Canada offers unique training in managing migration | Toronto Star

2014/09/30 Leave a comment

Howard Duncan, a former colleague in my CIC days, on his Metropolis immigration training initiative:

Unlike other academic programs in immigration studies, Metropolis Professional Development training, through its international faculties, is intended to avoid academic discussion and instead focus on finding the systems that get the best results through monitoring and evaluation tools.

“Many new countries are getting into the immigration game and don’t know what to do,” said Howard Duncan, executive head of Metropolis, an international network of immigration policy-makers and researchers based at Ottawa’s Carleton University.

“Migration is no longer a one-way permanent flow from Italy to Canada or Germany to the United States. With the shift in global economic strength, the old immigrant source countries have now become destinations of returned migration. Some are struggling in managing reintegration.”

The not-for-profit program aims to give policy-makers, international migration organizations, community groups and private sectors that deal with immigrants a broader understanding of the global phenomenon and guides in problem solving — like an MBA in immigration.

“The global competition for talents and migrants is heating up. There is a huge demand and need for this kind of training,” noted Duncan.

Canada offers unique training in managing migration | Toronto Star.

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Can Canada duplicate its boat people rescue with Syrian refugees? | Toronto Star

2014/09/30 Leave a comment

Fascinating history of Canada’s response to the Vietnamese boat people and the people involved from both the government and non-government sides. Well worth reading and reflecting upon, and their suggestions for refugees by connecting sponsored cases with businesses relying on low-skilled Temporary Foreign Workers:

Three and a half decades later, Adelman, Molloy and Alboim wondered if the courage and leadership that characterized the boat people rescue effort could be transferred to the Syrian refugee crisis.

They established a three-person task force to develop new strategies for refugee resettlement in Canada and crisscrossed the country talking to a variety of experts. In three reports discussing possible policies, they outlined projects that might revitalize refugee resettlement.

Their goal was ambitious: “to improve family reunification for refugees already in Canada, expand the pool of Canadians willing to sponsor refugees, improve the quality of support for government-assisted refugees and enhance labour market integration of refugees admitted to Canada under various resettlement programs.”

A core concern is the fact private refugee sponsorships, so successful in the “boat people” crisis, have atrophied and become the preserve of faith-based communities, ethnic and cultural groups.

They want to expand the base of people involved in sponsorships, creating more opportunities for groups such as book clubs, neighbourhood associations or unions, to become involved.

Can Canada duplicate its boat people rescue with Syrian refugees? | Toronto Star.

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Multicultural Marketing: Tokenism Won’t Cut It – New Canadian Media – NCM

2014/09/30 Leave a comment

Good review by Gautam Nath of Robin Brown and Kathy Cheng’s book, Migration Nation: A Practical Guide to Doing Business in Globalized Canada:

Migration Nation introduces the concept of the Cultural Lens, which affects how people view products, services, or brands in the Canadian landscape. The Cultural Lens is shaped by one’s ethnic culture, pre-migration experiences with products and brands, and post-migration experiences of acculturation. Together, all those factors influence one’s habits and attitudes towards retailing, service style, and service conventions.

Our tastes and preferences are shaped by the language, cultural, religion, values, and habits from our countries of origin. Brown and Cheng provide the example of Chinese Canadians who, they say, may like orange juice, but “tend not to drink it in the mornings, unlike the mainstream, as they find it too cold and acidic, and therefore prefer something hot for breakfast.”

Yet, while such practices may trend culturally, they also vary by individual, particularly post-migration. Many immigrants experience a period of disorientation as they scramble to get their ducks in a row, but over a few years, a greater sense of belonging and ease develops as they acculturate, and although they never really forget or lose their cultural roots, a sense of independence begins to balance their earlier cultural practices.

“The settlement journey as we conceive it is not a linear process of leaving one’s ethnic culture behind and adopting something else,” the authors write. They very simply and meaningfully explain the stages of disorientation, orientation, belonging, and independence that characterize the immigrant’s settlement journey. It makes for interesting reading for any marketer, but perhaps especially for those not born overseas or who have not lived in another country.

Understanding the settlement journey will help marketers to better understand their consumers and the need to communicate with them in a more relevant and actionable manner.

Multicultural Marketing: Tokenism Won’t Cut It – New Canadian Media – NCM.

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Wesley Wark: The rise and fall of Arthur Porter

2014/09/30 Leave a comment

Wesley Wark on Arthur Porter, the disgraced former chair of the Security Intelligence Review Committee. Pulls no punches and rightly so:

The lesson of Arthur Porter is simple. He was exactly the wrong kind of person to appoint to SIRC: No political experience, no knowledge of the world of security and intelligence, no capacity for thoughtful, non-partisan analysis, no moral compass. Now it behooves the current government and its successors to give serious thought to what the right kind of person should be.

A start could be made by actually appointing a SIRC chairman. The SIRC chairmanship has been vacant since Chuck Strahl’s resignation in January and the committee is down to three members, rather than the statutory five. Any fresh appointment to the SIRC chair should involve a much-more transparent process, involving genuine consultation with opposition parties and hearings before the appropriate Parliamentary committee. In that way, we might avoid a future man-on-the-make and actually give SIRC greater credibility and clout.

Wesley Wark: The rise and fall of Arthur Porter

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Conservatives received most election coverage in GTA ethnic newspapers – New Canadian Media – NCM

2014/09/30 1 Comment

Interesting but not surprising research:

[April] Lindgren’s research, which will be published in the December 2014 issue of the Canadian Journal of Political Science, focused on coverage of the 2011 federal election in five ethnocultural publications in the Greater Toronto Area – the Russian Express, Korea Times Daily, Canadian Punjabi Post, Punjabi Daily and Ming Pao. All are daily publications except for the weekly Russian Express. The study concluded that while there was no overwhelming pattern of stories or photos skewed explicitly in favour of the Conservatives, the party did benefit in that more of its politicians were featured in photographs, it was the sole focus of more stories and photos than its competitors, and it was mentioned first most frequently in news coverage.

“The degree to which a candidate or party can consistently earn first mentions in stories…is a measure of campaign effectiveness in that it means party strategists are choosing the topic and framing the discussion, leaving the competition to react in later paragraphs,” Lindgren observed in the paper, entitled “Toronto-area ethnic newspapers and Canada’s 2011 federal election: An investigation of content, focus and partisanship.”

Lindgren said she was interested in investigating election coverage in the ethnic media because language barriers have limited the amount of research done in this area. During the 2011 election, the Conservative Party, in particular, also launched a media strategy that targeted ethnic communities, because a “growing number of ridings in and around major Canadian cities were home to concentrations of potential supporters from single ethnic groups,” Lindgren wrote.

In almost all cases the ethnic papers filled in gaps left by mainstream media by providing more extensive coverage of the local races of interest to their readers.

Most Canadian voters do not participate directly in political events and therefore depend on the news media to help them make informed decisions, Lindgren noted. In addition to examining whether the Conservative party’s courtship of ethnic media paid off in terms of coverage, the research also examined how much election-related news the ethnocultural publications carried, the subject matter dealt with in the coverage and the geographic focus of the reporting local campaigns versus national campaigns.

The results showed that interest in the election varied by publication. The Punjabi Daily carried the most election-related coverage – a total of 123 stories and photos, or 32 per cent of all news items the paper published during the study period. The Russian Express, on the other hand, published just 19 election-related stories and photos, which made up a mere 5.9 per cent of their total news items. The study also observed that both the Punjabi Daily and the Punjabi Post were more similar to mainstream news coverage in that both publications ran more stories about election strategy and poll results than issue-related articles.

Analysis of the election coverage also suggested that individual newspaper’s commitment to election coverage seemed to be influenced by the number of candidates from the publication’s readership community. The Punjabi newspapers, which carried the most election news, also had the most in-group candidates to cover.

Conservatives received most election coverage in GTA ethnic newspapers – New Canadian Media – NCM.

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Hockey used to ‘Canadianize’ new immigrants and help grow the sport

2014/09/29 Leave a comment

Good initiative:

There’s an appetite for hockey within this new, largely untapped, market according to Dave Croutch, Director of the North York Hockey League.

He says introducing the sport to new immigrants is an effective way to build community and integrate them more seamlessly into North American life.

“If Billy and Johnny are talking about hockey in the playground at school, [some students] previously were not part of that conversation. But now that they’re playing the game, they are actually part of the conversation,” said Croutch.

Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment donated hockey equipment to the effort. They acknowledged introducing hockey to new immigrants is a good way to grow the sport and add diversity to the game.

“You look at Nazem Kadri for the Toronto Maple Leafs and his ethnicity. It’s a great thing for the diversity of Toronto,” says Nilesh Chauhan, who’s with the MLSE Foundation.

“The most I enjoy about hockey is that now if we get our own rink, we can play as much as we want. Because before it cost a lot of money and we didn’t get enough ice time,” says Ayaan, a young boy who was donning a Maple Leafs jersey during the fundraiser.

Hockey used to ‘Canadianize’ new immigrants and help grow the sport – Toronto | Globalnews.ca.

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Rex Murphy: The case for revoking the citizenship of Canadian terrorists

2014/09/29 2 Comments

Rex Murphy makes the case for revoking citizenship.

Like Wente (How can we stop the jihadi tourists? – Margaret Wente), he forgets, either by design or by ignorance,  to mention that this means different treatment for the same crime based upon whether one has Canadian or dual nationality:

Priests are defrocked; medals from honour societies have been imperiously stripped from their holders; soldiers are court-marshalled and drummed out in disgrace; lawyers disbarred, judges swept from the bench, Senators tossed from caucuses, and even Presidents impeached.

The soldier who flees in combat and exposes his fellows to danger is seen as not worthy of being a solider. The judge who has oiled his palm with a bribe is seen as not worthy of being a judge. Treason and excommunication are long-standing responses to ultimate disfealties — and they are surely a kind of cancellation of status, one by the death penalty, the other by exclusion from the community of believers and the possibilities of salvation.

To my mind, these are all of an inferior enormity to the case of a citizen who abandons the country in which he was born, or to which he gave the oath of citizenship, who then pledges his fealty to a murderous band professing a murderous creed.

It’s a strange world in which we have even to contemplate such exigencies, but it is a strange world we find ourselves in today, in which nationals of the democracies willingly travel abroad to invest themselves in the orders of international terrorism, spit on their achieved citizenship, and threaten the safety of their onetime fellows in nationality.

The denial of passports is a stage toward the denial of citizenship. But the denial or witholding of passports is not a sufficient signal of the detestation a country and its people hold for those who so contemptuously forsake the gifts of loyalty and respect that a country rightfully commands from real citizens.

So to use his examples, decisions to defrock a priest do not depend on whether he was born into that religion or converted.

Neither are medals stripped, soldiers court martialed, lawyers disbarred, judges swept from the bench, or Senators tossed on the basis on the distinction whether they are single or dual nationality.

It is the crime or infraction that determines the punishment, with the same punishment for the same crime.

Passport cancellation applies to all, Canadian-born or naturalized, single or dual nationality, and thus consistent with the fundamental principle of equal treatment.

So pursue relentlessly, punish through the Canadian justice system but don’t make a distinction between nationality. After all, we have any number of Canadian-only nationals involved in extremist activity (e.g. Damian Clairmont, the Gordon brothers, John Maguire).

Rex Murphy: The case for revoking the citizenship of Canadian terrorists

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Security agencies condemn use of encryption on iPhone 6

2014/09/29 Leave a comment

One of the unintended consequences of NSA over-reach in scooping up so much data. Another reason to buy an iPhone?

Apple declined to comment. But officials inside the intelligence agencies, while letting the FBI make the public protests, say they fear the company’s move is the first of several new technologies that are clearly designed to defeat not only the NSA, but any court orders to turn over information to intelligence agencies. They liken Apple’s move to the early days of Swiss banking, when secret accounts were set up precisely to allow national laws to be evaded.

“Terrorists will figure this out,” along with savvy criminals and paranoid dictators, one senior official predicted, and keep their data just on the iPhone 6. Another said, “It’s like taking out an ad that says, ‘Here’s how to avoid surveillance – even legal surveillance.’”

The move raises a critical issue, the intelligence officials say: Who decides what kind of data the government can access? Until now, those decisions have largely been a matter for Congress, which passed the Communications Assistance to for Law Enforcement Act in 1994, requiring telecommunications companies to build into their systems an ability to carry out a wiretap order if presented with one. But despite intense debate about whether it should be expanded to cover email and other content, it has not been updated, and it does not cover content contained in a smartphone.

Inside Apple and Google, company executives say the U.S. government brought these changes on itself. The revelations by former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden not only killed recent efforts to expand the law, it made nations around the world suspicious that every piece of American hardware and software – from phones to servers made by Cisco Systems – have “back doors” for U.S. intelligence agencies and law enforcement.

Surviving in the global marketplace – especially in places like China, Brazil and Germany – depends on convincing consumers that their data is secure.

Security agencies condemn use of encryption on iPhone 6 – The Globe and Mail.

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British Columbia Premier proposes name change for Temporary Foreign Worker program

2014/09/29 1 Comment

Not a stupid idea – names and labels are important – but goes completely against the grain of the recent changes to the Citizenship Act that removed credit for pre-permanent residency time, with Minister Alexander trying (not completely successfully) to argue for a clear distinction:

Christy Clark says a simple name change might help.

“I think the federal government needs to remember that almost all of us are descended from people who came from other countries. So maybe if they are overhauling the program they can change the name from temporary foreign worker to potential new Canadian. It was people from all over the world that built this company are continuing to do that.”

That said while Clark emphasized BC needs foreign workers to fill some jobs she says British Columbians must be in the front of the employment line.

Premier proposes name change for Temporary Foreign Worker program | CKNW AM AM980.

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Temporary foreign worker data don’t correspond with reality

2014/09/29 Leave a comment

More on Temporary Foreign Workers and poor data/mistakes that undermine the Government message:

Restaurants Canada president Garth Whyte said he had concerns about the data when the government released its figures in June but the names of the employers weren’t known until now. He said the government should have checked the information before using it. “The math doesn’t add up,” he said.

Mr. Kenney’s office said he was not available for an interview Friday. A department spokeswoman responded to The Globe’s questions about the data in an e-mail by saying that the government’s changes are intended to restore the TFW program to its original purpose, as a short-term last resort for employers. She did not say whether they intend to review the data.

There have been other data problems in the federal government. Statistics Canada issued a major correction to its July jobs numbers after human error led the agency to vastly under-report growth in hiring. And in March, The Globe revealed that Finance Canada was using job postings from Kijiji, a popular online classified site, in its job-vacancy calculations. As a result, Finance Canada’s numbers differed from Statistics Canada’s.

Restaurants Canada and the CFIB are concerned that TFW program changes will harm businesses in regions with labour shortages.

Not sure how and why these mistakes happened (reduced capacity, time pressures, political direction to move too quickly) but another illustration why solid data and evidence necessary (but I still find no justification for fast food Temporary Foreign Workers and equivalent).

Temporary foreign worker data dont correspond with reality – The Globe and Mail.

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