Reconciling Injustices in a Pluralistic Canada

2014/05/26 Leave a comment

Further to an earlier post (Opinion: Reconciling injustices in a pluralistic Canada) on the Simon Fraser Centre for Dialogue on historical recognition and reconciliation, obtained the final report and discussion documents. For those interested, it provides a good overview of recognition/reconciliation challenges, principles and pitfalls. The report lists the following principles:

Values-based decision-making: Rebuilding relationships between affected communities and Canadian society requires trust, shared intentions and long-term commitment. Lacking these, a reconciliation process risks causing further harm rather than healing.

Acknowledging shared history: Recognizing the full scope of past injustices is a necessary first step toward reconciliation. Witnessing stories, incorporating past injustices into the official narrative of Canadian history, and educating the public are critical elements of this.

Accountability: Governments must be accountable for past actions and take substantive actions to repair the resulting harm. The form this takes is circumstance dependent.

Opportunities to work through conflict: Space for comprehensive dialogue must be built into any reconciliation process, including upfront space for consensus building within the affected community and the mutual exchange of perspectives between members of the community and government.

Balanced community representation: Reconciliation processes must engage the full range of actors within the affected community, recognizing that communities are diverse and legitimately include different interests. Where community leadership exists, it must demonstrate the extent to which it accomplishes this goal of balanced representation.

Along with the more structured decisions, participants were also allowed to provide their assessment of one particular step or activity that would most help reconciliation:

Education, where educators and all parts of the education system fully communicate the truth of past injustices, and all Canadians understand a common history.

Substantive legacies, such as policy changes to specific legislation and resources, are provided to communities to correct and compensate for past injustices.

Responsiveness by government and Canadian society, where power structures evolve to ensure they reflect the needs of all communities, especially those that are marginalized or lack political power.

Mutually-held values and support, where all Canadians embrace ideas such as diversity, inclusivity and a shared sense of humanity.

Self-empowerment and advocacy within communities affected by injustice, leading to broader changes within society.

One of the more interesting processes and engagement on how to engage and build consensus.

Looking back at my experience with the Community and National Historical Recognition Programs (CHRP and NHRP), the community consultations were largely led at the political level.

The balance between a full and inclusive reconciliation process, and delivering practical initiatives that recognize past injustices, is hard to achieve.

While there were fairly open consultations with some of the communities, leading to an initial program design under Minister Oda, in the end Minister Kenney found out that these did not satisfy the political needs of some of the key communities such as Ukrainian Canadians. His personal consultations with key community leaders and organizations led him to recraft the programs in order to meet the political needs, and largely did so successfully. Some communities ended up happier than others (e.g., Ukrainian Canadians, Jewish Canadians); similarly some community organizations and individuals were unhappier than others (e.g., some Chinese Canadian and Italian Canadian organizations).

In the end, while there was consensus between the Martin and Harper governments on the communities to be recognized, how each government responded to the communities reflected their political objectives and interests.

In the end, reconciliation has to work through the political process, and this report, by presenting the more ideal scenarios, provides a reference point to judge some of the inevitable compromises that happen in the political process.

On the other hand, many if not most of the projects funded under CHRP were focussed on education and awareness. The recent commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the Komagata Maru is but one example of how a story largely ignored by the mainstream media in the past now attracted major media coverage.

And most of these community experiences are now part of our national narrative in Discover Canada, the citizenship guide.

As to the more ambitious items on the “wish list”  (e.g., legacies, power structures, empowerment), the success of the communities in having these events recognized, and the ongoing political attention to community interests, shows a very different Canada to when these events occurred. For some, this may not be enough; for others, it may be too much. But overall, Canadian society continues to respond to the changing nature of our country, and the democratic pressures of the more organized and influential communities.

Report and discussion document links below:

Dialogue Report

Discussion Guide

Filed under Historical Recognition, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Western women can learn from Islam – Anne Michaud

2014/05/26 Leave a comment

A bit of an odd piece on dress codes. Yes, the hypersexualization of the West in unhealthy, for both men and women, yet my sense, anecdotal, from my daughter and her friends, is that are strong young women, and have navigated the imagery successfully.

As to her comments about Iran, total ignorance. A thousand people demonstration  in Tehran, a city of more than 10 million, is a rounding error:

Women in full burqas and hijabs poured into Tehran’s streets last week to protest the modern dress of their urban sisters. City women usually nod to the conservative religious dress code by wearing knee-length coats and head kerchiefs in public. But earlier this month, several dared to bare their full heads and faces for a photograph.

So, the protesters — about 1,000 women and men — appealed to Iran’s morality police to better enforce the law, which obliges women to cover their hair and much of their bodies in loose clothing when outside, regardless of their religion.

As I studied the images of the mob of black-cloaked women, I thought we could use more public modesty ourselves.

As I see it, the hijab head covering and burqa cloak are symbols of subservience. They erase individuality, represent hostility to girls’ education and independence, and press unique souls into one narrow feminine role.

And yet, I wonder whether the same couldn’t be said about a culture that turns a Hannah Montana into a twerking, crotch-rubbing wrecking ball.

Western women can learn from Islam – Anne Michaud – Newsday.

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Christie Blatchford: Evangelical Christianity and aboriginal healing come together to battle transparency and accountability | National Post

2014/05/26 Leave a comment

Christie Blatchford on Makayla and her family’s decision to stop conventional treatment. I have sympathy with their situation; chemo and related treatments are brutal, and treatment success is generally measured only by 5 year remission rates. However, putting one’s faith in prayer and non-traditional treatments will most likely condemn Makayla to death:

The issues that ought to have been central to the correctness of those decisions — was this little girl capable of making her own decision, and she may well have been, and if not, were her parents acting in her best interests? – were never fully explored.

The authorities effectively looked away. As the result, Makayla is both receiving treatment from aboriginal healers at Six Nations, a reserve near her own, and counting on Jesus – the efficacy of both much in doubt except to fervent believers.

Indeed, if it’s difficult to reconstruct from public reports which came first in the little girl’s story – her religiosity or her aboriginal culture – it’s less tricky to establish which had the greater impact.

Christie Blatchford: Evangelical Christianity and aboriginal healing come together to battle transparency and accountability | National Post.

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Behind the Komagata Maru’s fight to open Canada’s border and the Question of an Apology

2014/05/26 Leave a comment

Fascinating account of the legal battles and the lawyer, J. Edward Bird, regarding the passengers of the Komagata Maru. Well worth reading:

The government’s strategy became clear the very day the Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver. Health screening, a process normally completed within an hour, followed by immigration board interviews of all passengers, dragged on for days. The ship became a prison – no one was allowed off or on; food and water began to run low. The passengers’ lawyer, J. Edward Bird, was denied the right of access to his clients for weeks.

“I can only surmise that the instructions from the department at Ottawa to the immigration authorities here was to delay matters and delay matters and procrastinate and delay until such time as these people were starved back to their original port from whence they came,” he told a meeting hall packed with both South Asians and whites on June 21. “They talk about socialists and anarchists. There are no set of anarchists in Canada like the immigration officials who defy all law and order.”

Behind the Komagata Maru’s fight to open Canada’s border – The Globe and Mail

Interesting that Leader of the Opposition Tom Mulcair has called for a formal apology in Parliament.

I witnessed PM Harper’s “drive-by” apology in 2008 at the Surrey community picnic and it was not pretty. I quickly came to the conclusion that if governments wished to apologize (without legal liability for events which occurred in the past), the only acceptable way to do so was in Parliament, as was the case for Indian Residential Schools, the Chinese Head Tax, and Japanese WW2 Internment:

As we celebrate Asian Heritage Month this May, we cannot ignore the mistakes of our past — we must remember the history of the Komagata Maru Tragedy.

We must condemn these acts, respectfully, officially, and with sincerity, no matter when they occurred.

That is why New Democrats stand with members of the Indo-Canadian community in their call for an official apology from the Parliament of Canada for the Komagata Maru Tragedy.

In 2012, Canada’s New Democrats presented an Opposition Day Motion calling on Stephen Harper and the Conservatives to deliver an apology long overdue — they refused.

While successive Liberal and Conservative governments have failed to do the right thing, the NDP has always advocated for an apology.

Today, we renew our call.

Let’s not wait another 100 years to do the right thing — it’s time for the government to act now.

Mulcair: 100 years after Komagata Maru tragedy, Parliament’s apology is overdue | Toronto Star.

Filed under Historical Recognition, Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Canada’s birthright citizenship policy makes us a nation of suckers – Jan Wong

2014/05/24 Leave a comment

Jan Wong in Toronto Life does some serious research beyond the purely anecdotal. Much better than the government-led consultations in 2012, which was largely anecdotal with no hard numbers (sigh … see ‘Birth tourists’ believed to be using Canada’s citizenship laws as back door into the West | National Post).

Her numbers for the main Toronto birthing hospitals for non-medicare births (which also includes immigrants within the 3-month waiting period before coverage).

Number over 5 Years

Yearly Average

Sunnybrook

121

24

North York General

569

114

St. Michael’s

311

62

Mount Sinai

318

64

Total

1319

264

Compare this with the total number of live births in Ontario: 142,462 in 2012/13 and in Toronto itself, 30,800 in 2009 (latest data I could find from the City of Toronto website).

In other words, the 4 main birthing centres in Toronto together had less than 300 births per year, or just under 1 percent of all live births. What percentage of these are from birth tourism compared to pre-medicare eligibility cases is unclear. But a fix for a less than 1 percent problem is likely to be costly (how many other government programs can boast such a low fraud or error rate?).

So much of her arguments are more blather and outrage than dispassionate, with no consideration of the additional administrative cost and burden of addressing a relatively small problem. It is no accident that C-24 revisions to the Citizenship Act did not contain any provisions regarding jus soli (birthright citizenship). Too complex and costly.

Do we really have to make a more complicated and lengthy process of giving birth and registering a child for the other 99 percent? And does she really believe that any children of birth tourists who return to Canada will not contribute to the Canadian economy?

What is Canadian citizenship worth in cold hard cash? Like a birth tourist trying to decide whether to hand over $36,200, I crunched the numbers. Canadian citizenship, I calculated, is worth about $840,000 in tangible benefits, excluding welfare payments should you end up on the dole. Assuming a current average life expectancy of 81 years, free health care alone is worth at least $485,000 ($5,988 annually, but much more if you require major surgery or a long hospital stay), according to 2013 health data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information. Free public education is worth $174,750, according to international tuition rates charged by the Toronto District School Board. As for university tuition, a Canadian at the University of Toronto would save $58,512 over four years, because international students pay substantially more. Finally, an average old-age pension (from age 65 to 81) totals $121,624.

And those are just the measurable assets. What about clean air and water, an untainted food supply, an absence of famine and civil war, and a charter of rights and freedoms? Another incalculable advantage comes in adulthood during the job hunt. By law, many institutions can’t even consider hiring a foreigner unless there’s not a single qualified ­Canadian or landed immigrant applying for the job.

It’s difficult not to feel like a nation of suckers. Birth tourism is a form of immigration fraud that gives pregnant women and their families a way to jump the queue, while wasting our tax dollars and raising serious security concerns—who knows what happens to some of those passports down the line? Immigration Canada concedes it has no idea of the magnitude of the problem, because Ottawa doesn’t record whether a woman is pregnant when entering Canada. When this kind of immigration fraud is detected (a rarity), the potential consequence is, of course, deportation of the parent, but the child would still remain a Canadian citizen.

Canada’s birthright citizenship policy makes us a nation of suckers torontolife.com.

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, C-24, Citizenship, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

The man behind Komagata Maru project marks 100th anniversary

2014/05/24 Leave a comment

Interview with Naveen Girn, the curator of two exhibitions regarding the sending back to India of the Komagata Maru and its passengers 100 years ago:

When you’re sitting by yourself and researching and reading these stories, you can’t help but get sad and cry about these stories, because they’re so heartfelt. They’re on the boat and they’re being deprived of food and water and they believe in their cause and they’re being turned away. A country that I love, a city that I love, is treating people who look like me this way because they look like me. So yeah, it can be very hurtful. But I think the focus has to switch [from] looking at the trauma [to] looking at the ongoing battles that need to take place. So linking this 1914 story to a 2014 story – whether it’s temporary foreign workers, whether it’s rights for other migrant peoples – it has to be relevant to today. People can look at the Komagata Maru and say it’s a “safe” memorial because it happened so long ago. But I think we have to make it a difficult memorial. We have to make it a time when people have those difficult conversations about racism and discrimination. It’s not a time to rest on our laurels. The exhibition is great but what’s the further goal? The end goal is education and awareness and keeping the dialogue going. Getting this in school systems, having a lasting legacy.

My work on the Community Historical Recognition Program, getting to know these stories, their ongoing impact and the power of education and awareness was incredibly rewarding.

The man behind Komagata Maru project marks 100th anniversary – The Globe and Mail.

Filed under Historical Recognition, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

New York Times publishes Islamophobic ad by anti-Islam group

2014/05/24 Leave a comment

Contrasting high-brow Islamophobia in the NY Times for The Investigative Report on Terrorism and low-brow on Washington DC buses for Pamela Geller:

NYT Islamophobia

 

Geller Bus ads

The group also purchased a full-page display ad in Wednesday’s print edition New York Times. The all-text ad opened by “commemorating today’s official opening of the National September 11 Memorial Museum.” It went on to warn at great length that mainstream Muslim-American groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations were in fact part of a clandestine “radical Islamist” vanguard of a “holy war” that supports terrorism and wishes to continue the efforts of the September 11 attacks. “This is the new form of the jihadist threat we face,” the ad reads.

The Investigative Project on Terrorism has long been criticized as Islamophobic for its campaign against what it describes as a clandestine effort by “radical Muslims” — which they allege includes mainstream rights groups — to infiltrate and destroy the United States from within. The group was founded in 1995 by Steven Emerson, whose 2002 book is titled “American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us.”

Just imagine, a similar ad stating:

Jewish Muslim Hatred: It’s in the Torah. $3 billion in US aid goes to Israel. Stop racism. End all aid to Israel.

New York Times publishes Islamophobic ad by anti-Islam group – Vox.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , ,

Public servants risk becoming policy dinosaurs, David Emerson warns

2014/05/24 1 Comment

More on David Emerson’s comments on the need for a more open, responsive public service in an era of more and more data and sources of information and policy advice:

Former cabinet minister David Emerson, the outgoing chair of the prime minister’s advisory committee on the public service, said technology and big data are turning the world of policy-making on its ear.

“Government is a little information economy with lots of barriers to the free flow and use of information, so a big challenge for the public service will be how to adapt when the world is now able to access all kinds of quantitative and qualitative information is a split second on hand-held devices,” Emerson told the Citizen.

“And if they can’t do that quickly, government becomes less and less relevant because, by the time decisions are made, it will be too late.”

Emerson said the public service can no longer rely on traditional sources of “structured” and “cleansed” data produced by the likes of a downsized Statistics Canada to advise ministers in a world flooded with massive amounts of unfiltered information and less reliable data.

Emerson said his committee never took a position on the elimination of the agency’s mandatory long-form census but instead argued globalization and huge volumes of data now available have changed the “breadth and scope” of advice governments need in order to deal with complicated issues.

He said this “tectonic shift” will force public servants to change the way they work and think about their advice to cabinet, which was “traditionally seen as utterings of the priesthood.”

Public servants have to get out of the “Ottawa bubble,” re-think how to analyze and manipulate data and speed up internal approval processes to get advice to ministers faster.

“If all you are doing is relying on StatsCan and other institutional sources of data … then you are missing out on massive amounts of new data now available,” Emerson said. “The other sources of information will crowd you out and compete for the ear of politicians who are trying to anticipate what is actually happening out in the world to satisfy voters who have access to the same massive amounts of information. It is a whole new ball game.”

True enough. But the risks of “uncleansed” data became apparent with labour market information that overstated job vacancies (Job-vacancy rate plunges as Tories drop Kijiji data – Evidence vs Anecdote).

The plethora of data and outside sources of information needs “curation” in order to be more useful for policy and decision makers. The public service has to be more engaged and open (and be allowed to consult and engage Canadians more widely than at present). In doing so, it also needs to guard against bias in its choice of outside evidence and advice.

Data and information without synthesis and analysis is largely noise, and not helpful to policy choices.

Public servants risk becoming policy dinosaurs, David Emerson warns | Ottawa Citizen.

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Canada facing more competition in drawing immigrants, says OECD study

2014/05/24 Leave a comment

Interesting study by the OECD on the essentially neutrality of immigration overall, even though it may be significant in particular sectors with skills shortages.

So both the claims of its benefits are likely exaggerated, as are the claims of its costs (i.e., Herbert Grubel: The invisible price tag of immigration):

“Even though most migration is not directly driven by workforce needs, immigrants are playing a significant role in the most dynamic sectors of the economy,” the study states.

“The impact of the cumulative waves of migration that arrived over the past 50 years in OECD countries is on average close to zero, rarely exceeding 0.5% of GDP in either positive or negative terms,” it says.

An examination of the fiscal impact of immigration on Canada, the U.S., Europe and Australia over the past 50 years suggests “is, on average, zero.”

New arrivals to OECD nations are “neither a burden to the public purse, nor are they a panacea for addressing fiscal challenges. In most countries, except in those with a large share of older migrants, migrants contribute more in taxes and social contributions than they receive in individual benefits.

Gives both perspectives reason for further reflection and analysis, as well as where does citizenship policy figure in immigration competitiveness.

Canada facing more competition in drawing immigrants, says OECD study.

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Justin Trudeau can’t ignore domestic concerns in foreign policy

2014/05/23 Leave a comment

John Ibbitson on diaspora politics and how that will influence any future Liberal government’s foreign policy. He is right, of course, that all Canadian governments, whether Liberal or Conservative, respond to diaspora concerns, always have, and always will, and the change is more in the number and relative influence of diasporas, rather than the principle. Democracy, as he notes, responds to interests; the more organized, cohesive and large the diaspora, the more the influence. We are living in a “shopping for votes” world.

But what he and others get wrong is the assumption that diaspora voters are single issue voters (some are, most likely not) and that they all share the same views on diaspora issues. There is political diversity within ethnic communities with respect to both domestic and international issues. Of course, for every diaspora pushing one perspective another exists with an opposing one (e.g., Canadian Jews and Arab Canadians, Armenian and Turkish Canadians etc):

“Diasporas are a huge problem in foreign policy,” he observed. Immigrants’ unwillingness to sever political ties with their homeland “is a problem with diasporas everywhere,” he added. The duty of political leaders is to transcend the “old views” of immigrant communities and craft a responsible, enlightened foreign policy, something Mr. Westall believes the Harper government has conspicuously failed to do.

Mr. Westall is absolutely right. Canadian Tamils influence Conservative foreign policy toward Sri Lanka; Canadian Sikhs influence Conservative foreign policy toward India; Chinese Canadians influence the Harper government’s approach to China; Ukrainian Canadians influence the Harper government’s approach to Ukraine.

But what would you expect? When Canada’s population was mostly of French, English, Irish and Scottish descent, does anyone believe our foreign policy was anything other than diaspora-driven?

Forgive this repetition, but over the past two decades we have imported the equivalent of two Torontos-worth of immigrants, almost all of them from what used to be called the Third World. Any political party that wants to succeed must earn their support. Political parties that lose the immigrant vote lose the election.

The Liberals believe that they can reconnect with Canada’s immigrant community without pandering to parochial concerns. They believe they can improve Canada’s reputation abroad and revitalize the Canadian economy through trade while recognizing the hard realities of today’s global environment.

If so, Mr. Trudeau’s supporters may be surprised to discover that Canada’s foreign policy under his leadership is essentially what it was under the Conservatives, but with softer language and a warmer smile.

Again, governments of any stripe make policy choices of which diasporas to support, and which organizations within each diaspora. How they express that support, how they manage it, and how they dismiss an opposing diaspora’s concern, however, can make a difference.

The Government has chosen a more muscular approach in articulating these choices. In some cases, this is appropriate, in others, “softer language and a warmer smile” may be more effective to “harsher language and a cooler scowl” both domestically and internationally.

Justin Trudeau can’t ignore domestic concerns in foreign policy – The Globe and Mail.

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