Quebec rejects cap on student visas floated by Ottawa to address housing crisis 

2023/08/24 Leave a comment

Expect other provinces will join the chorus given all rely on international students to fund post-secondary education. Education organizations already also chiming in:

The Quebec government says it won’t accept a cap on the number of international students it can admit, rejecting one of the options the federal government is considering as part of a plan to tackle a national housing crisis.

Universities and colleges, meanwhile, said they were surprised and troubled, respectively, by the suggestion, which was first raised by Housing and Infrastructure Minister Sean Fraser at a Liberal cabinet retreat in Charlottetown on Monday.

Quebec’s reaction indicates that attempts to limit international student admissions could create conflict with the provinces. They have jurisdiction in areas of education and their postsecondary institutions have come to rely on lucrative international tuition fees.

“Quebec does not intend to impose a cap on the number of foreign students in its jurisdiction. Although issuing study permits is the responsibility of the federal government, education is the exclusive power of Quebec. It’s up to Quebec and its educational institutions to determine the number of people they can accommodate,” said Alexandre Lahaie, a spokesperson for Quebec Immigration Minister Christine Fréchette.

Federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller confirmed his government is strongly considering a cap on the number of international students Canada accepts. But Mr. Miller stressed that such a measure alone won’t fix the housing crunch.

“This will be a multipronged approach. A cap is something we’ll definitely entertain,” Mr. Miller said on Tuesday.

The number of international students in Canada soared past 800,000 in 2022, more than twice as many as when Justin Trudeau’s government took office in 2015. Some experts have said the influx of students in need of lower-cost rental accommodation has contributed to rising rents in some cities, at a time when construction of new housing has been inadequate.

More than half of all international study permits issued in 2022 went to students at Canadian colleges, a sector that has surpassed universities as the top destination for international students.

In a statement, Colleges and Institutes Canada, which represents publicly funded colleges, said it is “troubled” by the suggestion of a cap on international enrolment.

“Although implementing a cap on international students may seem to provide temporary relief, it could have lasting adverse effects on our communities, including exacerbating current labour shortages. Furthermore, we want to emphasize that students are not to blame for Canada’s housing crisis; they are among those most impacted,” Colleges and Institutes Canada said in a statement.

Michael Sangster, president of the National Association of Career Colleges, which represents private colleges, said his members are willing to work with a cap, if that’s what the federal government decides, or with a trusted institution model, another proposal the federal government has floated that could see institutions with a good track record receive preference in permit processing.

“The students that are coming to our institutions, many of them are training to become tradespeople to build the homes we need. So we’re in a bit of a catch-22 right now, but we want to be part of the solution,” Mr. Sangster said.

Philip Landon, interim president of Universities Canada, an umbrella group representing nearly 100 institutions, said the idea of a cap on international university students is concerning and something universities don’t believe is necessary.

“Universities seek to attract talented students to Canada and have been doing so in a responsible way with responsible growth rates,” he said.

Mr. Landon called on the federal government to make low-cost financing available to universities to allow them to build more residence spaces.

Mr. Miller said the government is already in talks with postsecondary schools about what they can do to guarantee more housing availability. He said provinces also need to be at the table, as they’ve benefited greatly from the international student program.

He said it has become “very lucrative” for some schools, adding that the economic impact of international students in Canada is more than $20-billion a year. While he said much of that is good, there is also “some abuse in the system.”

The international student program is a temporary resident immigration stream that isn’t subject to the yearly caps or targets that Ottawa sets for permanent resident immigration streams.

Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc said Tuesday that the premiers have not raised the need for a cap on foreign students with him. He added that while they talk often about the need for more housing, the premiers have also made clear they need more immigrants to fill labour shortages, including in the construction industry.

Mike Moffatt, the founding director of the PLACE Centre at the Smart Prosperity Institute and one of the authors of a new report on housing supply, spoke to the federal cabinet behind closed doors on Tuesday.

He said the increase in foreign students has had knock-on effects in the housing market that have helped turn a rental crisis into a home-ownership crisis.

In the area around Fanshawe College in London, Ont., for example, neighbourhoods once occupied by young families have “turned into a sea of student rentals” bought up by investors, he said.

“Domestic and international students are the biggest victims of this, not the cause of it,” he said.

“This is a systemic failure, I would say of both the federal and provincial governments and as well the higher education sector.”

Source: Quebec rejects cap on student visas floated by Ottawa to address housing crisis

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Clark: The Liberal housing plan is overdue

2023/08/24 Leave a comment

Indeed. As it is for an annual immigration plan that includes temporary workers and international students:

You have to agree with Housing Minister Sean Fraser’s assertion that the answer to Canada’s housing crisis isn’t new political branding. Still, it would be nice if the federal government had a plan.

The good news is there are signs that the Liberal government is putting together what could be the rudiments of a plan. But it needs an actual plan. And it needs to come to grips with the screaming urgency.

So perhaps the best exercise for the Liberal cabinet retreat taking place in Charlottetown this week would be having all ministers dip their heads in vats of ice water before and after their briefings about the housing crisis. You know, so everyone there feels the kind of shocking wake-up call that should be motivating them now.

It sounded promising when Mr. Fraser, freshly appointed as Housing Minister on July 26, outlined some of the government’s thinking about increasing the housing supply – and even said he thinks the government is thinking of capping the rapidly increasing number of international students coming to Canada. But then he said a decision on that is “premature” right now.

The problem is that Mr. Fraser is mixing up the concepts of “premature” and “overdue.”

The feds have missed a window to cap – and reduce – those numbers for this school year.

Let’s note here that Mr. Fraser is quite right when he says that we should be careful not to “somehow blame immigrants for the housing challenges that have been several decades in the works in Canada.”

That’s absolutely true. We should blame governments. They failed to plan.

Immigration itself isn’t the cause of the problem: It is good for Canada, and international students can be an especially good thing. But successive governments, federal and provincial, encouraged a boom in numbers, especially international student numbers, without planning policies to encourage housing for them.

One of the people briefing the Liberal cabinet Tuesday was economist Mike Moffatt, who has been doing the academic equivalent of waving his arms trying to get governments to pay attention to the problem. “We are in a crisis and a war-time-like effort is needed. The federal government must prioritize speed and act now,” he wrote in The Hub this week.

Mr. Moffatt’s diagnosis boils down to the fact that the population grew quickly in recent years, especially in Ontario, but the pace of home-building was a lot slower. Few places for a lot more people means house prices and now apartment rents skyrocketed.

The rapid population growth went a little under the radar because it was not just an increase in permanent immigrants. The number of temporary residents has ballooned. In 2015, there were 352,325 international students. In 2021, the number was 617,250. The following year, 2022, it was 807,260. But there weren’t a lot more student residences and apartments for rent.

Now the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation estimates Canada needs to build 5.8 million homes by 2030 to make housing affordable again. So it’s good the Liberals are talking about policies to encourage more home-building. Mr. Fraser unironically noted that the Liberals campaigned on some of them in the past two elections. In fact, they promised to remove the GST on purpose-built rental housing back in 2015. It’s time to step it up.

It’s true successive federal governments are to blame. Municipal administrations and provincial governments are to blame for a lot of it, too. All for a lack of planning.

Now the plan is urgent, and it will have to include short-term measures like cutting back the number of international students. A government that doesn’t craft such a plan will create more poverty and damage many Canadians’ standard of living. And despite Mr. Fraser’s words, it is not at all clear Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet is shaking off the complacency.

Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc said he hadn’t heard talk of the idea of capping the number of international students and hasn’t spoken to premiers about it.

Mr. Trudeau, who was criticized three weeks ago for saying housing is not a primary federal responsibility, provided a nonsensical explanation for that on Monday when he said his point was that his Conservative predecessor, Stephen Harper, had “completely walked away from housing.”

And sure, we have to expect politicians will make points about politics. But this is a bigger issue now, and it’s time to pull together a plan.

Source: The Liberal housing plan is overdue

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Petition e-4511 – Opposing self-affirmation of the #citizenship oath “citizenship on a click” – Signatures to August 22

2023/08/24 Leave a comment

The chart below breaks down the 1,471 signatures as of 22 August by province. No major changes by province as numbers plateau.

And if you haven’t yet considered signing the petition, the link is here: https://petitions.ourcommons.ca/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-4511

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The Political Impact of Increased Diversity: What the Census Shows with Respect to Indigenous peoples

2023/08/24 Leave a comment

As a companion piece to my earlier riding level analysis of visible minorities, The Political Impact of Increased Diversity: What the Census Shows, I performed the same analysis with respect to Indigenous groups, highlighting that the relative political importance of Indigenous groups is declining in relation to visible minorities in electoral terms. This draft was shared with the three national Indigenous organizations but no comments were received given their higher priorities. 

census-2021-the-political-impact-of-increased-indigenous-populationDownload

Filed under Aboriginal, Multiculturalism, Politics Tagged with ,

Keller: The Liberals broke the education visa system, but they had lots of help

2023/08/23 Leave a comment

Another good column by Keller, on how the objectives of international student recruitment have been largely overtaken by economic objectives of low-paid workers:

Over the last two decades, the number of foreign students studying in Canada has increased almost sevenfold, to more than 800,000. The jump has been particularly sharp in recent years. At the end of 2022, there were nearly half a million more visa students than in 2015.

At first blush, this sounds like a success story: Canadian higher education must be so outstanding that record numbers from around the world are lining up to pay university and college tuitions several times higher than those for Canadian students.

Foreign students clearly believe that they’re paying for something that offers a positive return on their investment. But what are they paying for? And what are they getting?

Also: What are we getting?

For many international students, what they are buying is mostly not education. And what many – or most – schools are selling is not education. A big part of what is being bought and sold are public goods: the right to enter Canada, to legally work and to get on a track to citizenship.

There are, of course, excellent university and college programs attracting the best and the brightest to this country. That’s what tying higher education to immigration is supposed to be doing: boosting economic vitality by pulling in, say, the world’s best engineering or computer science students, and giving them opportunities to become Canadians after graduation.

Using foreign student recruitment to raise the education and skill level of the work force benefits all Canadians. When highly-skilled and productive foreigners graduate from a high-level program and become even more skilled and productive – and choose to become Canadians – everyone wins.

But much of the current visa-student pathway is about something else. It has become an important, though unofficial, stream of temporary foreign workers – a bottomless supply of labour to flip burgers, stack boxes and deliver late-night burritos, at minimum wage. And the number of student visas on offer is not capped.

Consider what’s happening at Ontario’s 24 public colleges. Between 2012 and 2020, their foreign enrolment grew by 342 per cent. There’s been more growth in the last three years. But a large part of that growth comes from public colleges selling their name, and their publicly-bestowed credentials, to private operators.

Students in these so-called public-private career college partnerships are often hosted at a “campus” that is a few classrooms in a strip mall or office park, usually somewhere in the Greater Toronto Area – and often hundreds of kilometres from the public college whose credentials the private partner paid to use.

Consider Lambton College in Sarnia. According to its strategic mandate agreement with the province, between 2020 and 2024 it expects domestic student enrolment to drop from 2,104 to 2,038. But international student enrolment will more than double to almost 9,000. Most visa students study at one of two campuses in Toronto, run by private operators in suburban office parks.

Why is a foreign student willing to pay $25,460 tuition for a four-semester course in hotel and resort management, from a Lambton-affiliated private business called “Queen’s College,” in a warehouse district in Mississauga?

Perhaps because the holder of an education visa can legally work while enrolled. And thanks to private Queen’s link with public Lambton, the federal government will issue another work visa upon graduation. Even a low-level Canadian educational credential plus Canadian work experience boosts one’s chances of claiming “PR” status – permanent residency, the last stop before citizenship.

That’s what many schools are selling. At $25,460, it’s a bargain.

But it brings me back to the question of why Canada is not being more selective. Using the education-to-citizenship pathway to recruit highly skilled, future Canadian citizens is a great idea. It boosts GDP-per-capita, increasing the size of the economic pie by more than the number of forks in the pie.

But much of the educational visa stream is no longer about that. And graded on the curve, Lambton is far from the bottom of the class.

The federal government lists 526 higher-education institutions in Ontario as “designated learning institutions.” Most are private and may not offer much in the way of education. Yet enrolling at any DLI includes the opportunity to come to Canada on a student visa, and the legal right to work while enrolled.

Even more than at public colleges, that’s what foreign students at private career colleges appear to be paying for: the right to enter Canada, and to work, mostly at low-skill, low-wage jobs.

However, despite the fact that governments have allowed private operators access to a bottomless helping of student visas, they’re sufficiently dubious of their education that completion of a private career college program generally does not gives students the right to a post-graduation work visa – unlike grads from public-private partnerships.

When these private college students are asked to stop working and leave Canada upon graduation from their short course, will they? Don’t bet on it. But that’s a column for another day.

Source: The Liberals broke the education visa system, but they had lots of help

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Federal government should look at cap on student visas, Housing Minister Sean Fraser says

2023/08/23 Leave a comment

Looking at vs doing something about….

Raj Sharma developed what I view as a neat little test as to whether the government is serious or not:

The federal government should reassess its policy on international students and consider a cap on a program that has seen “explosive growth,” putting pressure on rental markets and driving up costs, Housing and Infrastructure Minister Sean Fraser said.

The number of international students in Canada has more than doubled since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took office in 2015, government data show. At the end of 2022, it sat at 807,260.

“The reality is we’ve got temporary immigration programs that were never designed to see such explosive growth in such a short period of time,” Mr. Fraser said Monday in Charlottetown. He noted that unlike the permanent resident immigration programs where the government sets targets each year, the study permit program is a temporary resident program that is driven by demand and doesn’t have a set cap.

He said the growth of the program for international students is happening in concentrated regions of Canada and is putting an “unprecedented level of demand” on the job market but even “more pronounced” demand on the housing market.

Asked if the government should cap the number of international students allowed in Canada each year, he said it’s an option Ottawa should consider.

Mr. Fraser did not provide any timeline for when Ottawa might lower the number of study permits issued. Asked if a change would be made this fall, he said Immigration Minister Marc Miller would have more to say at a later date.

Mr. Fraser spoke to reporters on the sidelines of a three-day cabinet retreat in Prince Edward Island.

The affordability crisis pushing many Canadians to the brink, in particular owing to rising housing costs, is at the top of the agenda for the meetings. The government wants to come up with new ways to make the first-time homebuyers’ market more accessible and also address rental costs that are increasingly unsustainable for lower- and middle-income households.

Postsecondary schools in Canada have relied more and more on international students for their revenue streams because their tuition fees are much higher than the fees paid by domestic students.

Mr. Fraser said the federal government needs to work with colleges and universities to ensure those institutions also take responsibility for housing the record numbers of international students they’re accepting.

He also said the government needs to more closely scrutinize private colleges, some of which he suggested were illegitimate and taking advantage of the international student permit system.

Some of those schools “exist purely to profit off the backs of vulnerable international students,” Mr. Fraser said. He added that there are some “plaza colleges” that have up to six times more students enrolled than physical space for them in their buildings.

“Not all private colleges should be treated with the same brush,” he said. “There are good private institutions out there and separating the wheat from the chaff is going to be a big focus of the work.”

As part of the federal cabinet’s focus on the housing crisis, it will hear from two of the authors of a report released last week. That report says the spike in rental housing costs is in part attributed to the growth in young adults living in Canada, which is in part linked to the rise in international students

The authors call on the government to establish an industrial strategy for housing, saying that in order to restore affordability by 2030, the country needs to build 5.8 million more housing units, of which approximately two million should be rentals.

In Ottawa, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre blamed the government for the sky-high housing costs, noting the rapid rise has happened under Mr. Trudeau’s watch.

“Now he wants Canadians to forget all that and blame immigrants; he wants to divide people to distract from his failings,” Mr. Poilievre told reporters on Parliament Hill.

Mr. Poilievre would not say whether he would lower immigration levels, and instead said that Ottawa needs to crack down on slow-moving municipal bureaucracies that make it harder to start construction projects.

In Charlottetown, the Housing Minister stressed the need to be “really, really careful” not to blame immigrants for Canada’s housing crisis. And Mr. Fraser dismissed Mr. Poilievre’s criticism entirely, saying the Conservatives are now promising what the Liberals have already campaigned on in past elections.

At a separate press conference, Mr. Trudeau told reporters in Cornwall, PEI, that immigration is a key part of the solution for Canada’s housing shortage because the construction industry needs more skilled labour.

“There’s much more we need to do on housing and we’re continuing to step up,” he said. “But we’re going to continue to be the open, welcoming, prosperous and growing country we’ve always been, because that has been something that has led to great opportunities and prosperity for all Canadians.”

Source: Federal government should look at cap on student visas, Housing Minister Sean Fraser says

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Regg Cohn: Doug Ford hits a new low by using immigrants to sell his Greenbelt scheme

2023/08/23 Leave a comment

Of note:

Doug Ford is peddling a risky strategy to save his political skin, and it’s not pretty.

It goes like this:

Unless we gut the Greenbelt, we can’t construct all the homes needed for waves of new immigrants and refugees.

And unless we build all that new housing urgently, resentment will build up rapidly against all those newcomers.

Day after day, as the premier digs himself into a deeper and deeper political hole, he repeatedly raises the alarm: If you block the bulldozing of protected lands, you risk a popular backlash.

Far better to let me unravel the Greenbelt than allow my opponents to undermine tolerance for immigrants and refugees — which will surely happen if anyone thwarts my controversial new housing plan. Unless you let me chew up those protected lands, we will all choke on a housing shortage that is somehow the fault of foreigners.

If Ford’s fanciful scenario sounds over the top, the unpleasant reality is that he has hit a new low. Just listen to how Ontario’s premier keeps drumming up support by whipping up fears of an unaffordable foreign influx:

“Failing to act threatens to erode Canadians’ so-far unwavering support for immigration,” Ford claimed on Aug. 9, the day the auditor general delivered a damning report of his government’s political interference in gifting Greenbelt lands worth $8.28 billion to “favoured” developers.

He used the same phrasing again two days later, reading from the same Teleprompter: “Failing to act threatens to erode our unwavering support for immigration.”

Again on Monday, in a highly touted speech to municipal leaders from across the province, the premier repeated his gut-the-Greenbelt-or-else warning: “Failing that would threaten to erode Canadians’ unwavering support for immigration.”

Over and over, again and again, Ford purports to be raising the alarm in his role as a guardian of social cohesion. But if tolerance is truly his goal, the premier is playing with rhetorical fire.

It’s not a dog whistle. It’s a bullhorn being blown from Ford’s bully pulpit.

The premier’s comments this week to the Association of Municipalities of Ontario were especially unseemly and unsettling. His speech brought back memories of Ford’s performance in early 2018, when he told an audience of northern mayors that he wanted to put Ontarians to work first, before ever letting in foreigners who might take their jobs.

Back then, Ford’s parochial pitch fell flat in front of a more worldly audience of northerners, who well understood the massive demand for talented foreign doctors and nurses, teachers and preachers, traders and tradespeople in their rapidly depopulating cities and towns. But it took a while for the premier to catch on.

Again in 2018, Ford turned his wrath on “illegal border-crossers,” picking a fight with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by claiming, wrongly, that “this mess was 100 per cent the result of the federal government.” It was an attempt to whip up resentment then, just as he risks fanning prejudice now.

Let’s be clear about the housing squeeze, the Greenbelt gambit and the foreign factor. No matter how many times Ford tries to connect the dots and paint by numbers, he is making it up as he goes along.

As much as Ford keeps pointing to future immigration levels as justification for his action, the truth is that the housing shortage long predates it. Even as the premier continually cites the Greenbelt giveaway as the prerequisite to building new homes, the reality is that his own housing advisory task force (and the auditor) argued the precise opposite.

In fact, there is more than enough land that can be repurposed to meet the government’s building targets without cannibalizing protected lands. In any case, the auditor’s report notes that the government had already met its specific housing targets last October, a full month before it suddenly went back to the well by targeting the Greenbelt.

There is no shortage of land in the region, just a paucity of political will and economic ambition. There is, however, a shortage of skilled labour today that will grow more acute in future, which explains the need for rising immigration targets.

Historically, there has been a remarkable political consensus on the benefits of immigration for a small population in a big country. That’s not to say that asking questions about the right level of immigration should be taboo.

But an elected leader must be mindful of his musings lest he legitimize the blaming and scapegoating of outsiders for our own internal miscalculations and misconceptions. Our housing shortage remains a homegrown problem, and our affordability challenges are not about foreigners.

The environmentally and agriculturally sensitive lands that form a protective cordon against uncontrolled urban sprawl are neither the problem nor the solution — just a distraction and a temptation. Which is why this Progressive Conservative government is playing a dangerous game by pretending we cannot afford to preserve the Greenbelt without fracturing societal tolerance toward newcomers.

This premier has vowed never to back down on his scandalous rezoning of the Greenbelt — a bonanza that is benefiting developers with billions of dollars in windfall profits. The least he could do is stop using immigrants and refugees as fodder for his speeches.

Source: Doug Ford hits a new low by using immigrants to sell his Greenbelt scheme

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Tom Flanagan: Why the Liberals once tried to ban Black immigration

2023/08/23 Leave a comment

Bit silly to tie this ban to the Liberals as Conservative government’s of that and other early periods were equally exclusionary:

“Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain….”

Oklahoma! is a classic work of American musical theatre. Probably everyone has heard some of the music even if they haven’t seen the stage play or movie. Composer Richard Rodgers and librettist Oscar Hammerstein immortalized the frontier conflict between “the cowman and the farmer” — but they left out a bigger, racially-charged conflict surrounding Oklahoma’s accession to statehood in 1907. This conflict included an inspiring Canadian dimension.

The new state had a large Indian population because it had been carved out of the United States’ Indian Territory. The so-called “Five Civilized Nations” of the southeastern American states (most notably the Cherokee), had been deported there in the 1830s by Democrat President Andrew Jackson in the infamous Trail of Tears expulsion.

These tribes had acquired, from their southern white neighbours, the practice of owning Black slaves. They brought along thousands of slaves, who became the nucleus of Oklahoma’s Black population. After the Union States of the North won the Civil War, the Indian tribes emancipated their slaves, but former slave-owners continued to look down on Black people. In this, they were joined by many white settlers who flooded into the Indian Territory from nearby southern states.

After the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 enunciated the odious segregationist doctrine of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, whites and Indians alike in Oklahoma began planning to entrench and extend “Jim Crow” segregation laws. Once Oklahoma became a state, legislators set to work, passing one Jim Crow law after another, segregating schools and public buildings, and outlawing interracial marriage.

Canada during this same period was actively seeking agricultural immigrants to fill up the Prairie provinces. Small groups of Oklahoma Blacks, led by their Baptist ministers, decided they didn’t like what statehood would mean for them without the protection of the U.S. federal government. As one immigrant put it: “Things began getting worse for our people. So, my father, always ambitious and proud, wanted to go where every man was accepted on his merit or demerit, regardless of race, colour or creed. So, in the summer of 1909, we moved to Canada.”

It was a long overland journey of more than 3,000 km. Between 1905 and 1911, about 1,000 Black people from Oklahoma moved to Canada to homestead in the West, establishing five small farming villages, of which the best-known were Eldon, near Maidstone in Saskatchewan, and Amber Valley, north of Edmonton in Alberta.

Some Canadians welcomed their new neighbours while others complained to the federal government. “We view with alarm the continuous and rapid influx of Negro settlers,” the Alberta chapter of the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire wrote to the minister of the interior in Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government.

In response, Laurier’s cabinet passed an order-in-council prohibiting Black immigration to Canada for one year. Its rationale? The “race is deemed unsuitable to the climate and requirements of Canada.” The order, however, did not need enforcement because the Liberal government had already run newspaper ads and sent speakers to Oklahoma to tell Blacks that they would not be happy in the cold Canadian climate. Laurier rescinded the order after losing the 1911 election, knowing that Robert Borden’s newly elected Conservative government would repeal it.

The Black homesteaders survived and thrived in their villages; their children and grandchildren eventually moved to the cities, and indeed all over the world. Today the largest concentration of their descendants remains in Edmonton. They founded the Shiloh Baptist Church there in 1910 because other churches didn’t want them as members. That church still functions as the religious home of a mixed-race congregation.

The U.S. was the world’s first large-scale democracy, which was truly a historic achievement. But the democratic rule of the majority can lead to the oppression of racial minorities. Black Oklahomans found greater toleration in Canada’s constitutional monarchy than in American democracy.

Is it surprising that a Liberal government deliberately excluded the Black race from immigrating to Canada? Not really. Liberal governments wrote the first Indian Act in 1876, banned Chinese immigration in the 1920s and interned Japanese Canadians during World War II.

Because of their suffering on the notorious Trail of Tears, the Five Civilized Nations are one of the prime victim groups of American history. Yet they adopted the practice of Black slavery from the whites who drove them out of their ancestral homes and continued it in the West.

Despite all these ironies and hypocrisies, this story had a happy ending. Freedom-seeking people found refuge and a new life in Canada, and that’s worth celebrating.

The original, full-length version of this essay was recently published in C2C Journal.

Tom Flanagan is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary.

Source: Tom Flanagan: Why the Liberals once tried to ban Black immigration

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Mike Moffatt: Canada’s housing crisis demands a war-time effort

2023/08/22 Leave a comment

Hard to disagree with Prof Moffatt but how realistic is that his recommendations can or will be implemented in the short-term. Much more complex that rolling out pandemic income benefits and complex jurisdictional issues and a federal government that has “Deliverology” implementation issues.

But a really good article by which government action (or inaction…) can be judged. And while I am being repetitive, need to address the demand side (permanent and temporary migration) along with the supply side:

A war-time-like effort is needed for Canada to build the 5.8 million homesthe Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) estimates need to be built by the end of 2030 to restore affordability. This goal can only be achieved through a robust industrial strategy, as a “more of the same” strategy is doomed to fail in at least three different ways.

The first failure point is speed. The CMHC target requires Canada to triple homebuilding in a short period, and we cannot scale that construction sector that quickly without innovation. The second is labour shortages. Canada needs a robust housing workforce strategy to increase the talent pool from electricians to urban planners, but that will not be sufficient. Housing construction must experience rapid productivity increases. The third is climate change. Simply tripling what we are doing now will not be compatible with Canada’s climate targets due to emissions from construction and land-use changes. Furthermore, we must ensure that what gets built is resilient to a changing climate.

A federal industrial strategy can address all of these by changing what we build and how we build to make the process faster, less labour-intensive, and more climate-friendly. The government can begin by curating a list of climate-friendly, less-labour-intensive building methods that exist today in Canada but need support and expansion financing to grow, such as mass timber, modular homes, panelization, and 3D printed homes. 

Next, a strategy is needed to create a market for these technologies. The CMHC can facilitate this by creating a free catalogue of designs as they did in the 1940s. This catalogue would include designs for various housing types incorporating these technologies, from midrise apartment buildings to student residences, with diverse designs appropriate for different climate conditions. Builders using these designs could be fast-tracked for regulatory approvals, such as ones from the CMHC, since the building design had already been approved.

Government can act as the first customer for these projects, further accelerating uptake. It can build homes to address the estimated 4,500-unit shortage for Canadian Armed Forces families. Social housing can be built with the use of an acquisition fund. Colleges and universities should be given funding and instructed to build on-campus student housing to support a rapidly growing population of international students or risk losing their status as designated learning institutions, which would eliminate their ability to bring in those international students.

Tweaks to the tax system will be needed to help make these projects viable, from removing the HST on purpose-built rental construction to reintroducing accelerated capital costprovisions. The approvals process at all orders of government must be streamlined, and agencies must be staffed up to address backlogs, such as in the CMHC’s MLI Select program. Building codes will need to be amended to be compatible with these technologies, and zoning codes will need to be amended to allow for more as-of-right construction, such as in New Zealand, where six-story apartment buildings are permissible as-of-right within 800 metres of any transit station.

The federal government cannot alter municipal zoning codes, but it can offer incentives to do so. It could set up a set of minimum standards (call it a National Zoning Code), and any municipality that altered its zoning code to be compliant could be given one-time per-capita funding to spend on infrastructure construction and maintenance, no other strings attached. For example, a $200 per-capita fund would give the City of Toronto an additional $600 million to upgrade infrastructure and cost the federal government a maximum of $8 billion should every municipality in Canada sign-up. It could also follow Australia’s lead, which is giving states an extra $15,000 for every home built over a target. These incentives would not only cause provinces and municipalities to approve more homes, but they would also give them the infrastructure funding holding up current homebuilding. 

We should view this strategy as an investment, not a cost, as the economic opportunities are enormous. New housing will allow workers to live closer to opportunities, and scaling up these technologies creates manufacturing jobs across Canada and new products to export worldwide.

The key to this industrial strategy working is speed. The federal government must avoid setting up new approvals processes and micromanaging the system. Instead, it should set straightforward standards, and as long as those standards are met, approvals should be granted and payments made. New infrastructure funding to municipalities should not be on a project application basis, as it slows the process, and cities know best what they need.

We are in a crisis, and a war-time-like effort is needed. The federal government must prioritize speed and act now.

Source: Mike Moffatt: Canada’s housing crisis demands a war-time effort

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

ICYMI: ‘Some of my closest friends are from Iran’: How this human rights hearing sparked a fight over ‘unconscious bias’

2023/08/22 Leave a comment

Interesting case, which seem always to follow Professor Attaran. And while “some of my closest friends…” arguments can hide explicit or unconscious bias, one needs to assess the context of the remarks and the actual behaviour of the person involved.

An unfortunate side effect of this case is that it provides a disincentive for public office holders to share more of their thinking:

The former head of Canada’s human rights watchdog may have left the door open for an appeal of one of his final rulings by taking the time to make clear his views on the topic — and allegations — of “unconscious bias.”

In doing so, he opened a rare window, observers say, into the private thinking of an adjudicator — one that may now become the subject of scrutiny before the courts.

In July, David Thomas, the former chair of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, dismissed a complaint against the Immigration Department.

Thomas also took the unusual step of including a seven-page addendum with his 109-page decision. In those extra pages, he addressed the fact that he had been accused of unconscious bias during some heated exchanges at the hearing.

“I feel the need to speak on the record from a personal perspective,” Thomas wrote. “Allegations of racial bias are very toxic in today’s world. The mere allegation of such impropriety carries with it significant stigmatization.

“It is often very difficult for the accused to achieve redemption because the allegation, though difficult to prove, is also quite difficult to disprove. My personal reputation was impugned by Dr. Attaran’s allegation, so I wish to reply to defend myself.”

The case Thomas was hearing centred on a human rights complaint brought by Amir Attaran, a University of Ottawa law professor and an American-born Iranian.

In 2009, Attaran had applied to sponsor his aging parents, both U.S. citizens, to Canada under the family class immigration program.

The next year, he complained to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, claiming the Immigration Department discriminated against parents and grandparents by delaying the processing of their applications based on age, race, family status and national/ethnic origin.

It was taking immigration officials, at the time of the complaint, 42 days to screen the sponsors of spouses and children — but 37 months for those who wanted to bring their parents and grandparents to Canada.

After some legal wranglings and delays caused by COVID-19, Attaran’s complaint was heard in 2021 by Thomas, who left the tribunal later that year but continued to preside over the case.

Thomas said in dismissing the complaint that both Attaran and the commission, as a party at the hearing, failed to establish a “prima facie” case demonstrating “adverse” differential treatment in the provision of a service by the Immigration Department.

The commission is mandated to promote human rights through education, research and policy development, and is responsible for screening human rights complaints and referring them to the tribunal, the independent body responsible for hearing the cases.

The tribunal ruled in favour of the government’s arguments that the delays in processing parent and grandparent sponsorships were caused by Canada’s annual immigration levels plans and the immigration minister’s instructions — neither of which is considered “a service” under the Canadian Human Rights Act.

While the process for parents’ and grandparents’ applications may be different from spousal sponsorships, the tribunal dismissed the allegation that the practices were discriminatory.

That was the ruling. Then came the addendum.

In it, Thomas referred to Attaran’s “insinuations” of bias, including a suggestion that he had given preferential treatment to a government witness because the adjudicator and the government witness were both white men, rather than to the complainant’s expert witness, who was female and Asian.

Thomas also made reference to an incident during the hearing in which he called out the “mannerisms” that Attaran demonstrated as others spoke — rolling his head back, mock-laughing and throwing his face into his hands — that prompted the complainant to raise his concern over the perception of bias.

“I honestly feel it gives rise to an apprehension of unconscious bias. I have spent my entire working life, as a minority person, being told I should speak differently, I should behave differently, it is not something I welcome,” Thomas quoted Attaran in his addendum.

“And I am unhappy that it has happened here and from somebody I respect, as I very much do you. The case law requires me to put notice of an apprehension of bias on the record when it happens.”

Attaran did not ask the adjudicator to recuse himself.

Although Thomas in his decision recognized Attaran had the “protected characteristics” under the human rights act, he said he did not observe the complainant to speak with an accent or differently from any North American.

“I have only seen him on a video screen. He does not even appear to me to be a visible minority. Perhaps it might be different in person. I also highly doubt that I have a subconscious bias against people with a Persian ethnic background,” Thomas continued.

“Some of my closest friends are from Iran, including my college roommate who has remained a lifelong friend and participated as a groomsman at my wedding. In the absence of a motion for my recusal, I did not view the allegation as being serious. I perceived it more as an attempt to intimidate me, which it did not.”

Thomas went on to trace unconscious bias to the “controversial” implicit-bias test developed by researchers 30 years ago that he said failed to meet “the accepted standard of consistent test results” and suggested the implications to discrimination were not “supportable.”

“While the complainant may argue that the respondent is discriminatory due to the unconscious bias that is unseen, the respondent is equally open to argue that the complainant is delusional and seeing discrimination where it doesn’t exist,” Thomas wrote.

“Neither of these arguments are helpful to the adjudicator.”

In an interview, Attaran said he did not ask Thomas to recuse himself because he believed the comments on his “mannerisms” were a lapse of judgment.

Attaran defended his own demeanour at the hearing, saying cross-examinations can be unpleasant because no one likes to have their evidence pierced. But he took issue with Thomas’s claim that he couldn’t be biased against Iranians.

“This is basically like saying I can’t be a racist because I have a Black friend,” said Attaran. “I am not calling Mr. Thomas a racist, but I am saying that his approach on unconscious bias and denying that I am a racial minority person is something a racist might do.”

The human rights tribunal refused to comment on the case, but said its adjudicators are independent decision-makers.

Thomas declined the Star’s request for interview, saying he will let the decision speak for itself.

“It would be highly inappropriate for me to make any comments about it at this time,” Thomas said in an email. “Decision-makers avoid speaking about their decisions while under review lest their comments be construed as supplemental reasons or something else that might interfere with the process which must run, undisturbed, through the courts.”

Generally, the court system is of the opinion that it’s difficult to prove bias against a tribunal adjudicator and that one must rely on surrounding circumstances to make any determination, because it’s impossible to get into the decision maker’s mind.

But what makes this human rights tribunal decision unusual — and potentially disputable — is that the adjudicator laid out his way of thinking and response in the seven-page addendum.

“The court said it’s difficult to get into the (person’s) state of the mind,” Caroline Carrasco, senior counsel of the Canadian Human Rights Commission on this case, said in an interview.

“I’m saying to you, though, I haven’t seen anything like this. It’s unconventional.”

She said that through the addendum: “We have an opportunity to get the personal perspective of a decision-maker on the issue of unconscious bias and his thoughts about the complaint.”

The human rights commission told the Star it’s appealing Thomas’s decision because the case touches on racial bias, systemic discrimination, the definition of service and the rights of older immigrants as they navigate Canada’s immigration processes.

Both the commission and Attaran, representing himself, have asked the Federal Court to overturn the tribunal decision, arguing that it was not transparent, intelligible and justified. They want the case referred back to the tribunal for reconsideration.

Source: ‘Some of my closest friends are from Iran’: How this human rights hearing sparked a fight over ‘unconscious bias’

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

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