Melbourne man ‘dumbfounded’ after finding out he lost Australian citizenship 33 years ago

2024/05/11 Leave a comment

Of note. What struck me the most was the speed of the government response, focussing on the essential, rather than process. But like in Canada, it took media interest to provoke a response:

Sometimes wonder Last month the 55-year-old was informed by Home Affairs that he had no Australian citizenship or visa, due to a law that was repealed more than 20 years ago.

When the father-of-two told his employer about the situation, he was initially stood down from work without pay.

“I’m no longer Australian and apparently I haven’t been for the last 33 years,” Mr Keogh told Raf Epstein on ABC Radio Melbourne Mornings.

“It’s not a situation I expected to find myself in. I’m mid-50s, I’ve paid my taxes … I’m very grateful to be Australian.”

Applying for Irish citizenship had unintended consequences

Mr Keogh’s grandparents were Irish and, proud of his ancestry, he decided to register his heritage with the Irish government when he was 22.

He didn’t understand that would automatically be treated as an application for Irish citizenship or, crucially, that he would immediately lose Australian citizenship as a result.

Mr Keogh received Irish citizenship and a passport, which he held alongside Australian identity documents which technically were not valid.

It was never flagged as a problem until he came forward late last year.

When Mr Keogh shared his story on ABC Radio Melbourne today, the office of the Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs, Andrew Giles, said they were looking into Mr Keogh’s case.

Three hours later his citizenship was restored.

He said he was “absolutely elated” to have his citizenship restored after going to the media, but the problem was not solved.

Source: Melbourne man ‘dumbfounded’ after finding out he lost Australian citizenship 33 years ago

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Elite Colleges Walked Into the Israel Divestment Trap

2024/05/10 Leave a comment

Valid contrast:

…But there’s a key difference between avoiding fossil fuels and shunning Israel. The institutions that divested from oil and gas made sure to describe it as financially prudent, albeit sometimes with shallow investment logic. This time, Israel’s social license is the only thing that is on the table. And if Israel is on the table, what other countries should lose their social license? How many years must pass since what some believe to be a country’s settler colonialist period or messy wars that kill innocent civilians to make it investable?

And if divestment against Israel is carried out, when should it end? Oil and gas divesting is meant never to end; oil and gas consumption is meant to end. Divestment from South Africa ended with apartheid. So university leaders will be forced to ask an often heterogeneous group of students what would earn Israel its social license back. A cease-fire? A new Israeli government? A two-state solution? The end of Israel as a Jewish state?

The effort to identify every investment with ties to Israel is also fraught. Columbia activists could find information only on pocket-change-size ownership of certain companies, such as $69,000 of Microsoft stock. So protesters are also demanding that colleges disclose all their investments, presumably so students can research the morality of each one. However, some firms that manage parts of an endowment’s money, particularly hedge funds, don’t report individual holdings to investors: asking them for it is like asking for the secret recipe for Coke.

But even if an endowment could provide a list of every underlying investment, it would likely then be inundated for more calls to divest, for more discovered connections — however small — to Israel, and for reasons related to other offenses discoverable with an online search. Why would there not be a Taiwanese student group demanding divestment from China, to dissuade an invasion? Other students demanding divestment from Big Tech, citing students’ mental health? Others demanding divestment from all of it, the hedge funds and private equity funds whose asset managers are not exactly healing American income inequality?

The answer, of course, is that endowments can’t be in the moral adjudication business — and they should never have headed this way. This does not mean that investing should be a returns-at-any-cost exercise. But it does mean that the real world does not always provide objective answers to how to balance benefits and consequences of companies providing products and services: Carbon emissions are bad, but energy consumption is necessary. Microsoft software for the Israeli government may displease you, but Microsoft saying it won’t sell software to Israel would displease others — and probably get itself banned from working with New York State agencies.

Listen to the protesters on divestment. They will not stop. They will not rest.

But neither will the markets. They open every morning, Monday through Friday, and university budgets’ demands on endowments never go away. Tuitions are rising. Costs always go up. Colleges should debate deep moral issues and discuss the hard compromises to solve the world’s ills. But we should move those efforts to the lecture halls, away from the investment offices. Divesting is an easy chant. Investing is hard enough as it is…

Source: Elite Colleges Walked Into the Israel Divestment Trap

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House passes bill to add citizenship question to U.S. Census

2024/05/10 Leave a comment

While a citizenship question, like we have in Canada, makes sense,  the blatant politicisation and political purpose of the initiative does not given how it would further reinforce the political weight of rural states compared to more urban ones:

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday that would add a citizenship question to the next U.S. Census in 2030, preventing non-citizens or illegal immigrants from being counted toward the allocation of representatives and federal electors in each state.

The Equal Representation Act passed the House by a vote of 206 to 202, along party lines. It now moves to the Senate.

Rep. Chuck Edwards, R-N.C., who introduced the bill in January, called it “commonsense” that only U.S. citizens be counted when it comes to representation. Currently, anyone who participates in the census every 10 years — including non-citizens and undocumented immigrants — is counted for redistricting.

“One of the lesser acknowledged, but equally alarming, side effects of this administration’s failure to secure the southern border is the illegal immigrant population’s influence in America’s electoral process,” Edwards said on the House floor Wednesday.

“Though commonsense dictates that only citizens should be counted for apportionment purposes, illegal aliens have nonetheless recently been counted toward the final tallies that determine how many House seats each state is allocated and the number of electoral votes it will wield in presidential elections,” Edwards added.

The White House has been “strongly opposed” to putting a citizenship question on the census, saying it would be too costly.

“The bill would increase the cost of conducting the census and make it more difficult to obtain accurate data,” the White House’s Office of Management and Budget said in a statement this week.

“It would also violate the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which requires that the number of seats in the House of Representatives ‘be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state,'” the White House added.

“It is unconscionable that illegal immigrants and non-citizens are counted toward congressional district apportionment and our electoral map,” said Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn.

“While people continue to flee Democrat-run cities, desperate Democrats are back-filling the mass exodus with illegal immigrants so that they do not lose their seats in Congress or their electoral votes for the presidency, hence artificially boosting their political power and in turn diluting the power of Americans’ votes.”

Before Wednesday’s vote, Democrats blasted the effort as unconstitutional and a waste of time given its prospects in the Senate.

“This bill is an affront to the great radical Republicans who wrote the original Constitution and the 14the Amendment, which has always made persons, not voters, the basis for reapportionment,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md. “This bill would destroy the accuracy of the census, which may have something to do with its real legislative motivation.”

Source: House passes bill to add citizenship question to U.S. Census

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Minister said ‘hundreds’ of Canadians might use Gaza visa. More than 7,500 applied.

2024/05/10 Leave a comment

Not an easy environment in which to make accurate estimates but still striking:

More than 7,500 Canadians signed up in the first three months of the year to get family out of Gaza through a federal visa pathway that lawyers have described as onerous, chaotic and nearly impossible to complete….

…The data show Canadians filed 7,549 initial applications, or statutory declarations, to obtain temporary visas for their family members from the day the program opened on Jan. 9 through April 1.

When Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced his department’s plans to launch the family reunification program in December, he told a news conference he expected the number of people who might benefit would be “in the hundreds.”

From those 7,549 declarations filed, just 179 visas had been issued as of April 29, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada….

Source: Minister said ‘hundreds’ of Canadians might use Gaza visa. More than 7,500 applied.

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Clark: Results? That’s not Ottawa’s business

2024/05/10 Leave a comment

Unfortunately, outputs trump outcomes, the latter being harder to measure yet being more meaningful:

…In Mr. Trudeau’s early days in power, he called in former British prime minister Tony Blair’s results guru Sir Michael Barber, the author of a book called Deliverology 101, in what was widely seen as a faddish attempt to teach the old bureaucracy new tricks.

A lot of what Sir Michael emphasized was actually pretty straightforward stuff, and it is pretty easy to see why Mr. Trudeau’s government abandoned it.

Sir Michael wanted the government to clearly identify what the success of an initiative would be – not the announcement, but the outcome – and tell people. He suggested the government measure progress, with data. And to change things when they weren’t going as planned.

The zeal for all that drifted away. It’s politically risky. Measuring progress with data – or audits, for that matter – asks questions you might not want answered. Acknowledging mistakes means – heaven forbid – acknowledging mistakes. None of that makes good marketing.

Source: Results? That’s not Ottawa’s business

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MIREMS: Diaspora and the Representation of Home Conflicts in Canada’s Ethnic Media

2024/05/10 Leave a comment

Detailed analysis of the major diaspora issues and how they play out in ethnic media in contrast with mainstream and home country media. Some groups have greater diversity of opinions and coverage than others. Overview below:

This discussion paper delves into the reactions of ethnic media in Canada to four distinct conflicts: the alleged Chinese interference in Canadian elections, the assassination of a Sikh leader in Canada, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. By comparing and contrasting the coverage of these events in Chinese, South Asian, Eastern European, and Middle Eastern Canadian media outlets, the paper aims to shed light on the critical role that ethnic media plays in shaping the mindset of Canadian citizens.


The paper argues that ignoring grassroots community media can have significant consequences on the mindset of Canadian citizens, as evidenced by the reactions to these conflicts in ethnic media outlets. This assertion is grounded in several well-established theories in the field of media and social communications analysis, including agenda-setting theory, framing theory, uses and gratifications theory, and cultivation theory.


The case studies presented in the paper provide compelling evidence for the application of these theories in the context of ethnic media in Canada. The chapter on Chinese media’s reaction to alleged election interference reveals how these outlets frame the issue in ways that prioritize the concerns and perspectives of the Chinese Canadian community, potentially influencing their political engagement and attitudes towards the Canadian government.


Similarly, the chapter on South Asian media’s response to the assassination of a Sikh leader highlights the role of these outlets in shaping the community’s understanding of the event and its implications for Canada-India relations. The analysis of Eastern European media’s coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war demonstrates how these outlets serve the specific informational and cultural needs of their audiences, providing perspectives and narratives that may differ from those found in mainstream Canadian media.
Finally, the chapter on Middle Eastern media’s reaction to the Israel-Palestine conflict underscores the power of these outlets in cultivating distinct worldviews and shaping public discourse within their communities.


In conclusion, the paper serves as a call to action for greater attention to and engagement with ethnic media outlets in Canada. By recognizing the power of these grassroots community media in shaping the mindset of Canadian citizens, we can work towards a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of how global conflicts and events are impacting our diverse nation. Future research should continue to explore the role of ethnic media in shaping public opinion, while policymakers must consider the perspectives and concerns expressed in these outlets when crafting inclusive and responsive policies.

Source: Diaspora and the Representation of Home Conflicts in Canada’s Ethnic Media

And Douglas Todd’s article on the report:

Canada’s ethnic media is “the canary in the coal mine,” offering warnings about everything from foreign interference to psychological stresses on newcomers, whether from Iran, China, Russia, India, South Korea, the Middle East or beyond, says Andrés Machalski, president of Multilingual International Media Research (MIREMS).

But governments aren’t taking advantage of the fertile resource. Their lack of understanding of the powerful role played by ethnic media has “enabled Chinese and Indian agents to (impact) public opinion … and provided an open door to homeland subversion of Canadian democracy,” says Machalski.

MIREMS’ 54-page report maintains the media outlets are invaluable for understanding what is going on in scores of diaspora communities.

The report goes so far as to suggest many newcomers suffer from anxiety and depression associated with “complex PTSD” as they try to navigate news and views from their homelands with their new lives in Canada.

Although many of the views expressed in ethnic media are predictable, there is some range of opinion, says the report by MIREMS, which tracks more than 800 media outlets in 30 languages in Canada and worldwide….

Source: Douglas Todd: Canada’s ethnic media reveal tough realities

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Canada’s immigration points system is flawed, a new report says. Here’s how it proposes to fix it

2024/05/09 Leave a comment

More advocacy on need to focus on productivity:

Canada should revamp its immigration points system to better select those with the skills to boost productivity, a new report says, even if the changes might favour applicants from some countries.

Immigration has long been premised on newcomers being the engine of economic growth and prosperity, said the study by the Business Council of Alberta. But “cracks” have emerged with Canada’s recent population surge, which has magnified challenges in housing and health care.   

“That’s always been the promise of immigration over the years, but it hasn’t delivered recently,” said Mike Holden, the council’s chief economist and vice-president of policy.

“We need to make sure we’re selecting the right immigrants because otherwise that national consensus and that perception of immigration is going to continue to fall.”

Prompted by concerns over Canada’s rising immigration intake amid a stagnant economy, researchers looked at how the country selects skilled immigrants and released the report on Wednesday. The council recommends “a prosperity-driven immigration system” to ensure it delivers on its promise and grows Canada’s per-capita gross domestic product.

Although the Canadian economy is getting bigger as a result of a surging population, primarily driven by immigration, the report said productivity — an indicator of living standards — has been weak for decades and, more recently, has turned negative.

“We’re not getting wealthier. There are just more of us around,” said the 40-page study, titled “Delivering the Promise.”

“Future prosperity requires that the Canadian economy generate more value, not just because there are more of us, but because each one of us is better off.”

The business council’s own survey of Canadians released this month found less than half of the 2,300 respondents think immigration is good for Canada’s economy and standing in the world, society and prosperity; only 28 per cent believe the current approach is effective in its selection and support of immigrants…..

Source: Canada’s immigration points system is flawed, a new report says. Here’s how it proposes to fix it

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‘They don’t matter’: Advocates frustrated Ottawa not including anti-Palestinian racism in upcoming update of anti-racism strategy

2024/05/09 Leave a comment

Maybe I am missing something but wouldn’t anti-Palestinian be covered by a mix of anti-Arab and for Muslim Palestinians, Islamophobia? Not convinced by the arguments and like all one-off proposals, will have implication for other groups, including of course Israelis and Jews.

The broader question is whether the Canadian Anti-Racism Strategy has been effective, the rising numbers of hate crimes suggest it has not, as does the 2023 evaluation of the strategy:

Advocates for Canada’s Palestinian community have been told that a definition of anti-Palestinian racism will be missing from Ottawa’s newest anti-racism strategy, an inclusion they say would have helped Canadian institutions properly recognize and respond to the growing form of hate.

“I’m concerned that members of our community shared potentially traumatic, harmful, personal stories with the Trudeau government and that the government has disregarded those stories and ignored them outright,” said Dania Majid, head of the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA).

“That’s going to make our people, our communities, those who participated (in government consultations) feel even more unheard, more unseen, and feel even more like they don’t matter.”…

Source: ‘They don’t matter’: Advocates frustrated Ottawa not including anti-Palestinian racism in upcoming update of anti-racism strategy

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Ottawa not sufficiently addressing flood of access requests for immigration records, watchdog says

2024/05/09 Leave a comment

Biting and justified comments:

…While she commends IRCC and CBSA’s efforts to increase the efficiency of their access teams, those measures aren’t enough to stem the tide, and amount to “treating the symptoms” instead of “curing the illness,” Ms. Maynard says in the report.

“It’s frustrating, because I think they do know how to fix it,” Ms. Maynard said in an interview. IRCC’s operations division, responsible for processing immigration applications, “are not doing their part in fixing the root cause,” she said.

“Three years ago, we told them, ‘You have to find a different way to provide that information. You have to fix your system, you have to increase the amount of information that’s provided to new applicants.’ They said they would do it. But, as you can see in the report, it’s now three years later and it still hasn’t been fixed.”…

Source: Ottawa not sufficiently addressing flood of access requests for immigration records, watchdog says

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John Ivison: CUPE is being held to account for its obsessive anti-Israel vitriol

2024/05/09 Leave a comment

Words and actions matter. Will be interesting to see how the Marshall lawsuit progresses:

….Keffiyehs are now the cultural appropriation of choice for leftists, including CUPE Local 905 president Katherine Grzejszczak, who wore one during a video meeting with members to discuss remote-working policies, as National Post recently reported. One fellow union member who raised objections to the keffiyeh was told participants were not allowed to talk about anything political. When the Post reporter called Grzejszczak for comment, she said that “intimidating and harassing individuals for wearing traditional cultural clothing is a form of racism.”

At least CUPE is not yet on record as threatening its critics with violence. But a communications officer with the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, Vic Wojciechowski, recently warned U of T professor Kevin Bryan to watch his back after Bryan penned a thread saying the majority of protesters he talked on his campus to were neither students nor affiliated with the university. “There need to be street-based consequences for clumsy buffoons like Kevin,” Wojciechowski tweeted.

This kind of thuggery seems to be where we are heading.

The CUPE-supported rally at the U of T sported a huge banner that bore the legend: “Long live legal armed resistance.” This wording is a variation of the aforementioned tweet on Oct. 7th by CUPE Local 3906, which represents academic workers at McMaster University. That tweet was later taken down because the union said it was not aware of the full scope of the situation on the ground.

The reality was that the massive expression of revulsion across the country shocked even the ivory tower revolutionaries into rethinking their support for slaughter.

But we seem to be inured to such outrages. Students and their public sector union allies can now parade across campuses inciting and glorifying violence without fear of repercussions or even censure.

Source: John Ivison: CUPE is being held to account for its obsessive anti-Israel vitriol

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