I keep thinking I have posted my last post this Saturday morning, this is simply stunning and has to be noted:
"Ever since I was there [in 1998], there was a guy who told us that one cafeteria was for whites, one was for black." But his eventual complaints, along with those of three other black workers, led to a damning decision recently by Quebec's Human Rights Tribunal against Centre Maraîcher Eugène Guinois Jr., one of Canada's largest commercial vegetable farms, located about 40 minutes southwest of Montreal. In her 32-page report, Judge Michèle Pauzé said she was "stunned, even scandalized" by the racism, neglect and segregation that took place at the 1,300-acre farm where Mr. Michel and scores of other black workers were hired to pick and process vegetables. The judge was so shocked by the case that she prefaced her decision with the phrase, "The events you are going to read happened here, in Quebec, during the years 2000 and 2001."While the Globe and Mail, instead of invoking the US south, could have as easily said this sad story sounded like something out of the segregationist elementary schools of forty or fifty years ago in my Nova Scotian hometown or the segregated movie theatres there then, too, the point is the same. Read the whole story and check the labels in your vegetable drawer.
Comments
Flea - April 30, 2005 2:22 PM
I had heard nothing about this. Sickening.
Arthur - April 30, 2005 8:05 PM
That's a pretty sad story.
Arthur - April 30, 2005 8:58 PM
my Nova Scotian hometown or the segregated movie theatres there then
I've heard those stories too from my mother-in-law. Surprised me.
After 9/11, I have had several Truroians yell at me 'Stupid Arab' and that kind of stuff. I brushed it off as ignorance.
There was also a case when somebody (invited in my house) told me I was a Paki and that I didn't belong in this country. I brushed that off as stupidity, but me (and my wife) kicked him out of the house. That was the only time I remember being angry with a fellow-Canadian.
Generally I think Nova Scotians (the ones in town, I should say) are pretty tolerant: there are always misfits in society, as the case you wrote about clearly demonstrates.
Alan - April 30, 2005 9:33 PM
Willow Street elementary had segregated entrances into the 60's and at the movies balconies were the only place African-Canadians were to sit as I understand, though I would be gladly disabused of that notion.