Footsteps Episode 3

0:00
I also started to see the emergence of well-intended but bad policy. They were what one author, one scholar has called words that work and policies that fail.

0:12
And after I finished university, I started to really see that, that we started to see the selling of ideas that would get people elected rather than the selling of ideas that made a difference in individual lives.

[MUSIC]

0:30
Welcome to Footsteps, the podcast of the Master of Human Rights program housed in the Faculty of Law at the University of Manitoba.

0:41
Join us as we explore and uncover inspiring stories about human rights, human rights education, and the remarkable journeys of our students, human rights advocates, and change makers.

0:52
We're excited to have you with us on this journey.

I. Introduction and Early Experiences (0:00-5:12)

0:57
Good morning, Doctor Reimer, how are you today?

0:59
Well, good morning, Doctor Shariff.

1:02
I'm good.

1:02
Thank you.

1:03
It's lovely to have you in the podcast booth here at Robson Hall and to have a little chat today.

1:09
Thank you for having me here.

1:10
Today's conversation is just a casual conversation to hear a little bit about your story, your personal journey and professional journey towards human rights and, and the work that you're doing in human rights. And I'm curious as to what was your earliest memory or story that you can share about why you ultimately went down this pathway towards working in human rights?

1:36
Well, thanks for asking. I think when I look backwards, that it's been a lifelong journey.

1:42
And I originally thought that it might have started sometime after I did my doctorate, but I think actually it started in early childhood.

1:51
I've always had a great tenderness towards people who have suffered unjustly.

1:58
And as I grew up, and my father was with the railway, so we moved back and forth across the country, I became increasingly tender towards people who were struggling.

2:09
And these would be people in my neighborhood, people living nearby.

2:14
Sometimes stories I would hear.

2:17
My uncle fought in the Second World War; my dad was in the Navy.

2:20
So I heard about people sacrificing on behalf of others, and I think I always thought that was a very noble way to be.

2:28
I was raised to be a corporate lawyer. There was never discussion about me being anything else.

2:34
And so when I was 19 and moved to Winnipeg, the expectation in my family was that I would go to Robson Hall and be a lawyer one day.

2:42
Interestingly, part way through my Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and English, I realized that I was much about justice, and to me, corporate law was about winning.

2:55
And so I changed trajectories and started studying public administration because the idea of an excellent government truly committed to the common good fascinated me, and some of my mentors also believed in excellent governance, and that propelled me forward.

3:13
I ended up doing a master's in public admin.

3:15
My thesis was about education and management theory, and I've always been very, very interested in what motivates people not just for good, but also what motivates them for bad, what my mom would have called bad choices.

3:31
So I did my master's in public admin, as I said. Then I went and worked in a retail environment and managed to actually for the Hudson Bay Company for several years, went from there to cosmetics and in those contexts again, was captivated by the idea that not everyone was treated equally, although we were born equally.

3:52
I just want to go back a little bit before we continue on with that part of the story.

3:57
You said from your childhood you were thinking about people and observing things about people. Is there any one story that sticks out to you from when you were a child that you thought was particularly egregious or really incensed you? Is there a catalyst?

4:13
Thank you. I don't know if it incensed me, but it certainly captivated me.

4:19
I was living in Nelson BCA, little town on the arm of the Kootenai River, and I learned about indigenous people.

4:28
And I learned because my grandmother had Cree blood.

4:32
And that was kind of my first understanding that there was a whole, what we would now call an identity that I knew nothing about.

4:40
And I slowly discovered that there were many Indigenous people around us and I had never seen anyone that belonged to an Indigenous community.

4:49
And I kept asking myself why.

4:51
And honestly, I was very young, 7,8, 9 years old. And I thought, how can it be that there are there are people near me that I never get to see?

5:00
And I think that was really my first exposure to what we now call “othering”.

5:05
And it bothered me, really bothered me.

II. Governance, Education, and the Seeds of Human Rights Work (5:12-17:47)

5:12
Just to pick up that thread that I made us drop for a moment there. You described this idea of justice, I guess social justice, and then about the importance of government or governance and how that could potentially achieve justice. I guess you were thinking that way as you were obtaining your education and your employment choices.

5:34
Can you talk a little bit about that in terms of that link between justice and governance?

5:42
I think I believed, and to some extent still do, that if we can put a just framework around the principles by which we live, we can all live in a just world.

5:56
And so the role of government would be to ensure that legislation, policies, regulation, all the decisions that are made in a governing organization would give careful thought to how those decisions would affect the people who are going to be affected by them.

6:15
And as the years went by and I got to university, I got involved in politics, not in the sense of ideological or party politics, but I started paying close attention to what was being said, what was actually happening, and I started to see a gap between the two.

6:32
I also started to see the emergence of well-intended but bad policy.

6:39
They were what one author, one scholar has called words that work and policies that fail.

6:45
And after I finished university, I started to really see that that we started to see the selling of ideas that would get people elected rather than the selling of ideas that made a difference in individual lives.

7:02
So for example, my doctoral dissertation was on why Indigenous people leave the school system, and that started in part because I was an elected school trustee and in those days the province measured school achievement.

7:16
And so I knew as a school board trustee that we had the best French and English elementary schools and the best 2 high schools in the province.

7:24
And so we knew that these were really good schools.

7:27
We also knew that 70% of our Indigenous population didn't make it to the end of grade 12 and that really caught my interest.

7:36
I wondered why and how that could be.

7:38
If we had excellent schools, how could we possibly lose this many people?

7:42
Can I just ask you a follow up question? And this is a ridiculous question: I'm not even sure I know what a school trustee does. Can you tell us a little bit about what a school trustee actually is and what the responsibility of a school trustee is.

7:58
And thanks for asking that, Mary, because in many ways that is related to my human rights work.

8:07
Most of us don't know how to govern. We are not taught how to govern. We're not taught even our political system anymore. And that is really frightening.

8:14
I believe it was Thomas Jefferson who said that the greatest threat to democracy was the lack of education. And he didn't mean whether or not we could read and write.

8:22
He meant whether or not we understood how our system works and how to operate respectfully within it, how to trust it, when to change it, that type of thing.

8:31
The role of the trustee is to represent the constituency that elected them.

8:36
So that means that they form a really important layer of democracy between the neighborhood and what's happening inside the school system.

8:45
It's a critical role. It links the school board with the excellent values of democracy, of equity, peace, justice, freedom, and hope.

8:58
So school boards in many ways are possibly democracy’s best kept secret. On the school board are trustees. Collectively, they're the board. The authority is in the board.

9:10
They oversee a school division or in the United States, called a school district, but they are there to make sure that it is well run.

9:18
The big mistake many trustees make is that they think they are there to run the school division. They are not there to do that.

9:27
They might be involved in approving a budget.

9:30
They might be involved in strategic planning.

9:33
That's where they should be consulting with the neighborhood community, finding out what people are thinking, what people are comfortable with, and then weighing those against the directions that are coming in recommendation from, frankly, the very highly trained, excellent educational administration, which are the Superintendent, the assistant superintendents, and the people that the school division pays to actually run the school division.

9:57
If trustees collectively disagree with the direction of a district, then they can talk to the Superintendent. That's a human resources issue and say we're going in a different direction.

10:08
OK, that makes sense. In terms of human rights, then, what's that linkage between school boards and human rights from your experience and perspective?

10:21
In many ways, I think that the school board represents the responsibility piece of human rights.

10:26
So it's not that there needs to be ideological agendas, but rather a consideration for what we know as the common good. And that also has to be defined communally.

10:38
And so the role of the trustee, again, is to know what people are thinking, where they've been, if there are challenges in the schools.

10:45
In the olden days, it had to do with, for example, whether or not school needed to change to accommodate the harvest. That's actually one of the circumstances the school boards would think about.

10:56
But their role in that example would be, we need school to start at 1:00 because the children are out in the fields (which is another human rights issue, but we won't go into that one).

11:07
But instead what tends to happen is that they think they should be out in the fields working with the students. So there's a confusion of the roles.

11:14
So the board works between the community and the recommendations of administration so that it's a very important layer of democracy and it takes a lot of discernment.

11:25
So we don't need people who are educational leadership or curriculum experts or even members of a political party to serve on a school board. We need people who can connect with the people that are out there.

11:36
And that's the link back to human rights.

11:38
OK.

11:39
So for example, when I was a school board trustee, there was a conflict across the sea.

11:45
The province of Manitoba brought a number of families in and put families from both sides of that conflict in the same apartment building. They landed in the same school.

11:54
This was actually an example, probably 30 years old now, but a child said to somebody, “I'm going to get you”.

12:01
The other child brought it back to the conflict zone that they'd come from. And frankly, that's how it ended up in front of the school board because we realized that that this was much more serious than what was happening.

12:12
But if the school board trustees hadn't been there, somebody hadn't heard about that, however they heard about it in the neighborhood, the province and the school couldn't have addressed the problems.

12:21
Right.

12:22
So it's just really an important voice.

12:24
It was fun when I was a trustee, one of the Superintendent, it said to me, you're my favorite trustee because you sit in the rink, and you sit in the school and in the soccer pitch and you hear what people say.

12:34
So there seems to be a parallel here with this idea, subsidiarity. Do you know that concept of subsidiarity? I'm throwing this at you. There's many different approaches to it. It comes from environmental and sustainable development. You see it in human rights conversation, which I'm hearing from you right now, theological perspectives as well, this idea of the people who are closest to the issue know what the issues are.

12:56
Yes.

12:57
Can you just speak to that a little bit, That idea? I understand it from this language of subsidiarity, but you see it everywhere.

13:04
That is excellent. So you asked about the role of the trustee?

13:08
Yes.

13:08
If they hear those issues, it is their role to bring that to the board table and to have a discussion about whether or not that's something that the school division needs to be addressing.

13:18
And then if they feel that it is something that needs to be addressed, the experts in the school district, the Superintendent, the teachers, those people can figure out how that can actually happen.

13:29
So the school board sets the tone we need to consider XYZ, but they should never, ever, ever be in direct conflict with the people that they represent, right?

13:39
And we're seeing that increasingly.

13:42
I decided to write two books on good governance called Leadership and School Board, and that might have been when I realized that the right to a safe learning environment, not defined ideologically but rather in terms of human dignity and respect, was not what I was seeing taking place.

14:03
What I'm hearing then is experiences early on that you observed things around inequity or you had social justice questions, a linkage in your mind to this relating to governance and then another link relating to education.
14:28
Right.

14:29
So tell me then, how does this all come together as an issue around human rights?

14:36
If human rights are the acknowledgement that we are all created equal and that we all are deserving of respect and dignity by the fact that we're people, then education fits right exactly right into that.

14:51
Education in all cultures is governed. There are people to collectively who decide how that is going to take place.

15:01
If it takes place not in the interests of the dignity and respect and learning capabilities of the children, then it's off course.

15:14
So when I finished being a school board trustee, I decided that I would explore more at the academic level. And so I enrolled in a Master of Education program, specifically in education administration, with a mind towards figuring out if the school system was wrong for Indigenous kids.

15:34
But I was also wondering why it was wrong for other children that I knew, family members, neighbors, students, and parents that I met through the school systems. I was almost finished that when my advisor said to me, you need to be in peace and conflict studies.

15:51
And I said absolutely not because I thought that peace and conflict studies and the peace movement were the same thing. And I grew up in the era of Volkswagen buses and, you know, “ban the bomb” and all that kind of stuff. And so I didn't understand what it was.

16:05
But peace and conflict studies is actually the study of conflict to understand what is happening across issues.

16:13
It doesn't have an ideological base. We're starting to see the emergence of that now, which is making it not be peace and conflict studies anymore.

16:21
But peace and conflict studies had a human rights element to it, and it was the notion that peace can be built if conflict is properly acknowledged.

16:31
So what we studied were different frameworks and theories to explain what we would be seeing.

16:35
So in my case, the conflict of why the school system, this award-winning top level school system didn't work for Indigenous kids was a gap for me in terms of human rights or human dignity.

16:49
So I ended up going into peace and conflict studies and my dissertation, the overall research question was, I think I mentioned why do Indigenous students drop out of school? What I meant was why don't they get through grade 12.

17:01
I read over 400 pieces of literature.

17:03
I was convinced that I was going to find a new school system, that somehow, we had to just do it differently.

17:09
What I did not find in over 400 pieces was anybody who had actually asked somebody, an Indigenous person who dropped out of school, why they did it.

17:17
There's lots and lots of theories out there, but nobody had actually said to the person, “you walk that road, you want to tell me about it?”

17:24
This was 10 or 12 years ago.

17:26
I also did a postdoc in North Carolina, where I saw injustice in a different way.

17:31
That was also a fascinating year, but I came back, I taught public administration at the University of Winnipeg and just started to really see a big gap between good governance, good decision making and the experience of individual people.

III. The Intersection of Peace & Conflict Studies and Human Rights (17:47-23:50)

17:47
I would like to probe that a little bit more, the idea of peace and conflict and the ideas, of course, of human rights, and just try to understand that a little bit better, particularly from your point of view. And if I understood correctly, you said from a peace and conflict studies perspective, you have to name it. You have to name and identify the conflict in order to find that path to peace, correct?

18:16
Yes. 
Basically, conflict takes place in four ways.

18:19
It happens intrapersonally, like within ourselves.

18:22
It happens interpersonally between people.

18:24
It happens intranationally and internationally.

18:29
So we have 4 levels of conflict.

18:32
Conflict studies is not sexy, it is cold. It is about looking at what's happening, not determining who's right and wrong, but looking for the common interests that would build the conflict back towards a peaceful scenario.

18:49
That takes work.

18:50
It takes no ideology, it doesn't take activism. It takes really long, hard work, but it's about moving people and educating people so that they can see one another as human beings.

19:04
So some of the earliest work in peace and conflict studies that's very, very relevant for human rights came out of Israel in the University of Jerusalem with Dr. Dan Baran, who was intrigued about how descendants of the Holocaust made sense of their family histories.

19:19
Right, Right.

19:20
And then that was picked up by the Irish peace processes after 1998 in the Good Friday Agreement.

19:26
And so that was adopted to help people, in particular in Northern Ireland cross the huge divide between Catholic and Protestant, English and Irish, which it turned out through peace and conflict studies, we learned was really not a religious conflict.

19:43
It was what's called an identity conflict.

19:45
And that's what most human rights conflicts are about.

19:48
An identity conflict is very difficult to well, it's almost impossible to identify until it's actually manifesting.

19:56
And by then it's, it's hard because then you have to try to unpack it or undo it.

20:00
But an identity conflict is about at least two groups who feel their identity is under attack.

20:07
So that's their language, their history, their religion, their hopes for the future, their social constructs like their family, their education systems. All of those are at threat from the other side.

20:19
And we read language of pathology, right? Like, if you don't agree with me, you're pathological.

20:25
But in fact, people aren't pathological. These are their deeply, deeply held values.

20:30
So if you have two sets of deeply held values that are in conflict, how do you move forward, right?

20:35
You find out what they actually have in common.

20:38
They love their kids. They want to be able to eat healthy. They like a roof over their head.

20:42
And that's really the origins of human rights.

20:44
Can you tell me a little bit more about what you were thinking about in terms of education? Because you make a move then from thinking about children's education, and you move into adult education.

20:56
Right.

20:57
So the link, again, between peace and conflict and education.

21:02
Yeah, when I did my doctoral research, I was one of the few that had made that link.

21:07
So I understand why it's difficult. And I had trouble also trying to see the connection at first.

21:13
The conflict is between the delivery of what education should be and what was actually happening.

21:20
And we've all heard the phrase people vote with their feet. So if people are leaving the school system, there's a reason for that.

21:27
And if the reasons were not what I was reading in literature, then what were they?

21:32
Because what I was reading were, frankly, governance decisions, structure of the classroom, the training of the teachers, the ethnic identity of the teachers. Like the literature talks a lot about those pieces, which are all decisions that elected people can make. So if those decisions can be changed and change the outcome on education, because obviously it's not just K to 12 that was an issue or nursery school that was an issue.

21:58
So those are all again, structural or governance decisions, right? How is the curriculum developed? How do the classes take place? What days of the week do they take place? What hours do they take place? What kind of equipment is available? What is studied? Who's hired, how are they hired? What does academic freedom mean?

22:14
All of those questions are actually governance questions.

22:17
So if we knew that 70% of the Indigenous students in what was Saint Boniface school division were not making it through Grade 12, what decisions could be made - in particular at the school board level or the provincial level ( because education is provincial) or even at the federal level in terms of fiscal transfer payments -  what decisions could be made that are different that would change those outcomes?

22:38
What is the nature of that conflict in terms of those four domains or looking back at it from your perspective?

22:45
This digs back into my academic career.

22:47
It's an identity conflict, OK?

22:49
And I actually have gone to the United States and to Ireland talking about Canadian Indigenous relations or Canadian democracy as an identity conflict.

22:59
And that's what we're seeing.

23:01
And so those few things that our governments have done that are helping or decisions that are made even at the university that are helping that outcome are responses to an identity conflict, whether it's recognized or not.

23:13
Interesting. I think that's probably true that a lot of what academics or administrators work on, especially in higher education is addressing the identity conflicts …

Not identity politics, right, Very different.

Right.

23:29
And so we would probably do well to have more conversations around that and have some structure around our conversations in order to try to…
Yes, because in fact, identity politics is what comes out of mismanagement of identity conflict, which I realize is a very lofty statement to make, but it's based in research.

23:49
You've got some gems today. So thank you, Laura. Let's now just move from after you do your peace and conflict studies degree.

IV. Joining Robson Hall and Finding a platform for change in the Master of Human Rights program (23:50-27:12)

23:50 Tell me about the decision to come work at Robson Hall and specifically in the Master of Human Rights program.

24:06
Thank you.

24:07
It's probably an odd an odd answer, but I hope I can walk you down this windy road, so that it's clear.

24:14
I worked with 66 people in downtown Winnipeg who were Indigenous people who had left the school system and then come back as adults. That's how I was able to talk to them.

24:23
So in many ways they represented Hope because the circle had closed.

24:26
It's a fascinating story of how the school was set up there, and that's a story for another day.

24:31
My findings indicated that the reasons why they had dropped out of school were reasons that were rooted exclusively in government, and they were decisions we thought we were dealing with. Bullying, absence of adults, no mentoring, addictions.

24:47
So we have policies around all of that that's supposed to prevent that kind of thing, especially in children.

24:53
And the, the number one reason was loss. Staggering loss.

24:57
Community, loved ones, friends, family, moving a lot that that type of thing all categorized under loss.

25:04
So unfortunately, although I made policy recommendations out of my study, they weren't, as I'd said, sexy. And so it seemed to fall flat.

25:13
So when the opportunity came along to work with the very bright, talented students that were coming into the Master of Human Rights program, and I was asked if I would help facilitate their training, the teacher in me just leapt for joy.

25:28
And so I had the opportunity to meet the people who lead practicum sites, get a window into their hearts and what it was they were really trying to do.

25:37
So in the daytime, they might have been the executive director of one of the commissions, but actually they really believed in human dignity. And so it was those people that I worked with, and there's a bunch of them, right, The Children's Advocate, a number of different offices.

25:53
So I got to meet these people, I got to meet the students, and I got to put them together. And so I felt like this was my way of bringing bad policy, turning it possibly towards something good, not through so much what I was doing as it was equipping these students to see human rights in the context of organizational decision making.

26:13
And because they were going to be masters graduates, they would be in positions of influence.

26:18
And I do believe we all have influence, whether we're like wherever we are in an organization or family or society.

26:24
But they in particular were going on to, and they did go on to great things.

26:27
So it was a wonderful experience working with those students and working with those practicum sites.

26:32
And to me, human rights was manifesting as I saw respect and dignity in the hearts of the students, manifesting in their practicum sites and in them launching into remarkable careers.

26:44
Senior policy analysts with the province being scooped up by other provincial governments, some of them going on to work with, I don't want to say obscure, but really tiny human rights groups who are having a huge influence somewhere overseas.

27:00
But for that group of people who are being influenced by the MHR grads, they're really experiencing a better life.

27:07
it was extremely invigorating, exciting, rewarding work.

27:12
Why do you think there is that kind of success? What are all the ingredients that are coming together to lead to that kind of result and that kind of success? I'm genuinely curious to understand that since you were the really the first person to work on establishing those linkages between the students’ aspirations and the practical work in this program.

27:39
I have actually given that a lot of thought.

27:41
Oh wonderful.

27:41
And I think one of the reasons why is that that job let me really work closely with the students and work closely with the leaders of the practicum sites and make the match. So I wouldn't say, oh, you have to go here, but instead I would introduce them to each other.

27:57
They would meet, they would have conversations, and they'd realize that they shared a common path.

28:02
So it was really about facilitating and listening if the student wanted to be there and they wanted to work with them.

28:09
And together they were achieving a goal that met the human rights career goals really of the student.

28:16
Then we would make it happen so that the site supervisor would work with their interests and their skills to get them to the platform that they wanted to be on so that when they graduated, they could go forward.

28:28
So last question, what kind of advice do you have for anybody who's has it written on their heart to work in human rights or to strive for the dignity and quality of people just as you described you were when you were younger?

V. Reflections and Words of wisdom for aspiring human rights advocates (28:48-30:18) 
28:48

Well, my advice would be based in my experience, it would be expect to have your heart broken.
But I think it's good to have a soft heart. I think it's good to let your heart break with the things that are really important, to be able to stand alongside somebody and walk beside them, teach them to walk again sometimes.

29:08
For an academic, that means learning those things that can make the world a better place, and not necessarily in line with your own ideology, but definitely in line with dignity and hope.

29:22
And for people who are interested in human rights, it's much easier than it was even 10 years ago to be in the field.

29:31
But I find myself again, candidly, feeling cautious. I fear sometimes that we lose sight of the dignity and respect piece in our zeal to have our cause front and center.

29:44
I think the humility piece is absolutely critical, and the sincerity, but also the preparedness that it is very hard, long, difficult work.

29:54
It's part of why I really like the museum.

29:56
Remember when it was built, they said those long alabaster hallways are there because the progress is long and slow, uphill, difficult. And so each time I walk those alabaster pathways at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, I think about that it doesn't happen fast, fast, fast takes a long time, but people are worth it.

30:18
They're always worth it.

30:21
What an amazing way to end this conversation. I thank you so much, Laura Reimer.

30:26
And we thank you for joining us and listening in, and we hope to see you next time.

30:31
Thank you very much.

30:32
Thank you.

30:33
It's been my pleasure.

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