CTV television network’s W5 :30th Anniversary of Chinese Canadian Activism

sweetspot · 发表于 2010-11-27 01:15

本帖最后由 sweetspot 于 2010-11-27 01:21 编辑

Learn how history was written 30 years ago, Read this!
30th September 1979:  30th Anniversary of Chinese Canadian Activism
September 28th, 2009 by  Staff from www.gingerpost.com

The Edmonton protest march against W5, January 26,1980
Chinese Canadians began a new chapter of political and social action  on 30th September 1979. Here is a digest of the events thirty years ago  described by Anthony B. Ch...an in his book Gold Mountain:  The Chinese in  the New World (Vancouver:  New Star Books, 1983).  Chinese Canadians  today can still learn many lessons from the Anti-W5 social movement.  Editor.
On September 30, 1979, the CTV television network’s W5 public affairs  program aired a segment called “Campus Giveaway” which was to become  the focus of political activity that would shake the Chinese community  for the next two years.  The program’s blatant racism sparked a degree  of public wrath unprecedented in Canada’s Chinatowns.
“Campus Giveaway” portrayed the Chinese as alien, inassimilable,  insular, and competitive.  As the camera panned across the faces of  students of Chinese ancestry, the show charged that 100,000 foreign  students had descended on Canada’s campuses, squeezing white Canadian  students out of places in the professional schools.
CTV’s message was plain – the Chinese were foreigners regardless of  their birthplace.  Reminiscent of the chargers against early Chinese  labourers, the students were accused of coming to Canada to milk the  country of its wealth and resources.  After using Canada’s educational  facilities, these “foreigners” would flee to China and Hong Kong with  professional degrees financed by the Canadian taxpayer.  The Chinese  were yet again pictured as transient, as exploiter, as sojourner.  The  opening remarks of W5 host Helen Hutchinson conveyed a message of a new  Chinese threat:
Here is a scenario that would make a great many people in this  country angry and resentful.  Suppose your son or daughter wanted to be  an engineer, or a doctor, or a    pharmacist.  Suppose he had high marks  in high school, and that you could pay the tuition – he still couldn’t  get into university in his chosen courses because a foreign student was  taking his place.  Well, that is exactly what is happening in this  country.
The opening statement was a deliberate attempt to incite mistrust and  hostility towards “foreigners.”  With the camera focused on Chinese  faces, there was no doubt to whom Hutchinson was referring.
To back up its allegations, W5 stated that 100,000 foreign students  were crowding Canadian universities.  The actual number of foreign  students in Canada was 55,000 at all levels of education, including only  20,000 in full-time university studies.
Another statistical distortion involved Barbara Allan, the heroine of  “Campus giveaway.”  She was portrayed as an aspiring pharmacist who was  rejected by the faculty of pharmacy at the University of Toronto  because a foreign student had taken her place.
While Helen Hutchinson narrated Allan’s emotional outcry again  foreign students, CTV’s cameras roamed the classroom searching out  Chinese faces.  It isolated six Chinese students:  Steven Ng, Teresa  Chu, Doris Ng, Faye Wong, Betty Cheung, and Jennifer Lee.  Jennifer Lee  was born in Canada, and the rest were citizens, thus eligible for  admission to the pharmacy program.  The pharmacy faculty admits Ontario  residents only:  visa or foreign students are barred.
Barbara Allan was also eligible for admission to the professional  school.  According to Dr. E.W. Stied, the associate dean of pharmacy: “If she had had the marks she said she did, she would have been  accepted.  But, according to our records she didn’t have those marks.”
Yet, few viewers knew the facts.  To them, Barbara Allan appeared as  the victim of a yellow horde taking away her “rightful” place in the  university.  The emotional impact of “Campus Giveaway” struck at the  hearts of the white audience who could sympathize with Allan, a young  woman in anguish because her ambitions were snuffed out by the  villainous foreign (read “Chinese”) students.
At the heart of “Campus Giveaway” was the allegation that foreign  students were taking the places of white Canadians in job-directed  programs such as pharmacy, computer science, engineering, and medicine. Since the foreign faces in the report were Chinese, W5’s implication  was that all students of Chinese origin were foreigners, and that  Canadian taxpayers were subsidizing Chinese students – who would never  be truly Canadian, regardless of their birth or citizenship.
Initial reaction to the show in Chinese communities across Canada was  subdued.  The workers in the Chinatowns and the professionals in the  suburbs were preoccupied with their own lives.  Some Chinese even missed  the allegations of a few vocal students that the program was racist in  tone and effect.
While Chinatown and suburbia slept, these students – both Canadian  and foreign – bombarded the CTV with protest letters.  Forming small  study groups, the students initiated a publicity campaign to enlist  wider community support.  They also sought legal advice to determine  whether CTV had libelled and slandered Chinese Canadians. By November,  the apathy among Chinese about the W5 issue had changed to support and  sympathy.  This transformation was spearheaded by the students  themselves, led by Norman Kwan.
The traditional representatives and leaders of the Chinese community,  who had gained a high profile because of their business or political  connections, shied away from the W5 controversy.  Believing that the  students’ talk of a libel suit would upset the status quo and endanger  their own personal interests, they dismissed the students’ grievances as  the fulminations of a radical group.
Preserving the status quo was not in the interests of the new group  of professionals now gaining prominence in the Chinese community.  One  of these was a physician named Donald Chu.  Later to become the  chairperson of the Toronto chapter of the anti-W5 movement, Chu was  driven to attack W5 because of his “belief in equal rights for all  Canadians.”  Part of the progressive element of the Chinese Canadian  intelligentsia that was schooled in Canada, Chu and others rallied  firmly behind the students, taking part in an Ad Hoc Committee Against  W5.
Represented on the Ad Hoc Committee were the Association of Chinese  Canadian Students and Graduates, Chinese Canadians for Mutual  Advancement, Action Committee for Refugees in Southeast Asia (ACRSEA),  Asianadian Resource Workshop, and the Council of Chinese Canadians in  Ontario.  ACRSEA was especially important in the development of a  volunteer organization that would provide the human resources for the Ad  Hoc Committee.
Ad Hoc Committee workers distributed pamphlets and leaflets and spoke  to church gatherings, social groups, community forums, and political  rallies throughout the Toronto area.  They wrote letters to politicians,  ministers, and newspapers. They sent representatives to show a tape of  “Campus Giveaway” to influential people in various positions of power.
By the second week in December, the campaign had yielded only meagre  results.  The Ad Hoc Committee decided to try a different approach.  The  protest of ink on paper now gave way to the tactics of direct  confrontation – street demonstrations and picketing.
The question of legal action had already been investigated by the  students.  Having called on the expertise of a Toronto lawyer with an  impressive civil rights record, the students told the committee that a  lawsuit could be successful.
On December 19, 1979, a rally at the Cecil Community Centre revealed  that the W5 issue had united the Chinese community regardless of  occupation and political persuasion.  The auditorium was filled to  capacity for a screening of “Campus Giveaway.”  Matrons in black silk  jackets, ambitious young lawyers, Chinese Benevolent Association  members, aging bachelors from a forgotten era, fashionably dressed  students, and small children clutching their parents’ hands crammed into  the 200 seats and line the walls.  From every corner of the Toronto  Chinese community the W5 issue had brought out the previously  uncommitted, apathetic, and the sceptical.  The atmosphere was electric  with the anticipation of momentous developments.
The Cecil meeting demonstrated the depth of the community’s feelings  about the Ad Hoc Committee’s campaign.  Many began to believe that a  united community dedicated to achieving clear-cut goals could be  victorious.    At its first meeting, the Ad Hoc Committee set three objectives: • to demand a public apology from CTV and an equal opportunity to  present a fair and accurate report to repair the damages done by the W5  program; • to take the necessary steps to ensure that CTV does not air similar  programs misrepresenting and damaging the image of any ethno-cultural  group; • to educate the public about the contributions of the Chinese Canadians to Canadian society.
The Cecil turnout convinced the Ad Hoc Committee to stage a peaceful  demonstration in Toronto, the media heartland of the country.  The plan  was to hold a mass rally on January 26, 1980, in the education building  on the University of Toronto campus. Then, the protesters would march on  the CTV headquarters about a mile away.
The federal election then impending helped attract twenty speakers  representing all the political parties to the rally.  Ron Atkey, the  incumbent minister of employment and immigration, did not show but his  surrogate told the crowd of 1,000 which packed the auditorium that W5  “was unfair to the extreme” because “the majority of the foreign  students came from Europe and the USSR.”
Politicians Bob Kaplan, Bob Rae, Peter Stollery, John Foster, and  Eric Jackson denounced the CTV program.  John Sewell, the mayor of  Toronto, called for police and media reform “if we are to create a  country where we all feel at home.”  He blasted the CTV program as “a  serious insult to the educational aspirations of Canadians who are not  white.”
Wilson Head, president of the National Black Coalition, told the  predominantly Chinese audience that “CTV did you a favour in arousing in  you a need to fight back. . . . No one gives you freedom.  It is won in  struggle.”
George Bancroft, an education professor, got the most enthusiastic  response when he said:  “At the University of Toronto we give grades  ranging through A, B, C, D, and F for failure.  But I would not give W5  an A, B, C, D, or F.  I would give it a P. . .  I mean P for pollution  in its facts.  I mean pollution in analysis.  Pollution must be cleaned  up.  W5’s pollution must be removed!  Its pollution must be eradicated.” When he sat down, the usually subdued Chinese Canadians gave a  deafening ovation.
The roused audience, inspired by these speeches, emptied into the  street, where they were met by about 1,500 more protesters.  Pickets  were unveiled and slogans echoed in the bitterly cold air:
CTV Apologize Now!    Red, Brown, Black Yellow, and White – We Canadians Must Unite    Biased Show, W5 Got to go!
Marching four abreast, the demonstrators headed for the CTV’s  national headquarters.  The crowd was mostly Chinese but people from  many other ethnic groups in Toronto were there to lend support.  Here  was multiculturalism in action – ethnic people defending the rights of  all Canadians.
In front of the CTV office, Donald Chu told the protesters that the  W5 program “encourages stereotyping and discrimination in a  multicultural society under the guise of freedom of speech.  It is  irresponsible journalism that must be suppressed.  We need all Canadians  to support the cause and promote mutual understanding.  We’ll keep up  the pressure through all avenues . . . by peaceful means, of course.”
Toronto was not the only scene of picketing and protest against CTV. On the same day, more than 500 demonstrators marched in the bitter cold  on CTV’s Edmonton affiliate, CFRN.  The protest, lead by the Ad Hoc  Committee of Chinese Canadians in Edmonton Against W5 was supported by  groups from Calgary and Vancouver.
In the post-rally days Ad Hoc committees were formed in Winnipeg,  Regina, Vancouver, Calgary, Saskatoon and Halifax.  This type of social  movement was unprecedented in Chinese Canadian history.  The Chinese  community, once stereotyped as passive and docile, was now  action-oriented and conscious of its own democratic rights.
CTV was disturbed by the unfavourable publicity generated by the  Chinese community across Canada, and requested a meeting.  Held on  February 4 and attended by the leaders of the Toronto committee and the  network’s vice president and executive Don Cameron, and Lionel Lumb  (producer of “Campus Giveaway”), the meeting produced nothing concrete.
On February 11, the Toronto committee and the five student plaintiffs  hired lawyer Ian Scott as their negotiator.  The Ad Hoc Committee’s  decision to use a lawyer was a reminder to the CTV that legal action was  imminent if the network did not negotiate sincerely and seriously.
While the Ad Hoc Committees across Canada filed complaints to  provincial and federal human rights bodies and amassed 20,000 signatures  on a petition protesting the W5 program, CTV tried to diffuse the  movement by issuing a statement of “regret.”
The March 16 statement set off a national reaction among the Ad Hoc  Committees.  The Vancouver local committee asserted that CTV’s “regret”  was “wholly inadequate to redress the damage done by the story to the  Chinese Canadian community.”  The major problem with the CTV statement,  the Vancouver group continued, was the “no fault is admitted other than  the admission that one of the statistics quoted in the story was in  error, and even the admission is qualified.  The impression thus created  by the statement is that the Chinese Canadian community has launched a  deep and vociferous nation-wide protest over a single statistical error. This is in itself condescending and insulting to all the many good  Canadians who have joined the protest.  The error admitted was only of  the many faults of the story and it was far from the worst. . . . There  is no indication in the statement that W5 really understands what was  wrong with the story in the first place.”
The Toronto Ad Hoc committee decided to mount a sustained campaign  against CTV and called together the fifteen committees across the  country for a meeting in Toronto.  The strategy behind this gathering  was to demonstrate to CTV that the anti-W5 movement embraced Chinese  communities throughout Canada.
While plans were going ahead for the April 18 to 20 national meeting,  CTV and the Toronto Ad Hoc Committee met on April 3.  Lawyer Scott  restated the Ad Hoc Committee demands and called on the CTV to  negotiate.  At this meeting, CTV finally realized the extent of the  anger of the Chinese over being labelled “foreigners” in “Campus  Giveaway,” and that inaccurate statistics were not the major issue.  On  April 15, the CTV and the Ad Hoc Committee agreed on a settlement  package.  The next day, CTV issued a public apology.  The network’s top  executive, Murray Chercover, said that “Campus Giveaway” was largely  based on extrapolations that distorted the actual statistics. . . the  majority of the research data was incorrect.  We were clearly wrong in  our presentation of the facts and W5’s initial defence of the program.”
The program, Chercover continued, “was criticized by Chinese  Canadians and the universities as racist.  They were right. . . .”  He  confessed that “there is no doubt that the distorted statistics combined  with our visual presentation, made the program appear racist in tone  and effect.  We share the dismay of our critics that this occurred.  We  sincerely apologize for the fact Chinese Canadians were depicted as  foreigners, and for whatever distress this stereotyping may have caused  them in the context of our multicultural society.”
Finally, Chercover said that “corrective measures have been taken. We believe we have now instituted a better system of checks and balances  in respect to editorial control and presentation programs.”  Marge  Anthony, CTV’s public relations director, told reporters after the  apology that the person chiefly responsible for the “distortions” in the  segment “is no longer with us.”
The anti-W5 movement did not disappear with CTV’s apology, but  evolved into the Chinese Canadian National Council for Equality, a  Toronto-based organization “to safeguard the dignity and equality of all  Chinese Canadians and other ethnic groups in this country.”

See how we reacted effectively against "Campus Giveaway"

http://www.youtube.com/results?s ... s+giveaway&aq=f

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