ChatGPT is generating fake news stories — attributed to real journalists. I set out to separate fact from fiction

2023/04/13 1 Comment

Of interest (I am starting to find it useful as an editor):

“Canada’s historical monuments are also symbols of Indigenous genocide.”

“Police brutality in Canada is just as real as in the U.S.”

Those seemed to me like articles that my colleague, Shree Paradkar, a Toronto Star social and racial justice columnist, could have plausibly written. They were provided by an AI chatbot in response to my request for a list of articles by Paradkar.

The problem is that they don’t exist.

“At first blush it might seem easy to associate me with these headlines. As an opinion writer, I even agree with the premise of some of them,” Paradkar wrote to me after I emailed her the list.

“But there are two major red flags. The big one: they’re false. No articles I wrote have these headlines. And two, they either bludgeon nuance (the first headline) or summarize what I quote other people saying and what I write in different articles into one piece,” she said.

Paradkar’s discomfort reflects wider concerns about the abundance of fake references dished out by popular chatbots including ChatGPT — and worry that with rapidly evolving technology, people may not know how to identify false information. 

The use of artificial intelligence chatbots to summarize large volumes of online information is now widely known, and while some school districts have banned AI-assisted research, some educators advocate for the use of AI as a learning tool.

Users may think that one way to verify information from a chatbot is to ask it to provide references. The problem? The citations look real and even come with hyperlinks. But they are usually fake.

In recent months, academics have issued multiple warnings that ChatGPT was making up academic studies, including convincing scientific research abstracts. This came to the attention of Oxford University professor David Wilkinson when a student turned in a paper with a reference to a study that he couldn’t locate, but which was similar to fake references he found on ChatGPT.

It is less well known that media sources provided by chatbots are often fabricated as well. The Guardian recently called attention to the confusion that ensued at the newspaper when a reader inquired about an article that did not appear on The Guardian’s website.

The headline was so consistent with the newspaper’s coverage that staff thought it could have been something the reporter had written in the past. Staff went deep into computer systems to try to track down the article in case it was deleted. Luckily before more time was wasted, the reader disclosed that the reference came from ChatGPT.

“The invention of sources is particularly troubling for trusted news organizations,” wrote Chris Moran, The Guardian’s head of editorial innovation.

“It opens up whole new questions about whether citations can be trusted in any way, and could well feed conspiracy theories about the mysterious removal of articles on sensitive issues that never existed in the first place,” said Moran.

In cases of both fake media and academic references from chatbots, this is because “generative” AI chatbots are large language models. They are trained on a huge body of internet data, and can reproduce human language. But the important point is that they are not search engines, said Subodha Kumar, professor of statistics, operations and data science at Temple University in Philadelphia.

“The general public using ChatGPT now doesn’t really know how it works. It creates links and references that don’t exist, because it is designed to generatecontent,” Kumar told me.

“That’s what makes AI beautiful, but also problematic. False references can fool the public and policymakers, so if we have a newspaper article based on a false reference, then we’ll be in big trouble,” he added.

I wondered if ChatGPT has undergone any modifications since researchers raised concerns about the prevalence of fake citations. The U.S.-based company Open AI did not reply to my request for clarification. So like many other curious journalists have done, I interacted with the bot itself.

“Could you give me some articles by Globe and Mail journalist André Picard?” I asked.

“As an AI language model, I do not have access to specific articles or publications by individual authors, including André Picard, as I do not have browsing capabilities or access to the internet. I can, however, provide you with a general format for citing articles,” it replied.

This response appeared to clearly explain ChatGPT’s limitations. I was pleasantly surprised.

But alas, when I asked ChatGPT for a summary of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou’s legal battle in Canada and asked it to provide sources, the list of references it provided were all fake.

The hyperlinks were either broken or led to unrelated pages. A note at the bottom said that since it was trained on information up to September 2021, it may not reflect current events. But there was no disclaimer that the references themselves were fake.

“Why are your citations fake?” I asked ChatGPT.

“As an AI language model, I do not generate fake citations deliberately. However, I do not have direct access to external sources or the internet, and I do not provide real-time information … It’s always a good practice to cross-check and verify information from reputable and reliable sources independently, especially for critical or sensitive topics.”

But Kumar said it is very possible for developers to train chatbots to verify the references they generate.

“They don’t have to fundamentally change the concept to be just like Google Search, but the algorithm can be easily improved by giving it one more step: When references or links are created, check for the veracity of the content.”

Kumar added that other companies may soon offer new AI products that provide more reliable references, but as a “first mover” in the field, OpenAI has a special responsibility to address the issue.

OpenAI has said it is aware of the potential of generative AI to spread disinformation. In January, the organization partnered with Stanford University and Georgetown University to release a study forecasting potential misuses of language models for disinformation campaigns.

“For malicious actors, these language models bring the promise of automating the creation of convincing and misleading text for use in influence operations,” the study found.

And ChatGPT is only one out of a plethora of chatbot products from different companies, including apps that purport to be based on ChatGPT’s open API. I had found the list of my colleague’s fake opinion articles on one such Android app, “AI Chat by GPT,” (ChatGPT doesn’t currently offer a mobile version.)

For Ezra Levant, a conservative Canadian media commentator, the app offered up fake headlines on hot-button issues such as a fake column alleging that global migration will “undermine Canadian sovereignty” and another that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax is in fact a “wealth tax.”

Paradkar pointed out that the generation of fake stories attributed to real people is particularly dangerous during a time of increasing physical violence and online abuse against journalists worldwide.

“When AI puts out data that is incorrect but plausible, it counts as misinformation. And I fear that it offers ammunition to trolls and bad actors confirming their worst biases and giving them more reason to abuse journalists.”

Source: ChatGPT is generating fake news stories — attributed to real journalists. I set out to separate fact from fiction

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Jones: Politicians are right about the ‘decline of the west’ – but so wrong about the causes

2023/04/13 Leave a comment

Pessimistic view but not without merit. But social shifts have also been important, with considerable progress in terms of diversity:

If there is such a thing as an onward march of human progress,it has not just halted, but screeched into reverse. Last autumn, a little-discussed report issued by the United Nations noted that human development had declined in 90% of countries for two years in a row, a fall without precedent for more than three decades. The pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine played their role, but so too did “sweeping social and economic shifts, dangerous planetary changes, and massive increases in political and social polarisation”.

You may well be familiar with chatter about “the decline of the west”: it has tended to be the preserve of the reactionary right, who blame, variously, moral decay, multiculturalism and a reassessment of European history for our downfall. But it is not minority rights, diversity or acknowledgment of western crimes to blame. The turnaround in our collective fortunes has been dramatic. But it is driven by an economic system that promised personal freedom but instead delivered insecurity on a mass scale, and which has has hurt us in every conceivable way, from our emotional and physical wellbeing to our material circumstances.

Take one basic measure: life and death. The UK government has been forced to delay lifting the state pension age after a fall in life expectancy without precedent since the war. Although certainly worsened by the pandemic, life expectancy was already declining in many English communities years before Covid arrived on our shores. In the US, life expectancy declined from nearly 79 in 2019 to 76 two years later, the biggest fall for a century.

And the morbid symptoms of a crisis in wellbeing are everywhere. Across the Atlantic, the suicide rate soared by 30% in the first 20 years of the 21st century. As the “war on drugs” has escalated, so have deaths from substance abuse: in the US, they have grown exponentially since the 1970s, helping to drive the fall in life expectancy, while in the UK they have reached their highest level since records began. Karl Marx once described religion as the “sigh of the oppressed creature”: today this is more of an apt description of drug addiction, driven by the self-medication of those afflicted by trauma and misery. Indeed, it is difficult to disentangle from a global leap in depression, which increased by almost a fifth between 2005 and 2015, and has also surged among US teenagers.

Peering at the rubble left by humanity’s bloodiest war the best part of a century ago, a western European citizen in 1945 would have been pleasantly surprised to discover that the most prosperous years in history awaited them. Such was the unprecedented rise in living standards in the west in the three decades after the war that it became christened the “Golden Age”; for the French it was the “30 glorious years”. But while the UK suffered a particularly pronounced fall in wages in the 2010s, they have stagnated across the western world. Before the pandemic hit, the purchasing power of US workers had barely shifted for four decades.

It’s easy to be lulled into the illusion that dramatic progress is still happening. Computer chips get ever-smaller; computer processors ever-faster; mobile phones ever-more dynamic. But technological advancement does not automatically translate into improvements in the human condition. Across much of the west, stagnation and decline has become the defining feature of our age. If you want to understand why politics became angrier and more polarised, don’t look for facile explanations such as argumentative behaviour fostered by social media. A grand experiment has been under way for more than a generation: what if you cut off optimism from rich societies that previously took ever-rising living standards for granted?

UK renters can’t afford their mouldy, exorbitant homes – now they can’t afford to complain either

The rise of the “free market”, we were promised, would unleash endless prosperity. But while the much-demonised age of strong trade unions, nationalisation and expansive welfare states delivered the greatest improvement in living standards in history, our current economic model is decomposing all around us: the stench is becoming harder to ignore. On both sides of the Atlantic, economic growth has fallen since the frontiers of the state were rolled back, and that more limited growth is more likely to be sucked into the bank accounts of the gilded rich.

How does that explain, say, falling life expectancy driven by rising opiate use in the US? We know that the disappearance of secure, well-paid jobs has bred the conditions of misery in which addiction thrives. Growing inequality has helped spur on deteriorating mental health: rates of depression correlate with low income, for example. From the generational collapse in public housebuilding to the decimation of social care, the security that underpins a comfortable human existence has been peeled away.

And yet how little this halt in human progress is mentioned, let alone debated. With our civilisation facing multiplying existential challenges, how quickly stagnation and decline could become a freefall. You don’t need an overactive imagination to ponder the brutal possible consequences, especially if progressive politicians fail to offer compelling answers. Our lives are shortening, our wellbeing is falling, our security being dismantled. These are the conditions of despair, and a bitter harvest beckons.

  • Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

Source: Politicians are right about the ‘decline of the west’ – but so wrong about the causes

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Skuterud: Using immigration to fill vacant, lower-skilled jobs is not sound economic policy

2023/04/12 Leave a comment

Mikal continues his crusade, rightly, against the flaws of the government’s approach in terms of productivity. Unfortunately, appears governments and business are not listening to these warnings:

Ask a Canadian why the government is increasing immigration and more often than not they will tell you: “to grow our economy.” Ask an economist and you’ll rarely get that answer.

Boosting the economic well-being of a population is indeed a worthwhile objective of immigration, but that requires more than simply making the economy bigger.

India’s economy is 60 per cent bigger than Canada’s and Switzerland’s is 60 per cent smaller. Is India’s economy what we are aiming for? Making the economic pie as big as possible is clearly not the objective. What matters is the size of the average slice when the pie is divided by the population.

The immigration policies that the current Liberal government adopted in 2015 reflected two decades of reforms focused on leveraging immigration to boost GDP per capita, the size of the average slice – a sound economic objective. But this government has shifted the objective to something new.

The government hinted at its objective in March when it rationalized Canada’s surging population – a one million increase last year – as an alleged economic necessity to fill vacant jobs, which if focused on lower skilled jobs is more likely to lower than raise GDP per capita.

Other times, however, the government has been less than transparent. The government’s opacity in what it is trying to achieve leaves us to guess.

Perhaps it is trying to maximize our population to raise our geopolitical influence on the world stage or to keep small towns in the Maritimes from disappearing.

But why then limit our annual immigration target to only 500,000? Why not announce to the world that if you get here, you will be granted permanent residency status on arrival?

That’s because economies have absorptive capacities. When our housing, social infrastructure and business-capital investments do not grow commensurately with our population, there are economic tradeoffs. Usually, the Canadians most adversely affected by these tradeoffs are existing immigrants competing for housing, jobs and social services in the same communities as the newcomers.

Perhaps the objective is humanitarian, that is it’s more about boosting the economic well-being of the newcomers themselves. If that is true, however, then we should target the world’s poorest.

The world’s 20 poorest countries accounted for 8.2 per cent of the world’s population in the 2015-21 period but only 4.8 per cent of Canada’s new immigrants. The share of immigration dedicated to humanitarian objectives in the government’s latest targets is 19.8 per cent in 2023, 18.5 per cent in 2024, and 16.2 per cent in 2025. Humanitarian ideals is clearly not what this government is focused on.

The reality is that the objective of this government’s immigration policies is not the size of the economy, population growth, humanitarianism or GDP per capita.

Leveraging immigration to boost GDP per capita requires attracting the world’s best and brightest to drive innovation, productivity growth and job creation in advanced sectors that are intensive in new technologies, research and development, and STEM skills. That does not seem to be this government’s priority.

The priority of this government appears to be filling existing job slots with workers regardless of the value added of those jobs. The goal is overwhelmingly to support businesses by alleviating the competitive labour market pressures they are facing to increase the wages and productivity of their work forces.

This is evident in the government’s recent decision to reverse regulations introduced by its predecessors in 2014 to curtail business reliance on low-skill temporary foreign workers.

It is also evident in the government’s recent decision to waive all limits on the off-campus work activity of foreign students, whose numbers are exploding and who are heavily engaged in low-wage work.

Most significant, the government is now proposing a reform of its system for selecting candidates for economic-class immigration, known as the “express entry system,” which will target immigrants to fill existing job slots rather than being focused on attracting the world’s top talent.

Debates about immigration policy are contentious precisely because people have different objectives in mind.

The Immigration Department is launching a new initiative that will solicit the views of Canadians on optimal immigration policy. It is hard to believe that this exercise will be any more productive than asking Canadians how they would change the income tax rates they pay.

If we are going to solicit the views of all Canadians, I propose a rule: In making public statements about how Canada should reform its immigration policies, we must all first declare what objective we think the government’s immigration policies should be aiming to achieve and how that objective is best measured.

Mikal Skuterud is a professor of economics at the University of Waterloo and the director of the Canadian Labour Economics Forum.

Source: Using immigration to fill vacant, lower-skilled jobs is not sound economic policy

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Douglas Todd: B.C. desperately needs Ottawa to tie immigration levels to housing

2023/04/12 Leave a comment

More on housing and immigration levels:

Last week, hundreds of B.C. mayors and municipal councillors heard exactly why Ottawa’s failure to do so is causing them grief when it comes to providing adequate infrastructure, particularly affordable housing, but also schools, health-care facilities and daycares.

Delegates to the Union of B.C. Municipalities convention heard the country’s record population growth last year of one million was 96 per cent from offshore arrivals. Forty per cent of those newcomers were permanent residents and 60 per cent were temporary residents, especially foreign students.

The flood of foreign nationals is creating unprecedented demand for homes, which is pushing up rents and housing prices, which are among the highest in the world in cities like Vancouver and Toronto.

While people in Canada who already own homes, or serve as landlords, are benefiting, the rest are having to struggle with price-to-household income ratios that have soared since 2005 to among the worst in the Western world.

Chris Friesen, a national leader in providing settlement services for immigrants and refugees, told delegates it’s taking far too long for Ottawa to do the obvious and co-ordinate its migration policy with housing and other taxpayer-funded services.

Last year, British Columbia, which has almost no control over migration, took in 60,000 new permanent residents and 140,000 temporary residents, said Friesen, the longtime CEO of the Immigrant Services Society of B.C.

“And at the end of the day everybody is looking for a home,” said Friesen. Despite Kahlon’s recent efforts, Friesen criticized the way the NDP government in 2018 launched a 30-point housing strategy “and nowhere in that plan is there mention of immigrants, temporary residents or refugees.”

Friesen said service providers are increasingly talking about how the country’s “absorptive capacity” for newcomers is stretched. It’s not only affecting newcomers, he said, but Canadian-born residents, too.

A Statistics Canada report by Annik Gougeon and Oualid Moussouni showed immigrants bought 78 per cent of the homes purchased in Richmond in 2018, and more than 65 per cent of the dwellings bought in Surrey and Burnaby. Newcomers bought more than 40 per cent of homes in Vancouver, North Vancouver and New Westminster in 2018.

Dan Hiebert, professor emeritus of geography at the University of B.C., told the delegates that Canada would have to immediately build 1.36 million more houses and apartments just to reach the average homes-to-population ratios of the OECD, a club of well-off nations.

And to achieve “affordability” in the housing market, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation has estimated the country would need to build 3.5 million extra housing units in the next seven years. Currently, only about 280,000 units are built each year.

The proportion of Metro Vancouver housing owned or rented by recent newcomers has doubled since 2016, according to census data. Growth rates are rocketing.

Permanent and non-permanent residents who arrived in the past five years alone now account for 14 per cent of Metro Vancouver’s population, eight per cent of all homeowners and 25 per cent of all renters.

Canada has not seen such high immigration rates since 1912, when 400,000 newcomers arrived, said Hiebert. Ottawa is now aiming for 500,000 new permanent residents each year. And that does not include hundreds of thousands of guest workers, plus the record 800,000 foreign nationals in the country on study visas.

Years ago, Hiebert referred to how Canada’s immigration policy is, in effect, Canada’s housing policy. Without knowing its origins, many UBCM attendees repeated the phrase frequently.

Hiebert suggested Canada’s dilemma is that arguably there might not be enough people to fill the country’s labour market, but there are too many for Canada’s housing market.

The vice-president of the Vancouver Board of Trade, David van Hemmen, said B.C. businesses are having difficulty attracting talent because of the alarming cost of housing. Some businesses, he said, are moving operations to Alberta or Washington state, to avoid B.C.’s daunting land costs.

While panelists and delegates consistently said the country should welcome newcomers, some civic officials who went to the microphones remarked on how Ottawa’s migration targets are “aggressive.”

Carling Helander, a provincial government immigration policy specialist who sat on the panel in lieu of Municipal Affairs Minister Anne Kang, acknowledged B.C.’s quest for new workers to address labour shortages creates a “circular loop” that tends to hike housing costs.=

A recent Gallup poll revealed 75 million people around the world want to move to Canada, the delegates heard. In addition, an Angus Reid Institute poll found newcomers are enthusiastic about getting into the housing market.

While 59 per cent of Canadian-born residents said “it’s important to own a home to feel like a real Canadian,” that figure jumps to 75 per cent among recent immigrants. While the individual earnings of recent immigrants are below average, Hiebert said household incomes are higher than most because more people tend to inhabit the same dwelling.

Friesen cited how the Liberal government’s humanitarian approach to asylum seekers from war-ravaged Ukraine exemplifies the absence of co-ordination between federal migration policy and local housing needs.

More than 175,000 asylum seekers from Ukraine have already landed in Canada, said Friesen. But 850,000 more have applied for refugee status. It’s just been announced they will have to forfeit their refugee application if they don’t get to Canada by March, 2024. All this, Friesen said, is being done without housing co-ordination.

The ISS of B.C. already has 13 full-time staff devoted to finding houses for asylum seekers and other newcomers, said Friesen. “Over 60 per cent of them land in Surrey in basement suites.”

Similar to B.C.’s housing minister, Friesen said this country badly needs a 10-year population growth strategy that matches arrivals with housing.

Source: Douglas Todd: B.C. desperately needs Ottawa to tie immigration levels to housing

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François Legault shares racist article, reveals hypocrisy on secularism

2023/04/12 Leave a comment

Sigh…

Quebec Premier François Legault shared an article by infamous Journal de Montréal columnist Mathieu Bock-Côté about the importance of Catholicism in Quebec, revealing his hypocrisy on secularism and a willingness to overlook barely disguised racist sentiments in the material he shares.

In his column, timed with Easter weekend, Bock-Côté praises Quebec’s Catholic heritage, noting that  “Catholicism, from the origins of New France, gave a particular impetus to our adventure in America” — kind of like how the Catholic Church’s Doctrine of Discovery encouraged Europeans to crush Indigenous communities in their travels? Bock-Côté also says, “It is this same sense of the collective that leads us today to resist the fragmentation of society under the pressure of multiculturalism” — a gratuitous slam on multiculturalism as being the root of all our problems.

Legault quoted another piece of the Journal article on Twitter: “Catholicism has also engendered in us a culture of solidarity that distinguishes us on a continental scale.” As Montreal comedian Sugar Sammy pointed out, “Secularism is important except for this one tweet.”

Secularism has been identified by the Legault government as one of Quebec’s core values, and used as justification for Bill 21, which supposedly treats all religions equally in terms of banning religious symbols.

Source: François Legault shares racist article, reveals hypocrisy on secularism

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Canada’s housing and immigration policies are at odds

2023/04/12 Leave a comment

More commentary on the disconnect between immigration and housing (and other infrastructure and services):

Housing affordability has metastasized from a Toronto and Vancouver problem to a national crisis. Double-digit rent increases have hit traditionally more affordable communities coast to coast, and the cost of home ownership remains persistently high amid rising interest rates. One of the main reasons for the lack of affordability, according to our recent report, is the misalignment between Canada’s different levels of government.

Over all, Canada’s system of decentralized federalism has served us well. Allowing different levels of government to make decisions that suit their own contexts is usually the right approach when it comes to program delivery. A century ago, Louis Brandeis, then a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, famously referred to states as “laboratories” for policy experimentation. This holds true for Canadian provinces, and on the whole, the structure is healthy for a medium-sized country spread out over the world’s second-largest land mass.

Many factors have contributed to eroding housing affordability, but the fundamental problem is a growing mismatch between supply and demand. While residential construction in Canada has plateaued, falling well short of historical highs, our population is growing faster than that of any other G7 nation.

Canada’s population growth averaged 422,000 additional inhabitants per year (July to July) between 2012 and 2022, compared with 335,000 annually over the previous decade. This trend is accelerating, with net growth of more than 500,000 inhabitants in three of the past five years, including a record 703,404 between 2021 and 2022.

Meanwhile, housing completions have stagnated over the past five decades. Between 2012 and 2022, an average of 195,000 homes were built annually, down from 199,000 annually the decade before – and 229,000 annually during the 1970s, Canada’s home-building highpoint.

Which brings us back to Canada’s system of governance. Population growth is controlled in large part by the federal government, and home building primarily by provincial and local governments.

Since the early 1990s, immigration has replaced net births (births minus deaths) as Canada’s primary driver of population growth. Unlike birth rates, which governments can only indirectly influence, immigration numbers are determined by government policy. For example, Canada’s most recent Immigration Levels Plan aims to add 465,000 new permanent residents in 2023, then 485,000 in 2024, and 500,000 in 2025 – the highest immigration levels ever.

Provincial and local governments, meantime, are tasked with planning for and approving enough housing to keep up with this record population growth. They do so through a series of land-use and growth plans, starting at the provincial or regional level and ending with local plans and bylaws governing how much building is permitted to happen, and where.

In short, the federal government (and, to varying extents, provinces) wield a formidable lever over housing demand, while provinces and municipalities largely control the housing supply. Unfortunately, these two sets of policy levers – immigration policy versus growth planning – are essentially set in isolation of one another.

Immigration levels plans, which are updated every year, are partly informed by a series of federal-provincial/territorial agreements. However, none of the current agreements even mention the word “housing,” focusing instead on concerns such as labour market needs and language requirements. These are important considerations, but newcomers also need places to live.

Meanwhile, provincial and local growth planning takes years to implement and update. For example, the Ontario government updated its 2006 growth plan for the region surrounding Toronto in 2019, and again in 2020, giving municipalities until 2022 to adjust their local plans accordingly. However, municipal plans can take years to translate into updated zoning bylaws, if at all, and since there is no strict enforcement of growth plans’ housing targets, they amount to a best guess as to how communities might grow.

Further, the length of time it takes to create and execute local plans means their population growth assumptions are often outdated before or during their implementation. While immigration levels plans are updated annually, major provincial directives – such as Ontario’s 2022 target of getting 1.5 million homes built over the next decade – are already a step behind.

Federal, provincial and municipal policy makers all need to get on the same page. Canada’s housing shortage won’t end until immigration policies start reflecting the reality of our housing markets, or until land-use and growth planning accurately reflects population growth. Without better co-ordination, the housing crisis will likely get worse.

Steve Lafleur and Josef Filipowicz are policy analysts who research housing and taxation. This article is part of a project they undertook with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Source: Canada’s housing and immigration policies are at odds

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ICYMI – Keller: Why the Trudeau government was right to close Roxham Road

2023/04/11 Leave a comment

Good commentary pointing out the reality of trade-offs and the unreality of “open borders” and permanent residence for all:

If you’ve been dreaming of a guilt-free, morally pure, no-hard-choices solution to the problem of irregular border crossers into Canada, illegal border crossings in the United States, overwhelmed refugee determination systems in both countries and people smuggling in all directions, I offer you this simple answer: open borders.

Under open borders, anyone who wanted to move to Canada could. Simple as that. If 10 million immigrants wanted to come to Canada this year, then 10 million would.

There’d be no more refugee claimants sent back to the United States under the Safe Third Country Agreement. Anyone would be free to enter Canada, work as soon as they arrived, remain as long as they liked and become a citizen. There would be no need for an Immigration and Refugee Board to determine who is or isn’t a genuine legal refugee; there’d be no need for refugee claims at all. We would also get rid of Canada’s immigration points system, which gives priority to people with advanced educations and in-demand skills. We’d admit everyone, and give priority to no one.

There would be no annual immigration targets, such as this year’s target of 465,000 immigrants, including 266,000 economic immigrants, 78,000 spouses and children, 28,500 parents and grandparents and more than 92,000 refugees and compassionate cases. Under open borders, Canada would not select immigrants, and “no one is illegal” would not be a slogan. It would be the law.

While you ponder that, I should make it clear that I don’t think an open border is right for Canada. But unless you do, there’s no way to design an immigration system that doesn’t involve choices – sometimes hard and unpleasant ones – about who gets in and who doesn’t. There’s no avoiding it.

Many Canadians are uncomfortable with the closing of the Roxham Road-sized loophole in the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement. I believe the government made the right move, but the discomfort of the critics is not without reason – real people are affected, and not in pleasant ways.

However, unless you go all the way to open borders, every approach to immigration and refugee policy involves at least some people who want to come to Canada being denied entry. It’s inevitable.

The Roxham Road loophole was not a principled response to any of that. A Canadian family hoping to bring in their grandparents still had to apply from overseas and wait in a queue. Ditto regular immigrants from overseas. Same story for refugee claimants from Syria or Afghanistan in a refugee camp.

But if you were from a country where U.S. visa rules are loose enough, and you had enough cash for a plane ticket, you could fly to the United States and then slide into Canada’s refugee-determination system at Roxham Road. Or if you were able to get to Mexico, make it across the U.S. border and then head north, you could similarly jump the queue and make your claim directly on Canadian soil.

But every successful refugee claim at Roxham Road was quietly but effectively reducing the number of spots available to people in refugee camps an ocean away.

What’s more, unless our policy is that everyone who claims asylum gets asylum, we need some sort of legal process to figure out who is a refugee and who isn’t. Canada has such a system and, after detailed investigations that tend to last for years, it finds that many refugee claimants are not refugees, and orders them deported. That’s what happened to one of the families that recently died trying to illegally cross from Canada into the United States though Akwesasne Mohawk territory.

And then there’s the underpinning of our entire immigration strategy. The Trudeau government aims to raise immigration to 500,000 permanent residents a year by 2025 – roughly double the level under the Harper and Chrétien governments. That move was justified in 2016 by the government’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth as a plan for, well, economic growth. A higher population, said the council, would expand the economy, but only if new immigrants are more productive than average Canadians will each slice of pie grow faster than the number of forks. If immigrants are less productive than Canadians, the number of forks will grow faster than the pie.

“An increase in overall economic output (GDP) is a positive thing for Canada,” wrote the council, “but only if the expansion translates to a rise in living standards for the average Canadian (GDP per capita). This goal can be achieved by focusing the recommended increase in immigration flows among educated and highly skilled workers, and those with specialized skill sets lacking in Canada.”

In other words, Canada’s immigration policy is not just about having more Canadians, but more educated, skilled and productive Canadians. To do that, newcomer immigrants have to be mostly young, educated and skilled. One big knock against the Liberal government is that while many new immigrants meet the criteria, too many do not. Immigration can raise everyone’s living standards, but only if we’re selective about who we let in, and who we do not.

To govern is to choose. There’s no getting around it. Nowhere is that more true than at the border.

Source: Why the Trudeau government was right to close Roxham Road

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Lisée: Le droit au monologue

2023/04/11 Leave a comment

A noter:

Ce n’est pas tous les jours que 388 professeurs, auteurs et personnalités se donnent la peine de signer une lettre commune, publiée mardi dans Le Devoir (« Ce ne sont pas que des mots »), pour nous avertir de « dérapages inquiétants, de plus en plus nombreux » dans le débat public au Québec.

M’étant plusieurs fois exprimé, y compris dans ces pages, sur la nécessité d’un débat qui, s’il peut être robuste, doit toujours être respectueux, j’ai été étonné que ma signature n’ait pas été sollicitée. J’ai compris pourquoi une fois avoir soigneusement examiné de quoi il était question.

Les signataires nous y aident en donnant, au total, quatre exemples de ce qui leur paraît intolérable. Il s’agit d’abord d’une entrevue donnée à Stéphan Bureau par Léa Clermont-Dion. Elle y décrit son groupe social d’origine à Rawdon comme étant du « White trash ». Une expression dure, rarement utilisée au Québec, mais courante aux États-Unis pour désigner une population blanche marginale, peu éduquée. Bureau lui demande si elle oserait aussi parler de « Black trash ». « Ben non, ça marcherait pas », dit-elle.

L’échange a été capté par un chroniqueur de Québecor, Mathieu Bock-Côté (MBC), qui y a vu un exemple de « racisme anti-blanc ». (Détail savoureux : ce sont les esclaves noirs du sud des États-Unis qui ont inventé le terme pour dénigrer ces Blancs). L’argument du deux poids, deux mesures se tient, mais la charge de MBC est un peu lourde, d’autant que Clermont-Dion s’amende, dans l’entretien, d’avoir utilisé le terme. Puis, le reproche lui en a été fait sur les réseaux sociaux. J’y reviens.

Les signataires renvoient ensuite à un gazouillis où une autrice et éditrice écrivait ceci : « Les élections et leurs hochets habituels — et même certains dont nous croyions qu’ils appartenaient à un vieux Québec ranci et révolu : l’immigration, l’identité, le vilain étranger, les maudits intellectuels ». Je ne la nomme pas parce que les signataires s’insurgent que de tels propos entraînent une riposte ad hominem, mais surtout parce qu’elle a retiré la publication. Le gazouillis serait passé inaperçu si MBC n’avait pas jugé dans son blogue qu’il « est difficile de trouver un propos plus méprisant à l’endroit des centaines de milliers de Québécois qui prennent la question identitaire au sérieux ».

Pour moi, c’est clair : les deux positions ont droit de cité dans notre débat public. L’autrice a le droit de penser et d’écrire que ces thèmes reflètent un « Québec ranci et révolu », d’autres ont droit de répliquer que cette opinion suinte le mépris.

Le troisième cas concerne l’auteur et vice-président de la Ligue des droits et libertés, Philippe Néméh-Nombré. Dans Seize temps noirs pour apprendre à dire kuei, (Mémoire d’encrier), il écrit : « Une autopatrouille qui brûle est une promesse. » Ce qui lui vaut, toujours par MBC, une accusation de glorifier la violence antipolicière. Cette phrase est prise « hors contexte », écrivent les signataires. Je suis allé le lire. J’ai bien trouvé cet autre extrait : « Détruire des ordinateurs, fracasser des vitrines, brûler des autopatrouilles, bloquer des ponts, des voies ferroviaires. » Mais je n’ai trouvé aucun contexte qui puisse laisser entendre que ces phrases ne doivent pas être prises au premier degré. Il s’agit, au mieux, d’une normalisation de la violence, au pire, de sa glorification. Que les signataires estiment que cela devrait passer comme une lettre à la poste laisse songeur.

Finalement, la lettre nous emmène en 2018, dans la foulée de l’attentat à la mosquée de Québec. Dans un texte publié dans La Presse, la prof et psychiatre Marie-Eve Cotton estime troublant que certains se montrent empathiques envers les troubles psychiatriques de l’accusé, Alexandre Bissonnette, mais n’en fasse pas autant envers les tueurs islamistes qui ne sont, écrit-elle, « pas moins désespérés, apeurés, perdus, et habités d’une colère qui cherche un objet sur lequel se déverser ». Cette fois, c’est Richard Martineau qui monte au créneau, estimant qu’il faut distinguer « un massacre perpétré par une personne déséquilibrée et dépressive et un attentat sanguinaire commis au nom d’une cause par un terroriste qui revendique fièrement son geste ». Ici encore, les deux positions doivent avoir droit de cité. (Je trouve pour ma part des parcelles de vérité dans les deux textes.)

Les signataires se plaignent que la force de la riposte est disproportionnée, de deux façons. D’abord, parce que des chroniqueurs et animateurs ont des tribunes dont l’empreinte est très large; ensuite, parce que leurs critiques entraînent sur la Toile un flot de commentaires souvent haineux qui traumatise l’auteur du texte critiqué. Personne n’est préparé pour le torrent de réactions qu’une première déclaration tranchée peut provoquer. Mais tous ceux qui mettent le petit orteil dans le débat public doivent savoir que cette tempête permanente existe. Il n’y a que deux façons d’y survivre : pour les menaces, on appelle le 911, pour toute violence verbale, on bloque jusqu’à ce que la racaille disparaisse de nos fils.

Mais la lettre ouverte appelle les propriétaires de médias à mettre leurs chroniqueurs et animateurs en laisse. Ils devraient s’abstenir de relever qu’untel parle d’un « Québec ranci » et que tel autre sourit à la vue d’une autopatrouille en flamme. Au nom de quoi, exactement ? Du droit de ne pas être contredit ? Du droit au monologue ?

Je remarque, dans la liste des « victimes » citées et les signatures, des gens qui, à répétition, ont écrit que ceux qui n’étaient pas de leur avis sur la question de la laïcité étaient, nécessairement, des opportunistes et des racistes. On comprend que, du haut de leur certitude d’être les seuls porteurs de la raison, ils voudraient que leur intolérance et leur irrespect de l’autre ne soient relevés par personne, ou alors qu’on taise leurs noms dans les répliques, même lorsqu’ils persistent et signent dans l’insulte.

L’argument de la disproportion des voix aurait de la valeur si l’espace médiatique québécois n’était pas si diversifié. Toute personne outrée peut publier sa prose sur son blogue ou ses réseaux avec l’appui et le relais de sa communauté de vues. Des lettres ouvertes sont acceptées dans tous les médias. J’admets qu’il manque de signatures et de tribunes, disons, « woke », à Québecor, mais ce n’est pas le cas dans ce quotidien-ci, ni à La Presse ni à Radio-Canada.

On pourrait débattre, chiffres à l’appui, de la présence médiatique relative des deux grandes tendances intellectuelles qui s’affrontent. Il faut cependant savoir qu’en politique comme dans le débat d’idées, chacun est toujours convaincu que l’autre camp a trop de visibilité.

J’ai jugé particulièrement significatif de constater que le signataire principal de cette lettre, Mathieu Marion, dénonçant le manque de retenue et de respect et les attaques ad hominem, un prof de l’UQAM, a affirmé quelques jours auparavant sur Twitter que la pensée de MBC s’apparentait à de la « pink slime » — cette viande artificielle dont la vue lève le cœur. Ce qui me rappelle vaguement une histoire de paille et de poutre.

Source: Le droit au monologue

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

ICYMI ‘It’s cultural genocide’: Native Americans shine a light on the epidemic of disenrollment

2023/04/11 Leave a comment

Of note, “blood quantum”:

For Kadin Mills, a first descendant of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, resources offered through his family’s tribe will always be just out of arm’s reach.

He will never be able to call himself a citizen of Keweenaw Bay — and with that comes limits on the sort of benefits, such as health, that he is able to receive. In desperate cases — like when Mills needs a prescription that would simply be too expensive at non-tribal pharmacies — he must depend on good timing, luck, and the generosity of his enrolled family members.

“If my mom has the same prescription, she gives them to me and refills hers,” he said.

Mills is just one of many Native American young adults and youths who are unable to enroll with their tribe, even when one or more of their immediate family members — such as a parent or a grandparent — are enrolled. Most, if not all, federally-recognized tribes rely on blood quantum and lineage requirements to determine whether an individual is eligible for citizenship.

The term “blood quantum” is exactly what it sounds like. It refers to the amount of “Indian blood” a person has — for example, if someone’s grandparent was fully Native, that person’s blood quantum would only be a quarter Native.

According to “American Indians without Tribes in the 21st Century,” a journal article published in the National Library of Medicine, one-third of mixed-race American Indians and one-sixth of single-race American Indians did not respond to questions regarding tribal affiliation or enrollment in the 2000 United States census.

In many tribes, including the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, a minimum of one-fourth of Native American blood is required to enroll. These requirements ice out mixed-race Native Americans such as Mills, something that he said promises a decline in tribal membership and an uncertain future for traditional ways of life.

“I think it’s cultural genocide,” Mills said.

During the mid to late 1800s, the United States government began using the blood quantum measure in the hopes that “intermarriage would “dilute” the amount of “Indian blood” in the population,” according to an article by Maya Harmon published by the California Law Review at the UC Berkeley School of Law. The end goal was to breed out Native Americans and assimilate them into white society.

Other tribes, such as the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians in southwestern Michigan, rely on a model of “lineal descendancy,” where a person’s citizenship is determined by their ancestry rather than blood quantum percentage.

Blood quantum, according to an article published by NPR, “What Exactly is ‘Blood Quantum’?”, refers to the amount of “Indian Blood” an individual possesses. The manner in which this is determined is through legal tribal documents issued by a tribal official or government official. The difference with lineal descendancy is when individuals acquire citizenship by proving they have ancestors previously part of indigenous groups.

While uncommon, Mills pointed out that this model has significant potential to reshape tribal communities.

“I think that that’s the future of our communities, at least in this area,” he said.

Native Americans who are enrolled with any of the 574 federally-recognized tribes in the United States have access to benefits such as free or low-cost healthcare, subsidized housing and universal basic income, which grants citizens consistent payment to support during any socioeconomic struggle. In most tribes, no such benefits are offered to lineal descendants, even when a child’s parent is an enrolled citizen.

For Mills, whose mother is an enrolled member of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, access to healthcare services has been a rocky journey, riddled with countless obstacles, financial barriers and disappointing dead-ends.

After his dad became unemployed and lost their health insurance over a year ago, Mills sheepishly explained that he hadn’t been to the dentist in over a year despite needing prescription toothpaste.

Even the primary care he once received as a student at Northwestern University was no longer accessible.

He believes that if Keweenaw Bay followed a citizenship model similar to the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, the quality of life for tribal members and their families would be much better.

“I think that it really hurts our ability to offer programs and services to people who are subject to ongoing cultural genocide that is blood quantum,” Mills said. “You keep them from actually accessing that culture and being able to be active participants in their communities.”

Even enrolled tribal members aren’t necessarily in the clear when it comes to citizenship. Such is the case with Summer Paa’ila-Herrera Jones, whose family was disenrolled from the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians in 2004.

At the time, Jones was only six years old; she said she still struggles to fully understand what led to the situation.

“I feel like I don’t have a whole grasp of the whole picture of what happened to our family or why,” Jones said. “That’s a really hard thing to grow up in. I knew the term disenrollment. But what does that mean to a six-year-old?”

Jones said that she believes that around 210 tribal members — about 25 percent of Pechanga’s membership — were disenrolled. She was one of 76 children who were impacted by the disenrollment.

“In the name of sovereignty, it happened,” she said.

Disenrollment, while uncommon, is a serious matter, as enrollment status holds power, security and privilege that an individual might not otherwise have. In the case of the Nooksack Tribe of Washington state, over 306 tribal citizens were disenrolled in 2018; 63 of these disenrolled citizens were evicted from federally-subsidized housing on tribal land.

In Jones’ case, her family was outcast socially by enrolled members of the tribe, who she said treated them poorly and discriminated against them due to their enrollment status.
“[This woman] had confronted my mom at the clinic and basically said, ‘you’re not welcome here. You’re not allowed to come here with your kids. You don’t get services here,” Jones recalled. “She [had known] me since I was born.”

After this encounter, Jones’ parents began taking her and her siblings to a health clinic on the Rincon Indian Reservation in San Diego, a 45-minute drive from the Pechanga reservation where Jones’ family lived. As an adult, Jones said that she still experiences significant anxiety and stress around making appointments for her health, even when it comes to primary care.

“To have [the disenrollment] at the forefront, when I’m literally just trying to get a teeth whitening appointment, it can be a struggle,” she said, chuckling.

“I feel like it’s still like really, I don’t know, kind of taboo or strange to talk about,” Jones said. “I do feel like my family has suffered this extra layer of trauma that is very much invisible to people in society, but also to people within the Native community.”

Source: ‘It’s cultural genocide’: Native Americans shine a light on the epidemic of disenrollment

Filed under Aboriginal Tagged with , ,

How welcoming are communities to immigrants? Researchers …

2023/04/10 Leave a comment

Useful initiative but the test will be in the degree to which it is used and how it effects change.

Ironic, to say the least, that the first indicator pertains to housing where the welcome falls flat:

How welcoming are communities across Canada to immigrants and refugees who come here seeking to build new lives? A group of researchers have designed a new tool they say can help measure this, as well as a second tool they hope will help communities identify ways of addressing the obstacles that prevent immigrants from succeeding.

The initiative is being led by Western University professor Victoria Esses, who researches immigration policy. It was launched by Pathways to Prosperity, an alliance of university, community and government partners that works to ease integration into Canadian society for immigrants and minorities.

The measuring tool consists of a list of 19 characteristics, such as housing, employment and anti-racism initiatives – all of which the researchers say are key factors in creating a welcoming community. The tool provides a set of indicators for each characteristic, to help communities measure how welcoming they are.

At a time when Canada is admitting record-high numbers of immigrants, keeping track of these things is crucial, Prof. Esses said. For new arrivals, finding affordable housing, employment, schools, social services and health care can be daunting. When immigrants don’t feel welcome in a community, they often leave.

“If we don’t know how welcoming those communities are, and if they’re not retaining newcomers, then the program bringing in that many people is going to fail,” she said.

Last year, the federal government announced it was increasing its immigration targets for the next three years. It is now aiming to admit almost 1.5 million new permanent residents to Canada by the end of 2025 in order to respond to significant labour shortages and an aging population. The boost is also intended to attract newcomers to rural communities.

Prof. Esses said the measuring tool is particularly important for small- and medium-sized communities, because they historically have not absorbed a great deal of immigrants. Now, many are working to attract and retain them.

In addition to affordable housing, employment and social services, another important thing for communities to address is anti-immigrant discrimination, Prof. Esses said.

She added that it will be important for communities to measure their progress over time, determine how well immigrants are faring and put in place new strategies and structures to address any gaps that are identified. “A really important piece of this is that some of this measurement will be a baseline,” she said.

The second tool – the one for addressing gaps – will include best practices based on evidence, she said. If a community discovers it has gaps, the kit will provide potential solutions.

“I support the government’s program of bringing in many immigrants in the next few years. I think that’s great,” Prof. Esses said. “But I think this piece of welcoming communities is crucial, and I can’t emphasize enough that those two really go hand in hand.”

Source: How welcoming are communities to immigrants? Researchers …

Toolkit Link: Welcoming Communities Toolkit

Filed under Immigration, Integration Tagged with ,

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