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Results: 1 - 15 of 153
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
[Member spoke in Mohawk as follows:]
Wa’tkwanonhwerá:ton í:se néne kèn:’en sewatia’tarò:ron. Kwe kaweienón:ni.
[Mohawk text translated as follows:]
I thank you all who are gathered here. Hello Kaweienón:ni.
Ms. Margaret (Kaweienón:ni) Peters:
[Witness spoke in Mohawk as follows:]
Kwe.
[Mohawk text translated as follows:]
Hello.
Mr. Marc Miller:
[Member spoke in Mohawk as follows:]
oh niiohtonhátie?
[Mohawk text translated as follows:]
How is it going along?
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View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
[Member spoke in Mohawk as follows:]
Wenhniserí:io wáhi!
[Mohawk text translated as follows:]
It is a nice day isn’t it!
Ms. Margaret (Kaweienón:ni) Peters:
[Witness spoke in Mohawk as follows:]
Nahò:ten?
[Mohawk text translated as follows:]
What?
Mr. Marc Miller:
[Member spoke in Mohawk as follows:]
Wenhniserí:io.
[Mohawk text translated as follows:]
It is a nice day.
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View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
I first off want to acknowledge the two fluent language speakers here who are members of Parliament, members of the NDP who have spent a good part of their lives in the struggle to preserve indigenous languages. I'm just a learner. I do want to underscore that.
Kaweienón:ni, could you speak briefly? I'm going to give my colleague Kent Hehr my last couple of minutes, but I want you to speak to your struggle in your community to preserve the language.
I visited Akwesasne Freedom School. It's a school that is built out of armed struggle over treaty rights, and out of that came a school that was able to preserve and underscore language, culture, tradition. What is your experience in ensuring that people actually become speakers?
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View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
[Member spoke in Mohawk as follows:]
Wa’tkwanonhwerá:ton ní:se ne kèn:’en sewatia’tarò:ron. Òn:wa ken’ wenhniserá:te wa’tkwanonhwerá:ton katsi’tsákwas, Amos, tánon Claudette ne kí:ken kanonshakwe’niiò:ke. Í:kehre ó:ni taietewatenonhwerá:ton tsi ionkwatia’tarò:ron tsi ionhwentsá:te ne ratirón:taks.
[Mohawk text translated as follows:]
I thank you all who have gathered here. Today I thank you Katsi’tsákwas, Amos, and Claudette who are here, at main house. I want us too to thank those that have gathered here in Algonquin land.
[English]
I want to acknowledge our presence on traditional Algonquin territories.
Thanks for coming.
I want to focus on one specific issue that I want to take up with people working in grassroots organizations.
Katsi'tsakwas, I know your work: I know you fought tooth and nail in Kanesatake to revitalize the language. I want to focus on the funding repercussions and the issues surrounding the scope of the ILA funding, the criticisms you have with it, and the necessity for persistent, consistent and wide-scope funding, and then focus on some of the challenges that students, particularly in the immersion stream, have with getting from non-fluency to a stage of fluency that allows them to start perpetuating or at least self-learning. Can you touch on those specific aspects as they touch on the financing and the flaws with the current ILA funding?
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View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
Amos, Cayuga is a language that is in a much more threatened state, even compared with Kanien'kéha. How would the question I posed to Ellen apply to Cayuga, particularly in its current state of vitality? What do you think the additional measures would be to even begin to close a gap, if that's even the proper comparison?
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View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
Okay. I'd like to note that Gordie is colour-blind, which explains the pink jacket. Actually, it is an initiative to underline efforts against bullying. There is a reason for the colour.
What's always confounded me in this legislation is the imperfect attempt to try to encapsulate the diversity and richness of 60 or 70 languages into a piece of legislation, with imperfect consulting. Money may be attached in a budget conferred to people who know best how to do it, who are outside legislators in Parliament. By the nature of the legislation itself, it's always been an imperfect endeavour, while important symbolically and important in terms of real rights.
Mr. Joffe, you have much more experience in this field as a lawyer than I have. In a vacuum, absent money and cognizant of the fact that governments are catching up with courts and there is much work to do, what is the value in and of itself of the rights recognized under this piece of legislation—all in a minute?
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View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
Exactly, so I represent a slight slice of the St. Lawrence—
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View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
I'd have to ask the CFO.
Voices: Oh, oh!
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View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
I can guarantee that I'll wield the immense power that I hold within government to move this forward.
Thank you, Mr. Christopherson.
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View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
I'd like you to speak briefly regarding your concerns with the drug trade in the northern triangle states, and the effect it's having geopolitically, particularly on a society level with respect to those states, and your organization's ability to further the human rights agenda.
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View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
Thank you.
The question to both of you is, how do you choose your priorities? Let me explain.
The frustration we feel as a committee, as politicians, is generally that there seems to be an obsession with capturing the one-off successes, the release from jail, and obviously one person sweltering unjustly in jail is one person too many. The human rights agenda writ large seems to be, from a popular perspective, inherently individualistic—for a number of reasons, and with cause—but sometimes the sense is that there is an impossibility to capture, advocate, or push for systemic changes in countries, pushing for a simple thing: one country observing one clause in their charter of human rights that would save 1,000 lives we've never heard of, or don't necessarily have to hear about, but it would save those lives.
I guess, Professor Cotler, you faced this first-hand as Minister of Justice, that tension between systemic change—the desire as a progressive country to achieve systemic change throughout the world with other states—and this seeming obsession. It's obsessive in the media, and I don't blame the media for that. I blame the human mind, focusing on one person who has been released or on one success story in a country that has a systemic record of human rights violations.
My question to you is, how do you choose your priorities? I think you answered why: it's because you're optimistic. Sometimes you must feel like Sisyphus. How do you address your daily activity with helping individuals who desperately need it, and advocating for systemic and progressive change?
Professor Cotler, perhaps, could answer first.
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View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
Thank you both. It's great to have Canada's foremost human rights defender in front us, together with the world's greatest chess player. It's a true honour to be able to ask questions to you about this extremely compelling case and the bodies of legislation that we are studying.
For your benefit, there's no conclusion yet. We haven't finished our report and we haven't completed the witness testimony, but what we have been able to identify clearly is a gap in the ability to freeze assets of foreign nationals who have committed gross human rights violations. Now, proceeding from that premise or conclusion to putting that into effect is a lot more difficult than it seems at the outset. There are grave concerns in a pluralistic democracy with respect to the rule of law as understood in many facets, one of the facets being gathering evidence of those gross human rights violations. In the case at hand that you've mentioned, obviously there was a sufficient determination that those occurred. I'm not contesting that.
What I'm trying to ask, I guess, is about placing those into a body of law. We're concerned, obviously, with the rule of law, the ability of someone who is accused of these acts to appear and be able to plead their case. You are asking us to freeze assets of someone, assets that may be ill-gotten, in which case there's already a law in our Criminal Code that deals with that, or they may simply be assets that were acquired in a different manner. There are valuable arguments for freezing them as a deterrent, or as a moral imperative.
Mr. Cotler, you're a jurist and a pre-eminent lawyer. Essentially, what I would like to hear are your concerns for the rule of law.
Then Mr. Kasparov, what do you think the effect...? You mentioned earlier, when you responded to Mr. Kent, about the impact on Russia of this type of sanction by a country such as Canada, and the countermeasures that we need to be aware of if we're to enact this legislation vis-à-vis such a country, or indeed other countries.
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View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
With your colleagues present, and on behalf of the Minister of Canadian Heritage, I had the honour of announcing a grant of $1 million in the light of your civic engagement. I was able to see your colleagues in action and to have your activities well described to me.
I would like to come back to your domestic activities, because here we are talking mostly about civic engagement in Canada.
In our study on the Yazidis, a witness mentioned that most human rights violations are committed by people known in the villages, when they were experiencing social disintegration, an erosion of the social fabric.
How can your action help to strengthen the dialogue between the parties who may be threatened where their society is being weakened, such as with the Yazidis and those around them?
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View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
Absolutely.
In terms of education and awareness, which specific steps have to be taken in a program in a third-world country, a developing country?
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