bob tarantino

British Association for Canadian Studies Conference

The good folks at the British Association for Canadian Studies were generous enough to accept my proposal for a panel at their Being, Becoming and Belonging: Multiculturalism, Diversity and Social Inclusion in Modern Canada conference, which is taking place here in Oxford at the end of March. My paper is entitled (actually, I suppose that should be rendered as will be entitled - still need to write the damn thing) “Free to deal as he may choose” – Why displacing “freedom of commerce” was a necessary condition to the creation of Canadian multiculturalism.  For a flavour of what it's going to look like, this was the proposal which I submitted.  I'll be presenting on March 30th - hecklers encouraged.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A black man in Montreal walks into a bar and orders a drink; the bartender says, “We don’t serve your kind here, get out.

If you’re waiting for a punch-line, there isn’t one. That’s a true story – actually two true stories, separated by about sixty years. There’s more to the stories, of course – the first time it occurred, in the late 1930s, the Canadian legal system, all the way up to the Supreme Court of Canada, told Fred Christie (and, by extension, all Canadians) that the owners of the bar had every right to refuse to serve him just because they did not like the colour of his skin (in a perfectly Canadian twist, the court decisions also hinged on whether “beer” could be considered “food”). When it happened again in 2003, the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal ordered the owners of the bar in question to pay a total fine of $16,000. How virtually identical cases resulted in such radically different decisions is a function of the institutional mechanisms, legal structures and cultural discourses which were disassembled and then constructed in the intervening years.

Using as frames of reference the Christie case and the Viola Desmond incident in Nova Scotia, this paper briefly explores the Canadian history of how freedom of contract became sublimated to concerns about the deleterious and pervasive effects of discrimination, and describes how only with the advent of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was Canadian common law irrevocably wrenched away from permitting discrimination housed under the guise of “freedom of contract”.

"jubilant at the effective nullification"

I always hesitate to point out the obvious, but the various purveyors of histrionics about Stephen Harper's motion to recognize "that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada" (note, not "Quebec", but the "Quebecois"), would be well-served by recalling that, just after he nearly lost the country in the 1995 referendum, Jean Chretien introduced the following motion in Parliament (that's the best source I can find at the moment):

Whereas the People of Quebec have expressed their desire for recognition of Quebec’s distinct society;

1) the House recognize that Quebec is a distinct society within Canada;

2) The House recognize that Quebec’s distinct society includes its French-speaking majority, unique culture and civil law tradition;

3) the House undertake to be guided by this reality;

4) the House encourage all components of the legislative and executive branches of government to take note of this recognition and be guided in their conduct accordingly.

The motion, on its face far more dangerous and a complete and utter abdication to the separatist demands then extant, resulted in... well, nothing, really.  Which is likely what the current motion will result in.  As you were.

"pounding on the door in Pall Mall"

People love their poppies.  Chris Selley weighs in with pertinent questions on the matter, contrasting the approaches of the Canadian and British Legions to the use by third parties of their registered poppy marks.  For previous discussion on this matter, see here.

Again with the Poppies

In 2005, Pierre Bourque received a letter from the Royal Canadian Legion asking him to remove the image of a poppy which he had put on his site to commemorate Remembrance Day.  I wrote a piece which was published by The Lawyers Weekly, which outlined the legal basis for the action taken by the Legion - as I explained in a post at the time on Let It Bleed, the Legion really doesn't have much choice in the matter: in order to protect their trade-mark rights in the poppy image, they basically have to protest whenever there is an unauthorized use of the poppy.

This year, the Legion, our cultural heritage and intellectual property rights are intersecting once again, as this story in the Globe and Mail relates, this time with respect to white poppies:

The Royal Canadian Legion is threatening to bring out its big guns — the lawyers — in a war with peace activists over poppies.

Veterans say the activists are unlawfully selling white poppies in a fundraising drive that violates trademark rights to the scarlet poppy, which they say belongs to the Legion.

Already, an Edmonton store owned by Michael Kalmanovitch that has been selling the so-called “poppies for peace” has been shipped proof by the Legion's intellectual property lawyer that the veterans association owns the image, regardless of the flower's colour, and has been asked to stop.

“If he [Kalmanovitch] doesn't, then we will proceed with further legal action,” explained Steven Clark, the Ottawa-based remembrance co-ordinator who oversees the poppy trademark for the Legion.

Oliver Kamm offers some background on the "white poppy" initiative (hat tip: Damian Penny).