. To be clear, change is not bound to be good, nor is it always progressive. A stagnant belief in the idealized, benevolent identity of Canada encourages passivity and might lead to losing current ‘gains.’ Most importantly, it discourages dreaming and working for a better future in which ‘diversity’ does not hide racial inequity and injustice.”