India trip provides lessons learned, all around: Cohn

2016/02/05 Leave a comment

Good piece abound the visit by Premier Wynne’s visit to Amritsar’s Golden Temple, the spiritual centre of Sikhdom, and the controversy it provoked:

As for Wynne, her visit to the Golden Temple proved anti-climactic. Despite the media speculation, she received the traditional gift of a siropa robe of honour — though the deed was done, diplomatically, in the basement (as opposed to the sanctum sanctorum, minimizing any awkwardness for the temple’s current leadership, who remained publicly coy on precisely how and by whom the honour was bestowed).

Lest anyone be too judgmental of the public coyness of Golden Temple officials — and their subsequent circumlocutions about Wynne’s circumambulations — one must concede that homophobia is nothing new, whether in the West or the East. Coincidentally, India’s Supreme Court is now revisiting antiquated laws on homosexuality inherited (and imported) from British colonial rule. Canada phased out discrimination against gay marriage only in 2005, and American states are just now catching up.

The lesson for politicians making the pilgrimage to Punjab is that it can sometimes be a delicate dance. You may walk into trouble, as Wynne nearly did, or you may wrong-foot yourself, as Brown might have (until his recent circumspection on sexual orientation).

Good for Wynne for standing her ground, without trampling on local sensitivities. Good for Brown for belatedly standing up against homophobia, after previously stooping to the level of local homophobes and gay-baiters who hyperbolized the sex-ed update.

Lessons learned, one hopes, all around.

Source: India trip provides lessons learned, all around: Cohn | Toronto Star

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OIC Head Madani advocates multiculturalism to counter intolerance

2016/02/05 Leave a comment

Rather ironic that the head of the OIC is speaking of the importance of multiculturalism and tolerance when so many of its members practice the opposite.

My news feeds haven’t picked up any Australian media coverage which might have a different take on the meeting from this Pakistan media clip:

The Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Iyad Ameen Madani stressed in his meetings with officials in Australia on the importance of multiculturalism in countering violence and intolerant discourse.

In the capital Canberra Mr. Madani met Wednesday with the Prime Minister, Mr. Malcolm Turnbull, who stated that Australia is absolutely committed to maintaining multiculturalism and it has proven its success in that.

The Secretary General underlined the importance of Australia to OIC, considered it a good example of implementing multiculturalism and looked forward to working with it on capacity building, humanitarian aid and addressing regional issues of mutual concern.

The Secretary general also met the Minister of Justice and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister of Counter Terrorism, Michael Keenan MP, at Parliament House. They exchanged views on ways to counter extremism and such terrorist groups as Daesh.

Mr. Madani stressed that security and military measures are not enough; instead there is a need to look at economic, social and cultural aspects and to put effort in building institutions, giving hope to the youth and create development.

The Secretary General reiterated these points in his meeting with the Attorney General of Australia, Hon George Brandis QC, who underlined the need for understanding Islam, its true tenants and diversity in order challenge extremists on both sides.

The Secretary General also met with Assistant Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, who explained the basis for Australian multiculturalism of mutual respect and pride in ones culture, which has been nurtured through various measures.

Source: Madani advocates multiculturalism to counter intolerance

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Open government push requires ‘cultural shift’ in public service, federal documents warn

2016/02/05 Leave a comment

Sound analysis of the challenge:

The Liberals’ promise to pry open government requires nothing less than “cultural change” within the public service, warn documents obtained by the Star.

Treasury Board President Scott Brison was told in November that there are significant hurdles to the Liberals’ campaign pledge to reform access to information laws, make government information open by default, and more effectively communicate with the public.

Documents prepared for Brison describe a federal culture of “limited disclosure, insular policy making,” which takes into account the “federal view only.”

To implement the Liberals’ ambitious democratic reform agenda, that culture will need to shift to one of “proactive release, engagement and connectivity, (and) broad leadership on open government.”

It’s not clear exactly how the government intends to change the culture of some 257,000 employees in the core public service. But Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has already made clear he wants to end the era of the federal government deciding and acting on issues unilaterally, putting an emphasis on meeting with provincial premiers and, on Friday, the mayors of Canada’s largest cities.

“The government holds a largely untapped wealth of mostly unclassified information of interest to Canadians,” read the documents, obtained under access to information laws. “This information is not sufficiently leveraged to fuel the digital economy, spur innovation, and give Canadian business a competitive edge.”

Trudeau made openness and accountability a key plank in his party’s election platform. The idea is to make government information “open by default,” unlike the current system where citizens need to resort to access to information requests that can take months or even years to process.

But releasing more information about government operations, the documents warn, carries with it the risk of public relations headaches for the new government.

In an interview Tuesday, Brison acknowledged that risk.

“(But) you can’t expect Canadians to trust us if we can’t trust them,” Brison said.

“The other thing to keep in mind is we will make better decisions when we engage Canadians in the decision-making process. The old days where governments would be covetous and secretive (with) information to try and make a decision because government thought they were smarter than citizens, are over.”

When it comes to changing the public services culture, Brison suggested the Liberals need to lead by example – and the leadership starts with the prime minister.

“(Trudeau) is absolutely committed to this throughout government,” Brison said.

“For most Canadians, the transparency bus has left the station. You try to explain to a millennial why a lot of this information isn’t rendered public, and you lose them.”

But it’s not just the culture of secrecy and risk aversion preventing information from getting to Canadians. The documents note Canada’s dated privacy and access to information acts are falling out of sync with technological development.

The Access to Information Act, for instance, has not been substantially changed since the early 1980s when most government business was conducted on paper.

Source: Open government push requires ‘cultural shift’ in public service, federal documents warn | Toronto Star

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Ottawa falling short in assessing gender impact of policy decisions

2016/02/04 Leave a comment

Provides material for reflection given Minister Hajdu’s mandate letter commitment:

Work with the Privy Council Office to ensure that a gender-based analysis is applied to proposals before they arrive at Cabinet for decision-making.

Ideally, of course, this would be expanded to a broader widespread diversity lens, as I have argued in my deck, Multiculturalism – Implementing Diversity and Inclusion (example slide below):

Multiculturalism - Implementing Diversity and Inclusion.001

Two decades after pledging to assess the gender impact of federal government policies, Ottawa is still falling short in its efforts, meaning that obstacles to both men and women still stand, auditor general Michael Ferguson says.

In an audit report released Tuesday, Ferguson reported some progress on the file but cautioned that Ottawa’s commitment to assess the gender impact of its policy decisions was still haphazard.

“We observed that gender-based analysis is still not fully deployed across the federal government 20 years after the government committed to applying this type of analysis to its policy decisions,” Ferguson said.

He noted that while Status of Women Canada, Treasury Board and Privy Council Office have made progress in this area, the gender analyses done by departments and agencies were “not always complete, nor of consistent quality.”

“This means gender considerations, including obstacles to the full participation of diverse groups of men and women, are not always considered in government decisions,” he said.

New Democrat MP David Christopherson said the audit findings are evidence the federal government is not taking the issue seriously.

“Imagine, 20 years later and there (are) still six departments that don’t even have a framework for recording the information, let alone doing something about it. We’re a long, long way from where we need to be,” he told reporters.

At a 1995 United Nations conference on women, Ottawa committed to analyze the “gender-specific” impacts on women and men before making decisions on policies, legislation and programs across government.

Those considerations should include assessing the differences between men and women, which could include age, education, language, geography, culture and income.

Such analysis is meant to flag whether an initiative could have unintended impacts, or perhaps treats men and women differently.

Ferguson’s audit team examined 16 initiatives undertaken by four departments: Employment and Social Development; Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development; Industry Canada; and Natural Resources.

The audit found that the departments performed gender-based analyses for all initiatives but did not always complete them. For example, in one case, analysis of a funding program for skills training did not flag the under-representation of women in the information, communications and technology field.

In another case, the review of an apprentice loan program did not examine barriers to access training and trades for women, visible minorities and immigrant women, the audit found.

Ferguson’s report flagged a number of systemic barriers to gender-based analysis, starting with the fact that such assessments are not mandatory. As well, he noted the tight deadlines for developing policy initiatives and limited ability of some departments and agencies for doing this work.

And the report found that Status of Women Canada was unable to track whether gender-based analysis was being considered in the decision-making across government.

Ferguson’s report urges the Privy Council Office, Status of Women and Treasury Board to “take concrete actions to identify and address barriers that prevent systematic conduct of rigorous gender-based analysis.”

Still, the audit report did find progress in implementing gender-based analysis compared to 2009, the last time the auditor general’s office reviewed the issue.

Patricia Hajdu, the minister of status of women, said she agreed with the audit findings that while progress had been made, “more needs to be done.”

“Our government has been clear about its commitment to consider the gender impacts of our decisions. We will use the auditor general’s report as a renewed call for action within the federal government,” she said Tuesday.

Still, Hajdu said that the government is not considering make gender-based analysis mandatory.

Source: Ottawa falling short in assessing gender impact of policy decisions | Toronto Star

OAG Full Report

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The curious career of the ‘taxpayer’ in Canadian public life: Delacourt

2016/02/04 5 Comments

Good piece by Susan Delacourt on the use of the word ‘taxpayers’ vs ‘citizens’ (I prefer the latter):

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is not fond of the word ‘taxpayers’ as a synonym for Canadian citizens.

“Unless you say ‘service-receivers’ at the same time as you say ‘taxpayers,’ you’re only giving half the equation,” Trudeau said in an interview with me last week. “The idea of ‘citizen’ involves both benefits and responsibilities, and I like that a bit better.”

I can’t say I’d be unhappy to see a little less casual use of that word ‘taxpayer’ in politics. Bob Rae, the former interim Liberal leader, would occasionally ‘correct’ reporters in scrums when they asked how some policy would affect taxpayers. “You mean citizens,” Rae would say.

The idea of citizenship as a two-way relationship with government seems to have fallen out of fashion in recent decades. Whether it can be revived is an interesting question.

Seeing citizenship as a send-and-receive equation, for instance, also gives us another way to look at Trudeau’s conversations with 10 Canadians on CBC TV the other night.

While all the attention was on what Trudeau had learned from the questioners, I kept wondering how much the questioners themselves were learning about government. Did they come away with their views changed on what we require of political leadership?

CBC did a good job of choosing people with tough questions; not one of them was able to walk away from the Trudeau encounter with easy answers. The prime minister has taken a bit of flak in some quarters for offering too little in the way of comfort or solutions, but that’s an occupational hazard in modern politics. If the answers were easy or quick, wouldn’t someone have offered some by now?

One thing is certain — none of those people came to the Prime Minister’s Office simply asking for their “taxpayers’” money back.

There are all kinds of good reasons to keep reminding politicians that the money they’re spending is public money — a better term, it seems, than “taxpayers’ money”. And the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has served as a useful check on reckless spending over the years.

But taxing and spending are not the sum total of running a country, despite how that rather limited view has been hammered into popular political culture over the years. If they were, those ten citizens who met Trudeau the other night could have been sent away with a nice cheque as a parting gift.

Susan Delacourt takes us on an etymological tour of the word “taxpayer”

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Needs of some Syrian refugees higher than expected, analysis finds

2016/02/04 Leave a comment

While this data is not totally surprising, it does highlight the integration challenges being faced by some refugees:

While the report says the government doesn’t foresee the need for widespread changes to existing programs, here’s a look at what it found, and some of the implications for resettlement providers.

  • Government-assisted refugees have bigger families: 53 per cent of approved cases listed five to eight people on the application, compared with seven per cent of privately sponsored cases. This highlights the current housing crunch — it’s harder to find apartments to accommodate that many people within available budgets.
  • They’re younger: 55 per cent of approved applicants were 14 years of age or younger, compared with 27 per cent of privately sponsored ones. The report notes that services directly targeted at children will need to be stepped up and the report notes they’ve often only gone to school in Arabic.
  • They speak little English or French: 67 per cent of approved applicants reporting speaking neither language, compared with 37 per cent of privately sponsored ones. Resettlement agencies have previously highlighted that in some cities, wait lists for language training are over a year long.
  • How much education they have is unclear: The analysis says anecdotal reports suggest the average level of schooling for adult Syrian government-assisted refugees is six to nine years. Of cases coming from Jordan, 90 to 95 per cent have not finished high school. The report notes that many kids are also a year or two behind their peers, putting new demands on the school system.
  • Their most recent jobs may not reflect their skills: Many refugees can’t legally work in their host countries, and often find general labour jobs. “Anecdotally, reports from visa officers abroad indicate that work experience is largely low-skilled and almost entirely limited to males,” the analysis said.
  • They are generally healthy: The brief says the health of refugees runs from entirely health to those with severe diseases such as cancer. But only 12 per cent of the medical assessments had at least one condition listed. The most common were hypertension, diabetes and vision or hearing impairment. “While mental-health issues were not identified as one of the most frequent conditions at the time of the (medical exam), it is a condition that can arise soon or several months after arrival in Canada,” the brief says.

The data shows that 15,157 Syrians landed between Nov. 4 last year and Jan. 31 this year. Of these, 8,767 were government-assisted, 5,341 were privately sponsored and 1,049 are part of a program that combines the two.

Source: Needs of some Syrian refugees higher than expected, analysis finds – The Globe and Mail

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Google Looks to Divert ‘Extremist’ Searches to Anti-Radicalization Sites | TIME

2016/02/04 Leave a comment

Interesting approach:

Google is experimenting with a program that would redirect U.K. users searching for words linked to religious extremism to content designed to counter radicalization, a company executive has said.

Anthony House, Google’s senior manager for public policy and communications, told British lawmakers in a parliamentary committee hearing about the pilot initiative, which was targeted at reducing the online influence of groups like ISIS, the Guardianreported Tuesday.

“We should get the bad stuff down, but it’s also extremely important that people are able to find good information, that when people are feeling isolated, that when they go online, they find a community of hope, not a community of harm,” House said.

At least 700 British citizens have traveled to Iraq and Syria to join jihadist organizations, the BBC reports.

Source: Google Looks to Divert ‘Extremist’ Searches to Anti-Radicalization Sites | TIME

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Intel Discloses Diversity Data, Challenges Tech Industry To Follow Suit : NPR

2016/02/04 Leave a comment

Intel_Discloses_Diversity_Data__Challenges_Tech_Industry_To_Follow_Suit___All_Tech_Considered___NPRAn ambitious approach with clear, quantifiable goals, publicly available that provide accountability:

Intel set a goal last year: of all new hires, 40 percent have to be women or under-represented minorities (black, Latino, Native American). The company had never hit that level in the past. So for Intel, it was an ambitious goal. And the company reports today: it managed to exceed it, hitting 43.1 percent.

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich shares some of his motivation: “I have two daughters. They’re both technically very bright. I want them to come into a workplace that’s a better place than the way the workplace is today.”

To do that, he says, Intel has to open up about how it’s doing inside. “There’s nothing here [that’s] top secret or should not be shared with the rest of the world in my mind.”

Other tech giants don’t agree. Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft — companies that value metrics so much — have not publicly stated any measurable goals when it comes to diversity hiring, or the retention of employees. They haven’t disclosed the numbers of new hires or of exits from their companies, by gender and race.

Facebook, Google and Microsoft say their goals are not publicly available. An Apple spokesperson says the company has purposely decided to not set goals.

Intel is now an exception. Today’s report gets in the weeds. The company aims to increase its external diverse hiring rate to 45 percent this year, and it’s establishing a new target within this goal of a 14 percent hiring rate for underrepresented minorities.

There’s a sense of urgency. By 2020, Krzanich says, Intel must reach “full representation.”

By that he does not mean the company will look like America or its global consumer base. He means it’ll reflect the available talent pool. Intel has a long way to go — currently at 75 percent male and a combined 86 percent white and Asian.

Source: Intel Discloses Diversity Data, Challenges Tech Industry To Follow Suit : All Tech Considered : NPR

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Marni Soupcoff: Reviving the court challenges program is the wrong way to address a real problem

2016/02/03 Leave a comment

Soupcoff’s overall point about the excessive costs of going to court and the more fundamental need to address these is valid.

However,  the complexity of reducing costs and the time required to do so, makes restoration of the court challenges program a sensible interim step (disclosure, I used to have the team that managed the program under my branch at Canadian Heritage and it was small and low-cost):

Only if we address the outlandish costs — in both time and money — of suing government will we actually approach a reality of constitutional litigation being a meaningful check on government power and a meaningful protector of Canadians’ rights. The details of who pays those costs are far easier to sort out.

The fact that challenging a law should not be as painless as, say, buying a sandwich, is worth mentioning. Only, we’ve ended up at such an extreme in the opposite direction, with a typical constitutional challenge quite easily requiring several millions of dollars and a good decade of time, that worries about opening the floodgates seem best left for later, once we’ve made battling for constitutional justice slightly more accessible than walking on the moon.

While it might be true that reducing the price tag of a constitutional case by even $50,000 or so (the amount at which the Court Challenges Program used to max out per matter) would help citizens hold government to account, reducing government delay, document dumping, and excessive procedural manoeuvring during constitutional litigation would be even more productive. Assuming that most Canadians who challenge a law are also federal taxpayers who’d be paying for both a Court Challenges Program and the legions of crown lawyers and other government employees defending the status quo, the plaintiffs would be getting a better deal with a streamlined judicial and litigation process than with a challenges program.

Achieving access to justice is complex, but cutting, rather than adding, bureaucracy is usually a dependably positive step.

Source: Marni Soupcoff: Reviving the court challenges program is the wrong way to address a real problem | National Post

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Light Government Touch Lets China’s Hui Practice Islam in the Open – The New York Times

2016/02/03 Leave a comment

Interesting contrast to the repression of the Uighurs:

As the call to prayer echoed off the high walls of the madrasa and into the surrounding village, dozens of boys, dressed in matching violet caps, poured out of their dorm rooms and headed to the mosque.

That afternoon prayer ritual, little changed since Middle Eastern traders traversing the Silk Road first arrived in western China more than 1,000 years ago, was at once quotidian and remarkable.

That is because in many parts of the officially atheist country, religious restrictions make it a crime to operate Islamic schools and bar people under 18 from entering mosques.

Asked about the Chinese government’s light touch here, Liu Jun, 37, the chief imam at the Banqiao Daotang Islamic School, offered a knowing smile.

“Muslims from other parts of China who come here, especially from Xinjiang, can’t believe how free we are, and they don’t want to leave,” he said, referring to the far-west borderlands that are home to China’s beleaguered Uighur ethnic minority. “Life for the Hui is very good.”

With an estimated Muslim population of 23 million, China has more followers of Islam than many Arab countries. Roughly half of them live in Xinjiang, an oil-rich expanse of Central Asia where a cycle of violence and government repression has alarmed human rights advocates and unnerved Beijing over worries about the spread of Islamic extremism.

But here in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, a relatively recent administrative construct that is the official heartland of China’s Hui Muslim community, that kind of strife is almost nonexistent, as are the limitations on religion that critics say are fueling Uighur discontent.

Throughout Ningxia and the adjacent Gansu Province, new filigreed mosques soar over even the smallest villages, adolescent boys and girls spend their days studying the Quran at religious schools, and muezzin summon the faithful via loudspeakers — a marked contrast to mosques in Xinjiang, where the local authorities often forbid amplified calls to prayer.

In Hui strongholds like Linxia, a city in Gansu known as China’s “Little Mecca,” there are mosques on every other block and women can sometimes be seen with veils, a sartorial choice that can lead to detention in Xinjiang.

Source: Light Government Touch Lets China’s Hui Practice Islam in the Open – The New York Times

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