History’s purpose isn’t to comfort us, says David Olusoga, although many in the UK seem to think it is. “History doesn’t exist to make us feel good, special, exceptional or magical. History is just history. It is not there as a place of greater safety.”
As a historian and broadcaster, Olusoga has been battling this misconception for almost two decades, as the producer or presenter of TV series including Civilisations, The World’s War, A House Through Time and the Bafta-winning Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners. His scholarship has been widely recognised: in 2019, he was awarded an OBE and made a professor at the University of Manchester. (He is also on the board of the Scott Trust, which owns Guardian Media Group.) Yet apologists for empire, in particular, like to dismiss him as a “woke historian” in an attempt to politicise his work or flatly deny the realities that he points out.
First published in 2016, and made into a TV series the same year, the book charts black British history from the first meeting between the people of Britain and the people of Africa during the Roman period, to the racism Olusoga encountered during his own childhood, via Britain’s role in the slave trade and the scramble for Africa. It is a story that some of Olusoga’s critics would prefer was forgotten.
Hostility to his work has grown since the Brexit vote, shooting up “profoundly since last summer”, he says, speaking over Zoom from his office in Bristol. “It has now got to the point where some of the statements being made are so easily refutable, so verifiably and unquestionably false, that you have to presume that the people writing them know that. And that must lead you to another assumption, which is that they know that this is not true, but they have decided that these national myths are so important to them and their political projects, or their sense of who they are, that they don’t really care about the historical truths behind them.
“They have been able to convince people that their own history, being explored by their own historians and being investigated by their own children and grandchildren, is a threat to them.”
‘You have to have a real tenure in the country to play your ancestors’ … a recreation of the Empire Windrush at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012. Photograph: Lee Jin-man/AP
For Olusoga, 51, this hostility can in part be explained by ignorance. “If you were taught a history that the first black person to put his foot on English soil was stepping off the Windrush in 1948, then this can seem like a conspiracy,” he says.
But there is a deeper issue at play. “If you have been told a version of your history and that is part of your identity, it’s very difficult when people like me come along and say: ‘There are these chapters [that you need to know about].’ People feel – wrongly in my view – that their history is being undermined by my history. But my history isn’t a threat to your history. My history is part of your history.”
When the book was published in 2016, it ended on a hopeful note. Olusoga was writing just a few years after the London Olympics, in which a tantalising view of Britain emerged – a country at ease with its multiculturalism, nodding with pride to the arrival of the Windrush generation in 1948. Black Londoners dressed up as their ancestors for the opening ceremony, “with long, baggy suits, holding their suitcases”, says Olusoga. “You have to have a real tenure in the country to play your ancestors.” That moment, he says, was profoundly beautiful.
But that upbeat note has begun to feel inaccurate – an artefact of a more optimistic time. In the new edition of Black and British, which includes a chapter on the Windrush scandal and last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, Olusoga describes that moment in 2012 as a mirage. The summer afterwards, vans bearing the message “Go home or face arrest” were driven around London as part of Theresa May’s notorious “hostile environment” strategy, aiming to make the UK inhospitable for undocumented migrants. Thousands of people who had lived legally in the UK for decades, often people who had arrived from the Caribbean as children, were suddenly targeted for deportation.
But this movement for racial justice has been met with a severe backlash. In January, Robert Jenrick, the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, said he would introduce laws to protect statues from what he called “baying mobs”. The government’s recent review on racial equality concluded controversially that there was no institutional racism in areas including policing, health and education, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
“I’m really frightened about the future of this country, and frightened about people using forces of race and racism for electoral reasons and not being cognisant about how difficult it is to control those forces after elections have been counted,” says Olusoga. “I’m really frightened about the extent to which people are able to entirely dehumanise people who they deem to be their enemies in this culture war.”
Olusoga was born in Lagos in 1970, to a white British mother and a Nigerian father, moving to his mother’s home town, Gateshead, at an early age. As one of a handful of mixed-race families on the council estate where they lived, they were regularly terrorised by the far right. The violence culminated in a brick being thrown into the family’s home, wrapped in a note demanding they be sent “back”. He was 14. Eventually, the family had to be rehoused.
His early experience of education was also distressing. “I experienced racism from teachers in ways that are shocking if I tell them to young people at school now,” says Olusoga. He was dyslexic, but the school refused to get him tested until he did his GCSEs: “It was the easier story to believe that this kid was stupid because all black kids are stupid.” When he finally got his diagnosis and support – thanks in large part to his mother’s fierce determination – Olusoga went to study history at the University of Liverpool, followed by a master’s degree at Leicester.
Olusoga was confident about having two identities, despite the prejudice he had encountered. He was proud of being a black Nigerian of Yoruba heritage and was perfectly happy being part of his mother’s white working-class geordie tradition. But he has always had a third identity.
“I’m also black British – and that had no history, no recognition. It was presented as impossible – a dualism that couldn’t exist, because whiteness and Britishness were the same thing when I was growing up. So, to discover that there was a history of being black and British, independent from being half white working-class and being half black Nigerian, that was what was critically important to me,” he says. His book does its best to uncover that history, exploring the considerable presence of black people in Britain in the age of slavery, as well as the part played by black Britons in both world wars.
He says that some of the aggression shown towards black historians who write honestly about Britain’s past comes from people who think “this history is important because it gives black people the right to be here”. They hold on to the belief that the UK was a “white country” until the past few decades and refuse to accept evidence that shows the presence of black people goes back centuries. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand what drives him and also why this history is important for black people.
“I don’t feel challenged in my right to be proud to be British,” he says. “I’m perfectly comfortable in my identity. I’ve looked at this history because it’s just exciting to be part of a long story. This comes out of wanting to enrich life, not seeking some sort of needy validation of who I am.”
He found it refreshing to see the UK’s history of empire and colonialism acknowledged in last summer’s anti-racist placards, with one popular slogan stating “The UK is not innocent”. “A generation has emerged that doesn’t need history to perform that role of comfort that its parents and grandparents did,” he says.
As for black people’s experiences in Britain, he says, there is a “hysterical” level of anger if you point out that many have lived in some form of slavery or unfreedom. Recently, historians have uncovered notices of runaway enslaved people or advertisements for their sale. This adds to the evidence that thousands of black people were brought to Britain, enslaved as well as free.
“It brings slavery to Britain and therefore undermines the idea that it doesn’t really matter because it happened ‘over there’,” says Olusoga. “It short-circuits an idea of British exceptionalism. And there are a lot of people for whom that idea of exceptionalism is a part of how they see themselves. I’m really sorry that the stuff I do and that other people do is a challenge to that, but my job is to be a historian. It’s not to make people feel good.”
Olusoga is often accused of pursuing a political agenda. He is asked, for instance, why he doesn’t speak about the Barbary slave trade of the 16th to 18th centuries, in which Europeans were captured and traded by north African pirates. He has a simple response: that he has been trying to get a programme made about it for his entire career and it is finally happening.
He gives another example: “I have been accused literally hundreds of times of ignoring the slavery suppression squadron that the Royal Navy created after 1807.” Its task was to suppress the Atlantic slave trade by patrolling the coast of west Africa. “I think the chapter in Black and British about that is 30,000 words, which is as long as some books.”
What his more extreme critics fail to understand, he adds, is that he is loyal to history and not a political agent. He remains committed to one goal: to uncover the stories of those who have long been deemed unimportant. When he wrote his first book on the 1904-08 Namibian genocide, he went to mass graves where he saw bones sticking out of the ground. “We promised the victims of that genocide that we would be their voice, we would fight for them and we would tell their story – and we use every skill we have to do that.
“I care deeply about people who were mistreated in the past. I care about the names on slave ledgers, I care about the bones of people in Africa, in mass graves in the first world war and in riverbeds in Namibia. I care about them. I think about them when I read the letters, when I look at their photographs and their faces. No one gave a damn about them. That’s my job – to care about them. And I will be ruthless in fighting for them.”
The federal government is opening up new immigration options for Hong Kongers to make Canada their home as Beijing continues its unprecedented crackdown on the former British colony.
Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino said two new immigration streams will now begin taking applications from Hong Kongers working in Canada or recent university graduates from Hong Kong now living in Canada. They will be offered a quicker and more efficient pathway to permanent residence.
“At this difficult moment, Canada continues to stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Hong Kong. We are deeply concerned about China’s imposition of the National Security Law, and more broadly the deteriorating human rights situation in Hong Kong,” the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship department said in a statement.
This is on top of a program announced in February targeted at people living in Hong Kong who had graduated from a Canadian or foreign university. It offers them a three-year open work permit that would help pave the way for applying for permanent residency.
The work permit program opened in February and has so far attracted 3,481 applications, the department said on Monday.
An exodus from Hong Kong has been expected since the Chinese government imposed the national security law on Hong Kong in June, 2020, saying it was to target secession, subversion and terrorism. But it includes vaguely defined offences that critics say effectively criminalize dissent and opposition to the Chinese Communist Party’s rule.
“With young Hong Kongers casting their eyes abroad, we want them to choose Canada,” Mr. Mendicino said in a statement.
“Skilled Hong Kongers will have a unique opportunity to both develop their careers and help accelerate our recovery. This landmark initiative will strengthen our economy and deepen the strong ties between Canada and the people of Hong Kong.”
Canada and Western allies have called China’s clampdown a violation of the international treaty it signed pledging to allow local autonomy and civil rights to continue for 50 years after the 1997 handover.
Records show Hong Kongers have already moved billions of dollars to Canada. Last year, capital flows out of Hong Kong banks and into Canada reached the highest level on record, with about $43.6-billion in electronic funds transfers recorded by FINTRAC, Canada’s anti-money-laundering agency.
A crackdown on civil rights in Hong Kong that accelerated in 2020 amid the global pandemic has steadily eroded the territory’s political and social freedoms that were unique in China, a legacy of the territory’s years under British control. Earlier this year, Chinese lawmakers approved changes to Hong Kong’s electoral system, further reducing democratic representation in the city’s institutions and introducing a mechanism to vet and screen politicians for loyalty to Beijing.
A lament for what is lost. I suspect each generation has similar regrets, reminding me of Woody Allen’s treatment of nostalgia in Midnight in Paris:
Darwin’s Arch, the magnificent rock formation near the Galápagos Islands, collapsed last month. It took millions of years of erosion, and then gravity finished the work instantly. It was witnessed by a handful of divers on a nearby ship, Galapagos Aggressor III. What’s left over is being renamed “the Pillars of Evolution.” Why not “Darwin’s pillars”? Probably because Darwin is problematic now. Far safer to name things after the pitiless laws of nature, which cause every poorly adapted beast to disappear from the face of the earth forever.
The world is always disappearing. And faster than you think. The British writer Peter Hitchens visited Bhutan some 16 or so years ago in the first years after it had been introduced to the television. The mountainous and mysterious little country that sits between China and India was ruled by a king who famously privileged “gross domestic happiness” and who banned blue jeans. Hitchens worried about the effect of television on this peaceful, quiet, and devout kingdom. His essay made me long to visit a nation that was culturally formed by Buddhism and whose mountainous geography was so imposing that the two giants of Eurasia had not dared to conquer it.
Hitchens was right to worry about the effects of television. Now, Bhutanese youth are crowding in the capital city, Thimphu. They have smartphones. The traditional culture of Bhutan — its sports, music, and folklore — competes directly with the Bollywood hits that are beamed in to their Motorola phones. Elements of land reform that other nations completed in the 19th century are still part of active debate. And yet, the young King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck just this year abolished the last laws criminalizing same-sex relations and was congratulated by a native identity lobby group, Queer Voices of Bhutan. Such a development was literally unthinkable three decades ago, and yet also inevitable once Facebook arrived.
Even still, something left over from Bhutan’s mannerly and courteous culture shines through. An article about these changes dictated to Vice by Tashi Tsheten, a gay Bhutanese man, noted that Bhutan has never had a single pride parade and doesn’t plan on it. Why? Because “parades are a form of activism where people go out on the streets and talk about policy and legal changes; that’s not something that we Bhutanese agree with.” A Buddhist nation can be queered, but they won’t march about like a bunch of drumming Presbyterians in Belfast. How long can that last? Social media is like a different kind of social physics. Perhaps there will be a police-shooting incident in Nevada someday, and within hours the youth of Bhutan will put Thimphu to flames like Minneapolis last summer.
Global capitalism talks about diversity and multiculturalism, but we are all modernizing toward conformity. Globalization destroys diversity. Sometimes it does so with a malign purpose, such as the Chinese Communist Party using every totalitarian means to extirpate the native Muslim cultures of Western China. But half the time it is hardly intended at all. It proceeds by our attraction to power and wealth. Bhutan’s Buddhist culture, if the lines of transmission are set the right way, will slowly be zapped away by the parts of India’s culture that are made for export. Much of that culture too will have been borrowed by America.
Our desire for better and more easeful lives, not only for ourselves but our children, optimizes for the selection of a few lingua franca. Half of all human languages still spoken today will cease to exist before the end of the next century. Most of them before they had the chance to develop a literature. There will be efforts to preserve and revitalize these treasure chests of human culture and civilization — but it’s like trying to make water gush from a sand dune where there was once a riverbank.
The Trudeau government’s former representative in the Senate says a proposed motion in the Red Chamber to condemn China’s treatment of ethnic Muslim minorities as genocide smacks of “moral superiority and self-righteousness,” given Canada’s past conduct toward Indigenous people including in residential schools.
Senator Peter Harder, a former deputy minister of Foreign Affairs who later headed the Canada-China Business Council, recently spoke in the Senate to oppose a motion that would say the Chinese government’s repression of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims fits the United Nations’ definition of genocide. A similar motion has already passed the Commons, although Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet abstained from voting.
Activists and UN experts have said a million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims have been subject to mass detention in Xinjiang. China denies abuses and says the centres provide vocational training and are needed to fight extremism in the remote western region. Reports have emerged about Beijing’s success in slashing the birth rate of Uyghurs and other minorities through mass sterilization, forced abortions and mandatory birth control.
Senate motion No. 79, which has not yet been put to a vote, notes that two successive U.S. administrations have labelled China’s behaviour as genocide. It also proposes calling upon the International Olympic Committee to deny Beijing the 2022 Winter Olympics by relocating the Games to another country “if the Chinese government continues this genocide.”
The Dutch, British and Lithuanian parliaments have in recent months adopted similar motions recognizing the treatment of Uyghurs as genocide.
Mr. Harder, however, urged fellow senators to consider Canada’s conduct toward Indigenous people before they vote.
He noted that the debate is occurring after “the tragic discovery” of unmarked graves containing the remains of 215 children and “adds to the indictment of our centuries-long practice of residential schools, forced sterilization and what the former chief justice of Canada described as cultural genocide of our Indigenous peoples,” the senator said.
“This horrifying reality of our history stands in rather cynical contrast to the tone of moral superiority and self-righteousness contained in the motion before us tonight.”
The former Trump administration declared the repression of the Uyghurs to be genocide and U.S. President Joe Biden’s Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, said he concurs with that assessment. In addition, a March, 2021 State Department report on human rights issued under the Biden administration declares that “genocide and crimes against humanity occurred during [2020] against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang.”
Mr. Harder, speaking to the Senate motion late last week, said this is not the way to engage with China.
“We should get off our high horse and seek to engage more appropriately, not bellicosely and belligerently, with countries – not just China, but countries that we need to engage.”
Ottawa has already joined with the U.S., Britain and the European Union in imposing sanctions on several Chinese government officials for “gross and systematic human-rights violations” against Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other largely Muslims groups.
Senator Leo Housakos, the sponsor of motion No. 79, said that unlike China, Canada has acknowledged its atrocities. “China still doesn’t acknowledge what they are doing is ethnic cleansing.”
David Mulroney, a former Canadian ambassador to China, said Beijing’s use of technology to monitor, coerce and control a whole people is providing a how-to manual for other authoritarian powers to follow. “It’s writing the book on genocides of the future,” Mr. Mulroney said.
He said Canada’s shameful treatment of Indigenous people shouldn’t preclude Canadians from identifying and calling out misconduct elsewhere. “We call out the Uyghur genocide and question Beijing’s hosting of the Olympics not as a political statement but as a moral statement,” Mr. Mulroney said.
“Surely if we have learned anything as a country it is that you need to act swiftly against genocide anywhere.”
Mr. Harder also said he worried that the motion declaring China’s conduct to be genocide could jeopardize the treatment of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, the two Canadians locked up by Beijing after Ottawa arrested a Huawei executive on a U.S. extradition request.
In addition, he cited concerns that it could also inflame anti-Asian violence in Canada and hurt Ottawa’s ability to find common cause with China in fighting climate change and building stronger global trading rules.
Asked for further comment, Mr. Harder said Monday that Canada should be humble. “It’s not that we lack moral authority as much as we should speak with humility and acknowledge our own historic (and recent) failings,” he said in an e-mailed statement. “Regardless of the motivation of our governmental and church leaders at the time, history has shown that we were wrong.”
The Globe and Mail asked Perry Bellegarde, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, for comment on whether he feels Canada’s conduct toward indigenous people – in particular, its record of residential schools – precludes Canadians from criticizing China. Chief Bellegarde’s office said that he was not able to respond Monday afternoon.
No surprise. Like the vast majority of these programs, vulnerable to corruption, both in terms of those applying and administering:
The Cyprus government continued for at least four years to unlawfully issue passports to relatives of wealthy investors under an investment-for-citizenship program, despite warnings by the Attorney-General that this could be in breach of the law, the head of an independent commission said on Monday.
Former Supreme Court President Myron Nicolatos said that, of the 6,779 passports issued during the program’s 13-year run, 53% were issued not to the investors themselves but to family members or top company executives.
The Attorney-General’s Office had warned on separate occasions in 2015 and 2016 that the practice might be unlawful because there was no specific law enabling the government to issue such passports.
Of the remainder that were granted to investors, one-third failed to meet all the criteria, Nicolatos said. He was speaking after handing the final, 780-page report of an investigation into the multibillion-euro program to Attorney General George Savvides,
He said 8% didn’t meet the primary condition of investing around 2.5 million euros ($3 billion) into the Cypriot economy, while another 12% failed to meet the bar on owning a permanent residence in Cyprus.
Nicolatos said the four-member commission is recommending that authorities look into revoking citizenship in 85 cases in which the applicants may have committed criminal or other offenses to secure a passport.
He said that revoking the citizenship of investors’ relatives and company executives who weren’t directly at fault could prove “particularly complicated” because of legal clauses enshrined in Cypriot and European Union law.
“It’s obvious that the (program) operated between 2007 and Aug. 17, 2020, with blanks and omissions, without a legal framework and almost without a regulatory framework,” Nicolatos said.
“Also absent were those safety valves, the proper legal guidance as well as adequate supervision regarding existing laws and regulations.”
The program was scrapped last year amid much controversy over an undercover TV report that allegedly showed the parliamentary speaker and a powerful lawmaker claiming that they could skirt the rules to grant citizenships.
They had made the pledge to a reporter posing as a representative of a fictitious Chinese investor who had been convicted of fraud in his country. Both resigned shortly after the report was aired.
The golden passport program ran for 13 years but was ramped up in 2013 following the financial crisis. It generated more than 8 billion euros (almost $10 billion) for the east Mediterranean island nation and proved particularly attractive to foreign investors because obtaining an EU passport allowed them access to the 27-member bloc.
The EU had also taken Cyprus to task over the scheme.
Nicolatos also faulted some lawyers, accountants, banks, real estate brokers and developers who he said “didn’t sufficiently live up to their legal or other obligations” through the application process, while in some instances, supervisory authorities failed to do their job properly.
Politicians and officials may bear “political” responsibility for the debacle and some could face disciplinary action.
Although the program spanned the tenure of three different presidents, the overwhelming majority of citizenships were granted during seven years during which the sitting president, Nicos Anastasiades, held the office.
He called on law enforcement authorities to prosecute alleged law breakers and to mete out punishment to the degree of an individual’s responsibility.
Attorney General Savvides said authorities would examine revoking citizenships, take lawbreakers to court and take disciplinary action in those instances that the report recommends.
In the first such legal action, his office last month took five individuals and four legal entities to court to face 37 charges in connection with the commission’s findings.
A redacted version of the final report — so as not to compromise ongoing legal actions — will be made public in due course, Savvides said.
An interim report released in March also pointed to serious shortcomings in how the Interior Ministry processed applications, including the “complete lack” of a database to properly vet applicants. It said the Finance Ministry was also at fault for “green lighting” certain applications that didn’t fulfil all the criteria due to the size of the investment.
Good depiction of some of the issues, including increased inequality:
Millions of Canadians are now well into their second year of working from home. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, non-essential employees began working from their couches, kitchens and bedrooms, hopping virtually from one endless video meeting to another. What began as a temporary arrangement, however, will likely change the way we do our jobs permanently: working from home has its challenges, but it has enough upsides that both workers and employers may be reluctant to go back to the old ways. If this happens, we must ensure that this shift does not widen workplace inequalities.
Not all workers are equally likely to have been working from home during the pandemic. The shift was easier for people with office jobs, for instance, than for those in retail. Workers with permanent, full-time, higher-paid jobs are also more likely than those with less secure, lower-paid positions to have been working from home. This is the first way in which the change has exacerbated inequality within Canadian society: more economically vulnerable workers also ended up more vulnerable to the virus owing to their need to be physically present at work. All Canadians have been urged to stay at home as much as possible during the pandemic, but their ability to do so is in large part a function of the types of jobs that they hold.
For many who made the transition from office desk to the kitchen table, the experience has generally been positive – perhaps surprisingly so. In our recent survey, more than three in five agree that working from home has been easier than expected, and they say they like working from home better than their regular workplace. The same proportion even say that working remotely has been less stressful than working in the office. So far, so good.
At the same time, more than two in five express concerns about juggling work and family responsibilities while working from home – they feel like they are constantly working and never have time for themselves or their families. One in three find it impossible to do their job well while working from home.
It will shock no one that these stresses are most acutely experienced by parents of young children. Three in five of those caring for young children say they worry that they can’t be a good parent and be good at their job at the same time while working from home.
Younger workers, immigrants, racialized people, Indigenous workers and workers with a physical or mental condition that limits their daily activity are also more likely to experience challenges working from home. Most notably, each of these groups is morelikely than average to worry that working from home will have a negative impact on their career. These workers may be less securely employed, and therefore more concerned about the longer-term consequences of being physically distant from their workplaces.
What’s notable, though, is that many of those experiencing challenges with working from home nonetheless feel positive about the arrangement overall. In fact, seven in 10 of those who have been working at home say that once the pandemic is over, their employer should continue to allow them to work remotely at least a few days a week. Clearly, workers are likely to expect greater flexibility from employers from now on.
All of this puts the onus to act back on employers and policy makers alike. It is not enough to pick up on the current zeitgeist and consider offering more flexible working arrangements once all lockdowns have been lifted. This experience should bring with it an obligation to ensure that new arrangements do not simply place further disadvantages on those already less connected to the centres of power.
Coming out of the events of the past year, we must renew our resolve to tackle persistent inequalities. This includes confronting the higher risks faced by front-line workers, the bigger challenges for those combining work and family responsibilities, and the greater barriers facing minority groups. New working arrangements will need new infrastructure, new policies, new supports, new ways of thinking about work and new skills for both employee and managers. These changes must now be made, not only in the context of physical offices and places of business, but in virtual ones as well.
Good ongoing focus on the challenges in Brampton and the L6P postal code:
Half the members of Sunidhi Sharma’s social circle have been vaccinated but it’s them, rather than the unvaccinated, who are keeping her from getting the jab.
None of the 22-year-old restaurant cashier’s friends or colleagues have had the novel coronavirus, so hearing friends’ accounts of developing fever and body aches after receiving their first dose has worried her more than COVID-19itself.
“It feels a bit scarier, so I’m not sure whether I should go for it or not,” said Ms. Sharma, who immigrated from India in 2019 and now lives in L6P, a postal code in northeast Brampton, Ont., that has logged the highest per capita cases of COVID-19 in the province.
She’s part of the 27 per cent of adults in Peel Region, west of Toronto, who have still not received their first dose of the vaccine, despite being eligible for more than a month.
Concerns about the highly contagious Delta variant, which now makes up one-quarter of COVID-19 cases in Peel, have prompted political and health leaders to call for an accelerated rollout of second doses of the vaccine in the area. A British-based study found that the variant reduced effectiveness of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines to just 33.5 per cent after one dose, but that two doses are nearly as effective against Delta as they are against Alpha (the variant first associated with Britain).
But there is a worry that people like Ms. Sharma, and others who haven’t yet rolled up their sleeves because of logistical barriers, vaccine shopping or hesitancy, may be left behind.
Despite being the hardest-hit city in Ontario, Brampton’s vaccination campaign got off to a slow start. Relatively few Brampton pharmacies offered shots early, and community pop-ups and workplace clinics took weeks longer to come online than they did in Toronto.
In L6P, overall coverage is still slightly below the provincial average, despite the area receiving extra vaccines, and Peel being the first public-health unit to open vaccines to everyone over 18. Seniors, in particular, are being left behind in L6P, with 69 per cent of people over 80 covered, compared with a provincial average of 83 per cent, according to the non-profit Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences.
This month, a team of researchers launched the COVID CommUNITY-South Asian study, a federally funded project that will investigate both vaccine effectiveness and hesitancy in South Asian communities. In Peel, 55 per cent of infections have been among South Asians, though they make up 32 per cent of the population. The team hopes to recruit 1,500 vaccinated and 1,500 unvaccinated participants in the Vancouver and Toronto areas – including Brampton.
“If health care workers from the South Asian community were hesitant to get the vaccine, they could have a very significant negative ripple effect in the community around them,” said principal investigator Sonia Anand, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at McMaster University in Hamilton. “Because if you say, ‘Well, if this ICU nurse is not getting the vaccine, then I’m not getting it, because she must know something I don’t.’ ”
On an evening in late May, just days after the Embassy Grand vaccine clinic in L6P had opened, the lineup snaked around the parking lot out front. The queue was filled with young teens, accompanied by parents and other relatives. The province had just dropped the age of eligibility for a first shot to 12.
But in that queue were many who had been eligible for weeks or even months.
Nancy Chandhi, a 31-year-old international student who moved to Brampton from the Indian state of Punjab in April to study business management at Conestoga College, came to the Embassy Grand for a shot with her six housemates.
A week earlier, they had walked away from their appointments at the Brampton Soccer Centre, one of Peel’s mass vaccination sites, because the site was administering the Moderna vaccine. The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna shots, which both use mRNA technology, performed nearly identically in clinical trials and real-world studies.
Ms. Chandhi hadn’t heard anything particularly bad about the Moderna product, but so many friends had recommended Pfizer-BioNTech that a sense of “brand loyalty” had developed in her circle.
At Peel Public Health’s fixed clinics, where about 40 per cent of all doses have been administered, 6 per cent of booked appointments last week were no-shows. But the no-show rate at pop-up clinics and hospitals has been much higher, said Priya Suppal, a Brampton family doctor who has worked at several of the vaccination sites in the city, including the Embassy Grand, where she is one of the medical directors.
After the initial surge of teens when it first opened on May 17, the site has seen a daily no-show rate of about 15 per cent to 20 per cent. Some clinics have reduced their hours or closed. One day last week, a clinic in Brampton had capacity to administer 600 daily doses and only did 50, Dr. Suppal said.
With cases of the Delta variant rising, she said the government should immediately move to opening up second-dose vaccinations to everyone over 18 in COVID-19 hot spots such as Brampton – but the variant is also good reason to keep pushing those first doses, she said.
With so few appointments booked in recent weeks at her clinic, her team has had time to canvass local gurdwaras, temples and supermarkets to draw people in, and they’ve learned why so many are still without first doses. There are the long-haul truckers who are only at home one day a week and have had difficulty finding an appointment, there are home-bound seniors who are unable to drive themselves to a clinic, there are warehouse workers whose schedules are too unpredictable to book an appointment weeks ahead of time, there are international students who mistakenly believe they must pay to get a vaccine.
“I think we have to sort of go full steam ahead with second doses, but really continue our efforts on [first doses],” Dr. Suppal said. “We don’t want to have all these mutations out and about and people getting sick all over again.”
For Muntaz Alli, the president of the Brampton Islamic Centre, vaccinating locals who are on the fence requires buy-in from trusted community leaders and institutions. In April, the city asked the mosque to hold a pop-up vaccination clinic. It ran from April 30 to May 11 and administered 6,200 first doses. A team of volunteers engaged with community members on social media and WhatsApp – a major source of local news and information – to encourage residents to come to the pop-up clinic.
“When community members heard about the [mosque’s] pop-up, their worries went away because it was their local community holding the vaccination clinic,” Mr. Alli said.
Leaders in Brampton’s Black, African and Caribbean communities followed that model when they launched a four-week pop-up clinic at the Bramalea Civic Centre in the L6T postal code, which has the lowest vaccination rate – 54 per cent – in the region.
They dispatched community ambassadors into apartment buildings and grocery stores to spread the word about the clinic and found Black doctors, nurses, staff and volunteers to work there. But the battle against vaccine hesitancy has been formidable.
Angela Carter, executive director of the Brampton non-profit Roots Community Services, said there is a well-founded mistrust of a health care system that has not always treated Black people well.
Some tell her “the government is inflating the numbers” of COVID-19 infections. Or explain, “I am not going anywhere, so I don’t need to get the vaccine.” Others say, “I don’t know what’s in the vaccine. I don’t know how it’s going to affect my body.”
The weekend soft launch of the clinic in mid-May was busy and celebratory, but a few days later, appointment bookings dropped and organizers pivoted to allowing anyone who qualified to walk in and get a shot.
Marsha Brown, the manager of community programs and services for WellFort Community Health Services, said even as the government’s focus shifts to second doses, the work to ensure residents get their first doses must continue long after the Bramalea Civic Centre pop-up closes on Friday.
“Knowing the mistrust, the hesitancy and the resistance that’s there, if we didn’t carve out a space and focus on our community, they could very easily just fall through the cracks and get forgotten,” she said.
South Korean court on Monday rejected a claim by dozens of World War II-era Korean factory workers and their relatives who sought compensation from 16 Japanese companies for their slave labor during Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea.
The decision by the Seoul Central District Court appeared to run against landmark Supreme Court rulings in 2018 that ordered Nippon Steel and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to compensate Korean forced laborers.
It largely aligns with the position maintained by the Japanese government, which insists all wartime compensation issues were settled under a 1965 treaty normalizing relations between the two nations that was accompanied by hundreds of millions of dollars in economic aid and loans from Tokyo to Seoul.
A total of 85 plaintiffs had sought a combined 8.6 billion won ($7.7 million) in damages from 16 Japanese companies, including Nippon Steel, Nissan Chemical and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.
The court dismissed their civil lawsuit after concluding the 1965 treaty doesn’t allow South Korean citizens to pursue legal action against the Japanese government or citizens over wartime grievances. Accepting the plaintiffs’ claim would violate international legal principles that countries cannot use domestic law as justification for failures to perform a treaty, the court said.
Some plaintiffs told reporters outside the court they planned to appeal. An emotional Lim Chul-ho, 85, the son of a deceased forced laborer, said the court made a “pathetic” decision that should have never happened.
“Are they really South Korean judges? Is this really a South Korean court?” he asked. “We don’t need a country or government that doesn’t protect its own people.”
It wasn’t immediately clear how the ruling would affect diplomacy between the estranged U.S. allies, which have faced pressure from the Biden administration to repair relations that sank to postwar lows during the Trump years over history and trade disputes.
South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it respects the decisions by domestic courts and is willing to engage in talks with Tokyo to find “rational” solutions that can satisfy both governments and the wartime victims.
Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said Tokyo was carefully watching the developments in South Korea and hoping that Seoul would take a responsible action to improve ties. He said bilateral relations were still in a “severe condition” because of issues related to Korean forced laborers and wartime sex slaves.
“We believe it is important for South Korea to act responsibly to resolve the outstanding problems between the two countries and we will be watching concrete proposals by the South Korean side aimed at resolving the problems,” Kato said at a news briefing.
The plaintiffs had said the workers endured harsh conditions that caused “extreme” mental and physical pain that prevented them from resuming normal lives after they returned home at the end of the war.
The Seoul court said in its ruling that it had to consider that forcing Japanese companies to compensate the victims would cause significant “adverse reactions” for South Korea internationally.
“A forcible execution (of compensation) would violate the large constitutional principles of ensuring the safety of the country and maintaining order, and would constitute an abuse of power,” the court said, describing its ruling as an “inevitable” decision.
In April, the court issued a similar ruling on a claim by Korean victims of Japanese wartime sexual slavery and their relatives, another sticking point in bilateral relations. In that ruling, the court denied their claim for compensation from Japan’s government, citing diplomatic considerations and principles of international law that grant countries immunity from the jurisdiction of foreign courts.
Relations between Seoul and Tokyo have been strained since South Korea’s Supreme Court in 2018 ordered Nippon Steel and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to compensate Korean forced laborers. Those rulings led to further tensions over trade when Japan placed export controls on chemicals vital to South Korea’s semiconductor industry in 2019.
Seoul accused Tokyo of weaponizing trade and threatened to terminate a military intelligence-sharing agreement with Tokyo that was a major symbol of their three-way security cooperation with Washington. South Korea eventually backed off and continued the deal after being pressured by the Trump administration, which until then seemed content to let its allies escalate their feud in public.
South Korea’s tone on Japan has softened since the inauguration of U.S. President Joe Biden, who has been stepping up efforts to bolster three-way cooperation among the countries that declined under Donald Trump’s “America first” approach, to coordinate action in the face of China’s growing influence and North Korea’s nuclear threat.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in in a nationally televised speech in March said his government was eager to build “future-oriented” ties with Japan and that the countries should not allow their wartime past to hold them back.
Some lessons here more broadly, both with respect to policy and service delivery:
Has Ottawa’s latest immigration pathway for international graduates and essential migrant workers been a success or a missed opportunity?
After much fanfare in April to announce the first-come, first-served program to grant permanent residence to temporary migrants in Canada, officials released details about the process and requirements less than 24 hours before applications opened a month ago on May 6.
The cap of 40,000 applications for international graduates here on postgraduate work permits was filled within a day, while intake for the two migrant worker streams in health and non-health sectors — with a cap of 50,000 applications — has been slow.
As of Friday, only 1,700 applications had been received under the stream for health workers out of a quota of 20,000, and just 11,900 of the 30,000 vacancies for those in non-health related jobs were filled.
That shortfall has prompted some critics to question whether the special pathway only favours those with Canadian education credentials and in higher-skilled jobs, but excludes the essential workers who don’t meet the strict language and job criteria and who really need the help.
“It’s a missed opportunity to provide a pathway to permanent residence for other ‘low-skilled’ workers who don’t qualify. … They had an opportunity to finally give all low-skilled foreign nationals pathway for permanent residence that they’d been talking about for years,” says Vancouver-based immigration lawyer Steven Meurrens.
“There are so many people here in low-skilled jobs for such a long time. It’s not clear to me why they didn’t just expand it to all low-skilled workers who are here but don’t have an (eligible) immigration program.”
International graduates who lost their jobs during the pandemic and had their postgraduate work permits expire are already eligible to renew their permits for up to 18 months due to the pandemic, said Meurrens.
“The government sold the pathway as a COVID program. They could’ve sold it that ‘these people have been working during the pandemic and we’re going to let them stay permanently,’” said Meurrens. “They could have the political will to do that. I don’t think any opposition party would attack the government for it.”
Excitement — followed by disappointment, for some
In April, Ottawa’s announcement of the new pathway made for a good news story and the pathway was well received. It came as Canada was struggling during the peak of the third wave of COVID-19 pandemic, with daily new infections averaging more than 8,500 cases.
“This new pathway to permanent residence recognizes Canada’s need for educated and experienced workers as we work toward our economic recovery,” the immigration department said in a news release.
“It also acknowledges the extraordinary service of so many essential workers during the pandemic, many of whom are newcomers to our country and have played critical roles as we fight COVID-19.”
The pathway created a frenzy among many temporary migrants with precarious status in Canada, who were faced with the uncertainty over the impact and disruption of the pandemic toward their pursuit for permanent residence here.
Jose, a failed refugee claimant from Mexico with diabetes, has braved the exposure to COVID-19 while working in a restaurant and house cleaning through the pandemic. He said he was excited when he first heard about the program, but that excitement quickly turned to disappointment when he learned the pathway wasn’t opened to all essential workers.
“I felt sad when I found out more about the new program. We have been working to support Canadians who are staying at home during the pandemic,” said Jose, who asked his last name be withheld because he has been undocumented in Canada since his asylum claim based on sexual orientation was refused in 2009.
“Many of us have no other options to stay. We have worked hard during the pandemic and we are the ones who need a special program for permanent residence,” added the 41-year-old Montreal man.
The new pathway stipulates that all applicants must be legally employed with valid work permits in Canada at the time of their application and when they are granted permanent residence. Some applicants may end up being disqualified if they fail to keep their jobs or work permit while waiting out the process.
There are also minimum English proficiency requirements based on language test results. The migrant worker streams are limited to 40 health-care occupations and 95 other essential jobs across a range of fields, such as caregiving and food production and distribution.
Communication around program falls under criticism
Ottawa lawyer Betsy Kane said immigration officials did a poor job in communicating about the specifics of the program as they rushed to roll it out.
“The execution was very poor because people didn’t even know what the requirements were. People had to prepare in real time as they were changing what actually had to be submitted. Their guide came out the day before the application was due to open,” she pointed out.
“For somebody who is unable to appreciate what the requirements are, one of the challenges is using a portal. Expecting all documents to be scanned in a beautiful fashion and uploaded in a timely basis under the gun of a quota for low-skilled workers is not realistic.”
Although the new government portal did not crash as many observers expected it to, the immigration department’s system was so overwhelmed by the number of applicants trying to pay the $1,050 application fee that it stopped working for hours on May 6.
The pathway for international graduates would have been a godsend for Sunshine Pardinan, who was laid off as a technical assistant at a dental office and unemployed for seven months at the onset of the pandemic.
The 41-year-old Filipina missed the cap for that stream because she was unable to secure the birth certificates of her four children back home as required in the application.
Fortunately, she still qualified for the nonhealth essential worker stream.
“I was blessed that I had another chance to apply or my family’s immigration dream would be crushed,” said Pardinan, who has a degree in education from Cebu and graduated from Centennial College’s one-year business foundation program in April 2020.
“I was lucky that my former employer called me back in October so I have a job and can still qualify as an essential worker. We all have been helping the economy and I hope the government can give all temporary residents a chance.”
Kane, the lawyer, said she was not surprised the cap for the international graduate stream was filled quickly, as there’s a huge demand to keep attracting international students here and the 40,000 quota accounts for less than 10 per cent of the international student population already here.
While health workers are in huge demand, many of those are tied up helping to fight the pandemic and are not in a rush to apply because they are likely going to qualify or may have already applied through a regular immigration program.
‘A mad rush’
Daniel Lantin, who just completed a two-year program in business marketing from Centennial College this spring, was already preparing to apply for permanent residence under the skilled immigration class before Ottawa announced the new pathway.
With his work experience in social media marketing for a software company, the 30-year-old from the Philippines was able to obtain all the documentation he needed, such as proof of completing his school program and police clearances. He even managed to register and take the mandatory English test before application opened.
“This pathway is a bonus. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that they’re taking in international students who basically just graduated and have full-time work,” said Lantin, who already had an undergraduate degree and worked in marketing in the Philippines.
“We weren’t sure whether this was going to open up again. This is an opportunity that’s not given to everyone. It’s a blessing.”
However, Lantin couldn’t get his application photos professionally done because studios were closed. Instead, he included in his file a note to explain why he didn’t have a photo and hopes immigration officials will accept the reasoning.
His lawyer, Lou Janssen Dangzalan, said people were bound to miss documents and make mistakes in their submissions as they were rushed to complete applications online, sometimes without even looking at their eligibility.
“Based out of my consultation that I’ve had, a lot of people are saying that ‘I’m going to take my chances and maybe they will adjust the policy.’ They were planning to apply anyway,” said Dangzalan, who was approached by a couple of dozen applicants for help and only 14 had valid language test results.
“The 40,000 international graduates that they’ve got. They’re not going to get all of that,” he added. “It’s such a mad rush and mistakes will be made.”
‘There will be opportunities above and beyond this pathway’
Experts said it all comes down to how forgiving and flexible immigration officials are in handling that and if they would just refuse those applications outright.
During a parliamentary immigration committee meeting, officials appeared to have moved the goalpost of the new pathway when they were asked what they would do if many ended up not being qualified.
“One single application can allow two or three people (family members) to ultimately come to Canada. We can therefore hit the target of 90,000,” said Daniel Mills, assistant deputy immigration minister in operations. “It does not necessarily depend on the number of applications, but the number of people involved.”
And for those who don’t meet this program’s criteria, Marian Campbell Jarvis, assistant deputy immigration minister in policy, said, other “pathways still exist alongside this special temporary public policy that was put in place, so there will be opportunities above and beyond this pathway.”
Jarvis expects the uptake for the essential worker streams will ultimately pick up as in the case in most new immigration programs.
In an interview Friday, Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino praised the new pathway as the “broadest and most inclusive” pathway to permanent residence for essential workers in the history of the immigration system.
He said the details of the program were clearly communicated before it opened to applications and that the feedback to the pathway has been overwhelmingly positive.
“By publishing the guideline before the program even opened, we began to inform, educate and give access to clear transparent guidance, so that as people began to prepare to submit, they have the benefit of clear instructions,” Mendicino told the Star.
“The doors are still open to this program. There are spaces. There is still time.”
Mendicino also did not rule out the possibility of another, similar pathway as the pandemic continues to wreak havoc to global migration.
“We are going to make the greatest success out of this program. Once this program has concluded and we have a really clear understanding of how it has landed, we’ll be in a better position to decide. There may be other similar pathways that we should create,” he said.
A system that needs ‘overhaul’
Karen Cocq of the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change said the problem with the new pathway is that it was designed for the people who don’t need a special program to get permanent residence.
It’s evident, she said, the program privileged those who were already the most well placed to access permanent residency with the money to pay for lawyers and fees, or may already be preparing their applications with documentations handy.
“The immigration minister trotted out these highly qualified hardworking workers in health care as examples of front-line heroes the program was built to thank. But the vast majority of people the minister called out don’t need this program,” said Cocq.
“And we know so many people who work in health care in other job classifications who do need access to permanent residency simply can’t get it through the program because so many of them are working undocumented.”
She said these are just symptoms of the fundamental tenet of Canada’s current approach to immigration that’s based on transitioning temporary residents such as international students and migrant workers to become permanent residents.
“Until the immigration system stops producing temporariness, we will continue to require partial, piecemeal and inadequate solutions. This is a historic opportunity that the government has where there’s public awareness in how the system puts people in vulnerable positions,” Cocq explained.
“I think there’s public support and public appetite to see fundamental change coming out of the pandemic to see the reorganizing of the economy and of the immigration system. The government is missing an opportunity to do the overhaul of the system that’s required.”
The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to drive an increase in immigration fraud and human smuggling as desperate migrants try to get into Canada, says a strategic intelligence report prepared by the Canada Border Service Agency.
The report warns that economic downturns and increased poverty abroad caused by the pandemic will prompt more people to resort to irregular methods to come to Canada.
“With more people looking to immigrate, there is likely to be an increase in fraud in all immigration streams via the use of fraudulent supporting documentation to bolster visa or permanent resident applications, fraudulently acquired travel documents to be able to board flights to Canada and misrepresentation,” says the report, dated June 2020.
“It is also likely that we may see more downstream immigration fraud once individuals are in Canada, such as an increase in workers without authorization, marriages of convenience, or the use of unscrupulous agents to assist individuals in regularizing their temporary status into permanent residence.”
The pandemic is likely to increase both the number of people seeking refugee status in Canada and the number of economic migrants pretending to be refugees, the report warns.
It’s also expected to trigger a rise in human smuggling, the report predicts.
“With migration pathways likely reduced globally either as a result of restrictive socio-economic conditions or harsh immigration policies, desperation will likely see more migrants increasingly use the services of smuggling networks and more dangerous pathways, which is likely to increase migrant vulnerability and exploitation by traffickers or other criminal groups,” the report says.
“Migrants who have the means will likely engage the services of smuggling networks, likely resulting in the use of more fraudulent and counterfeit travel documents, increased targeting of visa-exempt travel documents, and the use of new transit points and clandestine routes to facilitate the movement of people to Canada.”
Poverty, corruption and inequality
Part of the problem, the report says, is how the pandemic is aggravating economic inequality around the world.
“Economic inequality is likely to exacerbate push factors such as corruption, unemployment, poverty, poor infrastructure, restrictive human rights and violent conflict,” it reads. “These push factors and the desire to seek favorable socio-economic opportunities already drives a significant portion of irregular migration to Canada and consequences of the pandemic are likely to intensify this.”
The report says Canada is one of the largest sources in the world for remittances — money sent back to home countries by people who come to Canada for work.
Judith Gadbois-St. Cyr, spokesperson for the CBSA, said the report is the most recent assessment by the agency. She said the pandemic has affected the number of people attempting to get into Canada through fraud or human smuggling.
“Irregular migration is impacted by the pandemic travel restrictions in place in Canada and around the world,” she said in a written statement. “At this time, asylum numbers remain lower than those experienced before COVID-19. The CBSA continues to assess these trends and the broader impacts of COVID-19 as it plans for a post pandemic environment.”
She said the agency conducts training in fraud detection techniques and immigration fraud involving “consultants, representatives and organizers remains a top investigative priority.”
Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland, who obtained the report under the Access to Information Act, said the report and its warning about fake documents could account for some of the delays applicants for work or study permits have been experiencing.
“That explains why in many key visa processing centres around the world, more scrutiny is given to applications to come to Canada, which takes more time to process, resulting in lengthier processing times because of COVID and its impact on immigration enforcement,” he said.
“So, if you’re delayed for a visa service, that helps explain why.”
Kurland said the pandemic has destroyed the economies of some countries — at least temporarily — and coming to Canada allows migrants to stay healthier, work legally or illegally and send money back home.
“CBSA hit the nail on the head when it comes to a COVID warning for Canadian immigration authorities,” he said.
Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, said the report paints a bleak picture of the situation. She said the report focuses more on how to enforce laws than on ways to help desperate migrants.
“It is really distressing how quickly the CBSA analyst goes to, ‘People are going to be in dire situations, they’re going to be fleeing human rights abuses, they’re going to be facing humanitarian need, therefore we must be expecting more fraud and taking action against fraud rather than looking at options that are available to them such as being more understanding of why people are forced to turn to smugglers because they are facing dire humanitarian need,'” she said.
Dench said a few urgent refugee cases have been permitted to come to Canada during the pandemic but her group would like to see the Canadian government again allow the arrival of refugees who have been approved to resettle in Canada.
Multicultural Meanderings 