A summer of last-minute passports from a government that was too slow in spring

2022/07/08 Leave a comment

A number of articles on the passport and other delays.

Starting with Campbell Clark of the Globe:

A month ago, the strategy to beat down Canada’s passport backlog was to get people to apply in-person, rather than by mail. Now workers at big-city passport offices triage the people standing in the long lines outside, sending those travelling in the next 48 hours on, and giving others tickets to come back another time.

The minister responsible for the passport offices, Karina Gould, has started to tell Canadians that she is angry about it, too, or something like that: She calls the situation “totally unacceptable,” and insists more will be done.

But what Ms. Gould really needs is a time machine and a bullhorn, so she can go back four months to March to wake up the slumbering government machine.

That was when the uptick in passport applications was becoming visible. The alarm bells didn’t get sounded loudly enough, quickly enough. In April, the government announced it was hiring 600 staff, but it was too little. And now that more resources are being poured in, it’s too late – or at least too late to avert a summer logjam that has made travellers livid.

“We anticipated a surge, but we didn’t anticipate just how large it would be,” Ms. Gould, the Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail.

She said she accepts that people think the government should have seen the problem sooner, but it wasn’t easy to predict. “It doesn’t justify it by any means, because we need to do better and we’re going to do better.”

Perhaps hindsight is 20/20. But the government wasn’t just slow to see the tsunami coming, but slow to react. One problem, as the backlog mounted, was that federal public-health rules kept COVID-19 capacity limits in place at passport offices, with 40 per cent of wickets closed, till May, two months after restrictions were lifted for stores in Ontario, for example.

And more broadly, the federal government was slow to get a grip on reopening. The bureaucracy that delivered CERB cheques in a few weeks in 2020 didn’t spring into action to meet travel-surge challenges in 2022. Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government didn’t put the government on alert for reopening. The passport debacle is one embarrassing result.

The government notes that people are getting their passports. But it is often at the last minute, the day before they fly. The government is leasing space next to passport offices for waiting, or sometimes putting up tents, Ms. Gould said. “This is not the solution. This is just in the interim,” she added.

How did this happen?

In the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, demand for passports pretty much halted. Passport offices were closed. The number of employees shrank. When people started applying again, the numbers rose gradually. Then there was a surge. The immigration department’s forecasts of passport demand for 2022 were low, but revised dramatically upward in January, and again in the spring.

When applications started to pour in March, and pile up in April, there was another problem. In the pandemic, most people hard started mailing applications. But a quarter of them arrived with errors such as missing documents or blank boxes, so they took longer to process. The backlog mounted.

So officials encouraged people to apply in-person instead. And then the lines at offices grew. It wasn’t just new applicants showing up in person, but folks who had mailed in applications, and were getting nervous that their mailed application hadn’t been processed.

“The Easter long weekend was a worrying long weekend for me, because there was a big rush for people who wanted to travel,” Ms. Gould said. “And I would say that in mid-May we really realized we needed to ramp up in a much bigger way than we had been because the number of applications that kept coming in were much greater than the processing capacity.”

There was hiring – 600 in the spring, 600 being hired now and 600 to be seconded from other government jobs. Some get only part of the 12- to 15-week training so they can quickly do one part of the job. Workers were reorganized.

But the backlog of roughly half a million applications isn’t shrinking yet, and it’s a scramble. The government was slow to hit the panic button months ago. And now Ms. Gould forecasts that things will be back to a “steady state” by the end of summer, when most Canadians’ vacations are over.

Source: A summer of last-minute passports from a government that was too slow in spring

Heather Scofield in the Star:

Here’s a number the federal government would like you to know.

Between February and June of this year, the amount of Canadians travelling by air shot up 280 per cent. In the United States, the increase was just 25 per cent.

The number comes from Transport Canada, and the reason federal Liberals want us all to know about it is because they argue it’s why families are camped out at Canadian airports and why police have had to intervene in unruly passport lineups that stretch around the block.

For sure, a 280 per cent spike in demand for travel is enormous, and very difficult for normal-times bureaucracy and travel industry to digest. But it didn’t materialize out of nowhere.

The lineups that have thrown the delivery of government services into disarray are egregious, but they’re also a symptom of the post-pandemic disruption that has afflicted much of the private sector too. And the sooner we address that disruption with the full force of our ingenuity and resources, the better.

“Whatever it takes” defined economic policy on our way down into pandemic recession. The recovery requires an equally concerted effort, because this is more than congestion in airports and on the sidewalks outside Passport Canada.

The erratic flow of people is running amok in our travel industry, for sure, but also our immigration system, our labour markets and our housing markets, showing up in the form of massive lineups, backlogs, erratic prices and inflation. The disruption is not going away on its own, and there are serious implications for both our political landscape and our economy.

Let’s start with the 280-per-cent spike in Canadian travellers this spring, compared to just a 25-per-cent climb in Americans. It’s huge, but not a surprise.

After a couple of years of being mainly housebound here in Canada, we were then sent back home by the sudden restrictions imposed at the end of 2021 because of Omicron. Canadians finally burst out of their homes when Omicron settled down, and they haven’t stopped moving since.

The United States, on the other hand, responded with a lighter touch both to Omicron this winter and even before then, explaining why their wanderlust is not nearly as intense as ours.

Was that kind of surge foreseeable? Probably not to the exact extent we see before us. But one thing we have learned about how the economy and the public respond to the pandemic is that it’s in fits and starts. We have lurched from open to closed with dramatic and volatile effects on how things work.

Strange consumer demands have led to runs on toilet paper and used cars, and — more seriously — a perplexing and persistent shortage of computer chips and shipping containers. Supply chains have seized up, caught between the unpredictable demands coming their way and the unpredictable disruptions in the infrastructure they use.

And the job market is going haywire. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland is fond of saying it has completely recovered from the pandemic recession because more Canadians are employed now than before the pandemic. But in fact, Stage Two of the pandemic recovery is upon us, where one million jobs sit empty and too-high inflation has dug itself in for the long haul.

We have to expect, and prepare for, a certain amount of chaos.

It’s too soon to abandon the crisis footing that Ottawa and the private sector shifted to in the early days of the coronavirus, when decision-makers quickly learned that projections based on how the world worked in pre-pandemic days were not worth much.

In the past few weeks, we’ve seen some attempts to regain that footing. Transport Canada is meeting with increasing frequency with the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, border officials, union officials and air navigators to detect every single inefficiency in the airport system, and shave off time and effort wherever possible.

Vaccine requirements have been scaled back and streamlined, airlines have cut flights, and now their attention has turned into the nightmare which is baggage.

It’s hard to know if there is progress, and there’s a recognition that no one was quite ready for the traffic patterns gumming up trips everywhere right now.

As for immigration, the lineups for processing have ballooned over the course of COVID-19. A parliamentary committee was told this spring that the backlog stands at two million people — almost double the pre-pandemic list — and that was considered already way too long. 

Canada’s economic growth and recovery strategy is heavily based on increasing immigration, but with backlogs like that, it’s a bumpy road.

Over in the world of passports, there’s a similar all-hands-on-deck approach that has taken on added urgency as the intractable lineups made a mockery of internal projections and erupted into a backlash on the sidewalks and in the offices of MPs.

Extra workers have been hired, senior managers are now involved in triage, new offices opened, hours extended.

But the pivot takes time, and success is hard to see.

Over on Facebook Marketplace, one enterprising Montrealer was offering to stand in line at 4 a.m. for passport-seekers for $250 just over a week ago. He has since dropped his price to $200. Is that a sign the lineups are easing?

The Liberals had better hope so, because the public patience for queuing and dysfunction in the machinery of government has worn thin.

Source: On passports and airports, public patience with Liberals is running out

And lastly, Minister Gould on the reasons:

The minister responsible for Service Canada admits the government did not fully anticipate the overwhelming surge in passport applications that came with the lifting of travel restrictions and is hopeful waiting times will return to normal by the end of summer.

Families, Children and Social Development Minister Karina Gould said the federal government hired 600 new staff ahead of the anticipated increase in passport applications and renewals, but said “clearly it was not sufficient.” The surge has forced some Canadians to camp overnight outside of government offices in an attempt to obtain their passports.

“If I put myself where we were as Canadians back in February, we weren’t talking about this kind of a surge. We knew it was going to increase and that’s why we took the measures that we did. But I will concede for sure that they were insufficient for what ended up happening,” Ms. Gould said in an interview.

Service Canada issued 363,000 passports during the first year of the pandemic, from April 1, 2020, to March 31, 2021 – and that number jumped to more than 1.27 million the following fiscal year. The government has received 757,207 passport applications since April 1, nearly 60 per cent of the past year’s total.

Service Canada is hiring an additional 600 staff to help with the delays. Ms. Gould said training for some of the new hires is being shortened from the typical 15 weeks to one to two weeks, so that fully trained passport officers can focus on more complex applications, such as children with custody issues, while new hires will work on simpler files.

Ottawa is asking Canadians travelling within the next 45 business days to go to one of the country’s 35 dedicated passport offices for service. Waiting times topped more than six hours at some locations Monday, according to the government’s website. The government is asking those who are not travelling within the next 45 business days to apply at a Service Canada centre or by mail.

Ms. Gould said the return to normal waiting times will depend on the number of applications the government receives in the coming weeks.

“If volumes on a weekly basis continue where they are now and don’t substantially increase, we feel quite confident that we’re going to be in a much better position over the next four to six weeks and definitely by the end of summer,” she said.

The department has a service standard time of 10 business days for passport applications submitted at a passport office. Ms. Gould said 96 per cent of those passports are being issued within the standard, but the government’s website says they could still take up to two weeks.

Ms. Gould said the mail option is about “40 per cent less efficient” than in-person service. The government groups processing times for mail with the in-person option at Service Canada centres; the service standard is 20 business days, but processing can take up to nine weeks.

Raphael Girard, a retired assistant deputy minister who was responsible for Passport Canada in 1993, said the government needs to consider more creative solutions to the problem, such as extending passports for a year so officials can catch up on the backlog. He said this could be done by having Canadians bring their expired passports to a government office, where an agent could extend the document with a stamp.

However, a spokesperson for Immigration Minister Sean Fraser said simply extending expiration dates is not possible. Aidan Strickland said amending an expiry date that is not aligned with the electronic expiry date recorded in the Canadian ePassport could create further travel disruptions for the passport holder, and that the individual could also be refused boarding on a plane and denied entry to some countries.

More generally speaking, Mr. Girard argued the government has “lost the sense of operations designed to improve client service.”

“They’re layering on … controls and slowing things down, whereas 90 per cent of the workload is always routine,” he said.

Last month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau established a new task force of cabinet ministers to improve government services, such as passports, and monitor the delays causing chaos at Canada’s airports.

Conservative social development critic Laila Goodridge said Ms. Gould and Mr. Fraser, along with the task force, “continue to fumble managing the delivery and processing of passports. This is indicative of what we’ve seen with the Trudeau government that is unprepared for a predictable increase in demand for travel.” She pointed to a recent government tender for 800 chairs for people to sit on as they wait outside of passport offices.

NDP transport critic Taylor Bachrach said the continued delays for Canadians to get new or renewed passports are unacceptable, and that many people are going to their MPs for help to get their documents.

“Ultimately, the increased demand for passports was entirely predictable. But the Liberals failed to act even though they had months to prepare for travel to return. Now they need to urgently address this problem before more Canadians see their travel plans ruined, including speeding up the hiring process to clear the backlog.”

Source: Ottawa acknowledges it underestimated surge in demand for passports

Filed under Citizenship, Passports Tagged with , , ,

Historian Irving Abella said the struggle for Jewish equality changed Canada for the better

2022/07/08 Leave a comment

Worth reading:

The Canada of the first half of the last century, and particularly from the 1920s through the 1940s, was a foreboding place for Jews, as it was for most immigrants. Closed to most of the world by racist immigration laws that divided the peoples of the world into preferred and (mostly) non-preferred, Canada was a country permeated with xenophobia, nativism and antisemitism. The Jew was the pariah of Canadian society, demeaned, denounced and discriminated against.

For Canadian Jews in these years, quotas and restrictions were a way of life. According to a 1938 study by the Canadian Jewish Congress, few of the country’s teachers and none of its school principals were Jewish. The banks, insurance companies and the large industrial and commercial interests, it charged, also excluded Jews from employment. Department stores did not hire Jews as salespeople. Jewish doctors could not get hospital appointments, and when one Jewish doctor, Sam Rabinovitch, was hired as an intern at the Montreal hospital, the other interns went out on strike, along with other doctors, closing the hospital for a week until Rabinovitch was fired.

If the Jew experienced difficulty finding a job or getting an education, finding a place to live or to vacation was even harder. Increasingly, restrictive covenants were placed on various properties prohibiting their sale to Jews, and at beaches and resorts throughout the nation, signs were springing up that banned Jews. So-called swastika clubs of young hoodlums were formed to intimidate Jews and keep them away from “restricted” beaches. The threat of violence was so great that Jewish leaders took the unusual step of warning the community “not to hold large gatherings in any portion of the city where such a gathering is liable to arouse the animosity of certain classes of the non-Jewish population.”

Why was Canada so antisemitic? There are various reasons. To some extent the massive antisemitic propaganda of the Nazis had its impact. Some were taken in by it and by such American hate-mongers as Henry Ford, Father Charles Coughlin, Gerald L. K. Smith and dozens of others. It was also a time of depression and the search for scapegoats invariably ended at a Jewish doorstep. Jews were also publicly seen and denounced as troublemakers. The prominence of Jewish names in the left-wing movement seduced many gullible or malevolent Canadians into believing that most Jews were communists. Obviously, many others hated Jews for religious reasons. Much of the antisemitism in Quebec and in fundamentalist areas of Western Canada originated from religious teachings. Jews had killed Christ, had refused to repent or convert to Christianity and, therefore, were damned.

What is most astonishing about this antisemitism is how few and powerless were Canadian Jews at this time. They made up just more than 1 per cent of the population and had no political or economic clout. Clearly they could be seen as a threat only by the paranoid. Equally surprising was the silence of the churches in the face of this frightful and oppressive anti-Jewish feeling.

With the onset of war, if Canadian attitudes toward Jews changed at all, it was for the worse. Fully half of the Canadian people, according to a Gallup poll in 1943, indicated that they wanted no more Jews in the country. At about the same time, Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis was campaigning through the province waving a copy of a document, which he charged showed that the federal government had made a deal with the International Zionist Brotherhood, a fictitious group, to settle 100,000 Jews in Quebec in return for campaign funds for Liberal candidates. Duplessis was decisively elected.

Even the end of the war brought no respite for Canadian Jews. Discovery of the Nazi barbarities against the Jews, and the graphic horrors of the Holocaust detailed by newspapers, magazines and newsreels in theatres across Canada did not lessen antisemitic feelings. Rather, it seemed to exacerbate them.

Nevertheless, it is clear that by 1948, attitudes in Canada were beginning to change. With most of the world’s economies still devastated, Canada was on the brink of becoming a genuine world power. All she needed was more people. Thus Canada’s immigration doors were flung open, and over the next decade, more than 1.5 million newcomers poured through, including thousands of Jews, most of them survivors of death camps.

By this time, the pervasive antisemitism of earlier years had receded. Obviously, the horrors of the Holocaust shocked many Canadians; others were caught up in the dramatic struggle of the Jews in Palestine to create their own state. Though official Canadian policy was to support the British attempts to forcibly blockade Jewish refugees from entering Palestine, it seemed that a large number of Canadians sympathized with the plucky struggle of the beleaguered Jews in the Holy Land.

It was at this propitious moment that Canadian Jewish leaders chose to launch an all-out offensive against discriminatory practices in Canada. This was not the first time such an attempt had been made. In the late 1930s, the Canadian Jewish Congress had set up a committee called the Joint Public Relations Committee (JPRC) with the co-operation of another Jewish communal organization, the B’nai B’rith, to deal with discrimination against Jews in employment. These early campaigns struggled, but in the late 1940s, similar efforts finally started to see some success.

As Jewish soldiers were returning from overseas, they found the same old restrictions barring their way. In a much-publicized incident, a veteran was fired from his salesman’s job in a Toronto hardware store when it was discovered he was Jewish. “I would lose customers,” the storekeeper explained. Others found that skating rinks, swimming pools, golf clubs and hotels refused them admission despite their heroic efforts on behalf of their country.

Outraged that this kind of behaviour was perfectly legal, the Canadian Jewish Congress organized a protest march of various ethnic and religious groups from City Hall to the Icelandia Skating Rink, which had refused to remove its signs restricting admission to gentiles. As a result of the march, the coverage of it by the Toronto Star, and a meeting with Congress officials, the Toronto Police Board ruled that licences of public places were subject to cancellation if the licence holder discriminated against any minority. This was the first of many victories for the Jewish Public Relations Committee (as it was called by then) and for its new partner, the aggressive Jewish Labour Committee. Its 50,000 feisty members would provide the backbone to the Congress’s political lobbying.

Members of both the JPRC and the Jewish Labour Committee were unrelenting in their lobbying. They arranged for delegations to meet Ontario premier Leslie Frost and his cabinet colleagues; they spoke at hundreds of meetings across the country, they planted articles in the press, they met editorial boards; they distributed pamphlets; they embarked on letter-writing campaigns and they arranged for talks on radio and to various service clubs of prominent speakers who supported their views. One of these, senator Wayne Morse (a Republican from Oregon), spoke so passionately and persuasively on the Trans-Canada Network of CBC Radio in favour of fair employment legislation that it had a real impact on one of his listeners, premier Frost.

By 1951 it was clear that the lobbying had made a real difference. Most Ontario newspapers were now in favour of anti-discrimination legislation, as were many city councils across the province. And so, it seemed, was premier Frost. He arranged a quick meeting with the Jewish and civil-liberties organizations and told them secretly that he would be enacting an anti-discrimination law in the next session of the House.

Three weeks later, in the Speech from the Throne, the government of Ontario announced its intention of introducing a fair employment practices act, which would bar discrimination in hiring because of race, creed, colour, nationality, ancestry or place of origin. It was a remarkable piece of legislation and the historians who have written about it (particularly James Walker, Ruth Frager and Carmela Patrias) have described it as one of the Jewish community’s great victories in this country.

Of course employment discrimination did not disappear in Ontario, but the act marked the beginning of an era in which discrimination was no longer acceptable. Both the JPRC and the Jewish Labour Committee saw the legislation as the “thin edge of the wedge.” Once the Ontario government had admitted that discrimination in employment was unjust and immoral, how could it be condoned in other areas such as housing?

Finally, in 1962, the government created the Ontario Human Rights Commission, many of whose powers were those recommended by the Canadian Jewish Congress five years before. The victory was now largely complete. Though obviously racism and discrimination would not disappear, there were now in place mechanisms and legislation to protect minorities. With both anti-discrimination statutes and human-rights commissions successfully established, not only in Ontario but in most provinces, the human-rights lobby could move onto other issues.

Thus, by the 1960s, Canada had turned the corner. For Jews, as well as for this country’s other minorities, that decade was a watershed. Before it existed the old Canada, parochial, nativist, exclusionary; beyond it, a new Canada was taking shape, a Canada of diversity, colour, vibrancy, a Canada of open minds rather than closed doors, a Canada in which Jews and other ethnic groups were quickly becoming part of the Canadian mainstream, and were seen as part of the solution rather than as part of the problem.

The decade began with Canada finally repealing its odious racist immigration laws and opening itself up to all the world’s nations, and it closed with a government commitment to implement an official policy of multiculturalism. And it was in the 1960s that all of the barriers, restrictions and quotas against Jews crumbled, one by one, sector by sector. At long last, after 200 years in the country, the Jewish community would be able to play out its dreams and become an integral part of the very same Canadian society that had excluded it for so long.

Of course the battle for human rights in Canada is not yet won. Racist, homophobic and xenophobic attitudes still manifest themselves too often, and much remains to be done. Yet who can deny that today’s Canada is a far better place, and that its minorities better integrated thanks in large part to the trail-blazing efforts by the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Jewish Labour Committee.

Irving Abella, a noted scholar of Jewish history, died on July 3. This is an excerpt of a speech he gave to the Canadian Historical Association when he was the group’s president in 2000.

Source: Historian Irving Abella said the struggle for Jewish equality changed Canada for the better

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‘Kaali’ poster row: Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum says it ‘deeply regrets’ offence caused to Hindus; FIR filed

2022/07/07 Leave a comment

A classic example of the intersection between multiculturalism and religion, when the more conservative and fundamentalist elements are all too quick to take offence.

I was posted to Iran during the Rushdie Satanic Verses affair, the classic and extreme example of religious intolerance of contemporary culture:

Days after the poster of the documentary film ‘Kaali’ created an uproar in India and abroad, Aga Khan Museum where the film was screened issued a statement. The museum has said that it deeply regretted the offence caused to the members of the Hindu community. The documentary helmed by NRI film-maker Leena Manimekalai was being showcased at the museum in Toronto in the ‘Under The Tent’ section.

“The museum deeply regrets that one of the 18 short videos from ‘Under The Tent’ and its accompanying social media post have inadvertently caused an offence to the members of the Hindu and other faith communities,” read the statement that was posted on the museum’s website.

The statement further said that the Toronto Metropolitan University brought together works of students of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds, each student exploring their individual sense of belonging as part of Canadian multiculturalism for the ‘Under the Tent’ project. The university’s presentation was hosted by Aga Khan Museum with a view to fostering an intercultural understanding and dialogue through arts.

FIR Against Film-maker
Meanwhile, the controversy surrounding the poster continues to rage closer to home. On Tuesday, an FIR was filed against Leena Manimekalai and others for hurting religious sentiments. The FIR was filed in Uttar Pradesh and DCP Central Lucknow, Aparna Kaushik, said that an investigation was underway.

Earlier this week, the Indian High Commission in Canada issued a statement urging the Canadian authorities to take action. The High Commission said in its statement that it has received numerous complaints from the leaders of the Hindu community in Canada.
“Our Consulate General in Toronto has conveyed these concerns to the organizers of the event. We are also informed that several Hindu groups have approached authorities in Canada to take action. We urge the Canadian authorities and the event organizers to withdraw all such provocative material,” read the release.

Filmmaker Manimekalai took to Twitter on Sunday to share a poster of her upcoming film ‘Kaali’ that depicted goddess Kali as smoking with an LGBTQ+ flag in the backdrop. The poster created an uproar on social media demanding the arrest of the NRI film-maker.

Source: ‘Kaali’ poster row: Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum says it ‘deeply regrets’ offence caused to Hindus; FIR filed

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , ,

Smart tech is key to solving Canada’s service failures and ending passport seekers’ woes

2022/07/07 Leave a comment

All true and necessary, but government has mixed record on such large and complex IT projects.

Even harder is the necessary simplification and streamlining of programs and processes that would facilitate IT and related modernization:

Canadians are missing flights, cancelling trips and even camping out overnight at government offices as the passport application process has utterly failed to keep up with post-pandemic demand.

With anger and frustration over the delays flaring into a national issue, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau named a task force of ten cabinet members to try to address the problem and figure out how to end the backlogs on passports and immigration processing.

This comes not long after Auditor General Karen Hogan found veterans seeking disability benefits also face unacceptable delays in the processing of their applications by Veteran Affairs Canada.

Hogan found veterans applying for disability benefits waiting almost 40 weeks for a decision on their first application compared to the 16-week average processing time for other benefits packages. And she reported that the department’s inability to meet timely delivery standards has been going on for seven years.

As governments struggle to fix these problems, it has to be pointed out that a simple automated solution is readily at hand. It’s just a question of the government’s ability to take advantage of it.

Better data management

In fact, the current backlogs on passports, immigration paperwork and veterans’ applications are nothing less than case studies in the need for digital innovation to enable government departments to quickly and efficiently upgrade service delivery and deliver a better experience for Canadians.

Organizations around the world are increasingly leveraging intelligent automation, particularly Robotic Process Automation (RPA), to tackle business challenges, including the need for greater efficiency, reduced processing time and better data.

Addressing shortcomings in data operations is one of the hallmarks of RPA, a software technology that uses digital workers for repetitive tasks like data entry and validation. RPA reliably captures and handles data faster and more accurately, while streamlining the client experience. As importantly, RPA frees employees from repetitive, mundane work, allowing them to be more productive and focus on better solutions.

Solutions seen globally

For example, the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has adopted RPA solutions to address persistent service problems similar to those faced by Veterans Affairs Canada. Among other improvements, the U.S. VA has saved over 500,000 hours by leveraging RPA in its mailroom. It has successfully automated the review and classification of more than 8,000 physical mail packets on a daily basis, representing 277 unique document types.

Such examples of positive RPA implementation are myriad. For instance, ATB Financial, Alberta’s Crown-owned bank, has used RPA to achieve a 99 per cent improvement in turnaround time for end-to-end processes, as well as other upgrades. Other sectors worldwide have successfully implemented RPA technology, including in accounting, retail trade, government, professional services and manufacturing.

The Canadian government is, of course, well aware of the game-changing potential for service delivery through intelligent automation, and is committed to digital transformation in its 46 departments and agencies. But it started this process from a weak position, with officials informing Prime Minister Trudeau that critical federal computer systems and applications were “rusting out and at risk of failure.”

The federal government has committed billions of dollars to new digital operations, and Shared Services Canada has been mandated to modernize these systems, but accomplishing overall change in such a massive, traditionally-siloed organization has proven challenging. Despite its efforts, the government acknowledges that some of its services are still hard to access and use.

Changing expectations

The demand for processing improvements is on the rise. The pandemic has produced a transformation in services and online access across the socio-economic landscape, and Canadians increasingly expect governments to meet this standard.

“We’re at a point where digital matters so much … we saw that amplified in the last two years,” Catherine Luelo, who was appointed the federal chief information officer last year, recently told CIO.com. In Budget 2022, the government promised legislation allowing it to expand availability of its digital platform services, including in other jurisdictions in Canada, and Luelo is working on ways to accelerate the institution-wide transformation away from legacy technology at the federal level.

Indeed, as thousands of frustrated would-be travellers can attest, the opportunities for RPA-based improvements have never been greater as the government tries to reopen services in the face of post-COVID demand. RPA is able to be procured by individual government departments and could quickly assist in speeding up passport and immigration processing. Intelligent automation could also provide solutions to the service problems now causing long wait times at airports in Toronto, Montreal and Calgary.

When service providers modernize their administration processes using RPA, they are not only able to realize solutions to specific needs but also make their operations scalable. This scalability through intelligent automation is the key tool needed to respond effectively to the surge in demand that has been so badly tying up the country’s passport offices and airports, with no end in sight.

Michael McGeehan is the North American Intelligent Automation Leader at SS&C Blue Prism.

Source: Smart tech is key to solving Canada’s service failures and ending passport seekers’ woes

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City apologizes, seeks to rectify job loss after ‘clean-shave’ policy under fire by Sikh advocacy group

2022/07/07 Leave a comment

Reasonable accommodation in action with “under-mask beard covers”:

First came the Tuesday afternoon phone call and apology from Toronto Mayor John Tory. Now, Birkawal Singh Anand wants his job back.

Anand was one of more than 100 Sikh guards laid off from the security companies contracted to staff City-operated shelters and respite sites after the guards refused to follow a City mandate requiring they be clean-shaven in order for a tight-fitting N95 mask be worn in the event of a COVID-19 outbreak.

On Tuesday, Toronto issued a press release apologizing and saying that security guards should be rehired and paid for lost wages. “City of Toronto apologizes to the World Sikh Organization of Canada (WSO) for any delay in addressing this issue and ensuring security contractors were offering religious accommodations.”

The city said it was providing the update to “ensure security contractors accommodate all employees following a complaint from the World Sikh Organization of Canada.”

“It shouldn’t have taken a public outcry to make this change but I still appreciate that it is happening,” Anand said Tuesday night.

“The city did their part, now it’s up to the company to do theirs.”

Demanding that a Sikh shave his beard is like asking a non-Sikh to “peel off their skin,” Anand told the Star Monday.

“I told them, I belong to the Sikh community, shaving is not an option for me.”

The job losses began in April, the new release said. City staff had been inspecting work sites and deducting billable hours from contracted security companies for having employees who were not clean shaven.

The WSO complained about the layoffs in June, saying security service providers did not offer appropriate accommodation to their employees who have facial hair for religious reasons. The complaint was sent to city staff to resolve, sources said. Now, Toronto says it will allow the guards to wear “under-mask beard covers” as a “reasonable accommodation.”

That covering uses a “tight-fitting mask over a beard that covers the chin and cheeks, and ties in a knot at the top of the head,” the city’s release said.

“An N95 mask is then worn over the cover. The technique, also known as the Singh Thattha Method, is used by many Sikh people in the medical community and has been found to be highly effective in respirator fit testing.”

Before his 4 p.m. phone call to Anand, the release said Tory called the WSO to say the under-masking practice will go into effect “immediately.”

“This option was proposed by the World Sikh Organization of Canada and the City is grateful for this information. The City is also committed to followup meetings with the organization,” the release said.

Balpreet Singh Boparai, the lawyer for the WSO, said the organization received a call on Tuesday from Tory.

“He confirmed that the security guards could return to their jobs and the City would work with the security contractors to make it possible,” Boparai said.

The job losses may not be so easily resolved, he added.

“We are still waiting for the security contractors to get this message. A number of Sikh security guards had their shifts cancelled and they have not been invited to return to their positions.”

Source: City apologizes, seeks to rectify job loss after ‘clean-shave’ policy under fire by Sikh advocacy group

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

LILLEY: Feds allow illegal immigration to flourish while the legal system fails

2022/07/07 Leave a comment

Apples and oranges comparison between irregular arrivals and those who come through the regular immigration processes but does highlight the backlogs and the damage to trust in and credibility of government:

Canada has long had an immigration system that worked — one that we could be proud of — but right now, no one can say that. Like so many government services these days, the immigration system simply isn’t working like it should.

Now we face an incredible backlog for legal immigration while people stream across the border illegally at will, something that’s relatively new in this country.

Unlike in the United States, immigration has never been a political hot potato thrown around between the two main parties.

There have been differences throughout the years, with Liberals tending to favour increases in family reunification, while the Conservatives have placed an emphasis on economic migration. Both main parties have supported high levels of newcomers to this country.

I was born in this country, but only three years after my parents immigrated. That process, according to my mother, took only a few months.

But now, it’s too often taking years for people simply to have their application processed under what are called “express” conditions.

Right now, there is a backlog of more than 2.4 million applications, an increase of more than a 250,000 from just a couple of months ago. That’s an untenable position for our system to be in and a hopeless one for those waiting for word on whether they can come to Canada.

According to the federal government’s website, it takes 42 months to process the application of someone coming in under the federal skilled trade program. That works out to three years and six months just to have your application processed.

Who would want to wait that long?

The Quebec business class program takes 63 months to process applications, while the provincial nominee program “express” track takes 21 months. On what planet is 21 months processing time considered express?

It takes almost two years to sponsor a spouse and just shy of three years to sponsor your parents.

Meanwhile, anyone willing to take a flight to JFK in New York City and then make their way to Roxham Road in Quebec can simply walk across the border and be welcomed to Canada. The number of people crossing at Roxham Road has far surpassed pre-pandemic levels.

After dropping from 1,500 to 2,000 per month to just a few dozen a month during the pandemic, the numbers are now about double. For example, the 3,449 people who crossed illegally this past May is double the previous high for that month in 2018.

We are now seeing higher numbers than ever before enter Canada illegally, while our legal immigration system can’t process people.

Quebec Premier Francois Legault has called for the Roxham Road crossing to be closed, saying his province’s social services are being strained by a lack of federal action. Legault has rightly pointed out that many of those crossing aren’t refugees, they are economic migrants.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in response that closing the crossing won’t stop people crossing illegally, and instead has now started to transfer people to Ottawa and Niagara Falls.

All of this undermines faith in and support for our immigration system as a whole. How can Canadians, or those hoping to become Canadians, have faith in a system that can’t process applicants following the rules but can constantly expand for those going around the rules?

Like passports, customs and airport screening, the immigration department is another example of the federal government not being able to get the basics right.

If the minister can’t fix this, maybe he should look for applicants in that backlog who can and step aside.

Source: LILLEY: Feds allow illegal immigration to flourish while the legal system fails

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Ali-Khan: Finding the American Dream in Canada

2022/07/06 Leave a comment

Of note, getting some coverage in major US media:

This is a festive period for Muslims around the world. One Eid, or Muslim celebration, has just passed, and another is coming up in July. I’ve left strings of starry lights in the tall windows of our family room, where they can be seen twinkling from the street in our neighborhood outside of Toronto. There’s a shadowbox-like window by the front door, where I’d hung a colorful garland of star ornaments at the start of Ramadan in April.

I wasn’t always willing to mark my family publicly as Muslim. In fact, we were three years in to becoming Canadian when I first realized that I could put up lights for our celebrations without any of the trepidation I’d felt in my hometown in Pennsylvania. There is a huge contrast between being Muslim in Canada and being Muslim in America today and it has a lot to do with Canada’s decision to tell the truth about its history, while America buries its own.
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We left America in 2017, eight months into Donald Trump’s term in office. That was not a coincidence. There was something malignant about the leap from ordinary, private Islamophobia to a state sponsored anti-Muslim agenda that made leaving feel urgent, for me and for my husband, but especially for our children. We worried for their physical safety, but also for the sense of themselves they were developing at four and six years old.

Recent studies and surveys by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) tell us our concerns were justified. ISPU has been a boon to American Muslims, who had previously lacked good data about themselves, helping us see more clearly how we’re faring. In 2020, half of all Muslim parents reported having a school aged child who experienced bullying related to their religious identity in the previous year. In almost a third of those cases, the perpetrator was a teacher or school official. In 2021, Muslims reported experiencing institutional discrimination at levels much higher than other religious groups, for example 25% of Muslims vs. 5% among those of other religious affiliations reported religious discrimination while receiving health care. At the airport, those figures are 44% for Muslims contrasted with 5% of the general public, applying for jobs, it’s 33% for Muslims and 8% for the general public. It’s increasingly clear that the appropriate comparison for the rate at which American Muslims are experiencing discrimination is not with other religious groups, but other racialized groups. It is also increasingly clear that anti-Muslim attitudes in America are durable, as attitudes towards other racialized groups have also been.

All of the myriad ways in which American Muslims experience anti-Muslim bias, threats, and discrimination appear to be having serious impacts on our mental health. A study published in JAMA Psychiatry in 2021 found that American Muslims are now twice as likely to have attempted suicide than Americans of other religious affiliations. It attributes this spike to religious discrimination and a reluctance among American Muslims to seek mental health treatment.

I first noticed the uptick in these trends after 9/11 and then again in 2015, when my kindergarten-aged daughter was told not to say she was Muslim at school. The teacher who told her this was Muslim herself, the only other Muslim at the school in any capacity. While it was likely the instruction was meant to be protective, it was nonetheless worrying. Unwilling to navigate a landscape in which it was dangerous for my six-year-old to be openly Muslim at school and seeing that this sentiment was increasingly normative in our nation’s culture, we began to plan our departure.

It’s not that Canada is utopian for Muslims. Even non-Canadians likely remember the Quebec City mosque shooting of 2017, in which 6 men were killed and 5 others injured by a 27-year-old named Alexandre Bissonnette. The number of anti-Muslim hate crimes in Quebec tripled that year.

There was another mosque shooting just last week in Toronto. In 2019, Quebec passed Bill 21, banning certain public workers from wearing visibly religious symbols, widely understood as an attempt to prevent Muslim women in such positions from wearing hijab, though also affecting those who wear turbans, for example, or kippas.

Nor is Canada utopian for other racialized groups. Recent surveys and reports all suggest that Black and Indigenous Canadians continue to experience widespread discrimination in jobs, education, and social services, health disparities, and disproportionate rates of incarceration and violence. Like America, Canada has a legacy of Black enslavement and Indigenous genocide, as well as a long history of residential schools and police brutality. Like America, Canada interned ethnically Japanese people during World War II. When I was a child visiting cousins in Toronto, the epithet “Paki,” for South Asians, was ubiquitous. These aspects of Canadian history have driven modern racist attitudes and continuing disparities in wealth, land ownership, and political power.

So why move our children here? Why not make our stand where we have a large, layered community of friends and family? There is a specific element of Canadian governance that made us hopeful that our American dreams might be better realized in Canada. If you go to Canada’s Department of Justice website today, you’ll find this remarkable statement: “The Government recognizes that Indigenous self-government and laws are critical to Canada’s future, and that Indigenous perspectives and rights must be incorporated in all aspects of this relationship. In doing so, we will continue the process of decolonization and hasten the end of its legacy wherever it remains in our laws and policies.”

The Canadian government’s acknowledgement of itself as a colonial project that must be actively undone is a dramatic contrast to political discourse in America today. Americans rarely acknowledge the essential thefts of land and labor from Native and Black people that have made America possible. Certainly, America’s government has never articulated an intention to decolonize. Americans are taught that their country has already had its revolution, freeing its people from colonial domination.

Years ago, in preschool, my children brought home a flyer about how to make an apology. The first step, the flyer said, is to acknowledge wrongdoing. With its history of slavery and colonial genocide, Americans yet find this step so controversial that, today, we cannot even agree to teach our own history in public schools. In the years since my family moved to Canada, we find that while imperfect, this nation’s fundamental intention towards justice does, in fact, make it a better place for our children to live. Their elementary school curriculum, for example, includes a discussion of what it means to be a settler on land that was promised to First Nations peoples in treaties. It challenges our children to reckon with what human rights for all of us, newcomers from many waves of immigration, descendants of those trafficked in slavery, and Indigenous peoples, might look like.

The children know whose traditional land they live and study on. They think about where the descendants of those people are, and what debt they might owe to them. In the process they are developing the capacity to navigate competing interests, diverse identities, and unfamiliar traditions. They are building the tools for a better future through honest study of their nation’s past. They recognize that this model secures space for them, too. Recently, their teachers applied the same principles to create a meditation space in the gym for fasting children to use over lunch during Ramadan.

I don’t fully understand why Canada has chosen to confront its colonial legacy while America continues to minimize and deny its own. I continue to hope that America will eventually unite around a plain telling of its own history in choosing a path forward. It is, after all, the only path that is wide enough for us all.

Source: Finding the American Dream in Canada

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Paré: Le mot en n et les deux solitudes

2022/07/06 Leave a comment

Contrast:

Une fracture se dessine clairement entre le Québec et le reste du Canada à la suite d’un controversé jugement du Conseil de la radiodiffusion et des télécommunications (CRTC), qui somme CBC/Radio-Canada de présenter des excuses pour une chronique où a été cité à quatre reprises le titre du livre de Pierre Vallières, Nègres blancs d’Amérique.

En 2020, la journaliste vedette de CBC Wendy Mesley avait été suspendue pour avoir nommé le titre complet du même livre, non pas en ondes dans ce cas-ci, mais bien lors d’une réunion de production. Elle s’en est excusée, mais la tourmente ne s’est jamais estompée ; tombée en disgrâce, Wendy Mesley a fini par annoncer sa retraite l’an dernier.

Rien de tel au Québec, malgré le blâme du CRTC. Personne n’a publiquement exigé la tête de l’animatrice Annie Desrochers et du chroniqueur Simon Jodoin pour avoir prononcé en ondes le mot en n dans un échange en août 2020 où il était question de la saga autour de la professeure Verushka Lieutenant-Duval à l’Université d’Ottawa. Au contraire, les lettres ouvertes s’accumulent depuis la décision du CRTC pour implorer CBC/Radio-Canada de ne pas s’excuser et de plutôt porter la cause en appel.

« Wendy Mesley n’a ni plus ni moins été congédiée de CBC. Et à l’époque, il n’y a pas beaucoup de monde au Canada anglais qui s’en était scandalisé. Il y a eu une sorte d’acquiescement. Maintenant que cette histoire se produit au Québec, on peut très bien voir les deux solitudes », observe Marc-François Bernier, professeur au Département de communication de l’Université d’Ottawa.

Dans cette université bilingue, on a constaté le même clivage entre anglophones et francophones lors de l’affaire Lieutenant-Duval, ajoute-t-il. Rappelons que Verushka Lieutenant-Duval, qui y enseignait l’histoire de l’art, avait été sanctionnée pour avoir mentionné le mot en n. S’en était suivi un long battage médiatique, principalement au Québec, où plusieurs avaient exprimé des craintes pour la liberté universitaire. Dans la foulée, 34 professeurs de l’Université d’Ottawa, pour la plupart francophones, avaient publié une lettre ouverte pour s’insurger du sort réservé à Verushka Lieutenant-Duval.

« Plusieurs professeurs anglophones étaient d’accord avec nous, mais c’est beaucoup plus difficile pour eux de parler, surtout dans les départements de sciences humaines. Ceux qui veulent dénoncer ce genre de censure ont peur, car ils peuvent être la cible d’intimidation », avance Marc-François Bernier.

Réalités parallèles

Cette polarisation semble teinter aussi la manière dont a été traitée la récente décision du CRTC dans les médias. Au Québec, l’affaire fait grand bruit depuis plusieurs jours. La plupart des chroniques et des éditoriaux dénoncent avec vigueur le jugement du CRTC.

Mais le portrait est tout autre au Canada anglais, où l’affaire n’a pas donné lieu à une mobilisation extraordinaire de la classe médiatique au nom de la liberté d’expression. Dans les rares articles qui portent sur le sujet, le nom du livre de Pierre Vallières n’est jamais retranscrit dans son intégralité. Qui plus est, CBC a publié le jour même de la décision du CRTC une entrevue avec Ricardo Lamour, l’artiste montréalais à l’origine de la plainte, qui a par ailleurs été très peu cité jusqu’ici dans les médias québécois.

« Le N word a une lourde connotation en anglais, que le mot français n’a pas […]. Avec la traduction, il y a des nuances qui se perdent, et je pense que ce sont ces nuances qui ont échappéau CRTC », conclut Guy Gendron, ancien ombudsman de Radio-Canada.

Existe-t-il le même fossé culturel au sein de la haute direction de CBC/Radio-Canada, où se côtoient francophones et anglophones ? Chose certaine, la réaction officielle du diffuseur public se fait attendre depuis plusieurs jours. La société d’État réitère « prendre le temps nécessaire pour étudier la décision rendue par le CRTC », en insistant sur la « complexité de la question ».

Source: Le mot en n et les deux solitudes

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Quebec’s Roxham Road on track to see record number of asylum seekers — but they face delays and despair in post-pandemic Canada

2022/07/06 Leave a comment

As do many others…

In Pascal’s Canadian dream, he becomes a doctor.

He’s only been in the country a month. He has a long way to go. But consider how long he’s been running, and how far he came to get here.

He left his home in Cap-Haïtien, on the north coast of Haiti, for the Dominican Republic, which occupies the eastern half of the island of Hispanola, right next to Cuba.

From there, he travelled with others in a car to Brazil. From Brazil, west to Peru, then north, through Ecuador, Colombia and Panama, where they were set upon by thieves who stole pretty much everything — except for the money that Pascal had hidden in a hollowed-out deodorant container.

This money allowed him to continue his northward journey, through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico and the United States, said 39-year-old Pascal, who requested that his last name not be published for security and privacy reasons.

On May 21, he arrived at the Canada-U.S. border, where more than 13,000 people so far this year have been arrested by Royal Canadian Mounted Police as they take their first hesitant steps along a dirt path at the end of Roxham Road onto Canadian soil.

Technically a dead-end street, Roxham Road is a sleepy country route watched by high-tech border surveillance cameras. The passage that starts in New York state and continues into Hemmingford, Que., stands as the worst-kept secret of those seeking refuge from despots, disasters and all manner of dire circumstances, including North American immigration laws.

Thanks to the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions on border crossings, the return of air travel and a general increase in the numbers of people seeking asylum, 2022 is on track to become a record year for the controversial crossing point.

The federal government, which screens newcomers to determine their eligibility to make a refugee claim, is now straining to keep pace with the flow.

The result is delay and despair: a months-long wait during which asylum seekers receive social assistance payments but are denied a temporary work permit in a country struggling to meet its labour needs.

“They want to work,” said Stéphanie Valois, president of the Quebec Association of Immigration Lawyers. “They’ve got nothing — no money, no furniture. They’ve got nothing and they need it.”

This could also be a decisive and pivotal moment for a haphazard arrangement that allows refugee claimants to cross at Roxham Road, make their asylum claim while already on Canadian soil, and thus bypass the terms of the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement, which obliges asylum seekers to make their claim in the first country they reach.

The Quebec government, facing a fall re-election, wants Ottawa to plug the hole in the nearly 9,000-kilometre Canada-U.S. border, saying that it has neither the resources nor capacity to deal with the flow of migrants.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court of Canada has agreed to hear a constitutional challenge to the Safe Third Country Agreement which, if successful, could allow asylum seekers to make a claim at any official Canadian border crossing — spreading Quebec’s burden more equitably across the country.

“We have an obligation to examine the cases of people who seek protection here,” says Wendy Ayotte, founder of Bridges not Borders, a support group for asylum seekers.

“Of course it is correct to say that it isn’t a fair distribution of people entering irregularly into Canada. Obviously it’s not fairly distributed across the country, but surely the response … is to call for the end of the (Safe Third Country Agreement) and then people can go anywhere.”

The Star met Pascal, a community organizer who said he was beaten and threatened by members of a local Haitian political party, at Maison d’Haïti, a Montreal community centre where he had come, immigration documents in hand, to consult Peggy Larose, a social worker.

From her cramped office behind the reception desk and the centre’s coffee bar, Larose helps Haitian refugee claimants complete their myriad forms and find housing, food and jobs, all while listening to the thoughts that weigh heavily on their minds.

“They are long stories and difficult stories. There are stories that rip you apart, that make you want to scream and cry out,” she said, recounting the plight of one couple who told her how their young daughter had been struck and killed by a truck while they travelled through Mexico, and was buried where she died.

Evidence of the great distances and hardships that people endure to get to Canada lies in the high grass on either side of Roxham Road.

The two halves of an identification card for a 25-year-old woman who stayed at a homeless shelter in Portland, Maine; part of a bright yellow Bancolombia bank card; the four ripped quarters of a blue plastic pass issued to a Nigerian man upon his admission to to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing centre in Tacoma, Wash.

Relics, secrets or the shame from past lives that people hope to leave behind.

Last Sunday, a group of seven people — three men and four women — boarded American Airlines Flight 1280 from Phoenix to New York, paying $378.60 (U.S.) each for the second-to-last leg of their journey to Canada. Their tickets were recovered floating in the water of a stream that runs alongside Roxham Road.

The next day, Monday, a woman named Jakelina boarded an Adirondack Trailways bus in New York City at 6:30 p.m., arrived in Plattsburgh, N.Y., at 1:20 a.m. on Tuesday and made her way toward Roxham Road, discarding the receipt for the $77.25 trip moments before starting a new life in a new country.

Roxham Road owes its popularity among those fleeing their homeland to the immigration policies of former U.S. president Donald Trump.

In January 2017, Trump signed an executive order banning Syrian refugees and blocking citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States — the so-called Muslim ban.

Later that year, 58,000 Haitians living in the U.S. learned of Trump’s plan to let their “Temporary Protected Status” expire, depriving them of protections under the special programs for migrants from countries deemed unsafe or which had suffered humanitarian emergencies, as Haiti did during the 2010 earthquake.

These policies prompted a flight to Canada with little modern precedent as asylum seekers took advantage of a loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement that allowed them to avoid being forcibly returned to the U.S. by crossing into Canada at a spot between official border posts — something known as an “irregular border crossing.”

In 2017, 18,836 people were intercepted by the RCMP crossing irregularly into Canada in the province of Quebec, compared to 1,018 who were intercepted in Ontario and 718 in British Columbia, 14 in Saskatchewan and six in Alberta.

The phenomenon — and the provincial ratio — continued in 2018 and 2019 but dropped sharply with the arrival of COVID and the closure of the Canada-U.S. border.

“If you crossed at Roxham Road, you were given a notice by the Canadian government known as a ‘direct back’ notice, which means that we’re not willing to hear your claim right now, we’re going to send you back to the U.S. and at some later date when we think the time is good we will allow you to return to pursue your claim,” says Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees.

She says that some of those who wanted to make refugee claims in Canada were subsequently detained in U.S. immigration detention centres and, in at least a few instances, were deported to their country of origin.

When the Canada-U.S. border reopened in November 2021 asylum seekers returned almost immediately to Roxham Road.

Compared to October 2021, when there were 96 RCMP interceptions, 832 people were picked up after crossing in November and 2,778 in December. That monthly tally has remained steady through to May 2022 — the last month for which statistics are available — when 3,449 people entered through the Quebec crossing.

In response to questions from the Star, a spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said that federal officials “continuously monitor conditions and developments in other countries to inform our planning.”

The government declined to speak about the possible reasons for the increased volume of people crossing the border, though others attribute it to the newfound freedom of movement that people around the world are experiencing after lengthy pandemic lockdowns

“I think it’s just normal that — like everyone else — people are starting to move again. These are people who were blocked in their home countries or in transit on their way to Canada,” says Valois, who practises immigration law in Montreal.

“Looking at the bigger picture, there are many more people entering the United States each day and there is also an increase in the number of asylum seekers who arrive in the U.S., so the percentage of those who make it to Canada is really small.”

Not so small that they escaped the attention of Quebec Premier François Legault.

In mid-May, Legault, who casts himself as a fiscally conservative nationalist whose policies are guided by common sense, complained about the “unacceptable” number of people crossing the border into the province and the strain it was placing on the province’s resources.

“We are the only province that has a wide-open road named Roxham, and the federal government, which is responsible for controlling the borders, is not doing its job,” he said.

Legault added that there is a long delay in making an initial eligibility assessment to determine whether there are sufficient grounds for a refugee-claim hearing. During this time, the province is obliged by law to provide health-care services and financial assistance to asylum seekers, he complained.

“A good number of these people aren’t real refugees,” the Quebec premier said in a news conference. “A refugee is someone who faces physical risk in their country, but the majority are not refugees and eventually, when their case is analyzed, they are refused and returned to their country.”

Data from the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada from February 2017 to March 2022 on refugee claims made by irregular border crossers such as those who enter Canada through Roxham Road would appear to contradict Legault’s claim.

Of more than 63,000 claims, nearly 28,000 were accepted and 19,000 rejected while some 6,000 were abandoned or withdrawn. More than 11,000 claims are waiting to be heard.

But government statistics show that refugee claims made by individuals from the two largest source countries of irregular border crossers — Nigeria and Haiti — find their demands for protection from Canada rejected more often than they are accepted.

Marjorie Villefranche, Maison d’Haïti’s general manager, says Haitians are compelled to come to Canada not so much due to the widespread poverty in the country but because of the violence and insecurity in their native land.

“They say, ‘If I remain here, I will die. I will die with my children.’ What family would accept to stay and die?” she asked. “Anyone would try to do whatever they can to save their lives and to save the lives of their children.”

Villefranche says that it was “exaggerated” to claim that a wealthy country such as Canada could be overloaded by an influx of 20,000 or 30,000 refugee claimants, as the Quebec government claims.

“I think that, as a rich country it’s the least we can do to receive a certain number of refugees,” she says. “There are even poor countries that receive a million or two million refugees across their borders.”

Post-pandemic, Canada is nevertheless struggling to keep up with the flow of asylum seekers.

Upon arrival on Canadian soil, people undergo an initial interview where border agents record their identities, take fingerprints and make biometric recordings. Once their file is created, they are able to receive health care and social assistance.

But it is not until a more thorough admissibility investigation is conducted that a refugee claimant is eligible to receive a temporary work permit.

Dench, from the Canadian Council for Refugees, says a delay that was once limited to several days has now stretched to a months-long wait because officials conduct more extensive security checks that include the exchange of biometric data with other countries.

“They are so keen to exclude people from the refugee determination system that they make a system that is unworkable and starts accumulating these huge backlogs,” she says.

In response to the Star’s questions about delays, a spokesperson for the Canada Border Services Agency said the time required to complete an eligibility check depends on the complexity of the case, the availability of information and the amount of research required.

Legault, the Quebec premier, put this delay at 14 months. Pascal, the Haitian asylum seeker who arrived in May, says he was told he would have to wait until March 2023 before he would receive an eligibility ruling — meaning he will not legally be able to work for 10 months.

Valois, the immigration lawyer, said the delay in receiving an admissibility hearing was “relatively new” and “really problematic.”

“The client wants to work. They want to get moving. They want to have a hearing. They want to be heard. The delay is not to their advantage.”

In an post-pandemic economy that is experiencing desperate labour shortages, the delay in approving work permits for people ready and willing to work is not to the country’s advantage either.

“It’s so ridiculous when you see that so many employers are wanting to employ people and yet the federal government is keeping people in this kind of limbo state because they can’t even get them through the first part of the process,” says Dench.

Another young Haitian couple arrived in Canada in April after a seven-month period in the U.S. during which they were held in detention and the man was forced to wear an ankle bracelet to track his movements.

He wants to find work as a driver, eventually. She said she would like to train to become a caregiver in a hospital — a line of work that, by some estimates, up to 2,000 asylum seekers in Quebec took up during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the needs were greatest.

The couple did not want to provide their names, nor would they discuss the reasons they had for seeking refugee protection from Canada.

But they were happy to share the details of their first Canadian victory — finding an apartment of their own that will allow them to finally leave the downtown Montreal shelter that they and hundreds of other refugee claimants call home.

It’s a studio apartment. It will cost them $850 a month, not including utilities. That will leave them less than $300 a month to eat, to support themselves as well as the baby boy due to enter the world this fall.

Source: Quebec’s Roxham Road on track to see record number of asylum seekers — but they face delays and despair in post-pandemic Canada

There are legitimate concerns regarding the undue burden on Quebec given that over 99 percent of irregular arrivals occur there (2022 to date):

The federal government is starting to relocate asylum seekers who have crossed irregularly into Quebec from the United States, following a rise in the number of would-be refugees at the border.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada says that as of June 30, officials have started to transfer a “small number” of asylum seekers to Ottawa and Niagara Falls to help reduce the pressure on Quebec. The department didn’t give details.

More than 13,250 refugee claimants were intercepted outside official points of entry in Quebec by border agents between January and May, mostly at Roxham Road — a rural road leading from the U.S. into the province.

That is more than double the number of people who crossed irregularly into Quebec during the same period in 2019, before the entry points into Canada were closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Roxham Road was reopened to would-be refugees in November 2021.

Premier François Legault has asked the federal government to shut down Roxham Road because of the pressure the rise in asylum seekers is putting on Quebec’s ability to care for the newcomers.

The Canada Border Services Agency says it has increased its capacity to temporarily house asylum seekers at the Roxham Road crossing, to 477 people from 297.

Source: Ottawa starting to transfer ‘small number’ of asylum seekers to Ontario from Quebec

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Quebec and the rest of French-speaking Canada are at a crossroads

2022/07/06 Leave a comment

Interesting contrast on how Francophones outside Quebec are embracing Francophone immigration and multiculturalism:

A rebelle and rêveur, my father was a young audacieux, venturing from Sudbury, Ont., the Nickel City where he had come of age, off to the Université Laval in pursuit of graduate studies in 1978.

But after he arrived in la ville de Québec (a wonderful city, he insists), he was excluded by his Québécois peers — “from Ontario,” he had lived among les anglais. Among the Anglos. 

It did not matter that he was born and raised in la belle province, that he was French Canadian and Catholic, or that he spoke eloquent French and then-incomprehensible English. He was, as René Lévesque said in 1968, a dead duck. A “cadavre encore chaud,” the still-warm corpse of a Francophone outside Quebec. A spectre that (falsely) reminded this société distincte of what would happen if it did not seek refuge from the empire and its dominion, which had worked to uproot the fait françaisin Canada over centuries. 

A rebelle and rêveur, my father was a young audacieux, venturing from Sudbury, Ont., the Nickel City where he had come of age, off to the Université Laval in pursuit of graduate studies in 1978.

But after he arrived in la ville de Québec (a wonderful city, he insists), he was excluded by his Québécois peers — “from Ontario,” he had lived among les anglais. Among the Anglos. 

It did not matter that he was born and raised in la belle province, that he was French Canadian and Catholic, or that he spoke eloquent French and then-incomprehensible English. He was, as René Lévesque said in 1968, a dead duck. A “cadavre encore chaud,” the still-warm corpse of a Francophone outside Quebec. A spectre that (falsely) reminded this société distincte of what would happen if it did not seek refuge from the empire and its dominion, which had worked to uproot the fait français in Canada over centuries. 

It was, said my father years later, une mentalité de paroisse — a parish mentality. One that excludes, prompting the question: who has a right to be Québécois? Who has a right to be Franco-Canadian? Who has a right to belong? 

It’s a question that Francophone communities across Canada, at a crossroads in the expression of our identities, are contemplating with vastly different outcomes. We, Quebec and the rest of French-speaking Canada, are following divergent paths as we define what we aspire to be.

On the eve of la Fête Nationale last month, celebrated on June 24 under the banner of “our language of a thousand accents,” Quebec Premier François Legault threw oil on the traditional feu de joie, or bonfire. “It’s important that we don’t put all cultures on the same level; that’s why we oppose multiculturalism,” said Legault. “We prefer to concentrate on what we call interculturalism, where we have one culture, the Quebec culture.”

Quebec’s notion of predatory multiculturalism intertwines with its secularism law (which impacts Muslim women in particular) as well as its problematic new language law (a notable transgression on truth and reconciliation with Indigenous nations). Coupled with obstinate denials of the existence of systemic racism in the terrible aftermath of Joyce Echaquan’s death, this all conspires to put the province on a path to a narrow and exclusionary definition of who is truly Québécois. 

By contrast, Franco-Canadians are choosing a different path — one that rejects the notion of our provincial and national identities as being pure laine, instead connecting us back to a mosaic that is multiracial, multifaith, multilingual and multicultural. Our communities and institutions have recognized that, despite our unbreakable spirit, our declining demographic dividend may not sustain the French language over generations to come. Francophone immigration can ensure that the French language continues to thrive in Canada, opening us to an incredible “francophone galaxy.”

Despite my determined idealism, our communities in Franco-Canada are far from utopian. In my hometown of Sudbury, a “welcoming francophone community,” advocates are calling out systemic barriers to employment for francophone immigrants and the need for a northern anti-racism strategy in pursuit of equity for immigrants and First Nations, Inuit and Métis nations. We Franco-Ontarians have our work cut out for us.

And so, who belongs? 

After over 50 years in northern Ontario, my father continues to speak eloquent French and still-incomprehensible English. The jeune audacieux would grow to become a leader of la Franco-Ontarie, among the youth involved in the creation of the beloved Franco-Ontarian flag. 

He wasn’t from Sudbury, from the north, or even from Ontario. Yet he became Franco-Ontarian. On ne naît pas Franco-Ontarien — on le devient. You aren’t born Franco-Ontarian — you become one.

As Franco-Canadians, we benefit immensely from multiculturalism. Our Francophonie is ripe with a thousand accents, persuading us that there is much to be gained in global citizenship — and as a mosaic of global sociétés distinctes in our own right.

Isabelle Bourgeault-Tassé is a Franco-Ontarian writer.

Source: Quebec and the rest of French-speaking Canada are at a crossroads

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

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