More a country of emigrants which may explain some of the support for immigration:
Portugal‘s government is celebrating rising immigration numbers after the number of foreign nationals living in the country hit half a million for the first time in its history.
The socialist-led government said Portugal had “overcome” barriers to attracting more migrants, who it says are needed due to the country’s relatively low birth-date and ageing population.
“Preliminary data prompt me to say that in 2019, for the first time in our history, the barrier of half a million foreign citizens residing in Portugal has been overcome,” interior minister Eduardo Cabrita told the country’s parliament on Wednesday.
The minister told MPs there were 580,000 foreign nationals were living in Portugal at the end of 2019, up from 490,000 at the end of 2018.
The debate in Portugal over migration contrasts with that in other EU countries, notably the UK – where the government has been aiming to reduce immigration.
Portugal is one of ten EU states where fewer than five per cent of residents are foreign-born; between 2011 and 2016 it also suffered strong emigration due to the fallout from the global financial crisis and austerity.
In 2017 prime minister António Costa’s government passed new laws to boost immigration, with the legislation taking effect in the autumn of 2018.
“We need more immigration and we won’t tolerate any xenophobic rhetoric,” Mr Costa said at the time.
The changes made it easier to come to Portugal for seasonal work, casual work, and study; while the process for regularising undocumented migrants was also modernised. Visas and other bureaucracy were also streamlined.
Notably the Portuguese government has also promised a 50 per cent income tax cut until 2023 to tempt back Portuguese emigrants who have left the country for at least three years.
Portugal’s Socialist Party leads a minority administration that governs with ad hoc support from communists and the radical left.
His party was re-elected in 2019 with a higher percentage of the vote than in 2015 and 22 more seats.
While Todd’s points, of course, about religious believers not being monolithic, Scheer was likely more hampered by his inability to articulate credibly his beliefs and how they would not impact his decisions should he become PM, not to mention his other credibility issues (insurance agent claims, dual citizenship etc).
Moreover, Canadian public opinion has shifted as Todd notes and leaders need to be attuned to that reality:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau regretted in the fall that “divisiveness and disinformation were all too present features of this past election campaign,” in which he acknowledged he had become a polarizing figure.
What the Liberal party leader didn’t quite admit, however, is he played an oversized role in turning the October 2019 election, in which his party was reduced to a minority, into a toxic battle about, of all things, religion and sexual ethics.
Who would have thought it would come to this in multicultural, multi-faith Canada? We like to think it is only other countries, like the rivalrous U.S. or India, that are torn apart by religion-fuelled conflict.
But we had our own culture war in Canada in part because of the way Trudeau, and to some extent NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, hammered Conservative party Leader Andrew Scheer and even Green party Leader Elizabeth May, over two wedge issues with ties to religion — abortion and same-sex relationships.
These two ethical concerns were torqued so hard that most of the electorate likely lost track of any real sense of what Canadian Catholics and Sikhs actually believe about abortion and LGBTQ issues. The public might be surprised.
The Angus Reid Institute found Scheer, an active Catholic, suffered the most as a result of his religion. Commentators say it’s a key reason he announced last month he would step down as Conservative leader.
More than 51 per cent of Canadians told pollsters they developed a negative attitude to Scheer based on what they heard about his Catholicism and his beliefs.
A smaller proportion, 36 per cent, leaned negative about the religion of Trudeau, who says he is Catholic. Voters’ pessimism declined to 31 per cent for May, an Anglican who wears a small cross on a necklace, and to just 24 per cent for Singh, an orthodox Sikh who wears a turban and carries a ceremonial dagger.
Faith clearly remains combustible in Canada. Even though two of three Canadians believe having “freedom of religion” makes this a better country, more than one in five admitted they feel deeply “repelled” when a political candidate is a person of faith.
Scheer’s political opponents didn’t want voters to forget he is personally “pro life” on abortion. That lead to Scheer often saying “as leader of this party it is my responsibility to ensure we do not reopen this debate.”
Nor did Liberal or NDP campaigners want anyone to overlook that Scheer doesn’t attend Pride Parades. To which Scheer’s typical defence was, “I find the notion that one’s race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation would make anyone in any way superior or inferior to anybody else absolutely repugnant.”
But Scheer’s commitments to non-prejudicial behaviour did not assuage a suspicious electorate. Two of three Canadians said they don’t trust politicians to keep their personal views out of the public realm.
It’s possible, however, the public might have felt a bit more trusting of Scheer if they knew most of the country’s 13 million Catholics, many of whom are recent immigrants, are not nearly as uniform or doctrinaire as they are often portrayed.
Even though the Catholic church has long opposed any “direct attack on the fetus,” University of Lethbridge sociologist Reginald Bibby and Angus Reid reveal in their book, Canada’s Catholics, that 85 per cent of Canadian Catholics approve of abortion when a woman’s life is in danger.
Illustrating striking variance among the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, the book also shows half of Canadian Catholics believe “a woman should be able to obtain a legal abortion for any reason.” That was the same pro-choice stand championed by Trudeau and Singh.
When it comes to same-sex relationships, Catholic authorities continue to formally oppose them, while urging compassion. However, Canada’s Catholics are much like the rest of the laissez-faire population: “Close to two in three approve both of same-sex couples marrying and their adopting children.”
Canada’s 13 million Catholics are hardly doctrinaire on abortion or same-sex marriage. (Source: Canada’s Catholics)
Contradicting the pundits, who said before the election that Singh would provide the strongest test of voters’ tolerance for religious diversity, Angus Reid Institute polls show he was harmed the least because of his religion, in which he often expresses pride.
It’s conceivable many Canadians were, through extroverted, upbeat Singh, getting more exposure than ever to a member of the Sikh faith, which is about 500 years old, rooted in the Punjab region of India, has about 27 million followers and more than 500,000 in Canada (mostly in Greater Toronto and in Metro Vancouver).
But just as Scheer does not come close to representing all of Catholicism, Singh does not represent all Sikhs. Nobody, especially a politician, can embody everything about a faith (and that includes the pope).
Sikh scholars make it clear that followers hold a spectrum of beliefs about abortion and homosexuality, most of which are more conservative than those promoted by the NDP leader.
In Sikhism: A Guide for the Perplexed, respected University of Michigan professor Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair says the “idealistic” position in the Sikh religion, which teaches reincarnation, is opposition to abortion.
“To terminate a birth through abortion would be tantamount to refusing a soul entry into a particular body and sending it back to the cycle of birth and deaths — a choice that is not ours to make,” says Mandair.
However, the professor says many Sikhs today feel “morally ambiguous” about abortion and are less “hard and fast” about it. Mandair says Sikhism’s ethical bottom line is abortion, though sometimes acceptable, should not be “driven by selfish motives.”
In a similar vein, Mandair points out many Sikh leaders have condemned homosexuality in recent years, leading to most members of the faith believing in a “hetero-normative model of sexuality” that discourages alternative forms of family.
“Such a process of forcing homosexuals to go underground, as it were, has led to a belief among many Sikhs that there are no homosexual Sikhs,” says Mandair. Despite it, the professor maintains the primary source of Sikh ethics, the Guru Granth Sahib, does not justify castigating homosexuality.
All of which should help demonstrate that followers of religions are not monolithic. So we can always hope next time an election comes along more voters will have a bit better understanding of people of faith.
In that way perhaps fewer politicians will try to twist religion-linked concerns into dangerous wedge issues.
For this analysis, I used data from Simmons, looking at the sports preferences of consumers under 25 years old, broken down by ethnicity (non-Hispanic White, Hispanics, African Americans, and Asian American respondents).
One of the reasons why I decided to start this series of articles with sports is because of the importance that sports marketing has as a brand/business-building tool for brands to connect with consumers, as well as the fact that sports have significant power to shape a society’s culture.
When it comes to the relationship between sports preference and demographics in America, the picture is mixed. While there are some noticeable differences in preferences by different ethnic groups, there are also commonalities. These differences and commonalities will be felt in the next decades, since the impact of the choices demonstrated by minority consumers will increase exponentially, mainly from Hispanic and Asian-American consumers, given their fast population growth. In contrast, the influence of non-Hispanic White consumers may be reduced over time.
It’s a Soccer World
Soccer has significant growth potential in the years ahead. Already the favorite among Hispanic-Americans, soccer has a robust preference among Asian-American fans as well, and it has been growing amongst non-Hispanic White fans too.
One challenge facing soccer is that differently from the major sports leagues in America, their fans are spread among different franchises, including MLS, Mexican Futbol League and, growing in popularity, the European National leagues (mainly the ones from England, Spain, Italy, and Germany) as well as Europe’s Champions League, making it harder to reach the whole spectrum of soccer fans with one sponsorship program, but also offers a diverse set of options for marketers to align with.
I spoke with one of the authorities when it comes to sports marketing, Ricardo Fort, Coke’s Head of Global Sponsorships, who is directly involved with the trends and opportunities when it comes to sports marketing. Below is his take on the growth of soccer in America:
“As the profile of an American fan becomes more international, particularly Hispanic, soccer is likely to be the biggest winner. Thanks to the growth of the MLS, the increasing availability of international soccer content in open TV and, mostly, the incredible global success of the women’s national team, new generations of fans will be as familiar with the Mbapes, and Alex Morgans as their grandparents were with the Joe Montanas and their parents are with the Tom Bradys.”
The Three Major Leagues
America’s favorite sports leagues: NFL, NBA, and MLB face a mixed set of challenges from a demographic standpoint for the decades to come.
NFL, America’s favorite sport has an excellent position with African American and Asian American sports fans, and a substantial appeal to Hispanic fans, which explains why we see more outreach efforts from the league like games in Mexico City and increased availability of games broadcast in Spanish.
Similarly, the NBA has also been investing in becoming more international, including efforts to connect with Latin American and Asian markets. These efforts, combined with their stronghold among African American sports fans, make the league another strong contender to benefit from the shifts in demographics in the years to come.
For MLB, the challenge for the next decades is less about connecting with multicultural fans, but more about how to make a game considered too long by many, played during too long of a season to interest a generation of consumers used to “everything now.”
Weak Spots
On the other side of the spectrum are Nascar and NHL, who significantly under-index in preference among sports fans from minority ethnic backgrounds, with less than a third of the responses when compared to their non-Hispanic White preference levels. If these leagues don’t become more relevant to minority fans, they risk experiencing declines in attendance at their events, in viewership, in broadcasting fees from media partners, and ultimately sponsorship dollars from corporations.
The Idol Factor
Idols are extremely important for building leagues, franchises, and brands, and having icons from the multicultural segment is a great step toward the path of making your brand more relevant with multicultural fans. Still, you don’t need to be from a minority background to connect with minority consumers, as pointed out by Freddy Rolón, ESPN Deportes Vice President and General Manager, based on the Sports Poll data, a study about sports interest in America: “Kobe Bryant was a great example of an athlete that connected with multicultural consumers. He speaks Spanish, has publicly demonstrated his passion for soccer, which is a departure from a U.S. centric type of sports idol we are used to seeing”.
What Won’t Change
In spite of the fast changes we will face during the next decades, according to Rolón, a few things won’t change: “Despite all the future demographic changes, one thing that will stay the same is that there will be very few opportunities for brands to connect with a massive audience of fans like they do during a live sports event. Live sports bring scale because people want to watch sports live. Given the current (and future) media fragmentation environment we live in, expect live sports and news to break through the clutter and that’s key in reaching a wider audience. However, brands should go beyond the game itself; marketers should also focus on the stories behind the game, the players, the stadiums, the eco-system surrounding the games.”
Watch Outs
Almost every sports franchise, either at the league level or individual team level, will need a multicultural strategy for the next decades.
Similar to what we observe from best practices in multicultural advertising, sports franchises should focus on being relevant through authentic culture strategies, rather than depending on language or stereotypical approaches.
Sports franchises need to build a fan base with an approach that starts from grassroots, youth connection, growing vertically towards professional levels, passing through the so crucial high school and college steps.
Either from a video streaming consumption or by the growing relevancy of eSports, multicultural consumers are leading the pack when it comes to the fusion of technology and sports.
One thing is for sure. The impact of multicultural consumers as they relate to the sports scene in the U.S. is bound to make it “a whole different ballgame”. Get ready!
Any measures to reduce birth tourism should not be outsourced to an airline rather than government visa or other requirements:
A Hong Kong-based airline has apologized for requiring a passenger to take a pregnancy test before a flight in November to Saipan, a United States territory in the Western Pacific that is a popular destination for so-called birth tourism.
The carrier, Hong Kong Express Airways Limited, said in an emailed statement this week that it had stopped administering pregnancy tests after re-evaluating the contentious practice.
The apology came a little over two months after the passenger, Midori Nishida, blogged about her experience on a Nov. 9 flightfrom Hong Kong International Airport to Saipan, which is in the Northern Mariana Islands.
The commonwealth has become a magnet for expectant Chinese mothers because babies born on the island are eligible for United States citizenship.
“We would like to apologize unreservedly to anyone who has been affected by this,” the airline said in the statement.
Ms. Nishida, 25, a Tokyo resident, was raised on Saipan and was visiting her parents when the episode occurred, she wrote in a blog post on the website of The Saipan Tribune newspaper.
“Despite being a frequent flier to Saipan, none of my previous experience would have prepared me for what happened during my most recent flight: Take a pregnancy test or be denied boarding,” she wrote.
After filling out a mandatory questionnaire from the airline stating that she was not pregnant, Ms. Nishida was selected to undergo a “fit-to-fly” medical assessment and was asked to sign a medical release form, her blog post said.
The form read: “The passenger has been observed to have a body size/shape resembling to a pregnant lady,” according to Ms. Nishida, who said she showed airline employees her return plane ticket, but to no avail.
“I was then led by a female in plainclothes, who claimed to be the medical practitioner, to a public restroom,” she wrote. “I was handed a pregnancy test and when the result came out negative, she failed to record this on the medical form and instructed me to throw the test into the trash. Satisfied that I had no baby in me, the airline staff finally issued me a boarding pass.”
The airline, which Cathay Pacific bought in July, said the pregnancy test requirement arose early last year.
“In response to concerns raised by authorities in Saipan, we took actions on flights to Saipan from February 2019 to help ensure U.S. immigration laws were not being undermined,” the airline said. “Under our new management, we recognize the significant concerns this practice has caused. We have immediately suspended the practice while we review it. We’d like to apologize for the distress caused.”
The United States Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday night.
Ms. Nishida wrote that she was well aware of Saipan’s reputation as a “hot spot” for birth tourism, but that she was appalled by the way the airline had treated her.
“Coming back to Saipan has always been a happy time for me as I look forward to seeing my family and catching up with friends,” she wrote. “But after this incident, I can only think of how I will be suspected, investigated and humiliated before I can return to a place I consider home.”
Interesting overview of Dutch debates contrasted with minority group outcomes:
It’s time for the media and politicians to overcome their pessimism about integration, says Leiden professor Leo Lucassen.
Twenty years ago the Netherlands witnessed the rise of Pim Fortuyn. In the wake of his death on May 6 2002, his party Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF) scored 26 seats in the elections.
Many were taken completely by surprise by the massive win and the social discontent about immigration and integration that was at the bottom of it. Journalists and commentators, as well as many politicians, were beating themselves up for not having seen it coming.
Yet the groundwork had been laid as early as the 1990s by then VVD parliamentary party leader Frits Bolkestein, Fortuyn’s columns in Elsevier magazine and Paul Scheffer’s article ‘The multicultural tragedy’ in the NRC.
But it was the death of Fortuyn and the explosive rise of the LPF which kicked off the pessimism about integration which is continuing to this day. Driven by guilt for having been too politically correct during the 1980s and 1990s, many a journalist and politician made a complete u-turn.
Central was the idea of a ‘clash of civilisations’, proposed by American political scientist Samuel Huntington and introduced in the Netherlands by Bolkestein among others. It predicted a new conflict between ‘western civilisation’ and Islam in the wake of the implosion of the Soviet Union, and generated a generally pessimistic climate with respect to the integration of Moroccan and Turkish migrants and their children in particular.
Second-generation problems, such as criminality and radicalisation – the murder of Theo van Gogh by Mohammed Bouyeri, for example – unemployment and school dropout numbers were not only highlighted but also considered as the ultimate proof that the multicultural ideal was a left-wing utopia that has crashed and burned.
The members of a parliamentary commission on integration policy, led by the then VVD MP Stef Blok, which concluded that integration had been a completely or partially successful barely escaped being tarred and feathered. Their findings, it was assumed, simply could not and should not be true.
With hindsight. the commission’s conclusions were right: there were all sorts of problems and disadvantages but all the trends pointed in the right direction.
And now, 15 years later, despite the dominant pessimism about integration, the children of low-skilled labour migrants are continuing to do better, both in education and the jobs market.
In 2016, socio-cultural thinktank SCP found that Turkish, Moroccan, Surinamese and Antillean representation in the crime stats had almost halved since 2006.
A survey by the same think tank published at the end of last year showed that a considerable number of Dutch people, particularly those with a lower level of education and the elderly, are paying scant attention to these facts and continue to think that newcomers are barely integrating.
Over half think that former migrant workers and colonial migrants from Suriname and the Antilles should adopt ‘Dutch cultural traditions’ and distance themselves from their own. Many also think ‘they’ are out to ‘do away with’ ‘our’ traditions, such as blackface Zwarte Piet.
An 80% majority think migrants should, at any rate, adopt ‘Dutch values and norms’. That is not an unreasonable stance, and is certainly valid when it comes to learning the language, paying tax and abiding by the law but on closer inspection many people take it to means something completely different.
To them ‘Dutch values and norms’ are unique cultural characteristics which, they assume, are new to immigrants and their children. Many of these values are in fact not so uniquely Dutch and many newcomers have similar outlooks. Moreover, many Dutch citizens do not share such lauded ideals of women’s and gay rights, as radical right-wing Tweets and Facebook entries demonstrate every single day.
And lastly, a Dutch person with a migration background is, like any other citizen, perfectly entitled to question certain traditions, such as the blackface Pete.
But as long as people perpetuate the artificial division between ‘them’ and ‘us’ they contribute, perhaps unwittingly, to the exclusion of immigrants. It should not come as a surprise that the children of many immigrants are saying they have done their bit to integrate and that it is now up to the majority to do theirs.
Journalists, commentators and politicians should finally shake off the Fortuyn trauma and stop treating immigrants to this country as a separate category. That would not only recognise the true measure of integration but also contribute to a more pleasant and healthier social climate.
Good commentary regarding some of the causes of the hostility of many Americans to immigration, largely based on misperceptions and not the actual evidence, and the contrast with Canadian support based on immigration that favours skilled workers.
Given US discussions of their H1-B visa program (workers for the tech industry), not convinced that this would change anti-immigration discourse much:
Public opinion about immigration is hard to understand. Americans express more favorable views toward immigration since Donald Trump was elected president:
But these poll numbers come with several caveats. First, the surge in support for immigration might simply be a reactionto the xenophobia of the Trump administration and could fade after he leaves office. Second, the polls say little about the salience of the issue to the two sides; opponents of immigration might be more motivated than advocates, and thus fight harder. Finally, it’s worth noting that even now, those who support decreasing immigration outnumber those who back increasing it. And this data is just for the U.S.; other countries may be going in the opposite direction.
Why does the public seem to have an anti-immigration bias? The bulk of the data shows that immigrants, at least in the U.S., are a healthy and positive force. They are highly upwardly mobile. They make outsized contributions to technology and industry. They don’t push down the wages of native-born workers and in the case of high-skilled immigrants they even raise them. They commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. They pay plenty of taxes that help support local and state governments. They revitalize dying small towns and blighted neighborhoods. Why are so many Americans wary of what seems on paper like an unadulterated good?
One possible reason is that Americans, though more positive toward diversity than those in many other countries, also worry that their culture will be diluted by newcomers. Racial prejudice toward immigrants from nonwhite countries plays a role as well. And politics may also be a factor; because children of immigrants tend to vote for the Democrats, Republicans may fear that immigration poses a threat to their electoral strength.
But on top of all this, anti-immigration sentiment may be intertwined with suspicion of the welfare state. People may overestimate the amount of public resources spent on immigrants. And they may be less willing to distribute government benefits to people from other countries.
That’s the upshot of a recent paper by economists Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano and Stefanie Stantcheva. The authors conducted detailed surveys with 24,000 native-born people in six developed Western countries — the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Sweden and Italy. What they discovered is a pervasive tangle of misperceptions.
First, native-born people in all the countries surveyed tend to substantially overestimate the number of immigrants. Across the entire demographic and political spectrum, people said that the share of immigrants in their countries was about 10 to 15 percentage points higher than it actually was. They also tended to make mistakes about the people coming in, overestimating the share of Muslim immigrants and underestimating the share of Christian ones (except in France). And they tended to underestimate immigrants’ share of the highly educated workforce. The researchers also found that people tended to assume that immigrants receive more welfare benefits than the native-born.
So many people in rich countries seem to think of immigration much the way it’s depicted on the famous poem on the Statue of Liberty — a tired, hungry, poor huddled mass. Even those who normally support the welfare state might be inclined to curb benefits if their country was faced with such a teeming horde of needy newcomers. That inclination will be even stronger among those who don’t like the idea of the welfare state in the first place, who blame the poor for their poverty, who simply don’t care about foreigners, or who buy into racist stereotypes. In a follow-up paper, Alesina and Stancheva show mathematically how all of these factors combine to reduce support for welfare.
Sure enough, Alesina and his colleagues found that when they ask people questions about immigration before asking them about redistribution (rather than afterward), their support for the welfare state goes down. Unsurprisingly, the effect is stronger among conservatives.
So immigration seems likely to reduce support for redistribution. But advanced countries all have big welfare states and are unlikely to abandon them up any time soon. Instead, it seems likely that many will try to shut the gates to foreigners instead.
Those who know the benefits of immigration will have trouble formulating a response. Information campaigns telling people that immigrants are a net fiscal positive seem unlikely to work (the Alesina study, for example, found that respondents weren’t very interested in learning actual facts after the survey was over). Campaigning against racism and negative stereotypes of the undeserving poor may help, but changing deep-seated attitudes is always an uphill battle.
One approach might be to admit more skilled immigrants. Studies show that educated immigrants contribute much more in tax revenue than they take out; most people instinctively know that engineers or doctors are not likely to claim welfare benefits.
Tilting the immigration system toward skilled workers, as Canada and other countries do, won’t just help keep government coffers flush — it might help preserve broad support for both immigration and the welfare state, even in the face of stubborn public misperceptions.
The ongoing challenge of better and more timely data that can be best achieved through linking data, and the privacy and consent concerns, where government is held to a much higher standard:
On December 9, 2019, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada published the results of an investigation into complaints that Statistics Canada had requested from a credit institution and Canadian banks the personal information on financial transactions of banking customers without notifying those customers. This clearly raises the issue of big-data mining by public authorities – the marriage of Big Brother and Big Data – with regard to the protection of privacy.
Let us recall the facts: Seeking to measure household debt more precisely, Statistics Canada reached an agreement with TransUnion, which agreed to forward files covering close to 24 million Canadians. The files included personal credit ratings along with identifying elements (name, address, date of birth, social insurance number, etc.). Statistics Canada was then able to link this data (600 pieces of information) with data from its own surveys, such as the census. In addition, Statistics Canada asked Canadian banks to provide it with information on all transactions carried out by a sample of 500,000 households.
The Canadian Bankers Association (CBA), which Statistics Canada first approached, said that it was reluctant to respond to such a request because of the burden it placed on banks, but mostly because complying meant that they would violate their privacy standards. A Global News report on October 26, 2018, blew the whistle. The chief statistician was called up before the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology, and an investigation was launched by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. The Financial Transactions project, for which no data had yet been transferred, was immediately suspended. TransUnion also stopped forwarding information.
According to the results of the investigation, those whose information had been shared had not been notified. In the first case, TransUnion put a note in people’s files, but nobody told them it was there. (Only if they asked to see their file for some other reason could they discover it.) In the case of the project with the banks, Statistics Canada had not planned to notify the selected households. In both projects, Statistics Canada claims to have complied with the Privacy Act. The organization also claims to have relied on section 13 of the Statistics Act, which requires any person responsible for documents or archives, public or private, to transmit them to Statistics Canada if such a request is made. The Commissioner concluded from his investigation that the Credit Information Project did comply with existing law and that the complaint on this subject was thus “not well founded.” In the case of the Financial Transactions Project, he concluded – against the opinion of Statistics Canada – that what was asked for went beyond the transmission of pre-existing documents or archives and involved the creation of new files. However, since no data had yet been transmitted, the Commissioner did not see fit to accept the complaint. That said, he expressed several concerns and made six recommendations, two of which call on Statistics Canada to refrain from going ahead with both projects as designed.
These two projects offer an example of linkage between big data as a by-product of transactions and interactions carried out for private purposes and information obtained through surveys to which citizens are obliged to answer. The scale of Statistics Canada’s projects is impressive and suggests that the revolution associated with Big Data is now affecting national statistical offices, hitherto hesitant to join it due to methodological scruples and ethical constraints. Section 13 of the Statistics Act, conceived of at a time when statistical treatment of documents and archives was limited by their physical nature, presents unforeseen potential. It is also clear from the results of the investigation that Statistics Canada’s requests rested upon a particularly broad interpretation of this section of the law. The Privacy Commissioner therefore considers that the legal framework applying to the collection of “big-data administrative data” from the private sector is outdated and suggests that the legislator review the Statistics Act respecting this matter.
On the other hand, the problems that the Statistics Act could pose would no doubt be lesser, according to the Commissioner, “if the Privacy Act were not so out of date.” In 2016, he proposed that it be amended “to explicitly require compliance with the criteria of necessity and proportionality in the context of any collection of personal information.” In fact, even if Statistics Canada agreed to demonstrate the “necessity” of the information sought in these and other projects and the “proportionality” of the means used to obtain these data, the agency is not legally required to do so.
Finally, beyond legal amendments, the Commissioner’s report presents recommendations that are inspired by European practices aimed at ensuring the consent of individuals or even at circumventing this problem. They include “civic data sharing,” which is based on prior consent, “algorithm-to-the-data,” which means only anonymized results are transferred by the private enterprise to public authorities, and “privacy-preserving computation,” which also amounts to anonymizing information at the source. The first method resembles in all respects the position of the Harper government with regard to the long-form census. The other two would interfere with the type of data linkage that Statistics Canada envisioned.
Much has been made in recent years of the necessary independence of Statistics Canada from government. If the Office of the Commissioner’s report presents a less-than-sympathetic and somewhat authoritarian image of the agency, it is at least reassuring that Statistics Canada is accountable to a parliamentary committee, that it had to collaborate with the Office of the Commissioner to improve its practices and that a report was made public. The whole affair illustrates how big-data mining poses new challenges for official statistics when it comes to the trade-off between privacy rights and evidence-based policy-making.
Will be interesting to see the results and program:
A “brave” new programme that tests a group of British children for unconscious racial bias will air later this year on Channel 4.
The two-part series will put a class of 11 and 12-year-old pupils through a series of tests at their London comprehensive school in a bid to discover why racial equality has yet to be achieved.
With the working title The Segregation Experiment, the multicultural class of year seven pupils will take part in games, exercises and activities, both inside and out of the classroom, that will challenge everything they thought they knew about race.
The programme is based on pioneering American schemes and the children will be led by leading multicultural education academics and scientists, Channel 4 said.
It will start with the pupils taking a bespoke version of the Harvard Implicit Association Test, considered a benchmark test for unconscious racial bias.
Social psychologist Professor Rhiannon Turner, Queens University Belfast, said that “tests have revealed that children as young as six are aware of racial differences but, as a society, we do not talk about them and often take a colour-blind approach to race.
“Is our failure to discuss race part of the problem?
“This ground-breaking experiment will look at if it is possible to eradicate bias.”
Channel 4’s head of factual entertainment Alf Lawrie said: “This brave series tackles head on the issue of unconscious racial bias.
“Its important findings apply beyond just schools, to society at large.”
The programme has been described as “gripping, shocking and funny in equal measure” by executive producer David DeHaney from production company Proper Content.
He added that “the kids really throw themselves in and attempt to tackle issues adults wouldn’t dare”.
Le gouvernement chinois profite de sa puissance économique pour attaquer avec une intensité inédite le système international de protection des droits de l’homme, a estimé mardi 14 janvierl’organisation Human Rights Watch (HRW), en appelant les démocraties à réagir.
« Le gouvernement chinois mène une intense offensive contre le système international de protection des droits de l’homme, (…) la plus intense qu’on ait vue depuis l’émergence de ce système au milieu du XXe siècle », a déclaré depuis New York Kenneth Roth, directeur exécutif de l’ONG, en présentant son rapport annuel, qui couvre une centaine de pays.
En Chine, le parti communiste a bâti « un Etat policier orwellien high-tech et un système sophistiqué de censure de l’Internet pour surveiller et supprimer les critiques publiques », a écrit M. Roth dans ce document de 650 pages, qui dénonce notamment « le système cauchemardesque » de répression instauré contre les musulmans du Xinjiang.
« Menace existentielle » sur les droits humains
A l’étranger, le gouvernement chinois « utilise son influence économique croissante pour museler les critiques », selon l’organisation.
« Si d’autres gouvernements commettent des entorses graves aux droits de l’homme, aucun autre gouvernement ne montre les muscles avec autant de vigueur et de détermination pour saper les normes internationales des droits humains et les institutions qui pourraient les soutenir. »
M. Roth avait espéré présenter ce rapport cinglant depuis Hongkong. Mais il a été refoulé dimanche en arrivant dans ce territoire semi-autonome, secoué depuis sept mois par des manifestations prodémocratie qui dénoncent une ingérence croissante de Pékin dans les affaires de l’ex-colonie britannique.
Human Rights Watch dénonce l’inaction, voire la complicité d’autres pays face à cette « menace existentielle » que fait peser Pékin sur les droits de l’homme, selon elle.
« Plusieurs gouvernements sur lesquels on pouvait compter pour que leur politique étrangère défende les droits de l’homme au moins une partie du temps ont largement abandonné cette cause », affirme l’organisation.
« Certains dirigeants comme le président américain Donald Trump, le premier ministre indien Narendra Modi et le président brésilien Jair Bolsonaro brident le même ensemble de lois protégeant les droits humains que la Chine, galvanisant leur public en combattant les “mondialistes” qui osent suggérer que tous les gouvernements devraient respecter les mêmes normes. »
Reproches faits à l’UE ou à l’ONU
L’Union européenne, « occupée par le Brexit, handicapée par des Etats membres nationalistes et divisée sur les migrants », en prend aussi pour son grade, ne défendant plus les droits de l’homme comme avant.
HRW reproche notamment à Emmanuel Macron de « ne pas avoir mentionné publiquement les droits de l’homme » lors de sa visite en Chine en novembre.
Les dirigeants de l’ONU, où Pékin fait tout pour éviter que la situation au Xinjiang soit discutée, sont aussi pointés du doigt. M. Roth reproche notamment à son secrétaire général, Antonio Guterres, de ne pas avoir voulu « demander publiquement que la Chine mette fin à l’emprisonnement massif de musulmans » au Xinjiang.
Plus généralement, HRW accuse gouvernements, entreprises et universités de préférer se taire plutôt que de risquer de perdre l’accès à l’immense marché chinois.
Human Rights Watch appelle les démocraties à s’unir pour contrer les efforts Pékin contre les droits humains, en gelant par exemple les comptes bancaires à l’étranger de tous les responsables impliqués dans la répression au Xinjiang.
L’ONG les appelle aussi à conditionner toute visite d’Etat de dirigeants chinois à « de véritables progrès en matière de droits de l’homme ».
Hundreds of people across Canada are rounding out the worst week of their lives. They are the friends and family of passengers aboard Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, who perished randomly and pointlessly because the Iranian military, by its telling, made a mistake.
Politics usually doesn’t matter in the worst week of your life, when grief insulates you from the normal noise of partisan theatre and governmental affairs. The exception, however, might be when the worst week of your life is intrinsically political: When an American contractor is killed in Iraq, so air strikes are carried out in Syria and Iraq, so the U.S. embassy is stormed in Baghdad, so an Iranian military commander is killed, so a plane is shot out of the sky, so suddenly, you’re on the phone with your wife’s life insurance provider. The haze of grief might break for a few political observances in that case, even if it happens to be the worst week of your life.
To the extent that political gestures resonate in these situations, there are few “right” things a leader can do and just about an infinite number of wrong ones. The last time Canada experienced a crisis of this type and magnitude – the Air India disaster of 1985, when a bomb exploded aboard Flight 182, where a majority of victims were Canadian – Canadian leadership chose a number of wrong ones.
In the aftermath of that crash, prime minister Brian Mulroney phoned India’s prime minister to offer his condolences, as if the tragedy wasn’t a patently Canadian one. Mr. Mulroney’s government was slow to set up a hotline for victims’ families, slow to provide information and slow to connect personally with those who lost loved ones. “Mr. Mulroney has not sent condolences to the individuals [affected] by the crash,” a spokesperson for the families was quoted in The Globe and Mail nearly a month after the explosion. The article also noted that since Mr. Mulroney was on vacation, the families would likely meet with a senior adviser instead.
Since then, and particularly in recent days, the Canadian government has proven it has learned from the mistakes of the Air India disaster. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has stood in front of cameras almost daily since Wednesday’s crash, and Foreign Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne has been tweeting updates on visa approvals for Canadian officials seeking to go to Iran. A national hotline for relatives and friends of victims was set up within days.
Mr. Trudeau’s personal statements have also hit just the right notes; he has been outraged for those who need to see their anger reflected in leadership, and sorrowful for those who need to see their pain acknowledged and understood. Partisans have already chalked up Mr. Trudeau’s empathy to skilled acting on the part of a former drama teacher, which is a fine way for curmudgeons to console themselves while ignoring the actual impact Mr. Trudeau has had on affected individuals – which, based on their telling, has been profound.
The Trudeau government has had plenty of communications problems in the past, but it doesn’t appear to be suffering from those issues now. In his first address hours after the crash, when information was still scarce, Mr. Trudeau prudently said that he would not rule out the possibility the plane was shot down, even as the Iranians claimed a missile attack on a commercial plane would have been “impossible.” Even more prudently, Mr. Trudeau later declined to engage with reporters’ questions about whether to blame the United States for escalating the conflict by killing top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.
No doubt the Prime Minister recognizes there is little to be gained, and a whole lot to lose, by taking too strong of a position in terms of blame at this point. While he remains wisely circumspect, the Iranian people, who bravely took to the streets by the thousands over the weekend, are clear about who they hold responsible. The chief executive of Maple Leaf Foods, meanwhile, posted a Twitter thread Sunday evening in which he condemned the “narcissist in Washington” for escalating tensions leading to the crossfire killings.
These are fair positions for individual citizens to take, and reckless ones for a political leader in the early days after a disaster. To his credit, Mr. Trudeau has resisted invitations to wade in, and has instead remained focused on the victims, their families and the profound loss for Canada as a nation. If nothing else, that has to make at least a small difference to the Canadians currently grappling with the worst week of their lives.
Let us recall the facts: Seeking to measure household debt more precisely, Statistics Canada reached an agreement with TransUnion, which agreed to forward files covering close to 24 million Canadians. The files included personal credit ratings along with identifying elements (name, address, date of birth, social insurance number, etc.). Statistics Canada was then able to link this data (600 pieces of information) with data from its own surveys, such as the census. In addition, Statistics Canada asked Canadian banks to provide it with information on all transactions carried out by a sample of 500,000 households.
Multicultural Meanderings 