Five years on, Trudeau’s vow to build a diverse public service still unfulfilled

2020/06/13 Leave a comment

I find this report unbalanced and does not reflect that the government largely met its commitment to increase diversity in appointments as I wrote in 2019 (Taking stock of Ottawa’s diversity promises) while public service diversity continues to increase for women and visible minorities for both employees and executives albeit at a slow but steady pace.

The main issue is with respect to Black Canadians at senior levels and I will be looking at data to take this concern from the anecdotal and symbolic (only one Black DM) to quantify the occupational groups and levels where this is most prevalent, as well as looking at other relatively under-represented particular visible minority groups.

I agree with Michael Wernick that while the employment equity act is ripe for a review, opening it up would indeed be a hornet’s nest. And looking back over the over 30 years of EE data, hard to argue that it has not been a success in improving representation given its focus on representation:

When they took power in 2015, the Trudeau Liberals promised to “build a government that looks like Canada.”

But their government, now in its second mandate, still hasn’t hired enough minority senior staff members to truly reflect the country’s diverse makeup.

Only four chiefs of staff to 37 ministers are people of colour — roughly 11 per cent of the total — while they constitute more than 22 per cent of the national population, according to the last census in 2016.

As protests against anti-black racism — triggered by George Floyd’s police custody killing in Minneapolis — have grown in size and spread around the globe, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been talking more about “systemic” racism in Canadian institutions. The prime minister also kneeled in a crowd of anti-racism protesters in Ottawa last Friday as a symbolic gesture of support for their calls for change.

“Systemic racism is an issue right across the country, in all our institutions, including in all our police forces, including in the RCMP. That’s what systemic racism is,” Trudeau said Thursday morning.

“Here are the facts in Canada. Anti-black racism is real, unconscious bias is real, systemic discrimination is real,” the prime minister said in a speech in the House of Commons last week, vowing that his government is committed to breaking down barriers and providing opportunities for marginalized communities.

The lack of diversity among Liberal staffers was keenly felt by Omer Aziz, who worked briefly as an adviser to Chrystia Freeland when she was foreign affairs minister.

“I would go into meetings and I’m the only non-white person there. I felt that when I would raise my voice and give my advice, that it wasn’t taken seriously,” Aziz told CBC.

“That is eventually why I left what was my dream job.”

Getting better … slowly

Other senior staffers told CBC that while being one of just a few people of colour around the table may not be an ideal job situation, diversity in the higher ranks of the federal public service has come a long way in the past decade.

The government is also responsible for appointing people to hundreds of bodies outside the core public service, such as agency boards, foreign missions and Crown corporations.

The Trudeau Liberals reformed that hiring process early in its first mandate to serve its goal of attracting diverse applicants. The result: a dramatically improved ratio of people of colour to other hires, from 4.3 per cent when the Liberals were elected in 2015 to 8.2 per cent as of June 2020.

As for the most senior civil servants (deputy and associate deputy ministers), the number coming from diverse backgrounds is still less than 10 per cent of the total — so low that the Privy Council Office won’t release the figure, arguing it would compromise privacy rights because it would be easy to work out who these senior civil servants are.

‘You have to represent’

“We are in 2020. How come it took so long? It shouldn’t have,” said Caroline Xavier, the only Black person serving as an associate deputy minister in the federal government. She was appointed to the post at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada back in February.

“Sometimes the burden is heavy because you have to represent. It’s a burden I’m prepared to take on because it’s my job to open more doors for others.”

Xavier said there’s no easy solution, but conversations about breaking down barriers “are happening” within government.”There is a recognition at the most senior levels that this has got to be rectified.”The federal government fares far better when it comes to appointing women; the ranks of deputy ministers and other high-level positions are close to gender parity now.

The Trudeau government isn’t the first to pursue greater diversity in the upper ranks of the public service.

In 2000, a task force struck to look into the participation of people of colour in the federal public service cited an “urgent imperative to shape a federal public service that is representative of its citizenry.”

Seven years later, the Senate published a report on employment equity in the public service with the title: “Not There Yet.” Ten years after that, in 2017, a Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat task force reported that “many gaps in representation persist in the executive category … the very leaders who shape and influence the culture of federal organizations are not sufficiently diverse.”

‘People don’t want to admit that’s going on’

Since 2000, there has been a slow but steady increase in the number of Canadians of colour in the public service — from just under six per cent of the total then, to more than 16 per cent today.

But annual employment equity reports and the census show that Black civil servants, along with Filipinos and Latinos, are still grouped at the lower end of the salary ladder.

Liberal MP Greg Fergus, chair of the parliamentary Black caucus, told CBC News this week that he wants to see the government address that disparity.

“It doesn’t make sense that there’s been no Black deputy ministers — you can’t convince me that there aren’t Black people who are competent,” he said. “But there’s something that went into the calculation over time, that that person didn’t make the right fit, or didn’t get that promotion. We can justify any individual decision, but when you aggregate all these decisions, you end up with a biased result.

“Those are the things that we’ve got to take a look at. But it’s hard to do the things which are hard to do. And it’s hard to see bias. People don’t want to admit that’s going on.”

Trudeau has tasked his parliamentary secretary, Ontario MP Omar Alghabra, with looking at public service renewal. While the Black Lives Matter protests have given the file more urgency, the government has no clear plan yet.

Sharon DeSousa has suggestions. A regional executive vice president with the Public Service Alliance of Canada, she served on the 2017 task force on diversity in the public service. She points out that only one recommendation out of 43 was implemented.”We keep having committees and reports and, to be honest, we’re coming up with the same data,” DeSousa said.”We’ve got systemic barriers and we need to address them,” she said, adding that if the Liberals were serious about going after unconscious bias, they would take a hard look at how data on hiring are being collected, and the problems baked into legislation like the Employment Equity Act.

A ‘hornet’s nest’

The Employment Equity Act hasn’t been updated in nearly two decades and still uses the broad term “visible minorities” — a phrase the United Nations has called discriminatory because it lacks nuance and assumes the experience of a Black employee is the same as that of a South Asian one.

Former head of the privy council Michael Wernick said he believes now is the time to look at changing legislation.

“I think to get at issues in the 2020s, you’re going to want to dig down into each of those communities and have more precise strategies for them,” Wernick said, adding that employment equity laws are still an important tool for promoting diversity.

Still, he said, opening the act up for debate could be like turning over a “hornet’s nest” and coming to a consensus won’t be easy.The Liberals also have flirted with the concept of “name blind” recruitment for the public service — the practice of concealing a candidate’s name to protect those with more ethnic-sounding names from conscious or unconscious bias in the hiring process.A pilot project in 2017 produced a report suggesting name blind recruitment made no difference to outcomes, which prompted former Treasury Board president Scott Brison to declare that “the project did not uncover bias.”

But it turned out the methodology was flawed. Departments had volunteered to take part in the pilot and knew their hiring decisions would be evaluated.

The Public Service Commission is still examining other random recruitment processes.

Some factors that serve to prevent people of colour from being hired by the federal government — the country’s largest single employer — are harder to work around, said Andrew Griffith, a former director-general with Citizenship and Immigration Canada who has written extensively about the issue.

“There’s a preference in the public service to hire Canadian citizens and not all visible minorities have become citizens yet,” Griffith said. He said he believes that factor narrows the gap between the diversity of the general population and that of the federal public service.

Other factors that could be frustrating the push for a more diverse public service, he said, are language requirements and a need for regional representation in parts of Canada that are not so diverse.

That second factor could be less of a problem in the longer term, with a pandemic crisis forcing many civil servants to work from home. But Griffith said getting into government work is “just a long convoluted process.”

Source: Five years on, Trudeau’s vow to build a diverse public service still unfulfilled

Filed under Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Economics, Dominated by White Men, Is Roiled by Black Lives Matter

2020/06/12 Leave a comment

Tone deaf and blindness about socioeconomic realities:

The national protests seeking an end to systemic discrimination against black Americans have given new fuel to a racial reckoning in economics, a discipline dominated by white men despite decades of efforts to open greater opportunity for women and nonwhite men.

A growing chorus of economists is seeking to dislodge the editor of a top academic publication, the University of Chicago economist Harald Uhlig, after he criticized the Black Lives Matter organization on Twitter and equated its members with “flat earthers” over their embrace of calls to defund police departments.

Days earlier, the profession’s de facto governing body, the American Economic Association, sent a letter to its members supporting protesters and saying that “we have only begun to understand racism and its impact on our profession and our discipline.” A group of economists, mostly from outside academia, last week hosted an online fund-raising effort for the Sadie Collective, an organization that aims to bring more black women into the field.

Black economists say the events have brought some progress to a field that has long struggled with discrimination in its ranks — and with a refusal by many of its leaders to acknowledge discrimination in the country at large. But the profession remains nowhere close to a full-scale shift on racial issues: On Wednesday, the director of the White House National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow, told reporters, “I don’t believe there is systemic racism in the U.S.”

Black Americans are vastly underrepresented among economics students and professors, a wide range of data have shown. There are no black editors of the most prestigious economics journals. There are no black professors in the main economics department at Chicago, Mr. Uhlig’s employer, which is one of the most storied departments in the country.

In a survey of economists released by the American Economic Association last year, only 14 percent of black economists agreed with the statement that “people of my race/ethnicity are respected within the field.”

As protests against discrimination have grown in recent days, a conversation has erupted — often led by black economists — over how the lack of diversity has left the profession ill equipped for a moment where policymakers are seeking ideas on how to combat racial inequality in policing, employment and other areas.

“Hopefully, this moment will cause economists to reflect and rethink how we study racial disparities,” the Howard University economist William Spriggs wrote to colleagues in an open letterthat was posted this week on the website of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

“Trapped in the dominant conversation, far too often African American economists find themselves having to prove that African Americans are equal,” he continued. “We find ourselves, as so often happens in these ugly police cases, having to prove that acts of discrimination are exactly that — discrimination.”

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , , ,

Walmart to change policy that saw ‘multicultural’ beauty products in locked display cases

2020/06/12 Leave a comment

Of note and overdue:

Walmart Inc will stop keeping personal care products designed for people of colour in locked display cases, the retailer said, after the practice drew flak online with many saying it suggested customers for these products cannot be trusted.

“We have made the decision to discontinue placing multicultural hair care and beauty products in locked cases,” the company said in an e-mail statement on Wednesday.

Walmart said the practice was in place in about a dozen of its 4,700 stores in the United States and the cases were in place to deter shoplifters from products such as electronics, automotive, cosmetics and other personal care products.

The criticism of the retailer comes at a time when the United States has been rocked by protests against racial discrimination, following the killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, on May 25.

The change in Walmart’s policy was prompted by a June 8 CBS News report that a Walmart customer had complained of the practice being discriminatory against people of colour, while visiting a store in the city of Denver.

“The multicultural hair care is all locked behind the glass. That’s so ridiculous,” Lauren Epps, a Black woman was quoted as saying in the report.

Many companies have issued statements in support of the Black community, in addition to setting up funds to fight systematic racism.

Walmart Chief Executive Doug McMillon has said the company, along with Walmart Foundation, will commit $100-million to create a new centre on racial equity.

Source: Walmart to change policy that saw ‘multicultural’ beauty products in locked display cases

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

@KonradYakabuski François Legault’s denial of systemic racism reveals Quebec’s great divide

2020/06/12 Leave a comment

Good commentary on the new “two solitudes” of Quebec::

When Dominique Anglade became the Leader of the Quebec Liberal Party last month, a historic step forward for equality was buried under an avalanche of sad statistics as the province grappled with Canada’s worst COVID-19 outbreak.

Ms. Anglade, who won the job by acclamation after the only other candidate in the race dropped out, is the first woman to lead the party in its 153-year history. She is also Black and the daughter of Haitian immigrants in a province whose top institutions are still dominated by white men descended from 17th-century French colonists.

Still, Ms. Anglade’s odds of winning next election remain low. The QLP holds no ridings outside of non-francophone Quebec. Recent polls place support for Premier François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec at more than 60 per cent among francophone voters. The QLP barely cracks double digits. Although all but two of her 15 predecessors as leader went on to serve as premier, Ms. Anglade faces a steep challenge if she is to avoid becoming the third.

Such is the extent to which Mr. Legault has come to dominate Quebec politics since the party he founded in 2011 won power 20 months ago. His approval rating was slightly dented as the coronavirus death toll mounted in long-term care homes, but it remains through the roof. Not since René Lévesque have Quebeckers seemed to like their premier this much.

This explains why Mr. Legault was in no hurry last week to concede that systemic racism exists within Quebec society. Unlike Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who quickly changed his tune after initially denying the existence of systemic racism in Canada, Mr. Legault has continued to insist there is no “system of discrimination” against visible minorities in Quebec.

Although thousands of people marched in Montreal on Sunday to argue otherwise, Mr. Legault’s own political base is with him on this one. While his refusal to state the obvious drew guffaws among many Montreal-based media commentators, others defended the Premier.

“This murky concept [of systemic racism] has no scientific value. Its principal function is to associate all forms of resistance toward multiculturalism with racism,” prominent Quebecor Media columnist Mathieu Bock-Côté wrote last week. “When you search pseudo-scientific literature on systemic racism, you find that the main proof [offered for] its existence lies in the fact of [others] not recognizing it.”

Quebec nationalists have always dismissed Ottawa’s official policy of multiculturalism as a political strategy aimed at winning votes among ethnic Canadians. So, it should hardly come as a surprise that the concept of systemic racism so eagerly embraced by Prime Minster Justin Trudeau would be a harder sell in Quebec than the rest of Canada.

This was clear in debate over Bill 21, the law Mr. Legault’s government passed last year to ban public-sector employees in positions of authority from wearing religious symbols. The law might easily be held up as an example of systemic discrimination, since it institutionalizes barriers faced by certain Muslim women. But it remains extremely popular among francophone Quebeckers, most of whom live outside Montreal.

The political divide between Montreal, long the home of the province’s anglophone elite, and the rest of Quebec has always been a large one. But it has grown in recent years as the city became the destination for thousands of immigrants from North Africa and Haiti. White francophones who live in Montreal’s hip Plateau Mont-Royal or Rosemont neighbourhoods tend to be far more progressive in their politics than their relatives in the suburbs.

This clash in values between Montrealers and other Quebeckers risks putting the province on a path toward the extreme political polarization that has destabilized the United States and many European countries. Mr. Legault may not need to win over voters in Montreal to keep his job in 2022. But unless he wants his province to descend into civil war, he will need to make greater efforts to bridge the political gap between Montreal and the rest of Quebec.

He took a tentative step in that direction this week by promising to soon release an action plan for combating racism that could include police reforms. But in calling for “quiet evolution” of Quebec society, in contrast to the province’s Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, Mr. Legault appeared to minimize the importance of the issue. He will need to do much better than that.

Source: François Legault’s denial of systemic racism reveals Quebec’s great divide

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

As Protests Grow, Belgium Faces Its Racist Colonial Past

2020/06/12 Leave a comment

Of note:

When it comes to ruthless colonialism and racism, few historical figures are more notorious than Leopold II, the king of the Belgians who held Congo as his personal property and may have been responsible for the deaths of millions of Congolese more than a century ago.

Yet across Belgium, the monarch’s name is still found on streets and tunnels. Cities are dotted with his statues and busts, even as evidence of his misdeeds has piled up over the decades.

Now a reckoning seems to be at hand.

The protests sweeping the world after George Floyd’s death in the U.S. have added fuel to a movement to confront Europe’s role in the slave trade and its colonial past. Leopold is increasingly seen as a stain on the nation where he reigned from 1865 to 1909. Demonstrators want him removed from public view.

In just the last week, a long-running trickle of dissent that resulted in little more than occasional vandalism has turned into a torrent, with statues of Leopold defaced in a half-dozen cities. In the port town of Antwerp, where much of the Congolese rubber, minerals and other natural riches entered the nation, one statue was burned and had to be removed for repairs. It is unclear whether it will ever come back.

“When you erect a statue, it lauds the actions of who is represented. The Germans would not get it into their head to erect statues of Hitler and cheer them,” said Mireille-Tsheusi Robert, president of the Congolese action group Bamko-Cran, which wants all Leopold statues removed from Belgian cities. “For us, Leopold has committed a genocide.”

On Wednesday, an internet petition to rid the capital, Brussels, of any Leopold statue swept past 70,000 signatures. Also this week, regional education authorities promised history course reforms to better explain the true character of colonialism. And at the University of Mons in southern Belgium, academic authorities removed a bust of the king, saying they wanted to make sure “nobody could be offended by its presence.”

Similar efforts are unfolding in Britain, where at least two statues of prominent figures connected to the slave trade have been taken down by protesters or city officials. London’s mayor has promised a review of all monuments.

Leopold ruled Congo as a fiefdom, forcing many of its people into slavery to extract resources for his personal profit. His early rule, starting in 1885, was famous for its brutality, which some experts say left as many as 10 million dead.

After his ownership of Congo ended in 1908, he handed the central African country over to the Belgian state, which continued to hold sway over an area 75 times its size until the nation became independent in 1960.

Leopold has come to symbolize the racism and inequality citizens of Congolese descent have had to endure. Next to the royal palace stands an equestrian statue with Leopold gazing solemnly toward the horizon. On Wednesday, his hands and eyes were covered with red paint, and expletives were spray-painted on the side of the monument.

Maximilian Christiaens, an architect with a Congolese mother and Belgian father, who came to see the statue after the defacing, realizes the issue is part of his identity. Since Congo achieved independence, Belgium’s Congolese population has swelled to about 230,000 in a nation of 11 million.

“You know, we feel at home here, but seeing symbols like this in the city and all over the country gives us the opposite signal,” Christiaens said. He would like to see them torn down.

A similar struggle is playing out in the majestic woods east of Brussels in Tervuren, where the palatial Royal Museum for Central Africa stands. It was built over a century ago to glorify Leopold’s colonial exploits and to convince Belgium citizens that their country was delivering civilization to the heart of wild Africa.

Museum Director Guido Gryseels fully understands the challenges and the sensitivities, especially after a Leopold statue was defaced in the gardens outside the museum last week. He has sought to shift the museum’s views on colonialism into a contemporary reassessment of a flawed past. This week, the Black Lives Matter logo was displayed on digital screens at the museum entrance.

As part of a major renovation he oversaw, Gryseels consigned the racist statues of Congolese and the glorifying busts of the Belgian military to the “depot” of outdated sculptures in the museum’s cellars.

“We wanted to keep them somewhere so that the visitors could still see, so that we could explain: ‘This is how we looked at Africa before,’” Gryseels said.

Upstairs, in the grand rooms, the only bust of Leopold on display is made of ivory and aims to explain how the plunder of the country extended to the wholesale slaughter of elephants.

As a listed architectural treasure, Leopold’s royal double L monogram is still plastered all over the building. But Congolese artists have been asked to make a counterpoint, and in the main hall now stands a sculpture of a skull of a Congolese chief who was beheaded by a Belgian. In front of statues that could not be moved because they were protected, there are now transparent drapes with images criticizing Belgian actions in Congo.

“It would have been impossible 30 years ago, but there is a step forward,” Robert said. Still, she said the changes do not go far enough and the museum needs to better embrace Congolese in its management structure.

Just about everybody acknowledges that Belgian society needs to take a hard look at its past. The Catholic church, the dominant force in education during much of Belgium’s existence, was at worst an active participant in colonialism, at best a passive bystander. And since many Belgians had family members who went to Congo to seek their fortunes, there is a sense of unease in confronting the history of racism and exploitation.

“The amnesia is linked to the money the Belgians made in Congo,” Robert said.

For many years, Belgian colonial authorities peddled the idea that the king went to Congo to stop the slave trade, Gryseels said, when it was really “a pretext to make big economic gains.”

Source: As Protests Grow, Belgium Faces Its Racist Colonial Past

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

@TrueNorthCentre 76% of Canadians want a total pause on immigration: Fake poll or fake news?

2020/06/12 Leave a comment

With her usual sensationalist style, Candice Malcom reports on the findings of a poll commissioned by the True North Centre.

However, first of all, the company “ONE” does not appear to have a website according to a Google search and is not known by industry professionals I consulted.

So is the company named “ONE” just one person and if so, who?

Secondly, the poll question was with respect to a temporary pause not a total pause, two very different questions. For Malcolm to mischaracterize as a total pause is irresponsible and unethical at best.

Hard not to think of this as just clickbait to solicit donations to True North ongoing overly simplistic conservative commentary on immigration and related issues:

The majority of Canadians want to close the borders and pause immigration into the country until the coronavirus threat has passed and until Canada’s economy has fully recovered, according to a recent scientific poll commissioned by True North.

Three quarters (76%) of Canadians polled by ONE, a research company based out of Toronto, strongly agree or moderately agree with the statement: Canada should temporarily pause immigration until a vaccine is developed for coronavirus and the unemployment rate drops down to pre-coronavirus levels.

The survey shows a vast consensus to the immigration pause among all regions, age groups, education levels, income levels, political party preference and in both official languages.

Two-thirds of Canadians who voted Liberal (67%) in the 2019 federal election support the statement, as do two-thirds of NDP voters (66%). The consensus is even stronger among Conservative voters, as 67% strongly agree and another 22% moderately agree. Likewise, 48% of Bloc voters strongly agree and 39% moderately agree with the immigration pause.

Canadians similarly agree that Canada’s temporary immigration programs should also be suspended during this time.

Nearly two-thirds (61%) of Canadians surveyed agree that “Canada should temporarily pause the Temporary Foreign Workers program until a vaccine is developed for coronavirus and the unemployment rate drops down to pre-coronavirus levels.”

Back in April, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hinted that life in Canada will not go back to normal until a vaccine is developed. “Normality as it was before will not come back full-on until we get a vaccine for this… that will be a very long way off,” said the prime minister during his daily COVID-19 media performance. “We will have to remain vigilant for at least a year.”

While a vaccine may be years away, Canada’s economy may need even more time to recover. The unemployment rate in February 2020, prior to the coronavirus pandemic and resulting lockdowns, was 5.6%. According to the May 2020 jobs report, Canada’s unemployment rate is at an all-time high of 13.7%.

With millions of Canadians out of work and looking for jobs, the rationale for bringing in temporary foreign workers to fill gaps in the labour market is wearing thin for Canadians. Rather than importing cheap labour from developing countries and risking that those travellers may bring coronavirus with them, this survey shows Canadians would broadly prefer hiring domestically.

There is also confusion around the state of Canada’s immigration system and the policies introduced during the coronavirus lockdown.

Many Canadians wrongly believe that our borders are currently closed and that Canada’s immigration system has been shut down. Trudeau announced border and airport closures and travel restrictions in mid-March, and the mainstream media largely reported that the borders were closed.

Official numbers from the Canadian Border Security Agency (CBSA), however, paint a different picture.

According to the most recent CBSA Traveller Statistics released on June 3, more than one million travellers entered Canada at land border crossings between the period of March 21 and June 2. An additional 763,000 travellers arrived at our international airport during that same week.

CBSA does not release the immigration status of land travellers, but it does for air travellers. Of the 763,000 people who landed at Canadian international airports since Trudeau’s March announcement, only 283,000 were Canadian citizens and 21,000 were Permanent Residents. More than half of the people arriving in Canada — 459,000 — were new immigrants.

This is because the Trudeau government’s travel ban includes wide exemptions for new immigrants, including students, agricultural workers and others who come to Canada through the Temporary Foreign Workers Program.

A recent employment report compiled by the federal government likewise revealed that 13,000 foreign workers were approved to come to Canada between March 15 to May 8, or approximately 1,625 per week.

According to ONE’s research, most Canadians would prefer no immigration for the time being.

ONE surveyed 1,000 Canadians using a national representative sample between June 3 and June 6 in both official languages. The survey was commissioned by True North Centre for Public Policy and the margin of error is +/- 4.3%.

Source: READ MORE

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Ancient Rome Thrived When the Empire Welcomed Immigrants. We Should Remember What Happened When That Changed

2020/06/11 Leave a comment

Leave it to other historians to provide more informed comment but of interest and relevance:

Instances of xenophobia shook the cities, each one worse than the next, in the anxious years of the early fifth-century Roman Empire. Doors were slammed in immigrants’ faces when they asked for food, immigrant family members were kidnapped and beaten on the road, an immigrant house of worship was set on fire. One commentator, taking up his stylus to decry the foreign “pestilence” ravaging his comfortable way of life, won instant applause from Latin-speaking audiences. He twittered about contemporary events with matter-of-fact indifference. “Everyone insults the immigrant,” the poet Claudian said.

Among the many ideas modern societies have inherited from Claudian’s Rome, none has had a more pernicious power than his people’s questionable notion of dividing the world into the civilized and barbarian, us and them. A modern version of that antiquated ideology still holds power. For example, even before the pandemic, Trump adviser Stephen Miller—who, the Southern Poverty Law Center has found, has shared material from white nationalist websites—reportedly scoured the federal law code for novel ways to restrict legalized immigration. The arrival of the novel coronavirus has only intensified the Trump Administration’s priorities, offering a convenient pretext to reduce green cards and tighten the borders.

But history didn’t have to turn out this way. The circumstances that led Western Europe and the U.S. to embrace the worst of classical culture demand a second look, now more than ever.

According to tradition, the once-great and formerly welcoming city of Rome had been founded in the eighth century B.C. as an asylum, a Latin word meaning “sanctuary for refugees.” As Rome grew from monarchy to humble republic to unrivaled empire, the Roman people developed a winning formula for ending wars, fostering stability and achieving widespread, lasting economic success: They extended citizenship to non-residents of the capital.

By any conservative account, Rome’s government did so three times by Claudian’s day: first, in its wars of Italian conquest in the first century B.C.; then, during its aggressive period of colonial expansion in the first and second centuries A.D.; and finally, in 212 A.D., when Emperor Caracalla granted citizenship rights to every free-born person in Rome’s orbit. In this multilingual, multiethnic world of nearly 60 million people—a disturbing number of whom were enslaved—hundreds of thousands of people in Europe, Africa and Asia saw their fortunes improve because of Caracalla’s law.

If you lived at the empire’s frontier, citizenship guaranteed your ability to hear a case before a Roman judge. If you grew up at the border, it ensured that you and your family could not suffer arbitrarily at the hands of slave traders, who stole boys and girls like hungry wolves. Citizenship also promoted a widespread public trust in investment and fostered economic growth. Fides, the Roman god of reliability, always looked favorably on citizens who drew up their contracts in writing, or so the Romans believed.

Citizenship had long worked quieter miracles throughout Rome’s long history. After 25 years of service, veterans were regularly handed a diploma, a bronze certificate “folded in two” that recorded for posterity their hard-won citizenship status. They passed it to their children. Outside the military, individuals earned citizenship when struggling families left the Mediterranean for a more precarious—but potentially more lucrative life—on the frontiers. When they petitioned the government to grant them equal resident status to families in Italy, thankful emperors obliged. As Romans and locals married, the picture of a Roman changed.

But that shift also spawned a backlash, the legacy of which still appeals to racists, xenophobes and white nationalists, many of whom have opted to embrace the worst features of “Western civilization” to justify their own bigotries. When a foreign-born soldier named Maximinus was acclaimed emperor after Caracalla’s law, traditionalists in the Roman Senate resorted to stereotypes to undermine his rule. Pegging him as monstrous “Cyclops,” they groused about his “lowly origin” and implied, one contemporary wrote, that he had won his position “by luck,” not talent.

Stereotyping left a lasting mark on Europe. By the Middle Ages, monks circulated short, alliterative lists, cataloging what they thought to be the worst of foreigners’ supposed behavior, immortalizing tropes they copied from classical writers. Egyptians were evasive, Jews jealous, Gauls gluttons, Saxons stupid. Modern opponents of immigration draw on this same ancient playbook, as if they’re waging a battle against the globe’s new “barbarians.” But they’d better look more closely at the history of what happened to Rome.

After Caracalla’s reform extended citizenship, one generation passed, then the next, but a repeat was not forthcoming. The new waves of new foreigners who wanted a Roman life were met with no such welcome. Even as Rome became noticeably“dependent on the help of these same foreigners for their livelihood” (as the great chronicler of the fourth-century empire, Ammianus, wrote), a more rigid, two-tiered society hardened over time. Citizens and non-citizens lived side-by-side, often in the same towns, but with widely different rights. Roman law variously categorized them as “allies,” “transfers” or “fortunate ones.” Still, no politician ever proposed a policy for releasing them from these second-tier categories.

By Claudian’s day, Rome’s government and its people simply presumed that immigrants would always till their farms, stock their cupboard, and serve at the front lines of the next war, without any reward for their sacrifices. But on Aug. 24, 410, a disgruntled immigrant named Alaric the Goth gave up waiting for change and unleashed a surprise attack on Rome’s unjust empire. Even as the Romans picked up the pieces of their city in the weeks that followed, their political convictions remained stubbornly unchanged. Within a decade, it was widely thought to be more convenient to dissolve the empire than to articulate a strategy for incorporating foreigners within it. By 476, Rome fell apart.

Many policy-makers have drawn the wrong lessons from Alaric’s attack, seeing in it a reason to fear outsiders. But in fact, the long-beating heart of classical civilization had depended on its embrace of immigrants—and for citizens of modern states who aspire to stay united, this turning point in world history invites a closer look.

Source: Ancient Rome Thrived When the Empire Welcomed Immigrants. We Should Remember What Happened When That Changed

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Boycott Beijing Winter Olympics, former top Canadian diplomat to Hong Kong says

2020/06/11 Leave a comment

Among other reasons:

Canada should boycott the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022 in response to China’s imposition of a national security law on Hong Kong, says Canada’s former top diplomat to a city whose freedoms are coming under the increasingly direct control of authorities in mainland China.

Over the past few years, relations have been strained between China and a number of major Winter Olympic medal-winning countries, including the United States, Norway, Sweden, South Korea, Japan and Canada, whose athletes are preparing to compete in Beijing even as China continues to incarcerate Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.

Canada also counts an estimated 300,000 citizens in Hong Kong, where Beijing is extending its control through the introduction of a new law, expected this month, that will criminalize conduct that Chinese authorities consider secession, subversion, terrorism or foreign interference. Ottawa has unsuccessfully sought to pressure Beijing to release Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spavor. It has also criticized the new law for Hong Kong, without any result.

Now, it’s time for Ottawa to make a more assertive response, says John Higginbotham, who from 1989 to 1994 was commissioner for Canada in Hong Kong, a role equivalent to an ambassador. Mr. Higginbotham was previously posted as a diplomat to Beijing.

The next “Winter Games are in February, 2022, not long from now. China wants them badly as the latest pageant of national power and prestige,” he said. Canada should organize a boycott of those Games unless China ”lays off Hong Kong,” he said. With the exception of Russia, he noted, “Winter Olympics are easier to organize a boycott than Summer. Medals are concentrated in a few friendly, cold, democratic countries.”

Others, too, have called for a boycott of the Beijing Games. Advocates for China’s Uyghur population have said it would be wrong for Western athletes to come to Beijing at a time when the largely-Muslim group has been forcibly incarcerated for political indoctrination.

China’s actions toward Hong Kong, which it has promised a high degree of autonomy, have created new concern.

“Boycotting the 2022 Olympics is one of the ways for the world to challenge China’s decision and urge for the withdrawal of this evil law,” said Joshua Wong, one of the most visible young activists in Hong Kong.

”The new security law is just another new weapon for Beijing to leverage political pressure, which puts all Canadians working and living in the city under threat,” he added. To defend “the city’s autonomy and the Canadian interests in this global financial city, I call upon the Canadian government to reconsider Hong Kong’s special treatment and take all necessary actions to oppose the national security law.”

Canada’s foreign ministry referred a question on the 2022 Olympics to Canadian Heritage, which said in a statement: “The decision on whether or not to participate in the Olympic and Paralympic Games lies with the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic committees.” The Canadian Olympic Committee did not respond to a request for comment.

In China, scholars dismissed the possible impact of any Olympics snub. “Unlike small to medium-sized countries, I don’t think a Winter Olympics boycott would bring any detrimental effect to China,” said Wang Yizhou, a prominent Chinese foreign policy thinker who is deputy dean of the school of international studies at Peking University.

Prof. Wang himself raised concern over the impact of Beijing moving too quickly to intrude on Hong Kong’s autonomy. But “I don’t think rising criticism or foreign pressure would wound China,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if some countries decide to quit the Winter Olympics, honestly.”

It’s not the first time people have called for exclusion of an Olympics in China. Across Europe and North America, lawmakers decried the 2008 Summer Games, and some national leaders, including Canada’s Stephen Harper and Germany’s Angela Merkel, declined to attend the opening ceremony.

But Canada and Germany still sent teams to the 2008 Games, which marked a major moment in China’s modern history. The Olympics cast a favourable spotlight on Beijing as a warm host, efficient organizer and co-operative global partner.

Since then, however, views on China have darkened among major Western democracies. China took years of trade measures against Norway after the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to imprisoned dissident writer Liu Xiaobo. Chinese authorities angered Sweden after Gui Minhai, a Hong Kong bookseller with Swedish citizenship, was seized from Thailand and sentenced to prison in China. Japan and South Korea have long-standing frictions with China over territorial disputes. Chinese diplomats have created anger across Europe for comments considered insulting or hostile.

The 2022 Olympics “may well be seen by some governments as a possible pressure point on China,” said Brian Bridges, a scholar of politics and sport who is an affiliate fellow of the Centre of Asian Pacific Studies at Lingnan University.

Against that backdrop, “whether it’s Canada, European governments or the U.S., the idea that they would pull out as a national policy seems far, far more likely” in 2022 than it was in 2008, said Matt Ferchen, head of global China research at the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies.

Canada has participated in Olympics boycotts before. In 1980, it joined the U.S.-led boycott of the Moscow Games as a protest against the Soviet-led invasion of Afghanistan. Conversely, more than two dozen countries boycotted the Montreal Games in protest against a New Zealand rugby tour of South Africa.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-boycott-beijing-winter-olympics-former-top-canadian-diplomat-to-hong/

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Black Lives Matter Is Winning Activists set out to show that police brutality was pervasive. The police have now made that clear.

2020/06/11 Leave a comment

Good piece by Farhad Manjoo:

It’s wondrous, isn’t it, how the people just keep coming out? Day after day, night after night, in dozens of cities, braving a deadly virus and brutal retaliation, they continue to pack the streets in uncountable numbers, demanding equality and justice — and, finally, prompting what feels like real change.

How did this happen? How did Black Lives Matter, a hashtag-powered movement that has been building for years, bring America to what looks like a turning point?

I have a theory: The protests exploded in scale and intensity because the police seemed to go out of their way to illustrate exactly the arguments that Black Lives Matter has been raising online since 2013.

For the last two weeks, the police reaction to the movement has been so unhinged, and so well documented, that it couldn’t help but feed support for the protests. American public opinion may have tipped in favor of Black Lives Matter for good.

By “the police,” I mean not just state and municipal police across the country, but also the federal officers from various agencies that cracked down on protesters in front of the White House, as well as their supporters and political patrons, from police chiefs to mayors to the attorney general and the president himself.

Black Lives Matter aims to highlight the depth of brutality, injustice and unaccountability that American society, especially law enforcement, harbors toward black people. Many protesters set out to call attention to the unchecked power of the police, their military weaponry and their capricious use of it. They wanted to show that the problem of policing in America is more than that of individual bad officers; the problem is a culture that protects wrongdoers, tolerates mendacity, rewards blind loyalty and is fiercely resistant to change. More deeply, it is a law enforcement culture that does not regard black lives as worthy of protection.

And what did the cops do? They responded with a display of organized, unchecked power — on camera, in a way that many Americans might never be able to unsee.

To understand why this moment may prompt structural change, it is worth putting the latest protests into a larger context. To me, the past two weeks have felt like an echo of that heady moment late in 2017, after The New York Times and The New Yorker exposed Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual assault. At the time, #MeToo, as an online rallying cry against sexual abuse and harassment, was more than a decade old. The Weinstein story didn’t create that movement, just as the videos of George Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis police didn’t create Black Lives Matter.

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Inside Statistics Canada’s efforts to improve diversity data

2020/06/11 Leave a comment

Good account. Some of the data on breakdowns between different Black groups can be found and analysed through of mix of ethnic ancestry, place of birth and generation status (approach used I believe in the StatsCan overview of the Canadian Black community.

The issue is less with respect to basic demographic and socioeconomic data and more with respect to specialized data sets that can identify, highlight and quantify inequities in areas such as health, education, policing etc:

When the Liberals announced the Centre for Gender, Diversity, and Inclusion Statistics in 2018, the government said it would have a “particular” focus on Black Canadians, recognizing a gap in data collection that academics and organizers say is so large it renders promises to address anti-racism “meaningless.”

For the centre to effectively offer information on Canada’s diverse Black population, understand how it’s doing and create policy to address inequality, both it and Statistics Canada need much more funding than the Liberals have allocated, according to one of its academic advisors on Statistics Canada’s Expert Working Group on Black Communities in Canada, and on immigration and ethnocultural statistics.

For months now, as COVID-19 swept across Canada, advocates and researchers have been calling for race-based data on the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on vulnerable communities. In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests across the world and Canada, advocates have redoubled that call.

With its “very poor” disaggregated data Canada can’t properly address systemic experiences around racism, including disparities of income and health, said Malinda Smith, a University of Alberta professor.

“You can’t address them without good data. It doesn’t get measured, it doesn’t get done,” she said. “My view is any politician, policy maker, university president making a statement about a commitment to address anti-racism and yet are not collecting data, are not consulting the Black population, I think those commitments, those statements become meaningless.”

Over the last week Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Papineau, Que.) spoke of systemic racism in Canada, promising to change “the systems that do not do right by too many Indigenous people and racialized Canadians.”

In the 2018 budget, the Liberals announced $6.7-million over five years to launch the centre. That funding is applied to both the centre and across various units at the agency to fulfill the mandate, said Statistics Canada spokesperson Peter Frayne by email. It has 10 people whose salaries are at least 50-per-cent funded by the centre, but who also have other duties, he said. In 2019, the Liberals’ anti-racism strategy set aside another $4.2-million, he added, so it could expand data collection in four areas: the general social survey, potential changes to the uniform crime reporting survey, supporting a new advisory committee on ethnocultural and immigration statistics, and added analysis of existing data to include racialized communities.

That funding is “peanuts,” said Prof. Smith who said these gestures give the ”appearance of addressing the problem.”

For the Nova Scotia-based Delmore “Buddy” Daye Learning Institute, it can be difficult to get important details about Black Nova Scotians, said its executive director Sylvia Parris-Drummond.

It’s evident Black Canadians face systemic racism across the board, she said, given they are disproportionately low income, have poorer health outcomes, and lower wages. Black people represent 8.6 per cent of the federal prison population, despite accounting for 3.5 per cent of Canada’s population.

“We know all those things exist, we would know them more deeply if we could get the disaggregation of data more strongly done,” she said, and the gap necessarily means policy making is coming from “a less informed place.”

Centre’s work on Black Canadians ‘key,’ says centre specialist

Since 2018, the centre and Statistics Canada have undertaken “major work” on the Black community, said Jean-Pierre Corbeil, the centre’s assistant director and chief specialist.

“Clearly the work on Black Canadians is key,” he said in an interview with The Hill Times about the centre’s work over the past two years, including four projects focused on the population.

After the 2018 budget announcement, Statistics Canada struck an ethnocultural advisory committee, which met that summer and into the fall. During Black History month in February 2019, it published an infographic demonstrating the growing diversity in Canada’s Black population and a 20-page overview of how it had changed over the decades. It showed that Canada’s Black population doubled in size between 1996 and 2016.

It was important to showcase the diversity of Black population, Mr. Corbeil said, and it was the first of its kind at that level of detail and “very well received.” In the early 2000s, the agency offered a few portraits of ethnocultural groups, but not to that level.

Using census data, he said it presented statistics in an accessible way, including portraits of differences between provinces, like Nova Scotia, where the Black community is for the most part third generation, compared to recent immigrants in Toronto and Montreal.

It also showed that cities like Edmonton and Calgary have more than 50,000 Black residents, noted Ms. Smith, which is consistent with the fact that the Prairies have a fast-growing Black population in Canada. Lethbridge, Alta., and Moncton, N. B., were two of the fastest growing populations.

“Diversity has escaped much attention and analysis,” Prof. Smith said, adding it may be surprising for people to know that before 1981, more than 80 per cent of the Black population immigrated from the Caribbean, but since 2001, it’s shifted to more than 62 per cent from Africa.

“There’s a tendency to treat it as a homogenous group,” she said, and Canada’s lack of data has helped make that so.

In February 2020, the centre released another report called “Canada’s Black population education, labour, and resilience.” In this study, the centre integrated the 2006 census with the 2016 census for the same person, making it possible to look at education attainment and the educational characteristics of Black youth in Canada and look at labour market integration 10 years later.

It showed that Canada’s Black population is younger than average, and though more Black youth aged 15-25 (94 per cent) reported wanting to get a university degree, only 60 per cent thought it would happen, compared to 79 per cent of the rest of that age range in Canada.

Labour force ‘pilot’ survey to include visible minorities

In July, the labour force survey will include a question about visible minority status for the first time. These mandatory monthly surveys have a 56,000-household sample, so there will still be limitations in the technical analysis, but Mr. Corbeil said it’ll be a first for tracking employment.

Mr. Frayne said the pilot to expand the survey makes up part of Statistics Canada’s response to the data needs stemming from the pandemic. The agency has “enhanced crowdsourcing survey instruments to enable reporting for key vulnerable populations,” including immigrants, Indigenous people, and visible minority groups.

“Statistics Canada recognizes that the social, economic and labour market impacts of COVID-19 have not been equally felt by all Canadians,” he said, adding the agency is also developing techniques to add information by race and visible minority status to previously released data.

Also, in the coming months, the centre plans to release a comprehensive report on changes to the socioeconomic situation of Canada’s Black population, from 2001 to 2016, Mr. Corbeil said, noting there’s a “very, very big appetite” for this analysis.

And, through Canada’s anti-racism strategy, announced in 2019, the centre received an additional $3-million to expand the sample size for the next social identity cycle of the General Social Survey—a smaller, annual themed survey. The survey typically has about 25,000 respondents, while the 2020 survey will be expanded to 80,000 respondents and will allow StatsCan to track perception of discrimination and belonging.

Mr. Frayne added by email that an advisory committee on immigration and ethnocultural statistics has been formed and met once, with another meeting this week.  There is also work underway to improve information on hate crimes by linking police data to courts data, he said.

Canada is long overdue in developing better data on its Black and broader visible minority populations, said Prof. Smith, far behind the United States and United Kingdom. In Britain, researchers can break down racialized students attending post-secondary institutions, but Canada is unable to do that.

“Frankly, we need a Royal Commission on visible minorities in order to examine more systematically and thoroughly the different experiences of the nine groups within that category,” she said, saying it remains shocking to her that the Black population is considered one category despite remarkably different immigration routes and experiences. There are more than 170 different places of birth for the Black immigrants in Canada.

Over the next three years, the centre is also planning to release new indicators, consulting with the agency’s expert advisory committee on ethnocultural and immigration statistics to develop a conceptual framework on ethnocultural diversity and inclusion to better track relevant “inclusion” indicators over time.

“This is a great opportunity to identify data gaps,” Mr. Corbeil said, and when some surveys do not have a large enough sample, it’s an opportunity “to send the message” if more information is needed. Asked if the centre had enough resources, including staffing and funding, he said following the 2018 budget it was “clearly” a key initiative from the government to assign resources to address gaps.

“This is where the emphasis right now is put, trying to get the funding to have the oversampling and all the efforts to integrate the information with different data sources,” he said.

Source: Inside Statistics Canada’s efforts to improve diversity data

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