As Canada stays mum, which Commonwealth countries will put the King on their money?

2023/05/04 Leave a comment

Relatively easy change to make, no constitutional issues but likely some will object:

Countries around the world whose currencies pay tribute to the late Queen Elizabeth II now have a new monarch — and a decision to make about whether the King has a place on their money.

Since the queen’s death in September, Canada has stayed mum on whether or not it intends to put the King’s likeness on its coins and bills.

But other members of the Commonwealth have moved more quickly towards enshrining his visage on their cash — or instead moving away from any kind of royal tribute.

Unsurprisingly, the United Kingdom was the first country to move forward with new banknotes that will feature King Charles, unveiling the designs in December.

The Bank of England says the new banknotes will come into circulation in mid-2024.

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand also said after the queen’s death that it would be preparing to change out the image it uses on coins for one approved by the new King. It said the transition would take several years.

Australia went in the other direction, deciding not to place King Charles on its new five-dollar bill. Its central bank announced in February that the country was opting for an Indigenous design instead.

But the King is still expected to appear on Australian coins that currently bear the image of Queen Elizabeth.

The decision to include the portrait of King Charles on banknotes and coins is largely symbolic.

But even symbolic details can reflect the relationship between a country and the monarchy, as well as the level of public support for the institution.

“Different countries are going to approach it differently, depending on the level of attachment to the monarchy and the strength of the republican movement in each country,” said Jonathan Malloy, a political science professor at Carleton University, referring to campaigns that seek to separate countries from their relationships with the Crown.

In the Caribbean, many countries have been contending with conversations on what role the monarchy should play. Barbados, for example, ditched the British monarch as its head of state in 2021.

Other Caribbean nations that still belong to the Commonwealth have said little about whether King Charles will be depicted on their banknotes and coins.

However, the Antigua Observer reported earlier this year that the governor of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank, Timothy NJ Antoine, said there may be “no appetite” for that.

In Canada, the federal government has not disclosed whether it plans to move ahead with placing the monarch on Canadian currency, appearing to avoid the conversation altogether.

The Finance Department would only say that “additional details will be forthcoming.”

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s office did not respond to questions on the matter in time for publication.

Malloy said that’s not surprising, noting there appears to be a partisan divide when it comes to the monarchy’s role in the country.

He said the Liberal government may be hesitant to discuss the future of Canadian currency and the monarch because its overall stance on the monarchy has been murky. Meanwhile, the Conservatives have traditionally stood more boldly with the Royal Family.

“I don’t think Prime Minister Trudeau wants to get rid of the monarchy, but he also doesn’t want to call attention to it,” he said.

“Whereas the Conservatives, I’m sure, would put (King) Charles on the money.”

The Royal Canadian Mint and Bank of Canada are waiting for the federal government to make a decision regarding the future of coins and banknotes.

“As always, the minister of finance is responsible for approving the form and material of any new banknote, including the portrait subject, in accordance with the Bank of Canada Act,” Bank of Canada spokeswoman Amélie Ferron-Craig said in an email.

“As such, it would be up to the government to announce if the King’s portrait is going to appear on any banknote.”

According to the Royal Canadian Mint, Canada has included a likeness of the reigning monarch on its coins since it started production in 1908.

Source: As Canada stays mum, which Commonwealth countries will put the King on their money?

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The Line Is Blurring Between Remote Workers and Tourists

2023/05/03 Leave a comment

Interesting implications for governments:

For years, cities, states and regions have been competing to lure corporate headquarters and offices, an arms race of ever-higher tax breaks and infrastructure projects cobbled together to benefit corporate executives and their shareholders. The spectacle of hundreds of American communities bidding against each other for Amazon’s now-paused HQ2 was both the pinnacle and nadir of this genre. But the remote revolution is upending this traditional model of economic development. The last two years of pandemic have accelerated previous trends, shining a spotlight on an alternative to the corporate sweepstakes, one in which cities chase the workers themselves. 

With many Americans newly willing to relocate and remote work vastly expanding the playing field of potential locations, smaller cities and regions need to be ready to capture their share of this windfall of migratory talent. While some of tomorrow’s destinations patiently wait for their turn in the sun, others have resorted to gimmicks — such as a $10,000 bonus, or $10,000 and a mountain bicycle, or $10,000 in Bitcoin — with less-than-stellar results.More fromBloomberg Citylab

Even the original and most successful of these programs, Tulsa Remote, has settled only 2,000 new arrivals since 2018, or roughly 0.2% of metro Tulsa’s population. That shouldn’t be surprising; these are relatively small-budget affairs. Many of these pandemic-era programs launched by cities ranging from Savannah to Helsinki used little more than mothballed travel budgets to seed their fledgling efforts. And even more mature efforts such as those in Tulsa or Northwest Arkansas (Bentonville and Fayetteville) still rely on philanthropic rather than public funding. Approaches such as these are forward-thinking but not scalable. 

Simultaneously, and in parallel, tourism departments are struggling to respond to a changing world of tourism. While tourism agencies’ historic target audience has been three-day weekend visitors, remote work and the rise of digital nomadsmeans that stays are increasingly in the 30-day range. According to Deloitte’s 2023 Travel Outlook, travelers willing to bring work with them take twice as many trips and, of those “laptop luggers,” more than a third are adding three or more days to their vacation to accommodate working remotely while traveling. Airbnb reported in May 2022 that long-term stays of more than 28 days were their fastest-growing category by trip length compared to 2019, more than doubling in size from Q1 2019. And United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby has declared a “permanent structural change” in the industry as business and leisure travel have become indistinguishable.

These two developments — a growing, restless class of remote workers, and a tourism market of people who spend more of their time traveling — are more than related; they’re different facets of the same phenomenon. The line between remote workers and tourists is blurring, and communities big and small need to think strategically about how to position themselves to take advantage of this changing landscape.

The New Talent Attraction Landscape

When cities try to lure or retain companies, they play a B2B game. When they adjust their strategy to try and court a highly mobile class of talented workers, the model shifts to B2C. And that transformation requires a change both in how city agencies are structured and in their culture. 

The simplest transformation would be combining economic development and tourism offices into something customer- and resident-focused. Call it the Department of Hospitality. Ohio is already inching in this direction, with a proposal to rename TourismOhio as  the State Marketing Office and expand its mission to attract residents, students and workers — in addition to tourists. 

Whether it’s renaming agencies or merging them, the transformation entails a new way of doing business. Any new department would shift from the high-upside, low-volume business of luring corporate headquarters to the low-margin, high-volume approach of direct sales. This may entail shifts to the make-up of staff, messaging and strategy. And it will mean broadening the customer-facing programs to transform first-time buyers (visitors) into loyal customers (residents). 

Whether this entails connecting newcomers with reliable Wi-Fi and work spaces, familiarizing short-term tourists with housing options and family amenities, or merely keeping track of and welcoming new transplants to help them assimilate and feel supported over time, the work is critical. In a world where there are now hundreds of competing cities chasing the same residents/customers, the cities that figure out how to make their visitors’ and residents’ lives easier are going to have a massive competitive advantage.

To achieve this, cities will have to train their employees for a new era of increasingly important customer service. This would be a sea change for the vast majority of cities, and culture change at municipal agencies is notoriously difficult.

Whether these new offerings are gathered under the umbrella of merged economic development and tourism agencies or, less effectively but more feasibly, a well-choreographed coordination between the two as standalone agencies, this culture change will have to infuse their programs, combining economic development agencies’ ability to expedite city processes and tourism departments’ expertise in marketing. 

This effort will require employees of a sort not normally associated with the public sector: people who act as point-of-contact assistance for new and recent arrivals. Imagine one part hotel concierge, one part HR onboarding expert, and one part university student life expert who has experience welcoming and orienting a constant wave of new residents. 

A smattering of examples exist in the field.

Evan Hock launched MakeMyMove as a one-stop shop for Indiana communities, but today his site boasts more than 150 destinations across the US. One is Greater Lafayette, Indiana, which offers arrivals a $10,000 incentives package, including relocation costs and work space on campus at Purdue University — the first partnership of its kind. “A lot of what we’re doing now is helping communities set up this kind of infrastructure and then obtain funding to keep it going,” Hock says. To that end, Indiana’s legislature amended the state’s tax credit toolkit last year authorizing municipalities to use government funds on these kinds of programs.

A few states away, the Greater Topeka Partnership has lured 99 workers from over 25 states to date with its own $10,000 incentives program. But the small program has contended with the challenges of connecting participants to the right amenities, according to Bob Ross, the partnership’s senior vice president of marketing and communications. One participant dropped out due to a lack of coworking spaces; another ended up in a broadband dead zone and had to relocate — unforced errors that might have been avoided by a more comprehensive citywide strategy. “We’ve ended up doing a lot of that lift ourselves, which is probably a little beyond our bandwidth,” Ross says. “Cities are going to have to find ways to answer those questions more efficiently.”

Incremental Change

For most city agencies, change will come slowly. A more practical question may then be, what do incremental steps look like and how can they be achieved?

Cassandra Costello, executive vice president and chief policy and external affairs officer at the San Francisco Travel Association, has operated in this interstitial space for years. Her position was designed specifically to liaise between economic development and tourism — a rarity in the industry — but it provides her a wide-angle view on how the changing landscape affects the day-to-day operation of government.

Pre-pandemic, tourism was solidly San Francisco’s number one industry, growing for ten straight years and drawing nearly 26 million visitors who spent over $10 billion annually. After Covid brought this growth to an immediate halt, “tourism was no longer taken for granted, but instead, proved to be an industry that you had to work for to be able to compete on a global scale for visitation,” says Costello. 

This challenging environment puts it on par with other corporate attraction efforts. And with Costello’s perch on committees within the planning, parks, and economic development agencies, she is increasingly able to give a voice to tourists within the city’s economic development machinery. Having someone from SF Travel add their voice to land use and economic development issues gives more context to complex political decisions, often bringing a broader, even global perspective to issues that can feel hyper-local. 

Costello’s work shows that, as the line between short-stay tourists and residents blurs, improved resident amenities are going to be even more important to economic development than they were in the past — to the benefit of both new residents and old. “What is good for the visitor is great for the employee, resident and for business attraction,” she says. “Tourism can also help to bring people to downtown core areas seeing less foot traffic due to work from home policies.” 

As an economic development strategy, talent attraction is not going away. And neither, clearly, is remote work. Small and midsize American cities, traditionally muscled out of the business attraction game, have been quick to seize on this transformation. Larger cities, even the heavyweights with legacy business clusters and resilient brands, are slowly pivoting their attention to this new way of doing business. A more consumer-oriented approach will improve the quality of service for all residents, regardless of how often they move, by making them feel more taken care of and more welcome. What’s good for the guest is good for the host, especially when the guest might never leave.

Lev Kushner is the founder of Department of Here, a strategic communications and economic development consultancy.

Greg Lindsay is an urban tech fellow at the Jacobs Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech.

Source: The Line Is Blurring Between Remote Workers and Tourists

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The glass ceiling may be dinged, but study shows a new barrier for women – glass walls

2023/05/03 Leave a comment

Interesting:

Just when it looked like the glass ceiling was getting dinged, new research shows a new barrier for women who are looking to advance in their careers – glass walls.

A study published in the Harvard Business Review in April looked at the experience of freelancer workers. When men broaden their experience they are rewarded, but when women do it they are penalized. This should be a wake-up call to both workers and organizations looking for the best outcomes.

The idea of a glass ceiling originated in the late 1970s when a Human Resources executive in the telecom industry named Marilyn Loden coined it to refer to the invisible barriers that too-often halted women in their climb to the C-Suite. Over the decades, organizations have made attempts to remove it and many women have succeeded in shattering it in terms of their own careers although there is more progress to be made.

These days, however, people are experimenting with different ways of working. U.S. freelance website Upwork estimates that as of 2022 nearly half of Gen Z and millennial workers did at least some freelance work. Although it is not always adopted by choice, freelancing is thought to have some advantages including letting workers be judged by the work rather than by how well they play corporate power games, but that might be a flawed assumption.

Evidence that female freelancers are running up against glass walls comes from research by Professors Yonghoon Lee of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Christy Zhou Koval of Michigan State University and is Soljee Susie Lee of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. They detail the experience of 8,000 freelance creative workers, specifically Korean pop music (K-pop) songwriters who released their first song between 2003 and 2012.

The authors judged success partly by the ability to release more songs (fewer than half of all songwriters released a second song). They found that when male songwriters expanded into fields beyond writing lyrics, such as arranging, they had more success.

That makes intuitive sense, suggesting that continuing success means expanding contacts and deepening their experience. Women should presumably have had the same experience, except that the researchers found the opposite was true. Female songwriters who tried out a new role after publishing a first song were less likely to get a second song released than were those who stayed as strictly lyricists.

The difference between the two experiences, the authors believe comes down to what decision-makers perceive as ‘agency’ or the ability of people to direct their own career paths. When researchers asked K-pop songwriters to evaluate the abilities of fictional freelancers’ profiles, they found that the women who expanded their roles were seen as being less competent and less committed to being songwriters than men who did the same thing.

When repeating the exercise in the U.S. using fictional profiles of cinematographers who expanded into production design, researchers found the same results. Men who branched out were seen as broadening their experiences by choice, while women who did so were seen as doing it because they had no choice, and in the process ended up diluting their original skills.

It would be easy to say that the experience of K-pop songwriters in Korea has nothing to do with the experience of those who work more traditional jobs in North America, but the results are worthy of reflection. Within many organizations both men and women are often encouraged to make lateral moves to gain experience, with the assumption being that by doing so they will enhance their ability to move up the ladder if they wish. If (unconsciously or consciously) women are perceived differently than men when they do, it might be that they should think about a different game plan.

The authors suggest ways to counter the glass wall, although some of them are depressingly retro. They suggest female freelancers use business names to obscure their gender and skip any bias toward women, a practice that hearkens back centuries. They also suggest that women who try out new roles take pains to communicate why they have done so, making it clear it was by their own choice. For organizations with traditional workers that want to avoid glass walls, the first step might be to acknowledge that they exist. That might mean establishing new metrics and taking a look at whether women who take lateral roles within organizations gain more or less ground than men who do the same thing.

The real eye-opener though is that women’s and men’s achievements, even when identical, are still being viewed through different lenses. Changing perceptions takes a lot more than changing a name, but hopefully the glass walls will fall faster than the ceilings.

Source: The glass ceiling may be dinged, but study shows a new barrier for women – glass walls

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Temporary foreign worker program must have open work permits

2023/05/03 Leave a comment

A more modest proposal than permanent status for all but unlikely given some business community opposition:

If your boss asked you to pay him $1,000 in cash to keep your job, expected you to work without safety equipment or holiday pay, or told you to sleep on the floor in the apartment he was renting to you … you would probably quit. I hope you would.

But if you are a temporary foreign worker this may not feel like an option for you.

The Canadian temporary foreign worker program continues to grow, as companies grapple with labour shortages in many sectors. Last year an estimated 220,000 temporary foreign workers came to Canada and this number is likely to be even higher next year as the federal government relaxes restrictions on the program.

Will the number of abuses increase too? Probably, unless we change the way the program is administered.

The biggest problem right now is closed work permits. Temporary foreign workers must stay with the employer who hires them. If temporary foreign workers quit or are fired they can only work for a new employer who happens to have an unfilled labour market impact assessment (LMIA), or they have to return home. And because temporary foreign workers all have closed work permits, they sometimes endure working conditions that Canadian employees would walk away from.

Open work permits, in contrast, would give temporary foreign workers the same flexibility that Canadians take for granted. Open work permits would allow them to quit a job that is abusive and move to any other employer that will hire them. Interestingly, open work permits are already offered to temporary foreign workers who can demonstrate that they are being mistreated. But at that point the abuse has already happened. And many temporary foreign workers are reluctant to report abusive employers because they are (mistakenly) worried about jeopardizing their future chances to apply for permanent residency. 

Open work permits are also more flexible for employers. With one, a temporary foreign worker can be promoted easily or moved to where they are needed most within an organization, especially as they gain more experience and their skills improve. Companies’ needs change quickly, and this flexibility can be crucial in a competitive environment. Some temporary foreign workers could even work at a second part-time, short-term, or seasonal job, if they wanted.

To be sure, some advocacy groups would argue that we should immediately grant citizenship or permanent residency to all temporary foreign workers as soon as they arrive in Canada. However, the amount of bureaucracy involved would also increase dramatically, slowing down a process that is already very cumbersome. When companies are hiring workers they usually need someone immediately. Temporary foreign workers who are seeking work also need to be able to work as soon as possible.

Granting immediate permanent residency to all temporary foreign workers would also give the companies that use the temporary foreign worker program, such as slaughterhouses and fast-food restaurant chains, much greater involvement in deciding who immigrates to Canada. Most Canadians would not be comfortable with more corporate involvement in Canadian immigration decisions.

Of course, with open work permits some companies might complain that their investment — the worker they just recruited — will walk out the door. Temporary foreign workers are more expensive and time consuming to recruit than Canadians. Companies pay $1,000 just to apply for a LMIA that enables them to recruit temporary foreign workers, and they may also have to pay for the worker’s transportation or housing costs. 

However, the risk of their new worker leaving is the incentive for companies to treat their temporary foreign workers well. Companies should not choose workers just because they cannot quit. 

Every few weeks we hear about more temporary foreign workers being exploited or mistreated. The government continues to tinker with the temporary foreign worker program, so these abuses continue. Open work permits would enable these workers to walk away from bad jobs, just like any Canadian.

Catherine Connelly is a Canada Research Chair in organizational behaviour at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University and the author of “Enduring Work: Experiences with Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program.”

Source: Temporary foreign worker program must have open work permits

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Time is right to scrap requirement to swear oath to the King, MPs and Senators say

2023/05/03 Leave a comment

Easy to agree, virtually impossible to implement and a distraction from more fundamental issues. However, the citizenship oath could be changed as former immigration minister Marchi tried to do in the 90s:

As King Charles prepares for his coronation at Westminster Abbey on Saturday, some senators and Liberal, NDP and Bloc Quebecois MPs want to abolish the federal requirement that parliamentarians pledge loyalty to the monarch. Instead, they say, office-holders should have the option of swearing an oath to Canada, or the Canadian people.

MPs and senators have to swear or affirm an oath to “be faithful and bear true allegiance” to the British monarch before taking their seats in Parliament after an election. They can’t sit if they refuse. The obligation dates back to the Constitution Act of 1867.

The oath is also taken by people with official positions across Canada, including judges, RCMP officers and members of the armed forces. New Canadians likewise pledge loyalty to the Crown at their citizenship ceremonies. The oath used to be sworn to Queen Elizabeth, until her death last year. It is now sworn to the new King.

Quebec Liberal MP Joel Lightbound said he has sworn an oath to the monarch three times since first being elected. “Having an alternative to swearing allegiance to the British Crown would have made me very happy,” he said.

“In my opinion federal elected officials should have the choice to swear or not swear allegiance to the Crown in future.”

Ontario NDP MP Charlie Angus said he was “personally astounded” when he first found out he had to swear allegiance to the British monarch as a requirement of taking his seat in Parliament. He said he imagined his late Scottish grandmother, an avowed republican, striking him with lightning for doing so.

He said it is “simply not credible” that the only obligation in the oath is to the Crown, not Canadians.

Reviewing the oath is a “very legitimate conversation” to have as the new King is crowned, he said.

Ontario NDP MP Matthew Green agreed. “An oath to an overseas monarch in perpetuity is increasingly outdated,” he said.

He added that he and many other Canadians “would be more comfortable with an oath that reflects the allegiance to the Constitution and the people of Canada.”

“While tradition is an important part of our culture and identity, from time to time it’s healthy to review these traditions and determine whether or not they still reflect our current values,” he said.

Senator Tony Dean, a former head of the Ontario Public Service, also said an oath to the monarch “seems dated” today.

“Of course the oath could be refreshed or replaced,” he said. But he noted that, because the oath is entrenched in the Constitution, changing it could require a constitutional amendment.

Michael Wernick, a former head of the federal public service and a former a senior official in constitutional affairs, said revisiting the oath with 220 parliamentary sitting days left until the next election would be “a huge waste of energy.”

“There’s more important things to focus on,” he said.

But New Brunswick Liberal MP René Arseneault, who is of Acadian heritage, said creating an alternative to the oath for MPs and senators who don’t want to swear allegiance to the Crown is “doable.”

Mr. Arseneault successfully challenged a requirement to swear an oath to the Queen when he joined the bar in New Brunswick. He was the first lawyer in the province not to do so.

“In 2023, there must be a way to modify this,” he said. “For me the best solution is a choice.”

Bloc Quebecois MPs want Parliament to follow the lead of the Quebec National Assembly, which in December unanimously passed a law scrapping the oath requirement for its elected members. Three members of the Parti Quebecois had refused to swear the oath after the October provincial election, and had been barred from sitting as a result.

Bloc House Leader Alain Therrien said Canada is “becoming more and more anti-monarchist,” in part because Canadians don’t feel the same attachment to the King as they did to the Queen. He said there should be a debate about Canada’s ties to the monarchy, including the oath.

“We are against having to swear this oath,” he said. “The monarchy is an institution that is out of date.”

Quebec Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne also questioned the need for the oath. “The time has come to at least have a choice … to swear to the monarch or to Canada,” she said.

“I would prefer to swear to the people of Canada.”

Source: Time is right to scrap requirement to swear oath to the King, MPs and Senators say

Filed under Citizenship, Government Tagged with ,

Dutrisac: Langues officielles, inégalité réelle

2023/05/03 Leave a comment

More on Quebec language concerns and immigration aspects:

Le gouvernement Trudeau a présenté son nouveau Plan d’action pour les langues officielles 2023-2028 avant même que ne soit voté le projet de loi C-13 qui donne un peu de mordant à l’actuelle loi sur les langues officielles. Ce plan reconduit la somme consentie dans la précédente version 2018-2023, tout en y ajoutant 1,4 milliard pour atteindre 4,1 milliards.

C’est un niveau d’investissement dont on dit qu’il est « historique ». On ne sait si ce sont les retards qu’a connus l’étude détaillée du projet de loi C-13 qui font que le plan vient avant l’adoption de la nouvelle loi, ce qui devrait survenir en mai à la Chambre des communes. Manifestement, nul besoin de nouveaux pouvoirs législatifs pour financer la kyrielle d’initiatives fédérales destinées à soutenir le français hors Québec et l’anglais au Québec.

À cet égard, l’offensive des députés libéraux de l’île de Montréal Anthony Housefather, Marc Garneau et Emmanuella Lambropoulos n’a peut-être pas permis de retirer toute référence à la Charte de la langue française dans le projet C-13, mais au moins, le gouvernement Trudeau a senti le besoin d’amadouer les Anglo-Québécois en réservant une enveloppe de 137,5 millions pour financer divers services destinés à la minorité anglophone. Feignant la surprise, le ministre de la Langue française, Jean-François Roberge, aurait voulu qu’une partie de ces sommes servent à la francisation des anglophones. De son côté, l’organisme de pression Quebec Community Groups Network a bien accueilli le plan qui financera un meilleur accès, si c’est possible, à la justice, à l’éducation, aux soins de santé et aux services sociaux, tous des services assurés par le gouvernement québécois, pour les « 1,3 million de Québécois de langue anglaise ». On notera que cette définition des anglophones ne se limite pas aux 7 % que représente la minorité historique, comme le conçoit Québec. Le groupe se réjouit particulièrement que le plan mette l’accent sur la diversité et l’inclusion, ce qui représente des « opportunités » pour la communauté anglophone et son rayonnement.

Il va sans dire que la situation des francophones hors Québec est tout autre. D’une façon générale, le plan fut bien reçu quoiqu’à bien des égards les problèmes d’accès à des services en français, que ce soit en matière de garderies, d’écoles, de collèges et universités, de cours de justice et de soins de santé, demeureront entiers.

En campagne électorale, le gouvernement Trudeau avait promis 80 millions par an pour l’éducation postsecondaire : le plan ne prévoit que 32 millions, souligne le média Francopresse. Les déboires de l’Université Laurentienne à Sudbury, qui s’est déclarée insolvable, la difficulté de mettre sur pied l’Université de l’Ontario français à Toronto, et la précarité du Campus Saint-Jean de l’Université de l’Alberta, notamment, contrastent avec le développement débridé des universités McGill et Concordia au Québec.

Alors que se déploient des services de garde à la petite enfance partout au pays comme il en existe déjà au Québec, il est loin d’être assuré que des garderies de langue française seront accessibles en dépit de l’aide de 50 millions en cinq ans que prévoit le plan d’action dévoilé la semaine dernière par la ministre des Langues officielles, Ginette Petitpas Taylor.

Les données du recensement de 2021 ont montré un déclin du français au Québec. En Acadie, le recul fut encore plus marqué. Dans le reste du Canada, seules des métaphores funestes conviennent pour évoquer la situation. En Ontario, par exemple, le pourcentage de la population qui parle français de façon prédominante à la maison a glissé sous la barre des 2 % alors que les Ontariens sont deux fois plus nombreux à se qualifier comme francophones.

Pour contrer ce déclin, Ottawa mise sur l’immigration francophone. Le plan d’action prévoit consacrer 100 millions de plus, pour un total de 222 millions, afin de soutenir cet apport.

Dans son mot d’introduction, Justin Trudeau s’est félicité du fait que, pour la première fois, la cible d’immigrants francophones hors Québec avait été atteinte l’an dernier avec l’admission de 16 300 immigrants de langue française. L’objectif est fixé à 4,4 %, ce qui représente le pourcentage de francophones hors Québec en 2001, une proportion qui a chuté de 3,5 % depuis. Mais cette politique est un leurre : à ce rythme, pour rétablir le pourcentage de 2001, il faudrait répéter l’« exploit » pendant près de 100 ans, et ce, sans même tenir compte de la formidable puissance assimilatrice du Canada anglais. Ce n’est pas sérieux.

Avec le projet de loi C-13, le gouvernement libéral délaisse en principe la doctrine, élaborée par Pierre Elliott Trudeau, de la parfaite symétrie entre l’anglais et le français en situation minoritaire. Le gouvernement libéral promet d’établir une « égalité réelle » plutôt qu’une « égalité formelle » entre les deux langues officielles. Or, c’est plutôt une inégalité tant réelle que formelle que continueront à supporter les francophones hors Québec dans ce pays essentiellement anglophone.

Source: Langues officielles, inégalité réelle

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Canada’s costly housing market leaves international students open to exploitation

2023/05/02 Leave a comment

No questioning, of course, of whether or not Canada should set levels for students, along with temporary foreign workers, to reduce housing and other pressures. Or whether the government should review existing designated learning institutions (DLI), particularly private colleges, given their recruitment practices:

Skyrocketing rent prices in Canada’s major cities are leaving more and more people struggling to find an affordable place to live. National conversations about the housing crisis often overlook a growing segment of the population that is extremely vulnerable to housing discrimination, rent gouging, rights abuses and sexual harassment: international students. 

Canada had more than 807,000 international students in 2022, around 40 per cent of whom come from India. While all these students need housing, many face discrimination in the rental market. Tania Das Gupta’s ongoing research into Punjabi newcomers in Canada has found that some landlords discriminate against international students based on gender and ethnicity. 

Discriminatory ads

An online search for rentals shows many ads for properties that are available to international students. In addition, many ads are aimed at Indian students with landlords seeking tenants who are vegetarian or from particular regions of India. 

The wording in the ads seems innocuous, but many can be discriminatory and prey on international students. Landlords often demand large upfront payments. And international students are often sought because their relatively recent arrival in Canada and temporary migration status means they are less likely to complain. 

Housing as a human right

Even though these ads violate the Ontario Human Rights Code, they continue to be posted on public websites. The code defines the right to be free from discrimination in housing as “not only the right to enter into an agreement and occupy a residential dwelling, but also the right to be free from discrimination in all matters relating to the accommodation.” 

Das Gupta’s ongoing research features in-depth interviews with students and service providers. Respondents have shared that many live-in landlords tend to infantilize and over-monitor them. Others, especially female international students, have experienced sexual harassment and assault as well as sexual exploitation.

A 2018 survey at McGill University found that 38.6 per cent of international students experienced sexual harassment and 23.6 per cent experienced sexual assault. 

Sub-standard, illegal and overcrowded housing

Accommodation aimed at international students can often be sub-standard, over-crowded and unsafe. Many often lack fire alarms and carbon monoxide detectors and have pest infestations. Many secondary units in single-family homes, like basement suites, are built without permits and not to code. 

Brampton, Ont., a city where many Indian international students reside, had a vacancy rate of 0.8 per cent in 2019, which is well below the minimum of three per cent considered acceptable. It is no wonder then that Brampton has an estimated 50,000 illegal units. 

This is dangerous and can lead to tragic outcomes. In January, an international student in Cape Breton, N.S. died in a fire in an overcrowded international student house. In December 2022, Cape Breton University advised international students to defer coming to Canada because of the shortage of suitable accommodation.

Another common issue with housing for international students is overcrowding. With rental costs increasingly unaffordable, many students are renting single rooms with others. Some online ads even offer a room with only one bed that is to be shared with another tenant the student does not know. One ad on Kijiji stated: “looking for 1 Indian girl to share one room with another Punjabi girl.”

Screenshot of an ad on the website Kijiji for a shared room in a house in Brampton, Ont. Author provided

Stories of landlord harassment and wrongful evictions are common across Canada. These incidents combined with the costly rental market mean that homelessness is a common experience for students. A 2018 study found that more than 31 per cent of post-secondary students experience some type of homelessness. 

While the study did not focus on international students in particular, Das Gupta’s ongoing research shows that homelessness is common with stories of some students sleeping in their cars because they cannot afford rent.

Ending the culture of exploitation

A recent CTV W5 investigation exposed how international students at Cape Breton University and other Canadian post-secondary institutions are strategically recruited because they pay significantly higher tuition fees than Canadians.

The extreme nature of the crisis at the university led students to speak out and advocate for the rights of international students, including raising awareness that complaining about human rights abuses, sexual assaults or other crimes will not hurt their chances of staying in Canada.

But such advocacy can only go so far. Structural changes by governments and post-secondary institutions are required and municipalities need to better regulate illegal rental units. And importantly, international students eager to voice solutions must be consulted and heeded.

Source: Canada’s costly housing market leaves international students open to exploitation

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

More immigration needed to help stave off Swiss worker shortage …

2023/05/02 Leave a comment

Of note:

“For Switzerland, it will likely become more difficult in the future to recruit [from] abroad,” said Hendrik Budliger, head of independent demographics firm Demografik in Basel. Behind this trend, he added, are an immigration level that is set to decline from 2026 and a coming wave of retirement of baby-boomer workers.

The current worker shortage is being felt across various sectors, including in the hospitality industry. Over 60% of hotels in Switzerland are unable to recruit enough staff, according to a survey by Gastrosuisse, the umbrella organisation for hotels and restaurants. With overnight stays climbing steadily, the number of unfilled full-time positions in this service sector has risen to record levels, SonntagsBlick reportsExternal link: from 2,000 in 2015 to a current total of 8,500 vacant positions.

Having exhausted possibilities to recruit locally, businesses are looking to neighbouring countries. But in Europe the number of people of working age is falling by almost three million per year, calculations by Demografik show.

“If the [Swiss] economy continues to grow at the same rate as it has in the last 20 years, there will be a shortage of around 1.3 million skilled workers in 2050,” Marco Salvi of the think tank Avenir Suisse told the newspaper. “Because skilled workers are also becoming scarce in Europe, Switzerland must increase labour migration from third countries.”

Why Switzerland needs workers from abroad

Switzerland is an attractive place to work and the country needs specialists. But work permits can be hard to come by.

Members of the hospitality industry associations have been pushing for a similar approach. Talk in Bern, however, seems to be headed in the opposite direction, with the right-wing Swiss People’s Party again putting into question the free movement of persons with the European Union. This summer the party plans to launch a “sustainability” initiative to limit population growth and migration to Switzerland.

Source: More immigration needed to help stave off Swiss worker shortage …

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Scholars defend Polish Holocaust researcher targeted by govt

2023/05/02 Leave a comment

Of note and Poland’s struggle to come to terms with its history:

Scholars and historical institutions from around the world are coming to the defense of a Polish researcher who is under fire from her country’s authorities after claiming that Poles could have done more to help Jews during the Holocaust.

Barbara Engelking said in a TV interview last week that Polish Jews felt disappointed in Poles during World War II, referring to what she described as “widespread blackmailing” of Jews by Poles during the Nazi German occupation.

Since then the historian and the independent TV broadcaster have been threatened with consequences by government institutions — turning the matter into a campaign issue ahead of elections scheduled for this fall.

Poland’s conservative government and pro-government media have described the remarks by Engelking, who is Polish, as an attack on the nation. They accuse her of distorting the historical record and not giving due credit to the Poles who risked — and sometimes lost — their lives to help Jews.

It is the latest eruption of an emotional debate that has been going on for years in Poland over Polish-Jewish relations, particularly the behavior of Poles toward their Jewish neighbors during the war — when Germans committed brutal crimes against Poles, whom they considered subhuman, and against the Jews, a population they sought to exterminate in its entirety.

Poles reacted in various ways to the German treatment of the Jews. Some helped the Jews, an act punishable with execution by the occupation forces. Others denounced or blackmailed them, motivated by antisemitic hatred or for personal gain. Many Poles lived in fear and sought to survive the war without getting involved either way.

Even Polish nationalists do not deny that some Poles preyed on their Jewish compatriots, but they say a relatively recent focus in scholarship on that aspect of the war distorts a larger history of heroism by Poles who resisted the Germans. They argue it risks blaming Polish victims for German crimes.

Engelking spoke on the 80th anniversary of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. She was being interviewed by private broadcaster TVN about an exhibition she helped create on the fate of civilians in the ghetto, “Around Us A Sea of Fire,” which opened last week.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki reacted to the interview with a long social media post describing Engelking’s comments as “scandalous opinions” and part of an “anti-Polish narrative.”

Morawiecki referred to the more than 7,000 Poles recognized by Israel’s Holocaust institute Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. A Polish institute is trying to document cases that have so far not been recorded.

“We know that there could be tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of such cases,” Morawiecki said.

This week Education Minister Przemysław Czarnek threatened the funding of the institution where Engelking works, the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, which is part of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

“I will not finance an institute that maintains the kind of people who just insult Poles,” Czarnek said.

He said that Poles “were the greatest allies of the Jews, and if it had not been for the Poles, many Jews would have died, many more than were killed in the Holocaust.”

According to Yad Vashem, some 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland on the eve of the Sept. 1, 1939 German invasion, and only 380,000 survived the war.

Some 3 million other Polish citizens who were not Jewish were also killed during the war.

Poland’s state broadcasting authority has also opened an investigation into TVN, which is owned by the U.S. company Warner Bros. Discovery. The broadcaster faced government criticism recently for a report claiming that Saint John Paul IIhad covered up cases of clerical abuse in his native Poland before becoming pope.

Government critics see an attempt to exploit the issue to win votes ahead of the election — as the ruling party risks losing votes to a far-right party, Confederation, which has been surging in popularity.

Liberal media and commentators warn that media and academic freedoms are being threatened.

Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan said on Twitter this week that he called Engelking to show support for “freedom of expression and of academic research, in the face of blatant and menacing attacks.”

By Friday more than 600 scholars of the Holocaust and related subjects in Poland and abroad had signed a statement expressing opposition to the “political attack” on Engelking.

They said they regard “such censorious tendencies … as extremely dangerous and unacceptable,” adding: “We object to the idea of making a subject that calls for meticulous and nuanced research — as carried out by Professor Engelking — part of an election campaign.”

The POLIN Museum of the History of the Polish Jews, where the exhibition about civilians in the Warsaw ghetto is being shown, also defended Engelking in a statement Wednesday.

The museum argued that the feelings of disappointment expressed by Jews during the war are a “fact,” and that “they appear in almost every account of those who survived the Holocaust, as well as those who managed to leave a record of their fate, but did not survive.”

“The essence of scientific research is a dispute, but a brutal personal attack on a scientist and an outstanding authority in her field cannot be called a dispute,” it said.

Engelking more than a decade ago again angered some Poles by seeming to downplay Polish wartime suffering, saying death for Poles then “was simply a biological, natural matter … and for Jews it was a tragedy, it was a dramatic experience, it was metaphysics.”

Source: Scholars defend Polish Holocaust researcher targeted by govt

Filed under Antisemitism, Holocaust Tagged with ,

Government ‘hackathon’ to search for ways to use AI to cut asylum backlog

2023/05/02 Leave a comment

For all the legitimate worries about AI and algorithms, many forget that human systems have similar biases and the additional issue of inconsistencies (see Kahneman’s Noise). Given numbers, irresponsible not to develop these tools, but take steps to avoid bias. And I think we need to get off the mindset that every case is unique as many, if not most, have more commonalities than differences:

The Home Office plans to use artificial intelligence to reduce the asylum backlog, and is launching a three-day hackathon in the search for quicker ways to process the 138,052 undecided asylum cases.

The government is convening academics, tech experts, civil servants and business people to form 15 multidisciplinary teams tasked with brainstorming solutions to the backlog. Teams will be invited to compete to find the most innovative solutions, and will present their ideas to a panel of judges. The winners are expected to meet the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, in Downing Street for a prize-giving ceremony.

Inspired by Silicon Valley’s approach to problem-solving, the hackathon will take place in London and Peterborough in May. One possible method of speeding up the processing of asylum claims, discussed in preliminary talks before the event, involves establishing whether AI can be used to transcribe and analyse the Home Office’s huge existing database of thousands of hours of previous asylum interviews, to identify trends.

Source: Government ‘hackathon’ to search for ways to use AI to cut asylum backlog

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