Minorities Avoid The Fight (In Canada) ... Peter Worthington

All I know about the Asian Pacific Post, a giveaway newspaper published fortnightly in Vancouver with a circulation of about 160,000, is from two editorials it ran this year.

Started in 1993, the newspaper has won several awards for excellence, including a Jack Webster award as the best community newspaper, and although it is aimed at Canadians of Asian extraction, the editorials in question apply to every Canadian -- but are rarely reflected in the mainstream Canadian (or American) media.

In mid-August, the Post asked: "Why are all the Canadian soldiers being killed in Afghanistan white?"

Of 67 soldiers killed since the start of the mission in 2002, all but two have been Caucasian, and the other two black. The Post asks: "Where are our new Canadians from China, India, Japan, Korea, the Philippine and the rest of Asia?" Where indeed.

The newspaper answers its own question with quotes from visible minority Canadians, who explain they didn't come to Canada to fight, didn't want their kids in the military, even came here to escape compulsory military service in their own countries.

The editorial admonishes this attitude: "If we, as new Canadians, do not hesitate to fight for equal rights, we must also not hesitate to defend those rights ...

... We must permeate and be present in all aspects of Canada. That includes the Canadian Forces."

Within 10 years, 20% of the Canadian population will be from visible minorities. The military today has a target of 9% of its personnel being from a visible minority, yet barely 3% of our Armed Forces are from these minorities.

Irony is that military recruiting and advertising posters often show visible minorities "being used as role models to dispel fears of racism and other undeserving taboos about the military" when, in truth, it is "minority groups that are shunning our military."

In an earlier, related editorial, the Asian Pacific Post criticized affirmative action programs, which it called "the attempt to deal with malignant racism by instituting benign racism." A perceptive definition, if you ask me.

The issue in this case was the Richmond, B.C., fire department chief , proposing to launch an aggressive campaign to recruit women and visible minorities as firefighters.

Of 191 active firefighters in Richmond, only eight were what the Post calls "vis-mins." "So what?" the newspaper asks rhetorically. "We don't hear anyone screaming that they should only be rescued by an Asian fireman."

It goes on to deplore the "white man need not apply technique," when it comes to affirmative action hiring. The green light for this hiring program would mean that no white person would be hired in the Richmond fire department for the next five years, until minority quotas were filled.

The paper says "Affirmative action erodes and undervalues the genuinely earned achievements of women and members of the visible minority," arguing that "neither the employer nor employee can ever be certain whether the job was given because of colour or credentials."

The paper urges employers to "abandon the affirmative action quick-fix" and start to look at why visible minorities who come here with professional credentials, qualifications and experience, yet are relegated to driving taxis and working in grocery stores, and having "doors slammed in their face" when they seek professional jobs.

Affirmative action programs designed to exclude applicants on the basis of colour and not their credentials, constitutes "an insult to visible minorities," the Post opines. "Our message is simple; Recognize our credentials, not our colour."

Bravo, Asian Pacific Post! It's an attitude the rest of Canada's (North America's) mainstream media might emulate, had they the courage.

"The paper urges employers to 'abandon the affirmative action quick-fix' and start to look at why visible minorities who come here with professional credentials, qualifications and experience, yet are relegated to driving taxis and working in grocery stores, and having 'doors slammed in their face' when they seek professional jobs.

"Affirmative action programs designed to exclude applicants on the basis of colour and not their credentials, constitutes "an insult to visible minorities," the Post opines. "Our message is simple; Recognize our credentials, not our colour."

Many of our "professional standards", regulations and "skill qualifications" have been driven by unions and our professional guilds to protect incumbent job-holders from truly open competition from "others".

Working in the construction industry in the early 1970s one of my acquaintances was an intelligent, well spoken (English) man from Pakistan (a Christian to boot) who was working in the Estimating Department (where they read blueprints/revised blueprints and analyzed what the cost/cost changes would be). But, back home, also working mostly in English and with international construction firms, he was a college-educated (two degrees), working professional civil engineer. It was not his "race" or ethnicity that found him caught in a lower-skilled job, but the rules that favored how, domestically here, the incumbents had gained their positions - rules that failed to recognize their equivalents from other venues.

Almost 20 years later, as an IT director, I had a legal immigrant from Russia come to me on a programming job interview. After reading her resume and having already had our legal staff thoroughly check her background and the accuracy of her resume I asked her why in the heck she was seeking to be an entry-level programmer with me. Why the question? Because she had a Masters Degree in Biology, a Bachelors Degree in Statistical Theory, from the top University in the Ukraine and at the time she departed for the U.S. she was running her own bio-medical research project in a joint venture with teams from two foreign drug companies, one in Switzerland and one in England. Her English communication, verbally and in writing was flawless (she had begun to learn English at age seven).

I saw that, at the time of the interview, she was working upstate NY at a university bio-medical research lab. So I asked why the attempt to switch professions (she had gone to night-school to get a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science)? She said that in her job at the time she was no more than a peon; she simply was tasked with following up on other people's work, or doing the more tedious work shunted off to the under-graduates who worked there. In spite of her obvious academic and professional background and command of English, many opportunities had not, and seem likely to not, match her true abilities in the field she had the most experience in.

I took her on. She was never my greatest programmer or my worst, but in terms of shouldering her responsibilities in a timely and responsible fashion, she was one of my best employees. She left when she and her husband (also a Russian immigrant working in an IT job) decided to start their family and about three months before her first child was born.

Times may have changed since then, for some immigrants with skills, but when you ask most Taxi drivers in New York City about themselves - most are immigrants - most will tell you that they had a college education before they came here.

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