In a Decade, Toronto's Filipino Community Hasn't Changed Much

Volume 1, Issue No. 12

OPINION/COMMENTARY

/ News That Fears None, Views That Favor Nobody /

. . . . . A community service of The Filipino Web Channel (TheFilipinoWebChannel@gmail. com) and the Philippine Village Voice (PhilVoiceNews@gmail.com) for the information and understanding of Filipinos and the diverse communities in North America . . . . . .

Our latest as of Friday, November 22, 2019 

~ "Water under the bridge," says the idiom to mean "that a lot of time has passed or a lot of things have happened since a bad experience". It's been over a decade and a year ago, but the role players are very much active in the local sphere and are still in the same old racket as before. Planting the seeds, manipulating the media, controlling outcomes - they're all evident in the events of 2008 in Toronto's Filipino community.

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SAME OLD, SAME OLD

A Peek at Toronto's Filipino Community in 2008

By ROMEO P. MARQUEZ 

Editor, The Filipino Web Channel

“Manipulation, fueled with good intent, can be a blessing. But when used wickedly, it is the beginning of a magician's karmic calamity.” ― T.F. Hodge

TORONTO - A friend recently handed me a bunch of Filipino tabloids that had been yellowed by age. I'm mildly surprised because high-quality newsprint does not deteriorate as quickly as the most common paper. I should know 'cause I still have good copies of my newspapers I published in 1998 in California.

The copies are dated August and September 2008, a full eleven years since they came out. The contents are very much readable, suggesting that my friend had taken a great deal of time to preserve them.

For a whole snowy morning on this eleventh day of the eleventh month, and pausing momentarily on the eleventh hour, I flicked through their pages, scrutinizing photographs, advertisements, and events as they were reported, and how. The contents were interesting, especially for a student of history like myself.

I was looking for meaningful happenings at that time. The year 2008 is an excellent period to look back to as it predates my move here from San Diego in 2010. In journalistic terms, the in-between years had many things to catch up with.

I know the information I gathered there may not be enough of a perspective but still, they afforded a glimpse of events of little or no importance during that phase but find relevance nowadays.

I see that then and now, the Filipino community is not much different. For example, the women role players are the same, and wonder of wonders, their physical appearance gets regenerated now by layers upon layers of makeup and fancy wigs, their youth almost made to look intact by assorted hues of hair dye.

An unsourced article, which was very likely a press release, in one of the tabloids that caught my attention was the reported meeting between then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his wife Lauren, and "Filipino leaders," which was what the accompanying picture said in its caption.

I purposely put the quotation marks in "Filipino leaders" as a precaution because I do not agree with the generic phrase to categorize the three people in that meeting with the Harpers.

In the article, it appeared that Harper and his Multiculturalism Minister, Jason Kenney, merely invited a pro-Conservative Filipino couple and ANCOP president Ricky Cuenca who seemed to have the good sense to stay out of the photoshoot. 

Where were the "Filipino leaders"? I might ask. The article did not mention them; it's the photo caption that said it without showing or naming them.

News management was at play, that's obvious. The slant by which one person was being projected as a key role player in the community did not seem to have been noticed by readers.. Or was it ever, and merely ignored by the lame media?

Another story bannered by a left-leaning tabloid appeared to confirm my observation that somebody must be orchestrating the promotion of one of the "Filipino leaders". It was essentially PR work to market the person and package him as somebody in the community's totem pole.

The paper's headline reads: "Mabuhay festival attracts 15,000". Considering that there were only 162,600 Filipinos in Toronto in 2008, official statistics showed, it appeared quite impressive.

The lede says: "A record breaker of over 15,000 festival goers packed the Metro Toronto Convention Centre last July 19, 2008 x x x . From the moment everyone set their foot on the 100,000 square feet of festivities, they marvelled at the immensity of the hall . . . "

The given numbers are 15,000 and 100,000. I did some calculations myself but I decided to just rely on the internet for help. From what came out, the manipulation was very evident.

A space of 100,000 square feet would accommodate 35,000 people. So, even if organizers had billed the event as "a success", the 15,000 festival goers did not half-fill the room, as they amounted to only 42.86 percent. 

That's probably the basis for the sentence "they marvelled at the immensity of the hall . . . " It's not that the hall was unusually large, it was that the people were few and sparse.

Comparing the 2008 figure with current terms, the number would not merit a mention. Stack against the Taste of Manila Festival, for example, 15K is a drop in the bucket - a mere 3.75 percent of the estimated 400,000 people who hit the road to Little Manila in August.

Of course, the organizer of the 2008 event was the Philippine Independence Day Council. And sure enough, the pro-Conservative Filipino couple was at the helm of the organization.

I believe the seeds were being planted already at that time in cahoots with a self-declared media couple. As a matter of fact, their alliance surfaced only after the person being pushed for public office had asked his co-conspirator to change the password for their phony social media account.

Fast-forward to 2012, and my personal assessment is validated by events in the community. The seeds had grown and flowering. (Copyright 2019. All Rights Reserved).