Inside Yellowknife’s courthouse, behind the plastic shield of the prisoner’s docket, Tommy is plucking his fingers: one, two, three, four, from pointer to pinky and back again. It’s October 14, 2009. His AC/ DC t-shirt is split down the side from armpit to bellybutton, but Tommy doesn’t seem to notice. He’s wearing his usual expression, mouth open in a lazy O, coffee-brown eyes staring at his hands’ worried fidgeting. This is his 21st court appearance. The 21-year-old aboriginal man was charged with sexual assault in February 2009. At this point, he’s been in custody for 230 days, and it’s been 120 days since the court ordered a mental health assessment so doctors can determine whether he’s even fit to stand trial.

It’s not supposed to take this long. By all accounts, Tommy’s first lawyer failed him. After a judge signed an order for a psychiatric assessment on June 16, defence lawyer Garrett O’Brien did, apparently, nothing. When Tommy’s follow-up date came on July 28, O’Brien wasn’t sure if his client had actually undergone the assessment. Later that afternoon, he told the court Tommy had never even left the jail. When local media asked him what went wrong, O’Brien responded he didn’t want to talk about a file that was no longer his: “Tomorrow is my last day here and Sunday I leave Yellowknife and I’ll never be back.”

Tommy’s second lawyer, a man named Abdul Khan who is prone to wearing ill-fitted suits the colour of over-ripe olives, says he’s tried to do better. He’s had little luck. As he tells Judge Bernadette Schmaltz, a stern woman who exudes capability and practicality in every detail, right down to her simple wire glasses and short hair, Tommy won’t talk to him. He’ll stare blankly, sometimes he’ll nod at odd places, or shake his head, but Khan has no idea how Tommy wants to proceed—or if he even knows why he’s in jail.

It’s a thought that seems to distress Schmaltz. “I have never in my experience in the North,” she says, “seen [an assessment] take that long.” With some difficulty—and a whole lot of prodding—she gets Tommy to respond in a way that few in the Northwest Territories courtroom have seen.

Eventually: “Have you spoken to a lawyer?” Pause. “A long time ago.” “Do you want to speak to Mr. Khan?” A shake of the head. No. “What do you want to do?” “Get out.” “Yes, I expect you would want to.” At this point, it seems possible. Crown prosecutor Terri

Nguyen has said Tommy’s already been in custody longer than she’s seeking sentencing for—if he were even found guilty, which he hasn’t been. Schmaltz has even suggested a judicial stay of proceedings (an indefinite suspension) might be appropriate. Likely, but it’s not to be. In the end, Tommy isn’t released from custody until January 2010. By then, he’ll have made 30 court appearances and have spent nearly a year warehoused in his cell inside Pod D, the smallest of four “pods” that comprise the NWT’s North Slave Correctional Centre.

Inside NSCC, Pod D has become the de facto ward for special-needs inmates: those who are mentally ill, or those who haven’t been diagnosed with anything, but aren’t quite all there, either. Wardens and guards alike openly call it the “special needs” pod. Some inmates, like Tommy, who is suspected to have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS), are officially undiagnosed. Others have been confirmed as having FAS or being schizophrenic or bi-polar. Diagnosed or not, they share one thing in common: they shouldn’t be there.

Thanks to a nationwide closure of mental health hospitals in the ’90s and a subsequent failure to put savings into community-level programming, the problem is not unique to the NWT. In 2009, Canadian federal corrections investigator Howard Sapers pinpointed mental health care and delivery as the most serious and pressing issue facing Corrections Canada today. “Criminalizing and then warehousing the mentally ill burdens our justice system and does nothing to improve public safety,” he wrote in his 2008/09 annual report. “The demands in this area of corrections are increasing dramatically; the unmet needs are immediate and troubling.” Sapers points to two recent in-custody deaths for emphasis: the high-profile case of Ashley Smith, a 19-year-old New Brunswick woman who committed suicide inside an Ontario jail, and that of a First Nations man who, as Sapers details in his report A Failure to Respond, slashed his left arm in his cell. Help came, but it was too little, too late. The man was left alone in his cell for half an hour before the ambulance arrived and staff, reported Sapers, “failed to respond in a manner that might have preserved his life.”

These core issues are not unique north of 60. But in the absence of any competent response, they become grotesquely inflated. Sapers’ office only investigates complaints from inmates in federal institutions; in the territories, there are no federal institutions. Inmates in provincially run facilities can bring issues forward to their provincial ombudsman’s office; the NWT doesn’t have an ombudsman.

At 475 offenses per 1,000 people in 2007, the NWT’s crime rate is more than six times the national average. There are 8.9 times as many assaults, 7.6 times as many sexual assaults, and 3.8 times as many cases of impaired driving. A large proportion of inmates are aboriginal and many struggle with substance abuse. Mental health support is limited. Court-ordered psychiatric assessments must be completed in Alberta—and there is only one psychiatrist servicing the entire territory. Indeed, many here believe were it not for the de facto mental health ward being run out of Pod D at NSCC, many more of the territory’s mentally ill would simply be on the street. With the North’s long months of 40-below weather and increasingly easy access to cheap crack-cocaine, it would be the Canadian equivalent of a death sentence.

The North Slave Correctional Centre is the NWT’s biggest, newest jail. The $44.1-million facility opened in 2004, replacing the original 38-year-old detention centre. Able to house about 180 inmates, the combined minimumand medium-security facility is designed to function as a federal penitentiary without actually being one, so that inmates serving sentences won’t have to be shipped south.

If anything, it doesn’t look like a penitentiary. The idea was to make a facility that, while not exactly comfortable, is at least “non-intimidating,” says Guy LeBlanc, the now-retired deputy warden and long-time staff member at NSCC. There are no bars, for instance. The walls are a soothing colour of washedout Pepto-Bismol. The visiting area is decorated with inmate artwork, swooping aboriginal murals unique to each artist’s home region. At Christmas time—a few weeks from our meeting—this area will be used to host a feast for the inmates, and a tree is decorated.

The differences continue outside the jail, too. Standing in the parking lot you can see three out-of-place log cabin–like structures, one of which is the newly built aboriginal fire ceremony building. Come summer, elders will come and inmates will gather in tipis and a new sweat lodge, meeting the spiritual and counselling needs for the jail’s largely aboriginal population.

It’s not all in the architecture, either. NSCC’s elected inmate advisory council, made up of eight inmates, has a semblance of power—and respect. “Everything they do,” says LeBlanc of the present council, “they do for the good and the benefit of the population.” LeBlanc meets regularly with the IAC, fairly beaming when he talks about the current contest to design an IAC logo—even more when he talks about the model bridge he and a team of inmates designed and entered in a local engineering contest.

And that’s another thing. The staff (for the most part) are, well, nice. If LeBlanc isn’t enough to convince you every prison movie you’ve seen is wrong, meet Gwen, Pod D’s guard, a short woman whose genuine—and seemingly permanent— smile is framed by her blonde bob. Because of Gwen, there are tiny dog-print patterns in the snow covering the “bullpen,” a tiny, fenced outdoor enclosure attached to the pod. For months the inmates pestered her to bring in her dog and a few days ago she relented. “We spoil them,” she says. “We really do.”

As if scripted to prove her point, just a few minutes later, the pod’s inmates get a visit from another staff member’s dog. Someone rolls up a wad of socks, making an impromptu ball, and a group of inmates play fetch in the pod’s common area. LeBlanc laughs, watching the scene: “Only in Yellowknife, eh?”

For an outsider, it’s almost easy to forget NSCC is a prison. As Gwen and Guy talk, Tommy bounds over, gripping a handmade card. The inmates are thanking the warden for bringing in Sno-Cones. “Hello, my lovely lady,” Tommy says, proudly flipping over the flimsy computer paper to show Gwen his name, printed out in careful block letters two inches tall, a child’s writing.

“We’ve replaced mental health institutions with correctional institutions where the staff aren’t even trained to work with people with mental health issues.”

Gwen doesn’t know what special-needs label Tommy might have, but a few weeks ago, she caught Tommy in the bullpen with a pilfered lighter trying to sniff the gas inside. Out of all of Pod D’s special needs inmates, she says, Tommy needs the most support. To help him deal with day-to-day chores, Gwen’s designed a task sheet. There are eight simple tasks—brush your teeth, make your bed, shower—and if Tommy gets them all done he gets a treat at the end of the day. It could be an orange, or it could be an hour of Dragon Ball Z on the TV. “It sounds sad to say,” says LeBlanc, “but the longer he’s in here, the longer he stays alive.”

And that’s when you feel it: the undercurrent of wrongness. For all the staff’s genuine care and support, Pod D is just plain weird. “We’ve replaced mental health institutions with correctional institutions where the staff aren’t even trained … in working with people with mental health issues,” says Lydia Bardak of the NWT’s John Howard Society. “They’re trained in security or guard work.”

“There must be a better way,” adds Glenn Flett, a selfdescribed “lifer” and founder of activist group Long-term Inmates Now in the Community (LINC). “We need to recognize those people are deserving of help and it’s to the advantage in the long run—and it’s a lot cheaper—to have somebody maintained out here.” Like many prison activists, Flett and Bardak would like to see some of the massive cash pumped into keeping inmates housed diverted into developing social and mental health programs outside of jail.

It’s not that idealistic. In the 2008–09 operating year it cost the territorial government more than $13 million, or $258.17 per prisoner per day, to run NSCC. And that’s only one jail. Together, the territory’s four adult facilities cost $23.3 million to run. That’s an awful lot of money questionably spent, says Bardak. “If we’re using [the correctional system] to address our social problems then we’re getting poor results,” she says. And that’s bad for the whole community: “Poor results means more victims in the future.” Bardak believes by treating inmates badly, the system is not curbing crime, merely turning out angry people.

Neither she nor Flett—who says, somewhat jokingly, that many criminals (including his past self) are “greedy bastards”—advocate an end to jails. “Society needs protection from dangerous people and we’ll always have a need for correctional facilities,” says Bardak. “But for the people who are alcoholic, mentally ill, homeless—[jails are] not meant to solve social problems because they’re not effective and they’re not qualified.” Spending cash on programs sorely lacking in the NWT is comparatively minimal, and, both believe, money better spent. Especially, says Flett, considering “what the social and economic consequences may be if we don’t deal with the problem” of incarcerating the mentally ill population.

There’s one sticking point: It’s hard to determine just how many special-needs inmates are in the correctional system. “My biggest, number-one complaint,” says Flett, “is the whole justice system fails to do competent testing on people to see if they have mental health issues. They just designate them as criminals and treat them all the same.” That can’t fairly be said of all NSCC’s Pod D inmates, but what of the jail’s other prisoners? There aren’t any stats kept and many inmates, fearful of the “crazy” stigma, do a remarkably good job of hiding any issues. “People need to be identified quickly,” stresses Flett.

“Once they’re identified, it would be pretty blatantly obvious that it’s not enough. That [the correctional system] has a bigger problem than they think they do.”

The territory’s correctional system either fails even to identify prisoners with mental health problems; recognizes them but does nothing; or is simply ineffective when it does try to help.

Nationally, it’s estimated 11 percent of federal offenders have a significant mental health diagnosis. Over 20 percent are taking a prescribed medication for a psychiatric condition and just over six percent were receiving outpatient services prior to admission. Sapers, too, suspects many are entering the correctional system without the benefit of a diagnosis. “If [inmates] are assessed at all,” he writes in his annual report, “their issues are often portrayed as a behavioural problem, not a mental health disorder.” He’s also worried about the fate of many lowto medium-level special needs inmates.

Like elsewhere in the country, the NWT’s extremely mentally ill offenders are not housed in regular jails—even Pod Ds—but instead vastly smaller regional treatment centres. It’s not enough, says Sapers. “The vast majority of offenders with mental disorders do not generally meet the acute criteria that would allow them to benefit from services provided,” he notes. “Less than 10 percent of offenders are ever admitted or treated.” Instead, those offenders stay in the general prison population. In the best of cases, they end up in makeshift wards like Pod D. In the worst of cases, they end up in segregation (often exacerbating their issues) or, as Flett puts it, are made “targets” and brutalized by inmates and staff alike.

In sum, the territory’s correctional system either fails even to identify prisoners with mental health problems; recognizes them but does nothing; or is simply ineffective when it does try to help. The offenders keep their heads down, their medical, mental, or addiction needs unmet, and wait for their release. So the question is: what happens when they get out?

Yellowknife’s answer to that question is Bardak. While not the only inmate advocate in the capital city, Bardak is likely the most well-known and well-liked, not to mention the loudest. She’ll never forget what prompted her to get involved in the John Howard Society. It was Oct. 28, 1996, James’ 40th birthday. Bardak had met James, who was from Cape Dorset (now a part of Nunavut), while she was in Inuvik working for CNIB. James was blind and in 1996, housed at the Yellowknife jail, thousands of kilometres from his home.

“For months I’d been asking him and the staff, ‘What’s going to happen when he gets out? He’s from Baffin Island,’” recalls Bardak. “Where’s he going to go? Where’s he going to live? What’s he going to do? And nothing, nothing, nothing.” Bardak found out at 9 a.m. on James’ release date. “I got a phone call from the correctional centre saying, ‘James is ready.’ I said, ‘For what?’ and they said, ‘Well aren’t you going to pick him up?’”

It was 25 degrees below zero that day and James was released from custody in his prison sweats, with no winter coat, no boots, and no money. “There had already been ice, so while I was driving him around town trying to get things figured out, someone slid into my car. And James said, ‘We’ve been in a car accident; that’s my first car accident,’” she says, laughing. “That brings me to where I am now.”

At this particular moment, “now” is sitting inside her office at the brand new Yellowknife day shelter, which opened in late November. It’s a simple space, housed inside the Western Arctic’s Conservative candidate’s old campaign office. The rectangular one-room common area is filled with dozens of the city’s homeless, many of whom have spent time inside NSCC. They lounge on the room’s couches, chatting, reading the paper, or playing cards at the tables lining the walls. Joan Osbourne’s ’90s hit “What if God Was One of Us” plays on the radio and a few heads bob along.

Although it was made possible by many people in Yellowknife, the centre is undeniably Bardak’s baby. It’s part of her answer to questions like: “How do we invest in community support so we don’t have to rely on cops, courts and jail?” Before the centre opened, the city’s homeless had limited options for shelter during the day when Yellowknife’s night shelters are closed and often loitered in the city’s malls or its library—also often getting into trouble with the law. Many, Bardak believes, have mental health issues. “Mental illness is the leading cause of homelessness and homelessness is the leading cause of mental illness,” she says. “You can’t be homeless and stay sane.”

If anyone can accurately gauge the relationship between homelessness, mental health, and crime, it’s Bardak. It’s not a stretch to say she knows most of the city’s homeless population. If she’s not at the day shelter or the Society’s offices or inside NSCC, it’s a likely bet you’ll find Bardak at the NWT Territorial courthouse. “There’s continually somebody there who’s got mental health issues,” she says. And they’re usually homeless. Today, one stands out in Bardak’s mind.

“He was walking through the streets…a lot of people were stopping me scared and worried for this young man because he was talking about collecting souls for the devil,” says Bardak. Because of his substance abuse, he believed he was living inside a video game. Facing charges, he was remanded into custody where he waited six months for a mental health assessment. Like others, he would eventually be released with time served. Also, like so many others, it’s likely he’ll be in and out of jail again. “The catch-andrelease program hasn’t really benefited anybody very much,” says Bardak, who, when then asked about the benefits of programming inside the jail, retorts: “What programs?” Admittedly, like elsewhere in the NWT, resources are scarce inside NSCC—the prison only got a new counsellor in November after being without one for months. (When asked in August about the flack she was getting for being without one, and how challenging it was to run NSCC without one, the jail’s warden responded it wasn’t a challenge at all.) High priority or not, however Adrienne Fillatre is a welcome addition and is working to become a registered psychologist so the jail can finally do in-house assessments. “People,” she says, “have as much right to mental health wherever they are.”

And there are programs, though they’re not necessarily geared toward people like Tommy. Currently, NSCC program manager Terry Wallis has embarked on a new four-month, five-day-a-week sex offender program—a treatment and counselling program for offenders convicted of sex-related offenses—that will run twice a year, enrolling 12 inmates per session. “It’s pretty intense,” says Wallis, who interviews inmates to see who best suits the program and is interested in seeing “how well they manage coming in every day.”

There’s also a family violence program, which also runs twice a year and accommodates the same number of inmates per session; it’s six weeks long. The substance abuse program runs five times a year and takes in the same number of inmates. Wallis and Fillatre are also quick to point out the jail’s chaplain, its resident aboriginal elder, and its visits by members of the Healing Drum Society, an aboriginal program designed to help people deal with the trauma of residential schooling.

It’s not that Bardak doesn’t know about these programs; it’s that she simply doesn’t think they’re enough. She’d like to see sessions that address inmates who aren’t serving long enough sentences to be eligible for such programs—the NWT is notorious for short sentences, even for seriously violent crimes. She wants additional help for those, like Tommy, who are in the indefinite limbo of remand custody, unconvicted and awaiting trial. More inmates also need to be enrolled in work-placement programs to get them used to contributing to society in a positive way, she says. She hired a team of inmates to paint the day centre, for instance.

Federally, Corrections Canada only spends two percent of its annual budget on inmate programming—$37 million worth of a $2.2-billion budget. More is spent on paying staff overtime. What’s more, with such sparse programming, says Flett, and without proper supports outside of jail, any counselling or benefits from programming an inmate gets in jail are likely easily forgotten. “In that routine structured environment it’s easy for them to follow what they’ve learned,” says Flett. But outside, it falls apart. “You’re teaching in an artificial environment that’s structured, that hasn’t got anything close to real, real, real life,” says Flett. “The only thing that’s close to real life is everybody is breathing air.”

Tommy is sentenced to one day in jail—a red flag on his criminal record—on January 6, 2010, after changing his plea to guilty. By this time, Tommy has changed lawyers yet again. He was forgotten by the RCMP and left at the jail for several of his scheduled court dates. After three signed court orders, he has, at least, had his mental health assessment, becoming one of the five accused individuals per year the NWT courts send south. On average, each of those assessments costs the territorial government more than $20,000.

While not a tool for diagnosis, the assessment—Tommy’s third—provides some insight, but largely serves only to confirm Tommy is both fit enough to stand trial (now a moot point following his guilty plea) and likely to reoffend. He has borderline intelligence, shows disregard for the welfare and safety of

others, and has a temper, often appearing uncooperative. His newest lawyer, Caroline Wawzonek, describes him as “an individual who certainly needs assistance but has fallen through the cracks.” Tommy, she says, has difficulty caring for himself.

His lengthy pre-trial custody has caused the NWT government to launch an investigation into the services provided by Alberta Health and the territory’s inability to follow up on assessment orders. It’s unclear whether it will result in any changes. Roger Shepard, legal counsel for the government of NWT, says while it is not right that Tommy had to wait so long for his assessment, he believes the case was an isolated one. The territorial government does not keep track of wait times, he admits, but he says he canvassed the Crown attorneys thoroughly and none could recall an assessment wait dragging on so long.

If this appears to be a less than failsafe method, it doesn’t seem to bother the territorial government’s own health department. When I asked him about the adequacy of the current system of assessing offenders, Dana Heide, the territory’s assistant deputy minister for Health and Social Services, said “We are very pleased with the services Alberta Health provides.” He declined to go into details about the contract the department holds with Alberta Health to provide assessments, saying only: “It does not stipulate any policy expectations other than a recognition that when necessary, we will transfer patients to the Alberta Health System.”

In Alberta, the answer was much the same. “The agreement encompasses all aspects of health in a general sense,” says Melissa Lovatt, a communications person in the addiction and mental health division of Alberta Health. Lovatt adds clients, regardless of location—NWT or Alberta—are prioritized by need, and wait times at the 12-bed facility are usually two weeks. Individuals who are in urgent need of health care and those with earlier court dates are given priority.

In a way, it doesn’t even matter. Until all the other pieces fall into place—diagnosis, in-custody programming, community support, addiction counselling, affordable housing— people like Tommy don’t stand a chance. Free for less than 24 hours, he broke the terms of his probation and was charged with assaulting a police officer. The night after his release, Tommy returned home—to Pod D.

The first step to getting help, they say, is admitting you have a problem. That part took me years of halting, painful introspection and self-doubt.

Later, I told friends—just a handful at first. They weren’t surprised; some of them even admitted to the same problem.

Finally, I decided it was time to get serious, and that I needed to call in the professionals.

Nervous, faintly humiliated, I dialed the number to the National Anti-Racism Council of Canada and explained myself. I think I might be a little bit racist, I said. And I’d like to change.

If this story were scripted in Hollywood, it would end with a scene of me dancing at a great big crazy ethnic wedding—my own. If there’s adversity at the beginning, you know how it’s going to end.

But the truth is, this story will always be unfinished. I can’t prove that I’ve kicked the habit, and any transgressions will never be known outside the privacy of my own brain. I’m not sure whether this is comforting or alarming, but I know I’m not alone in my feelings. In a 2007 poll on racial tolerance, almost half of Canadians were honest enough to admit to being at least “slightly racist.” Tempting as it is to despair about this number, I felt that it was, in a way, also hopeful. An admission of prejudice is not necessarily a proud admission. In my case, it sure as shit wasn’t—it was a problem in need of a solution. If the next question in the poll had been “Would you like to be less racist?” I would have answered with an unqualified “yes!” and, again, I would not be alone.

Canada talks a good game on acceptance and diversity: our official bilingualism, our policy of multiculturalism, the crazy-quilt ethnic jumble of our big cities, the throat-singers and tango-dancers and tabla-players who share the stage at Parliament Hill each Canada Day. But I came to feel a strange disconnect between this image of a national rainbow-coloured paradise and my daily reality, which featured a grim mixture of resentment, misunderstanding, and petty grievance. I liked the idea of the paradise, but I couldn’t live up to it. I began to wonder if the failing was mine or theirs.

Now, it wasn’t anything nutso. I was never proud of my feelings. I didn’t believe that I was right in any absolute sense. I was a liberal, tolerant person by and large, and I loved living in a city where so many different ethnic groups rubbed elbows. But, ironically enough, it was moving into one such community that started me off on my path to intolerance.

I had been warned. A friend of mine moved to the neighbourhood several years earlier. He was quite vocal about his dislike of his neighbours, who I’ll call the Quiddinese*. He described them as “rude” and “insular.” His friends were shocked at his blunt appraisal, and I secretly judged him for it. Hmm, I thought. Xenophobic. It must be because he’s Québécois.

A few years later, the turn was mine.

Oh, the Quiddinese. Time and again, these people refused, it seemed to me, to give me a reason to like them. They were grouchy when I visited their shops—grouchier, I thought, with me than with each other. The men appeared to spend all their days smoking and kibitzing. The women looked to me hunched and joyless from years of hard work. Their children seemed to specialize in noisemaking: blatting, thumping cars, shouted conversations. I tried to make nice at first, but was soon defeated by their surliness and gave up. My dislike metastasized: I began to project it onto the peculiarities of Quiddinese home decor: Ugly people, I thought. Ugly dwellings. I dismissed the entire culture.

For years I lived like this, grumpy in a grumpy land. I narrowed my eyes when I passed their houses. I resigned myself to the most perfunctory transactions with them riding on the bus, passing on the sidewalk, in the local stores. A sense of home and belonging should not stop once you’ve left the house, yet I felt rejected in my own city, in my own neighbourhood. I tried to get used to living in a cloud of vague hostility, like background radiation. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t submit to it. It wasn’t just that I was mad at my Quiddinese neighbours; I was mad at myself. I had failed. I had surrendered to intolerance.

And so my quest began to unbias myself. In doing this, I knew I would be putting Canada to the test as well as myself. We all know the rhetoric: as Ayman Al-Yassini of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation told me, “As a country we are committed to multiculturalism.” Well, okay, I thought. But how committed? Enough to help out the almost 50 per cent who admitted to being racist?

The CRRF was, Al-Yassini said, in the business of dealing with “situations of racism and discrimination, or how to deal with it if you are the one having these thoughts or tendencies … and how to work on addressing it.” Perfect, I thought: maybe there’ll be a support group I can join, Racists Anonymous or something. Bring on the 12 steps.

That’s not quite how it works, as it turns out. The CRRF has a few different initiatives, mostly bureaucratic in nature, but “we don’t deal with individuals,” Al-Yassini told me.

I began scouring the web for someone else who might be able to help. Eventually I found a local woman whose website described her as being “trained in the areas of diversity leadership, equity, education, and workplace issues.” I decided to give her a call.

As soon as I explained myself (“Hi, I’m just wondering what kind of resources you might have for someone who believes themselves to be racist. I think I might be a little bit racist”) she was, it seemed to me, sternly vigilant. She wanted the full spelling of my name, where I worked, my phone number. (In my paranoid fantasies, she was preparing to file a police report.) She said she didn’t like to use the word “racism,” because people recoiled from it; instead, she preferred to talk about “anti-racism.” This sounded like crazy talk, but I was too cowed to argue. She said she would consider the project and call me back. She never did.

I supposed a moral climate checkered with both judgment and sympathy was all anyone in the process of reforming could expect. But it was humiliating, and not for the faint of heart. I took a perverse kind of solace in the thought that plenty of people might harbour dark feelings, but I was actually woman enough to dredge them up and examine them. “I think the numbers are probably higher than 50 percent of Canadians who are racist,” said Tina Lopes, a Toronto-based race-relations educator. “I would be surprised if it was not closer to 80 percent of people who learn to be racist and sexist and homophobic.”

Nor would I. But what, then, were we supposed to do about it? Anorexics, alcoholics, people with anger management problems, sex addicts—all of them can find treatment in any mid-size city. The prejudiced? That’s another story. No wonder we tamp our feelings down, will them not to exist, and hope for the best.

Denial might work in the short term—it always does—but as any dime-store psychologist will tell you, trying to ignore something pretty much guarantees it will surface later. If we don’t admit to “owning” our own prejudice, as the shrinks say, we are certain to express it in oblique ways, ignorant to any harm we may be causing.

When Suaad Hagi Mohamud—a black woman whose identity was questioned by the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi—was detained there for three months, no one involved in the incident dared to suggest that cultural bias played into it, when how could it not? She was a) dark-skinned, b) a woman, and c) veiled: three traits that, whether or not they should, carry a certain baggage. Yet no one in a position of authority was willing to say, “Yes, we were wrong, because we were ignorant and prejudiced.” That would belie our national mythos.

Probably because the United States’s identity is so tied up with a history of stunningly obvious racial inequity that has forced blacks and whites into contact—and conflict—with each other, Americans seem more fluent in race relations—and more inclined to wear their biases on their sleeve. But racism in Canada, as author Pasha Malla wrote in an insightful Globe and Mail article in 2008, is the province exclusively of others. When it manifests in unseemly outbursts, we’re quick to judge, and seldom ask ourselves if we might harbour similar feelings.

As a muslim in the post 9-11 world, Nouman Ashraf is better qualified than many to talk about the discrepancy between what values Canadians say they hold and what they actually do. “Preferences and biases always exist,” he told me. We were chatting in a café on the campus of the University of Toronto, where he was head of the department of anti-racism and cultural diversity. “The question isn’t to illegalize them. The question is to ask people about how this affects our behaviour as individuals, as organizations, and broadly as a nation.”

A big man with a salt-and-pepper beard, he’s fast-talking and approachable, verging on cuddly. As we spoke, he scribbled organizational charts—reflecting his background in management studies—on paper napkins.

There are, he said, espoused theories—“the theory to which you give allegiance in your mind, and sincerely believe,” he explained—and theories-in-action, which are reflected in what we actually do.

“Our espoused theory,” said Ashraf, “is one of a multicultural nation.” Our theories-in-action, individually and collectively, are another story. Established Canadians may think they are generous, but newcomers arouse their baser instincts, according to Ashraf. All of us are reduced, by perceived threats to shared resources—such as jobs or spots in university—to the level of wildebeests locking tusks over a watering hole.

Professionally, Ashraf dealt with these conflicts by holding panel discussions at the university “on everything from religion and sexuality to race and culture.

“I think that we are a microcosm of the most diverse city on the planet.” He gestured at the lineup at the café counter, where students of all stripes stood gabbing as they waited to be served. “And one of my core beliefs is, if we don’t allow opportunities for our students to engage with this difference … we will have failed them.”

Yes! I thought. I wanted to high-five him. Engagement: that’s what I, in my clumsy way, was striving for. Someone who could talk to me on the level, who could challenge me without tipping into defensiveness. What I needed to do, suggested Ashraf, was seek out young Quiddinese who were, in his words, my “peeps.” The obvious retort was that they weren’t my peeps and that was the problem. Then I remembered Avery.

Avery (not his real name) was a former co-worker of mine, a Quiddinese guy who was so witty and sharp that I didn’t trust myself not to try to impress him, so I just stayed out of his way. What better way to impress someone than to tell them that you hated their ethnic heritage? I sent off an email explaining my project and hoped for the best.

Like al-Yassini, Estella Muyinda ran an organization—the National Anti-Racism Council of Canada—that was committed to fighting racism. And, like him, when I spoke to her on the phone, she had no resources for me. “If you’re talking about programs, we’re not hands-on, give-you-thisprogram-to-do, because no government organization is funding anything of that nature,” she told me. What NARCC does, she said, is support grassroots organizations that act on a local scale, by providing them with

educational materials. Although it was not within her purview, professionally, she did try to take on my problem. “What triggered it? Where is this coming from? These are the questions that you have to answer first because there’s no panacea to this,” she told me. “If you don’t get to the root of your bias,” she said, “you’ll have a lot of problems accepting any solutions that are out there.”

Well, I knew what triggered it: feeling like I was constantly being treated poorly in my own neighbourhood was one part of it. The other part was daily coming up against what I saw as conflicting values. Muyinda told me I should stop thinking of the difference in our values as a barrier. I knew I was being difficult, but really: wasn’t that advice a kind of a panacea? What if I really was getting secondary treatment from my Quiddinese neighbours because I was different from them? Was I supposed to continue trying to be friendly or patronizing their shops anyway, even though they might be discriminating against me just as much as the reverse?

And then there were deeper issues than social niceties: one of the problems I had with Quiddinese culture was that homosexuality was not accepted, but littering apparently was. What was I supposed to do, try to reframe these behaviours as merely “colourful” even though I found them untenable?

It didn’t help that the more I talked to people about my project, the more grumblings I heard from every direction.

“It isn’t the [Quiddinese], is it?” said Pasha Malla. “A friend of mine…called this morning and was like, ‘Ah, fuck, these [Quiddinese] people are driving me crazy!’”

My friends—who I had thought a pretty tolerant and broadminded group of people—began to tell me their stories. One had dated a Quiddinese guy. “His family didn’t like me one bit,” she said. “They would have rather he married his second cousin.”

Another had fallen off his bike on an icy street, in front of a group of five or so Quiddinese men. “They didn’t say anything,” he said. “They didn’t ask if I was alright or help me up. They just stared at me.”

“This sums up the [Quiddinese] community for me,” said Peter. He had been watching a sports game on TV but he missed the end. So, later, passing by a Quiddinese bar, he stopped to ask a small group of men how the game ended. “They looked at me,” said Peter, his voice hushed with remembered shock, “like I’d just asked them for money. They had these … dark looks, and they were like”—Peter made his voice gruff—“‘Two to one.’ And I was like, ‘Oh really, who scored?’… and I thought to myself, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?!’ Anybody else would have been like, ‘Yeah! Right on! We won! Okay!’… They had this look of complete distrust and I walked away, and I was disappointed and furious.” Doubly disappointed and furious, perhaps, because Peter himself is Quiddinese-Canadian. “The people certainly aren’t friendly,” he said.

Having this company was sort of comforting—but only in the way that being part of a mob is comforting.

The problem with this scenario, of course, was that it relieved me of any responsibility. In this version of events, I was an innocent who had stumbled into a snakepit of malice. There had to be more to it than that. For one thing, I was wildly generalizing. As Pasha Malla said to his incensed friend, “It’s not all the [Quiddinese] people in the world that are driving you crazy.”

Ascribing a bunch of traits to a people in the name of culture was a crude but tempting tool that robbed people of their individuality. Yet it wasn’t baseless, exactly—the quality of the exchanges I had in Japan, for example, were different from exchanges I had elsewhere. It was like a pointillist painting: up close, each person retained his or her particular qualities, but when you stepped back, the sum total made a distinct picture.

Yet ascribing certain qualities to any group of people—cheerful, spontaneous, family-oriented, devout, say—opens the door for others to call them childlike, chaotic, lazy, superstitious. Straightforward becomes rude, politeness seems remote or chilly. Still, we apparently need the idea of a shared culture and shared values: this is what makes us a nation, instead of just a bunch of random people on a big patch of land. That shared culture is what causes us to root for our countrymen and -women at the Olympics, or to stitch the flag on our backpacks when we travel.

So, yes, I was allowing for the fact that this was a group of individuals I was dealing with, but that they also existed within a cultural matrix. And some of those broad cultural traits aligned with my neuroses like a key in a lock.

After all, while there are, as Ashraf pointed out, some general conditions that can lead to discrimination, our targets are not arbitrary. If I was to take on the full responsibility for my problem, I was going to have to look into the murky depths of my own psyche.

Some schools of analysis suggest that we revile in others traits that are unrealized aspects of ourselves. According to Sylvia Brinton Perera, a Jungian psychoanalyst I spoke to who wrote a book on the topic of scapegoating, the revulsion I felt for the Quiddinese swagger and machismo (among other qualities) was, according to this theory, a result of having been taught not to externalize emotions, not to indulge in noisy selfglorification, not to be exhibitionistic.

This felt truer to me than anything I’d yet heard. At the same time, nothing in me particularly wanted to nurture those qualities in myself. The resistance went deep, and for good reason: “You probably internalized [your family’s values] before you were five,” she said. Overcoming deeply learned things was a life’s work. I needed something a little more immediate.

“How many individuals do you know?” Perera asked me. “Because as long as it’s collective it’s harder to manage.”

Which brought me back to Avery. Incredibly, he had responded to my email. “I’m not sure I’ll be much help,” he wrote back. “We may end up drawing up the blueprints for the internment camp together.”

Needless to say, Avery had a complicated relationship to his heritage. Both his parents were Quiddinese but he grew up immersed in mainstream Canadian culture. Rather than thinking of himself as having a foot in both camps, he thought of himself as having a foot in neither. “I always think of this James Branch Cabell thing,” he said, “where he’s like, ‘Patriotism is the religion of hell’—because it is.” What most irked him, it seemed, was the obsession many Quiddinese had with defining themselves by their patrimony, to the exclusion of other cultures and influences.

To some extent, Avery felt Canada’s ethos of multiculturalism was to blame. “You tell people to celebrate diversity. So … what you eventually build is a street lined with [Quiddinese] flags, a street of people speaking their own language.”

It wasn’t just the Quiddinese though. He disliked any cultural hegemony.

After I moaned about the Quiddinese being so loud, he asked me this: “What if you were living in the Gay Village?” he said. “That’s pretty loud. You walked into a bakery and you were holding hands with your boyfriend, you might not get the nicest service … Do you think after a year you’d be like, ‘Those fucking gays,’ or anything like that?”

“I might be,” I said. “It’s possible. But I’m not such an idiot that I would cluster all gays together.” I was, apparently, idiot enough to cluster all Quiddinese together. But it was a question of exposure, as well. I’d grown up isolated from the Quiddinese. They stayed among their kind and I with mine. “The celebration of diversity,” Avery said, “is also really a cause of ghettoization.” Although our conversation was full of such textbook phrases and lofty ideas, it also acted as a kind of confessional. No matter how stupid or offensive my questions, Avery was gracious and forgiving. I came away feeling kind of … melty inside. If, as Joni Mitchell says, “Love is touching souls,” so is this kind of open, unafraid dialogue.

Later, riding my bike home, I passed a few older Quiddinese men shooting the breeze on the street corner, and I had this thought: Hey, one of those guys could be Avery’s father. It was ludicrous in its simplicity, not to mention deeply corny, but it was also refreshingly effective. For the first time since beginning my project, I had softened.

Of course, all that sympathy evaporated the next time I passed a group of Quiddinese men who stared at me as they threw their cigarette butts on the sidewalk. Or the next time I was given the cold shoulder at a shop where they clearly knew me.

Given all the conversations I’d had, I felt safe in saying that it wasn’t my imagination or some cultural misunderstanding: I really was getting a frosty reception. In that case, all I could do was hope to understand why.

“I personally think the distrust comes from a lack of confidence,” said Peter, who had recently moved into the neighbourhood and found himself troubled by the same questions I was. “Like, ‘Why do you care about us? Why do you want to know about us?’”

Like Avery, he implicated multiculturalism. “In a community like Toronto’s, where it’s big enough that you can be selfsufficient, it becomes ignorant and mistrustful.

“What I would love to come to an end,” he said, “is, when you arrive in Canada, the sense that you keep doing whatever you’re doing.”

But was integration that easy? In addition to being cut off from their own culture when they moved, said Avery, the community is “also refused access to being Canadian.”

And this, according to Tina Lopes, was at the heart of the matter.

The Quiddinese were and are underdogs, both in the city and on a global scale. They come from a region of the world that gets little respect, and when they moved here, their status didn’t change—except now they’re out of their element, too. So they created a safe haven, a defensive perimeter.

“The unfortunate thing,” said Lopes, “is that I sometimes see that when someone who’s part of the dominant society … comes into their neighbourhood, there’s a bit of ‘We’re going to give you a taste of what I get.’”

What they got? In all the service jobs I ever worked, I was patient with people who struggled with English. I even got selfcongratulatory goosebumps from successful transactions.

But then I remembered Avery telling me how, after high school, he had changed his name. He was brilliant and articulate, but his Quiddinese name alone was enough to discourage employers. In school fights, he said, it was always the Quiddinese kids who took the blame. And at work, his boss once suggested he was absent because he’d been napping in the stock room; it was half-joking—but half-not.

The whole thing was much bigger than me. Each of us was, in the eyes of the other, accountable for transactions involving the worst of our ilk. Mutual mistrust flavoured every meeting, with the result that both parties ended up acting edgy and unfriendly. “I don’t think it’s a good human response,” said Lopes, “but I have some compassion for what is behind it.”

It was weird, but I didn’t want to hear what Lopes was saying. “How much out of your 24 hours do you experience that ‘you’re not welcome’ vibe?” she asked me. “And then think about if you were in their shoes and you were experiencing that eight hours—more!—how much it would eat away at you.”

Basically, I didn’t want to hear about anything that pointed up my own privilege. The slightly insane reality was that I worried it threatened to delegitimize my unhappiness. I wanted the occasional right to wallow in self-pity without having to think, “But then, in absolute terms, my life doesn’t suck as much as my Quiddinese neighbour’s.” But the fact remained: I moved through society more easily than they did, enjoying successes—professional, social—that weren’t available to them. Which was another troubling matter for me. Was my success at the cost of theirs, somehow? If they were oppressed, was I therefore the oppressor? I (somewhat guiltily) doubted it: humanity has an unmerited love affair with absolutes. Most of us are made up of more complex matter. After all, as Peter told me, the Quiddinese can be racist themselves. No one has a monopoly on tolerance.

While it would be tempting to conclude that, at the end of this process, I’ve “crossed over to the other side”—racist no more!—the pat answer is not the honest one. It may not even be fair for us to ask such radical transformations of ourselves—do we really need the burden of another expectation we can’t live up to? Aside from a commitment to a complete psychic overhaul, the best we can do is exercise an honest awareness of our own shortcomings.

I’m still petty sometimes, still cursing Quiddinese choices in home decor, still mad that some of the men seem to spend their days loafing while the women do the work. But I also look at each person and try to imagine a world of alienation, of being second class wherever I go.

As for me and Avery? Well, maybe I’ll get that big ethnic wedding yet.