ICYMI: Medical inadmissibility rules make Canada a laggard

2018/05/04 Leave a comment

Useful comparison with the policies of other countries (most of which have overall more restrictive immigration), buried in the advocacy:

Last year, between 900 and 1,000 individuals and their families were deemed medically inadmissible to Canada because of the “excessive demand” provision in section 38(1)(c) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. These are people who have been working hard for years in Canada, who are paying their taxes in Canada, who have a network of support or an extended family in Canada. And when they apply for permanent residency, they are told, after years of navigating a cumbersome administrative process, that, for instance, their child with a disability “might reasonably be expected to cause excessive demand on health or social services.”

In December 2017, the parliamentary Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration (known as CIMM) recommended the repeal of the excessive demand provision. The Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, Ahmed Hussen, had acknowledged before the committee a few weeks earlier that this provision, after being enforced for several decades, is not compatible with our Canadian values. He left open all policy options, ranging from incremental changes to a full repeal, and promised to act within months. But the minor revisions he announced on April 16 to “[bring] medical inadmissibility policy in line with inclusivity for persons with disabilities” fall short.

The provision has affected people such as Karen Talosig, who came to Canada in 2007. In 2010 she applied for permanent residency for herself and her deaf daughter, Jazmine, who had stayed in the Philippines. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada informed Talosig in 2014 that her daughter was medically inadmissible to Canada because of the possibility of “excessive demand.” Letters of support from a school board and a school for the deaf emphasized that Jazmine would not require any additional education costs. One of Talosig’s four employers lamented that “the mother has to either give up her rights to the child or leave Canada. Neither of which is a good option.” The administrative decision was reversed, on humanitarian and compassionate grounds, and Karen and Jazmine were eventually reunited in Canada.

The medical inadmissibility provision is 40 years old, though similar provisions have been in place in Canada for at least 150 years. When administrators conclude that applicants’ medical conditions or disabilities could cause excessive demand on services, the ruling can create a range of challenges for families and individuals, from lengthy and complex paperwork all the way to deportation. The Warkentin family, with a daughter with special needs, faced a deportation order, but they were eventually allowed to renew their permanent residency; the Montoya family, whose son has Down syndrome, had to leave Canada before the administrative decision was overturned.

As one witness before the committee said, if Terry Fox and Rick Hansen were applying for permanent residency in Canada, both of them would be denied under the excessive demand provision.

Others affected by the application of section 38(1)(c) have been persons under HIV treatment, and persons living and working in Canada who have suffered an accident that physically or mentally impaired them. Chris Mason, a permanent resident who became paraplegic while working, was deported. As one witness before the CIMM said, if Terry Fox and Rick Hansen were applying for permanent residency in Canada, both of them would be denied under the excessive demand provision. What would Canada look like without them?

The flawed logic behind this provision is that excessive demand would put pressure on “existing waiting lists and would increase the rate of mortality and morbidity in Canada.” The data available are only approximate and utterly unconvincing: these people may cost the system between 0.01 and 0.1 percent of Canada’s total annual health care and social costs. Moreover, while section 38(1)(c) applies only to the economic immigration category, the two other categories (family and refugee) have not been subjected to it for years, and Canada’s health care and social systems have not been bankrupted by families and refugees.

There are financial and psychological costs for these families, and Canadian taxpayers end up paying a substantial bill for the government to defend the provision in court.

Those who can afford an immigration consultant or a lawyer may challenge these administrative decisions in court. To convince judges that they will not cause excessive demand in Canada, these families generally either argue that the federal government did not apply the assessment rules correctly to individual cases (Hilewitz v. Canada) or propose mitigation plans to demonstrate that they can afford out-of-pocket health care and social costs (Hassan Chaudry v. Canada). There are financial and psychological costs for these families, and Canadian taxpayers end up paying a substantial bill for the government to defend the provision in court. Families who cannot afford to go to court are able neither to challenge the assessments nor to propose mitigation plans. Scott Macdonald, a Toronto immigration consultant, recently argued that the excessive demand provision is “anti-poor.”

Taking a broader view, numerous scholars, lawyers and advocates argue that section 38(1)(c) is not compatible with several international treaties that are binding on Canada, such as key United Nations human rights conventions, including the Convention on the Rights of the Childand the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Maurice Tomlinson, senior policy analyst at the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, told the CIMM, “Article 18 of the [CRPD] specifically calls on states parties to ‘recognize the rights of persons with disabilities to liberty and movement, to freedom to choose their residence, and to a nationality.’ The excessive demand regime clearly violates this convention.” Tomlinson also noted, “What is ironic is that we ratified the [CPRD] at the start of the Vancouver Paralympic Games, when we welcomed the world of disabled individuals to Canada. You could play here; you just couldn’t stay here. That’s the message that was sent.”

Our country, renowned for its international role and eager to get a seat at the UN Security Council in 2021-22, has been breaching these treaties for decades. If Canada is serious about this bid, the excessive demand provision should be removed, because voting nations inspect meticulously the candidates’ public track record in international law.

Moreover, on this score, Canada is lagging behind many developed countries that do not have an excessive demand provision and whose health and social services are functioning effectively: for instance, Ireland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland. The United Kingdom, which had the provision before us, got rid of its own a few years ago.

Minister Hussen’s decision to make only minor adjustments to the provision, while the federal government keeps working with provinces and territories toward a full repeal, is a missed opportunity. Instead of maintaining a disgraceful ableist approach to our immigration policy, we should embrace a respectful, engaging and inclusive model, as disability rights organizations have suggested for years.

Canadians will look back one day and wonder why nothing was done in 2018 to put an end to an unfair, costly and ineffective policy. All provinces and territories except Saskatchewansupport the repeal of the excessive demand provision. The CIMM heard an overwhelming call for repeal from representative organizations and individuals.

In 2018, this government had the opportunity to end nearly 150 years of discrimination against people with disabilities in Canadian immigration legislation and policies. Canada needs more people like Terry Fox and Rick Hansen, but when will we welcome them?

via Medical inadmissibility rules make Canada a laggard

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Given all its other apologies, when will Ottawa finally apologize to the Jews? Farber

2018/05/04 Leave a comment

Bernie Farber on the need for an apology (one apology understandably leads to another ….). The Conservative government-funded projects under the Community Historical Recognition program to commemorate the MS St. Louis (along with funding to other communities affected by wartime internment or immigration restrictions); the Liberal government has focused more on apologies (e.g., to Indo-Canadians for turning back the Komagatu Maru):

Ethical nations must confront their history with moral rectitude. It is time for Canada to offer an official apology to Jewish Holocaust survivors, their families and the families of those who were murdered. Because our hands are not clean.

May 13th will mark 79 years since the ill-fated MS St. Louis set sail from Hamburg, Germany, on a journey to Havana, Cuba. Aboard the ship were 937 passengers, mostly desperate Jewish refugees fleeing Germany, a country consumed by vicious anti-Semitism, controlled by a raving, genocidal dictator who vowed to rid the world of its “Jewish problem.” Each passenger possessed a valid travel visa to enter Cuba. They had every reason to believe they’d escaped.

As the St. Louis made its way across the Atlantic Ocean, unbeknownst to the passengers, the Cuban government, facing a huge anti-Semitic backlash and beset by a corruption scandal relating to visas, cancelled the entry permits for the refugees. When they finally arrived, after a week at anchor offshore, the vast majority of the passengers were told they would not be permitted to disembark.

Their choices were limited. The MS St. Louis was barely a 90-minute sail from the shores of Miami. Surely, thought the ship’s German captain — Gustav Schroeder, a decent man who understood the plight of his distraught travellers — the United States, a country which held the hope of sanctuary for so many, would extend a hand of freedom and safety to his passengers.

A photo of Jews aboard the MS St. Louis.

Instead, the American government rejected any request for asylum. To ensure that this message would not be misunderstood, a Coast Guard vessel was ordered to very visibly follow the ocean liner.

Like today, the media became the moral watchdog of a willfully blind nation. The New York Times wrote in a heartfelt editorial, “We can only hope that some hearts will soften somewhere and some refuge be found. The cruise of the St. Louis cries to heaven of man’s inhumanity to men.”

Prominent Canadians began calling for the refugees be admitted here. But the prime minister, William Lyon McKenzie King, accepted the position of his director of immigration: “No country could open its doors wide enough to take in the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people who want to leave Europe: the line must be drawn somewhere.” The St. Louis, although only two days from Halifax on its way back across the Atlantic, sailed on, forced by necessity to return to Europe. Some passengers allowed into the United Kingdom found safety. The others landed in Holland, Belgium and France,. Those countries were later overrun by the Nazis. They rounded up the Jews and send them to concentration camps. More than 250 of those passengers that Canada, and others, refused to help, were murdered.

Professors Irving Abella and Harold Troper have studied this grim part of our history, and noted our anti-Semitic immigration policies during the Holocaust in their seminal study None is too Many. “It was a Canada,” as Abella wrote elsewhere, “with immigration policies that were racist and exclusionary, a country blanketed by an oppressive anti-Semitism in which Jews were the pariahs of Canadian society, demeaned, despised and discriminated against.”

Today we have a different Canada, one that values diversity and pluralism. Canada today is offering official apologies for policies that were bigoted, racist and homophobic. It has been a steep learning curve for Canadians. Yet with historic apologies to Indigenous peoples for a cultural genocide committed against them through the residential school system, and with  similar national apologies to the Sikh, Japanese and LGBTQ communities for historical wrongs, Canada has become a leader in teaching the world of the power of a simple phrase: “We’re sorry.”

A recent poll by The Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, a respected Jewish organization, shows that fully “one-fifth of millennials either haven’t heard of or are not sure if they have heard of the Holocaust.” And recently released hate crimes statistics collected by Canadian police have once again placed the Jewish community on top of the haters lists. An official national public apology for Canada’s actions against Jewish refugees during the Holocaust would be a powerful lesson for all, especially the young Canadians who are most at risk of forgetting the painful historical lessons we were supposed to have learned. Owning up to the errors of our past will help ensure that such evil, discriminatory policies never again see the light of day.

Source: Given all its other apologies, when will Ottawa finally apologize to the Jews?

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Canada in ‘exploratory’ talks with U.S. over border agreement on asylum seekers

2018/05/03 Leave a comment

Appropriate and needed given that any workable solution requires working with the US:

Canada is in high-level exploratory talks with the United States over a border agreement to manage asylum seekers, but will not say whether Ottawa wants the power to automatically turn away thousands of refugee claimants who walk across the border.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security confirmed it is reviewing a Canadian proposal to amend the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), which requires Canada and the United States to refuse entry to asylum seekers who arrive at official ports of entry along the shared border, as both countries are considered safe for refugees. However, senior Canadian cabinet ministers insisted they have not entered into formal negotiations with the United States.

“It’s a discussion that we’re having with the Americans about the various techniques that could be pursued on both sides of the border to ensure security and integrity,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said on Tuesday. “If and when that conversation matures into a specific negotiation, we’ll have further things to say about it. But this is very exploratory at the moment – scoping issues and potential solutions.”

Concerns over the agreement, which was signed in 2004, surfaced last year when thousands of asylum seekers fled the United States for Canada on foot, fearing deportation under President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. Since the agreement applies only to those who arrive at official ports of entry, asylum seekers can avoid being immediately turned away by crossing between border posts, forcing Canada to process most of their claims.

Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen did not confirm a Reuters report on Tuesday that the government wants the agreement to apply to the entire Canada-U.S. border. Mr. Hussen said Ottawa is in regular contact with the United States about the agreement, but declined to get into details.

“As you can appreciate, we constantly talk about all aspects of the border, including the Safe Third Country Agreement,” Mr. Hussen said. “Those are discussions that are ongoing, so I can’t take a snapshot in time and give you what was discussed on a particular day.”

The RCMP intercepted more than 20,000 asylum claimants in 2017, 91 per cent of whom crossed in Quebec. Many entered at Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle after taking taxis along upstate New York’s Roxham Road.

The Mounties intercepted more than 5,000 asylum claimants in the first three months of 2018 – again, mostly in Quebec.

The Conservatives have urged the government to close the loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement that allows asylum seekers to enter Canada at unofficial border crossings. Last week, the Tories tabled a motion in the House of Commons calling on the Liberals to table a plan by May 11.

“Last week, Justin Trudeau voted against taking immediate action and tabling a plan to manage our borders and immigration system,” Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel said in a statement on Tuesday. “Conservatives will continue to hold the Prime Minister accountable, and call for the entire Canada-U.S. border to be designated as an official port of entry.”

Mr. Goodale said the Conservative proposal is “impractical,” as it would “change the entire concept about what the border means” and “increase insecurity at the border.”

As the Liberals iron out their approach to STCA talks with the United States, they are touting their efforts to prevent more asylum seekers from crossing into Canada. For instance, Mr. Hussen said many of those crossing into Quebec earlier this year were Nigerians carrying valid U.S. visitor visas. Canadian officials raised the issue with their U.S. counterparts, and the number of U.S. visas issued to Nigerians dropped.

via Canada in ‘exploratory’ talks with U.S. over border agreement on asylum seekers – The Globe and Mail

The contrary view, to this being a crisis, can be seen in Senator Omidvar’s op-ed in The Star:

Let’s be honest. The common thread of today’s populism is anti-immigration. This populism legitimizes xenophobia and encourage the separation of people into “us” and “them”. It creates a politics that sees the other not simply as different, but as different and therefor dangerous. Adversaries become enemies.

Populism prevents an energetic engagement with diversity. It erects barriers — whether literally or figuratively — that stand at odds with the reality of an increasingly interconnected — and interdependent — world.

Populism can undermine the basic underpinnings of a democracy. If we have learned anything from south of the border it is how norms that were once considered absolute can quickly become obsolete. How things that were once unimaginable can soon become unexceptional.

So how do we respond? First, words matter. We need to watch how we talk about legitimate issues around asylum seekers and our borders. We can’t whip up fear and division.

Second, we can’t use this as political football. No party should use immigration as a wedge issue. We deserve better than that.

Finally, we need to recognize the fact that when it comes to immigration, we’ve done a lot right. We’ve devised smart policies with high levels of skilled immigrants and we help people that are fleeing some of the most wretched situations around the globe. We do a very good job of integrating them. And while we’re far from perfect, we bring a lot to the table.

However, an area that needs attention is the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB). Although the recent budget increased funding for the IRB more is needed. Money is needed to process asylum claims efficiently as well as deal with a growing backlog. Continuing to build this “good governance” structure will go a long way to maintaining public trust in the system.

Canada still has work to do, but we have a strong foundation on which to build.

via Asylum seekers are not causing a crisis for Canada | The Star

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The foundational misogyny of incels overlaps with racism | Paradkar

2018/05/03 Leave a comment

Hard to understand and comprehend the extent and nature of such hatred:

The more things change, the more they stay the same, sometimes dangerously so.

In all the discussions around Incels or involuntary celibates — a term violently wrested out of an obscure internet subculture and thrown into mainstream lexicon after last week’s van rampage in Toronto — a less talked about aspect is the overlap of its foundational misogyny with racism.

There’s a reason for that. It’s complicated.

“When you have these communities that don’t have coherent ideologies on a lot of things, they’re united in their misogyny, not necessarily united on the racial stuff,” says Arshy Mann, a reporter for Xtra, a Toronto-based LGBTQ magazine, who has been surfing the larger “manosphere” subculture for a decade and researching Incels for the past six months.

Taking a virtual gander through some of these Incels threads is like entering the byzantine paths of a twisted mind. Whatever adjectives cross your mind, “healthy” is unlikely to be one of them.

Mann has come across East Asian men upset that white men have an easier time sleeping with East Asian women. He has come across brown men who fetishize whiteness.

Often, the racism is specifically anti-Black, he says.

“All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger,” says the now-deleted Facebook post on the wall of Alek Minassian, the man charged with murders after the Toronto van rampage.

Rodger, the half-Asian 22-year-old Santa Barbara, Calif., killer of six people (and then himself) in 2014, hailed as some sort of patron saint for the Incels, was so fixated on whiteness he bleached his hair and fantasized about tall, blonde girls. He saw their rejection as a rejection of his non-white parts. So he reserved in his so-called manifesto particular venom for boys of colour who got attention from white girls.

“How could an inferior, ugly Black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves. I deserve it more …”

Rodger’s rage wasn’t reserved just for Black people, though.

“How could an inferior Mexican guy be able to date a white blonde girl, while I was still suffering as a lonely virgin?”

“How could an ugly Asian attract the attention of a white girl, while a beautiful Eurasian like myself never had any attention from them?”

While experts caution against assuming that it was Minassian who authored his Facebook post, its content offers a window into this miserable world.

“The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys!” it says.

Chads are the attractive white men who get all the attention from Stacys, usually white women. But if Chad is the hated white guy in this warped world then “Tyrone” is the Black Chad, even more to be reviled.

Yet, there is a large non-white, or “ethnicels” participation on these forums.

“A significant number of these people who self describe as Incels identify as non-white,” says Mann. “I see a lot of South Asian and east Asian men and boys — or people of south Asian and east Asian origins.”

The currycels and ricecels.

And, of course, there are nazicels.

“There’s a real overlap with other parts of the alt-right,” says Mann. “The “manosphere” more broadly is an entry point into more racist, anti-Semitic and white nationalist ways of thinking.

“Because these are parallel subcultures there is a lot of movement from one to the other.”

On one incels.me thread, there is a discussion on “should Incels and alt-right form an unholy alliance?”

Not everyone is on board automatically. “They get some pushback,” says Mann. At the same time, he says, it’s a topic placed “within the window of legitimate discussion.”

On that same thread, a poster asks: should anti-miscegenation laws be enforced globally or should prostitution be made legal around the world?

It’s difficult to take seriously what appears to be juvenile jockeying around, a venting if you like, a play for who is worse off, who is uglier, who has it tougher — until there’s an actual body count.

“Of course, not all of them are violent,” says Mann. But the groups create a permission structure to engage in violence, he says. “They’re explicitly saying this is a good thing to do … It’s a way to prove their masculinity to engage in public violence.”

In one discussion on Minassian, a poster calling himself “blackcel” says, “While I do not condone killing or rape, I would be a lot more proud of a methodical Incel serial killer who carefully picked his victims and possibly raped them before death.”

via The foundational misogyny of incels overlaps with racism | The Star

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Eating while black in a Chinese restaurant: a grim lesson in racist division: Balkissoon

2018/05/03 1 Comment

Denise Balkissoon on the implicit heirarchies of racism and prejudice:

It took four years for Emile Wickham to get official confirmation of what he already knew: that the treatment he received on his birthday was racist.

Mr. Wickham is black, as are the friends he went to dinner with one night in May, 2014, at the Chinese restaurant Hong Shing in Toronto, just north of City Hall. There, they were asked to pay their bill in advance – a request that Mr. Wickham suspected hadn’t been made of the non-black patrons around them.

After confirming this, he confronted the server, who refunded the group’s money. They walked out, no longer hungry or in the mood for celebration. The incident so bothered Mr. Wickham that he was still thinking of it a year later, when he filed a complaint with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.

This week, the proprietors of Hong Shing were ordered to pay a fine of $10,000 for violating section 1 of the province’s human-rights code, which guarantees equal treatment when accessing goods, services and facilities. The tribunal’s adjudicator said that Mr. Wickham was treated as “a potential thief in waiting.”

There are many unpleasant truths confirmed by this story, including that black people in Toronto face consistent prejudice when going about their daily lives. Another grim reality it proves is often hard to talk about: the persistent racism between groups of non-white people, especially that directed at black Canadians, and how it works to maintain white supremacy.

On Monday, a Globe and Mail tweet about Mr. Wickham’s story attracted hundreds of comments, many of them racist. The vitriol was pointed at the group of black friends, but also against the restaurant: Toxic tropes about Chinese people’s relationship to money, or the quality of their food, were common.

The owners and staff at Hong Shing have likely experienced anti-Asian racism personally, perhaps many times. This doesn’t excuse them in any way from participating in anti-black racism – in fact, it might be the cause of it.

For centuries, pseudo-scientists have attempted to categorize human beings by race in a ploy to justify unjustifiable behaviour. Participants in this embarrassing game include philosophy celebrity Immanuel Kant and storied botanist Carl Linnaeus.

On the very worthwhile podcast Seeing White, American scholar Ibram Kendi dates the earliest attempts at racial categorization to the 1400s. That’s when broad, global slavery practices – in which many cultures enslaved basically whoever they could get their hands on, including their own people – evolved into overwhelmingly European enslavement of predominantly African people.

Where previously the justifications for erasing other humans’ basic rights were equally varied, those excuses began to narrow. Racial classifications denigrating dark skin tones and African origins became the dominant narrative.

That doesn’t mean that those who were neither black nor white were given equal status to white Europeans. Instead, a divide-and-conquer hierarchy emerged, in which a chance at a marginally less subjugated life was offered to those who participated in black oppression.

This hierarchy existed in many forms, in many places; apartheid South Africa’s “racial classification” was less harsh on those who were “coloured” than “native.” Convincing those of mixed race or Asian ancestry to help police black people made the system stronger and took some of the work out of white hands.

Today, this often plays out as the “model minority” trope, in which particularly skilled or educated East and South Asian immigrants are granted visas and citizenship to Western countries, including Canada. Their successes (which, yes Uncle, still require hard work) are used against other racialized people who live in entrenched poverty, including the Indigenous.

This, too, is a weapon that non-black, non-white Canadians often carry of their own volition – the fear that it could be turned against them adds incentive to use it.

Records show that the current owner of Hong Shing is 25-year-old Colin Li, who took it over from his parents. He hasn’t spoken with any media since the tribunal’s ruling, nor offered Mr. Wickham a private apology − in fact, he’s stated that he plans to appeal.

That’s a shame. There are many bridges to be built over the gulfs created by this ancient tactic of division, and Mr. Li could help, if he has the courage.

via Eating while black in a Chinese restaurant: a grim lesson in racist division – The Globe and Mail

Arti Patel’s take: 3 reasons why anti-blackness still exists in multicultural cities like Toronto

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Cohen: Why we ought to worry about democracy’s retreat globally | Ottawa Citizen

2018/05/03 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Andrew Cohen, including Rosalie Abella’s fears for the independence of Israel’s judiciary:

Justice Rosalie Abella of the Supreme Court of Canada lives on public platforms. She lectures often, at home and abroad, and collects laurels celebrating her shimmering career (including 38 honorary degrees) like loose change.

As a decorated jurist of 42 years, she contemplates law and society as a quotidian challenge. So there she was two weeks ago, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on the 70th anniversary of the founding of Israel, addressing the country’s democracy.

It was an extraordinary speech – a cri de coeur, really – brimming with erudition and urgency. It was also brave. Abella laments the assault on the independence of Israel’s judiciary, whose stature she has long admired.

“As a Jew, it has made me particularly sad to see the judiciary’s noble mission and legacy under rhetorical siege here,” she said. “To me when an independent judiciary is under siege, democracy is under siege, and when democracy is under siege, a country’s soul is being held hostage.”

She is alarmed by the effort to “delegitimize the judiciary … in the name of patriotism.” She finds this “perverse.” After all, she asks, doesn’t patriotism mean reflecting national values, which, in Israel, means being Jewish and democratic?

For defending those values, she sees a judiciary “demonized by some for being independent from political expedience and immune to political will.” Judges are not there to comply with the will of politicians, she warns; those who think patriotism means doing only what politicians want “are the biggest threat to Israel’s values, because they misconceive democracy as majoritarian rule.”

Abella doesn’t name the right-wing politicians targeting the judiciary. What makes her warning timely – like a siren in the night – is that she is addressing the erosion of democracy, in fundamental and disturbing ways, across the world. As Foreign Affairs magazine asks in its current issue: “Can Democracy Survive?”

It’s not hyperbole. Democracy is under its greatest strain since the 1930s. Assaults on the press, free and fair elections, minority rights and civil liberties are common. Look around: the rise of authoritarianism is everywhere.

Having liberalized after the fall of Communism, Russia is an authoritarian state under Vladimir Putin, who fixes elections, jails opponents and kills journalists. In China, which showed signs of liberalization leading up to Tiananmen Square in 1989, the leadership may serve for life.

Poland, Turkey and Hungary have lurched into authoritarianism. That Stephen Harper could tweet congratulations to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on his election was so brazen it was thought a joke; alas, it was not.

The man who once refused to shake Putin’s hand – “You need to get out of Ukraine,” Harper told him – now embraces Orban, who is silencing critics and attacking institutions in Hungary.

Freedom House tracks the state of democracy around the world. In 2017, it found that democracy declined in 71 countries and advanced in just 35. “Democracy in crisis,” it declares.

In old democracies such as France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, right-wing populists are gaining traction, appealing to anti-immigrant sentiments and shunning civil liberties or the rule of law. Surveys show that while support for democracy remains strong among those over 65, those under 35 care less about it. This is particularly disturbing.

Rwanda, Venezuela, Mexico, Kenya and Honduras are among the countries where democracy has eroded. The same in Nepal, Eritrea, South Sudan, Libya, Egypt and Yemen. In Myanmar, led by a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, ethnic cleansing is horrifying.

In the United States, the president declares the media “the enemy of the people,” and attacks the judiciary and law-enforcement agencies. He refers to “my justice department” and its failure to “protect” him.

In Canada, the threat to democracy comes through bots and fake news filling social media, which will play out dangerously in the next federal election.

For Abella, in Jerusalem, the attack on the judiciary in Israel reflects something larger: an attack on our humanity: “Without democracy there are no rights, without rights there is no tolerance, without tolerance there is no justice, and without justice, there is no hope.”

via Cohen: Why we ought to worry about democracy’s retreat globally | Ottawa Citizen

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Holocaust row: Abbas accused of anti-Semitism – BBC News

2018/05/03 Leave a comment

Not helpful:

Remarks by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas about the Holocaust have been condemned as anti-Semitic by Israeli politicians and rights activists.

Mr Abbas told a meeting in the West Bank the Nazi mass murder of European Jews was the result of their financial activities, not anti-Semitism.

He described their “social function” as “usury and banking and such”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman said the remarks were “anti-Semitic and pathetic”.

Michael Oren, Israel’s deputy minister for diplomacy, remarked in a tweet: “Mahmoud Abbas says money-lending Jews provoked Holocaust… Now there’s a peace partner.”

In New York, the Anti-Defamation League condemned Mr Abbas’s “anti-Semitic assertions”.

In its attempt to annihilate the Jews of Europe during World War Two, Nazi Germany murdered some six million of them, building death camps to expedite the mass slaughter.

Driven by fanatical nationalism, the Nazis regarded Jews as a threat to Germany’s “racial purity”.

What did Abbas say exactly?
He was addressing a rare meeting of the Palestinian National Council, the legislative body of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), in the West Bank town of Ramallah on Monday.

It was a rare meeting of the PLO’s legislative body

Carried live on Palestinian TV, the 90-minute speech in Arabic included a section on the Palestinian leader’s view of the history of European Jewry, based on what he said were books by “Jewish Zionist authors”.

Jews in eastern and western Europe, he said, had been periodically subjected to massacres over the centuries, culminating in the Holocaust.

“But why did this used to happen?” he asked. “They say, ‘It is because we are Jews.’ I will bring you three Jews, with three books who say that enmity towards Jews was not because of their religious identity but because of their social function.

“This is a different issue. So the Jewish question that was widespread throughout Europe was not against their religion but against their social function which relates to usury [unscrupulous money-lending] and banking and such.”

Mr Abbas also denied that Ashkenazi Jews – Jews from Germany and north-eastern Europe – were actually Semitic, saying, “They have no relation to Semitic people.” Ashkenazi Jews make up one of Israel’s biggest communities, giving the state a long line of prime ministers, including Mr Netanyahu.

It is not the first time the Palestinian leader’s views on the Holocaust have caused offence.

A student dissertation he wrote in the early 1980s argued there had been a “secret relationship between Nazism and Zionism” before the war, and appeared to question the death toll of six million.

He later played down allegations of Holocaust denial, saying in 2003: “The Holocaust was a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind.”

How did the Anti-Defamation League respond?

Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive officer of the ADL, which campaigns to “stop the defamation of the Jewish people”, dismissed the Palestinian leader’s “ahistorical and pseudo-academic assertions”.

“The Palestinian President’s latest diatribe reflects once again the depth and persistency of the anti-Semitic attitudes he harbors,” he said in a statement.

“With public speeches like these, it is not surprising that under Abbas’ leadership, the Palestinian Authority has failed to renounce and combat Palestinian anti-Semitic incitement, including narratives that Jews are to blame for the Holocaust and other anti-Semitic persecution, and which deny or diminish the millennial Jewish presence in and connection to the Land of Israel.”

via Holocaust row: Abbas accused of anti-Semitism – BBC News

My friend and Mid-East expert Arun recently posted on the Arte film, Israel-Palestine: one land, twice promised, link here, noting the balance and comprehensiveness of this two hour doc.

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Trudeau government proposes major changes to elections law: Expatriate voting rights

2018/05/02 Leave a comment

Very limited media attention to this proposed change in Bill C-76 (identical to Bill C-33) compared to other aspects.

And interesting that the government has chosen to press ahead with this when the current five-year limit is before the Supreme Court (see my earlier post Expatriate Voting: National and Municipal):

And the Liberals also would repeal statutes that make Canadian citizens ineligible to vote if they reside outside the country for five consecutive years.

Brison said that change would “restore voting rights to more than one million Canadian citizens living abroad.”

The wording in the backgrounder:

For Canadians living abroad, this includes:

  • Removing the requirement that non-resident electors must have been residing outside Canada for fewer than five consecutive years; and,

  • Removing the requirement that non-resident electors intend to return to Canada to resume residence in the future.

via Trudeau government proposes major changes to elections law | CBC News

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Haidt’s Theory Vindicated at MIT

2018/05/02 Leave a comment

Further to yesterday’s post (Heterodoxy Academy: Encouraging diversity of thought), this example of interest.

One could likely just as easily find an example of “free market U” driven by ideologies of the right, with comparable blind spots and biases:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology deserves some sort of research prize for confirming NYU professor Jonathan Haidt’s theory that the social sciences suffer from a deficit of viewpoint diversity.

Last Monday, several social scientists from prestigious universities gathered in a state-of-the-art theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts for MIT’s conference on Israel’s 70th anniversary. While enjoying trays of free cookies and drinks, the mostly upper middle-class audience got to hear speaker after speaker complain about the Jewish state.

Of the six academic speakers who were invited to participate, not one depicted the creation of Israel as anything other than a moral calamity. Only MIT professor Stephen Van Evera dared to criticize Yasser Arafat for turning down a generous deal put together by Bill Clinton in 2000. All the rest of the panelists seemed to agree with University of Massachusetts professor Leila Farsakh’s assertion that peace negotiations failed—and continue to fail—because of “Israeli intransigence.”

The near uniformity of opinion was a powerful instantiation of Haidt’s theory that the “American Academy has–arguably–become a politically orthodox and quasi-religious institution,” where “people compete for status as victims or as defenders of victims.”

Participants in the conference also lent credence to Haidt’s other big idea: that two incompatible “sacred” values are currently colliding on university campuses. One sacred value goes back to John Stuart Mill’s famous maxim, “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that”; the other sacred value is rooted in Karl Marx’s injunction that intellectuals shouldn’t just interpret the world but seek to change it.

These two pedagogical visions, Haidt believes, are at loggerheads on college campuses because they aim at different goals. “Marx is the patron saint of what I’ll call ‘Social Justice U,’ which is oriented around changing the world in part by overthrowing power structures and privilege,” Haidt argues. “It sees political diversity as an obstacle to action. Mill is the patron saint of what I’ll call ‘Truth U,’ which sees truth as a process in which flawed individuals challenge each other’s biased and incomplete reasoning. In the process, all become smarter. Truth U dies when it becomes intellectually uniform or politically orthodox.”

Viewpoint diversity is, nevertheless, widely valued in broader American society. So much so that even dogmatic political activists must pretend to embrace it. Before MIT’s Israel conference, for example, the organizers felt the need to market the event as if it would offer a Millsian “array of narratives” by bringing together “Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans to discuss and debate the history, the politics, and the current critical moment.”

But it was false advertising. The conference was squarely in the “Social Justice U” camp. Tellingly, one of the conference organizers, Israeli philosopher Anat Biletzki, argued fervently for the elimination of the world’s only Jewish-majority country. That might explain why her selection of voices on the panel seemed deliberately intended to convey the notion that Israel’s existence was a historical blunder and that the Arabs were wholly innocent victims of it. None of the social scientists raised any uncomfortable truths that might challenge that storyline—truths such as Palestinian Arab collaboration with the Nazis; Islamist aspects of the 1948 war to destroy Israel; historic persecution of Jews in Muslim-majority lands, culminating in the almost total ethnic cleansing of indigenous Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa.

Echoes of Marx’s injunction to change the world could also be heard at the conference. Activist-historian Irene Gendzier, a BDS supporter, seemed to channel the spirit of Marx when she claimed that history only matters if “in some way it paves the way for changing not only the perception of the present but the future.” Her own historical publications, presumably, therefore have an a prioripolitical agenda. If not, her thinking suggests, why study the past?

She also said: “although we are consigned to talking about the past, it seems to me that we here [at the MIT conference] are really talking in disguise about what we would like to see for a different future.” Judging by the overall message of this conference, that future involves the Jewish state’s paying in some way for the crime of its existence.

Source: Haidt’s Theory Vindicated at MIT

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UK Immigration Scandal Offers Tories a Shot at Redemption – Bloomberg

2018/05/02 Leave a comment

Good overview with some polling data regarding UK attitudes towards immigration:

The resignation of U.K. Home Secretary Amber Rudd on Sunday is bad news for the Conservative government on several fronts. A close ally of British Prime Minister Theresa May who had her boss’s back on a number of occasions, Rudd was seen as a rising star in the Conservative Party, a potential prime minister herself and the most articulate opponent of Brexitin the cabinet.

The real problem her resignation raises, though, isn’t the damage to May’s already weakened government or the shifting cabinet balance toward more euroskeptic members. It is yet more confirmation that the Conservative Party’s immigration policy is a mess. It embraces a “target culture” that not only hurts Britain’s economic interests but damages its global reputation.

For most of the last decade Conservative immigration policy has been populist and ineffective. Officially and unofficially, the name of the game was keepy-outy. Rudd’s attempts to uphold the policies of her predecessors descended into the grotesque.

The first sign of serious trouble concerned a generation of immigrants who were invited between 1948 and 1971 to help rebuild Britain after World War II during a time of labor shortage. Members of the so-called Windrush generation (named for one ship on which many arrived) came from Caribbean countries and were told they could stay indefinitely. But the Home Office didn’t keep records of those granted a right to stay — by some estimates, about 500,000 people. And in 2010 the Windrush landing cards, proving arrival for many, were destroyed as part of a cull of old paperwork.

This shoddy management became a more serious problem when landmark changes to immigration law — overseen by May herself when she was home secretary — made the lives of the Windrush generation untenable.

Immigrants, even those who had been there decades, faced new requirements for detailed documentation in order to access employment or benefits and health care. May’s “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants was meant to encourage self-deportations. (Remember that idea, Americans?)

It didn’t seem to result in many self-deportations, but it did lead to widespread injustices. Migrants faced demands that they prove their immigration status; landlords and employers risked large fines for renting to or employing illegal immigrants. A Law Society report found “clear evidence of serious flaws in the way visa and asylum applications are being dealt with.”

Some Windrush immigrants faced inhumane treatment by the country that had been their home for decades. They were denied re-entry into the U.K., health care and other rights. A media and public opinion outcry in recent weeks forced by both May and Rudd to apologize and promise justice and compensation.

They looked likely to ride out the Windrush storm until it emerged that the Home Office had set targets for illegal deportations. Rudd denied the existence of targets to a parliamentary committee, before leaked Home Office documents confirmed them. Five public apologies in a week were too many. Either she wasn’t in command (something many suspected) or she simply misled Parliament.

In immigration control, when officials are ordered to meet deportation targets, ugly things happen. Asylum case workers have described a system that is arbitrary and rushed, in which workers are trained to find ways to say no.

British Conservatives may be more socially minded than their American counterparts — nobody questions universal health care here, for example — but they ostensibly stand for innovation, entrepreneurship, individual freedom and opportunity. And yet for years, dating back to David Cameron’s government in 2010, this party has made it harder — sometimes with just the sheer expense and bureaucratic hassle — for foreign workers, students and family members to settle in the U.K. with increasingly stringent immigration policy and populist rhetoric. In the race for global talent, Britain has slowed its pace to a languid walk.

It was left to Labour’s Diane Abbott to make the case for a more reasonable migration policy: “In trade negotiations our priorities favor growth, jobs and prosperity. We make no apologies for putting these aims before bogus immigration targets.”

Meanwhile, the government’s target to reduce net immigration to the “tens of thousands” is so unrealistic that very few Britons are under any illusion that it will be met. Net immigration has declined — but the biggest declineshave come from European Union citizens, without whom the health service and other parts of the economy couldn’t function. Migration from non-EU countries has continued to rise.

Sadly the government seems to be responding to a crude reading of public sentiment. Ask Britons if they want to see less immigration, and most will say yes — though notably views have softened somewhat since the Brexit referendum and the trend is toward greater acceptance.

But ask them about particular classes of immigrants — students, nurses, the Windrush generation — and their replies are far more magnanimous. They want border control and fewer immigrants, but also a system that is fair and humane and welcomes people who will contribute.

By many accounts Rudd, along with some other leading Conservatives, had been uncomfortable with the immigration targets; and yet she placed loyalty to her boss and the party first. Other Conservatives have challenged May over aspects of the Conservative immigration policy from the targets to the indefinite detention of immigrants that has led to appalling conditions.

The good news is that it’s never too late: The Conservatives now have an opportunity to clean up the mess. The new home secretary, Sajid Javid, is the son of a Pakistani immigrant and a Muslim; his father arrived in Britain with 1 pound in his pocket in the 1960s, according to Javid.

In his first remarks Monday, he promised to look into injustices at the Home Office and promised a full review of the policies that led to Rudd’s embarrassment. That review shouldn’t end with the Windrush scandal. An honest review will mean changing the policies that May and her party have been so closely associated with for years. That will not be easy, but the country will be better off if neither of them flinch. It just might save the Conservative Party from the embarrassment of more such scandals.

via Immigration Scandal Offers Tories a Shot at Redemption – Bloomberg

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