You know what time it is! It’s Friday MashUp!
Dr W Andy Knight wins Trailblazer Award
Dr W Andy Knight, one of the John Humphrey Centre board members, Professor of International Relations at the University of Alberta, was named Trailblazer by the Black Business and Professional Association of Canada. According to the news release:
Knight is only the seventh person to have received the trailblazer award since the Harry Jerome awards were created in 1983.
We love Dr Knight here at the JHC; his passion, knowledge and leadership has been a great asset to our organization and to us at the office. He is chair of our beloved Ignite Change Now! Global Youth Assembly and has a great job in leading it. Congratulations Dr Knight for winning this awesome reward and all the continued best for the future!
Polluted Water Kills more than all Violence: UN Report
There is a new report released by the United Nations Environmental Programme called Sick Water that indicates that polluted water causes more deaths than war violence, event current ones. In the press release, they stated that turning polluted waste-water into a clean, renewable resource is a key priority for the 21st century.
It also really presses home the point that water is a human right, contrary to the stance of the Canadian government. Without water, there is no possibility of survival. And without the possibility of survival, the most basic tenet of most Western democracies, the right to life, liberty and security (Canadian Charter) cannot be fulfilled. Without the ability to survive, there really is nothing else. And making survival dependent on wealth is elitist, not to mention morally and ethically wrong. It’s wrong to privatize water, not because you don’t have a right to make a profit, but rather, you don’t have a right to make a profit at the cost of millions of lives that depend on that water that is being dammed and bottled, or squandered in heavy industrial sludge.
Somali-Canadians call for Task Force into Alberta Slayings
This article focuses on the fact that many young Somali-Canadians from Ontario are coming to Alberta to deal drugs in Ft McMurray where the drug trade is pretty lucrative. The Somali community wants a task force to look into the reasons why the murders are not being solved (as there is a high rate of unsolved cases) and to discover, if there is any, pattern behind the slayings. Minister Allison Redford for Justice declined to say whether there would be or not but Premier Ed Stelmach evidently did not think it was necessary.
It should be noted here that many of the young men who were slain were Canadians. This article is an interesting look at the attitudes directed towards second-generation immigrant kids, who are still regarded and defined by their parents’ cultural background rather than their own Canadian backgrounds. In other words, they are still considered “immigrants” even though they were born in Canada and hold Canadian passports (if they have any, that is). They didn’t “come” from anywhere but here.
There will be people who blame the parents and while I agree that parents bear the burden of responsibility for raising their own children, they didn’t do it in a vacuum. It’s important to look at how the parents’ Canadian experience may have translated to how they were raising their kids. Were they forced to work more than one or two jobs to make ends meet, thereby spending no time with their kids? Were they treated poorly? How well did the kids do at school? What were their friends like? Who were their influencers?
Blaming immigration for situations like these is basically pulling wool over your eyes; it’s rather like saying if there were no immigration, the crime rate would go down because “clearly” only immigrants commit crimes.
That is, of course, patently ridiculous. It’s a false correlation to assume that immigration = crime and that criminals = immigrants. That is not to say there is no overlap but as it was said previously…some of these young men were Canadian born. They are not immigrants by definition and yet they are still criminals. So where did we go wrong? Maybe it’s time to look at access to resources and look at the rising problem of xenophobia in Canada.
That wraps ups Friday MashUp for March 22-26, 2010. See you next week and have a great weekend!
