Russell Smith: Asylum seekers are the stars of this Canadian arts initiative

2015/09/28 Leave a comment

MamalianInteresting initiative to encourage understanding and integration, using the arts:

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how art has been interpreting the European refugee crisis. I was reminded after that of a Canadian artistic initiative currently happening in Germany that has direct contact with recent migrants. It is the work of the Toronto-originating theatre/social planning group called Mammalian Diving Reflex, directed by its creator, Darren O’Donnell.

The goal of this company is not to write plays and to put them on a stage, but to create social events that bring people together. They claim they aim to “trigger generosity and equity.” They do wacky things like getting children to give adults haircuts, but also deeply serious things like their current work in a small town in Germany, Hemsbach, near Mannheim.

There they have just finished a lengthy project centred around a reception centre for recent immigrants, designed to bring the newcomers and the German-born townspeople together, in an effort to find jobs for the immigrants.

O’Donnell himself stayed in the immigrant dormitory, with his co-worker Chozin Tenzin (also from Toronto), in a couple of beds that had been left vacant when some of the inmates were taken away by police. The town has about 80 recent asylum seekers staying in the holding centre, from everywhere from the Balkans to India. He then organized goofy events such as a cooking contest, for the refugees and for the German-born, in which participants were forced to use difficult ingredients from all over the world in their dishes.

The short-term goal was to facilitate interaction and understanding; the long-term goal is to leave a system of similar events in place, to continue after O’Donnell’s company leaves. (He calls this system the Hemsbach Protocol.)

O’Donnell likes in particular to work with teenagers, which he has been doing in the Ruhr region of Germany since 2013. It is only coincidentally that his work there became entangled with the refugee influx to Germany. His last project there, part of the Ruhrtriennale festival, near Dusseldorf, was called “Millionen! Millionen!” – a line from the Romantic poet Schiller’s Ode to Joy. (Yes, the one Beethoven used in his Ninth Symphony.) That poem is the European Union’s anthem and mantra, particularly for its now painfully relevant line, “Be embraced, you millions.”

The project was, like most of Mammalian Diving Reflex’s things, hard to define – social outing, urban planning, performance. In collaboration with a German theatre collective called Mit Ohne Alles, they got a bunch of teenagers of diverse immigrant backgrounds to go camping for a weekend, then take careful note of each interaction. Some talked deeply, some fell in love.

The performance, crafted afterwards, was a kind of barely-scripted play in which the teenagers recreated, for an audience, some of the interactions that had taken place over the weekend, with large images projected and everyone who had participated on the stage at once. The theme was “embracing.” Now that newer immigrants from the war-torn Middle East and Africa are showing up, such forced embracings will have a different edge and a different echo.

In theatre terms, this kind of practice is a kind of experimentalism called “post-dramatic,” an idea of the German critic Hans-Thies Lehmann. The primary intellectual influence on O’Donnell is the work of Nicolas Bourriaud, the art curator who wrote about “relational aesthetics,” the theory that stresses an artist’s role as catalyst for social interaction rather than centre of attention.

Source: Russell Smith: Asylum seekers are the stars of this Canadian arts initiative – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Integration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Changing the temporary mindset of refugees: Saunders

2015/09/28 Leave a comment

A reminder that while much can be done to foster integration, this also depends on immigrant attitudes and mindset:

There is a scholarly concept known as “myth of return:” the belief widely held among many new immigrants, and most refugees, that they will just stay a while and then move back. I know immigrants who have held this myth for decades. But their success depends on seeing their new location as home, and that home seeing them as fellow citizens.

Ending that “temporary” mindset is the refugee’s job, but there are a number of things that host countries need to do to make it happen. In a research paper examining the obstacles to refugee integration, three Canadian scholars found a number of factors were key.

Employment, housing and schools make a big difference: The sooner they can get a job suited to their skills (and refugees tend to be middle-class), secure tenure in an affordable living space and a school for their children, the sooner they become “here.” Cultural integration tends to follow naturally from economic and educational integration.

Equally important is the ability to be around refugees and immigrants from the same place. “One of the few resources available to most refugees is social capital in the form of social support networks,” two Canadian scholars wrote in a paper on refugee integration. “These many formal and informal social networks are extremely valuable, providing much-needed support and assistance when refugees are faced with financial, employment, personal, or health problems.”

Which means refugees should be allowed to relocate to join clusters of other refugees. A study by Citizenship and Immigration Canada found that 80 per cent of refugees who settled in Ontario, Alberta or British Columbia ended up staying there, whereas half the refugees settled in the Atlantic provinces or Saskatchewan ended up moving, presumably to the big cities.

The success of earlier, larger waves of even more foreign refugees shows that their integration tends to succeed. We just need to help them change their minds.

Source: Changing the temporary mindset of refugees – The Globe and Mail

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The niqab election: Commentary by Wherry and Hébert, past controversies

2015/09/28 Leave a comment

Aaron Wherry has the rights argument nailed down:

At the outset, it should be understood that the niqab debate, or at least this particular niqab debate, is not about the niqab. Whether you like or agree with the niqab is irrelevant. How you would feel about your daughter wearing the niqab is besides the point. You are entitled to your opinion and, given the fraught politics and cultural curiosity that surround the garment, there is a discussion worth having about the niqab, preferably including the voices of the women who wear it. But for the purposes of whether or not the niqab should be banned during the swearing of the citizenship oath by new Canadian citizens your opinion is of no applicability. Proponents of a ban might want to note that, according to public opinion surveys, a large majority of Canadians do indeed oppose the wearing of the niqab during the oath, but this is irrelevant unless you believe that the rights of individuals should be determined by majority rule, that the extent of minority rights are at the whim of the majority.

One’s rights are what is at issue here. And on that note it is fun to note that on Thursday morning, about nine hours before Stephen Harper made his declaration about a women’s sartorial freedom, the Conservatives announced that, if they continue to govern long enough to do so, they will have the federal government purchase John Diefenbaker’s childhood home and declare it a national historic site. Among the accomplishments the Conservatives recognized in explaining the reason for such an honour was Diefenbaker’s Bill of Rights, which acknowledged, among other rights, the freedom of religion. “It will give to Canadians the realization that wherever a Canadian may live, whatever his race, his religion or his colour,” Diefenbaker said in 1960, “the Parliament of Canada will be jealous of his rights and will not infringe upon those rights.”

Diefenbaker’s Bill of Rights was ultimately overtaken by Pierre Trudeau’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms and it is those Charter rights that are relevant (even if a Federal Court judge actually overturned the government’s policy on the niqab because he found it contradicted the Citizenship Act). As Zunera Ishaq‘s lawyers argue in their factum for the Federal Court of Appeal, “The impugned Policy forces the Respondent into an impossible choice: violate a sincerely held religious belief in a significant and material manner, or give up obtaining the Canadian citizenship that she is otherwise entitled to. And it forces this choice on her for no good reason.”

There are no practical justifications for the ban. Confirming an individual’s identity can be done privately before the oath ceremony. Confirming that an individual has said the oath—the practical consideration that Jason Kenney first claimed when he introduced his ban—can be done by having an official stand within earshot.

Jason Kenney has asserted that, based on his consultations, the wearing of a niqab is not properly grounded in religious theology. But we should surely not wish for a country in which ministers of the crown are the arbiters of what constitutes a proper expression of faith. The Supreme Court has set out parameters for legally recognized religious belief (in Syndicat Northcrest v. Anselem and R. v. N.S), and if the case of the niqab ban ever has to be adjudicated on Charter grounds the sincerity of Ishaq’s belief could be tested, but I might suggest that a decent and confident country should give the benefit of the doubt to the claimant unless the welfare of others or the country is somehow threatened.

In Alberta v. Hutterian Brethren of Wilson Colony, the Supreme Court upheld a law that was being challenged on the grounds of religious freedom, but in that case the Court found a “pressing and substantial” goal—specifically, minimizing the potential for identity theft associated with driver’s licences. There is no such goal here. There is only symbolism.

Source: The niqab election – Macleans.ca

A timely reminder of Sikhs wearing turbans in the RCMP. Those who forget history …

The rhetoric over the niqab in the federal election campaign is proving reminiscent of another furor, more than 20 years ago, around the turban and its compatibility with Canadian values and the country’s dearest institutions.

What was allegedly at stake in that debate in the 1990s was the very fabric of the nation, and the sanctity and perhaps survival of an important historic symbol of the country — the Stetson of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Baltej Singh Dhillon, a young practising Sikh, wanted to become a Mountie. But his application to the force led to a kind of turban turmoil and an eventual intervention in Parliament by the Progressive Conservative government of the day.

The debate was featured on newscasts and dominated the public conversation. Political parties took positions on it, including the Reform Party, which deemed allowing the right to wear a turban unnecessary, and went so far as to pass a resolution at its 1989 convention banning such religious attire for the RCMP. At the time, Stephen Harper was a defeated Reform candidate and the party’s policy chief.

Dhillon is now a staff sergeant in the RCMP. The force refused to allow him to speak to CBC News about the turban debate. But in a video story produced by Telus Optik in B.C. and posted online, Dhillon recalled the tone of the debate.

“It was vicious. It was angry. It was emotional. It had all the elements of racism in there. It was a disappointment is what it was,” he said in the video.

“The fear was that we would lose the symbols that defined Canadians and defined our culture and defined who we were and our branding with the rest of the world.”

“And that was the greatest irony: That on one hand, we need to protect our symbols, and in the same breath, we need you to not protect your faith or your religion or your roots.”

Source: Niqab debate recalls RCMP turban furor of the ’90s – Politics – CBC News

Lastly, Chantal Hébert on some of the debates that diverse societies will continue to have and the struggle for balance.

While her conclusion is right, the question is how to have such a discussion in an open and respectful fashion, not used as wedge politics but the Conservatives and Bloc:

And yet, under the guise of this discussion, voters are getting a taste of one of the fundamental debates of the 21st century. It revolves around how the increasingly diverse communities that make up pluralistic societies accommodate their cultural and religious differences and it is not going away after Oct. 19.

Source: Niqab debate leading to wider discussion on religious, cultural accommodation: Hébert | Toronto Star

Filed under Citizenship, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Kevin Page delivers a warning to the public service

2015/09/28 Leave a comment

Excerpt from Kevin Page’s book, Unaccountable: Truth and Lies on Parliament Hill. Some uncomfortable observations that merit reflection:

The ethical values section of the code speaks to a public service reflecting the need to act at all times in such a way as to uphold the public trust. It says that public servants shall act at all times in a manner that will bear the closest public scrutiny, an obligation that is not fully discharged by simply acting within the law.

This does not happen when deputy ministers refuse to provide spending plans to Parliament and the PBO that outline where Budget 2012 cuts will take place, along with an explanation of how those cuts will affect services to the public. Shame on all of us for sticking our collective heads in the sand.

Finally, under the code, the people values stipulate that public servants should demonstrate respect, fairness, and courtesy in their dealings with both citizens and fellow public servants. It says that appointment decisions in the public service shall be based on merit and that public service values should play a key role in recruitment, evaluation, and promotion. This did not happen with the recruitment of the new PBO.

What I learned from my PBO experience is that our public service has become good at avoiding accountability and transparency. The result is that public trust in the public service declines. Jane Jacobs, the famous American-Canadian urban activist, said “the absence of trust is inimical to a well-run society.” If only we could institutionalize trust, but alas, that is impossible.

Our public service leaders are going to have to step up and earn trust! To my friends and colleagues in the public service, I say this: Blueprint 2020, more than anything else it espouses, must be about restoring trust to the public service in Canada.

Source: Kevin Page delivers a warning to the public service | Ottawa Citizen

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Sign up today! CRRF Directions: Webinar – ‘The Power of Words’ 6 October

2015/09/28 Leave a comment

Join David Matas and myself in a discussion of the ‘power of words’ to shape discourse around citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism.

Sign-up: CRRF Directions: Webinar – The ‘Power of Words’ Tuesday, 6 October 11 am

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The Two Solitudes come to the fore after the French-language election debate (#361)

2015/09/26 Leave a comment

Worth reading as it captures the different media reactions.

Filed under Multiculturalism

Baloney Meter: How meaningful is the Bloc’s promise to ban veiled voting, oath taking?

2015/09/26 Leave a comment

Notwithstanding public opinion and wedge politics, likely that the experts have it right:

Constitutional law experts believe banning women from wearing veils while taking the citizenship oath or providing public services would almost certainly be struck down by the courts as a violation of religious freedom and equality rights.

“A ban during (the) citizenship oath ceremony is unquestionably unconstitutional,” says University of Waterloo political scientist Emmett Macfarlane, who has written extensively on Supreme Court constitutional rulings.

“I think a ban on front-line public service workers would also be constitutionally problematic, for similar reasons, although a court may entertain arguments relating to job requirements a little more seriously than it would the purely symbolic arguments concerning the oath.”

Ottawa University constitutional law professor Errol Mendes concurs: “If they didn’t use the notwithstanding clause, it would almost certainly be struck down.”

But here’s the tricky bit: the notwithstanding clause can be used to override only some provisions in the Charter of Rights, including religious freedom and equality rights. It cannot be used to override democratic rights, including the right to vote. Since Duceppe’s promised bill would include a ban on veiled voting, he could find the notwithstanding clause would be of no use to him.

“If the adverse effect was on voting rights, which is not covered by sect. 33 (the notwithstanding clause), it would fall,” says Mendes.

Carissima Mathen, another University of Ottawa law professor, agrees: “I think you absolutely could make a separate (democratic rights) argument because the citizen is being deprived of her right to vote.”

If the bill was limited to removal of face coverings for identification purposes before allowing a person to vote, Macfarlane said the courts might find that to be a justified limit on democratic rights.

However, it might be hard to justify requiring citizens voting in Canada to show their faces for identification purposes when Canadians abroad can vote by mail-in ballots – with no way to verify the identities of those who actually mark the ballots.

The Harper government twice flirted with the idea of banning veiled voting but did not ultimately pursue the matter, perhaps due to the constitutional hurdles.

It introduced a government bill in 2007 which was allowed to languish on the order paper. Conservative MP Steven Blaney introduced a private members’ bill on the same subject in 2011, which then-immigration minister Jason Kenney – the same minister who subsequently issued the directive against face coverings at citizenship ceremonies – called “entirely reasonable.” It went nowhere.

Even if the notwithstanding clause did apply to Duceppe’s promised bill, Mathen points out that its use would have to be approved by both the Commons and the Senate, so it’s “not necessarily a slam dunk.”

The Verdict

Strictly speaking, Duceppe’s promise to introduce a bill banning face coverings during voting, citizenship ceremonies and the provision of public services is accurate. He didn’t explicitly say it would be passed or enacted, although that was the obvious implication.

Given the procedural hurdles facing private members’ bills, it’s debatable whether such a bill would ever see the light of day. Were it to be passed, it’s equally debatable whether it would stand up to a charter challenge or whether the government could invoke the notwithstanding clause to get around the charter.

But of course none of this matters as the intent behind both the Conservatives and the Bloc lies more within identity politics than winning legal arguments.

With respect to the public servant issue (where a ban, as Macfarlane indicates, could be justified on the basis of job requirements), the following table, taken from the National Household Survey, shows the representation of religious minorities in all three levels of government:

Public_Administration_-_Religious_Minorities_-_Core_Public_Admin

This table of course only measures religious faith, not the religiosity of followers and the degree to which they request accommodation and/or they wear visible symbols of their faith (e.g., hijab, kippa, turban etc).

Source: Baloney Meter: How meaningful is the Bloc’s promise to ban veiled voting, oath taking? – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Citizenship, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Political Parties Respond to OCASI Questions for General Election 2015

2015/09/26 1 Comment

OCASI [Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants] surveyed the major parties regarding immigration-related issues. The following excerpts their responses to the question below on citizenship. The Conservative Party did not submit a response given that it has largely implemented its policies:

“3. Citizenship

Only 26 per cent of permanent residents who settled in Canada in 2008 acquired Canadian citizenship, compared with 44 per cent for immigrant who arrived in 2007 and 79 percent for those who arrived in 2000. These are the findings of research on citizenship acquisition released earlier this year. Access to citizenship has become more restricted, and naturalized citizens and those with dual citizenship are treated differently under the law.

Question: How will you ensure access to citizenship and exercise of citizenship is equitable?”

NDP:  Under Stephen Harper and the Conservatives, it has become harder and harder for immigrants to come to Canada and succeed. They’ve created huge backlogs, increased fees, politicized the citizenship test, made children and seniors pass language tests, and created new categories of citizenship rights. An NDP government will work with stakeholders to restore fairness and transparency to our citizenship and immigration system and to undo harmful Conservative changes. We will repeal Conservative legislation that treats naturalized and dual citizens differently from other citizens. We will review the citizenship test. And we will remove the requirement for 14-17 year olds and 55-64 year olds to pass a language test in order to receive citizenship.

Liberal:

Citizenship application wait times have ballooned during Mr. Harper’s time in office. Not content to quadruple fees and double processing times, the Conservatives have unnecessarily erected new barriers for aspiring citizens. We are witnessing ever more difficult language testing imposed on older potential Canadians, and the scrapping of the credit for time spent in Canada, which was previously extended to international students. In all of these areas, a combination of Conservative cynicism and budget cutbacks have abandoned those people who find themselves in the immigration system.

Over and over during the Harper decade we have heard how Canadians cannot get access to the services they need in a timely manner. A Liberal government will create new performance standards for services offered by the federal government, including streamlining applications, reducing wait times, and money- back guarantees. Performance will be independently assessed and publicly reported, including immigration processing. After years of cuts, all of these services take too long and do not provide the service that Canadians deserve.

Liberals believe that leading this country should mean bringing Canadians together, not dividing them against one another. We will repeal the parts of Bill C-24 that introduce unnecessary barriers and hardships for people to become Canadians. With C-24, the Conservative government has created a second class of citizen—dual nationals whose Canadian citizenship can revoked by the government without due process. Liberals believe in a Canada that is united and strong not in spite of its differences, but precisely because of them. These values have been abandoned under Stephen Harper, who wants us to believe that some of us are less Canadian than others.

Liberals believe that citizenship is a fundamental building block of Canada. No elected official should have the exclusive power to grant or revoke this most basic status. This bill devalues Canadians citizenship and undermines Canada’s economic well-being by making it harder to attract international talent and expertise to Canada.

Green:

The research clearly demonstrates that access to citizenship is rapidly becoming an unrealizable pursuit for many immigrants to Canada. Our immigration and refugee protection system is not prepared for 21st­century realities or challenges. A system with more than 50 entry streams that by 2010 had produced a backlog of one million applications ­ many of which languished in the queue for up to five or six years ­ is a dysfunctional nightmare at best. It is an embarrassment to a country like Canada that increasingly depends on interconnectedness with the rest of the world.

Immigration is first and foremost about citizenship. The Green Party is the only federal party to have concluded that the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) is irredeemably flawed and must be scrapped. Weak mechanisms for assessing labour shortages have allowed the TFWP to undermine wage and labour standards. At the same time, the program exploits foreign workers.

Any reforms to Canada’s immigration system must strengthen our social fabric and be consistent with our fundamental values of the rule of law, equality, and fairness. The Green Party will initiate a comprehensive overhaul of Canada’s immigration and refugee protection system. Our reforms will ensure an efficient and predictable path to citizenship for all immigrants and their families. In addition to the policies discussed in depth here, we will establish pathways to citizenship for temporary foreign workers and the families of new Canadians. Greens will work with municipalities and provinces to improve the integration of new Canadians. We will also repeal Bill C­24 which allows the minister of citizenship to revoke citizenship. Citizenship is a category that cannot have classes.

New Democratic Party response to OCASI – Election 2015 [PDF]

Liberal Party response to OCASI – Election 2015 [PDF]

Green Party response to OCASI – Election 2015 [PDF]

Filed under Citizenship, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , , ,

Visible minority communities and the Election: More interesting articles from New Canadian Media

2015/09/26 Leave a comment

Round-up of some interesting stories on the ‘ethnic vote’ in New Canadian Media.

No surprise that Tory Candidates Make Joint Pitch to Chinese Voters, given that Chris Cochrane’s analysis shows considerable support for the CPC (see Immigrants are not a monolithic voting block). Of note is the diversity within the Conservative candidates:

The seven candidates who participated were Bin Chang representing for Scarborough-Agincourt; Joe Daniel, for Don Valley North; Jobson Easow for Markham-Thornhill; Maureen Harquail for Don Valley East; Chungsen Leung for Willowdale; Michael Parsa for Richmond Hill; and Bob Saroya for Markham-Unionville.

Ranjit Bhaskar, in Courting the “Ethnic Vote” notes, among other observations, that:

However, in a blog post on the refugee issue, Andrés Machalski, president of MIREMS, a media monitoring and research firm, observed that many of the stories in the ethnic media reflected those in the mainstream.

But harsher tones could also be seen and heard. A radio host on a Punjabi show said Canada has already admitted enough refugee, adding that settling them costs an enormous amount of money. A former refugee claimant suggested in Sing Tao Toronto that only 5,000 refugees should be let in a year as otherwise Canadian residents might have to pay more taxes.

Silke in The Niqab – Competing Traditions Clash Over Women’s Clothing, captures the diversity of opinion within different ethnic groups, and concludes, erroneously that:

In Canada, the call to allow niqabs at citizenship ceremonies is mostly based on cultural relativism – a call for tolerance of diverse customs – notably a value not practiced by any fundamentalist religion, including the Islamists it is trying to accommodate. The Conservatives’ call to ban it is based on an appeal to traditional Canadian values of having one’s face uncovered when making a commitment – looking people in the eye, so to speak. Others have called for a ban on the niqab not just at citizenship ceremonies, but more widely, as a matter of women’s rights.  However, looking at the question from a gender equality perspective, one wonders why Islamist men should be allowed to swear the oath of allegiance to Canada in their traditional attire, but not their wives and daughters.

It has actually been framed as a Charter human rights issue, given the Supreme Court has ruled that the test for a religious practice is not theological but rather whether it is sincerely held.

Filed under Citizenship, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

US: Obesity Maps Put Racial Differences On Stark Display

2015/09/26 Leave a comment

Obesity_Maps_Put_Racial_Differences_On_Stark_Display___Shots_-_Health_News___NPRCorrelation between race, socio-economic status and obesity:

Take a look at the latest obesity data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and you can see that the country’s obesity epidemic is far from over.

Even in Colorado, the state with the lowest rate, 21.3 percent of its population is obese. Arkansas tops the list with 35.9 percent.

“It is the largest epidemic of a chronic disease that we’ve ever seen in human history,” says Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones, chair of the department of preventive medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Click on the CDC’s obesity prevalence maps and you’ll see something even more startling — the disparity among different ethnic groups. It’s not new that the obesity epidemic is hitting African-Americans the hardest, followed by Hispanics, but the maps highlight this worrying trend.

For African-Americans for example, there are 33 states with an obesity rate of at least 35 percent, whereas for white Americans only 1 state reports that rate. Nine states estimate the Hispanic obesity rate at 35 percent or higher.

“It is not about one group doing something wrong,” says Lloyd-Jones, who was not involved in creating the CDC maps. “It is about the environment that we have built that sets people up to fail.”

Race and ethnicity are often a surrogate for low socioeconomic status, he says.

“Our neighborhoods, workplaces and schools expose people, especially poor people, to less choices of healthy foods,” Lloyd-Jones says. There are also fewer places outside to be safe and burn off calories.

This has huge implications for the health of individuals and for health costs in the future, because obesity causes significant downstream health problems like diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

Source: Obesity Maps Put Racial Differences On Stark Display : Shots – Health News : NPR

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