Appeals Court Rules Harvard Doesn’t Discriminate Against Asian American Applicants

2020/11/14 Leave a comment

Of note (will be appealed to SCOTUS where, given Trump appointments, may be overturned):

A federal appeals court in Boston has ruled Harvard doesn’t intentionally discriminate against Asian American applicants in its admissions process.

The panel of judges upheld a federal district court’s decision from last year, teeing up a possible case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Circuit Judge Sandra Lynch, who wrote Thursday’s decision, agreed with the lower court that “the statistical evidence did not show that Harvard intentionally discriminated against Asian Americans.”

Students for Fair Admissions, an advocacy group, first filed its lawsuit in 2014, saying that Harvard’s race-based considerations for applicants discriminated against Asian American students in process.

“Today’s decision once again finds that Harvard’s admissions policies are consistent with Supreme Court precedent, and lawfully and appropriately pursue Harvard’s efforts to create a diverse campus that promotes learning and encourages mutual respect and understanding in our community,” a spokeswoman for Harvard told NPR.”As we have said time and time again, now is not the time to turn back the clock on diversity and opportunity.”

Proponents of ending race-based considerations at U.S. universities were unfazed by Thursday’s decision and plan to bring the case to the Supreme Court, according to Edward Blum, the conservative strategist behind SFFA.

Blum said in a statement to NPR member station GBH that he plans to ask the Supreme Court to end the consideration of race in admissions at Harvard and all other universities.

The question of how much race should be a factor in college applicants is a hotly contested one. President Trump’s administration has challenged colleges on using race in admissions policies, claiming such practices violate federal law. Last month, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Yale University, saying its policies violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yale has said the lawsuit is “baseless.”

Wen Fa, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in the Harvard case, said Asian Americans are harmed by the school’s admissions rules.

“The Supreme Court’s intervention is needed so that universities comport with” federal law, Fa said.

Stella Flores, an associate professor of higher education at New York University, said she hopes the court will rely on decades of research and data that show the benefits of such policies. Race is but one factor within the broad and “holistic admissions policy” at Harvard and other schools, she said.

Flores and Fa say the new conservative majority of the Supreme Court makes predicting whether the justices will take up the case difficult.

The court has previously decided on similar questions. It upheld race-based admissions policies in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, as well as the 2013 and 2016 Fisher v. Univ. of Texas at Austin decisions.

In Grutter, the justices were asked to determine whether the University of Michigan Law School’s use of racial preferences in student admissions violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment or Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In the 5-4 Grutter opinion, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said race-based admissions policies should be for a limited time only, Fa said.

That phrasing may be enough for the current court to take up the case, he said.

Source: Appeals Court Rules Harvard Doesn’t Discriminate Against Asian American Applicants

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‘A fight for the soul of the city’: Report shows how COVID-19 has deepened Toronto’s racial and economic divide

2020/11/14 Leave a comment

No real surprise as it confirms other reports and analysis, both in Toronto and elsewhere. Nevertheless, extremely disturbing:

Higher COVID-19 infection rates. Higher unemployment. Deepening poverty.

Racialized and lower-income Torontonians are bearing a heavier burden during the coronavirus pandemic, which is widening the gap between rich and poor in this city.

That’s the grim conclusion delivered by the Toronto Fallout Report, which provides a snapshot of where Torontonians stand in the midst of the pandemic.

Released Thursday by the Toronto Foundation — which also produces the annual Vital Signs report — this latest report offers an interim look at how the pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing inequality in the city.

Among the report’s findings:

  • People earning less than $30,000 a year are 5.3 times as likely to catch COVID-19 than those making $150,000 or more.
  • Black, Latin American and Arab, Middle Eastern or West Asian Torontonians have COVID-19 infection rates at least seven times as high as white residents.
  • About 30 per cent of Torontonians are struggling to pay rent, mortgage, food, utilities and other essentials.
  • Across the country, Canadians who are Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) have unemployment rates almost twice as high as white Canadians. Nearly one-third of BIPOC youth are unemployed, compared to 18 per cent of white youth.

The report shows just how much of a “crisis moment” this is for Toronto, said Mohini Datta-Ray, the executive director of the North York Women’s Shelter and one of the dozens of non-profit leaders who were consulted for the report.

“The consensus is really, really loud and clear that this is a fight for the soul of the city, for who we are as a city.”

The pandemic didn’t create this inequality, she said, but it has magnified it and exploded it into view.

“We’ve all been ringing the alarm bells for years, decades really,” Datta-Ray said. “There’s been a worsening over time and any of us that are working with vulnerable, marginalized, low-income families know how desperate these times have already been.”

The report looks at a broad range of issues, from income and employment, to food security and housing, and what comes up again and again is the widening gulf between rich and poor, and how that divide is increasingly occurring along racialized lines.

“When I looked through the report, for me it really highlighted how deeply embedded racism and white supremacy are in just about all of our systems and institutions,” said Paul Taylor, executive director of FoodShare Toronto, which has dramatically increased its services in response to rising food insecurity during the pandemic.

“It seems like communities that are made up predominantly of white folks have had a very different experience of the pandemic.”

In Toronto, racialized people make up 52 per cent of the population, but currently account for 79 per cent of the COVID-19 infections. The highest infection rates in the city are concentrated in the neighbourhoods with the most racialized people.

It’s in those neighbourhoods where people are often living in crowded housing, Taylor said, and where people are more likely to have to take public transit to low-wage jobs without adequate sick days, PPE or the opportunity to physically distance.

“We really have to ask ourselves what allows us to chronically underinvest in the communities where there are higher incidences of COVID infections,” Taylor said.

Datta-Ray, who lives in a relatively affluent downtown neighbourhood and works in the hard-hit northwest corner of the city, has seen first hand the city’s divergent pandemic experiences.

Where she lives, the pandemic has been novel, almost festive, she said. “You wouldn’t even know that the virus is around.”

But in the city’s northwest, where infection rates are 10 times as high, most people aren’t able to work from home and public transit is crowded. “Those neighbourhoods feel the city in crisis.”

Neethan Shan, executive director of the Urban Alliance on Race Relations, said governments need to put racial equity at the heart of any pandemic recovery plan.

“Universal programs aren’t going to be enough,” he said. “If you’re serious about racial equity you have to start looking at it.”

If you target the most vulnerable and most affected communities, he said, everyone will benefit.

“But if you just keep continuing with universal programs that are in some ways colour-blind, we’re not going to see the solutions that we need.”

Liben Gebremikael, executive director of the TAIBU Community Health Centre in Scarborough, said attention on Black communities is often driven by high-profile news events — such as the so-called “Summer of the Gun” in 2005 — which leads to cyclical but unsustained investment.

“We can’t really do systemic change with cyclical investment,” he said. “We have to have a long-term strategy, from the city, the province and the federal government, on how to address these injustices and inequities that are mostly impacting Indigenous and Black communities.”

Gebremikael said he’s hopeful the inequities laid bare by COVID-19 will garner enough attention for more substantial, long-term investment. He cited the provincial government agreeing to collect race-based data during the pandemic — after their initial reluctance — as an example of a step in the right direction.

“If we have evidence then we can really advocate for the resources and the policies and the strategies we need.”

Source: ‘A fight for the soul of the city’: Report shows how COVID-19 has deepened Toronto’s racial and economic divide

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Canada’s Federal Anti-Racism Strategy: An Overview

2020/11/14 Leave a comment

Good useful history, overview and reference document (I was involved in the evaluation of the first action plan, which was more virtue signalling than substantive, apart from police-reported hate crimes statistics):

In many countries around the globe, including Canada, recent movements to recognize and address racial injustices and discrimination have led to increased examination of government efforts to combat racism. This HillNote provides an overview of the federal government’s anti-racism strategy and some anti-racism efforts by other levels of government in Canada.

Canada’s First Federal Anti-Racism Action Plan

In 2005, the federal government established the first coordinated federal approach to combat racism in Canada, entitled Canada’s Action Plan Against Racism (2005-2010). This five-year plan was led by the Department of Canadian Heritage.

In 2010, the Evaluation of Canada’s Action Plan Against Racism identified limitations in the plan’s design and delivery and found challenges in measuring the plan’s overall impact. While some anti-racism initiatives continued at the federal level, the federal government did not renew or replace the action plan until 2019.

The Creation of Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy 2019-2022

In June 2017, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage(committee) launched a study of systemic racism and religious discrimination in Canada. Three of the 30 recommendations in the committee’s report tabled in February 2018 concerned Canada’s Action Plan Against Racism and called on the Government of Canada to:

(1) update and reinstate the previous Canadian Action Plan Against Racism and broaden it to include religious discrimination;

(2) create a directorate at the Department of Canadian Heritage which will develop, implement and monitor this National Action Plan; and

(3) have measurable targets, deadlines and reporting mechanisms in the Plan, dedicate resources to the Plan, and implement adequate monitoring.

In its response to the committee report, the Government of Canada agreed that it “needs to take an active role in addressing systemic racism and religious discrimination” and described recent efforts and plans to do so, including “support for community engagement on a new anti-racism approach that reflects the need to update [Canada’sAction Plan Against Racism].”

From October 2018 to March 2019, the Government of Canada consulted Canadians, especially those with lived experiences of racism and discrimination, to gather input to inform the development of a new anti-racism strategy. The input is summarized in the Department of Canadian Heritage’s What we heard — Informing Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy.

An Overview of Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy 2019-2022

Canada’s federal anti-racism strategy, Building a Foundation for Change: Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy 2019-2022, was launched in June 2019.

The strategy acknowledges the need for the Government of Canada to combat “racism and discrimination that is anti-Indigenous, Islamophobic, antisemitic, anti-Black, or homophobic.” The strategy identifies key terms, including:

  • Racism: any individual action, or institutional practice which treats people differently because of their colour or ethnicity. This distinction is often used to justify discrimination.
  • Systemic or institutional racism: consists of patterns of behaviour, policies or practices that are part of the social or administrative structures of an organization, and which create or perpetuate a position of relative disadvantage for racialized persons. These appear neutral on the surface but, nevertheless, have an exclusionary impact on racialized persons.

The strategy contains the following new investments:

  • $4.6 million to establish a new Anti-Racism Secretariat within the Department of Canadian Heritage, to lead a whole-of-government approach to address racism.
  • $30 million for community-based projects, in the form of a newly launched Anti-Racism Action Program. The program funds local, regional and national initiatives that address barriers to employment, social participation and justice for Indigenous peoples, racialized communities and religious minority communities. The Anti-Racism Action Program also has community-led digital and civic literacy programming to address online disinformation and hate.
  • $0.9 million to support Public Safety Canada’s efforts to develop a national framework and evidence-based guidelines to better respond to hate crimes, hate incidents and hate speech.
  • $3.3 million for a national public education and awareness campaign that aims to increase public awareness and understanding across Canada of the historical roots of racism and its impacts on Indigenous peoples, racialized communities and religious minority communities.
  • $6.2 million to increase “reliable, usable and comparable data and evidence regarding racism and discrimination,” including support for Statistics Canada and its Centre for Gender, Diversity and Inclusion Statistics.
  • Additional funding to be provided to the Community Support, Multiculturalism and Anti-Racism Initiatives Program.

The results of the strategy are to be reported “to Canadians on a yearly basis.” No report has been released as of 10 November 2020.

In October 2020, the Government of Canada announced more details about Anti-Racism Action Program funding.

Some civil society organizations have spoken in favour of elements of the strategy. For example, the National Council of Canadian Muslims expressed support for the strategy’s commitment to fund efforts to combat online hate in June 2019, but also suggested that other elements of the strategy need ongoing work informed by consultations. In October 2020 the organization published an open letter to the Prime Minister, co-signed by 25 community, human rights and other non-governmental organizations, calling for the federal government “to establish a national action plan on dismantling white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups that threaten Canadians who are Black, Indigenous, Jewish, Muslim, or Sikh, amongst other communities.”

Other organizations have criticized what they see as a lack of tangible targets in the strategy. For instance, Colour of Poverty-Colour of Change, a network of community organizations, said the strategy “while highlighting $45 million of various existing, redirected, and new federal funding under the banner of anti-racism, fails to specifically outline [its] concrete timelines, actions, and goals.”

The Speech from the Throne delivered on 23 September 2020 pledged to “redouble” the Government of Canada’s efforts to address systemic racism through a variety of new measures.

Recent Anti-Racism Activities at the Parliamentary Level

Recent parliamentary initiatives to address racism include:

  • On 16 June 2020, the Parliamentary Black Caucus published a statement calling for Canadian governments to take specific anti-racist actions.
  • On 18 June 2020, the Senate of Canada held an emergency debate on racism.
  • On 23 June 2020, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security launched a study of Systemic Racism in Policing in Canada.
  • On 25 June 2020, the Senate of Canada was resolved into a Committee of the Wholeto discuss the federal government’s role in combatting racism.
Anti-Racism Strategies and Efforts at Other Levels of Government in Canada

Several provincial governments have developed anti-racism strategies, projects and other actions. For example:

At the local level, some municipalities have their own anti-racism initiatives. For instance:

Additional Resources:

Department of Canadian Heritage, Anti-Racism Resources.

Robyn Maynard, Policing Black lives: state violence in Canada from slavery to the present, Fernwood Publishing: Halifax, 2017.

University of Waterloo, Anti-Racism Resources.

United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism.

United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Report of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent on its mission to Canada, 16 August 2017.

Authors: Laura Munn-Rivard and Laura Hatt, Library of Parliament

#anti-racism-strategy, #discrimination, #equality, #human-rights, #systemic-racism

Source: https://hillnotes.ca/2020/11/13/canadas-federal-anti-racism-strategy-an-overview/

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Ottawa announces new Hong Kong immigration options as committee warns Uighurs face ‘genocide’

2020/11/14 Leave a comment

A reminder that Canadian immigration policy has a large element of self-interest given the priority given to younger, highly-educated potential immigrants rather than political refugees (which it may prefer to be discrete about given likely Chinese government thuggish reactions):

The federal government today announced long-awaited plans to help more people living in Hong Kong come to Canada as the Chinese government cracks down on the pro-democracy movement in the territory.

Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino said Canada is introducing a new measure targeting students and young people in Hong Kong: a work permit designed to speed up the process toward permanent residency.

“This announcement also supports the commitments made by the Government of Canada to maintain the many connections between Canada and Hong Kong in response to the Chinese government’s imposition and implementation of the national security law in Hong Kong on June 30, 2020,” his department said in a statement.

There are about 300,000 Canadians living in Hong Kong, the department said, adding that the new Chinese national security law criminalizes “secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces,” using very broad definitions that undermine rights and freedoms.

Hong Kong was supposed to operate under a “one-country, two-systems” framework after Britain handed its former colony over to Beijing in 1997 under an international agreement. But human rights and pro-democracy advocates say Beijing’s new national security law is undermining freedom in Hong Kong.

Mendicino said the new immigration stream announced today was crafted in response to the Chinese crackdown on some Hong Kongers.

“We find ourselves at a challenging moment. Canada remains deeply concerned about China’s passage of the new national security law. We have unequivocally stated that this legislation and the unilateral powers within it are in direct conflict with China’s international obligations,” Mendicino said.

By targeting young Hong Kongers with post-secondary degrees from Canadian and foreign universities, Mendicino said Canada hopes to bring in “the best and the brightest” individuals fleeing repression.

On Wednesday, Foreign Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne said Canada was “deeply disappointed” by China’s latest decision to remove four elected lawmakers from office in Hong Kong.

“This decision further narrows Hong Kong’s autonomy and the space for freedom of expression and public participation in governance in Hong Kong,” the minister said in a media statement. “This action clearly demonstrates a concerning disregard for Hong Kong’s Basic Law and the high degree of autonomy promised for Hong Kong under the ‘one-country, two-systems’ framework.”

Earlier today, members of a House of Commons committee looking into the plight of ethnic Muslim Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang province cited their recent conclusion that the Chinese Communist Party is guilty of perpetrating a genocide against the ethnic minority.

The all-party Commons subcommittee on human rights heard harrowing testimony from survivors of China’s imprisonment of Uighur Muslims. They shared accounts of mass incarceration, rape, forced sterilization of women and mass surveillance.

Critics say China has detained as many as one million Uighurs and members of other Muslim groups in what amount to mass prisons, where they are subjected to “re-education.”

The Chinese government has denied any abuse of human rights in the region and insists that reports claiming that are false.

“The subcommittee is persuaded that the actions of the Chinese Communist Party constitute genocide, as laid out in the Genocide Convention,” said Liberal MP Peter Fonseca, the committee chair. “In particular, the subcommittee would like to thank the Uighur witnesses that provided evidence at great risk to themselves and their families living in Xinjiang.”

New Democrat MP Heather McPherson said the most compelling testimony she heard came from women who “survived the concentration camps and shared their stories of abuse and violence.”

“It has been shown again and again that to wipe out a people, to perpetrate a genocide, one must destroy the women. Acts designed to prevent births constitute genocide,” she said.

Thursday’s developments are sure to anger China, which has warned the Trudeau government not to intervene in Hong Kong and to stop levelling criticism related to the Uighurs.

Canada’s relations with China are at an all-time low because the People’s Republic has imprisoned two Canadian men, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor — an action the Trudeau government has branded as one of coercive or “hostage” diplomacy.

Kovrig and Spavor were rounded up by Chinese authorities in December 2018, nine days after Canada arrested Chinese high-tech scion Meng Wanzhou on a U.S. extradition warrant.

The subcommittee made it clear it was pointing the finger at the Chinese Communist Party specifically.

“This is not about a people. This is not about a country,” said Liberal MP Sameer Zuberi. “What we want are these practices to stop and then we will have nothing to say on the matter of the Uighur people.”

The subcommittee’s report will make its way up to the full Commons committee on foreign affairs and international development before it goes to the government for a response.

The Trudeau government has said repeatedly it won’t back down on public criticism of China’s human rights record.

Source: Ottawa announces new Hong Kong immigration options as committee warns Uighurs face ‘genocide’

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The Census Is Not Over: What’s Ahead During The Biden Transition

2020/11/13 Leave a comment

To watch:

Counting has ended, but the 2020 census is not over yet — and it’s likely to get tangled in the fraught transition to President-elect Joe Biden’s administration.

Some major final steps for this year’s national head count are set to take place while President Trump is still in office. That includes the release of the first set of results, legally due by Dec. 31, that are used to reapportion congressional seats among states and reset the Electoral College map for the next decade. Under federal law, the president is required by Jan. 10 to hand off those numbers to Congress for certification.

And the census continues to be mired in legal fights over the Trump administration’s push to alter the apportionment numbers, as well as last-minute decisions to shorten the schedule for the constitutionally mandated count of every person living in the United States. A federal judge in California, plus Census Bureau employees themselves, said those changes risked serious data inaccuracies.

Once in office, the Biden administration is poised to start shaping the 2030 count and could reverse some of the Trump administration’s census-related moves. Perhaps most notably, Biden could stop the bureau from producing citizenship data the Trump administration requested that could be used to radically change state-level redistricting in a way that a prominent Republican strategist concluded would benefit Republicans and non-Hispanic white people.

“It’s probably no secret that the census is not top of mind for every administration on an ongoing basis,” says Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former staff director of the House Oversight subcommittee for the census who advised the Obama-Biden transition team in 2008. “But this time is really different because this census faced unprecedented challenges and then disruptions.”

In a statement to NPR before the election, Jamal Brown, the Biden campaign’s national press secretary, said that Biden “knows the critical importance of the census and how it touches every aspect of American life, from federal investments around health care, housing, and education, to how states redistrict and draw their congressional boundaries.”

Among the members of Biden’s transition agency review team for the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, are two census watchers who have been calling for more transparency as the bureau prepares to release the 2020 census results. They include Nancy Potok — who, during the Obama administration, served as a deputy director at the bureau and was later appointed to be the chief statistician within the White House Office of Management and Budget — and Denice Ross, a senior fellow with the National Conference on Citizenship who worked on data projects and policy in the Obama administration as a presidential innovation fellow and an adviser at OMB.

But before Biden officials can make any changes, there are some key questions about the census for the courts and Congress to answer in the final weeks of the Trump administration.

Can Trump change who is counted in numbers that determine House seats and the next Electoral College map?

The Supreme Court is expected to weigh in with its answer to that question after hearing oral arguments on Nov. 30.

So far, three lower courts have rejected the presidential memo Trump issued in July that calls for an unprecedented change — the exclusion of unauthorized immigrants from the census numbers used for determining each state’s share of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives, as well as each state’s Electoral College votes.

All of those three-judge panels unanimously found that carrying out the memo would violate a federal law requiring the president to deliver a report to Congress of “the whole number of persons in each State” as determined by the census. One of those panels also ruled that it would go against the 14th Amendment.

The Trump administration has been pushing the high court to rule before Dec. 31. That’s the legal deadline for the commerce secretary, who oversees the bureau, to give the president the first set of census results, which Trump wants to alter.

But it remains unclear, given all of the schedule changes the Trump administration has made, whether the Census Bureau can meet the Dec. 31 deadline and how that would affect the president’s ability to report numbers to Congress by Jan. 10. Any delays that push key steps in the congressional reapportionment process past the Jan. 20 inauguration could strip Trump of control over the count.

Last month, the bureau’s top career official in charge of the census, Al Fontenot, said the agency hasn’t committed to when it will wrap up processing and checking all of the information it has collected.

“We are trying to maintain the flexibility to get the job done in a quality way,” Fontenot said during a news briefing.

Justice Department attorneys say the administration hasn’t finalized how to accurately count unauthorized immigrants, aside from those in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, in order to exclude them from the apportionment numbers.

In July, Biden condemned Trump’s memo in a tweet, writing: “We won’t let him deny communities the funding and representation they deserve. Because in America, everyone counts.”

But Brown, the Biden campaign spokesperson, has not responded to NPR’s question about what the Biden administration would do if, before leaving office, Trump attempted to remove unauthorized immigrants from the apportionment numbers before giving them to Congress.

If Trump did that, it is also unclear whether the clerk of the House, which will remain under Democratic control, would certify those numbers.

Will Congress extend legal deadlines for reporting census results to allow for more quality checks?

That question has been hanging over the census since April, when the Trump administration first proposed four-month extensions to the legal deadlines for reporting the apportionment counts and redistricting data, which are due to the states by March 31.

Publicly backed at the time by Trump and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Census Bureau, career officials at the bureau said that because of delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic, they needed more time to tally the country’s residents and run quality checks on the results.

But the administration made an about-face in July and began pushing to end counting early, sticking with the original reporting schedule. The Supreme Court ultimately allowed the administration to cut counting short, leaving open the possibility for Trump to control the apportionment numbers even without winning reelection.

Faced with a shortened window for counting in their states, some Republican lawmakers in Congress began publicly supporting the Democratic-led push for deadline extensions.

But now that counting has stopped, it’s unclear if there’s enough bipartisan support for deadline extensions to be passed.

The bureau has already scaled back some quality checks, risking “serious errors,” career officials warned, that they may not have time to fix.

Some census advocates — including Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights — are calling for Congress to pass deadline extensions during the lame-duck session to help ensure that the bureau has enough time to address any major errors it finds in the census results before they’re used to reapportion House seats.

“I think waiting until a new administration and new Congress to act would be too late for the census,” Gupta, a former Obama administration official, says. “A new administration and new Congress really would be in uncharted territory that would take time to navigate, conceivably creating a constitutional crisis that could be avoided if Congress gives the Census Bureau the time that it needs and the time that it asked for.”

Source: The Census Is Not Over: What’s Ahead During The Biden Transition

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Delacourt: Canada’s federal leaders will defend your right to wear a poppy, Just don’t ask them to stick up for your freedom of religion

2020/11/13 Leave a comment

Nails the virtue signalling and hypocrisy:

The great furor over the poppy ban at Whole Foods lasted less than one news cycle last week, thanks to the full-throated outrage from political leaders all over Canada.

Imagine how long Quebec’s secularism bill — which bans a lot more than poppy-wearing — would have lasted with similar shock and condemnation from those same politicians.

Sanctimony is never in short supply in the realm of politics, but we seem to have entered the season for freedom-of-expression lectures in Canada.

Politicians have waded into the frays over saying the N-word in the classroom, wearing poppies in upscale supermarkets and the publication of religiously offensive cartoons in France. There’s no end of courage — almost no end — when it comes to standing up for the right to make a statement.

Bloc Québécois Leader Yves François Blanchet has been the most strident, but by no means has he been the only one. Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole has put out videos proclaiming himself as a free-speech champion in the face of what he sees as worrying ambivalence by Justin Trudeau after acts of terrorism in France.

Funny, though, not one of them rushed to the podium over the stories being told in a Quebec court last week about the lives ruined by Bill 21’s limits on the rights of religious expression. Several constitutional challenges have been launched against that legislation, which bans the wearing of religious symbols in public, and one is now underway.

Even though it’s freedom-of-expression season in federal politics, not one party leader — not Blanchet, not O’Toole, not Trudeau or NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh — has offered comment on the tales being told in the Bill 21 trial. There have been stories of teachers having to choose between their careers and their religion, and Muslims being targets of hate and bigotry because of the law. And from the selective free-speech champions in Ottawa? Silence.

Trudeau and Singh have said they don’t like Bill 21, but they’re going to let the courts do what they do. O’Toole has said the law is “difficult,” but he’s not touching it because he doesn’t think it’s any of the federal government’s business — unlike poppies in supermarkets or acts of violence in Europe.

Blanchet has said he supports Bill 21 because it has majority support in Quebec, even though allowing minority rights to be settled by majority opinion has always been a sketchy kind of argument when it comes to constitutional matters. Where do we get that idea? Oh yes, from Quebec.

To its credit, Whole Foods didn’t try that one with its poppy ban, though it’s kind of fun to imagine how over-the-top the political outrage would have been if the Amazon-owned outlet had said, “Most people who work for us don’t want to wear poppies.”

Let’s face it, though, it was pretty easy to be mad at Whole Foods. No one in politics wants to be associated with billion-dollar companies, tech giants or overpriced food these days, so it was simply a matter of hearing about the poppy ban and pressing “play” on the outrage tape.

It’s a little harder, apparently, to work up the nerve to say that Bill 21 is a flagrant slap in the face of freedom of expression and, worse yet, that it is inflicting real, not symbolic damage on real citizens.

It’s politics, naturally. No one wants to get on the wrong side of that majority opinion in Quebec, or worse, get accused of trying to interfere with provinces’ rights to make their own laws. We may be enthusiastic rights champions in Canada, but we are also very polite about poking our noses into constitutional-jurisdiction matters. See O’Toole’s arguments, above.

As for why politicians are suddenly falling over each other to climb aboard the freedom-of-expression these days, there may be an easy explanation: It’s the pandemic, and especially this second wave of COVID-19, which is proving to be a real freedom-wrecker.

People are angry, frustrated and fatigued with limits on their lives. The addition of one more constraint, even if it extends to their speech alone, gives the public and politicians a way to vent a little emotion about how unfree we’re all feeling behind our masks and closed doors.

But the sanctimony of the free-speech champions at the podium in Ottawa is a little hard to take while Bill 21 is sitting on the books as a stain on Charter rights in Canada.

These staunch champions of rights are of course free to proclaim they believe in freedom of expression day after day at their political pulpits. But we should feel free to take note of what freedoms — and whose freedoms — they are also failing to defend.

Source: Canada’s federal leaders will defend your right to wear a poppy, Just don’t ask them to stick up for your freedom of religion

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Regg-Cohn: Surprised that some Black people and Latinos voted for Trump? Try looking at them as individuals

2020/11/13 Leave a comment

Good commentary on the diversity within groups:

In other news, it turns out that more Blacks, Latinos and gays turned out for Donald Trump this time than last time.

Why is that news? The only surprise is that anyone is surprised.

That certain groups are presumed to vote in their supposed self-interest — as determined by other groups who know better what’s best for them — is not merely presumptuous. It’s profiling.

Today, some of the same social critics who warn against stereotyping Blacks or Latinos are now scratching their heads about why they didn’t vote as expected in the U.S. presidential election. Profiling can be perilous.

Today, some of the same social critics who warn against stereotyping Blacks or Latinos are now scratching their heads about why they didn’t vote as expected in the U.S. presidential election. Profiling can be perilous.

It is a human impulse. But impossibly dehumanizing at times.

Profiling seeks out similarities, but it is pointless if we forget individual differences. It relies on the notion that people of similar backgrounds or aspirations hold similar beliefs, live in similar neighbourhoods, and so on.

Profiling seeks out similarities, but it is pointless if we forget individual differences. It relies on the notion that people of similar backgrounds or aspirations hold similar beliefs, live in similar neighbourhoods, and so on.

The biggest problems with profiling are the premises and definitions that underlie it. That more Latinos voted for Trump this time tells us little of interest, because it’s such an imprecise term (and is overshadowed by the overpowering reality that whites voted massively and decisively for him).

Latinos range from anti-Communist arch-capitalists in Miami’s Cuban émigré community to impoverished Honduran refugees fleeing drug wars via Mexico, to second-generation strivers in Texas or Arizona aspiring to join the ruling Republican establishment. Ethnic is not monolithic.

Just as LGBTQ voters can be Republican or Democrat, Latinos are more different than they are alike.

Profiling is a tool and a template. It is a form of demography and part of democracy, for better or for worst — which is why pollsters, political operatives and party fundraisers mine the data to harvest votes and donations at election time.

They’re just more sophisticated than the rest of us in slicing and dicing the fruit salad. They know that skin colour is only skin deep, so they drill down for other demographic details such as education, income, location.

That’s why postal codes are the preferred proxies for pollsters. Yet zeitgeist and zip codes are rarely congruent.

My own education in demographic divisions came when I was posted to the Toronto Star’s Middle East bureau years ago. Despite my background as a political reporter, I only realized as a foreign correspondent how many ways Israelis could be subdivided.

Not merely as hawks versus doves, but ethnic Ashkenazi versus Sephardi; secular Russian immigrants versus ultra-Orthodox Haredi; socialist kibbutzniks versus modern Orthodox Jewish settlers; urban versus suburban; Muslim and Christian Arab citizens versus Jewish citizens; and last but not least, left versus right. The miracle was how quickly those internecine divisions melted away when Israelis faced an external enemy and existential threat; and how quickly the internal tensions returned (Palestinians, too, fought their own civil war in Gaza between Islamist Hamas rejectionists and secular Yasser Arafat loyalists).

The security services typecast people as safe or threatening based not only on background but back story and behaviour — whether at airport check-ins, military checkpoints or political rallies. Which is why Yitzhak Rabin’s security guards let down their guard when a kippah-wearing orthodox Jew chatted them up before assassinating the prime minister — he didn’t fit their Palestinian profile of a clear and present danger.

Stephen Harper’s Tories made inroads in the GTA suburbs by appealing to the traditional values of many immigrant communities that converged with conservatism. His then-minister of multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, once sat me down to demonstrate his mastery of Chinese Canadian demographics — delineating early anti-Communist immigrants from Taiwan, subsequent waves of Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong dual citizens, and more recent (more apolitical) arrivals from mainland China.

The New Democratic Party — founded as an alliance between the co-operative agricultural movement and the labour movement — long ago learned the working class would not reflexively rally to their side. If workers are reluctant to recognize their own enlightened self-interest — rallying to Doug Ford’s Tories even when they campaigned on cancelling a minimum wage hike and then freezing it for years — why are progressives perplexed when Blacks or Latinos warm up to Trump?

Vote-determining issues are more likely to be economic than ethnic, and political preferences are often more idiosyncratic than ideological. That’s only human.

The point is that profiling tells you everything and nothing about people. Just as postal codes are imprecise — people are unpredictable.

Political parties bank on profiling because there’s much to gain from voters and donors, and little to lose from mass mailings or email blasting that misses the mark. The minimal cost of bulk postage and mass spamming is a mere rounding error.

The point is that profiling tells you everything and nothing about people. Just as postal codes are imprecise — people are unpredictable.

Political parties bank on profiling because there’s much to gain from voters and donors, and little to lose from mass mailings or email blasting that misses the mark. The minimal cost of bulk postage and mass spamming is a mere rounding error.

The rest of us can’t afford to be so reckless with our wild guesses, unproven hunches and dehumanizing assumptions. If the penalty of your profiling is an assassin’s bullet, or an airplane bombing, or a human rights humiliation, then the miscalculation yields an incalculable cost.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/2020/11/11/surprised-that-blacks-and-latinos-voted-for-donald-trump-try-looking-at-them-as-individuals.html

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Immigration committee study highlighting coronavirus impact on Canadian immigrants

2020/11/13 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to follow, particularly with respect to backlogs and processing (hopefully citizenship as well):

Separated family members, approved permanent residents unable to travel to Canada, and others are speaking up in the House of Commons as witnesses in a study on Canadian immigration.

Canada’s Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration is conducting a study that will examine the impact of COVID-19 on the Canadian immigration system over the course of no more than eight sessions. Once the study is complete, the committee will report its findings to the House. The government then has 120 days to table a comprehensive response, however, they are not obligated to make any change in policy.

This particular study will look into the following issues relevant to the coronavirus impact on Canadian immigration:

  • Application backlogs and processing times for the different streams of family reunification and the barriers preventing the timely reunification of loved ones, such as denials of Temporary Resident Visas (TRVs) because of section 179(b) of the Immigration and Refugees Protection Regulations, and the ongoing closures of Visa Application Centres;
  • Examine the government’s decision to reintroduce a lottery system for the reunification of parents and grandparents; to compare it to previous iterations of application processes for this stream of family reunification, including a review of processing time and the criteria required for the successful sponsorship;
  • TRV processing delays faced by international students in securing TRVs, particularly in francophone Africa, authorization to travel to Canada by individuals with an expired confirmation of permanent residency, use of expired security, medical, and background checks for permanent immigration.

While House is in session, the committee is meeting at 3:30 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays. The next meetings are scheduled for November 16, and 18. Immigration minister, Marco Mendicino, has been invited to appear before the committee on November 25 and December 2.

How travel restrictions are affecting immigrants’ mental health

Among other early findings, the mental health of immigrants and their Canadian family members was examined in two scenarios relating to family separation.

Faces of Advocacy is a grassroots organization established to reunite families in Canada during COVID-19 travel restrictions. They say they are directly responsible for the exemption on extended family members, which was announced on October 2.

The group indexed the mental health of 1,200 members at the end of August. They used validated mental health rating scales for depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress in civilians. The results are not diagnostic, but offer a glimpse into the mental health effects that have resulted from travel restrictions.

Despite 49 per cent of respondents reporting they have never been diagnosed with mental illness, just over 69 per cent would screen positive for symptoms of clinical depression. In addition, 16 per cent of respondents had a history of self harm or suicidal thoughts prior to the travel restrictions, but after family separation this nearly doubled to 30 per cent.

Spousal Sponsorship Advocates was established during the pandemic. It is as another grassroots movement, created to advocate for the accelerated reunification of families with ongoing spousal sponsorship applications in Canada.

Their survey took a mental health snapshot of 548 respondents, who had been separated from family for months or even years at a time. Of these, a reported:

  • 18 per cent have suicidal thoughts;
  • 22 per cent had to stop working;
  • 70 per cent have anxiety and 44 per cent generalized anxiety;
  • 35 per cent started having panic attacks;
  • 78 per cent have periods of severe depression;
  • 76 per cent have severe energy loss;
  • 57 per cent now have physical pain;
  • 52 per cent gained or lost weight abnormally;
  • 85 per cent have sleep problems.

The mental state of expired confirmation of permanent residence, or COPR, holders was also mentioned. These are people who were approved for permanent residence, but were not able to travel to Canada before their documents expired. As a result, many are unable to come to Canada without an authorization letter from Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada, and they have already upended their lives in their home country. The evidence includes a series of tweets that are intended to show the “pains, agony, [and] mental torture” experienced by COPR holders.

Source: Immigration committee study highlighting coronavirus impact on Canadian immigrants

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La part québécoise de l’immigration continue de diminuer

2020/11/13 Leave a comment

No surprise. Conscious policy decision with longer-term political impact:

Le Québec n’a peut-être pas accueilli autant d’immigrants qu’il le souhaitait en 2020 à cause de la pandémie, mais il n’en accueillera pas plus l’année prochaine que ce qu’il avait initialement prévu. Du coup, parce qu’Ottawa, lui, entend procéder à un rattrapage, la part québécoise de l’immigration canadienne diminuera encore.

Québec a reconnu fin octobre qu’il recevra cette année entre 30 % et 40 % moins d’immigrants que prévu et qu’il effectuerait un « rattrapage » de 7000 dossiers au cours des deux prochaines années. Plusieurs en ont déduit que ces 7000 personnes s’ajouteraient aux 44 500 à 47 500 personnes que Québec avait planifié d’accueillir en 2021. Ce ne sera pas le cas, a appris Le Devoir.

« Nous maintenons le cap sur les seuils d’immigration. En effet, la cible d’admission pour 2021 demeure la même, soit entre 44 500 et 47 500 immigrants », précise par courriel Flore Bouchon, l’attachée de presse de la ministre québécoise de l’Immigration, Nadine Girault. « L’ajustement des 7000 personnes est pour compenser la baisse des admissions qu’on pourrait avoir. » En d’autres mots, on pense que l’effet de la pandémie pourrait se prolonger en 2021 : garder la même cible constitue donc en soi un « rattrapage » aux yeux de Québec.

Or, le gouvernement fédéral entend vraiment, au cours des trois prochaines années, augmenter le nombre d’immigrants reçus par rapport à ce qu’il avait initialement prévu. Ainsi, il vise 401 000 admissions en 2021 (au lieu de 351 000), 411 000 en 2022 (au lieu de 361 000) et 421 000 en 2023 (les anciennes projections n’allaient pas jusque-là).

Or, le gouvernement fédéral entend vraiment, au cours des trois prochaines années, augmenter le nombre d’immigrants reçus par rapport à ce qu’il avait initialement prévu. Ainsi, il vise 401 000 admissions en 2021 (au lieu de 351 000), 411 000 en 2022 (au lieu de 361 000) et 421 000 en 2023 (les anciennes projections n’allaient pas jusque-là).

Ces hausses feront donc en sorte que Québec recevra une part plus faible qu’avant de nouveaux arrivants au Canada. En 2018, Québec avait reçu 15,9 % du total canadien. Ce taux a chuté à 11,9 % en 2019 et il sera seulement de 11,5 % en 2021 si les cibles des deux gouvernements sont atteintes. Pour l’année 2020 en cours, Ottawa pense être en mesure de respecter sa cible de 341 000 admissions, alors que Québec prévoit d’arriver bien en deçà, dans une fourchette de plus ou moins 25 000 à 30 000 arrivants, ce qui représenterait alors environ 8 % du total canadien.

La baisse de l’apport québécois à l’immigration canadienne se fera surtout sentir dans la catégorie des réfugiés et de la réunification familiale. Le Québec avait accepté 14,4 % de toutes les personnes arrivant au Canada pour rejoindre leur famille en 2018 et 10,6 % en 2019, mais ce taux passera à 9,6 % en 2021. Le déclin est de même amplitude du côté des réfugiés. La part québécoise était de 17,8 % en 2018 et de 13,6 % en 2019, mais ne sera plus que de 12,1 % en 2021.

La baisse de l’apport québécois à l’immigration canadienne se fera surtout sentir dans la catégorie des réfugiés et de la réunification familiale. Le Québec avait accepté 14,4 % de toutes les personnes arrivant au Canada pour rejoindre leur famille en 2018 et 10,6 % en 2019, mais ce taux passera à 9,6 % en 2021. Le déclin est de même amplitude du côté des réfugiés. La part québécoise était de 17,8 % en 2018 et de 13,6 % en 2019, mais ne sera plus que de 12,1 % en 2021.

L’accord entre Ottawa et Québec sur l’immigration commande que Québec accepte plus ou moins 20 % de tous les réfugiés venant au pays. Même si Québec est loin du compte, le gouvernement de Justin Trudeau accepte ses cibles, indique le bureau du ministre fédéral de l’Immigration, Marco Mendicino. « Le plan des niveaux d’immigration du gouvernement du Québec a été intégré au plan des niveaux d’immigration 2021 annoncé par le ministre Mendicino 30 octobre dernier. Nous collaborons avec le Québec afin de nous assurer de leur permettre de recevoir les immigrants nécessaires à la prospérité des entreprises », indique le porte-parole du ministre, Alexander Cohen.

Des craintes

Stephan Reichhold, qui dirige la Table de concertation des organismes au service des personnes réfugiées et immigrantes, trouve « très inquiétante » cette diminution. « Depuis deux ou trois ans, le Québec privilégie beaucoup plus l’immigration temporaire », note-t-il. Ces gens viennent travailler au Québec, mais attendront des années avant que leur statut soit régularisé, faute de place. Cela aura un impact sur leurs droits démocratiques et leur accès aux programmes sociaux ou encore les soins de santé.

Aussi M. Reichhold dit-il à ceux qui seraient tentés de se réjouir de cette diminution des seuils d’immigration que « c’est de la poudre aux yeux ». « Il y a autant de bodiessur le territoire québécois que lorsque les niveaux d’immigration étaient plus élevés. C’est ça que les gens ne comprennent pas. Ils sont déjà parmi nous. Ils vivent parmi nous. Ce sont nos voisins, ils sont là, ils participent, ils travaillent. […] Mais tout ça précarise beaucoup de personnes. »

La hausse des cibles d’immigration d’Ottawa a été généralement bien reçue par le milieu des affaires, qui y voit une solution à la pénurie de main-d’œuvre. Mais la population semble l’accepter avec moins d’enthousiasme. Un sondage Nanos Research Group effectué pour le compte de Bloomberg au début du mois indique que seulement 17 % des répondants pensent que le Canada devrait accueillir plus d’immigrants. 40 % ont dit qu’il faudrait plutôt maintenir les niveaux actuels d’immigration, tandis que 36 % des répondants ont dit qu’il faudrait abaisser les cibles.

Source: https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/canada/589588/immigration-la-part-quebecoise-continue-de-diminuer?utm_source=infolettre-2020-11-12&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=infolettre-quotidienne

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Citizenship applicants call on Ottawa to resume knowledge tests halted due to COVID-19

2020/11/12 Leave a comment

Given that we are unlikely to be out of various lockdowns and restrictions for the next 6 months, hard to understand why the government is not able to move faster on this beyond citizenship being a lessor priority for IRCC.

The last dataset on new citizens dates from June, compared to immigration datasets which include August data and will likely be updated with September data this week:

After spending the prime years of her childhood fleeing conflict and living as a refugee in Turkey, Sedra Alshamaly describes her arrival in Canada four years ago with warmth and gratitude.

“It’s the first place we felt welcomed,” said Sedra, now 12. “We felt like we belonged here.”

Sedra and her family arrived in Canada in 2016 after a circuitous journey sparked by the Syrian civil war. Today, she describes herself as a more-or-less ordinary Canadian Grade 7 student and a budding artist.

Source: Citizenship applicants call on Ottawa to resume knowledge tests halted due to COVID-19

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