Published: 3 October 2012
Country: Canada
Canada’s reputation for tolerance has been put under pressure in recent days following a bigoted and outspoken television attack on the country’s Roma community.
In a broadcast on the Sun News Network in September Ezra Levant, a conservative pundit, made a pointed attack on Roma saying: “They’re gypsies. And one of the central characteristics of that culture is that their chief economy is theft and begging.”
His intolerance drew a sharp response from other media and some community leaders. The former president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Bernie Farber, wrote in the National Post: “If the Sun News Network had aired an attack on Jews, the whole country would be outraged. Yet we have seen little support for the Roma from other faith and ethno-cultural groups, politicians and community leaders in the wake of Levant’s on-air rant. Even the media has remained mysteriously silent”.
Another angry observer is Gina Csanyi-Robah, the executive director of Toronto’s Roma Community Centre, who has made formal complaints to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission and the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council.
The Sun News Network responded to the criticism and published an apology as well as restricting broadcast of the video of Levant’s show in which he also compared Roma with “swindlers”.
In his outburst he said: “The phrase gypsy and cheater have been so interchangeable historically that the word has entered the English language as a verb: he gypped me. Well the gypsies have gypped us. Too many have come here as false refugees. And they come here to gyp us again and rob us blind as they have done in Europe for centuries.”
It’s not surprising that Levant is often compared to the right-wing TV network Fox in US.
The Toronto-based newspaper The Star took up the case and warned in an editorial that this is not “just an isolated eruption of ignorance and xenophobia.” It highlighted growing concern over the discrimination against the Roma community in Canada. These sort of attacks “are becoming all too common, and they increasingly come from public officials,” said the newspaper.
It also pointed out that Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney “never misses an opportunity to rail against what he calls “bogus” refugee claimants from Hungary — the vast majority of whom are Roma — who, in his view, come to Canada to take advantage of generous welfare and health-care programs”.
The newspaper says that last month that Canada Border Services Agency allegedly recommended that Roma refugee claimants be detained while their claims are being processed.
“If this is so,” it says, “it represents a Canadian government agency suggesting that civil liberties be distributed along ethnic lines.”
In the recent years there has been an increase in number of Roma who are migrating from European countries, mostly from Hungary, and seeking an asylum in Canada.
Bernie Farber in the National Post provided more useful background and context. Defending the Roma community in Canada, he said that they are a small group, numbering roughly 80,000.
“Some families have been living here since the early 20th century. These families, which still speak the native Romani language and share a culture dating back to the eastern and central Europe of the 16th century, are now into fifth and sixth generations,” he said.
And others have come to Canada to flee more recent persecution. “Many more Roma came to Canada during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956; and numerous others have arrived in the last two decades to escape vicious and violent attacks from neo-Nazi groups in Hungary and the Czech Republic”, he wrote.