Stephens: The New Conservative Pyrite “National conservatism” is another road to serfdom

2019/07/29 Leave a comment

Good post by Stephens on the bankruptcy of contemporary American conservatives:

Friedrich Hayek, whose thoughts used to count for something among well-educated conservatives, made short work of nationalism as a guiding principle in politics. “It is this nationalistic bias which frequently provides the bridge from conservatism to collectivism,” he wrote in “The Constitution of Liberty.”

That point alone ought to have been enough to dim the right’s new enthusiasm for old-style nationalism. It hasn’t.

A three-day public conference this month on “national conservatism” featured some bold-faced right-wing names, including John Bolton, Tucker Carlson and Peter Thiel. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page published a piece from Christopher DeMuth, a former president of the American Enterprise Institute, on the “nationalist awakening.” Yoram Hazony, an Israeli political theorist, has gained wide attention among U.S. conservatives with his book, “The Virtue of Nationalism.”

And, of course, Donald Trump: “You know, they have a word, it sort of became old-fashioned, it’s called a nationalist,” the president said last October. “And I say, really, we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am, I’m a nationalist.”

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FATAH: Bernier’s problems with multiculturalism cannot be dismissed

2019/07/29 Leave a comment

As usual, Fatah conflates populist discourse on multiculturalism with what the original policy, the subsequent act and the related policy instruments (e.g., employment equity) actually mean both in policy and practice.

The policy is all about integration through:

  • Assisting cultural groups to retain and foster their identity;
  • Assisting cultural groups to overcome barriers to their full participation in Canadian society;
  • Promoting creative exchanges among all Canadian cultural groups; and,
  • Assisting immigrants in acquiring at least one of the official languages.

And while identity politics is overly played, this is not new. After all, part of the historical playing out of French and British relations often involved identity politics and many critics of multiculturalism are playing on “white” identity.

Moreover, while there are pockets, analysis of Census level data by people such as Hiebert and Hulchanski confirm that fear of enclaves is exaggerated:

On Wednesday, Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada, announced his party’s platform on immigration, calling for a 50% cut in the annual number of immigrants admitted.

Justifying this massive cut, Bernier cited figures from a 2011 study by the Fraser Institute that said the net “cost” to Canada per immigrant was $6,051, estimating an annual burden of about $24 billion. He told the cheering audience, that “is a lot of money.”

He then opined that “one reason for this is that immigrants generally have lower wages than non-immigrants” and thus pay less tax.

In arriving at his figure of $24 billion, Bernier did not take into account the fact that immigration is a way of importing consumers without paying a penny to the society that manufactured us. We are the only goods that arrive duty free with no price tag.

When I arrived as an immigrant, Canada paid zero for my degree in biochemistry and 20 years of experience as a journalist and advertising copywriter. Neither did my wife’s postgraduate degree in English Literature cost a penny to the Canadian taxpayer, yet we were both contributing to the economy of Canada as taxpaying consumers and renters from day one.

Having said that, it would be foolish to outright dismiss Bernier’s very sincere fears about the integration of immigrants like me into Canadian society. It is true that most of us who come to Canada from developing countries in Asia and Africa arrive with religious-cultural baggage that includes archaic values bordering on racism, tribalism, casteism and superstitions that have little to do with the values that shaped Canada in the last 400 years of Western civilization.

Bernier said, “in the past, immigrants who came here gradually integrated into our society. They kept some aspects of the culture of their country of origin, of course. And that influenced and changed our society. They became Canadian, but with a distinct flavour.”

“This is a type of multiculturalism that enriches our society. And it is perfectly fine,” he added.

However, Bernier expressed a problem with immigrants “living permanently in an enclave apart from the larger Canadian society,” a problem he said that gets exasperated by “being officially encouraged by the government to continue to do so rather than to integrate into Canadian society and adopt Canadian culture and values.”

A nation must be based on a sense of belonging, of participating in a common national project, sharing the same values, being different from the rest of the world.

As an example, Bernier cited the way ‘ethnic politics’ has become the norm among Canada’s political parties. “They don’t talk to Canadians. They address themselves to ethnic voting blocs. To Ukrainian Canadians, Italian Canadians, Chinese Canadians, Muslim Canadians, Sikh Canadians.”

Bernier is right to point out this slow disintegration of Canadian society into vote banks. As he said, “even our foreign policy now depends on appealing to these ethnic political clienteles, instead of being based on the interests of Canada as a whole.”

The Multiculturalism Act must be revoked for the simple reason that not all cultures are equal. The culture that treats my autistic daughter with the utmost respect, love and care is not equal to the culture that treats autistic children as a punishment by God for sins committed by others.

The culture that calls for slaying gays, permits polygamy, and imprisons women in black burkas is medieval and misogynist and is certainly not equal to the culture of gender equity and LGBTQ rights.

Bernier is right when he told his party faithful: “Among the threats to our values and way of life is political Islam, or Islamism, the fastest-growing and most dangerous radical ideology in the world today.”

Canadians dismiss Bernier’s fears at their own peril.

Source: FATAH: Bernier’s problems with multiculturalism cannot be dismissed

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From immigration limbo to liberty: Canada sees surge of non-American migrants

2019/07/29 Leave a comment

Interesting shift but not surprising given the impact of the Trump administration on US immigration policy and practices:

After spending almost all her life in immigration limbo in the United States, Paras Pizada can finally set down roots and plan for a future … in Canada.

The 27-year-old woman is part of a surge of non-American citizens arriving here legally from south of the border where they’ve faced an increasingly hostile environment since President Donald Trump was elected in 2016.

Canada’s new biometrics visa requirements, however, could prove a deterrent for undocumented migrants in the U.S. who, like Pizada, try to come here legally.

Since January, applicants worldwide must provide fingerprints and have their photos taken at facilities designated by Canadian immigration.

In the U.S., almost all facilities are operated by American immigration officials. Undocumented migrants fear this will put them at risk of arrest and deportation. Indeed, the Canadian immigration website warns biometric applicants that they must be legally in the U.S. to go to a centre.

These biometrics requirements could potentially drive up irregular migration into Canada which has dropped by half to 5,140, between January and May, compared to the same period last year.

“Since these people can’t get fingerprinted to apply for Canadian work permits and study permits legally, they will all just walk across the border. Ottawa has made it impossible for the majority of undocumented U.S. residents who want to apply legally for Canada to do so,” said Winnipeg-based immigration lawyer Vanessa Routley.

According to Canadian immigration data revealed for the first time, in 2018, non-Americans in the U.S. accounted for 85 per cent or 13,754 of the 16,158 permanent residence applicants from south of the border, up from just 48 per cent or 1,477 of the total 3,077 applicants in 2015, with India (10,556), China (768) and Nigeria (337) being the top three source countries in 2018.

In 2015, non-Americans made up just 14 per cent or 4,664 of 33,062 applicants in the U.S. for Canadian work permits and student visas.

In 2018, the number almost doubled to 26 per cent or 11,840 of all 45,202 applicants.

It is not known how many of these applicants were actually undocumented in the U.S., because that data is not collected.

Pizada was two when her family arrived as visitors to the United States from Pakistan in 1994. They never left, moving from place to place to evade detection by immigration enforcement officials. Though both Pizada and her sister later qualified to remain temporarily in the U.S. under a special program for undocumented children launched under then-President Barack Obama, they had had no access to permanent residence and citizenship.

When Trump was elected in 2016 and stepped up the removal of undocumented migrants, the sisters started looking for places to go outside the U.S. In June, Pizada, who has a master’s degree in media studies from Pratt Institute in New York, came to Canada as a permanent resident under the federal skilled workers program, following in the steps of her sibling, Mahaik, who had arrived here the year before.

“We are so relieved,” said Pizada, who now lives in Niagara Falls. “I can finally put down roots and have a place to call home. I’m allowed here and no one can kick me out.”

Pizada was lucky she could avoid the biometrics dilemma presented by Canadian immigration because she had already been known to American homeland security officials by having registered with the Obama administration’s program that offered her a renewable temporary residence in the U.S. every two years. Most undocumented migrants didn’t meet that program’s criteria and are off the enforcement officials’ radar.

Of the 133 facilities in the U.S., only two, one in Los Angeles and the other in New York City, are run by private contractors, which means most undocumented applicants must either travel long distances to those two offices or take the risk of going to their local centres and potentially be intercepted by American immigration authorities.

Sharma, who asked that her full name not be used because she is undocumented in the U.S., has been accepted by four Canadian universities — these are Waterloo, Concordia, New Brunswick and Dalhousie — in their graduate programs, but is afraid of setting foot in her local centre run by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as it collects fingerprints.

“There is definitely a heightened fear of getting arrested with all these government raids against migrants,” said Sharma, 21, who arrived in the U.S. from Indian with her family 12 years ago.

She graduated in May with an undergrad degree in biomedical engineering.

“This biometrics requirement is hindering our ability to regularize our status in Canada. We just want to make a better life.”

Canada is doing everything it can to make the biometrics collection process as smooth as possible for all applicants, according to Canadian immigration department spokesperson Nancy Caron.

“In a situation where an applicant is unable to comply with the biometric requirement, these individuals can self-identify themselves by contacting the department and provide a supporting rationale for their situation. Canadian migration officers have the discretion, in specific circumstances, to exempt an applicant from providing biometric information,” Caron told the Star in an email.

“It is important (for us) to be aware of an applicant’s previous immigration history and their compliance with immigration laws, including their current immigration status. This helps in determining whether an applicant is admissible to Canada and whether they are likely to respect the conditions of their visa.”

Officials said the data on biometrics exemptions requested and granted is unavailable.

Source: From immigration limbo to liberty: Canada sees surge of non-American migrants

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New immigration program opens door to undocumented construction workers in GTA

2019/07/29 Leave a comment

Interesting. Seeing more and more pilot programs. Good way to test ideas but of course, they also generate constituencies that make them harder to change or cancel:

Ottawa has unveiled a new program that will offer both an immigration pathway for undocumented construction workers in Greater Toronto and help to address a labour shortage in the city.

The pilot has spots for 500 workers — plus their family members — and will open for application on September 3 through the Canadian Labour Congress, which will pre-screen and refer qualified candidates for final assessment by the immigration department.

“It’s a very small project for us but a very important project to initiate,” said Hassan Yussuff, president of the labour congress, who believes the number of non-status construction workers in the country is in the thousands. “Some of these workers have been here for five years plus and their families have set down roots in this country. We need to find a way to resolve their status.”

According to the latest forecast by Build Force Canada, a national industry-led workforce management research group, Ontario needs an additional 26,100 construction workers in the next 10 years as 91,100 people currently working in the sector will reach retirement age.

“Toronto is very busy right now with all the condo, infrastructure and transit projects. It’s tough to build projects when you don’t have the labour. It causes delays and increases costs. That’s not going to be of benefit to anyone,” said Andrew Pariser, vice-president of RESCON, a leading association of residential builders in Ontario.

“The history of the construction industry is built on immigration from Italy, Portugal, Eastern Europe, Scotland and Ireland. They all find a home in construction. We reward workers with skills and performance, and not where they come from.”

The labour congress has been working with immigration officials for almost two years to iron out the details of the pilot unveiled Friday. Only undocumented construction workers who live in Toronto, Durham, Halton, Peel and York regions qualify.

To be eligible, an applicant must have:

  • Entered legally initially as a temporary resident and lived in Canada for at least five years;
  • Proof of paying Canadian income tax;
  • Language ability for day-to-day conversation in English or French;
  • A family member living in Canada who is a Canadian citizen or permanent resident, or a spouse or child in Canada;
  • No previous offences that would make them inadmissible to Canada other than a breach of the immigration law for overstaying in the country.

The job categories that qualify for the program include: trades and skilled transport and equipment operators; maintenance and equipment operation trades; residential and commercial installers and servicers; heavy equipment operators (except crane); and construction trades helpers and labourers.

The labour congress’ Yussuff said applications will be processed on a first-come, first-serve basis and the first 500 qualified principal applicants will be provided a referral letter for the final assessment of the Immigration Department.

Immigration officials said many of the undocumented workers came to Canada with valid temporary resident status to fill labour shortages in the construction industry but have fallen out of status due to the now rescinded “four-in-four-out” rules introduced by the former Conservative government. That policy, in place between 2011 and 2015, required temporary foreign workers to leave Canada after working here for four years and banned them from returning for four years, but many chose to stay illegally.

“Without valid immigration status, these workers and their families have lived in fear and been left feeling very vulnerable. The presence of out-of-status workers in a significant industry leads to depressed wages for Canadians and makes workers vulnerable to employer exploitation and abuse,” the Immigration Department said in a statement.

“This temporary initiative is a step forward to increase the protection of some of these construction workers and their families, while safeguarding Canada’s labour market and ensuring that Canada can retain the workers it needs to grow the economy and build communities.”

Yussuff said personal information submitted by applicants to the congress will be kept confidential and priorities are given to those with spouses and children in Canada. Application to the labour congress pre-screening and referral is free, but qualified applicants must still pay for all applicable permanent residence processing fees.

Source: New immigration program opens door to undocumented construction workers in GTA

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Former PPC candidate ‘no longer confident’ in Bernier after being replaced

2019/07/29 Leave a comment

Of note (the riding profile can be found London North Centre).

A former candidate of the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) says he’s lost confidence in the party’s leadership after being replaced by a Muslim candidate, who he claims Maxime Bernier told him would be better suited to address the “topic of radical Islam.”

Braeden Beller says he learned he was being replaced as the PPC candidate for the riding of London North Centre by political science professor Salim Mansur less than two weeks before the party held one of its largest events to date in downtown London.

Beller spoke with PPC Leader Maxime Bernier and PPC executive director Johanne Mennie about the party’s decision to substitute Mansur in as the candidate in the riding.

He says Bernier told him that “it was very valuable to have a Muslim giving the message that would speak more adequately to other Muslims on the topic of radical Islam.”

Bernier also said that Mansur would be a higher profile candidate with a larger local following in London than Beller, who said he had no political experience prior to being involved with the PPC.

Mennie said Bernier “absolutely (did) not” tell Beller that Mansur’s perspective on Islam as a Muslim would be valuable, instead pointing to Mansur’s local notoriety as the reason for the party’s choice.

“(Mansur) is well known through his work as a columnist, his work as a professor, in terms of his professional career, and that was the extent of (Bernier’s) discussion with Braeden,” Mennie said.

Mennie and Beller both said there was one conversation that he and Bernier had that she was not a part of.

When Bernier announced that the PPC had begun its cross-country candidate search, he said the party wouldn’t do “anything special” to attract a diverse range of candidates.

“I hope that our candidates will represent our country, but … we won’t do anything to attract people with different backgrounds. I think these people are coming right now,” Bernier told reporters in March.

On Wednesday, Bernier praised Mansur as a “star candidate” shortly after introducing him as “one of the main critics of Islamism in Canada,” in a speech about the PPC’s immigration platform.

Mennie says that all potential PPC candidates were told during the selection process that the party could replace them with someone else, under “exceptional circumstances.”

Mansur’s appointment has been the only case the party has invoked that policy, according to Mennie.

Mansur had first tried to run for the Conservatives. While Beller had been presented by the PPC as its candidate, both on Facebook and on the party’s website, Mansur had been vying for the candidacy of the Conservative party in London North Centre. In a statement on his website, Mansur says he was told on June 10 that he had been “disallowed” to run for the Conservatives for unspecified reasons. Five days later, he appealed the party’s decision but was rejected because he had waited too long. The Conservatives haven’t announced their candidate for the riding yet.

Beller said only running for the PPC after failing to run for the Conservatives means Mansur’s choice was “out of self-interest.”

Beller had been the lone applicant for the PPC candidacy in London North Centre and had been acclaimed before Mansur replaced him. When Beller was replaced in the riding he was offered the candidacy in the bordering riding of London Fanshawe, and according to Mennie, was told by Bernier that the leader would help his campaign by personally canvassing for him. Beller said he declined the offer because he was no longer confident in Bernier.

“What made me lose faith in Bernier is because he decided to ignore his principles when it benefited him,” Beller said.

“It’s disappointing but unsurprising,” Beller said about his short-lived experience as a federal candidate.

“I won’t be voting for the PPC, let’s put it that way,” Beller added.

Source: Former PPC candidate ‘no longer confident’ in Bernier after being replaced

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Tech Companies Say it’s Too Hard to Hire High-Skilled Immigrants in the U.S. — So They’re Growing in Canada Instead

2019/07/27 Leave a comment

The latest in a series of articles. Perhaps the only upside for Canada of the Trump presidency:

On a recent Tuesday, Neal Fachan walked down a dock in Seattle’s Lake Union and boarded a blue and yellow Harbour Air seaplane, alongside six other tech executives. He was bound for Vancouver to check on the Canadian office of Qumulo, the Seattle-based cloud storage company he co-founded in 2012. With no security lines, it was an easy 50-minute flight past snow-capped peaks. Later that day, Fachan caught a return flight back to Seattle.

Fachan began making his monthly Instagram-worthy commute when Qumulo opened its Vancouver office in January. Other passengers on the seaplanes go back and forth multiple times a week. Fachan says his company expanded across the border because Canada’s immigration policies have made it far easier to hire skilled foreign workers there compared to the United States. “We require a very specific subset of skills, and it’s hard to find the people with the right skills,” Fachan says as he gets off the plane. “Having access to a global employment market is useful.”

In the fractious battle over immigration policy, most of the attention has been directed at apprehending migrants at the southern border. Some tech executives and economists, however, believe that growing delays and backlogs for permits for skilled workers at America’s other borders pose a more significant challenge to the U.S.’s standing as a wealth-creating start-up mecca. The risk of losing out on the fruits of innovation to Canada and other countries that are more welcoming to immigrants might be a bigger problem for our economic future than a flood of refugees. Half of America’s annual GDP growth is attributed to rising innovation.

“Increasingly, talented international professionals choose destinations other than the United States to avoid the uncertain working environment that has resulted directly from the agency’s processing delays and inconsistent adjudications,” testified Marketa Lindt, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, at a House hearing last week about processing delays at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Lindt’s organization finds that USCIS processing time for some work permits has doubled since 2014, a fact cited in a May letter signed by 38 U.S. Senators on both sides of the aisle asking USCIS to explain the processing delays.

The backlogs in processing have particularly benefited our neighbor to the north. Canada has adopted an open-armed embrace of skilled programmers, engineers and entrepreneurs at the same time the U.S. is tightening its stance. Research shows that high-skilled foreign workers are highly productive and innovative, and tend to create more new businesses, generating jobs for locals. So each one who winds up in Canada instead of America is a win for the former, and a loss for the latter. “Really smart people can drive economic growth,” says Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank in Washington, D.C. funded in part by cable, pharmaceutical, television, and tech companies. “There are not that many people in the world with an IQ of 130, and to the extent that we’re attracting those people rather than the Canadians doing so, we’re better off.”

With the unemployment rate hovering below at or below four percent for the past 18 months, tech companies are long used to battling for talent by offering $100,000-plus starting salaries and perks like onsite gyms and all the kombucha you can drink. Recruiting foreign talent is one way for them to find new hires. There are a number of ways companies can hire skilled workers from India, China, and other countries, including applying for L-1 and H-1B visas, which allow foreigners to temporarily work in the United States. Demand for these visas, which are awarded by lottery, is intense. Since 2004, 65,000 H-1B visas are issued annually: this year’s ceiling was hit in only four days. (The government allows 20,000 additional visas for workers who have a master’s degree or PhD from a U.S. university.)

Amid the wider crackdown on immigration under the Trump Administration, the application process for employment-based visas appears to have gotten even tougher. The government denied 24% of all initial H-1B applications in 2018, up from six percent in 2015, according to an analysis of data from the National Foundation for American Policy, a pro-immigration think tank. It’s not just H-1B applicants who are experiencing delays. Applicants for all employment-based green cards now have to appear in person at a field office, a new policy that has created long delays, according to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, which says immigration officials under Trump are focusing more on enforcement than on processing legal applications for benefits. And despite a backlog of 5.7 million cases in 2018, USCIS has been providing surge resources to Immigration and Customs Enforcement field offices across the country, diverting more staff away from processing visa applications.

Canada’s policies, in contrast, offer an alluring alternative. Canada permits companies with offices in the country to hire skilled foreign workers in positions such as computer engineers, software designers, and mathematicians, and have their visas processed within two weeks. These workers can soon after apply to be permanent residents and, within three years, become full-fledged citizens. (The path to permanent residency for foreign workers in the U.S., by contrast, can take decades.) Officials at the Canadian consulate in Seattle work with two to three companies a week trying to set up offices in Canada.

“The visa process is just completely unpredictable for us, and we were wrestling with it for so long, we decided we needed to have some certainty,” says Thor Kallestad, the CEO of DataCloud, which uses technology to help mining companies better assess land potential. He already had offices in Silicon Valley and Seattle, but decided to open up shop in Vancouver and close his Silicon Valley office so he could more easily hire foreign workers. “In the U.S., we just couldn’t get clear answers about what the process looked like, what we as a company needed to do to rectify it.”

The Canadian option offers workers more certainty — and a near-guaranteed path to citizenship — while many U.S. skilled workers have no idea when and if they will get approved to stay in the United States. Given the choice, talented entrepreneurs with cutting-edge companies are choosing Canada. “They really make it easy to come in and start a business,” said Nat Cartwright, one of the founders of Finn.AI, an artificial intelligence company that powers virtual assistants for banks around the world. Cartwright and her two business partners, who are from Australia and India, met in business school in Spain. When they graduated, they considered locating their new company in Silicon Valley, but ultimately chose Vancouver because they knew they would qualify for a start-up visa there, and that they would be able to quickly hire AI experts from around the world. Of the company’s 60 workers, 60% were born outside Canada. Seven of Cartwright’s business school classmates from Spain have since relocated to Canada.

Canadian officials have deftly responded to the changing climate in the U.S. In 2017, the Trudeau government announced Global Skills Strategy, the program that allows companies to get work permits for foreign talent in less than two weeks. Their spouses can also receive work permits; the U.S. Department of Homeland Security this year proposed revoking work permits of the spouses of skilled foreign workers in the U.S. In 2018, the Trudeau government also made permanent the Start-Up Visa program, which allows immigrant entrepreneurs to live and work in the country provided their start-up has secured funding from venture capitalists or angel investors. A similar start-up visa program in the United States was approved in the last days of the Obama administration, but the Trump administration is in the process of ending it. “By helping Canadian companies grow, this strategy is creating more jobs for Canada’s middle class and a stronger Canadian economy,” said Ahmed Hussen, Canada’s Somali-born Minister of Immigration, earlier this year.

Even the biggest American tech companies are expanding their Canadian operations in a quest for high-skilled labor. Software engineer Janko Jerinic moved to Canada after attending an Amazon recruiting fair in his home country of Serbia. He wanted a job in New York or Seattle, but his wife hoped to work as well, and an Amazon recruiter said it would be hard for her to get a visa. The recruiter steered the couple to Vancouver, where Jerinic has worked for Amazon since 2015. The office, which opened in 2013, rapidly grew from about 500 people when he started to triple that now. A map in Jerinic’s Vancouver office shows employees’ places of birth. There are hundreds of pins from places like India, Russia, Brazil, and Belgium. But “you have to use a flashlight to find people from Canada,” he jokes. Amazon said in April 2018 that it was building a 416,000 square foot office in downtown Vancouver that will open in 2022; it plans to hire 3,000 more people there.

That technology companies are growing across America’s border has big implications for the U.S. economy. Since World War II, the U.S. has been the epicenter of the entrepreneurial universe. But America’s entrepreneurial dominance is waning. While 95% of global start-up and venture capital activity took place in the United States in the mid-1990s, today it’s about half, according to a report from the Center for American Entrepreneurship (CAE), a nonprofit that advocates for start-ups and is funded by banks and financial institutions. And the number of start-ups still paying employees a year after their founding fell 42% between 2005 and 2015, the most recent year for which there is data available.

The innovation economy creates jobs outside of tech, too. Research by the Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti suggests that every high-paying tech job created in an economy results in five more openings, including positions like lawyers, nurses, and hairdressers. The United States allows about 140,000 immigrant skilled workers to become permanent residents annually; Canada, a company with one-tenth of the population, welcomed 160,000 skilled workers on the track to permanent residency in 2017 and hopes to get that number to nearly 200,000 by 2021. Its goal of making immigrants 1% of its population by 2021 would increase annual GDP growth by 0.6%, with immigrants driving one-third of that expansion, according to a report by the Conference Board of Canada.

Making it easier for high-skilled immigrants in the United States could help jump-start America’s innovation economy, said Ian Hathaway, a Brookings Institution fellow who studies entrepreneurialism and technology. Immigrants are twice as likely as native-born Americans to start businesses. Immigrants or children of immigrants founded almost half of America’s Fortune 500 companies. More immigration could also bring benefits beyond the country’s traditional tech hubs, boosting businesses in the countryside and suburbia that are short on skilled tech talent. Most of the start-up activity that has occurred since the Great Recession has been concentrated in only 20 counties, a startling contrast to the economic recovery of the 1990s, when new businesses were sprinkled across the country.

VannTech, a recruiting platform, recently brought 126 Brazilian workers to a company in the Canadian prairies whose native workers kept moving to Toronto and Vancouver. The platform has 70,000 skilled tech workers looking to relocate to Canada and Europe; it does not help these people go to the United States because the process is too difficult, said Ilya Brotzky, VannHack’s CEO. “If U.S. companies are putting 5,000 tech jobs in Canada, when they could be putting them in places like St. Louis or Indianapolis, that’s a huge deal to those local economies,” says Atkinson.

At the same time, Trump himself has advocated for rethinking the system. In 2017, he backed the Raise Act, a bill introduced by Senate Republicans that would have cut legal immigration in half, while also establishing a points system designed to give priority to skilled workers and investors. While the bill would not have dramatically increased the number of visas available to in-demand workers, it did signal a preference for skilled workers over other migrants. The bill stalled out after opposition from politicians whose constituencies include agriculture and tourism companies, which rely heavily on unskilled immigrants. Trump reintroduced the merit-based immigration idea this year in a Rose Garden speech, and his staff is considering a new immigration plan that would revamp the current system to prioritize skills over family ties. “We want immigrants coming in,” he said in May. “We cherish the open door that we want to create for our country, but a big proportion of those immigrants must come in through merit and skill.”

Harbour Air, the seaplane company, used to fly buyers in and out of remote log booms across the Pacific Northwest. As that business waned, the company pivoted to tourism. Now, pilot Reggie Morisset says that tech industry demand is filling up planes once again. When the Vancouver-Seattle route launched last year, tech companies bought tickets in bulk so their employees could easily go back and forth between Canada and the United States, he said. “It’s catching fire,” he said. “If anything, it is just going to get busier.”

Source: Tech Companies Say it’s Too Hard to Hire High-Skilled Immigrants in the U.S. — So They’re Growing in Canada Instead

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Political incivility is a losing strategy

2019/07/27 Leave a comment

Although I wish it were not so, I am not convinced, based on discourse to date:

With a federal election approaching, Canadians seeking elected office might be wondering about messaging strategies and whether the rules of engagement have changed. After all, Donald Trump, who has insulted 598 people, places and thingson Twitter alone (as of May 24), is president of the United States. Crowds at his political rallies go wild when he calls his opponents names or insults their character, “feeding red meat to his base.” Michelle Obama responded to Trump’s incivility with the slogan “When they go low, we go high” — but her preferred candidate lost. Canadian candidates for office may now be wondering if there is a lesson to be learned from south of the border. If insulting people worked for Trump, might it work for Canadian politicians?

As an experimental social psychologist, I have spent the past few years systematically testing this idea. The results from my experiments surprised me: insulting people remains a losing strategy in 2019. Even a politician’s most diehard and adoring followers do not react positively to uncivil political attacks. My advice to those aspiring to public office is to remain civil and win votes the old-fashioned way: on their merits.

It might seem obvious that onlookers would disapprove of someone personally attacking a political opponent. However, when people are grouped together into teams, the normal rules of engagement don’t always apply. For instance, body checking is usually not an acceptable thing to do, but it is sure to draw cheers at a hockey game (when the visiting team is on the receiving end, that is.) Like hockey, politics can be deeply personal for some people; it can set up a sense of “us” and “them.” At times, political opponents can seem threatening. Their policies can look callous and harmful. This sort of intergroup conflict can alter the rules of engagement by giving group leaders (politicians) a social licence to attack the other side as a means of thwarting the perceived threat. Whether this licence applies to insulting political opponents in the Information Age remained to be seen until we conducted our experiments.

Yes, Donald Trump insults people. And yes, he is President of the United States. But those two facts do not necessarily mean that Trump’s insults in some way helped him win the election. His insults and electoral victory appear to be correlated, but correlation does not imply causation. To get to the bottom of this question, my collaborator at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Linda Skitka, and I conducted a series of experiments. In each one, we randomly assigned about 1,000 Americans (from an internet panel) of varying political stripes to read either a real and insulting tweet by President Trump or a more civil version of the same. They then indicated how they felt about the President. Americans across the political spectrum approved of Trump more after reading a civil tweet than after reading an uncivil tweet, meaning that incivility uniformly backfired.

Even people who self-identified as “diehard Trump supporters” either reacted negatively to Trump’s incivility or were unmoved by it. It didn’t matter if Trump’s opponent insulted him first and his incivility was a means of restoring his honour; Americans still preferred civility. An analysis of the pattern of Trump’s uncivil tweets over time confirmed that they have a subsequent depressing effect on his public opinion polls, meaning that the results from our experiments and evidence from the real world converged. Simply put, Donald Trump probably won the US presidency not because of his incivility, but in spite of it. With the US economy humming along, just imagine what his approval ratings would be if he were to be civil more often. If insulting opponents backfires for Trump, it surely would backfire for Canadian politicians.

Why do insults backfire? Psychologists have worked out that people’s impressions, favourable or otherwise, tend to be rooted in two general categories: warmth and dominance. It is generally better to be seen as warm than as cold. And it is generally better to be seen as dominant than as submissive. We suspected that insulting an opponent would make a politician seem more dominant (a positive impression) but perhaps less warm (a negative impression). For diehard supporters of the politician, we wondered if the dominance boost might be larger than the warmth deficit, leading to a net boost in approval. However, we found no evidence that insults make a politician seem more dominant in the first place. Rather, insults only made a politician come across as cold. This perception of coldness explained why insults were universally frowned upon.

Along with its strategic shortcomings, political incivility can have larger, more ominous consequences. In their book How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt make the case that a formal system of checks and balances is necessary but not sufficient to prevent the collapse of a democracy into one-party totalitarianism. It is also necessary for members of different political parties to remain civil with and tolerant of one another (while still disagreeing about policy matters). Incivility can create a sense that subjugating the rights of a political party is both justified and necessary, and thus leads to democratic collapse. When it comes to civility, the interests of politicians and of our democracy are aligned.

Based on what I’ve learned so far from the science of persuasion, Canadians aspiring to public office would be wise to mind their manners and focus their attention on remedying the most important issues facing our nation, such as climate change, the economy (including affordable housing, the cost of living, the wealth gap between the rich and poor) and health care (including the opioid crisis). Insulting political opponents hasn’t helped Trump and it probably won’t help Canadian politicians either.

Source: Political incivility is a losing strategy

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Wrongful detentions, judges’ quotas in the search for illegals in…

2019/07/27 Leave a comment

Appears to be an ongoing issue, likely to continue under the current Indian government:

Three years ago, police in India’s northeastern state of Assam were looking for a woman named Madhumala Das, who had been declared an illegal immigrant by a local tribunal.

When they reached the village of Bishnupur, they picked up 59-year-old Madhubala Mandal, who was lighting a fire outside her bamboo hut one morning in November 2016.

Mandal, a frail, Bengali-speaking woman who is just over four feet tall, spent over two-and-a-half years in a detention center until she was freed last month following a probe conducted by a new police chief in the area.

In a recent interview in her hut, Mandal said she told the police she was not the person they were looking for, that she was Indian and had documents to prove it. But they did not listen.

Local activists and lawyers say such cases are not uncommon in Assam, where a long-simmering movement against illegal immigrants, particularly Bengali-speaking Muslims, has been fanned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government. His ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) also governs Assam.

BJP’s campaign against people deemed to be foreigners from Muslim-majority and Bengali-speaking Bangladesh, even if they have lived in India for decades, or were born in India but can’t prove it, is about to reach boiling point.

At the end of next month, Assam plans to publish the final version of a register of citizens it has been preparing since 2015. Hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – are likely to be left off the list – meaning they will have to prove their citizenship, or risk detention like Mandal.

This is unlikely to lead to immediate mass arrests because detention centers are full, and Bangladesh has not agreed to accept the people identified as “foreigners”.

But being a non-citizen carries many penalties, including loss of access to government payments, voting rights, healthcare and state education. People could be quickly marginalized.

And this isn’t only an Assam issue.

Last week, Modi’s top lieutenant, Home (Interior) Minister Amit Shah, who has described Assam’s illegal immigrants as “termites”, said the government intends to go nationwide in identifying and deporting those who don’t have the right to stay.

At the same time, the government has been welcoming Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist migrants, making Muslims feel targeted. Shah said this month that the government wanted to “stop infiltration and push every single infiltrator out of the country”, but would welcome Hindu refugees.

WORSE THAN CONVICTS

When she was arrested, Mandal, a Hindu, was taken to a detention center in the town of Kokrajhar, in western Assam.

A group from India’s National Human Rights Commission that visited that center last year said illegal immigrant detainees there were in some ways “deprived even of the rights of convicted prisoners”.

U.N. experts warned in a statement this month that the citizenship drive in Assam risked rendering millions stateless or in prolonged detention, and that the process “could fuel religious discrimination”, adding that the legal system was discriminative and arbitrary.

The office of the chief minister, the highest elected official in Assam, did not respond to questions sent by Reuters on this story.

Ajoy Rai, a local activist who worked with police to secure Mandal’s release, said there may be many more wrongly detained people in the state.

“Most people are not literate and don’t understand what the documents they have even mean,” he said. “When there are floods or a fire, people lose the documents too.”

Assam, one of India’s poorest states, is ravaged by floods annually, displacing millions, with this year no exception.

Rights activists and lawyers say Assam’s system of ‘foreigners tribunals’, detention centers and its ‘border police’ – a unit in charge of checking illegal immigration – is biased against the poor and against Bengali speakers, who are deemed to be from Bangladesh.

Bengali is the second-most widely spoken language in India, after Hindi. The official language in Assam is Assamese.

A review of orders issued in recent years by Assam’s tribunals – quasi-judicial bodies set up for illegal immigration cases – shows many people of Bengali descent have been declared foreigners because of discrepancies in their names and other details on identity documents.

The tribunal judges’ performance itself, which is evaluated by the government, appears to be at least partly based on the percentage of the people they declare as foreigners, according to their appraisal sheets. Reuters reviewed copies of the appraisal sheets of judges in 79 of Assam’s roughly 100 tribunals.

The documents, which evaluate the judges’ performance over two years until April 30, 2017, show that a majority of judges who declared less than 10 percent of all the people they examined as foreigners got a rating of “may be terminated.”

Despite criticism of the process, Assam is working on setting up some 200 more foreigner tribunals by Sept. 1, growing to around 1,000 eventually, as it scrambles to prepare for the aftermath of the publication of the final register on Aug. 31. Around 245,000 cases are pending at the tribunals, and scores more are likely to be added after the final list is published.

The government has also lowered the eligibility criteria for the post of judges, allowing retired bureaucrats and lawyers with seven years of experience to apply – as opposed to 10 years required earlier.

“It is obvious that these appointments lack judicial independence or adequate separation from the executive, and the judges are being appointed for tribunals with indications that they should lean in favor of declaring people foreigners,” said Sanjay Hegde, a senior Supreme Court lawyer in New Delhi.

There is room for appeal against a tribunal decision through the high court in Guwahati, Assam’s main city, But that court is swamped with some two dozen new cases of illegal immigration each week, said Hafiz Rashid Ahmed Chaudhry, a senior lawyer in Guwahati.

Santanu Bharali, legal adviser to Assam’s chief minister, dismissed criticism that the tribunals were biased or had targets to declare people as foreigners. He said the judges relied on documents submitted as proof of citizenship and the tribunals’ decisions could be appealed.

“CREATE ONE WHOLE TOWN”

Assam is far from ready to deal with the situation if hundreds of thousands of residents are declared illegal.

The six detention centers there are already overcrowded, said Bharali. They held 1,133 illegal immigrants as of May 25, 2019, the government said earlier this month.

Kula Saikia, the chief of police in Assam, told Reuters there was no clarity on what would be done with those who don’t make it onto the citizenship register. He and other officials say they are awaiting orders from India’s Supreme Court, which is supervising the process.

“It’s impossible” to detain hundreds of thousands of more people, said Bharali. “We will have to create one whole town for these people.”

Local activists say the fear of being declared an illegal immigrant has driven at least 25 people to suicide since a draft citizenship list was drawn up in July 2018. Reuters could not independently verify the claims, and the police have refrained from linking the suicide cases to the citizenship verification process.

In the case of Madhumala Das, she was first declared a foreigner by a tribunal in 1988, and a fresh order was passed in June 2016 that led to Mandal’s arrest.

Police said the mistake occurred as there were three women with similar names in Mandal’s village.

“They had to follow the tribunal’s orders and find the person,” said a senior officer at the police station near Mandal’s home.

Madhumala Das had died more than a decade earlier. The border police did not know.

Source: Wrongful detentions, judges’ quotas in the search for illegals in…

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , ,

Muslims Over-Represented In US State Prisons, Report Finds

2019/07/27 Leave a comment

Unfortunately, we do not have comparable data for Canada although I suspect we are better at accommodation (however, it does not appear that the Liberal government restored the Conservative cuts in 2012 to non-Christian chaplaincy services, or at least couldn’t find any evidence they had):

Muslims make up about 9% of state prisoners, though they are only about 1% of the U.S. population, a new report from the civil rights organization Muslim Advocates finds. The report, released Thursday, is the most comprehensive count of Muslims in state prisons so far.

The report also sheds light on the obstacles some incarcerated Muslims face in prison while practicing their faith.

“Getting a picture of the religious preference of state prisoners is, we think, really important and unique,” said Yusuf Saei, the author of the report.

Muslim Advocates requested religious preference data from every state, and based its report on the records it received from 34 states and Washington D.C. Previous data on the religious preference of federal prisoners show that Muslims make up about 12% of that population, but that’s just a small slice of a much bigger picture.

“There are roughly 200,000 federal prisoners and more than 1.3 million state prisoners,” Saei said. “We can say with a high degree of confidence this is one of the most comprehensive looks at religious preference data.” The report only focused on the Muslim population in state prisons.

Knowing how many Muslims are in state prisons, Saei said, helps prison officials understand the importance of respecting religious practice for a significant and growing portion of people in prison. The report also compiled 163 lawsuits between October 2017 and January 2019 in which Muslims alleged their right to practice was being violated.

“Incarcerated Muslims are asking for very basic things: religiously compliant food, books, prayer mats. But they’re not receiving them in many states,” Saei said. “This idea of religious liberty is baked into the U.S. Constitution and federal law specifically protects the religious liberty of prisoners. But our report shows that many state prisons are arbitrarily and illegally preventing incarcerated Muslims from practicing their faith.”

The report compared state policies and found they were inconsistent. Some are very accommodating; others are not accommodating at all. For example, the report finds that only 17 states specifically allow religious head coverings. It also finds that more and more states are fully accommodating Muslim dietary requirements–halal-certified meals. But there are states that still make access to alternative meals difficult or impossible.

“Many state policies do provide for full accommodation of Muslim diet requests. Others, however, provide diminished diet substitutes or no substitutes at all,” the report said. “And in some cases, the paucity of diet accommodations may coerce individuals into violating their dietary beliefs.”

The report provides examples of the inconsistent and in some cases burdensome state policies for Muslim prisoners. In Nevada, for example, to get a meat-substitute diet a prisoner has to pass a diet accommodation interview. In North Dakota, there is a “60-day sincerity test” for anyone who changes religions and has a new religious dietary requirement as part of the practice.

The report recommends some straightforward policies for prisons to facilitate Muslim religious practices such as permitting individual and group prayers for Muslims and training officers on how to make that happen. It also recommends giving prisoners with works assignments days off on their religious holidays, creating clear policies on burial practices that allow for Muslims to be buried within their faith traditions and allowing religious head coverings for men and women.

Prisoners’ religious practice is legally protected by the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, passed by Congress in 2000. That law states the government can’t impede a prisoner’s free exercise of religion without a compelling reason.

“Things that I want to do or congregate activities that I might want to engage in with other prisoners, if they’re done in the name of religion have a higher degree of protection than those same activities such as gathering together or studying together if they’re not done in the name of religion,” said Martin Horn. He teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and is the former secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

He said for the most part, state prisons respect federal law that protects religious practice for prisoners. And when prisoners sue over violations of religious practice, it’s difficult for the state to win.

“The state has a very high burden to overcome to avoid allowing them to practice their faith at all and that means not allowing the prayer books, not allowing them to gather for prayer, not allowing access to services of an Imam,” Horn said. “Once something is considered a religious practice, it has to be allowed unless there is a substantial burden on the state and there is no other way to mitigate that burden.”

But advocates point to cases like the recent execution of a Muslim prisonerin Alabama earlier this year. His request for an Imam to be present when he was put to death was denied by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision. The majority opinion said the prisoner had waited too long to make the request. In the dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the decision was “profoundly wrong.”

And Muslim prison chaplains say the current political climate affects the treatment of Muslim prisoners. That’s problematic for people with so little control over their lives.

Tariq Aquil, the Muslim chaplain credited with developing the halal meal program in California’s state prisons, said he saw that play out before he retired in 2017. Like when a Muslim prisoner’s prayer time coincided with the inmate count.

“The guard sees that he’s literally praying and he sees that he’s actually in his cell so he could literally count him right there, ‘I can see you, you’re praying so I know you haven’t escaped,” Aquil said. “But they would stop, they would yell at him and they would curse him.”

Because he was praying rather than responding to the roll call.

Some decisions made by the prisons that are obstacles to Muslims practicing their faith come out of ignorance, concerns about costs, like meal plans, or real security concerns like an emergency in the middle of Friday prayer, Aquil said.

But corrections officers live in the real world, he said, and the anti-immigrant, racist and anti-Muslim rhetoric spouted by the current administration has an impact.

“Those of us who’ve worked in an environment where we’re trained are told that we should leave our political and any other attitudes that we have at the front gate when we come to work and that we should treat everyone equal,” Aquil said. “Very few human beings that I know of have this on and off switch where they simply can disengage from hearing last night ‘lock her up’ or ‘send her back’ and then come into the prison and see the people who are attired in the same way or have the same face or something like that. So sometimes it’s subtle and sometimes it’s much more overt.”

Also, Aquil said it’s important to note that over-representation of Muslims in prison isn’t indicative of a lot of Muslims being arrested and convicted.

“About 90 percent of incarcerated Muslims in the United States become Muslims during their incarceration,” he said. “Most of the people that are in prison tend to be repeat offenders and so at some point in time they seem to become aware that they have run the gambit and maybe it’s time for a change.”

Source: Muslims Over-Represented In State Prisons, Report Finds

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , ,

Fêtes juives et scrutins: Élections Québec a reconnu des ratés

2019/07/27 Leave a comment

Useful background to the federal case and a reminder of the importance of preparation for advance polls in those ridings with large Jewish populations should Elections Canada stick with October 21st (as I think is justified):

La fête juive au centre du débat sur l’éventuel report de la date du scrutin fédéral a été célébrée, l’an dernier, au moment des élections provinciales. Et Élections Québec a eu beau se préparer en conséquence, l’organisme a été pris de court par les répercussions des célébrations, si bien qu’il s’est excusé auprès de la communauté juive et d’une association libérale, a appris La Presse.

Le déroulement du scrutin dans la circonscription montréalaise de D’Arcy-McGee, où habite une forte concentration d’électeurs de confession juive, a été perturbé à l’automne 2018, lors du vote par anticipation, alors qu’un nombre record de citoyens se sont rendus aux urnes, ce qui a engorgé les bureaux de scrutin.

L’attente a parfois été si longue que l’association libérale de la circonscription ainsi que le Centre consultatif des relations juives et israéliennes (CIJA) ont déposé des plaintes au Directeur général des élections (DGE).

« Les délais d’attente pour voter à certains moments de la journée se sont avérés relativement longs considérant les expériences antérieures », a convenu l’adjoint au directeur général des élections et directeur des opérations électorales, Jean-François Blanchet, dans une lettre adressée à l’Association libérale de D’Arcy-McGee, dont La Presse a obtenu copie.

« Nous tenons à nous excuser des inconvénients que cette situation a pu engendrer aux membres pratiquants de la communauté juive, mais aussi à l’ensemble des électeurs. »

– Jean-François Blanchet, dans la lettre datée du 18 mars dernier

Le CIJA a aussi confirmé avoir reçu une lettre, au nom du DGE, de Pierre Reid. « On nous disait être navré des inconvénients subis par les électeurs juifs », a indiqué le directeur de la recherche et des affaires publiques, David Ouellette.

De façon plus précise, dans la lettre de M. Blanchet, le DGE reconnaît que le vote par anticipation en 2018 a connu des ratés dans D’Arcy-McGee. Le nombre d’électeurs qui ont voté de façon anticipée a « plus que quintuplé » par rapport à 2014, passant de 500 à plus de 2500.

Cet « achalandage record » doublé d’un ralentissement informatique a eu des conséquences qu’il était « difficile d’anticiper », plaide M. Blanchet dans sa missive. « Même en organisant nos bureaux de vote de façon à accueillir un plus grand nombre de personnes, il était difficilement prévisible que l’augmentation soit si importante », ajoute-t-il.

Le DGE sensibilisé

Pourtant, le député libéral actuel, David Birnbaum, et le CIJA ont confirmé qu’ils avaient sensibilisé le DGE, plusieurs mois avant les élections, à la tenue de fêtes religieuses juives pendant la période électorale. « J’étais très conscient du défi qui était devant nous », a indiqué M. Birnbaum en entrevue à La Presse.

Parce que dans une circonscription où 42 % des électeurs sont de confession juive (estimation de l’Association libérale de D’Arcy-McGee), il n’était pas difficile d’envisager, selon le député, que le vote par anticipation allait être fort populaire. Il faut dire que lors des élections de 2018, trois des cinq journées prévues pour le vote par anticipation coïncidaient avec la fête juive de Souccot.

Ce qui ne laissait aux juifs pratiquants, contraints au repos et à la prière lors de ces rituels, que deux jours pour voter par anticipation, étant donné qu’ils ne pourraient pas non plus se rendre aux urnes lors du scrutin général du 1er octobre en raison de la fête de Chemini Atseret, la même qui fait couler l’encre à Ottawa.

Une candidate conservatrice de la région de Toronto, de confession juive, s’est adressée à la Cour fédérale pour qu’Élections Canada reporte d’une semaine les élections générales. Mardi, le tribunal a ordonné à l’organisme fédéral de se pencher à nouveau sur la possibilité de modifier la date du scrutin, ce qui provoquerait tout un branle-bas.

Taux de participation à la baisse

Dans une lettre de l’Association libérale de D’Arcy-McGee, adressée au DGE en janvier dernier, la conseillère juridique de l’organisation signale « plusieurs plaintes » formulées par des électeurs libéraux.

Dans sa missive, que La Presse a pu consulter, l’association libérale fait un rapprochement entre la situation vécue et l’effondrement du taux de participation dans D’Arcy-McGee, qui est passé de 72 % en 2014 à 46,56 % en 2018. Il est à noter que le taux de participation aux élections de 2018 a été, à travers la province, le plus bas depuis 2008.

« À la suite de notre évaluation de plusieurs plaintes, nous constatons qu’il y a eu des erreurs commises et des lacunes de planification qui ont potentiellement mené à un affaiblissement du taux de participation dans notre circonscription. »

– Me Meena Khan, conseillère juridique

Elle déplore « l’attente déraisonnable » à laquelle des électeurs ont été soumis et affirme que cela en a découragé beaucoup, qui sont repartis sans avoir voté, notamment au centre communautaire et aquatique de Côte-Saint-Luc, bureau de vote décrit comme l’« épicentre de la communauté juive » de la circonscription.

Pas de changement de date

La célébration de fêtes religieuses juives coïncidant avec des élections est « une situation bien réelle » avec laquelle tant les électeurs que les candidats et les bénévoles impliqués de confession juive doivent composer, estime David Birnbaum, lui-même membre de la communauté juive. Il est d’avis que la tenue d’élections à date fixe doit maintenant faciliter la préparation de celles-ci.

C’est dans ce sens qu’il dit avoir sensibilisé le DGE afin qu’il prenne des mesures additionnelles, comme l’ajout de personnel, pour pallier le fort achalandage estimé lors du vote par anticipation.

« Le principe de base du DGE est de rendre le vote le plus accessible possible à l’intérieur des contraintes [raisonnables]. »

– David Birnbaum, député libéral de D’Arcy-McGee

« Je n’ai jamais proposé un changement de la date électorale », précise-t-il, voulant faire écho au débat actuel.

Le CIJA a confirmé avoir fait des démarches similaires à celles de M. Birnbaum.

Élections Québec a indiqué dans un courriel transmis à La Presse avoir mis en place « du personnel en nombre suffisant » lors du vote par anticipation « ainsi que des mesures adaptées pour assurer la fluidité et le bon déroulement du vote » notamment lors des journées des 21, 22 et 23 septembre 2018 en raison de la célébration de la fête juive.

L’organisme n’a pas été en mesure de confirmer l’existence de plaintes officielles.

Dans sa lettre à l’association libérale, Jean-François Blanchet assure qu’Élections Québec « prendra en considération les problèmes rencontrés [en 2018] dans la préparation des prochaines élections » et « poursuivra [ses] efforts pour faciliter la participation électorale » de la circonscription de D’Arcy-McGee.

La date des célébrations des rituels juifs est établie en fonction du calendrier hébraïque. Les élections générales québécoises de 2014 ne coïncidaient avec aucune fête religieuse juive. Il en sera de même aux prochaines élections de 2022.

Pour un amendement à la loi

L’ex-ministre libéral et ancien député de D’Arcy-McGee Lawrence Bergman a confié à La Presse souhaiter un amendement à la Loi électorale québécoise ainsi qu’à la loi canadienne afin d’éviter la situation dans laquelle se trouve actuellement Élections Canada.

« Il faudrait que la loi soit plus claire, il faudrait apporter des nuances pour préciser, non pas que le DGE peut [changer une date], mais quand le DGE doit le faire, et ce, peu importe la religion », explique-t-il. Il est d’avis que la tenue d’élections à date fixe, tant à Ottawa qu’à Québec, devrait permettre d’éviter des conflits importants.

Lawrence Bergman, qui est membre de la communauté juive, estime également que le vote par anticipation ne doit pas être la seule solution, puisque faire « sortir » le vote lors de ces journées présente aussi son lot de défis.

Source: Fêtes juives et scrutins: Élections Québec a reconnu des ratés

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , ,

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