By Nicole Findlay
Mention Toronto’s Jane and Finch, and gun-toting gangs preying on children immediately springs to mind. Although firearms related murders are not restricted to that community alone, it is viewed as an anomaly, one more closely associated with racism in the United States, than a product of Canadian marginalization.
Students entering their first year at Carleton and enrolled in Katherine Arnup’s FYSM Contemporary Controversies in Canadian Society will tackle issues of inequality, race and poverty. In the process, they will upset their own perceptions – most students begin the class with the assumption that we are all equal in Canada.
“They don’t like me very much during the first term because I challenge what they think they know,” Arnup laughs. “Many say they have never experienced racism, but they tend to be white, middle class students who wouldn’t be exposed to difference.”
Arnup’s seminar will examine the colonial policies that shaped Canada’s immigration policy, including slavery and the Chinese head tax. Far from upholding an ideal of racial tolerance and equality, students are shocked to discover that Canada was complicit in the slave trade. The little-known practice fell from favour not as a result of superior ideals, says Arnup, but the short agricultural season which made housing slaves financially impractical.
The course material covers racism and discrimination in immigration policies, residential schools for aboriginal children, and climate change denial. As the fall months go by, students’ notions of Canada are upended. Arnup is sympathetic to them.
“I can remember the day I was reading a Globe and Mail the article and I realized that inequality did exist in Canada. I wanted to go back to my dreams of being a rich socialist!”
During the second half of the full-year seminar, students are ready to delve into more personally challenging content, as they begin to explore issues of death and dying, hospice care, and euthanasia.
“If you don’t die young, most of us will end up disabled in some way,” Arnup says. This is a notion that is impossible to fathom in the throes of immortal youth. Many of her students may have experienced the death of a grandparent or in rarer cases a friend, but most feel immune to death themselves and they rarely talk about it with friends or classmates.
Instead of despair, Arnup hopes the seminar’s content will imbue a sense of engagement among students in shaping their own, and Canada’s future.