Montreal Flashmob Info Session

Hi everyone!

The Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR) Youth Network is happy to invite you to participate in a mob to defend non-citizen children and youth rights in Canada, which will be organized by myself, Olivia Doggett, in downtown Montreal on the afternoon of Friday November 25, 2011. This event is part of a larger national flash mob happening around the Universal Day of the Child, November 20, 2011.

The CCR Youth Network is a space for young people to gather, exchange ideas, and take action in order to promote a fair and equal treatment of refugees and newcomers in Canada. As part of the CCR Youth Network, the organization I am part of, B Refuge McGill, aims to promote intercultural relationships between students and refugee claimants by organizing group outings and one-on-one activities around the city. We also do a lot of advocacy work, in hopes of informing students about the sort of challenges refugees face when arriving in Canada, and what we can do to help them.

In June 2012, the United Nations will examine Canada on its respect for children’s rights under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Canada still has work to do on refugee and immigrant children's rights if it wants to pass the exam. This is a great opportunity to push for change! This fall, groups of young people are organizing flash mobs from coast to coast to urge Canada to respect non-citizen children and youth rights. So far, flash mobs are taking place in Vancouver, Lethbridge, Edmonton, Toronto, Montreal, St John’s, and Fredericton. Amongst other things, we are uniting to demand that Canada stop detaining children for immigration purposes. For more information, please see the document attached, “Refugee and Immigrant Children and Youth Rights: Canada has work to do.”
http://ccrweb.ca/en/youthrights/frontpage

We will be holding an information session this Friday, October 28, 2011 in room 302 of the SSMU building from 3-4 in order to prepare the flashmob, and we warmly invite you to attend. This will be an interactive session to discuss the ways in which Canada is not respecting non-citizen children and youth rights, and to decide together on the content of the flash mob in Montreal. We also encourage you to invite young refugees and newcomers that would be interested in participating in the organization of this flashmob.