Federal panel lists 35 ‘plausible’ future threats to Canada and the world

2024/05/22 Leave a comment

Of interest and not necessarily encouraging. Some have noted absence of possible regional or global war (given that at least two significant ones ongoing at present):

In a new report, a think-tank within Employment and Social Development Canada cites 35 “plausible” global disruptions that could reshape Canada and the world in the near future.

The Policy Horizons Canada (PHC) panel drafted the list and then asked more than 500 stakeholders within and outside government to suggest which ones were more likely, when they might happen and how one might trigger others.

The authors of the report point out that the list is an exploration of theoretical — not guaranteed — threats. They say that even “seemingly distant or improbable” calamities can become reality and thinking about them helps governments create “robust and resilient policies.”

Leading the report’s top ten list — those threats that could have the greatest impacts and are most likely to happen — is the threat to truth.

PHC’s report says that in as little as three years, the world’s “information ecosystem” could be flooded with misinformation and disinformation created by both people and artificial intelligence (AI).

It warns that algorithms designed to engage audiences emotionally rather than factually could “increase distrust and social fragmentation,” isolating people in “separate realities shaped by their personal media …”

“Public decision making could be compromised as institutions struggle to effectively communicate key messaging on education, public health, research and government information,” the report says.

The second and third threats on the top ten list are environmental: ecosystem collapse due to loss of biodiversity and extreme weather events overwhelming our ability to respond.

In five to six years, the report says, a collapse in biodiversity “could have cascading impacts on all living things, putting basic human needs such as clean air, water and food in jeopardy.”

It says that impacts on key industries like farming, fishing and logging could lead to “major economic loss,” leaving people unable to “meet their basic needs.”

The report warns the increasing frequency of wildfires, floods and severe storms could destroy property and infrastructure, displacing millions of people and worsening the mental health crisis.

AI could run wild

In as little as four to five years, cyber attacks could disable critical infrastructure and billionaires could use their influence to run the world, the PHC warns.

The report says that cyber attacks on critical infrastructure could leave governments struggling to deliver services and compromise access to essential goods.

And in five years, the report says, the super-rich could use their influence to shape public policy and impose their values and beliefs on the world, “bypassing democratic governance principles.”

“As their power grows, billionaires could gain warfare capabilities and control over natural resources and strategic assets,” the report says. “Some might co-opt national foreign policy or take unilateral diplomatic or military action, destabilizing international relations.”…

Source: Federal panel lists 35 ‘plausible’ future threats to Canada and the world

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Karas: Canada must tackle rising antisemitism and security risks:Karas:

2024/05/22 Leave a comment

Illustration of fears of some regarding the possible security risks, not totally unfounded:

The federal government’s plan to allow Palestinians from Gaza to come to Canada presents serious security risks.

Despite the screening protocols associated with the temporary measures for Gazans who have relatives in Canada, the prospect of a significant influx of Gazans raises legitimate concerns about the exacerbation of rising antisemitism, the incitement of violence against Jewish Canadians, and the escalation of social unrest.

Recent anti-Israel and antisemitic organized protests, such as unauthorized campus encampments at universities countrywide, highlight the pressing need for immediate government action and strict security measures.

It is no secret that the Canadian government has faced critical challenges in facilitating the relocation of Palestinians from Gaza. Despite processing close to a thousand applications, as of now, not a single individual has been granted admission under the program.

A primary hurdle arises from the difficulties faced by many visa applicants when attempting to enter Egypt for mandatory biometric screening. According to the former Canadian ambassador to Israel, Jon Allen, individuals from Gaza have used alternative routes, arranging costly departures through private Egyptian firms that allegedly engage in bribery involving Egyptian border guards and possibly Hamas operatives.

Concerns regarding the unofficial methods employed by Gazans at the Rafah border crossing into Egypt have led to visa cancellations on security grounds by Australia and other countries.

Controversy also surrounds the document requirements for Gazans seeking visas. Applicants must have up-to-date passports and provide thorough disclosure of personal backgrounds, encompassing employment records and social media activity. Critics argue that these measures are overly invasive and hard to comply with, and have pushed for more lenient criteria.

However, robust screening procedures are essential for safeguarding national security. If anything, the program’s inability to admit even a single Gazan who passes all security screenings and is allowed entry through legitimate channels emphasizes the immense challenge of vetting individuals from this region. It also highlights the considerable security risks tied to this temporary program initiative….

Source: Canada must tackle rising antisemitism and security risks

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“La France, tu l’aimes mais tu la quittes” : pourquoi des musulmans surdiplômés choisissent l’exil

2024/05/22 Leave a comment

One could likely, for a StatsCan fee, obtain data on the religion and visible minority background of immigrants from France by immigration period and category to further quantify this qualitative study:

C’est un phénomène inquantifiable. De plus en plus de Français de culture ou de religion musulmanes, issus de l’immigration postcoloniale, très diplômés, quitteraient la France pour s’installer au Royaume-Uni, au Canada, aux États-Unis, à Dubaï mais aussi au Maghreb. C’est ce qu’affirme l’enquête “La France, tu l’aimes mais tu la quittes” (éd. du Seuil), un titre en forme de clin d’œil au slogan de l’extrême droite “La France, aimez-la ou quittez-la” en vogue dans les années 1980.

Entre 2011 et 2023, trois universitaires, Olivier Esteves, Alice Picard et Julien Talpin, ont interrogé 1 070 personnes à l’aide d’un appel à témoignages lancé sur Mediapart puis mené 139 entretiens approfondis. Leur constat est sans appel : des Français de confession musulmane, pratiquants ou non, peinent à trouver leur place en France malgré des parcours universitaires accomplis (54 % des sondés ont un bac+5). Victimes de discriminations en raison de leur nom, leur apparence ou leur religion, de microagressions, les personnes interrogées témoignent d’une “islamophobie” devenue insupportable au point de choisir l’exil. Un phénomène exacerbé depuis les attentats de 2015 mais aussi par le discours antimusulman de certains politiques. “L’islam n’est pas compatible avec la France”, affirmait ainsi en 2021 celui qui allait devenir le candidat à la présidentielle du parti d’extrême droite Reconquête!, Éric Zemmour. Entretien avec Olivier Esteves, coauteur de l’ouvrage et professeur des universités en civilisation des pays anglophones à l’université de Lille.

Source: “La France, tu l’aimes mais tu la quittes” : pourquoi des musulmans surdiplômés choisissent l’exil

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Barbara Kay: Radical Islam’s western fangirls

2024/05/22 Leave a comment

Not a great fan of Kay in general but I have to admit having similar questions (as with LGBTQ). Remember a tweet from one asking why Iranian Canadians were not similarly supportive with the obvious reason most of them fled the Islamic Republic of Iran:

….Hamas’s leaders knew that in these quarters, their atrocities would be perceived through a political rather than a moral lens. So they correctly assumed their pogrom would be characterized as “resistance” rather than wanton iniquity.

Hamas terrorists didn’t even shy away from filming themselves torturing women and children, which they should have considered a risk. After all, plangent appeals for the world to condemn Israel’s alleged genocide in Gaza, based on the war deaths of their own women and children, are a staple of the pro-Palestinian party line. The sight of the bloodied and raped female victims on October 7 could have been — should have been — a deal-breaker for feminists everywhere.

But it seems Hamas knew their female audience, too. One of the striking features about Hamas’s useful-idiot entourage is the robust support it enjoys from progressive women, in glaring contrast to the robust revulsion that should have prevailed among feminists.

Some women have publicly denied the vicious sexual torture inflicted on Israeli women, or shrugged it off as a sidebar to the sacred mission of “resistance.” This, they parrot, may entail “any means necessary,” including the degradation of women for no purpose other than malicious male pleasure. Evidence of western women’s indifference to Israeli women’s victimhood can be found in the fact that UN Women waited for months after the pogrom before condemning the rapes or Hamas.

A subset of anti-Zionist women appear to have taken their support to the next level. On some campuses, protesters are taking part in Islamic prayers. At UCLA, and elsewhere, to the consternation of some Muslim women living under Islamic regimes where the hijab is a symbol of oppression, some white female students bowing down in submission to Allah have taken to wearing hijabs in solidarity with their Palestinian comrades. Some young people have even reportedly converted to Islam as a result of the Israel-Hamas war, and others may soon follow suit….

Source: Barbara Kay: Radical Islam’s western fangirls

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Fears of new Windrush as thousands of UK immigrants face ‘cliff edge’ visa change

2024/05/22 Leave a comment

Of note, more an implementation issue than policy (where governments often fall short):

Lawyers and migrant rights campaigners have warned that the government is heading for a repeat of the Windrush scandal after imposing a “cliff edge” deadline for immigrants to switch to new digital visas.

By the end of this year an estimated 500,000 or more non-EU immigrants with leave to remain in the UK will need to replace their physical biometric residence permits (BRPs) – which demonstrate proof of their right to reside, rent, work and claim benefits – with digital e-visas.

In order to access their e-visa, people will need to open a UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) digital account. The Home Office has recently emailed invitations for a trial group of BRP holders to open digital accounts, but as many migrants used their solicitors’ email address as their Home Office contact, many have gone to lawyers rather than the immigrants themselves.

In addition, because personal details were excluded from the invitations for data security reasons, the lawyers would have no idea which of their potentially thousands of clients the emails were meant for, meaning they could not forward them on.

“After 31 December, a person without access to their e-visa will be un­able to prove their status in the UK,” said Zoe Bantleman, legal director at the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association. “The Home Office has placed them in a similar situation to members of the Windrush generation. They have status, but they cannot prove it.

“Given the poor reach of Home Office communications on the issue, it is fair to assume that there will be thousands of people who do not apply for an e-visa before the end of 2024.”

From this summer any BRP holder can open a UKVI digital account without an invitation. But immigration lawyers fear the government’s planned publicity drive will miss many older or poorer people who may not speak English as their first language or do not have ready access to the internet.

Zoe Dexter, housing and welfare manager at human rights charity the Helen Bamber Foundation, described the government’s plans as chaotic. She said: “The Home Office’s move to digitise proof of identity is bound to take a huge financial toll on hundreds of thousands of people, including refugees and survivors of trafficking and torture, whose proof of ID is linked to the benefits they receive.”

Critics warn the Home Office does not have measures in place to deal with possible technical failures, and that it has created a cliff edge with its deadline. People can still apply for a UKVI digital account after 31 December, but if they are not aware of the new rules they may only discover this when they are unable to prove their right to return from holiday or claim benefits, leading to disruption.

“This is a recipe for disaster,” said Bethan Lant of migrant rights charity Praxis. “People will be un­able to evidence their status through no fault of their own, because the Home Office has not communicated well and has given them a cliff edge after which they are going to struggle to access even the basics. We’re not saying don’t go digital, we’re not saying ‘don’t do this’. We’re saying engage better, do it carefully, do it softly, do it over a period of time.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “E-visas provide secure confirmation of someone’s UK immigration status, enhance security and bring cost savings for the UK public. They also offer greater convenience for customers and status checkers, using tried and tested technology. Our April phased launch marked an important step towards replacing physical documents with e-visas by 2025, a key part of the transformation and digitisation of the UK’s border and immigration system.

Source: Fears of new Windrush as thousands of UK immigrants face ‘cliff edge’ visa change

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Questions persist as Ottawa prepares  Citizenship Act amendments

2024/05/20 Leave a comment

We should know soon enough.

The legislation applying a first generation citizenship transmission limit included provisions for stateless provisions. However, IRCC citizenship operational statistics do not include a stateless category (standard table understandably is country of birth, not citizenship) and Statistics Canada does not capture how many stateless persons became citizens, which some certainly did.

However, IRCC operational statistics show a monthly average of about 90 stateless permanent residents since the pandemic and presumably most will apply and become citizens given their interest in having the security that citizenship provides.

The “lost Canadians” have mostly been found given successive lobbying and changes to the Citizenship Act to address gaps, even if the gaps were proven to the exaggerated as the number of total numbers of citizenship proofs were significant lower than the claims (22,000, 2007-22, data provided by IRCC).

Will see if the government uses the same residency requirements for children caught by the first generation cut-off as for immigrants, or whether it reverts to previous complex and contentious retention provisions:

The federal government is said to be preparing a bill to amend the Citizenship Act, but the details are still unclear – a concern for more than 3,500 stateless people who are in the country but have no access to critical services such as medical care.

They include former Canadians who had their citizenship revoked due to now-repealed provisions of the act. These nationless people are known as “Lost Canadians.”

The news comes after months of quiet on this issue. Last December, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled the act unconstitutionally creates two classes of Canadians and gave the government until June 19 to amend the Citizenship Act. The government said it wouldn’t challenge the decision but shared nothing further on the work being done.

The court also found the act has uneven impacts on women, particularly under Section 3(3)(a) which prevents certain second-generation Canadian mothers who live abroad from passing citizenship to their children, unless they return to Canada to give birth.

On Saturday, The Globe and Mail reported that the government has drafted a new bill to respond to the court order amid frustrations over the lack of progress on Bill S-245, which attempts to achieve the same goals. NDP member Jenny Kwan blamed Conservative filibuster tactics for causing the delay.

A Commons committee completed its considerations of Bill S-245 nearly a year ago but an official website reports “no activity” on the file. Third and final reading of the bill in the Commons was scheduled in January but was cancelled, and there remains no new date for this.

If passed into law, Bill S-245 would reinstate citizenship for those born abroad to Canadian parents between 1977 and 1981, though critics have argued it doesn’t go far enough to help tens of thousands who fall outside of that category.

Word that the government is preparing its own legislation on the issue should bring hope to the families torn apart by the act’s outdated provisions, but questions remain about the possible continued use of a “substantial connection test.”

The legislation may require the parents in these families to prove their ties to Canada to be able to pass down citizenship to children born abroad. The criteria for this test are not publicly known.

Meanwhile, Lost Canadians whose fates have rested on the passing of Bill S-245 or similar legislation continue to be denied access to health care, education and employment as they await more information.

The federal government should not delay in sharing the steps it intends to take to amend the Citizenship Act. A lack of transparency and communication about past changes to the legislation created this problem in the first place – and keeping the public in the dark will only prolong it.

How citizenship is lost 

The Citizenship Act has been amended several times since it was enacted in 1947, including provisions introduced in 1977 and 2009 that stripped certain born-abroad Canadians of their citizenship.

Thousands lost their citizenship because they were born outside Canada or had lived abroad for six or more years. Dual citizenship holders at one point faced deportation, while those who possessed only Canadian citizenship became stateless. A 2007 CBC investigation revealed up to 200,000 people were impacted.

Other amendments to the act have consistently failed to help several categories of Lost Canadians, including children born out of wedlock to Canadian servicemen and a foreign mother during wartime, and citizens born abroad between 1977 and 1981.

Who “counts” as Canadian?

The definition of Canadian citizenship is complicated. The first iteration of the Citizenship Act created two classes of “natural-born Canadians” who could hold citizenship: people born in Canada or on a Canadian ship or aircraft, and children born abroad to a Canadian-born father before 1947.

When a 1977 amendment restored the legality of dual citizenship, those who had lost their Canadian status under the original legislation did not have it automatically reinstated.

That 1977 amendment also introduced a new provision: under Section 8, born-abroad Canadians would have to apply to keep their citizenship before turning 28 years old – and would also need to have resided in Canada for the year preceding their application. Most affected Canadians were not informed of these requirements.

In 2009, attempting to resolve these complications, the Stephen Harper government repealed Section 8 by passing Bill C-37. However, the amendment came with two caveats:

  • First, those who had lost citizenship under the now-repealed provisions would not have it restored automatically. These former Canadians could apply for citizenship, but with no guarantee of approval. (The repeal also did not apply to Lost Canadians born abroad between 1977 and 1981.)
  • Second, a born-abroad Canadian could pass down citizenship only to children born in Canada. Children born abroad to second- or subsequent-generation Canadians would need to apply for immigrant or refugee status to follow their parents back to Canada. If born in a country without a birthright citizenship law, the children would be stateless – a major human rights violation, according to the United Nations.

Lost Canadians claim they were informed of the conditionality of their citizenship only when it was too late, such as when, after age 28, they applied for government pensions, driver’s licences, passport renewals or health care.

That was the case for Pete Giesbrecht. Born in Mexico in 1979 to born-abroad Canadian parents, the family returned to Canada when he was seven years old. But when Giesbrecht applied to renew his passport in 2015 – after living nearly 30 years in Canada – he was told he faced possible deportation.

Giesbrecht was officially stateless, without citizenship in another country to which he could be deported. When he reapplied for Canadian citizenship, he was required to prove his long-time connection to the country. After two years of uncertainty, Giesbrecht found a community of Lost Canadians to help advocate on his behalf and was re-granted citizenship.

Ontario court highlights sex discrimination

The Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruling in December found the Citizenship Act confers “a lesser class of citizenship” to Canadians born outside the country and echoed criticisms of the second-generation cut-off rule’s unjust impact on women.

Adoptees of foreign-born children, and second-generation, born-abroad Canadian mothers who gave birth abroad, are among those who have faced an undue burden. If a woman moved abroad for work and became pregnant in another country, she was required to return to Canada to give birth to pass down her citizenship.

Victoria Maruyama, a Canadian who gave birth while working in Japan temporarily, was told she had to apply to sponsor her two children as immigrants to Canada. On both occasions, her applications were rejected.

A few high-profile cases have succeeded in catching the attention – and intervention – of the immigration minister. One example is 16-year-old Olympic hopeful Erin Brooks, whose bid for citizenship has been successful. However, most families have been left dangling in uncertainty.

What now?

It’s not known whether the government will release more information about how it intends to modify the act before the June deadline.

As far as we know, the latest news does not guarantee Canadian citizenship for all applicants. The expectation that families will be required to pass a substantial connection test to bring their children into Canada means there’s a possibility their applications will be denied.

The lack of clarity leaves a cloud of doubt looming over Lost Canadians. How much longer will they have to wait?

After so many years of confusion and oscillation, it seems imperative for the government to share in greater detail how it plans to move forward.

Source: Questions persist as Ottawa prepares Citizenship Act amendments

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Richler: Is the Jewish moment in North America over?

2024/05/20 Leave a comment

Interesting long read:

….But later tides have washed the North American beach clean for other groups to land and make their mark. Jews, by virtue of their success, are seen as a part of the establishment now. Not allies, as Jews were to African Americans during the civil-rights era, but “white-adjacent” and fair targets for shunning. We are living, now, in a time in which our “common humanity” matters less than the particular, than the difference in our identities so often brandished to set a community apart. It may only be passing, but at least for today whatever qualities we may share falter before the imperative of fair representation so that where, earlier, Jewish authors dominated bookstore shelves, the cinema, Broadway and television, now a story by a Jew is unlikely to be chosen by, say, the CBC, over a Black, Indigenous, Asian, South Asian or Muslim one.

Which is a positive and as it should be. Jewish novels are not so novel, their stories, their idiom are familiar, and any reader, any patron of any art, craves the new and what it teaches for good reason. Through art we learn about each other and how to share the spaces, real and abstract, that we live in. Other communities’ stories are invigorating the arts and it is their turn for good reason.

But for Jews there is a negative in this receding from public view and therefore interest that is, when it comes to immigration and settlement, the ordinary historical order of things. For the integration of Jews into North American life – what the writer and critic Dara Horn, author of People Love Dead Jews, has called the diaspora’s “fantasy” of acceptance – was, in North America, realized. And this acceptance was doubly important to Jews because it constituted, in the second half of the 20th century, a mirroring of the establishment of the nation of Israel, a state for a stateless people, and the hopes it represented. The stark truth is that a loss of security in either country brings its own existential peril: No place in America or no place in Israel, each dour prospect augurs in a new iteration of the precarity Jews knew in the Middle East and Europe for two millennia.

How did this come to be? Well, through simple demographics for a start, the 20th-century waves of Jewish immigration vastly superseded by the arrival into this continent of peoples whose own traumatic histories either do not intersect with the Jewish ones or contradict them. This demographic shift is one that politicians, many caught off guard, have been compelled to recognize – we are democracies, after all – and especially after its furious acceleration by the entry into social and political arenas of younger generations for whom terms such as “the Holocaust” and “genocide” have markedly different meanings.

No longer is the Holocaust a literal burning – instead, a confluence of horrid circumstances that may even be inadvertent is enough. No longer is genocide the realization of the meticulously planned and organized murderous intent of a specific, targeted people. It can be cultural, or, as we are seeing today in Gaza, a crushing, deleteriously ham-fisted and ultimately self-defeating military campaign that is the result of a profound and inalienable existential fear in a grievously injured population whose motives there is no will to understand, let alone permit. In this age in which “lived experience” is ultimately what validates a truth, the manner in which Jews remember both the Holocaust and the Nazi attempt at genocide is not shared. Jewish references are historical and effectively redundant. They are not this generation’s, and useful only as weapons to be turned back against Israel and the Jewish “Zionist” by activists and also governments benefiting from the distraction – Colombia, Nicaragua, Russia, South Africa, Turkey. (I used to think that, yes, to be anti-Zionist or anti-Israel did not necessarily mean a person was antisemitic but now, what with Jews basically regarded as colonists “from the river to the sea” – well, I’m not so sure.)…

Source: Is the Jewish moment in North America over?

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Canadian immigration asks medical worker fleeing Gaza if he treated Hamas fighters

2024/05/20 Leave a comment

Sigh… Good comments by Kurland and Waldman:

….The federal Immigration Department said that an interview with its minister, Marc Miller, was not possible. In an emailed statement, spokesperson Jeffrey MacDonald said visa applicants may be asked additional questions about their employment and travel history, and their online presence, as part of Canada’s screening process.

MacDonald declined to comment on why it asked a medical worker about whom they had treated, citing privacy reasons.

Canada lists Hamas as a terrorist group, and Canada has the right to screen visa applicants for possible security threats, said Lorne Waldman, a Toronto-based lawyer who wrote a widely used textbook on Canadian immigration law.

“But this type of question is completely unacceptable,” Waldman said in an interview. “If there was a shootout in Toronto between members of a gang, a doctor wouldn’t stop to ask whether a person was a gang member before they treated them.”

Canada also cannot ask such questions of a visa applicant strictly for intelligence-gathering purposes, he said.

Richard Kurland of Lawyers for Secure Immigration, a group urging the government to ask pointed questions related to Hamas and terrorist activities, said he rejects the question on two grounds. One, because it only targets Hamas and not other terrorist groups operating in Gaza, and two, because it’s “problematic,” he wrote in an email.

“Even murderous terrorists deserve medical treatment,” he said.

Source: Canadian immigration asks medical worker fleeing Gaza if he treated Hamas fighters

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It was once a center of Islamic learning. Now Mali’s historic city of Djenné mourns lack of visitors

2024/05/20 Leave a comment

Sad:

…Djenné is one of the oldest towns in sub-Saharan Africa and served as a market center and an important link in the trans-Saharan gold trade. Almost 2,000 of its traditional houses still survive in the old town.

The Grand Mosque, built in 1907 on the site of an older mosque dating back to the 13th century, is re-plastered every year by local residents in a ritual that brings together the entire city. The towering, earth-colored structure requires a new layer of mud before the rainy season starts, or it would fall into disrepair.

Women are responsible for carrying water from the nearby river to mix with clay and rice hulls to make the mud used to plaster the mosque. Adding the new layer of mud is a job reserved for men. The joyful ritual is a source of pride for a city that has fallen on hard times, uniting people of all ages.

Bamouyi Trao Traoré, one of Djenné’s lead masons, says they work as a team from the very start. This year’s replastering took place earlier this month.

“Each one of us goes to a certain spot to supervise,” he said. “This is how we do it until the whole thing is done. We organize ourselves, we supervise the younger ones.”

Mali’s conflict erupted following a coup in 2012 that created a power vacuum, allowing jihadi groups to seize control of key northern cities. A French-led military operation pushed them out of the urban centers the following year, but the success was short-lived.

The jihadis regrouped and launched relentless attacks on the Malian military, as well as the United Nations, French and regional forces in the country. The militants proclaimed allegiance to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group.

Sidi Keita, the director of Mali’s national tourism agency in the capital of Bamako, says the drop in tourism was sharp following the violence….

Source: It was once a center of Islamic learning. Now Mali’s historic city of Djenné mourns lack of visitors

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May: Building a culture of public service on hybrid work, Speer: It’s time for public servants to return to the office

2024/05/20 Leave a comment

Some good comments by those interviewed:

….Spicer, who teaches values and ethics, expects the government will face clashes between “individual values and organizational values.”

“There hasn’t been a lot of weight put behind ethics … and we now have a lot of younger folks coming in who don’t have the same kind of understanding of what it means to be a public servant, what it means to act purely within the public interest,” he says.

Spicer says many have a weaker connection to the notion of public service. Some still have the “spark” and see it as a calling. Others, however, see it as little more than a secure and steady job with benefits. Then there are advocates who want to advance a cause, such as climate change or sustainability.

The last group is more likely to quit if they don’t see progress, if their advice isn’t taken or if a change in government takes policy in a different direction or undoes policies, Spicer says.

New recruits are also more culturally diverse. Many have experience in the private sector, other levels of government or are transitioning between sectors. They tend to be professionals, bring expertise from their respective fields and often identify more closely with their profession’s code of conduct than with traditional public service norms.

The era of social media and gig employment

Spicer says they grew up on social media and juggling different jobs. Many see no reason why they can’t voice their opinions on social media or pursue a side hustle while working in government – both of which were traditionally frowned upon and are still controversial.

Public servants claim to be more productive since they began working from home, but a consensus that government needs fixing has emerged. It is too big, slow and risk-averse to deliver its basic services, let alone get ready for the world’s crises. On top of that, trust in government is dropping.

Turnbull says the political timeline “is already so much faster than the public service timeline” and working from home slows that down. The “values-transmission question” is urgent, especially with so many new public servants, she argues.

Fox says the government is committed to a hybrid work model, but departments must be more deliberate about creating a workplace culture that reflects “who we are.”

“We’ve got to have more emphasis on our environment and our learning within so people feel that they’re part of something larger and they understand the responsibilities that come with that.”

Linda Duxbury, a professor of management at Carleton University and expert on work-life balance and remote work, counters that both the unions and the government are misguided in the battle over hybrid work.

She argues there is no one-size-fits-all solution and that people need to be where the jobs can be done. A meat inspector must go to a processing plant and a customs officer must go to the border, but many other public service jobs can be done from anywhere.

However, she added that public servants’ complaints about time and money spent commuting and on lunches and child care are not the employer’s problem. These gripes also don’t fly with Canadians.

“Your job is to serve the public. So, are you serving them? Are you serving yourself?” she asks.

Duxbury says both the government and unions need to “stop with the stupid rhetoric” and start designing jobs to get the best work done. “There is not a simple solution here, so stop talking as if there is.”

Source: Building a culture of public service on hybrid work

And from Sean Speer on the politics and perceptions:

It’s time for Canada’s public servants to return to the office

On last week’s Roundtable podcast, Rudyard Griffiths and I were critical of the public sector unions’ over-the-top reaction to the federal government’s new policy that public servants must be in the office three days per week beginning in September. 

Our weekly exchange generated a bigger reaction than normal. Most of the response was positive. But some were critical of our comments, including those who support remote work in general and those who believed we were wrong to single out public sector workers in particular. 

I thought it might be useful to elaborate on our objections to the union reaction to Ottawa’s back-to-work plan. 

Although we generally think that the negative effects of remote work are underestimated and that all things being equal, workers benefit, individually and collectively, from being in physical proximity with their colleagues, we believe that it’s reasonable to have asymmetric expectations of public sector workers. 

That is to say, while our personal belief is that people should generally be back in the office, we recognize that in the private sector those decisions will be made by employers based on their understanding of the interests of their respective companies. 

Government workers, by contrast, should, in our view, be thought about differently. As taxpayers, we have a collective interest in their workplace arrangements.

There are three chief reasons why we think public servants should be back in the office.

First, we’ve discovered through the We Charity scandal, the ArriveCan scandal, and the details of public servants earning millions of dollars as third-party contractors that there’s a “crisis of culture” in the federal government. One proof-point: The federal public service has grown by more than 40 percent since the Trudeau government took office and yet its service standards and state capacity seem to have deteriorated. Getting back into the office is a crucial step to restoring a more performance-driven culture.

Second, the unionization rate is almost five times higher in the public sector which means that there are inherent limits on the employer’s ability to terminate unproductive or underperforming staff. This is important because we know that public-sector productivity is already generally lower than the private sector’s. Working-from-home can enable public sector workers to lower their productivity even further and yet the government has little to no recourse to address it. Getting back into the office should be understood as a key mechanism for accountability in an employer-employee environment in which traditional forms of accountability are weak or essentially non-existent.

Third, as we discussed on the podcast, there’s something inherently unfair about public sector workers who already benefit, on average, from higher wages, more benefits, and greater job security relative to their private sector peers to also have more flexible workplace arrangements. But there’s also a risk that, in an era of labour scarcity, an asymmetry between the public and private sectors could create perverse incentives for where people want to work. A growing concentration of scarce talent in the public sector due its long list of advantages could come at the expense of Canada’s long-run dynamism and productivity. 

That’s because, whatever the strengths of the public sector, it’s not generally viewed as a source of productivity. Many in fact would argue that Ottawa is actually a drag on productivity—which is to say, the deadweight loss of financing and staffing the government typically subtracts from the more productive deployment of these resources in the broader economy. Therefore, as we face a combination of slowing labour growth and ongoing weak productivity, we cannot afford for the government’s workplace arrangements to distort the labour market. 

The upshot: Federal public servants—it’s time to return to the office. 

Source: https://thehub.ca/2024-05-18/the-weekly-wrap-being-young-doesnt-make-right/

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