Appropriate analysis and preparations, along with the note by Lorne Waldman of the need to see exactly what policies a Trump administration enacts (assume this kind of policy work is a focus across government these days):
The federal government is preparing for a potential surge in Mexican migrants coming to Canada after Donald Trump’s election victory, CBC News has learned.
Sources confirm high level meetings took place this week with officials at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and in other departments.
The news comes as Canada prepares to loosen rules for Mexicans to enter the country by lifting a visa requirement on Dec. 1. That restriction has been in place since 2009.
Talks on a plan to cope with a possible spike in asylum-seekers have been ongoing for some time, but were accelerated this week after Trump’s surprise win.
Trump campaigned on promises to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and to swiftly deport undocumented workers and illegal residents.
Lawyer predicts ‘significant impact’
Toronto-based immigration lawyer Lorne Waldman expects an increase in refugee claims from Mexicans once the visa requirement is lifted. He also predicts a “significant impact” from Trump’s election.
“The government was very concerned about the potential for a large number of new claims coming from Mexico, and that’s why they hesitated for so long before announcing that they were going to remove the visa,” he said.
“And that announcement was made before anyone knew that Donald Trump, with his very different immigration policies from those of the current administration, won the election.”
But Waldman cautioned it’s too early to tell exactly how the situation may unfold, saying it will depend on whether Trump follows through on his campaign pledges.
Good long read by Todd on some of the major policy and operational failures that have contributed to housing prices in Vancouver:
The main dereliction of duty by Immigration Canada has been its refusal, until it was too late, to properly assess the Business Immigrant Program (BIP).
Started in the mid-1980s, the BIP has arguably been the most crucial factor driving up Metro housing prices. UBC geographer David Ley estimates it has brought more than 400,000 well-off immigrants to Metro.
The first problem with the BIP, say Ley and others, is that it had extremely low standards.
It began by requiring an immigrant entrepreneur to invest only $150,000 in a business and hire one Canadian. The U.S., at the same time, was demanding business immigrants invest at least four times more money and hire at least 10 Americans.
One of the few high-level government officials to sound a warning about BIP applicants, whose first choice is to pour money into “safe” real estate, was David Mulroney, Canada’s former ambassador to China.
Asia-Pacific-trade boosters like Yuen Pau Woo, recently named a senator, have long said Canada should do everything it can to attract rich immigrants, calling them “the best and brightest.”
But Mulroney counters that liberally handing out passports “devalues the importance of Canadian citizenship.” And Justin Fung, with HALT (Housing Action for Local Taxpayers), concurs: “We’re practically giving away passports for free, and little benefit.”
In the meantime, Immigration Canada officials have not properly monitored the BIP. Their lax approach went on for decades as wealthy trans-nationals avoided being tested for compliance with even the BIP’s low standards.
A forensic auditor for the World Bank ended up called Canada’s BIP “a massive sham.”
The Conservatives finally killed it in 2014, which Fung called “years too late.”
Fung also worries a form of the BIP lives on in Quebec’s stand-alone immigrant-investor plan, which each year brings thousands more moneyed arrivals to Vancouver.
In addition, the federal Liberals are considering reviving a pilot program similar to the BIP.
Canada Revenue Agency
It gets worse.
While Canadian passports were being sold at bargain-basement prices, the Canada Revenue Agency has been ignoring another red flag — that many BIP newcomers and other owners of Metro mansions have been reporting strangely low incomes.
Even though the tax department had been warned, the politicians responsible did not want to face the reality that thousands of BIP investors and others were hiding most of their assets, which should have been taxed.
Officials have not wanted to admit to the widespread phenomenon of “astronaut” fathers who leave wives and student children in expensive homes in Metro to return to their homelands to do business — without declaring their offshore assets to Canadian tax officials.
An early attempt to bring in a national law requiring residents of Canada to disclose their foreign assets was opposed and not only by centre-right politicians, says Ley. B.C.’s centre-left NDP government of the 1990s also expressed concern such a law would be “culturally insensitive” and decrease B.C.’s attractiveness as a place for migrants to invest.
And even when a national foreign-assets disclosure tax law was finally brought into effect, it has often gone unenforced.
In the midst of Vancouver’s escalating housing crisis, in 2014, former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper chopped 262 experienced tax auditors.
One of the first people to publicly expose ongoing tax avoidance by the trans-national elite was former Richmond Mayor Greg Halsey-Brandt.
In 2015 Halsey-Brandt directed Postmedia to data showing residents of one of Richmond’s most expensive neighbourhoods, where most of the population is foreign-born, were reporting poverty-level incomes — and thus putting themselves in position to pay virtually no taxes.
Another revelation came in the fall of 2015 when statistician Jens von Bergmann and UBC geographer Dan Hiebert independently unveiled census statistics showing high portions of mansion owners in ritzy Vancouver neighbourhoods were declaring almost no income.
The figures from von Bergmann and Hiebert showed several neighbourhoods, in which houses were selling in the $5-million to $7-million range, that were generally populated by immigrants, particularly ethnic Chinese.
In 2016, South China Morning Post journalist Ian Young broke open the tax department’s failures. The Hong-Kong-based newspaper revealed Canada Revenue Agency officials had been aware for decades of such tax-avoidance schemes.
CRA officials had admitted, in internal documents, they were not willing to devote auditors to catching these “highly sophisticated” tax-avoiding schemes by Metro Vancouver mansion owners and others.
‘They were scared,” the source said, “of being labelled racist.’”
In addition, a common real-estate scam has gone largely undetected as a direct result of the failure of Canada’s tax and immigration departments to share their information.
Because of the absence of cooperation, many Metro house owners have been avoiding paying capital gains taxes. They have been falsely claiming they are residents of Canada for tax and immigration purposes when they are actually mostly living outside the country and not disclosing their foreign income.
Unfortunately, it turns out that Canada’s immigration and tax departments have not been the only ones turning a blind eye to such unfairness and cheating in Vancouver’s exploding housing market.
A good long read by James Bagnall regarding Shared Services Canada and the failure of officials and politicians to anticipate, understand and manage the risks involved. Sobering read:
But Shared Services and Phoenix have something in common — a botched introduction caused, it appears, by deep flaws in how government operates. In both cases, cabinet ministers and bureaucrats underestimated complexity and risk. In this, they were hardly unique — it was the scale of the misjudgment that set the federal IT agenda apart.
Standish Group, a Boston-based consulting firm, has been tracking the performance of IT projects since the mid-1990s — with surprisingly little variation in results. The consultants last year examined 50,000 projects worldwide, including government and private sector. About 30 per cent of these efforts succeeded — that is, they were on time, on budget and produced a payoff. Roughly half the projects ran into difficulty and nearly 20 per cent failed outright. The larger and more complex the project, the higher the rate of failure.
Carol Bellringer, the auditor general for the B.C. government, last month offered three key reasons why IT projects fail: Government departments, she said, lack in-house expertise; they attempt “overly ambitious” programs; they justify the latter through “incomplete” business cases.
All three elements were present at the launch of Shared Services. Most of the responsible bureaucrats were not trained in IT, yet were tasked with remaking on the country’s electronic infrastructure. Many also lacked experience in project management with a heavy IT component.
“I don’t know how many times I heard from deputy ministers that they didn’t understand information technology,” said a senior Shared Services official, “They didn’t like IT and they hoped never to see anything to do with IT for the rest of their career.”
Yet it is a group of deputy ministers — the ones in charge of the most IT-intensive departments — who determine the shape and scope of large IT projects. And when it came to launching Shared Services — the centrepiece of the government’s online renewal — the already high risks were exacerbated by a political agenda that stripped it of the capital necessary to get the job done.
It will likely end up costing taxpayers a fortune to set things right again.
Detail from one of the many legacy data centres in the National Capital Region.JULIE OLIVER / POSTMEDIA
It had seemed so simple in the beginning. The idea for Shared Services emerged from the Conservatives’ fifth budget, tabled March 4, 2010. The themes were clear: The economic recession was over; it was time to regain control of government spending.
One aspect of the strategy — little noticed at the time — was the launch of a “comprehensive review” of government spending on administration and overhead expenses. This should have offered easy pickings: Federal government employment was near high tide; and most departments and agencies had expanded rapidly.
Daniel Jean, the deputy secretary to the cabinet of the Privy Council Office, was picked to run the review, making it a big deal. The PCO is home to 950 bureaucrats who provide advice to cabinet and the Prime Minister’s Office, and oversee the development of the civil service.
Jean reported directly to Wayne Wouters (pronounced “Waters”) — the clerk of the privy council and the government’s top bureaucrat. Among the members of the review helping out Jean were Benoit Long, a senior manager seconded from the office of the government’s chief technology officer, and Liseanne Forand, then chief operating officer of Service Canada. The latter department offers Canadians online access to pensions and employment insurance.
The administrative services review was carried out in secret, typical PCO modus operandi. Its members roamed the bureaucracy, collecting information and searching for ways to consolidate or standardize how things were done. Some departments were already moving down this path.
…Information technology offered an even richer vein of potential savings. For half a century, computer networks and software applications had multiplied willy-nilly as individual departments and agencies looked after their own needs. The result was a patchwork of incompatible, higher-cost systems. Standardizing common, basic technologies such as email, data storage and telecommunications seemed logical.
It had been tried before. But attempts to centralize the buying of high-tech gear and services had failed, largely because federal departments were allowed to opt out. Most did so. They did want to give up control of their IT networks to a central agency.
The PCO determined this time would be different. The prime minister had the authority to create a new federal department through a simple cabinet approval known as an order-in-council. Most departments, including a reluctant Canada Revenue Agency and Department of National Defence, would be forced to carve out a significant portion of their IT groups and budgets — about 40 per cent on average — and hand them over to Shared Services.
Crucially, the move would not be subject to scrutiny by Parliament. And so Shared Services was born on Aug. 3, 2011.
Speed was demanded of the agency from the start. Minutes of meetings involving senior Shared Services staff are studded with references to “tight schedules” and the “urgency” of getting projects done.
Part of that had to do with the sheer age of the government’s infrastructure. The hardware was in danger of breaking down and the underlying software for many applications was so old that suppliers such as Microsoft, PeopleSoft and Adobe had stopped supporting it.
The faster Shared Services could install new networks, the less money it would be forced to throw at solving the problems caused by older technology.
But that wasn’t the only reason Shared Services was pressed for time. Senior Shared Services officials said the Conservatives were eager to see cost savings, and impressed upon them the importance of securing an early win.
The PCO framed the upgrade in simple terms: Consolidate, modernize and reap the savings. And Shared Services would have nearly a decade to get it done. By 2020, the thinking went, the government of Canada would be able to offer its citizens secure, online services that would be the envy of the world; and Shared Services would be a magnet for attracting the best and the brightest employees in government.
But cabinet — and to some extent the PCO — failed to account for the complexity. They were proposing to create a new organization using bits and pieces from other departments and loading it up with a series of mandates on a tight schedule. The entire production was fraught with risk.
“They had articulated the problem and come up with an organizational response (in the form of Shared Services),” an independent adviser to the PCO said in an interview, “but they completely underestimated the scale.”
Expected but still sad. During my cancer treatments and recovery, his words and music provided one of the anchors that keep me going, particularly these words from Anthem:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
Later, as I adapted to my “new normal,” Come Healing became another anchor:
O let the heavens hear it
The penitential hymn
Come healing of the spirit
Come healing of the limb
Multicultural Meanderings 