Instead of atheism, Canadian clergy choose alternative views of God

2016/06/13 Leave a comment

Douglas Todd summarizes the survey, provoked by United Church minister Gretta Vosper, a self-proclaimed atheist:

Admittedly, the survey captures only the views of United Church clergy, who tend to the liberal side of the theological spectrum. But I suspect they illustrate the main ways most people in Canada think about God:

Panentheism: This was the most common view among active United Church of Canada clergy.

Fifty-one per cent of active UC clergy agreed with the statement: “I believe in the existence of god/God, and that God/god is greater than the universe, includes and interpenetrates it.”

Bott believes this statement illustrates the core tenet of panentheism, an emerging form of theism that is often referred to as “natural theology.” Bott acknowledged he counts himself in this group, citing American Marjorie Suchocki among his favourite theologians.

Recognizing panentheism is a term that combines “pantheism” with “theism,” Bott said he understands it to mean “that God participates with all that exists. When changes happen in creation, changes happen in God. I see God in a dance with creation.”

Classic theism: Thirty-four per cent of active UC clergy hold this classic theistic belief in God.

They agreed with the statement: “I believe in one god/God as the creator and ruler of the universe, and further believe that God/god reveals godself/Godself through supernatural revelation.”

Classic theism is “what most people think of when they think of God,” said noted Bible scholar Marcus Borg. It is generally believed such a Supreme Being can supernaturally, unilaterally “intervene” in the world.

Deism: Deism was popular in 19th-century among European intellectuals. It basically teaches that God created the laws of the natural universe, like a clockmaker makes a clock, and then stood back and let it tick away.

Only 2.3 per cent of active United Church clergy supported the deistic statement: “I believe in the existence of God/god on the evidence of reason and nature only, and reject supernatural revelation.”

God only as a metaphor: Some people think God is at least partly a metaphor for love, truth or beauty.

But just 2.1 per cent of active United Church clergy agreed with the statement: “God is solely a metaphor for what is good in the human condition.”

The finding suggests that, while many think God is an ineffable entity only understood through metaphors, United Church clergy don’t therefore buy that God is not real.

Agnosticism: Only 1.2 per cent of active United Church clergy chose the agnostic option — that they “neither believe nor disbelieve in the existence of God/god, as it can be neither known nor proven.”

Atheism: Fewer than one in 100 active United Church clergy were atheists. Only 0.7 per cent agreed: “I do not believe in the existence of God/gods.”

Together these results provides evidence that Vosper is much more rare in the United Church of Canada than she suggests.

It’s why many say that, while there is nothing wrong with “not believing in God/gods,” it’s another thing to proclaim atheism while being paid as a Christian minister.

Nevertheless, Vosper has brought in lawyers to fight the confidential review of her ordination that’s underway in the Toronto region of the United Church. So far, her lawyers have failed to stop it.

The United Church is an extremely tolerant organization when it comes to clergy’s spiritual beliefs. So anything can happen yet.

But if Vosper ends up losing her public platform as a clergywoman in a Christian denomination, she will also lose much of her novelty value to journalists.

She will become just another one of the 4.5 million Canadians who are atheists.

Source: Instead of atheism, Canadian clergy choose alternative views of God | Vancouver Sun

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Changing O Canada: Is God next?

2016/06/13 Leave a comment

Unlikely that any MP will press for this in the near future but in the longer term, the demographic trends suggest that it may happen.

Or not – after all, it is the French version that has the stronger religious references, and Quebec, despite its overall secularism, remains attached to religious symbols as the reasonable accommodation debate over the Cross in the Assemble national (in turn balanced against Quebec nationalist opposition to Canada):

Router’s [author of the French version of O Canada] world was Roman Catholic as far as his eye could see. But, according to the 2011 census, there are almost as many non-Christians — close to 11 million — as there are Roman Catholics in Canada. Catholics are officially nearly 13 million — although a lot fewer than that show up for Mass.

So it’s not just the Pagans who might complain about the holy bits in the anthem — although Pagans are not to be dismissed as a tiny band of malcontents. The census found more than 25,000 of them, including 10,000 Wiccans.

And they’d presumably be less than thrilled if you asked them to carry even the tiniest Christian cross.

The problem multiplies

But then you have to add a vast rainbow of other religions and non-religions. Among the faithful, the census turned up 900 Shinto followers, 1,050 Satanists, 1,055 Rastafarians, 3,300 Jains, 3,600 Taoists, 6,000 Zoroastrians and nearly 19,000 Bahai. No doubt, many of these folks might not mind if a generic, interfaith god keeps our land glorious and free — but are they supposed to revere the crucifix? The central icon of Christianity?

The problem multiplies much more rapidly when you begin to count the mainstream religions for whom the Cross of Jesus is irrelevant or worse. There are more than 300,000 Jews in Canada. The Hindus and the Sikhs are each approaching half a million. Muslims are well over a million.

Next, consider those who don’t want any religious label at all. Add up all the atheists, the humanists and agnostics, then throw in all those who just said, ‘No thanks, no religion’ … and you quickly reach nearly eight million Canadians. And what will the 2016 census show when it’s out? After another five less-than-glorious years for religious faith, it’s hard to believe those numbers won’t grow.

These faithless millions might well begin to wonder, then, if they should remain politely mute about the godly content of the national anthem. There’s plenty to pick on. The antiquated French lyrics go on:

“Et ta valeur, de foi trempée,
Protégera nos foyers et nos droits.”

So, roughly: “thy valour, steeped in faith, will protect our homes and our rights.” And what if we’re not steeped in faith? Don’t our rights get protected? What if we think religious faith is often a dangerous thing?

Defenders of the faith

But don’t wait for some Christian soldiers to saddle up for the defence of the one true faith. They’re doing it already.

“Members of Parliament are being hypocritical by attempting to change Canada’s English national anthem,” thunders Charles McVety, of the Institute for Canadian Values. We notice at once that “Canadian values” are meant to be Christian values — and McVety leaves no doubt of this when he warns that, if we change “sons” to “us,” it’s a slippery slope to hell.

“The next step for revisionists will be to remove ‘God,’ ‘wield the sword,’ ‘carry the cross’ and ‘valour steeped in faith’ from the anthems,” McVety predicts. “Canada’s national anthems are precious to the foundation of the country and should not be changed.”

And if the country includes millions of unbelievers — and millions more who recoil from the image of Christians carrying swords and crosses — too bad. The party of God is suiting up.

Source: Changing O Canada: Is God next?: Terry Milewski – Politics – CBC News

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Status and race in the Stanford rape case: Why Brock Turner’s mug shot matters

2016/06/13 Leave a comment

Valid observations and commentary:

The fact that it took authorities 16 months and much prodding to release a booking photo from the Stanford sexual assault case – even after Turner was convicted – is enough to raise questions on its own given the seriousness of his crimes.

In a country where racial and socioeconomic disparity are so well-documented and pervasive, particularly within the criminal justice system, Turner’s case got many citizens wondering: Would the ex-Stanford swimmer’s sentence have been different if he wasn’t white?

A report submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Committee by The Sentencing Project in 2013 showed that African-American males are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white males in the U.S., and 2.5 times more likely than Hispanic males.

In California, where Turner was sentenced, the ratio of black people to white people in prison was 8.8 to 1 as of 2014.

While every criminal case is different, there are plenty of rulings involving black students to contrast Turner’s against – like the case of Corey Batey, a 19-year-old Vanderbilt University football star who was also convicted on three felony counts of sexual assault.

15 to 25 years for black offender

In April, a Tennessee judge ordered Batey to serve minimum sentence of 15 to 25 years in prison – “3,000 per cent longer than what Brock Turner was given for a comparable crime,” Shaun King noted in The New York Daily News.

The parallels between these cases in the wake of Turner’s sentencing hasn’t gone unnoticed. Nearly 200,000 people have now shared the Facebook image contrasting these felons below:

https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FOfficialMiseeHarris%2Fposts%2F1066565476745237%3A0&width=460&show_text=true&appId=857270271060031&height=480

Many writers and academics are now saying that, at best, the fact Turner’s mug shot was withheld is illustrative of the racial disparities within America’s criminal justice system.

At worst, choosing to show images of him swimming, smiling and looking every bit the all-American athlete could influence public perception to the point that his conviction is called into question.

Source: Status and race in the Stanford rape case: Why Brock Turner’s mug shot matters – Trending – CBC News

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , ,

What Jonathan Kay Has Wrong About Diversity in Journalism – New Canadian Media

2016/06/13 Leave a comment

Dan Rowe takes issue with Jon Kay’s explanation of the lack of diversity among journalists:

Canada’s journalism schools, not to mention independent campus newspapers and radio stations, are filled with people from almost every imaginable background—people trying to enter a field where job opportunities seem to be dwindling and salaries are stagnating. This is not because they don’t understand the situation but because they are passionate about what journalism, at its best, can and should do.

There is no reliable data specific to Canada that I’m aware of to support or refute this—there doesn’t seem to be much after former Ryerson professor John Miller’s Diversity Watch project which hasn’t been updated in 10 years—but a perception exists that there is a disparity in who gets jobs. “Journalism schools are pumping out so many visible minorities and plenty of women, and they do not get jobs the way white kids do,” Hazlitt managing editor Scaachi Koul was quoted by J-Source as saying at a recent Massey College Press Club event in Toronto on the generational gap in Canadian journalism.

Meanwhile, Amber Gero, a radio reporter who was laid off from her job at CFRB 1010 last year, effectively made the same point in a mid-March interview on the Toronto Mike podcast. “I’d also like to see more Asian people, more native people, more Hispanic people. Where are they? They’re graduating every year from the media schools so don’t tell me they’re not there and ready to work,” Gero said. “It has to change from the top down.”

Koul and Gero are right. Change will require action on many levels, including journalism schools. Journalism educators need to spend more time ensuring that all students are better prepared for success with a clear-eyed understanding of the challenges they face when they enter the field. Journalism departments need to offer a more diverse faculty, guest speakers and even examples of good works of journalism discussed in class.

Faculty also need to continue to use our resources and job security to agitate for change and highlight the problem—particularly with empirical data and not just anecdotal accounts, such as this one. For decades, journalism professors in the U.S., led by David Weaver at Indiana University, have done extensive surveys of American journalists. Without anything comparable in scope in Canadian journalism, legitimate concerns about diversity in the workplace can be brushed aside with greater ease.

Increasing diversity in workplaces will require leadership, risk-taking and time. It will require creating opportunities for younger, less proven journalists to take on assignments more challenging than what they’ve done before.

There needs to be more stories in this country like the one Ta-Nehisi Coates tells of David Carr. “In the February of 1996, I sent David Carr two poorly conceived college-newspaper articles and a chapbook of black-nationalist poetry,” Coates wrote of his time at the Washington City Paper in The Atlantic after Carr’s death earlier this year. “And David Carr hired me. I can’t even tell you what he saw.”

People in the position to hire and develop journalists need a more proactive approach than the one Kay exhibited in his interview with Brown, where he regretted the lack of diversity, but ultimately threw his hands up in the air. It was as though he—now the editor of a magazine and a longtime managing editor of the comment pages at a national newspaper prior to that—could not have played any greater role in opening up more opportunities for voices that are more reflective of Canada’s demographic makeup.

If Kay’s assertion that there are very few good essayists in the country is true, then why not use his position, resources and experience to develop new voices? Instead, when Brown asked Kay to name some people he would like to add to the Walrus’s roster, two of the three people he mentioned were Conrad Black and Rex Murphy—both of whom are exemplars of the status quo. (Not to mention bad writers.)

Kay’s comments are a perfect example of what Don Heider was writing about: someone who is not necessarily opposed to change but has no good reason, personally, professionally or politically, to act.

Source: What Jonathan Kay Has Wrong About Diversity in Journalism – New Canadian Media

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The door to reconciliation [with Indigenous peoples] is truly open: Adams

2016/06/11 Leave a comment

Michael Adam’s overview of the findings of the recent Environics Institute survey on non-indigenous adults on indigenous issues:

The survey measured support for key areas related to the TRC’s recommendations and other long-standing unresolved issues. There is almost universal public support (90 per cent) for increased government spending to ensure that indigenous peoples have decent housing and safe drinking water, basics that most other Canadians take for granted.

Unsurprisingly, the people who support other equity-oriented initiatives like universal health care are the same people who support addressing inequities in indigenous living standards.

Nine in 10 non-aboriginal Canadians (91 per cent) also support the TRC’s recommendation that funding to indigenous schools be increased to ensure that students have equal access to educational opportunities. Canadians today overwhelmingly believe that education is the key to sustained economic well-being.

This finding from the 2016 survey dovetails with findings from our 2010 Urban Aboriginal Peoples Study, which found that the top priority of indigenous people living in Canadian cities was education. Of course, the history of Canadian intervention in indigenous education is a painful one. This country’s policies of forced assimilation through education, which the TRC, Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and former prime minister Paul Martin have called cultural genocide, robbed tens of thousands of children of family and cultural heritage and inflicted damage across generations.

Our survey shows that awareness not only of the Indian residential school system but of the specific abuses and consequences of that system has grown among non-aboriginal Canadians since 2008; 73 per cent now make this connection.

Canadians see education as not only as a key to economic success, but as one means of unwinding the prejudices and stereotypes that have accrued during Canada’s colonial history. More than nine in 10 non-aboriginal Canadians say that it is very (62 per cent) or somewhat (30 per cent) important for all non-aboriginal Canadians to understand the true history of how indigenous people have been treated by governments and society.

Better indigenous education for all Canadian students has the potential to create a platform for true reconciliation and partnership, a project in which 64 per cent per cent feel strongly that all Canadians have a role to play (a proportion that has increased by 22 points since 2008). Only 6 per cent strongly reject the idea that we all have a role to play in reconciliation.

Our survey did find negative attitudes, including the belief that aboriginal peoples have a sense of entitlement about receiving support from government, and the belief that suffering communities are partly to blame for their own difficulties. Despite the ongoing presence of these sentiments, there is broad public support for key TRC recommendations, some of which the recent federal budget took steps toward.

Of course, government action on issues so deeply rooted in our cultural and political experience will not deliver immediate benefit. But these results suggest most Canadians would rather be moving along the path to progressive change, even if we stumble, than standing still or moving backward.

Source: The door to reconciliation is truly open – The Globe and Mail

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Canada’s diplomatic brass: too white, too male |

2016/06/11 Leave a comment

Good detailed piece on the Canadian foreign service demographics and head of mission appointments (my examination of the diversity of senior heads of mission – the 16 positions classified at the ADM level – showed 3 women (19 percent) and 1 visible minority (6 percent).

Another illustration of the government being more open in sharing this data:

The Prime Minister is a feminist and there is gender parity in cabinet, but Canada’s foreign service still has a long way to go.

Sources say that the foreign service has negative gaps in regards to the number of women it employs, as well as aboriginal peoples and persons with disabilities.

According to a public report on employment equity in the government for the 2015-16 year, in the entire department of Foreign Affairs, Trade, and Development, 54.8 per cent of employees were women, 2.4 per cent were aboriginal peoples, 3.3 per cent were persons with disabilities, and 14.4 per cent were visible minorities.

However, according to numbers given to The Hill Times from an “internal workforce analysis for the foreign service group,” Canada’s foreign service is significantly lacking in women.

The department has targets for employment equity, and in terms of women in the foreign service, the foreign service has a negative gap of 166, meaning the department would need to employ 166 more women in order achieve equity. There is also a negative gap of 18 for aboriginal people, and 16 for people with disabilities. However, for visible minorities, the department is positive by 64, meaning they have 64 more visible minority employees than required to be equitable, according to the standards set by the Canada Labour Market Availability.

Screen Shot 2016-06-07 at 12.35.59 PM

Employment equity data for the foreign service, provided to The Hill Times by Global Affairs on June 6, 2016.

The document includes data as of March 31 of this year. Global Affairs confirmed the above numbers, and provided a chart demonstrating the employment equity targets and gaps in percentages. According to Eric Pelletier, a spokesperson for Global Affairs, there is a negative gap of 4.1 per cent for women, meaning women are under-represented by 4.1 per cent. It cites that there are currently 48.1 per cent women in the foreign service, and 62 per cent required representation. A negative gap of 1.5 per cent exists for aboriginal peoples, a negative gap of 1.4 per cent for persons with disabilities, and a positive gap of 5.3 per cent for visible minorities. Mr. Pelletier also said that the foreign service is 71.6 per cent anglophone and 28.4 per cent francophone.

Michael Kologie, communications director for the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers (PAFSO), said in an interview with The Hill Times that overall, “if we’re talking about employment equity gaps, we’re doing very well when it comes to visible minorities. We’re doing okay when it comes to persons with disabilities, and where we’re really lacking is actually with respect to women and aboriginal peoples.” He said for women, the gap is “quite significant.”

Artur Wilczynski, Canada’s ambassador to Norway, further confirmed these gaps in an interview.

“I took a quick peek at the stats in terms of the employment equity. In the executive cadre, if you look at visible minorities in particular, there are no negative gaps there according to our reports, but there is still a lot of work to be done for example in increasing the representation of indigenous persons, persons with disabilities and women, and quite frankly, people of multiple backgrounds,” he said.

In a later emailed statement, Mr. Kologie wrote that PAFSO is committed to working in collaboration with Global Affairs to encourage a diverse foreign service, “with special attention on currently underrepresented groups such as women, aboriginal peoples, and persons with disabilities,” adding that visible minorities are well represented in the foreign service.

It has been reported by both The Ottawa Citizen and The Globe and Mail that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has given Global Affairs instructions to diversify the foreign service and to specifically hire more women.

The Citizen’s columnist Andrew Cohen wrote in April that “Justin Trudeau has told Global Affairs that its list of career candidates has too many white males and asked it to do better next time.”

The Globe reported at the end of last month that Global Affairs is choosing two women to fill positions in Israel and in Great Britain, naming Deborah Lyons as Canada’s new ambassador to Israel and Janice Charette as the person to take the lead at Canada House.

The article also pointed out that Mr. Trudeau had told Global Affairs “its list of career candidates has too many white males and promised better representation in terms of gender and ethnicity.” Global Affairs would not confirm whether or not it had received these instructions from Mr. Trudeau, with Global Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion’s (Saint-Laurent, Que.) press secretary Chantal Gagnon saying she wasn’t going to answer that question. She also stressed that Ms. Charette and Ms. Lyons had not yet been officially appointed.

Speaking of official appointments, the Trudeau government will take its first crack at shuffling the foreign service this summer, anticipated in June or July.

Anne Leahy, a former Canadian ambassador, said she expects the announcements to come around the end of June. “I would watch [the announcement] because Justin Trudeau made a point of saying that he wanted more women, more diversity,” she said, adding that she “wouldn’t be surprised” to see that come to light. She said from her own experience, she expects anywhere from 10-15 new heads of mission to be appointed, if not more.

A source from Global Affairs told The Hill Times that the department will have more to say about diversity once the heads of mission shuffle happens, hinting that more diverse nominations might be coming.

The Hill Times counted the number of Canadian heads of mission posted abroad as of October 2015. The results showed that of the 134 heads of mission at the time, 90 were men and just 44 were women. That translates to 32 per cent heads of mission positions being held by women.

Source: Canada’s diplomatic brass: too white, too male |

Filed under Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Stephen Gordon: Why Canadian academics stay away from government policy work

2016/06/10 Leave a comment

Interesting piece by Stephen Gordon on the challenges of academics working with government policy makers and the lack of incentives from the academic (economists) side:

I don’t know what it’s like in other fields, but the main obstacle to more and better evidence-based policy-making in economics is not a stubborn refusal of public servants to listen to academics. (The willingness of their political masters to listen is another question.) The problem is a shortage of supply, not a lack of demand. While many government agencies often have their own research departments, they are generally modest in scope and are ill-equipped to handle large projects without outside help.

Canadian academics have little professional incentive to get involved in policy work: tenure and promotion decisions largely depend on publishing in top journals and contributing to your department’s international ranking. Spending time on policy papers — especially papers that focus on Canadian policy issues — can be a risky career strategy. An economist who wants to work on policy would probably do better to take a job in the public service, not academia.

The challenge for the public service who would like to attract more academics into policy work is to offer incentives of its own. Financial support is an obvious place to start, but it’s not always effective: if academics were the sort of people who would work on projects that don’t interest them in return for higher pay, they probably wouldn’t be in academia in the first place. And in any case, professors in Canada don’t benefit personally from research grants — the rules forbid these funds from being used to top up salaries.

Another strategy involves using the public service’s most valuable asset as bait: insider status. Access to confidential data is especially tempting: researchers are always curious to see what patterns might be found in unexplored data sets, and a new finding might even be publishable in a top journal. Lesser attractions include things like getting invited to private conferences and being asked by deputy ministers and even ministers for advice. (In case you’re wondering: yes, I’ve done all this.)

To be sure, this approach is almost certainly a success on its own terms. Although no policy-making process is immune to error, it generally produces more hits than misses. And since policy evaluation is an integral part of the process, errors can be identified and fixed. Initiatives like free trade, the goods and services tax and the Bank of Canada’s inflation-targeting policy all emerged from the interactions between academics and public servants, and we’re all better off for them.

The insider culture of policy-making is an issue that deserves much more attention than figuring out ways to persuade more academics to do economic policy work. The problem with leaving policy-makers to insiders is that a system in which outsiders get presented with a series of faits accomplis is not consistent with most people’s views of democracy. And even if the process does produce good policies, subsequent governments will feel free to reverse them. The only way to ensure that a policy will survive a change in government is to obtain broad public buy-in.

The GST is a good case in point. It enjoyed — and still enjoys — broad support among economists, but we weren’t very present in the public debate, preferring to leave that job to the Mulroney government. This lack of public support from economists likely made it easier for the Liberals and then the New Democrats to campaign on promises to eliminate the GST. By the time the Conservatives campaigned on a promise to reduce the GST by two percentage points, almost nobody was left to credibly oppose the measure. As a result, the GST reduction may be the most enduring legacy of the Harper government, all because of the lack of public buy-in more than 20 years ago.

In principle, explaining the logic behind new economic policies is supposed to be the job of politicians and the media, but available evidence would suggest that they are not very good at it. For example, politicians always end up forcing everything through the prism of job creation, even when the policy being discussed has nothing to do with employment levels. And the media are too prone to the “Opinions differ on the shape of the Earth” fallacy of reporting the conflict instead of figuring out which side has the stronger argument. Economics professors have much to offer here, but too few of us feel obliged to share our understanding with the public.

The gap between academic economists and the public is much wider and far more troubling than that between academic economists and policy-makers. But if there are few incentives for us to do policy research, there are no incentives for us to engage the public: you won’t get tenure by writing blog posts and op-eds.

In my government career, there has been considerable collaboration with academics and use of their analysis, but that may reflect more my experience in foreign and social policy.

Source: Stephen Gordon: Why Canadian academics stay away from government policy work

Filed under Multiculturalism

Critics scoff as New Brunswick premier appoints minister of ‘Celtic Affairs’

2016/06/10 Leave a comment

Odd:

New Brunswick has raised a few eyebrows by naming its first minister of Celtic Affairs, an appointment that even the province’s multicultural association called a surprise.

The appointment of Lisa Harris, an educator, former bakery owner and MLA for Miramichi, was widely seen as a sop to anglophone voters angry over bilingualism requirements.

But the largely white province has long sought immigrants as its population shrinks, and Alex LeBlanc, executive director of the New Brunswick Multicultural Council, said he would have rather seen the government name a minister for immigration and cultural affairs.

“Quebec, Nova Scotia and Ontario have all done that. It could be a strong signal for New Brunswickers and for the federal government that we take those issues seriously,” he said.

He said the Celtic Affairs portfolio came as a surprise: “It wasn’t something that was coming up on our radar, but I don’t see any downside to having a minister responsible,” he said.

Political critics called it a waste of money, but Premier Brian Gallant said 40 per cent of New Brunswickers claim some link or ancestry that’s Celtic, and the ministry comes with no added cost.

“It’s a nice way for us to have a co-ordinated approach to the investments that we make in that realm,” Gallant said as he announced the new portfolio during a major cabinet shuffle Monday in Fredericton. “Many festivals are supported by the government, whether it’s the Irish festival in the Miramichi or whether it’s Scottish festivals that happen in many communities.”

Green Leader David Coon said the government is facing pressure on requirements for bilingual employees and the need for separate French and English school buses, and he thinks it is playing politics by adding Celtic Affairs.

“I think they’re trying to send a message that somehow they’re promoting at least one part of the anglophone side,” he said. “It would have been fair to have in the department, perhaps a culture section for Celtic Affairs with someone with that responsibility, but actually to appoint a minister of Celtic Affairs seems unnecessary.”

Tom Bateman, who teaches political science at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, called the appointment “laughable.”

“The only explanation I can think of is that the government has been sensitive to claims that it is too pro-French language, too pro-Acadian and it is doing this in some way to try to correct the balance. I don’t think that’s going to impress anybody,” Bateman said.

“I don’t think this will do anything to mollify peoples’ other concerns about language in the province.”

Source: Critics scoff as New Brunswick premier appoints minister of ‘Celtic Affairs’

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Ontario wants 40 per cent of provincial board appointments to be women – Macleans.ca

2016/06/10 Leave a comment

GiC Baseline 2016.010While I do not have the current numbers for Ontario appointments, federal Governor in Council appointments are 34 percent women as in my chart above (but no formal target has been set publicly):

Ontario’s Liberal government wants women to make up at least 40 per cent of all appointments to provincial boards and agencies by 2019.

Premier Kathleen Wynne announced the target Tuesday, saying she would like to see other businesses and corporations follow the government’s example.

The government is “encouraging” businesses to set a target by the end of 2017 of women making up 30 per cent of appointments to their boards of directors.

More than half of Ontario’s post-secondary graduates are women, and women make up half of the province’s workforce, but as of last year, half of the businesses listed on the TSX have no women on their boards.

Ontario is establishing a committee, led by Finance Minister Charles Sousa and Tracy MacCharles, the minister responsible for women’s issues, to implement recommendations from a report on gender diversity on boards in Canada.

Wynne says “women set the standards for the world” and it is up to women in Canada to set the standards high.

“My whole life I’ve heard about women’s issues,” Wynne said in a speech. “They’re everybody’s issues, people, and they’re economic issues.”

Source: Ontario wants 40 per cent of provincial board appointments to be women – Macleans.ca

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Malta PM says decisions on citizenship by investment schemes should not be taken by politicians

2016/06/10 Leave a comment

This is the flagship model used by advocates of investor and citizenship immigration programs in Canada. Does not change the fundamental question of the morality and ethics of buying citizenship, and that this is largely driven by the business interests of consultants, rather than broader ones:

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat underlined the benefits of the Citizenship by Investment programme for the Maltese economy when he addressed the Investment Migration Forum 2016 in Geneva this afternoon.

The forum is being hosted by the Investment Migration Council, a worldwide association for investor immigration and citizenship-by-investment, grouping the leading stakeholders in the field and giving the industry a voice.

Dr Muscat said the global industry linked to citizenship by investment would grow when criteria for such schemes were known and decisions were taken by technical people and not politicians.

He said that it was on this basis that Malta successfully launched its programme, which was now yielding great benefits for the economy.

He said that despite controversies, Malta’s scheme still remained the only one approved by the European Commission.

Source: PM says decisions on citizenship by investment schemes should not be taken by politicians – timesofmalta.com

Filed under Citizenship, Immigration Tagged with ,

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