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What I’m working on
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1. Revamping the website
A tech person is helping shape the website into what I want it to be! It’s quite complicated and I have no clue how people are expected to figure all this out on their own. But, I’m excited. I have many ideas. There has been much brainstorming and drafting and reference-compiling happening behind the scenes. I expect to be more prolific soon.
2. Helping
I had tried to put my time toward “official” volunteering but I was repeatedly thwarted. There was the legal org that acted like a volunteer writer requires the same vetting as a paid hire. And the local garden labourers who said they could use my help and then ghosted me. And the union that has repeatedly ignored me and either let the file go dormant or stopped updating their website. It’s been very frustrating. So, I’m doing casual helping work instead, for friends and neighbours, and strangers both local and remote. Whatever I can do where skills align and spoons allow. It might not impress on a résumé, but it makes an actual difference.
3. Learning
My current areas of focus include psychology, discrimination, current events and governance, technology, and cooking. I’m trying to balance the doomed and depressing with the hopeful and useful. There are some excellent resources out there I will probably be referencing in future posts, by which I generally mean materials produced by experts, whistleblowers, and those with lived experience, not artificially generated garbage and vacuous government talking points.
4. Healing
This takes a lot of dedicated time. Harmful beliefs and practices do not spontaneously resolve, particularly when so many are antagonistic to healing (including governments and employers and judgmental strangers). I’m lucky to have time to dedicate to this, and access to non-traditional coaches. I wish more people did.
5. Living
I put living on pause while I was at my most “productive.” It’s depressing how hard it is to really start living now. Spending time outdoors between thunderstorms and heat waves and tornado warnings, before the wildfire smoke blows this way. Timing what I need to do around grid failures, staff shortages and supply chain interruptions. Calculating which activities are worth the risk of temporary covid and long covid. I had really hoped for less dystopia. But, the world is what it is, and I plan to spend my time on things that matter, say no to things that cause harm, and speak my mind all over the place.
But yeah, not so many published posts this particular month.
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Little flickers of connection
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Decades ago, I made a trip to Toronto to see a boy (and possibly also a band; I’m efficient like that). The boy had stuff to deal with one day of my visit and I found myself downtown alone with no responsibilities.
What I decided to do was go to the CBC Radio building, and once there I somehow talked flagship program As It Happens into letting me hang out for a bit. I was doing a lot of work in campus print and radio at the time, so I guess that’s some explanation for their generosity in agreeing I could just wander into their headquarters and pester them with questions.
It was an amazing and surreal experience. I talked to producers and saw the actual studio (!), in which was working one of the actual hosts (!!!). I learned about the daily process of putting the show together. The only question I couldn’t get answered: “How much is As It Happens’ phone bill?” (It looked like the person I asked hadn’t thought to wonder this, not like the answer was confidential.)
In that same era, I was going to a lot of shows and interviewing a lot of bands. One day I struck up a conversation with, if I remember correctly, the sound guy for a touring west coast band I really liked. I must have asked a technical question that led to us enthusiastically discussing soundboards because he asked if I wanted to go see some tech on the tour bus. I did! It was cool.
Some people have since said, “You got onto a bus alone with a strange man who was only in town for one day?” Yup! I am genuinely interested in how things work behind the scenes. I might follow a stranger into an empty factory at night if they said they had conveyor belts to show me. I have so far not been murdered or even mistreated by the vast majority of strangers.
Most of my stories are smaller. A repair person who was happy to show and tell. Other pedestrians wanting to share over something we both noticed. Little flickers of connection between genuinely interested people. They seem so important in an angry world.
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Racism against a Supreme Court Justice
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There is some shockingly racist news out of Québec: “The Quebec government is requesting that Supreme Court Justice Mahmud Jamal recuse himself from hearing the challenge to the province’s secularism law because he was board president for one of the plaintiffs.”
Let’s start with some info about recusal. It is absolutely appropriate for the presiding judge to recuse themself when there could be even an appearance of conflict of interest, so that justice is seen to be done. But asking for recusal is a big deal and the conflict of interest alleged better be legitimate.
This is not.
Justice Jamal was indeed briefly the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, which was indeed one of many, many entities involved in the case à la cour d’appel and is also expected to be one of the many, many entities involved in the case if the Supreme Court of Canada grants leave.
It seems to me an incredible leap from “was Chair of the Board” to “has insider legal knowledge of the case that could result in unfairness to one of the parties.” The org’s paid, permanent and full-time Executive Director and General Counsel? Maybe. Counsel of record, obviously. The guy who was Chair of the Board for nine months while working on his own cases as a litigation partner at Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt? Doubtful. I have never known a Chair of the Board to be that involved in the day-to-day business of the organisation. This fear does not seem based in reality.
It should also be noted that recusal makes a lot more sense when you’re talking about one single presiding judge. If you have NINE Supreme Court judges hearing a case, and one of them at one point was Chair of the Board for one of the many, many intervenors, what actual risk of bias do you face? Basically none. I do not think this is legally a good faith request.
If, however, you are motivated by paranoia about defending your law that you have admitted through the use of the notwithstanding clause is racist, then yeah, it absolutely makes sense to try to find some way to discredit the first racialized person ever appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada. He’s even studied the Quran, and this law is known to have a particularly discriminatory effect on Muslim women! It’s not hard to hear the naked political fear-mongering behind the recusal request, as weakly as they’ve tried to clothe it in a fig-leaf of concern about Impartial Justice.
It is certainly possible that, with his personal experience and his professional expertise, Justice Jamal could have a different point of view about Québec’s admittedly racist law than would the 146 years of predominantly Christian white dude judges who were appointed before him. That is progress.
Diversity of experience on the Court can only be a threat to our system of government if the actual goal of government is to exclude people. I would hope the other either eight Justices would understand that that’s not a goal worth supporting, even without Justice Jamal’s perspective.
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Compassion
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I’ve started taking a year-long course on compassion. I find there’s a shortage of compassion in the world and, you know, be the change you want to see.
It’s got me reflecting on the nature of judgment, and what happens with unmet needs. They don’t stop being needs just because they’re unmet. I think they just take on additional dimensions, like trauma and dissociation and resentment and shame.
It seems obvious to me that compassion is a healthier response to human needs – our own and others’ – than scorn, dismissal, indifference, etc. But, the course points out, judgment is itself a response to a need, and understanding what that need is can lead to connection and growth.
I will admit that I reach the limits of my compassion when the question is, for example, billionaires and employers and politicians who exploit desperate people and destroy the environment because they personally expect to be fine. I would find it difficult not to throw scare quotes around the word “needs” when it comes to the motivations of capitalists and narcissists and fascists.
I also have trouble maintaining a compassionate patience with people who are causing obvious harm and seem unwilling to adapt to an approach that causes less. I draw a pretty strong line at pretending everything is fine when it isn’t. My need for truth is too strong.
Perhaps this is where the compassion course will meet up with boundaries, which is a topic I’ve done intensive self-study on after decades of being told my needs were irrelevant and burdensome and wrong. They’re not. They’re human and they’re me.
I, a human, deserve to have my needs met, with compassion. You, a human, do too.
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Disability Pride Month
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It is, the internet tells me, Disability Pride Month.
Disability is a topic I’ve read and thought about a lot lately, and ableism too.
Consciously or not, we often treat “disabilities” as a flaw in a person, like they didn’t try hard enough and should be ashamed. There is societal judgment and resentment, like they’re a burden. Like they are lesser humans. Like they should be grateful for “support” that fails to meet their basic needs. Like it wouldn’t be such a big deal if they just died.
One useful term I’ve learned from disability advocates is “pre-disabled,” which refers to people who are currently “able-bodied” but it’s only a matter of time. Disabilities increase with age, and long covid will disable many more.
Phrased differently, the term “pre-disabled” emphasizes that being able to function without accommodation in the world as it is set up is a temporary state. Instead, we treat it like a virtue.
Which brings me to the difference between the “medical” and “social” models of disability.
The “medical” model tends to be the conceptual default: the “disability” is situated in (is a “flaw” in) an individual’s body. Medical professionals are positioned as the gatekeepers of accommodation under this model. Often the disabled person has to meet ableist standards to get even a shred of help. Many report experiencing scorn and judgment from medical gatekeepers, rather than support and understanding.
In contrast, the “social model of disability” recognizes that the problem lies in the disconnect between an individual’s needs and how society is structured:
For many people with disabilities, the main disadvantage they experience does not stem directly from their bodies, but rather from their unwelcome reception in the world, in terms of how physical structures, institutional norms, and social attitudes exclude and/or denigrate them.
“Rethinking disability: the social model of disability and chronic disease,” Sara Goering, 2015.
Society could choose to design things inclusively, for a variety of bodies and experiences, rather than accommodating only a narrow subset of humanity and demeaning and abandoning those who don’t fit. But that would take thoughtfulness and – heaven forbid! – sometimes even budget.
Society is not becoming more compassionate towards people who don’t fit. The pre-disabled would do well to think about how they themselves want to be treated when they’re no longer able to meet standards of productivity. Perhaps Disability Pride Month is a good time to start that work.
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About the author
CKirkby
- earned degrees in language / literature and law (but is not currently a lawyer or a journalist);
- worked for over a decade on Parliament Hill;
- misses writing; and
- appreciates thoughtful comments, en anglais ou en français. (Email addresses are not published.)
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