Internal documents reveal how much consultants shaped the National Gallery

2023/04/10 Leave a comment

While most of the attention has been on McKinsey, reminder that other organizations are involved.

Given all the management and staff upheavals, hard to see the value for money in these consulting contracts. One also has the impression that Sasha Suda, the director who launched them, was “just visiting” until she got a more important gig in the USA, leaving the mess behind:

Consulting companies had profound influence on the National Gallery of Canada’s reimagining over the past few years, with senior management relying on hired guns to help craft the new identity of the country’s premier visual arts institution, documents released through access-to-information requests reveal.

The documents paint a picture of the extent to which two consulting companies – one headquartered in Vancouver and focused on diversity and inclusion, the other a California-based change management firm – shaped the gallery’s new focus, operations and culture.

The contracts began in the spring of 2020, shortly after Sasha Suda became director of the gallery (she left last summer to run the Philadelphia Museum of Art). Under Ms. Suda’s leadership, and under current interim director Angela Cassie, the gallery embarked on a reinvention intended to make the institution, its collection and its staff more diverse and inclusive.

Management viewed this as an overdue step toward restoring the gallery’s relevance and correcting its blinkered past. Current and former staff members and donors have criticized the project as well-intentioned but poorly executed, and they have said it left the institution in disarray.

In May, 2020, the gallery signed a contract with NOBL Collective, a change management consultancy based in California, for strategic planning work, at an initial cost of $95,000. As the scope of its work expanded, NOBL would eventually bill the gallery $632,500 over two-and-a-half years, making it the single biggest line item among the museum’s outside contractors during that time.

The documents, which were obtained by researcher Ken Rubin and shared with The Globe and Mail, include an initial proposal in which NOBL wrote that the gallery was “in the midst of a sea change” that represented “a moment of uncertainty but also of rebirth.”

“You have many of the right ingredients: a dedicated team, hungry for direction and empowerment; a rich history and story; a world-class collection; a new Director willing to do what it takes,” NOBL wrote. “We would be honoured to help your team make it happen.”

The documents detail a program of one-on-one interviews with senior management and other team members, as well as surveys and strategic planning sessions focused on topics such as “Sensing, Vision and Bet Making.”

Eventually, the scope of NOBL’s work became all-encompassing. The consultancy laid out plans and timelines for defining the museum’s values and crafting its “change narrative.” It said it would create working groups and synthesize for the gallery what it heard from them; communicate with the board of trustees, department heads and team leads; align blue-sky strategic ideas with budgets and staffing; even design and help to deliver the all-staff meetings in which the new vision would be shared.

The result was a strategic plan titled Transform Together. Unveiled in 2021, it is the spine on which the museum’s new direction rests.

“The Gallery’s strategic transformation is about how we can better develop, preserve and present our collection for the learning and enjoyment of generations to come,” said Douglas Chow, the gallery’s director of communications. NOBL “did not have the expertise required” to incorporate a justice, equity, diversity and inclusion (JEDI) approach, so NOBL recommended Elevate Inclusion Strategies as a subcontractor to its own work, he said, and the two jointly helped to craft the strategic plan.

Getting some specialized help with strategic development is fine, said Richard Powers, who teaches governance at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, but it should always be an institution’s own management that does the heavy lifting.

“It appears that management has handed off all the work to the consultants: tell us what we should do,” he said of the gallery. “Any consultant will never know as much as management – that is why management must be intimately involved in the development of the strategic plan.”

In August, 2020, Ms. Suda wrote a confidential memo explaining the gallery’s reasons for embarking on this work, and why it required sole-sourced contracts rather than the usual competitive bid process. When the pandemic struck, the gallery was forced to close and most employees shifted to working remotely, she wrote, and at the same time the gallery was affected by “various social movements that catapulted the necessity of diversity and inclusion review and reconciliation with BIPOC groups.”

The unusual pandemic circumstances and the “extremely sensitive nature of the subject matter” justified an exception to the standard procurement processes, Ms. Suda concluded. The following month, she wrote a virtually identical memo laying out the need to sole-source work from Elevate, which is based in Vancouver.

One year later, in September, 2021, Ms. Cassie – then vice-president of strategic transformation and inclusion at the gallery – wrote a more detailed confidential memo explaining the reasoning for an additional sole-sourced contract with Elevate.

Elevate had conducted an assessment of the gallery’s inclusion environment, and “significant differences in the level of knowledge and understanding amongst the team” became apparent, Ms. Cassie wrote. Among the key recommendations from Elevate was that the gallery remedy this. Because Elevate staff had already built a relationship with gallery employees, Ms. Cassie wrote, the company was “well positioned to create a safe and positive environment” for the ongoing work.

Mr. Powers said this process – with Elevate conducting an assessment of the gallery, then producing a report that effectively recommended further services provided by Elevate – appears odd.

“They are in a clear conflict of interest and the National Gallery should have gone to a competitive bid to avoid the conflict or the perception of a conflict,” he said. “Elevate may be the best company to do this type of work – and a competitive bid could have come to that conclusion.”

Asked for additional context on the sole-sourced contracts, Mr. Chow replied with sections of the internal memos on that topic. He added that the board was aware of the contracts. “The Elevate team had built that trust using a trauma informed approach and had the knowledge and expertise to carry on the next phases of work without requiring employees to retell stories of their trauma and racism experienced within the workplace to new people,” he said.

The gallery subsequently signed a contract with Elevate for $352,200. That fee included a retainer of $10,000 per month from September to February, 2022, for services including the development of a “JEDI working group,” meeting with gallery leadership or other consultants as needed, attending staff meetings and assisting with the onboarding of new staff. The hourly cost and hours of work covered by the retainer are redacted in the documents, because access-to-information laws permit public bodies to withhold those details about their private contractors.

Elevate’s contract also included a coaching program described as “a deep dive for senior leadership and management who wish to develop and practice critical inclusive leadership skills,” and the development and delivery of a suite of inclusive workplace training modules.

In June, 2021, the gallery again turned to NOBL, this time for a more targeted project that hinted at tensions behind the scenes. There had been near-total turnover among the gallery’s senior leadership since Ms. Suda’s arrival.

In its proposal, NOBL wrote that the gallery had evolved a great deal over the previous year, and now, with its new team members in place, it was time to focus on “engaging in productive, courageous conversations.”

“While conflict is a necessary part of our day to day existence on a team, both emotions and assumptions take the lead when we’re not paying attention,” NOBL wrote. “You’d like the team to improve their ability to separate the people from the problem and create space for learning for all involved.”

To that end, NOBL would design and deliver a four-hour team-building workshop for the seven members of the gallery’s senior management committee, at a cost of $15,000. The topics included conflict style, giving and receiving feedback and empathy perspective.

“Even though the session will be half a day, we’d request that SMC members clear their full day calendars to allow time to process conversations and bring their full presence to the session,” NOBL wrote to the gallery. “Development experiences should feel like an opportunity to slow down and set yourself up for success.”

Source: Internal documents reveal how much consultants shaped the National Gallery

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Goal of IHRA anti-Semitism definition is to target human rights groups, says proponent

2023/04/10 Leave a comment

Of note. However the main author of the definition, Kenneth Stern, has been vocal in his opposition to its “weaponization”:

A prominent advocate of the controversial and inaccurate definition of anti-Semitism created by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) has acknowledged that one of its purposes is to target and silence human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) and others documenting Israel’s human rights abuses.

“The purpose of the IHRA working definition was to prevent the illegitimate demonization of Israel, the singling out of Israel, and the antisemitic aspects of the attacks on Israel, which is exactly what these NGOs are doing,” said a key proponent of IHRA, Professor Gerald Steinberg, the founder of pro-Israel, NGO Monitor.

Steinberg made the remark in response to 60 human and civil rights organisations who on Tuesday released a joint open letter urging the UN not to adopt the IHRA. Steinberg told the Algemeiner that the letter, which was also signed by HRW, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and B’Tselem, is an act of “political warfare against Israel”.

According to Steinberg, the NGOs are doing the very thing which the IHRA was designed to prevent. But critics have pointed out that the IHRA is not preventing anti-Jewish racism and instead has had a chilling effect on free speech and has further undermined the work of the international human rights community.

In the letter to the UN, the groups warned that if the world body endorsed the IHRA then its officials who work on issues regarding Israel and Palestine may find themselves “unjustly accused of anti-Semitism based on the IHRA definition”. A case could also be made for “numerous UN agencies, departments, committees, panels and/or conferences, whose work touches on issues related to Israel and Palestine, as well as for civil society actors and human rights defenders engaging with the UN system,” to be smeared as racist.

The targets of accusations of anti-Semitism based on the IHRA definition have included university students and professors, grassroots organisers, human rights and civil rights organisations, humanitarian groups and members of the US Congress, who either document or criticise Israeli policies and who speak in favour of Palestinian human rights.

Rights group have constantly dismissed the claim that “illegitimate demonization of Israel” and “singling out Israel”, is anti-Semitic. If that principal was accepted in a definition of racism than by that logic, a person dedicated to defending the rights of Tibetans could be accused of anti-Chinese racism, or a group dedicated to promoting democracy and minority rights in Saudi Arabia could be accused of Islamophobia.

IHRA’s qualification that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic” has not offered any protection to the constant smearing of critics of Israel. “In practice,” said HRW, “these disclaimers have failed to prevent the politically motivated instrumentalization of the IHRA definition in efforts to muzzle legitimate speech and activism by critics of Israel’s human rights record and advocates for Palestinian rights.”

Source: Goal of IHRA anti-Semitism definition is to target human rights groups, says proponent

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Quebec Muslim associations denounce government ban on prayer rooms in schools

2023/04/10 Leave a comment

Of note:

A group representing Muslim associations in Quebec wants the provincial government to rescind a directive prohibiting the presence of prayer spaces in elementary and high schools.

On Wednesday, Education Minister Bernard Drainville banned school service centres from transforming classrooms into places of prayer.

In a joint statement issued Thursday evening, representatives from several mosques with the Table de concertation des organismes musulmans (TCOM) expressed their shock and indignation at the decision.

Source: Quebec Muslim associations denounce government ban on prayer rooms in schools

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Women are poised to make up 50 per cent of federally appointed judges in Canada 

2023/04/10 Leave a comment

Of note. Numbers have also increased for other groups: visible minorities from 2.0 to 9.7 percent, Indigenous peoples from 0.8 to 3.1 percent:

Women now make up nearly 50 per cent of full-time judges on Canada’s federally appointed courts, a milestone achievement that until recently seemed a distant dream.

Of 913 full-time judges in the country, 438 are women, according to data from the Office of the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs. That amounts to 47.97 per cent, or just 19 judges short of the historic mark.

And the remaining disparity could soon be erased because more men than women are nearing retirement.

Legal observers say the milestone is deserving of celebration, but that courts have further to go to truly reflect Canada’s diversity.

Ellen Anderson, a lawyer who wrote an authorized biography of Bertha Wilson, the first woman named to the Supreme Court of Canada, said Ms. Wilson would have been happy, but not satisfied.

“I am sure she would be delighted but she would also be rooting for representation for BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and persons of colour] candidates, Indigenous candidates, gay candidates, the whole diversity of human experience,” Ms. Anderson said in an interview.

Federal data show that those groups still lag behind their numbers in the community, though they have made strides in the past few years.

It was Ms. Wilson, appointed to the Supreme Court in 1982, who gave a speech eight years later titled “Will women judges really make a difference?” The answer, says Justice Michele Hollins of the Alberta Court of King’s Bench, is yes, they have.

Justice Hollins was a single mother of two-year-old twins when she studied law in the early 1990s at the University of Saskatchewan.

“I do think it’s incredibly important to have all kinds of perspectives,” she said in an interview. “You’ve got a much better chance of having someone who will understand you.”

Her personal experience “gave me a different perspective than a lot of my classmates, and even my colleagues now, on parenting, finances, employment, education – what it really took to get through those years.”

Beverley McLachlin, who in 2000 became the first woman to serve as chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, said: “I think it’s been a huge difference.” Part of that difference was in how the public viewed the judiciary: “They saw it as approachable, as representing them to some extent, and not just a uni-gendered, monolithic-like body of middle-aged, middle-class white men.”

The authority to appoint judges is one of the least-discussed, least-transparent exercises of government power. Non-partisan committees across Canada screen applicants and create a pool of qualified candidates. But it is up to the federal cabinet to choose from that pool.

The federally appointed courts include the appeal courts of provinces, the top trial courts (which go by names such as the Court of King’s Bench, Supreme Court or Superior Court), Federal Court and the Tax Court of Canada.

Since the Liberals came to power and began appointing judges in 2016, with the stated goal of increasing the representation of women and minorities, women have received 56.48 per cent of the 370 judicial appointments, or 209 in total. During that period, women made up 47.8 per cent of the 2,511 applicants, according to data from the judicial affairs office, an agency that provides support services for the judiciary.

The figures represent a sea change from the 10 years of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, 2006 to 2015, when women made up just 30 per cent of applicants and appointments.

As recently as 2014, 63 men were appointed (including promotions of sitting judges to higher courts), compared with just 26 women. Under the Liberals, men exceeded women in appointments just once, from October, 2021 to October, 2022, by a margin of 30 to 28.

Ms. McLachlin said that when she started out as a judge in B.C. in 1981, “there was a real sense of hope in the air.” Someone sent her a bouquet of flowers from their garden (security had to check out the bouquet). Male colleagues were helpful and supportive.

“I had a wonderful career for a very long time being a judge. It was absolutely the best thing that could have happened to me.”

By contrast, Bertha Wilson found the Supreme Court of Canada a boys’ club when she joined in 1982.

Male judges lobbied one another on the golf course or in other sports arenas, from which she felt excluded. It was one reason she pushed to expand the number of intervenors in Supreme Court hearings, to broaden the court’s knowledge of the social context of the cases before them, Ms. Anderson said. (In one hearing last month, there were 29 intervenors.)

Also, there was no women’s washroom for judges at the appeal court or the Supreme Court when she joined.

Ms. Wilson told Ms. Anderson that she felt “doomed to failure,” because no one could have lived up to the expectations placed on her by her well-wishers.

“Change in the law comes slowly and incrementally. That is its nature,” Ms. Wilson told her.

Still, the difference she made was striking. In Lavallee, a 1990 case, she wrote a judgment for the court recognizing battered women’s syndrome in how self-defence is understood in Canadian law. In Morgentaler, in 1988, she was the only judge to declare that a woman has a fundamental right to choose.

Under Ms. McLachlin’s leadership as chief justice, ending late in 2017, the Supreme Court established a right to physician-assisted dying, struck down prostitution laws as heightening the dangers faced by sex workers, and restored voting rights for federal prisoners.

In Justice Hollins’s view, change on the bench has been slow, given that her law-school class three decades ago was 54 per cent women.

“On the one hand, I’m elated,” she said, referring to women nearing 50 per cent of the federal judiciary, but “it’s sometimes hard not to be discouraged by how slow progress seems to be.”

She said women still face barriers in creating top-notch applications: They are not equal at the partnership tables of law firms, or in terms of assignments, opportunities and seats on corporate boards. And those with children tend to do more of the household work.

“It’s just that much harder for women to advance in their careers at the same pace,” Justice Hollins said.

Rosemarie Davis, vice-president of the Canadian Association of Black Lawyers, said more work remains to be done.

“There are more women, yes, and that’s laudable, but what we’re looking for even within those numbers is more diversity, more women of colour and more women who identify as Black, more women who identify as Indigenous.”

Source: Women are poised to make up 50 per cent of federally appointed judges in Canada 

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Record immigration, nowhere to live. Welcome to Australia’s rent crisis

2023/04/07 Leave a comment

Sounds familiar:

For Meg Edwards, it was $30 that sealed the deal.

The 20-year-old international relations student and her two housemates were struggling to find a home in Melbourne’s hypercompetitive, inner-city rental market, having inspected close to two dozen properties over the course of a couple of months.

“It was getting pretty stressful,” Edwards tells AFR Weekend. “There’s one place where we were calling the agent every day to make it really clear that we were interested.”

The real estate agent for the three-bedroom terrace house in North Melbourne told the trio they would need to offer more than the advertised $770 price if they wanted to stand out from the other 25 applicants and have a chance of securing the property.

“So we did end up doing that, and we did end up getting it,” Edwards says, with the group offering $800 per week for the home. “Obviously, we were pretty lucky to be able to do that. But not everyone can.”

What happened to Edwards and her friends was a clear breach of Victoria’s tough rental-bidding laws, which state higher offers cannot be solicited by an agent. Unfortunately, with Australia in the grip of what experts say is a rental crisis, what happened to the group is not likely a one-off.

Advertised rents have galloped 10 per cent higher in the past 12 months, research house CoreLogic says, and that adds to the cost-of-living pressures households already grapple with, such as soaring energy bills and grocery prices.

Worse, moving to a cheaper rental isn’t an easy alternative. Finding a place to live is harder now than at any time in at least two decades, with just 1.1 per cent of the nation’s stock of rental properties available for lease.

The country’s rental market is clearly out of balance, says Brendan Coates, the Grattan Institute’s economic policy program director.

“The rule of thumb vacancy rate for a healthy rental market – one where renters can find somewhere to live that suits their preferences and budget in a reasonable time frame – is around 3 per cent,” Coates tells AFR Weekend.

The situation is even worse in smaller capital cities such as Adelaide and Perth, where fewer than 1 in every 200 rental properties were vacant in February.

But the crisis facing renters, with few vacancies and rapidly rising prices, didn’t arise overnight. It’s the inevitable consequence of what happens when high, and rising, demand collides with limited supply. That, in turn, is the result of decades of policy failure and inaction across all levels of government. It took the pandemic, with its resulting inflation outbreak and flood of immigration, to bring it to a head.

It’s a problem being felt around the world. But in this country it is happening alongside forecasts for chronic underbuilding, property prices that have increased so rapidly that an entire generation of Australians believe home ownership is out of reach, and a system that treats property as just another asset class, favouring landlords at the expense of renters.

Finding a way out of this big squeeze won’t be easy.

Immigration and the ‘race for space’

On the demand side, Coates says a shift toward living in smaller households has contributed to the extraordinary tightness in rental markets.

“In a hybrid work world, people want more space to themselves and to live in smaller households. This means for a given number of renters, we need more rentals to go around,” he tells AFR Weekend.

The average number of people living in a household fell to 2.55 in 2021 from 2.59 in 2016, analysis of census data by real estate analysts at PropTrack shows. That means 160,000 more dwellings are required to meet the housing needs of the population.

“The ‘race for space’ started during COVID-19 and had a more subdued effect because borders were closed and there were no arrivals,” Coates says. “Now that migration has come roaring back, we have both more people and each person wanting more space.”

Treasury forecasts an influx of 650,000 migrants between this financial year and the next, as the reopening of Australia’s borders prompts the return of international students, working holidaymakers and skilled migrants, who are in high demand thanks to a chronic shortage of workers.

Coates says the migration boom contributes to the dwindling availability of rentals, as migrants compete with locals to snap up a shrinking number of homes for lease. “The more people there are, the more houses we need. And we are adding people a lot faster than we are adding houses,” he says.

Centre for Independent Studies chief economist Peter Tulip says the federal government has an obligation to help fix the problem of inadequate housing supply given it is responsible for the immigration program. “Canberra needs to ensure that new migrants have somewhere to live,” the former RBA researcher tells AFR Weekend.

The migration surge is bad news for renters in Sydney and Melbourne, where property markets are expected to bear a disproportionate share of the burden of the influx, given their popularity with international students.

Compounding the problem is that the boom comes as the construction industry is scaling back its plans to build more homes, burnt by rising interest rates and soaring material costs that have pushed a raft of builders into bankruptcy.

It means Australia will fall short of its housing needs between 2023 and 2027 by 106,300 dwellings, a report released on Monday by the government-run National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation said.

The rise of NIMBYism

A major handbrake on new housing supply has been the influence of existing homeowners who object to new developments in their communities. Known as NIMBYs (Not In My Backyard), their power is derived from their sheer number.

Twice as many Australians own property than rent – about a third of households own outright, and another third are paying off a mortgage – and to much of that cohort nearby development equates to putting their lifestyle and the value of their property at risk.

As such, the path of least resistance for politicians is to accommodate the will of a homeowning class through tough planning laws that restrict medium- and higher-density construction.

Limiting what can get built and where it’s built restricts the supply of new homes, making life harder for renters and prospective first home buyers by driving up rents and house prices. The problem is most evident in wealthy areas, where demand for new housing is high but very little is being built.

Councils in Sydney’s affluent eastern suburbs and lower north shore were the city’s most anti-development local government areas, CIS’ Tulip’s research showed last month. While the research only looked at Sydney, the findings would almost certainly translate to other housing markets.

Tulip found that council areas like Woollahra, Hunters Hill and Mosman built almost no new homes over the past few years. Between 2016 and 2021, Woollahra council built just 61 homes a year, while Hunters Hill – the smallest council area in Sydney – gained 12 homes annually on average and Mosman built 33 homes a year. The figures equate to tepid 0.2 per cent annual growth in the dwelling stock in each of the three harbourside locales.

Tulip found that most building took place in Sydney’s western suburbs, even though demand for housing was highest in the city’s inner and eastern suburbs.

While some planners argue that NIMBYs are not important since technical panels – not residents – make planning decisions, Tulip says it’s more complex. “The panels are guided by parameters set by politicians. And the politicians set restrictive parameters because they perceive their voters would object to new housing,” he says. “So the implication of this claim that public opinion is not driving planning decisions is false.”

Concerns about higher density developments harming neighbourhood character, which drives opposition to new homes from residents, are misplaced, Tulip says.

“There are lots of stories of people who opposed developments before they were built who then change their mind after seeing the final outcome,” he adds. “In particular, they like the new shops, restaurants and transport services that accompany higher density.”

In Sydney suburbs dominated by high-rise, such as Chatswood, Green Square and Liverpool, Tulip says house prices didn’t fall when development increased, in a sign that the lift in density had no effect on amenity. “I suspect that NIMBY opposition is just fear of the unknown,” Tulip says.

No silver bullet

Because the problem with the housing market stems in part from government policy, relief for renters can only come from government intervention. In the short-term Coates says the immediate priority for the federal government should be to increase rent assistance, which is a supplementary payment made to people on welfare who are also renting.

“Rent assistance works,” Coates says. “In 2021, it reduced housing stress levels for recipients nationwide from 72 per cent to 46 per cent.

“But the maximum rate of rent assistance hasn’t kept pace with the rising rents paid by low-income renters.”

For a single, the maximum fortnightly payment is $157.20, or just $79 per week, and research by economists at AHURI found that over one-third of recipients were still in rental stress after the payment was considered.

Rent assistance was already too low, even before the latest rental squeeze, says Australian National University associate professor Ben Phillips.

“Over the longer term we know that low-income renters are increasingly struggling and for that rent assistance is one part of the answer while the other part is some rebuilding of public housing and encouraging other forms of social housing and rental investment in lower cost housing options,” Phillips says.

A 40 per cent increase in rent assistance would cost the federal government about $2 billion, the Grattan Institute says, but it would go straight towards easing the cost of living for those struggling the most in the private rental market.

One way to pay for the increase would be to make the payment better targeted, with the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute estimating that 419,000 renters on moderate incomes receive rent assistance, while some renters on low income are missing out.

In a report last year, the Productivity Commission said an increase in rent assistance should be a priority, citing the fact the value of the payment had declined over time relative to rents, while urging the federal government to make the support better targeted.

Coates says there is also a case for state governments to lift the rate of land tax applying to short-stay accommodation platforms like Airbnb to encourage owners to return the properties to the rental market.

“That would come with a cost because fewer Airbnb would mean less regional tourism, and therefore fewer regional jobs. But it would be better than seeing families in regional Australia living in caravan parks, tents and cars.”

He also says state governments should consider expanding “hard leasing”, where the public sector takes out a lease on private rentals and sublets them to vulnerable people. Coates says governments should also buy existing homes and turn them into social housing.

ANU’s Phillips says purchasing existing dwellings would be an easy way for the government to increase the stock of public housing. “This has the advantage of being more timely but also removes the issue of public housing concentrating disadvantage in one small area.”

Build more homes

In the long run, most experts say the only solution is to relax planning laws and build more homes.

“This is the recommendation of a succession of official reports into housing affordability,” Tulip says, referring to reports by the Productivity Commission and former RBA governor Glenn Stevens. “Those reports, in turn, summarise a mountain of academic research from Australia and overseas.“

Tulip says governments need to set and enforce high housing targets for local councils, while also funding infrastructure that would allay concerns about overcrowding. “This preserves local control over the type and precise location of new construction, without letting local residents restrict the supply, as they otherwise would.”

Coates says the focus needs to be on building both government-owned social housing and market rate homes.

Grattan Institute research found the stock of government-subsidised social housing, which stands at 430,000 dwellings, had barely increased in 20 years even though the population had increased by more than a third.

“The Senate should pass the Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF) bill so we have a healthy stream of funding to help grow our social housing stock in line with population growth, and the fund should be increased from $10 billion to $20 billion,” Coates says.

The HAFF is one of the Albanese government’s two signature housing initiatives, but it lacks Senate support, with the Greens and Independent Senator David Pocock saying it doesn’t go anywhere near far enough given the scale of the problem.

And Tulip says the $10 billion initiative, designed to fund 6000 social and affordable homes per year, is close to useless. “Thirty-thousand new subsidised dwellings over five years is not much more than a rounding error in a housing market with hundreds of thousands of new households each year,” he says.

Labor’s other major policy – an accord with the states to build 1 million homes over five years – has also been criticised for a lack of ambition and insufficient detail. But despite questions over how it will operate, Coates says the accord has the potential to be a game changer.

“But that will only happen if the Albanese government puts enough money on the table to push state and territory governments to ease land-use planning rules, to enable more housing, including more high-density housing, to be built.”

Tough times

The bad news for renters is that the situation will probably get worse before it gets better. An increasing population, a subdued construction pipeline and inaction by federal and state governments means people who don’t own their own home should brace for more rent rises.

Together with already-high property prices and the likelihood that higher mortgage rates will make it even tougher for new buyers to get into the market, the rental crisis is just a part of a longer-term problem.

Australia’s housing economy, and broader social compact, is based around people owning their home by the time they retire. For many who don’t, paying ever-rising rents with modest super and pensions will be unaffordable.

While Tulip concedes it will be politically difficult to relax planning laws and build more homes, he says there is no alternative.

“It will be difficult to get meaningful improvements in affordability until we see a change in social values,” he says. “As a society, we need to show more concern for renters and future homebuyers and less concern for wealthy busybodies.”

Edwards, who is still settling into her North Melbourne home, says enforcing existing rules around rental bidding would make the market fairer.

“[Bidding] just completely rules some people out, which is just not fair. Because some people can offer more money doesn’t really mean that they’re going to be a better tenant.”

While she only signed a one-year lease, Edwards wouldn’t mind staying longer. But under the rules of Australia’s rental market, the decision won’t be entirely her own.

Source: Record immigration, nowhere to live. Welcome to Australia’s rent crisis

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Exclusive: New Data Shows the Anti-Critical Race Theory Movement Is ‘Far From Over’

2023/04/07 Leave a comment

Of note:

It’s been more than two years since President Joe Biden revoked Donald Trump’s Sept. 2020 executive order aimed at banning the teaching of “divisive concepts” in federal offices’ diversity training—a response to the increase in anti-racism sessions in workplaces and schools in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. But Biden’s decision galvanized conservatives, who successfully pushed to replicate the ban in state laws and school board measuresand wage an all-out war against “critical race theory”(CRT), which looks at the way legal systems and other aspects of society perpetuate racism and exclusion.

Now, for the first time, a University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) study provides a snapshot of the effort to regulate how race is discussed in the U.S. by putting a number on these acts at the federal, state, and local level, and quantifying their impact.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

In the report “Tracking the Attack on Critical Race Theory,” provided exclusively to TIME, a team at the law school tracked legislation, executive orders, state attorney general letters, and statements by governors and local school board officials, and found that between Jan. 1, 2021 and Dec. 31, 2022, federal, state, and local government officials introduced 563 anti-CRT measures. Nearly half—241—were enacted or adopted.

“The anti-CRT movement is very far from over,” says LaToya Baldwin Clark, one of the authors of the report and an assistant professor at UCLA School of Law. “It’s going strong, and it’s not slowing down.”

Twenty-eight states took some kind of statewide anti-CRT action—whether it was a letter from the state attorney general or a resolution, for example—and 16 of those states enacted anti-CRT legislation. In every state except Delaware, at least one anti-CRT measure was introduced.

The researchers found trends among red states (states that voted for the Republican presidential candidate in the last two elections) versus blue states (states that voted for the Democratic candidate). In blue states, anti-CRT measures are more likely to occur at the local level, including through school boards, while in red states, the efforts are more likely to be at the state level. Wyoming is the only red state that has not enacted a statewide anti-CRT measure.

The political divide is sure to become more pronounced as the 2024 presidential race heats up: presumed GOP candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to ban discussion of critical race theory not only at the K-12 level but also at public colleges and universities, and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who has announced a run for President, has called CRT “un-American.”

Researchers found the activity was roughly consistent year over year in the first two years of Biden’s Administration: In 2021, 280 anti-CRT measures were introduced, and in 2022, 283 were introduced.

Forty-one percent of the 563 measures borrow a line from Trump’s executive order that defines a “divisive concept” as a teaching that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.”

Most of the measures focus on regulating classroom teaching and curricular materials in K-12 schools and colleges and universities. The researchers calculated that the adopted anti-CRT measures affect more than 22 million American public school children— almost half of the public school children in the entire country. Yet actual critical race theory, which originated in law school, is rarely taught below the graduate level. Other measures most likely to be adopted were ones that targeted the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which reframed America’s origin story around the legacy of slavery.

The fervor also extends beyond classroom discussions of race. In political discourse, CRT has become an umbrella term for teaching anything progressive, such as issues of LGBTQ identity. The same political activists fighting anti-racism training in schools and workplaces have been working to ban books they think are too explicit, like works by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, and call the new Advanced Placement African American Studies class “indoctrination,” as DeSantis put it.

In 2023, the movement against CRT continues. Three months in, UCLA researchers have tracked at least 50 new anti-CRT bills, and they expect to see a lot more activity through the 2024 presidential election cycle.

Source: Exclusive: New Data Shows the Anti-Critical Race Theory Movement Is ‘Far From Over’

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Ottawa can’t keep up with the fallout from explosion of international sanctions

2023/04/07 Leave a comment

Always about delivery and implementation…

They never thought that a dental chair would constitute military hardware.

But Canadian manufacturers of medical supplies have found themselves fighting to win exemptions from a federal sanction that bans selling Russia anything used in the “manufacture of weapons.”

The measure covers not just tank parts and drones but an array of health-care products, veterinary equipment and even barber chairs — items “not traditionally referred to as weapons,” notes William Pellerin, the lawyer representing the companies.

His clients’ appeal is just one battle being waged behind the scenes of the sweeping set of sanctions Canada has imposed on Russia and Belarus over Moscow’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine a year ago.

Complaints have come from Canadians whose money transfers from Russia have been frozen, oligarchs insisting they were listed by mistake, companies unsure if they should deal with a Russia-linked partner and humanitarian groups barred from entering occupied Ukrainian territory.

The sanctions were imposed in response to a Russian military campaign that has laid waste to countless Ukrainian towns and cities, killed thousands of civilians and led to war-crimes charges against President Vladimir Putin himself.

But as the number of sanctions imposed by this country grows “exponentially,” lawyers say the government is ill-prepared to handle the complex fall-out, leading to a backlog at Global Affairs Canada of hundreds of official requests for exemptions and de-listing.

Unlike other countries, the government provides little direction on how to comply with the sanctions and has issued few general exclusions for those who might be needlessly caught in the cross-fire, they say.

“There is a very strong interest on the part of government to be moving quickly,” says Ottawa lawyer John Boscariol. “(But) when there’s not a lot of thought or consultation put into these measures, inevitably you’re going to side-swipe parties that should not really be targets … We haven’t been properly managing the collateral damage.”

The problems extend beyond the impact on those affected by sanctions, some critics charge.

Even as Canada wins kudos as a world leader in wielding the weapon, there’s no requirement to gauge how well sanctions work in changing behaviour, argues an academic expert in the area.

“At no time does Global Affairs have to go through and say ‘Hmm, these names have been on the book for a year, maybe we should look and see if they should still be there, if they’re having an effect,’ ” says Andrea Charron, a University of Manitoba international relations professor. “It’s fire and forget … We don’t measure effectiveness.”

But Global Affairs spokesman Grantly Franklin defended the sanctions regime as “hard-hitting,” yet judicious.

He said the government is already addressing the mounting workload, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announcing last October an extra $76 million to bolster the sanctions infrastructure. Part of that money will be used to expand the department’s team dealing with the issue, said Franklin.

He declined to answer questions about how many applications Global Affairs has received for exemption permits or for the de-listing of certain sanctions, but stressed the goal of the measures is to put pressure on foreign actors, not Canadians.

“Canadians or individuals in Canada whose money has been frozen … may apply for a permit,” said Franklin by email. “We have a rigorous due diligence process in place to evaluate permit applications, and each application is assessed on a case-by-case basis.”

Sanctions have always been a periodic weapon of Canada’s foreign policy, though often in conjunction with other members of the United Nations. But use of the tool began to proliferate under the previous Conservative government, when former prime minister Stephen Harper targeted Iran and North Korea, then Russia after its initial move into eastern Ukraine and occupation of Crimea.

The trend has picked up pace since then, with Russia the main focus but Canadian sanctions have also been placed on people or entities in China, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Syria, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Libya, South Sudan, Haiti and Saudi Arabia.

“I’ve been practising in this area since I became a lawyer in the 1990s and … it’s just been growing exponentially,” says Boscariol.

“The use of sanctions by the government of Canada has exploded since the further invasion of Ukraine by Russia,” echoed Pellerin, a partner in the McMillan law firm.

Both lawyers said their clients challenging application of the sanctions declined to be interviewed or named for this story.

As the number of sanctions has grown, so too has their complexity. Many of those aimed at Moscow don’t single out specific companies or individuals, for instance, but bar Canadians — even those living abroad — from providing supplies and services to particular industries, such as the oil and gas and technology sectors.

And though the sanctions may sound straightforward when announced, implementing them in the real world can be messy, the lawyers say.

Part of their work involves applying for those “permits” that exempt individuals or companies from one of the measures. Many of the applications are from Canadian residents who were expecting money to be transferred from relatives or others in Russia, only for the funds to be frozen because the originating bank was sanctioned.

There are Canadians who worked for multinational companies and were laid off because Ottawa’s sanctions won’t let them service Russian clients, and Canadian corporations struggling to figure out whether to do business with a certain firm, the lawyers say.

“A big part of the problem is that there are Russian oligarchs hiding under every rock,” said Pellerin. “It’s rare that a week goes by that we don’t encounter a Russian oligarch behind a company (clients) we’re dealing with.”

The challenge is determining if the sanctioned person’s stake in a particular firm that is based, say, in Dubai, makes that firm a no-go zone, he said.

Other countries have concrete guidelines, with the U.S. specifying that the sanctioned individual must own at least 50 per cent of an asset for the sanctions to apply to it. Canada has no such definition, leaving it up to companies to decide or apply for a permit, said Pellerin.

The U.S. actually has a Treasury Department unit — the Office of Financial Asset Control — that proactively embeds itself in banks and other firms to coach them on how to identify links they might have with sanctioned entities, says Charron. The U.K. and the European Union provide detailed instruction on how the measures apply. Not so Canada, she said, either under Harper or the current Liberal government..

“It’s not Global Affairs that enforces sanctions,” said Charron. “It’s basically you and I and real estate agents and banks. And they get no guidance.”

There are challenges, too, for humanitarian organizations. Those without a formal link to the Red Cross/Red Crescent, the U.N. or the federal government are barred by sanctions from working in places like Russian-occupied Ukraine or Syria. The U.S. and other nations, by comparison, have issued “general licences” to such groups to let them provide aid in those areas, said Boscariol, of the firm McCarthy Tétrault.

Perhaps more contentious are those individuals and entities who claim they have been sanctioned wrongly, based on faulty information or even a misspelled name. Boscariol said he’s been successful in the past getting clients de-listed.

Most of the Russians sanctioned by Canada probably don’t have assets here, but what Ottawa does still matters to them, he said. Different countries sometimes replicate Canada’s measures, while some international banks will not deal with potential clients that have been listed here, even if no other country sanctioned them, said Boscariol.

Pellerin said his firm has decided not to work for sanctioned Russian people or Russian companies, choosing to take a “public stance” against the Putin regime. Even so, he said he frequently is approached by oligarchs seeking his services.

The lawyers helping clients navigate the sanctions acknowledge that it made sense for Canada to act swiftly to impose penalties on Russia. But they say Global Affairs has invested far too few resources into managing the measures, even as its lack of guidance leads to more applications for exemptions and de-listing.

The new funding announced last fall has yet to have any apparent impact, they say.

Pellerin said he’s applied for an exemption permit for his medical-supplies clients, but has yet to receive a decision. (He acknowledges that the sanction may be aimed at goods that could be used by Russian armed forces, not just to make weapons.) The lawyer said he’s had answers quickly in some cases, and waited a year in others.

“The sanctions team at Global Affairs Canada work incredibly hard … in a very stressful and demanding environment,” said Pellerin. But “they’ve not been able to keep up with the large demands that have resulted from the government’s decision to massively increase the use of sanctions.”

Source: Ottawa can’t keep up with the fallout from explosion of international sanctions

Filed under foreign policy Tagged with , ,

Once-popular rural Quebec road for asylum seekers quiets down after U.S.-Canada deal

2023/04/07 Leave a comment

As expected:

About 12 hours after the closure of a rural southern Quebec road used by thousands of asylum seekers to enter Canada from the United States, Evelyne Bouchard witnessed RCMP agents escort a family of four people off her property.

Bouchard, whose farm is located about two kilometres from the forested pathway known as Roxham Road, says she is used to seeing police around her home; at times, she has found clothing and unknown footprints in the snow on her Hemmingford, Que., property.

In a recent interview, she said it was upsetting to see people being taken away so soon after the Canada-United States immigration deal closed Roxham Road to most would-be refugees.

“It’s that contrast,” she said. “This is like my happy place — my home. I love this place, and to think that someone in that same kind of physical space is feeling afraid and vulnerable and is possibly in danger is just completely heartbreaking.”

Officials say the massive wave of would-be refugees crossing into Canada has slowed significantly since the end of March, when the government negotiated a deal with the United States to turn away asylum seekers at unofficial border crossings like Roxham Road, closing a long-standing loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement.

That agreement assumes that Canada and the U.S. are “safe” countries for would-be refugees. It also forces asylum seekers to apply for refugee status in the first country they enter — Canada or the U.S. — and prohibits them from crossing the border to file a claim.

Estelle Muzzi, mayor of border community St-Bernard-de-Lacolle, said residents who live near Roxham Road have reported a decrease in foot traffic in the area since the treaty was expanded.

“The message is getting through because I’m told that it’s gone down dramatically — there’s a big drop in traffic,” Muzzi said in a recent interview.

“I think that for the citizens of St-Bernard-de-Lacolle who were very affected by the situation, those who live right next to the border, for them, the most important thing was to find some peace and quiet,” Muzzi said.

Frances Ravensbergen, an activist with Bridges Not Borders, a refugee advocacy group in Hemmingford, said local volunteers have also reported a decline in the number of people arriving to cross through Roxham Road.

“The few people that we have seen crossing either don’t seem to be completely aware of the new regulations … and not realizing that if you’re handed back to the Americans, you may never apply for asylum again in Canada,” Ravensbergen said in an interview.

But despite the drop in people arriving at Roxham Road, Ravensbergen said she thinks scenes like the RCMP arrest on Bouchard’s property will be replicated across the country. Now that asylum seekers are blocked from using that road, they will likely try to enter Canada through other spots along the 9,000-kilometre border that separates the two countries, she said.

Border officials are also reporting a drop in the number of migrants trying to cross the border between official ports of entry. The Canada Border Services Agency said that from March 25 to April 2, it recorded 191 cases of people crossing irregularly. Out of that total, 144 claimants were returned to the U.S. in accordance with the expanded agreement; 54 were deemed eligible to make an asylum claim in Canada.

Before the new treaty went into effect, the government reported that since December of 2022, about 4,500 people were crossing through Roxham Road every month.

Now, the CBSA said that when RCMP agents or local police intercept would-be refugees trying to cross at irregular checkpoints, they take them to a designated — and official — port of entry. There, border officials determine whether or not their claim is eligible.

An asylum seeker is permitted to cross an irregular checkpoint under four circumstances: they have family members living legally in Canada; they are an accompanied minor; they have legal documents such as a Canadian visa or valid work permit; or their application for refugee status is considered in the “public interest.”

“If an individual does not meet an (agreement) exception or is otherwise determined inadmissible, they will be removed to the U.S. If the refugee claim is eligible, the person’s file will be referred to the Immigration and Refugee Board for consideration, and the person will be authorized to enter Canada to pursue their claim for protection,” Maria Ladouceur, a spokesperson for the agency, said by email.

Viviane Albuquerque, a Canadian and U.S. immigration lawyer based in Montreal, explained that once an asylum seeker has crossed Roxham Road to Canada and is deemed ineligible to claim asylum, it becomes almost impossible for the individual to seek asylum in Canada ever again.

“Once there is a determination based on your status — a refused refugee claim — it is very difficult to apply for refugee status again unless (the asylum seeker) tries to appeal the decision in court,” Albuquerque said in an interview.

Bouchard said she was hoping for a long time that Canada and the U.S. would renegotiate the Safe Third Country Agreement — to make it easier for migrants to file asylum claims in either country.

“It was just such a gut punch that it went in exactly the opposite direction to what we’d hoped, making it more dangerous and more difficult and driving people into the woods, where they’re more likely to be in danger.”

Source: Once-popular rural Quebec road for asylum seekers quiets down after U.S.-Canada deal

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The Kuwaiti Bidoon: neither nationals nor foreigners

2023/04/07 Leave a comment

Of interest:

At the wheel of his car, Hakim, wearing a blue djellaba, drives through the town of al-Ahmadi, built by and for the workers of the Kuwait National Petroleum Company. “There are two types of Bidoon in Kuwait,” he explains. “Those who worked in the oil industry and those who were in the army or the police.” This leading activist of the Bidoon cause in Kuwait adds: “Until 1990, the Bidoon enjoyed the same rights as all Kuwaiti citizens and took part in this country’s construction. In the 1960s and 1970s, over 80 per cent of the armed forces were Bidoon.”

The Bidoon – Arabic for ‘without’, implying ‘without nationality’ – are a stateless Arab minority in Kuwait. They should not be confused with the Bedouin, who are nomads living in the desert, although many Bidoon are descendants of nomadic tribes from the Arabian Peninsula. Most Bidoon are now categorised by the Kuwaiti authorities as ‘illegal residents’, despite having no links to other countries.

The Bidoon Committee, the central authority for dealing with the status of illegal residents, established in 2010, is a public institution intended to resolve nationality issues by granting citizenship to those entitled to it. Very few Bidoon have, however, been able to benefit from this process, as the committee regularly claims, without foundation, that they belong to another nationality. The authorities’ approach to them became harsher after the Iraqi occupation, from 1990 to 1991, suspecting them of having “collaborated with the enemy”.

Nawaf, aged 37, works as a taxi driver. He shows the documents of his uncle who obtained Kuwaiti citizenship in 1973, but since his father did not have citizenship, he cannot have it.

They are faced with a range of pressures to reveal their supposed ‘real nationality’. They are attributed nationalities based on their physical traits: “You look like an Iraqi,” they have been told, for example. Although some of them have been able to obtain identity documents, with the reference “non-Kuwaiti”, since 2011, and the first demonstrations to defend their rights, it has become almost impossible for them to renew them.

Hussain works in an automobile garage. In 2009, corrupt officials suggested he should buy a fake EU passport, which he went to collect from the public authorities.

According to some Bidoon, they are offered fake passports to push them into exile. In 2009, after being arrested during a traffic inspection, Hussain found himself in front of an Egyptian* official, in a Bidoon Committee office. The official presented him with a card with the contact details of a person from whom he could buy a fake passport. After meeting this person, Hussain decided to buy a fake Danish passport, “because it was the cheapest”, he says. As agreed with the Egyptian agent, he went to his office to hand in his new fake passport. A few days later, he went to pick up his fake passport from the public authorities.

Abdul Razaq, aged 73, shares memories of his time in the Kuwaiti police force, where he worked for over 10 years until the Iraqi invasion in 1990. Now, the authorities are refusing to give him nationality and a retirement pension.

They are also now excluded from the army, the public administration and the civil service. When they are not directly harassed by the authorities, who tell them to close their businesses or have their goods confiscated, the Bidoon are discriminated against in the labour market.

“I have been working for 12 years in the mail service of a public body, I am not entitled to paid holidays and I used to be paid €750. Last year, they decided to reduce my salary to €600,” says Bender, another Bidoon. He adds, by way of example, that the basic salary “of a teacher, even a foreigner, is €3900, whereas for a Bidoon it is €1350”.

A view of the Mutla desert in the Jahra region, where the Bidoon lived before the country’s independence. Today, the majority of them live in the surrounding towns, but continue to come here to relax with friends.

Their number is a sensitive issue. For many years, the authorities have been claiming that there are about 100,000 of them in Kuwait, which is clearly a huge underestimate. Hakim explains that confidential documents leaked on social media in 2016, on the government’s public policies for the Bidoon, refer to a figure of around 400,000 out of a national population of just under three million.

In the town of Taima, some 20 kilometres from the capital, Kuwait City, a road separates two worlds: on the left, comfortable housing reserved for Kuwaiti families, often granted by the government, while on the right, low breeze block houses, corrugated iron extensions and poor roads is the lot of the Bidoon.

The town of Taima is divided into several blocks, where the Bidoon came to settle in the 1970s, at the request of the state. They were built to bring an end to the traditional settlements, the ashish , where the Bidoon used to live. They were supposed to be temporary and the families were to be rehoused. But, 50 years on, they have never been given the opportunity to move elsewhere.

From Block 2 in Taima, residents have a direct view of one of the largest hospitals in the Persian Gulf, but the Bidoon, for lack of identity documents, only have access to basic treatment.

A few metres from these houses is a public school, in which stateless children cannot enrol. The majority of the Bidoon population is deprived of access to free education and health care. Those who can afford it pay for their children to go to private schools. They are also often denied marriage and birth certificates.

Quelques avancées ont eu lieu, ces dernières années, grâce à l’engagement de plusieurs associations bidounes. Depuis 2014, une centaine de Bidoun ont eu la possibilité de rentrer à l’université publique chaque année, sous réserve de bons résultats scolaires, même si certains secteurs comme la médecine leur restent interdits. « Je veux juste ma liberté de mouvement », explique le jeune Hassan, assis dans sa tente où il loue des chevaux. Du haut de ses 20 ans, il est malfré tout fier de son pays et de toutes ses infrastructures, « je veux juste pouvoir voyager avec mes amis ». Some progress has been made in recent years, thanks to the work of several Bidoon associations. Since 2014, around 100 Bidoon have been given the opportunity to enter public universities each year, subject to good school grades, although some areas of study such as medicine remain off-limits to them. “I just want freedom of movement,” says young Hassan, sitting in his tent from where he rents out horses. The 20-year-old is proud of his country and all its infrastructure, and says, “I just want to be able to travel with my friends.”

Source: The Kuwaiti Bidoon: neither nationals nor foreigners

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Worker shortage? Canada’s supply of labour is actually robust

2023/04/06 Leave a comment

Undercuts the case made by business organizations, governments and advocates for current immigration increases and greater flexibility for temporary workers and students:

For many years, the corporate sector in Canada has pointed to labour shortages as a persistent challenge – one that’s getting worse as the country ages and baby boomers head into retirement.

In the Bank of Canada’s latest Business Outlook Survey, published Monday, companies indicated that labour shortages were their second-most pressing concern, behind cost pressures. Small-business owners consistently say that a lack of skilled and unskilled workers is the biggest impediment to increasing sales, according to surveys from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.

But these responses can obscure a simple fact: The supply of workers in Canada is growing quickly, and among some groups, participation in the labour market has never been higher.

As of February, that participation rate – the proportion of the population 15 or older that is working or looking for a job – was 65.7 per cent. That’s the same as in April, 2018.

To be sure, it has drifted lower from its peak levels of almost 68 per cent in the 2000s as Canada has aged.

Still, that clouds some milestones. The participation rate for Canadians 15 to 64 – what is often called the working-age population – has jumped to record levels, above 80 per cent, in recent months. In raw terms, the sum of labour market participants has surpassed 21 million, a first for the economy.

And with the unemployment rate just shy of an all-time low, it’s generally been a fruitful period for job seekers.

“Across the board – across basically all demographic groups – participation is at record highs or near record highs,” said Andrew Fields, a senior analyst at Statistics Canada.

The macroeconomic environment is certainly a draw for potential workers. Over the past three months, Canada has enjoyed a net gain of 241,000 jobs, despite higher interest rates meant to slow the economy. The Bank of Canada’s survey of consumers, also published Monday, showed that households think a recession is the most likely scenario over the next year. Even so, people are feeling upbeat about the labour market“Despite uncertainty about the economy, workers view the job market as strong. Respondents, particularly those not satisfied with their current job, are confident they can find new work,” the central bank’s report said.

Over the long term, immigration has been the main driver of population growth and, in turn, new workers. In a 2022 report, Statscan said immigrants accounted for 84 per cent of labour force growth in the 2010s.

The demographic profile of those newcomers is also helpful. According to the 2021 census, about three-quarters of immigrants who have been in Canada for 10 or fewer years were between the ages of 25 and 54 – prime years for working. Among people born in Canada, the proportion in that age bracket was 46 per cent.

This wave of newcomers is part of a deliberate plan to increase the supply of workers. The federal government is ramping up its intake of permanent residents to 500,000 annually by 2025, more than 60 per cent of whom will migrate through economic programs.

Lately, however, it’s not been solely a story of immigration. The employment rate of mothers (aged 25 to 54) with a youngest child under 6 was 76.6 per cent in January – a jump of almost four percentage points in a year.

Statscan said women with young children “are typically less likely to be employed, and these increases can reflect a tight labour market as well as a range of factors, such as the need to meet household financial requirements or changing access to childcare.”

The national child-care plan, which the federal government announced in 2021, is already delivering cost savings to parents with children in regulated daycare. Ottawa is betting that more access to affordable child care will boost female labour participation, much as it has in Quebec, which started a low-fee program in 1997.

Martha Friendly, the executive director of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit, said staff retention will be critical to creating more child-care spaces, given that industry wages can be meagre.

“It is absolutely clear that you can’t expand the supply of child care unless you actually address the work force issues. Because the people are the program,” she said.

Another theory to explain rising labour participation is that cost-of-living concerns are pushing more people to look for jobs. “If you have rising prices, some people are more likely to work,” Mr. Fields said.

Brendon Bernard, senior economist at hiring site Indeed Canada, stressed that while workers are broadly available, hiring could still be a challenge for some firms.

The situation is also a matter of perspective: Companies say there aren’t enough workers – but they’re also recruiting far more people than usual. At times last year, there were more than one million job vacancies, roughly double the number before the pandemic.

There are recent signs that the labour market is slackening. Job vacancies have tumbled about 24 per cent since last spring, although they are still elevated by historical standards. And in the Bank of Canada’s business survey, respondents said labour shortages were less intense than a year ago and it was easier to hire the workers they needed.

Despite the threat of a recession, companies have yet to implement widespread layoffs that would push up the unemployment rate, as many economists have predicted.

“Businesses are potentially waiting till the last minute, or waiting until they’re fully certain that the situation is going south, to actually start laying off workers in large numbers,” Mr. Bernard said.

“We haven’t hit that turning point.”

Source: Worker shortage? Canada’s supply of labour is actually robust

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

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