This being my debut column in Balita, I’d like to thank the publishers and editors – Ruben Cusipag and Tess Cusipag – for inviting me to write for their paper. I grabbed the offer when Tess made it, knowing I can help in modest ways in promoting understanding and expanding knowledge through accurate and balanced presentation of information.
Balita’s reach in the Greater Toronto Area, its reputation as a reliable community partner in the last 33 years, the professionalism of its publishers and editors, and the paper’s pre-eminent place in the industry are the major rationale in prompting me to accept.
Balita is endowed with the rich journalistic experience of the seasoned Ruben Cusipag and the undiminished passion for writing of his lifetime partner Tess Cusipag. It is comforting to know that they knew what good journalism is.
Their professional team-up makes Balita the paper of choice by readers and advertisers. For me, Balita is an effective vehicle to reach out to the great masses of Filipinos in Toronto.
I’m writing a column and with each piece, I bring a wealth of knowledge accumulated through decades of reporting for newspapers, magazines, broadcast and wire agencies in the Philippines, Japan, Germany and the United States, and lately for online media in Canada.
As a foreign correspondent for nearly 20 years, I learned the fine nuances of news coverages with a global perspective. Yet it is by interacting with local communities that gives me the full essence of what it means to write about people who are also neighbours, friends, community members, colleagues, province mates and compatriots. That lends a personal touch.
In San Diego, California where I lived for 16 years before moving to Toronto, I published and edited three community newspapers – Diario Veritas, The District Times and the Philippine Village Voice – none of which made money because of the adversarial nature of their coverage.
Exposing “dirty linen”, as others call it, was my way of serving the community – to inform who among its members are engaged in fraud and deceit and victimize others. That’s empowering our compatriots with knowledge so that they will know who to deal with.
There and then I was a muckraker, and I will continue to be that way in Canada through my own online news outlets, namely, The Filipino Web Channel and The Gotcha Journalist Channel’s Currents & Breaking News, and perhaps through this column in Balita if the Cusipags would permit it.
Investigative journalism is basically muckraking. Its watchdog journalism that – I’m proud to say – I pioneered on the community level in San Diego. Investigative journalism undid one elected public official in that city – a Filipino lawyer – who mulcted thousands of dollars from hapless Filipino clients too timid to complain.
An unwavering commitment to expose him despite threats of physical harm and lawsuits, backed by solid evidence and an airtight case, proved too much of a hurdle for him that he quit his elective position and fled to another city.
Later, he was disbarred, stripped of the braggadocio that he waved like a peacock. The community, though in a state of shock and disbelief, cursed me no end, for they felt incredulous that someone people had trusted was in fact a crook. He was a crook, and I stood my ground proving he was.
For a community paper like mine then, it was a big achievement. Not that I relish bringing people down but it’s part of a journalist’s credo to fight for the truth, spring it, and rub it on faces who deceive by sweet talk and idle promises.
Toronto is very much like San Diego. The demographics are the same except that more Filipinos there are in the military, particularly the US navy, than they are in healthcare like in Toronto.
In the unlit corners of Toronto’s Filipino community, there are hideous characters that make a career scamming the vulnerable among us. I know of several cases, and in most of them, the victims are those needing the most help. I shall endeavour to expose them. That is the challenge.
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In a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-lingual area such as Toronto, mine is a lone voice in the wilderness. I have ideas, dreams, opinions and sentiments about the world and my community in particular, but they are for the most part kept to myself.
I’ve thought about solutions to some of the ills plaguing the community. I’ve thought about ways to wean ourselves from our dire predicament. I’ve thought about engaging our leaders in a spirited dialogue . . . all these in an attempt to make our community visible.
My voice has been wanting out, and seeks to be heard and listened to by those who structure our lives in the shape they want us to be in forever – as subservient and uncomplaining servants to a larger community.
All men are created equal, it is said, but that’s better said than done. Filipinos are uniquely branded for their extreme capacity to absorb the hurts, the insults, the abuses because they are inherently kind and generous. Yet the voice that we should be articulating is at best taken for granted and ignored.
Multiply my lone voice 200,000 times and one can see the magnitude of our own apathy. We are what we make of us – content with our personal situations as long as a loaf of bread and a pot of rice come to the table.
We are happy that we can drink, sing and dance a little and be merry when the occasion arises. We give vent to our decadence but not to our aspirations; we crave but dare not brave the challenges of pursuit.
Still we can do better, dream bigger, and aspire higher.
To be called “visible minority” seems enough a category for us. Yet our visibility does not represent the whole. What people see is only a tiny fraction of who and what Filipinos are.
I went to the New Year’s Levee of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford as a journalist. But after taking pictures and videos for nearly an hour, I was dismayed to not see any Filipino in the hundreds of people who stood in line for a chance to meet and greet the city’s top officials.
Filipinos are the third largest “visible minority” group after the Indian and Chinese communities, and here, not one sits in the city council, and probably none too in the lower rungs of municipal bureaucracy. That’s probably the reason Filipinos are not here, they won’t find somebody they can relate to who look like them.
So I did what my impulse told me. I joined the queue and waited almost one hour before that opportunity to shake hands and talk briefly with the mayor and the city councillors present.
When the photo op came and I had to stand close to Mayor Ford, I first thanked him, then told him that my presence there was my attempt to disprove the notion that Filipinos are Toronto’s invisible visible minority. He smiled at my own jibe at myself and my community.
When are we going to be taken seriously, and not just during the campaign for votes? When are we going to add our collective voice to the mainstream chorus?