Dutrisac: Souveraineté provinciale

2022/10/13 Leave a comment

Dutrisac on Alberta and Saskatchewan’s focus on provincial sovereignty, along with picking up on Ibbitson’s arguments that aggressive federalism is fanning the flames (true but exaggerated IMO). Of particular note the last para:

Quant à François Legault, après les gaffes répétitives commises sur le dos des immigrants, il n’aura qu’à attendre ce que lui réserve le fédéralisme agressif d’un gouvernement Trudeau qui insiste pour que Québec se plie à la politique d’immigration pléthorique de ce pays postnational.

Full article:

La nouvelle cheffe du Parti conservateur uni (PCU) et, depuis mardi, première ministre, Danielle Smith, a remporté la course à la direction de son parti en promettant de présenter un projet de loi sur la souveraineté de l’Alberta.

L’utilisation du terme souveraineté, un concept au coeur du projet du Parti québécois depuis la fin des années 1960, peut prêter à confusion. On ne saurait voir dans Danielle Smith une émule de René Lévesque. Il ne s’agit pas pour la première ministre de promouvoir une quelconque sécession, ce qui ne correspond d’ailleurs pas aux inclinations de la plupart des Albertains. Cette souveraineté est bien celle d’une province, dans ses champs de compétence, une forme de néo-autonomisme, selon le politologue de l’Université de l’Alberta Frédéric Boily. C’est le modèle mis en oeuvre par le gouvernement Legault, en définitive.

Danielle Smith a repris l’expression du premier ministre de la Saskatchewan, Scott Moe, en affirmant que sa province, avec cette loi sur la souveraineté, pourra se comporter comme « une nation au sein d’une nation ». Mais il s’agit plutôt d’un régionalisme axé sur la défense d’intérêts économiques, notamment la poursuite de l’exploitation des hydrocarbures, et non pas d’un nationalisme de nature identitaire comme au Québec.

Certains ont vu dans ce projet de loi une bombe constitutionnelle… et surtout anticonstitutionnelle. Le premier ministre sortant, Jason Kenney, a qualifié l’idée de « cinglée ». De fait, il est encore difficile de savoir comment une telle loi s’appliquerait. Elle permettrait à la province de refuser de se soumettre à une loi fédérale ou à un jugement de la Cour s’ils sont contraires aux intérêts de l’Alberta ou s’il s’agit d’une intrusion illégale dans ses champs de compétence. Il reviendrait aux élus de l’Assemblée législative albertaine d’adopter une motion spéciale en ce sens. Selon la description somme toute sommaire de l’éventuel projet de loi, le gouvernement fédéral devrait alors s’adresser aux tribunaux pour trancher le litige.

À terme, c’est la Cour suprême qui aurait le dernier mot, faut-il comprendre. Le principal conseiller de Danielle Smith a indiqué lundi qu’une fois le projet de loi en vigueur, l’Alberta continuerait de respecter les jugements de la Cour suprême. La bombe est en train de se transformer en pétard mouillé.

Comme cela s’est vu quand Trudeau père était aux commandes, un fort ressentiment envers le gouvernement fédéral s’est développé dans les provinces de l’Ouest, ressentiment relié à l’exploitation des ressources pétrolières et gazières. Le fils semble suivre la trace du père. À l’époque, il s’agissait de la propriété de ces ressources naturelles et des revenus qu’elles généraient. Aujourd’hui, c’est le contrôle qu’entend exercer Ottawa sur ces ressources en raison de la lutte contre les changements climatiques.

Si jamais ce projet de loi sur cette souveraineté provinciale voit le jour, il viendra tard. Déjà, la Cour suprême, dans son jugement l’an dernier sur la taxe carbone du gouvernement Trudeau, a dépossédé les provinces de leur compétence exclusive en la matière au nom de « l’intérêt national » et du pouvoir d’Ottawa de faire des lois pour « la paix, l’ordre et le bon gouvernement ». Nous sommes à l’ère du fédéralisme évolutif, coopératif, qui se déploie au détriment des pouvoirs réservés aux provinces. Un fédéralisme de supervision, selon l’expression d’un juge dissident dans cette cause, Russell Brown.

Selon le chroniqueur du Globe and Mail John Ibbitson, le « fédéralisme agressif » que pratique le gouvernement Trudeau a mis en rogne l’Alberta, alors que le « fédéralisme passif » de Stephen Harper avait calmé le jeu, y compris avec le Québec.

La Saskatchewan et le Manitoba, deux provinces dotées de gouvernements conservateurs, partagent les doléances de l’Alberta. Il lui manque un appui de taille : celui de l’Ontario et du premier ministre conservateur Doug Ford. Lui aussi s’opposait à la taxe carbone du gouvernement Trudeau, mais, depuis le jugement de la Cour suprême, il semble s’être désintéressé de l’affaire. Il faut dire que le premier ministre ontarien a beau jeu. Justin Trudeau a tout intérêt à soigner ses relations avec lui. Doug Ford préférera sans doute profiter des avantages que lui offrira Ottawa au lieu de se joindre aux provinces de l’Ouest dans une fronde perdue d’avance contre le pouvoir fédéral.

Quant à François Legault, après les gaffes répétitives commises sur le dos des immigrants, il n’aura qu’à attendre ce que lui réserve le fédéralisme agressif d’un gouvernement Trudeau qui insiste pour que Québec se plie à la politique d’immigration pléthorique de ce pays postnational.

Source: Souveraineté provinciale

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How many houses does Canada actually need?

2022/10/12 Leave a comment

Depressing yet accurate need. Striking disconnect between immigration levels and housing availability and needs. Given housing constraints, becomes even harder to justify current and growing immigration levels and surprising that there is so little thinking and questioning regarding the linkage:

Everyone agrees Canada has a major housing shortage. To make homes more affordable for young people, to house incoming waves of immigrants and to restore sanity to markets like Toronto and Vancouver, the country needs more homes.

But exactly how many homes? That proves to be a trickier question than you may think.

Estimates vary hugely because the size of the country’s housing shortfall can be defined in a multitude of ways.

The simplest method is to look at what level of home construction would be required simply to meet new demand and stabilize the market at today’s lofty levels. Even by that conservative standard, Canada is falling short.

In recent years, it has typically completed about 200,000 new homes a year – standalone homes, condos and other types of dwellings. However, immigration and other factors will create about 240,000 new households a year between now and 2024, according to RBC Economics. This suggests that construction needs to quickly rise to levels roughly 20 per cent higher than in recent years simply to give all those new households a place to live.

Yet it only begins to address Canada’s structural shortfall of housing. “Even if we had 240,000 completions a year for the next few years, we would simply be meeting new demand, not reducing the gap that has already built up,” Robert Hogue, assistant chief economist at Royal Bank of Canada, said in an interview.

If you look at what would be needed not just to keep pace with new demand but to address the accumulated shortfall that has accumulated over many years, the numbers swell to truly frightening proportions.

Restoring Canada’s housing affordability by 2030 to the levels that prevailed around 2003 would require an immediate doubling or more of home construction rates, according to a recent study by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. In an ideal world, Canada would be completing an unprecedented 400,000 or more new homes a year, according to CMHC’s numbers.

A bit of historical context about Canadian housing trends may help to put this flurry of estimates into perspective.

Last year, construction soared and 272,000 new homes were started across Canada. Economists and housing analysts applauded this achievement since it was the country’s highest annual number of starts since the heyday of the 1970s.

Unfortunately, the figure was not quite as impressive as it appeared at first glance. Canada’s population is now much larger than it was a half-century ago – more than 38 million people compared with only about 23 million in 1975.

If you adjust last year’s housing starts for the vastly increased size of the Canadian population, the big jump in housing construction last year took Canada to only about 60 per cent of the rate of housing starts per capita that it was achieving in the mid 1970s.

And even that comparison doesn’t capture the extent of the shortfall because the average size of households has been steadily shrinking – the result of people marrying later, having fewer children and living longer.

In the early 1940s, the average Canadian household had 4.3 people, according to RBC Economics. By 1981 that had fallen to just under three people. Today it stands at 2.4 people.

This has resulted in a tremendous upward push in the need for housing. To house the three-person households that were common in the 1970s, you would have required roughly 33 homes for 100 people. In contrast, to accommodate the same 100 people today, in households that average only 2.4 people each, you would need more than 41 homes – a major increase even if Canada’s population hadn’t budged at all.

Most analysts agree the combination of shrinking households and years of sluggish construction has resulted in a serious housing deficit – but putting a hard number on the size of that deficit is difficult.

Last year, Jean-François Perrault, chief economist at Bank of Nova Scotia, wrote a noteexploring a couple of methods for estimating the size of Canada’s housing shortfall. Just to be clear: This is the size of the shortfall that would still exist even if Canada were to suddenly speed up construction to the point it was meeting demand from newly formed households.

His first approach was to look at what it would take to keep the ratio of housing units to population stable since 2016, when home prices began a notable upward surge. This method suggests Canada was about 100,000 dwellings short at the time Mr. Perrault wrote his report in early 2021.

However, it ignores the shortfall that had accumulated before 2016. A more wide-ranging approach is to compare Canada with other advanced economies in the Group of Seven and ask what it would take for Canada to achieve the same number of housing units per 1,000 residents as other G7 countries.

To catch up to the United States – a country experiencing housing shortages of its own – Canada would require another 99,000 units, Mr. Perrault estimated in his note. To catch up to the United Kingdom, 250,000 homes. To catch up to the G7 average, a staggering 1.8 million homes.

People can argue which number is most appropriate, Mr. Perrault said in an interview, but “we know there is currently a huge gap and that gap will rise given population growth and recent construction trends.”

One disturbing aspect of those recent construction trends is the discrepancy between housing starts and housing completions. While housing starts have been lacklustre, housing completions have been even worse.

Between the start of 2016 and the end of 2021, Canada started an average of 221,000 homes a year but completed only about 200,000 homes annually. The discrepancy appears to reflect a variety of factors – labour shortages, rising raw material costs and the long lag time between starting a multiunit project and completing it – but whatever the exact cause of the gap, it does drive a wedge between widely reported numbers on housing starts and the actual amount of housing that is being delivered.

Meanwhile, Ottawa has supersized national immigration targets, raising them from around 260,000 people in 2015 to more than 400,000 today. Thanks largely to immigration, Canada’s population is now growing at more than twice the pace of most developed economies, according to Mr. Hogue at RBC.

Given immigration pressures, demographic trends toward smaller home sizes and Canada’s long history of sluggish construction, how many new homes would it take to make housing affordable again? CMHC economists took a crack at answering that question in an ambitious study over the summer.

They defined housing affordability in two ways. The first was as the level of affordability that prevailed in each province in 2003-04. The second was as the level that would require households to devote no more than 40 per cent of their after-tax income to housing.

If nothing else, these definitions help to put a number on the extent of Canada’s affordability challenge.

In Ontario, achieving affordability would mean the average price of a home would have to fall from $871,000 in 2021 to between $499,000 and $551,000 in 2030, depending on which affordability benchmark you use. In British Columbia, restoring affordability would require average prices to fall from $929,000 in 2021 to between $607,000 and $679,000 in 2030.

In contrast, home prices in other provinces already seem to be affordable or at least close to affordable, especially when judged against the common 40-per-cent-of-disposable-income benchmark.

But even taking those more affordable regions into account, bringing the country as a whole back to affordability is a mammoth challenge because of the huge shortfalls in Ontario and British Columbia.

The CMHC study estimates that Canada must build an additional 2.3 million homes between now and 2030, on top of what it is already building, to meet the 40-per-cent-of-income target. Achieving the more ambitious target of restoring the affordability levels of 2003-04 would demand 3.5 million more homes than the business-as-usual scenario.

The bottom line? Canada needs to at least double its current pace of home building to have a serious impact on affordability, according to Aled ab Iorwerth, deputy chief economist at CMHC.

“We need a lot more supply, we need a sea change,” he said.

Source: How many houses does Canada actually need?

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How a Sludge-Filled Policy Stoked Uncertainty and Fear for Immigrant Families – By Kelli Garcia

2022/10/12 Leave a comment

Sludge is a new term for me (variant of nudge, but negative):

As a child growing up in Texas, I sometimes worried about getting caught up in an immigration raid. It was, in many ways, a fantastical fear. I was born in the United States, as were both my parents and all of my grandparents.

And, yet, my fear had some basis in reality. Cheech Marin’s 1987 film, Born in East L.A., about an American citizen being deported to Mexico and trying to get back to the United States, captured both the fear and absurdity of the moment. The United States does, after all, have a long history of deporting American citizens that continues to this day.

The climate of fear created and fanned by anti-immigrant rhetoric was and is real, not just for me but for many others. In 2018, one study estimated that about 50 percent of the United States’ Latino citizens reported fearing that they, a family member, or close friend could be deported.

This fear and anxiety have real consequences on individuals, families, and society. Several years ago, a harsh immigration policy implemented by the Trump Administration led people not to apply for benefits that they were eligible for. Because the consequences of running afoul of the rule could be dire, these changes created a chilling effect on who applied for benefits, reducing applications even for those who weren’t targeted by it.

This is an example of what behavioral scientists call sludge—when a policy’s design or implementation makes wise decisions more difficult through “friction and bad intentions.”

The United States immigration laws and regulations are full of sludge. Complicated and costly immigration processes have compounded disparities in who is able to apply for and obtain U.S. citizenship. The public charge rule I’m focusing on is an over-100-year-old law, rooted in racist and xenophobic beliefsthat people should not be admitted to the United States if they are “paupers or likely to become a public charge.” The law’s inexact language leaves ample room for policymakers to add or reduce sludge. The Trump-era change added sludge. Now, changes made by the Biden Administration aim to reduce it. But fear and uncertainty linger, preventing people from accessing the benefits they need.

From 1999 to 2019, the only things considered when determining whether someone was likely to become a public charge was whether they had received cash assistance from the federal government or had been institutionalized for long-term care at the government’s expense. In 2019, the Trump Administration’s new regulations expanded the types of programs the government would consider. The rule now factored in the use of housing, nutrition, and health programs. It also listed characteristics that would be weighted negatively against a person, such as having an income below 125 percent of the federal poverty line. The rule was long, complicated, and confusing.

In reality, the public charge determination applies to very few people in the United States. Refugees, asylees, and other groups of immigrants admitted to the United States for humanitarian reasons are excluded from the law. In addition, most immigrants in the United States who could be subject to the public charge rule are also excluded from using the types of safety net programs that would have been considered in the public charge determination.

But when the stakes are high and information is unclear, people err on the side of caution. The mere announcement of the now-defunct rule reduced the number of eligible immigrants enrolled in health, nutrition, and housing assistance programs, including in programs that were not affected by the rule.

For example, at ideas42 we found that Minnesota counties with higher proportions of noncitizens experienced larger declines in enrollment in food assistance through the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program than did counties with fewer noncitizens. This occurred even though participation in WIC was not considered part of the public charge determination. Applied nationally, our results suggest that the public charge rule announcement reduced overall WIC enrollment by over 28,000 people. Similarly, after the announcement of the Trump public charge rule, enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in Minnesota declined 6.3 percentage points more for noncitizens than citizens, even though nearly all of Minnesota’s noncitizen SNAP enrollees were exempt from the rule.

The rule also required certain immigrants who apply to become permanent residents to provide extensive and complicated documentation about any public benefits programs they used. Under these circumstances, it’s not surprising that many immigrants chose not to apply.

As a kid in Texas, my friends and I were careful not to be too loud in the movie theater or linger too long in a store for fear of drawing the attention of authorities. Similarly, many immigrants and citizens in mixed-status households stayed away from benefits programs for fear of running afoul of the confusing rule.

This fear persisted even after the Biden administration halted enforcement of the rule in March 2021. A September 2021 survey of 1,000 families with at least one immigrant family member found that 46 percent did not apply for assistance when they needed it because they feared it could harm their immigration status. Some immigrants expressed fear that merely seeking medical care could affect their immigration status. This fear contributed to vaccine hesitancy among Latino communities.

In September, the Biden Administration issued a new rule that provides clear guidance on when receipt of public benefits will be considered in the public charge determination. Unlike the 2019 rule, the new public charge regulations strive to be “clear, fair, and comprehensible.” Under the new rule, the Department of Homeland Security will only consider public cash assistance, including Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and state, local, and tribal cash benefit programs and government funded long term institutional care. The rule specifically states that nutrition programs, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Medicaid, housing benefits, and any benefits related to immunizations or testing for communicable diseases will not be considered in the public charge determination.

In developing these new regulations, the Department of Homeland Security considered the importance of reducing the chilling effect, not just for the benefit of individual people but also for society at large. Government benefit programs are supposed to help people when they need it. Making sure people can access medical care, have enough to eat, and have a roof over their heads helps society as a whole. By reducing immigrants’ participation in these programs, the 2019 public charge rule contributed to the very harms these programs were meant to address. The clarity of the new rule is intended to restore eligible immigrants’ participation in government benefits programs so that these programs can once again achieve their goals.

No parent should be afraid that accessing public benefits to feed their children or get medical care could lead to losing their right to remain in this country. No child should fear that a parent could be deported if they get reduced-priced lunches at school. As our and others’ research has shown, policies that create fear and uncertainty can undermine our social safety net and public health systems. I know from my own experience how easy it is for fear to change behavior in ways that can seem irrational. People respond to confusion with fear. By providing clarity, the new public charge rule should reduce fear and help ensure benefits programs serve those who are eligible.

Disclosure: Kelli García is an employee of ideas42, which provides financial support to Behavioral Scientist as a Founding Partner. Founding Partners do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine.

Source: How a Sludge-Filled Policy Stoked Uncertainty and Fear for Immigrant Families – By Kelli Garcia

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Axworthy and Rock: The Safe Third Country Agreement is unsafe – and unconstitutional

2022/10/12 Leave a comment

Reflections of former ministers (easier when no longer in government) but will see what the Supreme Court rules:

Former ministers As Canadians, we take pride in our well-deserved reputation as a caring society that offers a humane and generous response to those seeking asylum. Yet last week, the Supreme Court of Canada heard arguments that since 2004, Canadians have been complicit in the mistreatment of refugees arriving at our border from the United States.

At the heart of this issue is the 2004 Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), which requires that refugee claimants seek protection in the first country in which they arrive, be it Canada or the United States. On a practical level, this means that a person seeking asylum from a country other than Canada or the U.S. cannot seek protection in Canada if they have already landed in the U.S., and vice-versa. For the past 18 years, the STCA has operated on the premise that both countries are “safe” for refugees.

In July, 2020, a federal court judge determined that the STCA is unconstitutional and that Canada’s treatment of STCA returnees violates those provisions of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms that guarantee liberty and security of the person. The Federal Court of Appeal took a different view and upheld the STCA. Hence, the matter is now before our highest court for a final decision.

The problem here is not the agreement itself. In fact, similar arrangements have succeeded when all participating countries truly offer safety to asylum seekers. Instead, the problem is that the fundamental premise of the STCA no longer holds true. Put simply, the United States is not safe for many refugees. As a result, there are two distinct reasons why, in our respectful view, the Supreme Court should strike down the STCA.

First, while it is not the Court’s role to judge another country’s legal system, this case asks the Court to ensure that people who seek protection in Canada are not sent back to unjustifiable risk and real harm. Yet in returning people to foreseeable consequences in the U.S. – namely, detention in deplorable conditions and a serious risk of return to persecution – that is exactly what is occurring.

In the evidence before the Court, there are numerous examples of asylum seekers who were jailed in the U.S. after being turned away from Canada. They include a family with toddlers who were forbidden from sleeping with their parents; people kept for long periods in solitary confinement; and a 50-year-old woman forced to bathe naked in full view of security personnel.

Those who we send back to be detained in the U.S. face enormous barriers in claiming protection, leading some to be deported and persecuted in their home country. For example, the evidence in the case before the Court includes testimony from a Sri Lankan man who was turned away from Canada and then detained for a year and a half in the U.S. He was then deported and faced the exact persecution he feared – detention, interrogation and beatings by Sri Lankan authorities.

Second, our government has not been respecting the limits created by our own domestic laws. Canadian law implementing the STCA requires that our government monitor circumstances in the U.S. and only continue its designation as “safe” when it truly is. Here, the Court will hear the argument that Canada has neither adequately monitored what’s happening in the U.S. nor responded effectively to what it has seen. Given these circumstances, the Court will be asked to intervene.

Although Donald Trump is no longer in power, the reality for too many refugee claimants in the U.S. remains terrifying. We are by now all too familiar with last year’s images of U.S. border patrol agents on horseback chasing down Haitian migrants. And four years after the implementation of a disastrous policy at the U.S.-Mexico border that separated children from their parents, many are yet to be reunited. Immigration detention conditions in the U.S. remain deplorable, with staggeringly high rates of sexual assault and racially motivated attacks. Is Canada not properly monitoring these developments, or have we grown complacent in turning a blind eye to them? In either case, the STCA can no longer be allowed to stand.

It is important to note that even if the STCA is declared invalid, asylum seekers will still have to establish that they qualify for refugee status under international law. But they will no longer be automatically deemed ineligible for that status merely because they crossed into Canada from the United States.

It is said that the measure of a society is how it treats those on its margins. When vulnerable asylum seekers arrive at our border, they deserve to be treated lawfully and with dignity. We can no longer assume that if we send them back to the U.S., they will be safe. Indeed, the evidence establishes the contrary. It is time for us to abandon the STCA, an agreement no longer worthy of its name.

Lloyd Axworthy is chair of the World Refugee and Migration Council and a former Canadian foreign minister. Allan Rock is president emeritus of the University of Ottawa, and former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations.

Source: The Safe Third Country Agreement is unsafe – and unconstitutional

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Et si le discours de la CAQ nuisait à l’intégration des immigrants?

2022/10/12 Leave a comment

Obviously:

Le discours de la Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) sur les immigrants fait usage d’un vocabulaire alarmiste et de propos faux, qui le rendent défavorable à l’intégration des nouveaux arrivants au Québec. En effet, son discours attribue à la population immigrante des stigmates répulsifs au processus qui fait de l’étranger une partie intégrante de la société d’accueil. D’abord, disséquons le discours pour ensuite présenter le défi auquel fait face le Québec en matière d’intégration des immigrants.

Le chef de la CAQ, François Legault, a affirmé au cours de l’été dernier que l’immigration serait un facteur de la « louisianisation » du Québec. Or l’histoire ne permet pas de faire une telle hypothèse. En effet, la Louisiane française, vaste territoire d’Amérique du Nord, faisait partie de la Nouvelle-France entre les XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Sa « louisianisation » s’est faite non pas par des immigrants, mais de l’intérieur, par des échanges de territoires entre colonisateurs français, espagnols et anglais. Ruinée par la guerre de Sept Ans (1756-1763), la monarchie française céda une grande partie de la Louisiane aux Espagnols, puis, au début des années 1800, le premier consul Napoléon Bonaparte céda définitivement aux États-Unis la partie restée française.

Selon d’autres propos tenus par le chef de la CAQ, l’immigration conduirait la « société québécoise au suicide ». Or l’histoire du peuple canadien-français, puis québécois, est faite de lutte, de résistance, de résilience, de solidarité et de sa capacité à rester lui-même par l’assimilation de nombreuses influences venues de l’intérieur et de l’extérieur. Ce qui fait la vitalité du Québec, écrit Fernand Dumont dans Raisons communes, « tient à une plus étroite proximité avec l’existence réelle des gens d’ici en même temps qu’à une plus grande ouverture aux quêtes extérieures ».

Ailleurs, M. Legault fait un lien entre immigration et violence. Cette affirmation doit être relativisée si l’on considère les données sur la criminalité au Québec de l’Institut de la statistique du Québec (2021) et celles de l’Enquête sociale générale sur la sécurité de Statistique Canada (2014). Lorsqu’on considère les types de violence (agression sexuelle, vol qualifié, voies de fait, etc.) commis ou subis par la population immigrante et la population non immigrante, les taux d’incidence sont tantôt similaires tantôt différents. On ne saurait donc faire un lien direct entre immigration et violence.

Quant à Jean Boulet, ministre sortant de l’Immigration, il a déclaré pendant la récente campagne électorale que « 80 % des immigrants s’en vont à Montréal, ne travaillent pas, ne parlent pas français ou n’adhèrent pas aux valeurs de la société québécoise ». Une telle affirmation ne concorde pas avec la réalité, comme l’a démontré Le Devoir. Elle relève sans doute du sens commun ou de préjugé.

Au total, le discours de la CAQ n’est que la stigmatisation des immigrants. Celle-ci peut produire au sein de la population une représentation sociale négative de l’immigrant puis finalement compromettre l’altérité. Or dans une société pluriethnique, la relation humaine est fondamentalement basée sur l’altérité, c’est-à-dire sur le rapport à l’étranger. Lorsque les discours politiques au sein de cette société tendent à encourager la recherche des similitudes avec l’étranger, celui-ci est inclus dans la société, et son intégration est effective. Réciproquement, lorsque les discours recherchent surtout des différences, l’étranger risque d’être exclu de la société d’accueil. C’est la posture que la CAQ a adoptée durant la campagne électorale.

Le Québec est une terre d’accueil d’immigrants qui viennent de partout dans le monde. Pays d’expression française dans un océan anglophone, le Québec a un grand défi : être une société qui garde son identité nationale (par sa langue et sa culture) tout en étant une société qui devient de plus en plus pluriculturelle. Je crois que le Québec est capable d’élaborer et de construire un modèle d’intégration dans la perspective de ce qu’il est, de son projet de société particulière, en y incluant des étrangers qui arrivent et qui deviennent aussi de nouveaux citoyens. Dans les discours ambiants sur l’immigration ailleurs dans le monde, la spécificité du Québec est d’être une société plutôt réceptive au discours inclusif.

Source: Et si le discours de la CAQ nuisait à l’intégration des immigrants?

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We are much safer here, say Indians in Canada

2022/10/12 Leave a comment

Of interest. Reader experiences, of course, may vary:

As India witnesses an alarming rise in cases of hate crimes racism, and vandalism across North America, students and Indians in Canada say they feel much safer and that there is no rise in crimes against them.

“There is no rise in crime against Indians in Canada. It is extremely peaceful. Overall, it is much safer in Canada for Indians than it was in the previous century when our forefathers came. Canada is a peaceful nation,” Balbir Gurm, community activist and founder of Network to Eliminate Violence in Relationships, told IANS.

The New Delhi-Ottawa ties have been under duress lately due to the recent vandalisation of Hindu properties and religious shrines, hate crimes, and a referendum to garner support for the secession of ‘Khalistan’ from Punjab in India.

Last month, the BAPS Swaminarayan temple in Canada was defaced with anti-India graffiti, and in July, a statue of Mahatma Gandhi at a Vishnu Temple in the Richmond Hill neighbourhood of Canada was desecrated.

Indian-origin Sikh Joti Singh Mann, a radio host based in Brampton, was attacked by three people in August this year, and Kartik Vasudev, a 21-year-old student from Uttar Pradesh, was shot dead in Toronto as he stepped out of a metro station in April.

Echoing Gurm’s views, Sara Wasson (name changed), a student of Brock University in Ontario, said that she “feels much safer in Canada than in India. This is such a peaceful country with fun-loving and helpful people”.

“This is a friendly country. At 20, I have a job here and I am not dependent on my family to pay for my university education. Canada makes me feel independent and confident, and I am happy to be here,” said Ashwin Malhotra, a student who works part-time at a departmental part-time at a departmental store in Ontario.

There are over 622,000 foreign students in Canada, with Indians numbering 217,410 as of December 31, 2021, according to figures released by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).

A recent report by Bengaluru-based research firm Redseer Strategy said that as many as 217,410 Indian students applied for Canadian education in 2021.

“What we are seeing is an aberration and not the norm. I feel that overall racism is decreasing in Canada against Canadians of Indian-origin. Today we can vote, be MPs, own property, and become members of any profession we choose,” Dr Gurm said, highlighting that the majority of Canadians are very accepting of all peoples.

“Everything’s peaceful here. No commotion happening here, seriously. Also, the Bhagavad Gita Park thing is a misunderstanding,” Divya Shankaran, who permanently moved to Canada three years back, told IANS. 

While there was much hue and cry over vandalism of a sign board at a park in Canada’s Brampton that has been named Bhagavad Gita Park, the Mayor of the town clarified saying that the cops had investigated the matter and it was just a matter of “maintenance and reprinting work”. 

Though there is no country-wise break-up of the numbers, Indians are the top immigrant group to take up residence in Canada this year. 

In 2021, nearly 100,000 Indians became permanent residents of Canada as the country admitted a record 405,000 new immigrants in its history, according to an Economic Times report. 

During 2021-2022, over 210,000 permanent residents also acquired Canadian citizenship, the report said. 

Source: We are much safer here, say Indians in Canada

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Clark: How your right to know is getting stymied by the Denial Machine

2022/10/11 Leave a comment

Good commentary on the broke ATIP system and how this impacts service to the public, particularly with respect to immigration (IRCC does a good job in publishing most of its operational data on the government-wide open data site):

Thirty-nine years ago, after a wave of post-Watergate epiphanies about government secrecy, the Canadian government passed the first federal Access to Information Act. Ever since then it is has been building a denial machine.

It would be easy to pin the blame on secretive politicians trying to obstruct the public’s ability to know what is going on inside government, because they have done that. Prime ministers including Justin Trudeau and his predecessor, Stephen Harper, have broken promises to open government.

But it’s not just that. There is bureaucratic aversion to openness, and a default assumption that making the public’s business public would be tricky. Complicated. Impractical.

And there is another problem: The government’s failure to provide information about simple things is gumming up the system.

Take a look at the recent The Globe and Mail story in which Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard is quoted telling a House of Commons committee that every department in government is failing to keep up with Access to Information requests. Should there be reforms? Ms. Maynard told the committee, in a phrase that should leave us all gobsmacked, that “respecting the law as it currently exists would represent an important first step.”

The government’s Access to Information system, which cost $90-milion in 2021, is garnering 10,000 complaints a year, the story noted. And it included a statistic that offers a clue to one big chunk of the problem: Access to Information requests to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada have increased so much they now outnumber requests to all other departments.

Why? Because IRCC is so bad at providing basic routine info that people are resorting to freedom-of-information requests.

The Access to Information law is supposed to allow people to pay a small fee to request federal government records or, at least, records that aren’t covered by the extensive legal exceptions.

The system for implementing the Act – the $90-million machine – is based on finding the requested documents, but heavily focused on applying exceptions and blacking stuff out. Ask for a copy of a government contract and often the prices of items will be redacted, even though the Federal Court of Canada has ruled such information should be released. One huge problem is delays, sometimes of years. With information, access delayed is often access denied.

That’s why the volume of requests to the Immigration department is instructive. Many come from people asking for info on their applications, said Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland. He publishes an immigration-policy newsletter, Lexbase, which is based heavily on access-to-information releases.

IRCC has for decades been unable or unwilling to provide updates to applicants, so Members of Parliament are often deluged with requests for help. Increasingly, their offices file access requests.

If you’re a regular internet shopper, you might recognize those requests as the immigration version of a common customer-service question: “Where’s my stuff?” Companies such as Amazon have online tracking systems that give customers simple answers: whether the order has been received, or shipped, and so on. If they didn’t, they’d be deluged with inquiries. But IRCC doesn’t do that.

Now the government’s failure to provide basic information is gumming up the system that is supposed to allow Canadians to pierce the veil of secrecy.

More broadly, Ottawa’s failure to make openness routine – even though doing so is easy in the digital age – makes getting access to out-of-the-ordinary information slower, and harder.

Requesters sometimes ask for copies of agreements for “grants and contributions” that set out government funding for organizations and groups. These should be automatically published on a website. So should all contracts except in rare exceptions. And so on.

But politicians don’t much care for that sort of transparency. Why let more people see things that might raise embarrassing questions? When the system is clogged up, as it is now, they don’t have to care. There’s no real penalty for failing to respect the Access to Information law.

If the government spent twice the money on a functioning Access to Information system, it would be well worth it. Instead, over decades, Ottawa has built – by design and by accident – a system that is effectively a machine to deny and delay.

Source: How your right to know is getting stymied by the Denial Machine

Filed under Government, Immigration Tagged with ,

McWhorter: A Language Test That Stigmatizes Black Children

2022/10/11 Leave a comment

Good example of a systemic barrier:

It can be hard not to notice that a suspiciously large number of children, of seemingly normal human linguistic capacity, are officially designated as language impaired. In 2019, two researchers set out to determine just how common this phenomenon is. Examining nationwide data, they found that each year, 14 percent of states overrepresent the number of Black children with speech and language impairments.

Just what does “language impaired” mean, though? Much of the reason this diagnosis is so disproportionate among this group and has been for decades is that too many people who are supposedly trained in assessing children’s language skills aren’t actually taught much about how human language works. And it affects the lives of Black kids dramatically.

The reason for that overrepresentation is that most Black children grow up code switching between Black English and standard English. There is nothing exotic about this; legions of people worldwide live between two dialects of a language, one casual and one formal, and barely think about it. Many Germans, Italians, Chinese people, South Asians and Southeast Asians and most Arabs are accustomed to speaking different varieties of language according to different forms of social interaction. So, too, are Black Americans. Black children, along the typical lines of bidialectal contexts like these, are much more comfortable with the casual variety of Black speech, only faintly aware that in formal settings there is a standard way of speaking that is considered more appropriate. Black English grammar is often assumed to be slang and mistakes. But it’s actually just an alternate, rather than degraded, form of English compared to the standard variety.

Here are the kinds of phrases that so many Black kids know and use effortlessly, phrases that are richer than standard English in many ways: “He be singin’”; “He done sung”; “He had sung and then he had gone quiet.” All three sentences are examples of how Black English expresses shades of actions in ways that standard English leaves more to context. “He be singin’” refers to someone singing regularly; you wouldn’t say that if someone were singing right in front of you. “He done sung” doesn’t simply refer to the past but to the fact that his having done so was something of a surprise, or something people urgently needed to know. Used on verbs one after the other in sequence instead of in the past-before-the-past pluperfect way that we use it in standard English, “had” in Black English indicates that one is telling a story; it is a narrative marker. None of this is broken. It is just different.

Now, suppose a kid raised in this dialect were asked on a test: “This bird is blue. What about this one?” “It red” would be marked wrong. Never mind that putting it that way is the way one would do it in the most standard version of Russian. If the kids tested see a girl with scissors and say “The girl cuttin’” instead of “The girl is cutting,” they are not just doing what Tolstoy would have thought of as normal but evidencing signs of linguistic impairment, as it is called.

The test asks the kid: “This is Jack. Whose dog is this? It is ______.” The kid may say “Jack dog” — in Black English, it is permissible to leave the possessive “-’s” out. Hence the late Black comedian Robin Harris’s classic routine about his girlfriend’s children saying, “Dem Bebe kids!” Apparently Harris had a linguistic impairment?

Imagine 7- or 8-year-old Black kids asked to repeat the sentence “My mother is the nurse who works in the community clinic.” If they happily say, spontaneously expressing it in the English they are most comfortable with, “My mother the nurse work in the community clinic,” they could be marked as linguistically deficient.

You don’t have to imagine this. Many of these questions are right from the CELF (Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals)-5 test, which is commonly used to assess children for disability status. And while the test includes modified scoring guidelines for students who may not have grown up speaking standard English, many test administrators do not abide by them. And even when they do, it can sometimes lead to underidentification of true language impairment when those test administrators cannot distinguish between language differences and language deficits. (This would help explain why the researchers also found that an estimated 62 percent of states underdiagnose Black children with these impairments.)

Tests like this one tend to be central to assessments of children as language deficient. The CELF-5 is used quite often. The dialect issue has been shown to be of key importance in overdiagnosis, which isn’t surprising given that, as Professor Catherine Crowley, from the program in Communication Sciences and Disorders at Columbia University’s Teachers College, tells me, in one subtest of the exam, 20 out of 33 of the constructions in the CELF-5 are used differently in Black English.

Imagine something else: If Black English were standard and a test asked white kids: Which is correct? “He ain’t be wearing that kind of shirt” or “He don’t be wearing that kind of shirt”? What would they answer? By the established parameters of Black English — and again, it is important to note that there are established parameters; this isn’t just slang — the correct answer is the second option. In that alternate universe, missing the distinction could get kids sent to a specialized classroom where they wouldn’t be taught according to their abilities.

I remember my mother, a child psychologist, talking as far back as the 1970s about Black kids being treated as linguistically deficient for being bidialectal; she resisted diagnostic tests as a result. Yet here we still are. Tests like this stay in place.

There are many areas in which I remain skeptical of the systemic racism analysis — for example, I am unconvinced that it’s systemic racism to require social workers to perform well on standardized tests. However, these speech evaluation tests imposed on children are something else. They can shunt kids away from mainstream opportunity when they have done nothing but grow up immersed in Black English as their linguistic comfort zone. Being born Black makes you more likely to suffer this abuse, whether it means your language impairment requiring special attention goes undiagnosed or your perfectly fine Black English is labeled a problem. Growing up with nonstandard English in general, as one study demonstrates about Filipino kids growing up in the United States from early childhood, can also lead to similar results.

It won’t do. But linguists can only have so much effect here. I have spent three decades listening to educators, psychologists, other linguists and speech pathologists giving talks about this lack of fit between speech evaluation tests and linguistic reality, and little seems to change except people in education circles being aware of and dismayed by the problem. Speech pathologists seeking to meaningfully participate in antiracism must start not just questioning but resisting en masse these outdated tests that apply a Dick-and-Jane sense of English on real kids who control a variety of coherent and nuanced Englishes.

Yes, all kids need to learn standard English in order to be able to access mainstream sources of achievement, not to mention to be taken seriously in specific contexts. This may not be fair. But the idea of standard English as a menacing, racist “gatekeeper” (which I have covered here) makes for good rhetoric yet will help no one in the real world. Certain dialects will be treated as standard as inevitably as certain kinds of clothing are considered more fashionable than others.

But for kids to be designated as linguistically deficient right out of the gate, based on notions such as that if they don’t always use the verb “to be” they don’t understand how things are related, makes no sense. It constitutes a dismissal of eager and innocent articulateness. And as such, it is an arrant and thoughtless injustice that must be stopped.

Source: A Language Test That Stigmatizes Black Children

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Diversity Minister condemns CRTC for not severing ties with consultant under fire for tweets

2022/10/11 Leave a comment

Needed but questions remain regarding how Canadian Heritage and CRTC decisions to provide funding to the Community Media Advocacy Centre were made. Recommended by officials (“activists on a pension”) and/or pushed by the political level:

Diversity Minister Ahmed Hussen says he is “surprised and disappointed” by the federal broadcasting regulator’s decision not to ban an anti-racism organization that employs Laith Marouf, a consultant who has been widely condemned for a series of derogatory tweets about “Jewish white supremacists” and francophones.

The Minister made his comments on Friday to the Commons heritage committee, which had summoned him so he could explain how his department’s anti-racism unit had granted the organization, called the Community Media Advocacy Centre, a contract to run an anti-racism project in which Mr. Marouf was to play a key role.

CMAC has been paid over $500,000 to participate in proceedings held by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Canada’s broadcasting regulator. Most of the money was provided by the Broadcast Participation Fund, an independent body set up by the CRTC to administer payments to public-interest groups taking part in those proceedings.

The Broadcast Participation Fund told The Globe and Mail in a statement on Friday that it was “currently reviewing the CMAC matter.” The fund is paid into by broadcasting companies, which have no influence over who receives the money.

Opinion: Ahmed Hussen demands to know how someone else let his government partner with an apparent antisemite

A spokeswoman for the CRTC said on Thursday that the regulator would not ban CMAC from its proceedings because it would be inappropriate “to establish lists of parties that may or may not participate.”

At Friday’s committee hearing, Mr. Hussen told MPs that he had been warned by Liberal MP Anthony Housefather about Mr. Marouf’s offensive tweets on July 19th or 20th – a month before the Minister spoke out publicly.

Facing sharp questioning from MPs, the Minister admitted that the Heritage Department’s vetting process failed when it decided to pay $133,000 to CMAC to run the anti-racism project.

Mr. Hussen apologized to Jewish and francophone communities, which he said Mr. Marouf has “continuously attacked with his hateful comments.”

He said it was “completely unacceptable” that “this individual fell through the cracks” and was approved to run a government-funded project. The Heritage Department, which he said approved the funding before he became Diversity and Inclusion Minister, has now cancelled the initiative and is asking CMAC for its money back.

“The antisemitic, hateful and xenophobic comments made by Laith Marouf … I condemn them in the strongest possible terms,” Mr. Hussen said. “The fact that the Community Media Advocacy Centre received federal funding while employing Mr. Marouf is unacceptable and should quite frankly never have happened.”

CMAC describes itself as a non-profit organization supporting the “self-determination of Indigenous, racialized and disabled peoples in the media through research, relationship-building, advocacy and learning.”

Mr. Marouf denies he is antisemitic or racist. He said in an interview that CMAC is currently in discussions with the Heritage Department about the contract. CMAC and Mr. Marouf had already started the project when it was terminated.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in August that the government has launched a complete review of funding for CMAC. He added that it was unacceptable “that federal dollars have gone to this organization that has demonstrated xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism.”

Mr. Hussen told MPs that CMAC would be blocked from applying for any future funding. He said he has introduced tighter vetting procedures for such contracts, including an obligation to check social media profiles for hateful speech. And he said his department’s contracts now include a clause that allows them to be terminated if hate speech comes to light. He said he has paused all new departmental contracts until more checks are made.

Jewish groups, including the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre, called on the CRTC to follow the government’s lead in severing ties with Mr. Marouf and CMAC, and to ban the organization from taking part in regulatory proceedings.

“Laith Marouf’s hateful statements should have disqualified him, and CMAC, from access to any government funding, let alone to money from an anti-racism program,” said Shimon Koffler Fogel, president of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. “It is imperative that the values promoted by the government be reflected in the orientation and work of their partners outside government.”

Conservative MP Kevin Waugh told the heritage committee that CRTC chairman Ian Scott and Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez should both be summoned to appear before the committee to explain their organizations’ links to CMAC.

Rachael Thomas, a Tory MP, and Melissa Lantsman, deputy leader of the Conservative Party, issued a statement saying “Canadians deserve answers” from Mr. Rodriguez.

Source: Diversity Minister condemns CRTC for not severing ties with consultant under fire for tweets

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

After feds lift 20-hour work rule for international students, immigration consultant calls move ‘short-sighted’

2022/10/11 Leave a comment

Worse than short-sighted, makes a mockery of issuing permits for study purposes and essentially is encouraging low wage and low skilled immigration as others have noted. More critical commentary needed and media should not only focus on the activist perspectives:

While the federal government’s move to lift restrictions on how long international students can work in a week is being applauded by many, an immigration consultant in Windsor, Ont., is concerned it could do more harm than good.

In an effort to address Canada’s labour shortage, Immigration Minister Sean Fraser announced Friday it would be expanding employment limits for international students with off-campus work authorization.

Currently, international students are permitted to work 20 hours per week. The only time of year when that restriction does not apply is during scheduled breaks, such as reading week or summer and winter holidays.

Starting Nov. 15 until the end of 2023, there will no longer be an “upper limit” on how many hours they can work. The new directive applies to those who have submitted a study permit application as of Oct. 7, 2022.

“This means that more than 500,000 international students who are already here in Canada are going to be eligible to work more if they choose to do so,” said Fraser.

University of Windsor master student Kenil Maniya said, on any given day, he finds himself with free time that could be better spent making money at his job. But when he’s already worked 20 hours that week, it’s not possible.

“I’m really happy that we can tell our manager we are ready to work more. We are always ready to give our best,” said Maniya.

He added there’s no reason why the federal government should not be using international students who are itching to work to fill the country’s labour shortage.

“When students come, some of them take a loan back in their home country so they have to manage their finances over here,” he said.

“Utilizing the current student resources will make the students happy in Canada.”

According to immigration consultant Amanjit Verma, however, the federal government’s new policy is “short-sighted.”

“The fact that there was a limit of 20 hours was a bit of a blessing in disguise,” said Verma, adding the time restriction helps international students achieve a work-school balance.

She also has concerns about the information international students receive in their home country before coming to Canada and how the new policy may reinforce that.

“I’ve been amazed and saddened by when these students come and tell me the kind of immigration advice they got from their international student advisor who has no idea how IPA (Immigration and Refugee Protection Act) and everything else works,” she said.

In Verma’s experience, she said, one of the most common “refusal grounds” for postgraduate work permit applications is a student not able to maintain full-time academic status — and many students do not realize that.

“So if someone who’s now working more than 20 hours, because they’re authorized to do that off-campus, goes part-time or reduces his course load, it will negatively affect his ability to get that work permit that will get him his PR (permanent residency) later on,” said Verma.

“I’m just concerned about repercussions for the students with this new policy,” said Verma.

As for Maniya, the India-born student said he is trying his best to achieve a healthy work-school balance and added he’s just happy he no longer has to circle scheduled breaks from school on his calendar until the end of next year.

“We always ask our boss during those times to please provide us with a full-time schedule,” said Maniya, adding he will often “multitask” and work on school tasks while on the job.

“It’s stressful a bit but lifting the hours will be good for us. It’s nice we don’t have to wait for reading week anymore.”

In a statement, Migrant Workers Alliance For Change applauded the lifting of working hours, saying the group has been campaigning the government to do so in the name of “labour rights and mobility.”

“Removing the limit on hours of work while studying gives student migrant workers the power to leave bad jobs, speak up against exploitation and mistreatment, and freedom and flexibility to make decisions about their work,” the group said in a statement.

Source: After feds lift 20-hour work rule for international students, immigration consultant calls move ‘short-sighted’

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , ,

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