Fines mounting for violations in Canada’s temporary foreign worker programs

2024/05/07 Leave a comment

Of note. Good and revealing data analysis:

The federal government penalized nearly 200 companies last year for violating the rules of its temporary foreign worker programs, resulting in record fines for infractions such as wage theft and abuse in the workplace.

Ottawa reached 194 decisions against non-compliant employers in 2023 and handed out $2.7-million in penalties, an average of $13,800 per decision, according to a Globe and Mail analysis of figures published by the government. Some employers have also been suspended from hiring temporary labour from outside the country.

While the government reached more decisions of non-compliance in 2021, last year set a new high for fines. And 2024 is shaping up to be even worse.

So far this year, the average fine is nearly $29,000, according to data pulled by The Globe in late April. In 2019, it was roughly $3,200….

Source: Fines mounting for violations in Canada’s temporary foreign worker programs

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Klein Halevi: The war against the Jewish story  

2024/05/06 Leave a comment

Necessary read and questioning of the approach and effectiveness previous and current Holocaust education:

How has it come to this? How is it possible that Israel, rather than radical Islamism, would become the villain on liberal campuses? That thousands of students would be chanting “from the river to the sea” even as the Hamas massacre revealed that slogan’s genocidal implications? That the most passionate outbreak of student activism since the 1960s would be devoted to delegitimizing the Jewish people’s story of triumph over annihilation? 

This moment didn’t happen in a vacuum. The anti-Zionist forces in academia have been preparing the ground for decades, systematically dismantling the moral basis of each stage of Zionist and Israeli history. 

The attack began on the very origins of Zionism, which was transformed from a story of a dispossessed people re-indigenizing in its ancient homeland into one more sordid expression of European colonialism. (Europe’s post-Holocaust gift to the Jews: leaving us with the bill for its sins.) 

Next, the birth of Israel in 1948 was reduced to the Nakba, or catastrophe, a Palestinian narrative of total innocence that ignores the ethnic cleansing of Jews from every place where Arab armies were victorious and the subsequent uprooting of the entire Jewish population of the Muslim world. Post-1967 Israel was cast as an apartheid state – turning Zionism, a multi-faceted movement representing Jews across the political and religious spectrum into a racist ideology and reducing an agonizingly complex national conflict into a medieval passion play about Jewish perfidy. 

And now, with the Gaza War, we have come to the genocide canard, the endpoint in the process of delegitimization.

To turn Israel into the world’s arch-criminal requires three forms of erasure. The first is of the connection between the land of Israel and the people of Israel. In the anti-Zionist telling of the conflict, a 4,000-year connection that has been the heart of Jewish identity and faith is irrelevant, if not contrived outright by Zionists.

The second is the erasure of the relentless war against Israel, placing its actions under a microscope while downplaying or entirely ignoring the aggression of its enemies. There is never any context to Israel’s actions. Only by erasing Hamas’s atrocities can Israel be turned into the villain of this war. 

In focusing on Israel’s actions and dismissing those of Hamas, campus protesters are providing cover for October 7 denialism. This is a new version of the Holocaust denialism prevalent in parts of the Muslim world: The atrocities didn’t happen, you deserved them and we’re going to do it again (and again). 

On a recent trip to New York, walking along Broadway on the Upper West Side, I saw dozens of defaced posters of kidnapped Israelis. Rather than tear down the posters, the vandals had blacked out the Israeli faces – a literal defacement. And a useful metaphor for the anti-Zionist assault on our being.

The third form of erasure is dismissing the history of peace offers presented or accepted by Israel and uniformly rejected by the Palestinian side. No offer – an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, the re-division of Jerusalem, the uprooting of dozens of settlements – was ever sufficient. It is hard to think of another national movement representing a stateless people that rejected more offers of self-determination than the Palestinian leadership.

The ease with which anti-Zionists have managed to portray the Jewish state as genocidal, a successor to Nazi Germany, marks a historic failure of Holocaust education in the West.

This moment requires a fundamental rethinking of the goals and methodology of Holocaust education. By over-emphasizing the necessary universal lessons of the Holocaust, many educators too easily equated antisemitism with generic racism. The intention was noble: to render the Holocaust relevant to a new generation. But in the process, the essential lesson of the Holocaust – the uniqueness not only of the event itself but of the hatred that made it possible – was often lost. 

Antisemitism is not merely the hatred of Jews as other but the symbolization of The Jew – that is, turning the Jews into the symbol for whatever a given civilization defines as its most loathsome qualities. For Christianity until the Holocaust, The Jew was Christ-killer; for Marxism, the ultimate capitalist; for Nazism, the defiler of race. And now, in the era of anti-racism, the Jewish state is the embodiment of racism. 

Holocaust education was intended, in large part, to protect the Jewish people from a recurrence of the antisemitism that reduces Jews to symbols. Yet the movement to turn Israel into the world’s criminal nation emerges from a generation that was raised with Holocaust consciousness, both in formal education and the arts. And this latest expression of the antisemitism of symbols is justified by some anti-Zionists as honoring “the lessons of the Holocaust.” 

Unlike the Iranian regime, which clumsily tries to deny the historicity of the Holocaust, anti-Zionists in the West intuitively understand that coopting and inverting the Holocaust is a far more effective way of neutralizing its impact.

Many, perhaps most, of the campus protesters are likely not antisemitic. They may have Jewish friends or be Jewish themselves. But that is irrelevant: They are enabling an antisemitic moment.

What is under assault is the integrity of the mid-20th century Jewish story, of a people rejecting the self-pity of victimhood and fulfilling its most improbable dream: renewing itself, in its broken old age, in the land of its youth. The shift from the lowest point Jews have known to the reclamation of power and self-confidence is one of the most astonishing feats of survival not only in Jewish but world history. It is that story that is being distorted and trivialized and demonized on liberal campuses. 

I recently completed a lecture tour of some of the most Jewishly problematic campuses, from Columbia to Berkeley. In meetings with Jewish students, I was repeatedly told about a pervasive atmosphere of hostility toward Israel, even among many otherwise apolitical students. While the protests are an immediate threat to Jewish well-being on campus, the far deeper problem is the impact of the anti-Zionist campaign, linking the name “Israel” with racism and genocide. The vulgar protesters are a small minority, but they are shaping the attitudes of a whole generation. 

By focusing only on the immediate threat of the protests, we risk repeating the mistake we’ve made over the last decades of failing to adequately confront the systematic assault on our story.

We are losing a generation, but we haven’t yet lost. Like other radical movements, anti-Zionism could go too far in its righteous rage, potentially alienating the majority. Perhaps that process has already begun. 

The challenge of our generation is to defend the story we inherited from the survivor generation. We need to tell that story with moral credibility, in all its complexity, frankly owning our flaws even as we celebrate our successes, acknowledging the Palestinian narrative even as we insist on the integrity of our own. 

We desperately need new strategies to counter the anti-Zionist assault. A good beginning would be the creation of a brain trust, composed of community activists, rabbis, journalists, historians, public relations experts, that would devise both immediate responses to the current crisis and a long-term strategy, emulating the decades-long patient work of the anti-Zionists. 

The Jews are a story we tell ourselves about who we think we are; without our story, there is no Judaism. It is long past time to mount a credible defense of our mid-20th century story, which continues to sustain us as a people. 

Source: Klein Halevi: The war against the Jewish story  

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with

Some cities allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. Their turnout is quite low

2024/05/06 Leave a comment

Of note. Not surprised. Those that argue that non-citizen voting will increase municipal vote turnout should look at this case study. Similar to those advocating for no restrictions on voting by Canadian expatriates; while the number of registered voters and votes casts doubled, the numbers were still tiny (55,000 registered) compared to an estimated expatriate adult population of less than three million:

Three cities in Vermont now allow non-U.S. citizen residents to vote in local elections.

Winooski is one of those municipalities. It just held its third local election with noncitizen voting.

“Thirteen hundred and 45 people participated in our annual city and school election,” Winooski Clerk Jenny Willingham said about March’s contests. “Eleven of those ballots cast were from our all-resident voting,” a category that includes green-card holders, refugees and asylum-seekers.

In Vermont and elsewhere, municipalities that allow noncitizen voting in local elections have seen similar low voter registration rates and turnout. Local leaders are trying to parse out why.

That’s as noncitizen voting has emerged as a national flashpoint this election year. Republicans including former President Donald Trump are pushing legislation aimed at stopping noncitizens from voting in federal elections — which is already illegal and, by all accounts, very rare.

Small numbers of ballots cast

In Winooski, getting those 11 noncitizen votes cast in March’s races took a lot of legwork for Willingham. She had the ballots printed in 12 languages and had four interpreters — speaking Burmese, Nepali, Swahili and Somali — working on Election Day.

Burlington, Vermont’s largest city, counted 62 votes by noncitizens, accounting for less than half of 1% of the nearly 15,000 total votes cast.

In Montpelier, the state’s capital, 13 noncitizens voted. There are so few noncitizen registered voters that Clerk John Odum keeps their paperwork in a half-inch blue binder.

This trend extends outside Vermont. Takoma Park, Md., legalized local noncitizen voting 30 years ago. Still, registration and turnout remain relatively low.

There are ongoing grassroots efforts in Vermont to increase voter participation among green-card holders, refugees and asylum-seekers. The League of Women Voters distributes pamphlets and holds info sessions.

The city of Burlington pays outreach workers like Jules Wetchi, an immigrant from the Democratic Republic of Congo, to connect with immigrant communities. Wetchi hosts local radio and TV shows geared at French-speaking new Americans.

“I did what they call civic education to push people to know how they should be engaged to vote, because it’s very important,” Wetchi said. “This is our second country. We are living here — we should be more engaged to the political situation.”

Fear as a barrier to voting

But Wetchi said fear is one of the barriers to the ballot box. People have told him they’re afraid they might get harassed when they vote. Others worry that voting might negatively affect their U.S. citizenship application, even if their city clerk assures them that it won’t.

Some of that fear stems from the national spotlight on this issue, which got brighter last month when Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson pushed a measure that would add citizenship documentation requirements for voters.

Vermont Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas, a Democrat, said she understands why some Vermonters are reluctant to have their names on a list of non-U.S. citizens that’s accessible with a public records request.

“We are a nation of immigrants. So it’s wild to imagine how we got to this place where we have to worry about these things,” she said.

Winooski and Montpelier were sued by the state and national Republican parties to try to stop local noncitizen voting. The lawsuits were thrown out, but Copeland Hanzas wondered whether they added to the chilling effect.

“I’m quite certain that there are more folks who would have been eligible to vote in those local elections,” she said.

In Washington, D.C., Republicans in Congress are trying to block a law that allows noncitizens to vote in local D.C. elections. The law went into effect in January. As of April 30, there were 372 noncitizens registered in a city with around 450,000 total registered voters.

D.C. Board of Elections staff members are doing their best to keep their heads down and not let the controversy affect their work, said Executive Director Monica Holman Evans.

“I receive the quote-unquote attacks or the quote-unquote comments, commentary, opinions about it,” she said. “And I’m just very clear that I don’t take an opinion on this or any other legislation that has been passed in the District of Columbia. Our job is to enforce what’s currently in effect.”

Vermont’s local election officials also said they feel the heat from the national spotlight. They know that one slip-up, like a presidential ballot being mailed to a noncitizen, could end up on the national news.

Larger jurisdictions like D.C. have voter databases that can track noncitizen voters. Vermont doesn’t yet; the secretary of state’s office said one is in the works.

In the meantime, clerks use Excel spreadsheets and three-ring binders to track noncitizen voters. Willingham, Winooski’s clerk, keeps her noncitizen voter registrations in a manila folder in a filing cabinet next to her desk.

“I feel like I check and then I recheck just to make sure that everything is correct, that they are only voting in the elections that our charter has declared,” she said.

Despite the low turnout, the mere fact that noncitizen voting is on the books means a lot to many immigrants in Vermont. Wetchi’s mother recently made the move to Vermont from the Democratic Republic of Congo. She speaks only Swahili and a local dialect, but Wetchi said he hopes she can vote one day.

“Because her voice is very important. Her voice can change many things,” he said.

The thing is, Wetchi and his family just moved to the city of South Burlington, which doesn’t have noncitizen voting. His mom can’t vote there. But he can — he’s a full citizen. He’s even thinking about running for office one day.

Source: Some cities allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. Their turnout is quite low

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Clark: Foreign interference is a threat chipping away at pieces of democracy

2024/05/06 Leave a comment

Good commentary on risks:

….Instead, Justice Hogue’s report describes foreign actors – China, mainly – chipping away at pieces of Canada’s democracy. But those pieces matter. And they add up.

“It is likely to increase and have negative consequences for our democracy unless vigorous measures are taken to detect it and better counter it,” Justice Hogue wrote.

That’s the conclusion worth following here. Canadians – voters, candidates, constituents – feel real effects. Diaspora communities feel intimidated. There is a risk politicians alter their messages out of fear of foreign governments. And this is a growing danger…..

Source: Foreign interference is a threat chipping away at pieces of democracy

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Widening Racial Disparities Underlie Rise in Child Deaths in the U.S.

2024/05/06 Leave a comment

Of note:

Thanks to advancements in medicine and insurance, mortality rates for children in the United States had been shrinking for decades. But last year, researchers uncovered a worrisome reversal: The child death rate was rising.

Now, they have taken their analysis a step further. A new study, published Saturday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, revealed growing disparities in child death rates across racial and ethnic groups. Black and Native American youths ages 1 to 19 died at significantly higher rates than white youths — predominantly from injuries such as car accidents, homicides and suicides.

Dr. Coleen Cunningham, chair of pediatrics at the University of California, Irvine, and the pediatrician in chief at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, who was not involved in the study, said the detailed analysis of the disparities documented “a sad and growing American tragedy.”

“Almost all are preventable,” she said, “if we make it a priority.”

Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and Children’s Hospital of Richmond had previously revealed that mortality rates among children and adolescents had risen by 18 percent between 2019 and 2021. Deaths related to injuries had grown so dramatically that they eclipsed all public health gains.

The group, seeking to drill deeper into the worrying trend, obtained death certificate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s public WONDER database and stratified it by race, ethnicity and cause for children ages 1 to 19. They found that Black and American Indian/Alaska Native children were not only dying at significantly higher rates than white children but that the disparities — which had been improving until 2013 — were widening.

The data also revealed that while the mortality rates for children overall took a turn for the worse around 2020, the rates for Black, Native American and Hispanic children had begun increasing much earlier, around 2014.

Between 2014 and 2020, the death rates for Black children and teenagers rose by about 37 percent, and for Native American youths by about by about 22 percent — compared with less than 5 percent for white youths.

“We knew we would find disparities, but certainly not this large,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of family medicine at the V.C.U. School of Medicine, who worked on the research. “We were shocked.”

The racial and ethnic disparities were most drastic when injuries were isolated from other causes of death. For example, Black children died by homicide at 10 times the rate of white children between 2016 and 2020. When the study’s lead author, Dr. Elizabeth Wolf, an associate professor of pediatrics at the V.C.U. School of Medicine, compared accidents with intentional injuries, the sobering realities of the mental health crisis came into focus.

Native American children died by suicide at more than twice the rate of white children, whose rate was already high.

“As a pediatrician, that really took my breath away,” she said.

Gun-related deaths, including accidents, homicides and suicides, were two to four times as high among Black and Native American youths than among white youths, and the risk of dying from a gun-related injury more than doubled among Black and Native American youths between 2013 and 2020.

The researchers also drew attention to disparities in other causes of death: Native American children died from pneumonia and the flu at three times the rate of white children, for example, and Black children died from asthma at almost eight times the rate of white children.

This particular study did not examine all of the variables that contribute to the causes of childhood illness, injury and death. Dr. Wolf said she hoped the paper would serve as a “wake-up call” and galvanize researchers to scrutinize the underlying factors.

Understanding the reasons for the increase in car accident deaths, for example, could determine whether redesigned intersections or targeted seatbelt campaigns would be the most effective intervention for a specific group.

For other childhood deaths, access to care is a likely factor, given that Black children with circulatory diseases are less likely to be referred for transplants and less likely to have a successful procedure compared to white children. Asthma-related disease and death are likely to be affected by access to interventions such as inhalers, as well as socioeconomic and environmental factors like air pollution.

At the same time, Dr. Woolf said, policymakers should not “wait for more research to identify the obvious next steps,” including mental health support for children and stricter gun laws. The public perception of gun violence among children is often focused on school shootings, he said, but statistically speaking, “the vast majority occur in communities across our country — day by day, one by one.”

Source: Widening Racial Disparities Underlie Rise in Child Deaths in the U.S.

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Social justice or medical expertise: What do patients want more from their doctors?

2024/05/06 Leave a comment

Rhetorical question for patients. One thing to have awareness and understanding of the social determinants of health and to improve data and understanding of health factors that affect different groups, but how will anti-oppression language improve health outcomes:

For over a year Canadian physicians have been debating the CanMEDS roles, which is a framework describing the competencies required of specialist doctors certified by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. These roles are taught in medical school and form part of the basis for the students’ evaluations.

The roles include physician as communicator, collaborator, leader, health advocate scholar and professional. The central role is physician as medical expert, which integrates the other roles.

In the March 2023 special issue of the Canadian Medical Education Journal, the CanMEDS 2025 interim report was distributed for open public feedback and included a suggestion to centre social justice anti-racism and anti-oppression, rather than medical expertise.

A massive push back from physicians against the decentering of medical expertise arose and has been continuing since publication of the report.

Now, in a March 2024 issue of the CJME, one of the authors of the March 2023 report and others are responding to the negative responses. They claim that opposition to the decentering of medical expertise simply represents “medicine perpetuat(ing) its own power” and maintaining “medicine as an institution steeped in power and privilege.”

This is a deadly serious issue for medical education and for the care of patients. It matters not whether a surgeon is engaged in social justice for the patient who makes it to the operating room. At that point only medical expertise counts.

I learned this during my training at St. Michael’s Hospital in the late 1970s. A man living in a shelter was admitted to hospital for an urgent heart valve replacement. The surgeons saved his life but were not focused on social justice. Their expertise and attention were directed to the patient and nothing else.

Of course, post surgically he had no place to live and hospital personnel had a duty to find him an adequate place to which he could be discharged. But that would be all for naught had it not been for the expertise of the surgeons. That determined everything else. Medical expertise trumped all.

Confronting inequities and racism in health care is inseparable from confronting system-wide and societal inequities. Doctors alone cannot solve that, but they can at least be competent physicians technically and remain current on the science and standards of care for ailing people.

Beyond that they may choose to engage as any other caring citizen and fight fiercely for justice, freedom and truth in the health care system and in general.

They cannot be taught, mandated, and scripted to do so in the detached world of academic medicine. That is elitism at its worst, as if doctors should lead the charge for social justice.

There is a certain personal irony for me. Nearly 20 years ago I gave the first advocacy lecture in the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine undergraduate curriculum. I stated up front to the students that I was not sure why I was even giving the lecture. I have given the same talk dozens of times since.

Here is how I introduced my talk and then with breathtaking hypocrisy continued on with the presentation:

“In my judgment, all advocacy means is being a socially responsible and good citizen, values both personal and ideological that are part of being a human and could not possibly — and maybe, should not — be taught by the universities. After all, what business is it of medical faculties to be teaching and evaluating political philosophies within the context of a curriculum?

“But how can the matter of advocacy be incorporated into medical practice and medical school curricula? It should be expected that physicians advocate on behalf of individual patients, who might benefit from an experimental therapy for a life-threatening disease. Physicians should actively intervene on behalf of a group of patients who are being denied access to a standard treatment. And physicians must intervene when a neighbourhood is at a health risk because, for example, of an environmental hazard.”

I still do not think that it is the business of medical faculties to be teaching and evaluating political philosophies within the context of a curriculum.

The public, if they were ever asked I am certain, would choose a competent surgeon, if that is all the surgeon could offer. They can secure their social justice elsewhere, with or without doctors.

Philip Berger is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a longstanding downtown Toronto physician.

Source: Social justice or medical expertise: What do patients want more from their doctors?

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Immigration is surging, with big economic consequences

2024/05/04 Leave a comment

From the Economist, with some good comparative stats:

…There is one context in which averages matter: the provision of public services. If gdp per person falls, their quality might deteriorate. For this reason, Milton Friedman once remarked that “you cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state”. The state is under pressure in much of the rich world. Roads are congested and in countries with public health care, hospital waiting lists are long. “Those are not externalities, those are direct effects of new market participants affecting supply and demand,” says Mikal Skuterud of the University of Waterloo.

The crucial question is whether new arrivals on net contribute to or drain from the public coffers. High-skilled types make enormous net fiscal contributions. But for low-skilled workers the question is harder to answer. In immigrants’ favour is the fact that, because they typically arrive as adults, they do not require public schooling, which is expensive. And they may even prop up public services directly. The largest increase in British work-visa issuance last year, of 157%, was for desperately needed health and care workers.

Potential trouble comes later. Immigrants age and retire. Social-security systems are often progressive, redistributing from rich to poor. Thus a low-earning migrant who claims a government pension—not to mention uses government-provided health care—could end up as a fiscal drag overall. They are most likely to have a positive lifetime effect on the public purse if they leave before they get old.

Quite how this shakes out depends on the country and immigrants in question. A review by America’s National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in 2016 estimated that the 75-year fiscal impact of an immigrant with less than a high-school education, at all levels of government and excluding public goods like national defence, was a negative $115,000 in 2012 dollars. By contrast, a study by Oxford Economics in 2018 found that in Britain about one-third of migrants had left the country ten years after arrival, although it did not distinguish them by skill level.

If the fiscal impact is positive, it will not be felt unless the government invests accordingly. A windfall is no good if public services are allowed to deteriorate anyway, as in Britain, where the government is cutting taxes ahead of an election. Similarly, if regulations stop infrastructure from expanding to accommodate arrivals, migration risks provoking a backlash. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of housing, where supply is strictly curtailed by excessive regulation in many of the same places now experiencing a migration surge. Migrants, like natives, need places to live, which increases the imperative to build. Welcoming new arrivals means a lot more than just letting them in. 

Source: Immigration is surging, with big economic consequences

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Israel plans changes to Palestinian education to remake how children are taught

2024/05/04 Leave a comment

Hard to see how this will work. And of course, similar care needs to be taken with the Israeli curriculum. Good concluding quote:

…Yuli Tamir, a scholar and former cabinet minister who is president of Beit Berl College, said changes to schools can only succeed if they comes with much broader social and political change.

Ms. Tamir, who was Israel’s education minister from 2006 to 2009, provoked an outcry when as part of an effort to teach Israeli students about Palestinian history she reintroduced to textbooks a mention of the nakba – when Israeli forces drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes 1948 – and a map containing the green line, the pre-1967 borders of Israel.

It was a “mild change,” Ms. Tamir said, designed to foster understanding. It didn’t last long. “They took it out immediately when I left.”

By the same token, she said, teachers in Gaza should not be held uniquely responsible for fighting antisemitism when “the whole system hates Jews – the parents, the authorities, the health care,” she said.

It takes a change in governing priorities, she said, for education to successfully shift course.

“Curriculum is a representation of the state,” she said. “More than a flag. Or an anthem. This is what you tell your children you are all about.”

Source: Israel plans changes to Palestinian education to remake how children are taught

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Douglas Todd: Anti-stigma campaigns need a complete rethink

2024/05/04 Leave a comment

Social norms often change through stigma as the smoking example illustrates. For the most part, the same phenomenon with overt racism, sexism and the like but as we see south of the border, limits to its effectiveness:

…More importantly, slavish commitment to anti-stigma theory is also out of place when we realize we live in a society, if you think about it for more than a few seconds, that is quite adept at stigmatizing certain behaviours.

Like cigarette smoking.

In the past 50 years North America’s public-health community has used the power of stigma to great effect. It launched anti-smoking advertising campaigns, complete with grisly death data, that eventually rendered smoking uncommon. Something similar happened with drunk driving. And it’s widely agreed that’s been a good thing.

So there is much to learn from the professor whom Bonnie Henry hired as a consultant. In their article in The Atlantic, Caulkins and Humphreys actually highlight B.C.’s policies, because this province has gone further than just about any place in North America in making harm reduction, and anti-stigma, the centre of its drug-response strategy.

B.C. “has decriminalized drugs, offers universal health care, and provides a range of health services to drug users, including clinic-provided heroin and legal provision of powerful opioids for unsupervised use,” write Caulkins and Humphreys.

“And yet its rate of drug-overdose fatalities is nearly identical to that of South Carolina, which relies on criminal punishments to deter use, and provides little in the way of harm-reduction services.”

Caulkins and Humphreys are not trying to suggest there is no place for empathy for those in the clutches of illicit drugs. As they say, when it comes to people who are addicted, it’s worth remembering the teaching, “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” The problem is the behaviour, not the person.

And to be clear, no single strategy will end today’s scourge of drug deaths. That means there is a role for safer supply and harm reduction. And there is huge space for compassion.

But there is also a time for social deterrence, as there has been with cigarette smoking. There is a time to reinforce the message that “one pill can kill.”

To put it directly, fentanyl and its ilk should be shunned.

Source: Douglas Todd: Anti-stigma campaigns need a complete rethink

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La bouée de sauvetage des travailleurs temporaires coule

2024/05/04 Leave a comment

Of note, regarding open work permits for Temporary Foreign Workers:

De Vancouver à Gaspé, des personnes immigrantes attendent durant des mois la réponse à leur demande de permis ouvert pour travailleurs vulnérables afin de fuir les abus qu’elles subissent. Un programme d’urgence censé offrir cette protection rapidement est bloqué, selon cinq organisations qui accompagnent les travailleurs dans de telles démarches.

Une forme de soupape pour remédier aux risques du permis lié à un seul employeur, appelé « permis fermé », le programme a été lancé en 2019 avec la promesse de traiter les demandes en cinq jours. Ce délai est d’autant plus problématique que les responsables politiques l’utilisent pour se défendre des critiques, notamment formulées par le rapporteur spécial des Nations unies sur les formes contemporaines d’esclavage.

Mais cette manière « rapide » de « régler la situation des employés vulnérables », comme l’a décrite le ministre de l’Immigration, Marc Miller, en commission parlementaire, est en panne. Sur la soixantaine de demandes que ces organisations ont soumises depuis janvier dernier, seulement cinq ont été traitées, ont-elles confirmé au Devoir. 

Sur les 1349 demandes reçues pour les trois premiers mois de l’année 2024, Réfugiés et Citoyenneté Canada (IRCC) n’a délivré que 201 permis jusqu’à maintenant, soit nettement sous la moyenne de l’an dernier. Une trentaine de permis seulement ont été octroyés en mars. La page Web du programme a été modifiée en catimini depuis novembre 2023.

Ces réponses qui arrivent au compte-gouttes créent une « situation intenable » et « énormément de pression » sur les immigrants, dit Noémie Beauvais, organisatrice communautaire au Centre des travailleuses et travailleurs immigrants (CTI).

« Quelqu’un m’appelle en détresse quasiment chaque jour », illustre Florian Freuchet, organisateur communautaire au CTI du Bas-Saint-Laurent…

Source: La bouée de sauvetage des travailleurs temporaires coule

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

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