It’s not right to equate Islam with violence, pope says

2016/08/02 Leave a comment

Worth noting:

Speaking to journalists aboard his return flight from Krakow, Poland, July 31, the pope also stressed that violence exists in all religions, including Catholicism, and it cannot be pinned to one single religion.

“I do not like to speak of Islamic violence because everyday when I look through the papers, I see violence here in Italy,” the pope told reporters. “And they are baptized Catholics. There are violent Catholics. If I speak of Islamic violence, I also have to speak of Catholic violence,” he added.

Spending about 30 minutes with reporters and responding to six questions, Pope Francis was asked to elaborate on comments he had made flying to Poland July 27 when he told the journalists that religions are not at war and want peace.

The pope’s initial comment came in speaking about the murder July 26 of an elderly priest during Mass in a Catholic church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, France. Two men, armed with knives, entered the church during Mass. The attackers murdered 84-year-old Father Jacques Hamel, slitting his throat. The Islamic State group later claimed responsibility for the murder.

Although the death of the French priest was committed in the name of Islam, the pope said that it is unfair to label an entire religion violent because of the actions of a few fundamentalists.

“One thing is true. I believe that in almost all religions, there is always a small fundamentalist group. We have them, too,” the pope said. “When fundamentalism goes to the point of killing — you can even kill with the tongue. This is what St. James says, but (you can kill) also with a knife. ”

“I do not think it is right to identify Islam with violence. This is not right and it is not true,” he said.

Instead, the pope said, that those who choose to enter fundamentalists groups, such as the Islamic State, do so because “they have been left empty” of ideals, work and values.

Source: It’s not right to equate Islam with violence, pope says

Filed under Radicalization, Religion Tagged with , ,

Saskatchewan: A special report on race and power

2016/08/01 Leave a comment

Good in-depth piece by Nancy Macdonald on the lack of diversity in Saskatchewan. Well worth reading in its entirety:

Right now, 22 per cent of Saskatchewan’s population is non-white: 16 per cent Indigenous, and 6.3 per cent visible minority—figures that are expected to jump when new census figures are released early next year. And yet Saskatchewan’s power structure does not reflect its changing face.

In the course of reporting a story earlier this year about the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in provincial jails,Maclean’s heard complaints of representational deficiencies in the province’s power structure; the magazine undertook a survey that looked at the 265 most powerful people in government, justice, business, and education. Just 17 positions were filled by non-white people—1.8 per cent by visible minorities, and 4.5 per cent by Metis or First Nations peoples. The mayors of Saskatchewan’s nine biggest cities are white. So are all but one of the chiefs of police and 18 of 19 city councillors in its two major cities, Saskatoon and Regina, the presidents of its two universities and its biggest college, its six major sports teams.

Saskatchewan has never elected a visible minority candidate to the House of Commons, or to the council chambers of Saskatoon or Regina, say academics, political staff and city clerks in Regina and Saskatoon. In the last election, the province made history when it elected Muhammad Fiaz, the first visible minority to sit in the province’s Legislative Assembly, a milestone that surprised even Fiaz, he tells Maclean’s. (Neighbouring Manitoba did this nearly four decades ago.)

Just one of the province’s 21 Crown corporations and one of the six Saskatchewan-based, publicly-traded businesses are headed by a visible minority: Rupen Pandya is president and CEO of SaskBuilds, which manages the province’s large-scale infrastructure projects, and Murad Al-Katib is president and CEO of agribusiness giant Alliance Grain Traders.

In perhaps the most glaring omission of minority voices, just two of the 101 judges in the province—where 81 per cent of those sentenced to provincial custody are Indigenous, higher than in any other province—is either First Nations or Metis.

Therein lies the rub, says Saskatchewan MLA Nicole Sarauer, formerly a lawyer with Pro Bono Law Saskatchewan. The problem isn’t just the unrepresentative power structure, it’s the vast “disconnect” between those making decisions and those most impacted by them. Without adequate representation, the concerns of Indigenous voices are more easily overlooked, which helps spur the growth of the appalling socioeconomic gap dividing Saskatchewan’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations.

Indigenous people in Saskatchewan are, for example, 33 times more likely to be incarcerated than a non-Indigenous person—higher odds than an African American in the U.S., or a black South African at the height of apartheid.

Source: Saskatchewan: A special report on race and power – Macleans.ca

Filed under Aboriginal, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

It’s 2016, but women – even in elite professions – still earn less

2016/08/01 Leave a comment

Having data helps sharpen the conversation:

In the legal field, a 2016 survey of compensation paid to in-house counsel found that female lawyers who work as corporate counsel earn 15 per cent less than their male in-house counterparts.

“This wage gap cannot be fully explained away by the assertion that ’men have been in the workplace longer,’ as men have fewer average years as both legal counsel and senior counsel and [yet] still earn a higher base salary,” according to a report by the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association and The Counsel Network, a national legal recruitment firm. “For in-house counsel, the gender wage gap is real and it is not shrinking… In all sectors, except government, where woman have wage parity, men earn a higher salary than women.”

(The average annual salary for all in-house counsel surveyed is $165,000.)

A 2015 survey conducted by Chartered Professional Accountants Canada uncovered similar results: “At the total level, female members have a median total compensation of $99,000 versus $120,000 among their male counterparts.”

Some – but not all – of this is explained by the preponderance of men in more highly paid executive roles, said the CPA, which also provided a compensation breakdown by role and gender, based on 2014 pay stubs.

Examples: median annual compensation for male accountants in chief financial officer roles was $180,000, compared with $140,000 for females; $125,00 for male treasurers, compared with $98,000 for females; $133,000 for male professors, compared with $109,000 for females; $250,000 for male partners in accounting practices compared with $190,000 for females.

“It’s a fairly recent thing that we have looked at the data and gone on the record with it. That’s obviously good, because just recognizing that there is a problem can lead to change,” Robin Taub, volunteer chair of the CPA Canada’s women’s leadership council, said in an interview.

The most recent in-house counsel compensation survey – the fourth such survey conducted since 2009 – “was shocking” in that the gender pay gap has not narrowed “and it’s 2016,” said Dal Bhathal, Toronto-based managing partner of The Counsel Network.

This time, however, perhaps because it is 2016, “I can tell you that, absolutely, in the in-house counsel community, it has definitely received attention,” Ms. Bhathal said.

At a time when the federal government has its first-ever gender-balanced cabinet and securities regulators now require publicly traded companies to disclose the percentage of women on their boards of directors and in executive positions, the issue of gender equity is not only on the corporate radar, it’s on the agenda.

Source: It’s 2016, but women – even in elite professions – still earn less – The Globe and Mail

Filed under gender Tagged with ,

Justice Rosalie Abella: Doing justice to her father’s dream

2016/08/01 Leave a comment

Good profile of the background and values of Justice Abella:

She came to national prominence before her 40th birthday, when Liberal cabinet minister Lloyd Axworthy asked her to head a national commission on employment and minorities. After coining the term “employment equity,” she was attacked by critics coast to coast, but had the last laugh when a Progressive Conservative prime minister, Brian Mulroney, implemented many of her recommendations in the federally regulated work force (at such institutions as banks, Crown corporations and communications companies). The system she recommended is still in place today.

But there were no “quotas” in her recommendations – not after her father and others like him had faced quotas. In any event, quotas have a way of becoming a ceiling, she felt.

…Her philosophy as a judge is rooted in her parents’ experiences. She is a defender of human rights, of the rights of children, refugees, religious minorities, women.

She was the only judge to defend a Muslim woman’s right to wear a niqab (face veil) in almost all cases while testifying in a criminal trial. Determined to hold states accountable for human-rights violations, she was the only judge who said the family of Zahra Kazemi could sue the government of Iran for its involvement in the Iranian-Canadian photojournalist’s violent death. (The other judges said that Canadian law gives foreign officials immunity.)

Appointed to the Supreme Court by prime minister Paul Martin in 2004, she’s an activist judge, although she rejects the label. (Conservative judges have been activist, too, she says, in striking down laws protecting minorities.) “It’s not what you stand for; it’s what you stand up for,” she likes to say.

She has been reading Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich by German lawyer Ingo Müller, on the complicity of German judges in the Holocaust. She says they applied the letter of the law not to be seen as “activist.”

She scorns critics of judicial activism. “The plea for judicial deference [to elected legislators] may be nothing more than a prescription for judicial rigor mortis,” she said in a 2002 speech. The ubiquitous phrase “rule of law” annoys her: The Holocaust, apartheid and U.S. segregation unfolded according to law. She has an expansive view of the judge’s role, calls the Charter of Rights the “finest manifestation” of Canadian democracy.

“Of all the public institutions responsible for delivering justice, the judiciary is the only one for whom justice is the exclusive mandate,” she says. “This means that, while legislatures respond of necessity to the urgings of the public, however we define it, judges, on the other hand, serve only justice.”

This winter, she stood up for a more inclusive approach to marginalized people in two cases. In one, she wrote a majority ruling making it easier for refugee claimants to stay in Canada on “humanitarian and compassionate” grounds; in the other, she wrote the court’s unanimous ruling that requires the federal government to recognize the rights of Métis and non-status Indians, saying they have been living “in a jurisdictional wasteland.” Two weeks ago, she stood up for 500,000 non-unionized federally regulated workers, writing a majority ruling that strengthened their job security.

Source: Justice Rosalie Abella: Doing justice to her father’s dream – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Meet the wealthy immigrants at the centre of Vancouver’s housing debate

2016/08/01 Leave a comment

Good in-depth profile of some of the background and stories regarding mainland Chinese immigrants:

The mainlanders are the most recent of several waves of Chinese immigration to Vancouver. But they are not from the places familiar to Vancouverites for the past 160 years, like rural Guangdong, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan.

The 139,890 who have arrived since 2000, according to federal statistics, are from Nanjing, Shanghai, Harbin, Beijing, Guangzhou, Qingdao.

And they are a kind of immigrant Canada has not seen before, at least not in these numbers. They are here with money and confidence after surfing the wave of one of the world’s biggest economic booms, the result of people from Regina to Rome buying stuff stamped “Made in China.” The boom produced 3.6 million millionaires by 2014, up from 2.4 million in 2013.

…But they wonder why Canadians are ready to take their money for their houses – perhaps more money than they thought they would ever get – and then complain.

“A woman I know, her house cost $400,000 19 years ago and she sold the house for more than $2-million. She was happy, she has a studio now for her painting,” Sherry Qin said over coffee at UBC’s Old Barn Community Centre with three of her friends, including Ms. Yin. They like to gather here because one member of the group lives in a townhouse nearby.

And they do not understand why, if Canadians do not like the way things are, their governments will not change the rules – for investment, for preserving old houses, for citizenship, for paying taxes, for charges on vacant houses – instead of blaming newcomers.

And they were as divided as others over B.C.’s new tax for foreign buyers. Sherry Qin said B.C. should remain a free market. Anita He said it will send a message to all Chinese: “We don’t like you.” Alan Yu said it was a good idea. “I think it’s good to suppress the speculation in the real-estate market and it helps to fulfill the needs of affordable housing. I hope it could lower the housing price in Vancouver.”

But such government regulation is not new to them.

Chinese cities, which control who can be defined as a legal resident, are imposing their own restrictions. Shanghai has strict rules. In February, after house prices had jumped by 21 per cent in the previous years, it tightened the approvals for non-resident buyers even more.

Vancouver’s new arrivals also are puzzled why Canadians complain about wealthy people moving here when their government decided which kinds of immigrants it wanted.

“The government just chose rich people so they have lots of money,” said Mr. Liu, who immigrated to Canada in 2005 through the skilled-worker stream, not as an investor, even though he owned a chain of Best Buy-like stores in China. He is doing well, with a home he bought in Kerrisdale so the family could be close to Crofton House, where his daughter went to school.

(The proportion of immigrant-investors to Canada never exceeded more than 4.1 per cent of the total number of permanent residents. About 8,500 immigrant investors came from mainland China to B.C. between 2000 and 2015, along with 23,000 family members. In the same period, B.C. accepted 23,000 skilled workers and their 33,000 family members.)

Source: Meet the wealthy immigrants at the centre of Vancouver’s housing debate – The Globe and Mail

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Australia: Why multicultural policy looms as a Senate bargaining chip

2016/08/01 Leave a comment

Commentary on how the Australian Liberal party appears to be playing on the multiculturalism file, following the recent election of anti-multiculturalism hardliners Pauline Hanson and Eric Abetz:

[Liberal senator Zed[ Seselja [multiculturalism portfolio], in interviews with ABC Radio National and SBS, has revealed he supports multiculturalism – by which he means honouring ethnic community tradition while joining the Australian mainstream.

As he is a member of the government, and for as long as the government position is to leave Section 18C alone, he will stand by that position – though he may still push internally to change it.

Seselja said “it’s reasonable that people feel unease” about Islamic terrorism in response to TV personality Sonia Kruger calling for an end to Muslim migration. However, he did reiterate the government’s position that the immigration program does not discriminate on religious grounds.

But Seselja did not publicly voice his support for members of the Muslim community who may feel intimidated or victimised by calls for Muslim immigration to be banned – a call now echoed by right-wing Tasmanian senator Eric Abetz. Nor did he distance himself from Kruger’s endorsement of Bolt’s “understanding” of the drivers for potential vigilante attacks on the Muslim community and its institutions.

Seselja indicated that reworking “Labor’s multiculturalism policy” was on his to-do list. This is bizarre, as the current policy was taken almost unchanged by Labor from the considered policy of containment and minimisation developed during the Howard era.

Multiculturalism will clearly be one of the trading goods carried in the saddlebags of the government’s peacemakers in the Senate. How it will be shed, and for what deals, remains to be seen. That its components will be among the first sacrifices offered seems most likely, but the multicultural communities that defended Section 18C are alert to the dangers.

Source: Why multicultural policy looms as a Senate bargaining chip

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

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