KEYNOTE ADDRESS
AT THE ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE CENTRE FOR CANADIAN STUDIES,
JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY, FEBRUARY 2019
This article is an updated version of the keynote address.
THOUSANDS OF CANADIAN WOMEN AND GIRLS BELONGING TO INDIGENOUS communities were murdered or just disappeared since the 1970s. The victims do not include those killed earlier, since the arrival of the first European settlers in Canada in the sixteenth century. The unconscionable crimes of the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries are recorded in a 1,200 page report of a Canadian government investigation released on June 3, 2019. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) was ordered by the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and has completed its investigations after almost three years of work involving interviews and participation of more than 2,380 people.[1]
The report minces no words in calling the murders and disappearances “genocide,” but Trudeau was initially guarded at its official release. At that event, despite calls from some persons in the audience urging him to say “genocide,” Trudeau did not. But later the same day at another event, he did.[2] He declared, “Earlier this morning, the national inquiry formally presented their final report, in which they found that the tragic violence that Indigenous women and girls have experienced amounts to genocide.”
The record shows that Trudeau is not afraid of mentioning the politically sensitive word, genocide. Back in 2015, after a Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its report on the Indian residential school system, he called on the ruling Conservative government to take action address the “cultural genocide.” The violence cited in the National Inquiry directly affects First Nations, Inuit, and Métis women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people (two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, queer, questioning, intersex and asexual).
It may be politically hazardous for a politician to use the word genocide, even though the crimes were committed on a large scale, with the police doing little or nothing to prevent them or apprehend the murderers. But what has happened is a crime against humanity. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as actions “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”[3] Within the purview of this definition are murder, serious mental and physical harm, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” imposing measures to prevent births, and forcibly transferring children out of a group.
Trudeau has confirmed that his government would develop an action plan to address the “absolutely unacceptable” levels of violence against Indigenous women and girls. The report “would not be placed on a shelf to collect dust,” he reassured the Indigenous people. “You have my word that my government will turn the inquiry’s calls for justice into real, meaningful, Indigenous-led action . . . we must continue to decolonise our existing structures.”
The C$ 92 million inquiry was launched in 2016 with a mandate to take an in-depth look into the underlying social, economic, cultural, institutional, and historical causes of violence. It is estimated that 4,000 indigenous women and girls have disappeared or been murdered in Canada since the 1970s, but the inquiry report says the true number may be impossible to establish.
A notorious serial killer, Robert Pickton, who was jailed in 2007, confessed that he butchered 49 women at his farm near Vancouver. It has been suggested that police ignored the disappearances because the women were believed to be sex workers belonging to the indigenous community.
Tina Fontaine, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl,
was murdered in August 2014
The death of Helen Betty Osborne, a nineteen-year-old Cree Aboriginal woman, abducted and murdered in a street in Manitoba in 1971, generated outrage. The immediate event that forced the government to take action was the killing of Tina Fontaine, a fifteen-year-old school girl, who was murdered in August 2014, forty-three years after Osborne’s murder, sparking collective anger and widespread demand for a national inquiry. The murders attracted global attention, and by 2015, the United Nations was calling for a public inquiry, and Canadians were demanding reconciliation with their indigenous people. Trudeau officially launched the inquiry one year after winning the 2015 general election.
The chief commissioner of the inquiry, Marion Buller, argues that the calls for justice are not just “recommendations” but are “legal imperatives” that must be implemented to help end a cycle of violence.[4] “This report is about deliberate race, identity and gender-based genocide,” she explains. The inquiry found that Indigenous women and girls were twelve times more likely to be murdered or to go missing than members of any other demographic group in Canada, and sixteen times more likely to be slain or to disappear than white women. Indigenous women and girls comprised almost 25 percent of all female homicide victims in the country between 2001 and 2015, even though Indigenous people make up only 4 percent of the population. In 2014, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) identified almost 1,200 cases between 1980 and 2012. Alarmingly the thousands of cases of deaths and disappearances were not properly investigated by the police.
Buller acknowledges that the country faces “a crisis” and a “national emergency” as the murders and disappearances are continuing. The report recommends sweeping reforms to the justice system and policing, including stiffer penalties for men who carry out spousal or partner abuse. It proposes hiring more Indigenous judges to ensure Indigenous people are represented in positions of power in the criminal justice system. It recommends creating a separate court system for the Indigenous population.
Trudeau promises to work with Indigenous partners and turn the recommendations into concrete Indigenous-led action. The National Inquiry report asks all provincial governments to immediately transform Indigenous policing from merely delegating to self-governance and self-determination over policing.
If enough funds are not allocated to improve the justice and policing system, “we all [will] knowingly enable the continuation of genocide in our own country,” Buller declares. Michèle Audette, one of the commissioners and a former president of the Quebec Native Women's Association, explains that the RCMP needs to be reformed. The inquiry recommends the establishment of “robust and well-funded Indigenous civilian police oversight bodies” to prevent police negligence and misconduct in rape and sexual assault cases. The national police force has merely offered an apology so far.
The Trudeau government has committed to major reforms for Indigenous people, offering new funds for housing on reserves, revamp of the child and family services system, legislation for an Indigenous languages strategy, and more self-government.
“Decolonising Canadian History”
The National Inquiry report faults a lingering colonial attitude, and urges all Canadians to “decolonise” by “learning the true history of Canada.” Canadians must “learn about and celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ history, cultures, pride, and diversity, acknowledging the land you live on and its importance to local Indigenous communities, both historically and today.”
The “race-based genocide has been empowered by colonial structures, evidenced notably by the Indian Act, the Sixties Scoop, residential schools, and breaches of human and Inuit, Métis and First Nations rights, leading directly to the current increased rates of violence, death, and suicide in Indigenous populations,” it report declares.
The government of Canada currently recognises only five genocides in history: the Jewish Holocaust of 1933-45, the Ukrainian Famine and Genocide (Holodomor, 1932-33), the Armenian genocide of 1915, the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995. Canada ignores the Cambodian genocide owing to political reasons because Ottawa was aligned to U.S. policy that not only recognised the Pol Pot regime as the legitimate ruler of Cambodia, but also cast as invaders the liberating forces of Vietnam that ousted the Khmer Rouge. From the official Canadian perspective, the mass slaughter of its own Indigenous people does not belong in this category.
A number of authoritative studies have explored the history of the Canadian genocide, and provided much evidence of crimes committed: The Genocide Machine in Canada: The Pacification of the North, by Robert Davis and Mark Zannis; American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World, by David E. Stannard, and Accounting for Genocide: Canada’s Bureaucratic Assault on Aboriginal People, by Dean Neu and Richard Therrien. The Indigenous population was exterminated not just physically, but their lifestyles were destroyed by the seizure of their lands, separation of children, and assault on women.
The colonial social and economic structures installed by the European settlers allowed the Canadian genocide to occur. Many witnesses interviewed in the National Inquiry report believe that “this country is at war,” and that Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people are under siege. Racist colonial attitudes justified Canada’s policies of assimilation, which sought to eliminate the identities of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples as distinct peoples and communities. Colonial violence, as well as racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people became embedded in everyday life. Depicted and denounced in these ways, the Indigenous people were subjected to violence, through institutions of the health care system, the justice system, the laws, and structures of Canadian society.
In such a social milieu, many Indigenous people came to accept violence as normal, while Canadian society was disinterested in addressing the issue. A standard response from most White Canadians that I have spoken to is, “We never did any of this stuff. It happened way before we were even born.” They are partially correct: they were certainly not around in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, but they were present when the violence went on in the twentieth, and they are ignoring the murders happening now.
In their testimonies, Indigenous women and girls argue that oppression against them is primarily based on colonialism, racism, and gender. The families of the victims and survivors declared that their experiences were rooted in colonialism in four ways. The four pathways that maintain colonial violence are: historical, multigenerational and intergenerational trauma; social and economic marginalisation; maintaining the status quo and institutional lack of will; and ignoring the agency and expertise of Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people.
The Indigenous people are not defenseless either, in theory at least: they are armed with global agreements such as the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Convention on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. These conventions and declarations may not be technically binding, but they can help Indigenous people to hold governments to account.
Colonisation in Canadian History: The “Empty Spaces” Justification
The process of European colonisation of the geography now known as Canada started with sixteenth century “explorers,” who used the justification of terra nullius (unoccupied land) and the Doctrine of Discovery to denounce the Indigenous people as savages and claim rights to their land. Christian missionaries questioned the leadership role of Indigenous women and the Indigenous notions of gender. From 1650 to 1815, the First Nations shared power equally with the Europeans, but Confederation in 1867 changed this relationship. For First Nations women, the Indian Act tied a woman’s Indian Status to her husband. The colonisers began policing to exert control over Indigenous peoples, particularly First Nations and Métis women, by casting women as “a menace” to society and stereotyping them as prostitutes. These denunciations made it easy for police misconduct, such as rape and murder, to go unpunished.
The oppression continued from 1883 until as recently as 1996 when the Indian residential school system enforced a patriarchal Christian system that devalued women, enforced homophobia and transphobia, and exposed them to abuse. First Nations women were subjected to forced sterilisation, poverty and marginalisation, and were targeted by the Sixties Scoop and ongoing child welfare policies.
Métis share a common experience of colonisation with First Nations. The encounter of Métis women with colonialism began with the important roles they played in the fur trade. Soon there were fears around miscegenation or “race-mixing” and the Canadian government’s poor response to the two Métis resistances of 1869 and 1885. Métis girls, moreover, had different experiences of residential schools, with some being sent to residential schools while others were denied schooling entirely. They also had colonial encounters/experiences within Métis settlements and towns, the Sixties Scoop and other failed government interventions.
An unforgettable feature of Métis experience is their existence as “forgotten people” that were excluded from many of the programmes and services offered to their First Nations relatives, which directly encouraged violence. The colonisers’ efforts to separate them from their First Nations relatives through the apparatus of the state further created a hierarchy of identity, resulting in conflicts within the Métis community and drawing attention away from the ongoing marginalisation faced by Métis women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people.
For Inuit, the experience of colonialism began with interactions with White Europeans (whalers, fishermen and the RCMP). After a brief period of non-interference, damaging colonial encounters began in the 1940s, although much later than in First Nations and Métis communities. The Europeans exploited the power imbalance between Inuit and state governments in many ways, such as through forced relocations, attempts at Christianising, traumatising Inuit children in residential and federal day schools and tuberculosis sanatoriums, removing Inuit women from their communities to give birth, forced or coerced sterilisation, coerced relocations into centralised settlements, and the sled dog slaughter.
The troubled histories of gendered and racialised colonial encounter shows that the policies, practices and stereotypes confronting First Nations, Inuit, and Métis women and gender-diverse people in present-day Canada were put in place five centuries ago. The violence against Indigenous women and girls is a catastrophe of colonisation that has been occurring for centuries. The old forms of colonialism have created the social structures for violence to persist under a newer rubric of neo-colonialism.
The Conservatives Lay Seige to Multiculture: “Too Asian?”
The leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Andrew Scheer, disputes the use of the word “genocide” to reference the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.[5] Scheer declares, “I believe that the tragedy that has happened to this vulnerable section of our society is its own thing. I don’t believe it falls into the category, to the definition of genocide.”
It is certainly not an “own thing,” or an intra-Indigenous community issue. Calling it their “own thing” is an attempt to pass the responsibility on to the Indigenous people themselves. The violence was systemic, organised and sustained; it was an effort to destroy settled Indigenous societies.
The National Inquiry report has been released at a time of growing conservatism. A wave of White Canadian anxiety is raising its extremist profile in the centres of liberal learning in Canada. A burgeoning battalion of young student activists in Canadian universities are focused on destabilising the very blueprint of diversity which is protected by the Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1985.[6] These subversive moves are occurring in reaction to multiculturalism and inclusiveness pursued by the Trudeau government, which has demonstrated its commitment and investment in embracing the fringes and bringing minorities into the centre with equitable distribution of resources and sound policymaking. The government has been working to increase employment opportunities for refugees, newcomers, the Indigenous people, and women, and encouraging education among newly landed immigrants, particularly those from Asia.
There had to be a reaction. Inflammatory posters calling for the establishment of a “White Students Union” appeared at the University of Toronto, York University, and Ryerson University campuses in September 2015. They were promptly taken down. U of T did not license the posters. Many posters appeared along Toronto’s St. George Street and Bloor Street on January 21, 2019. One poster had this message: “If everyone is Canadian, then to be Canadian means nothing.” They had been put up by a White nationalist group, “Students for Western Civilization,” founded on the specious claim that universities have fostered “extreme antagonism and hostility towards white people.”[7] According to a blog post on the group’s website about the campaign’s intent, “Multiculturalism and a Canadian National Identity are mutually exclusive.”
In this article, I use current ideas of Nationhood and Nationalism—as employed by prime minister Justin Trudeau and his father, prime minister Pierre Trudeau, in their speeches, interviews with Canadian scholars, activists, cultural producers, and politicians—to unpack the rise of rightwing student initiatives and to locate the impulse, contagion and dangers of such a destructive force. The term “Extreme Multiculturalism,” currently used by the rightwing, is disturbing the easygoing, generally accepting nature of the average Canadian.
As a Canadian who spent eleven years in the Toronto academy and taught a course on Asian Cultures in Canada, endowed by Senator and Chancellor Emeritus of the University of Toronto, Dr. Vivienne Poy, I had felt the tug of war in the classroom that bordered on the beginnings of a battle between Anglo-Canadian students and South Asian students who were part of a thirty-strong final year undergraduate class that was studying Michael Ondaatje’s works.
The world of Literature and the Arts in Canada is witnessing a remarkable appropriation by minority writers, performers, and artists. The titles that are coming out of Canadian publishers’ lists are knocking Anglo-Canadian cultural producers off their pedestals. Newer authors such as Anoush Irani, Sheniz Janmohamed, and Doyali Islam are crowding the bookshelves. What is even more visible is the way the landscape of Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area has changed. More Asian stores with halal meat, fish and even vegetables are altering the culture of the city.
The vibrant Mississauga campus of the University of Toronto boasts a stunning demographic of eighty percent students who are not Anglo-Canadian, where hijabs are more visible than skirts, and where the visible minority wields majority power. In suburbs like Mississauga, with the shutting down of traditional grocers like Michaelangelo which was the bedrock of all tastes that are Canadian, and the opening of ethnic stores for immigrants, the landscape of the cities has become brown, yellow and chutneyfied. Michaelangelo wound up after many years, and sold their iconic Italian brand to a new owner that restructured the store. It now stocks all manner of Asian spices, meats and staples.
The magazine, Maclean’s, inquired tactlessly in a cover story in November 2010, whether Canada had become “Too Asian.”[8] Many Asians were outraged, and responded, “Not Asian enough.” The article was initially titled “Too Asian: Some frosh don’t want to study at an Asian university,” but it was re-titled with an added question mark “Too Asian?” and then finally amended to “The enrollment controversy: Worries that efforts in the U.S. to limit enrollment of Asian students in top universities may migrate to Canada.” The ducking and dodging act by Maclean’s shows that the magazine was reacting to growing criticism of its underlying message that white students feared the performance of Asians in the universities.
True North Grit of Trudeau
The resurgence of the rightwing deeply worries Trudeau. High on his reform agenda was to find ways of ending the cycle of violence against the Indigenous people. In a speech at the UN General Assembly in September 2017, Trudeau accepted Canada’s lapses in glossing over human rights’ concerns. “I know that Canada has a complicated history with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” he stated.[9] “We actively campaigned and voted against it, then endorsed it in the most half-hearted way possible, calling it an ‘aspirational document.’” The Declaration, he underscored, “is not an aspirational document. It means much more than that to the Indigenous Peoples and others who worked so hard, for so long, to bring the Declaration to life,” and it provides “the necessary principles, norms, and standards for reconciliation to flourish in twenty-first century Canada.” To the pleasant surprise of the UN, he declared: “That’s not an aspiration, that’s a way forward.” Canada had, in 2016, corrected its position on the Declaration, announcing that it was now a full supporter of the Declaration, without qualification.
Sustainable Development Goals for the Indigenous
Canada and 192 other UN member states adopted the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs in September 2015, to implement a 15-year global framework centred on an ambitious set of 17 SDGs, 169 targets and over 230 indicators. The 2030 Agenda envisions a secure world free of poverty and hunger, with full and productive employment, access to quality education and universal health coverage, the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls, and an end to environmental degradation. This does appear to be an unattainable goal.
Yet, Canada has made a start by bringing safe and clean drinking water to all Indigenous communities as part of the SDG #6 (clean water and sanitation). Under SDG #4 (quality education), it is making new investments to close the gap in First Nations education, and new education agreements that recognise the power and authority of First Nations communities to develop and control education systems, and to run those systems by communities, and for communities. The new investments are expected to do the groundwork for progress on SDG #8 (decent work and economic growth). The Trudeau government has constructed many new homes for the Indigenous people in order to fulfill SDG #11 (making communities safe and sustainable places to live). It is adhering to SDG #5 (combating gender-based violence and giving women and girls equal opportunities to succeed).
For Canada, an inclusive approach to implementing the SDGs will need to span the whole of Canadian society in order to really “leave no one behind,” particularly those groups who are marginalised or vulnerable. They include, apart from the Indigenous peoples, women and girls, immigrant and refugee populations, people with disabilities and individuals identifying with the LGBTQ2 community. Many of Canada’s priorities and programmes, both domestically and internationally, are already well aligned with the 2030 Agenda.
Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy supports the main principle of the SDGs, through its focus on the poorest and most vulnerable, including women and girls. By prioritising gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls, Canada supports SDG #5 (gender equality). Canada’s support for the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change, investments in clean economic growth and investments in international climate finance all contribute to SDG #7 (affordable and clean energy), SDG #11 (sustainable cities and communities), SDG #12 (responsible consumption and production), and SDG #13 (climate action).
Canada presented its report at the UN High Level Political Forum in New York on July 17, 2018, highlighting Canada’s progress and action plan to achieve the 2030 SGDs at home and abroad.[10] The UN expects Canada to play an important role in strengthening multilateralism worldwide. Canada’s belated support of the UN won the appreciation of the global community largely because Trudeau’s backing had helped to confront the attack on multilateralism led by the U.S president, Donald Trump, who used his speech to the UN General Assembly in September 2018 to tout his “America First” approach, reject globalism and demand respect for U.S. sovereignty. The Trump speech was an affront to the majority of UN member states that believe in the institution, and in multilateralism.
More recently, Canada was among 160 countries that signed the Global Compact, the first-ever UN agreement on international migration, in December 2018.[11] The non-binding agreement aims to mitigate factors that drive migrants out of their home countries, reduce the risks they face if they are forced to leave and create conditions that allow migrants to contribute to society.
Canadian conservatives, however, criticised the government’s actions on migration. The conservatives argue that Canada should not have signed the Global Compact given the Liberal government’s “severe inability” to manage the arrival of thousands of asylum seekers at the Canada-U.S. border over the past two years.[12] Some 38,000 asylum seekers have illegally entered Canada, mostly through Quebec, since January, 2017, putting pressure on Canada’s refugee system. The UN, however, applauded Canada’s leadership on the migration issue, particularly the federal government’s decision to welcome Syrian refugees and its support for the Global Compact. UN officials argue that more countries need to adopt Canada’s immigration policies and open their doors to refugees.
In conclusion, I must mention the Booker Prize winning novelist, Michael Ondaatje, a Canadian resident of Sri Lankan origin, who has explored the vast chasm between Asians and Europeans, particularly between the Ceylonese and the Europeans in Sri Lanka in his seminal work, Running in the Family:
Everyone was vaguely related and had Sinhalese, Tamil, Dutch, British and Burgher blood in them going back in many generations. There was a large social gap between this circle and the Europeans and English who were never part of the Ceylonese community. The English were seen as transients, snobs and racists, and were quite separate from those who had intermarried and who lived here permanently. My father always claimed to be a Ceylon Tamil, though that was probably more valid about three centuries earlier.”[13]
Ondaatje draws our attention to a colonial mindset that continues to exist across geographies and cultures, reminding us not to repeat the errors of history. The Trudeau government has begun the process of facing Canada’s blotchy record of racial and gendered genocide. But many Canadians remain in denial about their past. The National Inquiry is a good first step towards reconciliation.
Julie Banerjee Mehta holds M.A. and PhD degrees in English Literature and South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto. A specialist in world literature, cultural and diaspora studies, she currently teaches postcolonial literature at Loreto College, Calcutta, and has taught at the University of Toronto and York University in Canada. She is widely published. Some of her book chapters on the themes of identity, diaspora, and foodways are, “Hybrid Brown Gaijin is a “Distinguished Alien” in Sakoku Japan” (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011); and “Toronto’s Multicultured Tongues” (University of Toronto Press, 2012). Her work has also been published by Oxford University Press, New York, and the Atlantic Press. Her books on Southeast Asia are Dance of Life: The Mythology, History, and Politics of Cambodian Culture (Singapore: Graham Brash, 2001); and Strongman: The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish International Asia, 2013). She was awarded the distinction of being one of sixteen most influential South Asians in Canada when her translation of Tagore’s Dak Ghar was performed at the Berkeley Street Theatre in Toronto. She has just completed her first novel.
[1] “Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Children.” https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/final-report/.
[2] Jesse Ferreras, “Trudeau changes course, says ‘genocide’ when citing MMIWG report’s findings,” Global News, June 3, 2019.
[3] “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” Office of the High Commissioner, United Nations Human Rights. https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crimeofgenocide.aspx.
[4] John Paul Tasker, “Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Issues Final Report with Sweeping Calls for Change,” CBC, June 3, 2019.
[5] Kerri Breen, “Andrew Scheer rejects use of ‘genocide’ in reference to Indigenous women, girls,” Global News, June 9, 2019
[6] Canadian Multiculturalism Act, 1985, Justice Laws of Canada. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-18.7/page-1.html.
[7] Andy Takagi, “White nationalist posters found around UTSG,” The Varsity, January 21, 2019.
https://thevarsity.ca/2019/01/21/white-nationalist-posters-found-around-utsg/.
[8] Stephanie Findlay and Nicholas Kohler, “The Enrollment Controversy,” Maclean’s, November 10, 2010.
[9] “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Address to the 72nd Session of the UN General Assembly,” September 21, 2017. https://pm.gc.ca/eng/news/2017/09/21/prime-minister-justin-trudeaus-address-72th-session-united-nations-general-assembly.
[10] Canada’s Voluntary National Review – Report Synopsis. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/memberstates/canada.
[11] Refugees and Migrants. https://refugeesmigrants.un.org/migration-compact; and “Canada, more than 160 other countries adopt UN migration pact,” CIC News, December 10, 2019. https://www.cicnews.com/2018/12/canada-more-than-160-countries-adopt-un-migration-pact-1211591.html#gs.hkp1z0.
[12] Michelle Zilio, “Canada can help strengthen multilateralism amid attack on international institutions: UN,” The Globe and Mail, November 26, 2018.
[13] Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (London/Berlin/New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 31-32.