Hours on hold and long queues: Canadians still grappling with poor passport service

2024/05/09 Leave a comment

I had thought that the earlier problems with backlogs had been solved. Largely yes according to the data but it now appears that the problems are wait times for call centres and for in person service. Ongoing accountability issue between IRCC, with policy responsibility, and Service Canada for service delivery. Appears that the accountability issues mentioned in the IRCC evaluation in 2020 have not been addressed:

Canadians routinely wait hours on the phone and in person when dealing with Passport Canada, leaving many travellers infuriated by the quality of the agency’s customer service.

Post-COVID chaos at passport offices prompted the federal government to step up and promise a series of changes to get the documents into travellers’ hands in a timely manner.

Passport Canada claims that after a prolonged period of pandemic-related delays, the agency has returned to its normal “service standard” of getting passports to most people in 10 or 20 business days, depending on where an application is initially filed.

But the agency’s service standard makes no promises about how quickly they will serve people in person or over the phone.

Data and anecdotal reports suggest Passport Canada’s customer service track record is poor.

A CBC News analysis of passport office wait times shows people in urban centres often wait several hours to get face-to-face with a customer service agent at Passport Canada-branded offices.

On a weekday morning in mid-March, for example, Passport Canada’s website estimated the wait time at its west-end Ottawa location at 2 hours and 45 minutes.

In downtown Toronto that month, would-be passport holders faced a three-hour wait to get to the front of the line before noon.

The wait times in late April were much the same: people in Mississauga, Ont. were being told then they’d have to wait about 2 hours and 45 minutes to be served if they were on site at 9:30 a.m. There was a bright spot in Halifax — there the wait was only an hour.

On Monday, prospective passport holders in Brampton, Ont. faced a nearly three-hour wait shortly after that city’s office opened, according to Passport Canada data published online.

At Calgary’s Sunpark Drive location, travellers were told it would be at least three hours before they could speak to somebody after it opened its doors for the day, online data shows.

More than 12 hours on hold

Debbie Braun is a retiree who lives in High River, Alta., less than an hour south of Calgary.

She told CBC News that the prospect of those long in-person wait times led her to skip the drive into the city and send her passport application by mail in February.

And given Passport Canada’s commitment to process the vast majority of mail-in applications “within 20 days,” Braun thought she’d have her hands on a renewed passport well before her Mexican vacation in April.

In the end, it took twice as long. Braun said she got her passport in 40 days — and only after a bureaucratic battle with multiple phone calls and more than 12 hours spent on hold.

It was the same time frame for Braun’s daughter, who filed separately by mail from northern Alberta.

That’s despite Passport Canada’s commitment that 90 per cent of all mail-in applications will be processed within 20 days.

The agency routinely blows past that target.

Government data from 2022-23 reveals Passport Canada only met that 20-day processing target 52 per cent of the time.

Numbers from the past fiscal year haven’t been published online yet. A year ago, Karina Gould, who was the minister in charge of passports at the time, suggested there had been a big improvement.

Andrew Griffith is a former director general at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) who also worked at Service Canada and on passport files during his long tenure in government.

“The wait times are excessive. Nobody leaves happy if they have to wait three hours in person or on the phone,” he told CBC News.

“They either need to staff up or find other ways to reduce the time lag. I think, from a service point of view, it’s really problematic and it’s the kind of thing that undermines the faith of people in government institutions.”

While they’ve promised the option in the past, the government doesn’t yet allow Canadians to apply for a passport online.

Immigration Minister Marc Miller has said “system vulnerabilities” have prevented Ottawa from fulfilling that commitment. “It’s not secure,” he told reporters in February.

People can only fill out the required forms on the computer. Applicants still have to print them out and send them by mail for processing, or submit them in person.

That’s what Braun did — but then she wanted to use the government’s online application status tracker to keep tabs on her progress.

The federal government launched the tracker after the chaos of 2022-23, billing it as a big fix to prevent future passport pileups.

But Braun soon discovered she needed a file number to log in. She said she had to call to get that information because the online file number generator was “useless” and never gave her one after days of failed attempts.

That’s when the trouble started.

‘Who has time for that?’

“That first morning I called, there were 376 calls ahead of me in the queue,” she told CBC News. “I had no choice — I had to sit there and wait.”

Passport Canada had somehow affixed an old mailing address to her file. Braun filled out the right address when she sent it in, she said, and she has a copy of the application to prove it.

Each time she dialled through, she said, she was faced with a wall of other callers in front of her.

Later in February, she was number 352 on the line to speak to an operator.

In March, 377 people were ahead of her on the phone. On another March call, she was caller number 367.

On her last and final call that month, there were more than 500 callers ahead of her on hold, she said.

“I mean, who has time for that? Five hundred calls?” Braun said.

Braun said her average wait time to get an agent on the line was two hours and 40 minutes.

“How can somebody at an office sit on hold for two and a half hours?” she said.

Braun described some of the operators as “quite rude” and argumentative, adding they blamed her for an address error that was really their fault.

“I worked for Greyhound Canada for 35 years and if I would’ve done what Passport Canada does to the people calling in, I would have been fired,” she said. “It just angers me and it leaves a bad taste in your mouth, you know?”

She said that while the government has “bragged” about its changes to the passport program, it has nothing to boast about.

“They just tell the people what they want to hear — ‘Oh, we’ve fixed everything’ — and the systems they put in place to improve things aren’t adequate because they don’t think it through,” she said.

40 days to get a passport

No one federal department is responsible for the passport program.

That’s a problem, Griffith said, because nobody wants to take ownership of a vital service that touches so many Canadians personally.

In 2023, after the passport fiasco, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau created a new cabinet position called “citizens’ services,” with a minister responsible for “serving as our government’s champion for service delivery excellence.”

Trudeau’s mandate letter to the minister, Terry Beech, said he should focus on “delivering services where and when Canadians need them” and deal with “service delivery challenges” on passports.

A spokesperson for Beech said he was not available for an interview.

Griffith said Beech’s appointment was political — an attempt to show people the government cares about wait times. But the minister does not seem to have the power to push through any real change, he added.

“I never really thought the ministerial role was a meaningful position,” he said. “I don’t think it needs a minister unless you’re really going to revamp government. You never see Beech, he’s not very active.”

IRCC, which is taking the lead on introducing online passport applications, said in a media statement that it “remains committed” to the concept but didn’t offer a timeline for a rollout.

Employment and Social Development Canada, which is responsible for managing the passport program on behalf of IRCC, told CBC News that it sometimes “experiences increased demand on a seasonal basis as popular travel times approach.”

As for long call centre wait times, the department said time spent on hold “can vary and some clients may experience either longer or shorter hold times.”

The department says it encourages people to use the online status tracker to “get updates on their applications without needing to call or visit Service Canada.”

“Service Canada remains committed to service excellence and improving the experience for clients applying for passports,” the department said.

Braun, meanwhile, said her experience left her with little faith in government’s ability to deliver.

“I followed the rules, I did what I was supposed to do and then you have to go through the nightmare and you get upset,” Braun said.

“It’s a good thing I did the 10-year passport thing because I don’t think I could go through this again in five years.”

Source: Hours on hold and long queues: Canadians still grappling with poor passport service

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Keller: The campus occupations aren’t protected by free speech, because they aren’t speech

2024/05/08 Leave a comment

Of note:

…Imagine if a Christian campus group took over King’s College Circle, and said it would remain until the university stopped funding anything to do with abortion. Should they be removed? Why? If your answer is they have to go because their opinions are wrong, you’re standing free speech on its head. This is Canada, not the People’s Republic of China.

The legal problem with an occupation, left or right, pro-Palestinian or anti-vaccine, isn’t what its participants are saying. It’s what they’re doing – taking over a space and holding it hostage.

What does that have to do with free speech? Nothing.

Source: The campus occupations aren’t protected by free speech, because they aren’t speech

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While other countries add services, Canada adds public servants

2024/05/08 Leave a comment

Great header. One important point missing to deliver digital successfully, existing policies and procedures will need significant change. Tech cannot solve all the problems if the policies are too complex to understand and manage:

To change course, we must commit to:

  • Make digital skills a requirement for advancement in government. How will we progress if our leaders lack the skills, experience, and confidence necessary to own successful service delivery?
  • Deliver useful, simple wins quickly. Large projects are far more likely to fail than small ones. Let’s prove we can deliver value fast to restore confidence. The rapid delivery of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit proved that we can achieve wins when we must. 
  • Create a single government interface. Design services around citizen needs rather than around department responsibilities. Thirty-one countries have figured this out.
  • Change both citizen and government behavior.  All Canadians will have to relearn how they interact with their government using the new tools we build. The rewards will be significant: In Estonia, one simple rule—the government may not ask for a piece of information twice—slashed bureaucracy throughout the public sector.
  • Spending, schedules, and performance must be transparent. We’re clearly spending too much on transformation, and not getting enough in return. Yet nobody has a good handle on costs. From now on, every initiative must start with a clear definition of success, and then make simple metrics public throughout the delivery process. 
  • Let leaders do the hard work. There should be no responsibility without authority. If we task someone with making hard—even unpopular, changes—we need to give them the power, resources, and flexibility necessary to deliver citizen-centric services. It’s the only way we’ll attract serious digital talent to public service.
  • Create and re-use standard modules. Create software “building blocks” that make building services faster, easier, and more secure—and then insist that every department uses them. Freeze the budgets of departments who refuse.

In his 1993 resignation address, the then-prime minister Brian Mulroney said, “whether one agrees with our solutions or not, none will accuse us of having chosen to evade our responsibilities by side-stepping the most controversial issues of our time.” 

We have been side-stepping the biggest shift in government of our lifetimes. Digital power will define the best countries of the coming century. If we want to remain among them, we must become a digital-first nation.

Source: While other countries add services, Canada adds public servants

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McWhorter: The Columbia Protests Made the Same Mistake the Civil Rights Movement Did

2024/05/08 Leave a comment

Comparison of note:

Last week I wrote about the protests that had come to dominate my professional home, Columbia University, and make headlines across the country. I said that though I did not believe the participants were motivated by antisemitism, the volume, fury and duration of their protest left many Jewish students feeling under siege for their Jewishness. That assessment has turned out to be one of the more polarizing things I have ever written, in part because some readers interpreted my position as opposing student protest overall.

I had no objection when the protests began last fall, but since that time, they escalated significantly. After students occupied the university’s storied Hamilton Hall — and police officers in riot gear conducted over 100 arrests — the administration closed the campus, moved all classes online and recommended that we professors either trim or eliminate final examinations in our classes. The mood is as grim now as when Covid forced the spring semester of 2020 to end with a desolate groan.

What happened this week was not just a rise in the temperature. The protests took a wrong turn, of a kind I have seen too many other activist movements take. It’s the same wrong turn that the civil rights movement took in the late 1960s.

After the concrete victories of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, a conflict arose within the movement between those who sought to keep the focus on changing laws and institutions and those who cherished more symbolic confrontations as a chance to speak truth to power.

The conflict played out most visibly in what became of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC began with grass-roots activism in the form of sit-ins and voter registration, but in 1966 John Lewis, a veteran of the Selma demonstrations who spoke at the March on Washington, was replaced as the group’s leader by Stokely Carmichael, who spoke charismatically of Black Power but whose political plans tended to be fuzzy at best. The term “Black Power” often seemed to mean something different to each person espousing it. It was, in essence, a slogan rather than a program.

This new idea — that gesture and performance were, in themselves, a form of action — worried the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who regarded some of the group’s demonstrations as “expressions of rivalry and rage, without constructive purpose,” according to the historian Taylor Branch.

James Bevel, who worked alongside King, scolded his fellow activist Hosea Williams for having no political strategy beyond putting Black people — he used a racial slur instead — “in jail to get on TV.” In response to what he considered dangerous rhetoric, Andrew Young asked some activists in Memphis, “How many people did you kill last year?” and proposed that they translate their militancy into an actual policy goal instead.

Did this focus on performance bear fruit? Here’s something: Name some significant civil rights victories between 1968 and the election of Barack Obama. It’s a lot harder than naming the victories up until that point. Of course, protest requires theatrics, as King knew. (Writing to Young in 1965 amid the Selma demonstrations, King said, “Also please don’t be too soft. It was a mistake not to march today. In a crisis we must have a sense of drama.”) But it’s perilously easy for the drama to become the point, for the protest to be less about changing the world than performing a self.

I share the campus protesters’ opinion that the war in Gaza has become an atrocity. Israel had every right to defend itself after Hamas’s massacre, which itself was an atrocity. However, the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, with uncountable more left maimed or homeless, cannot be justified. I am increasingly dismayed that President Biden does not simply deny Benjamin Netanyahu any further arms.

Beyond a certain point, however, we must ask whether the escalating protests are helping to change those circumstances. Columbia’s administration agreed to review proposals about divestment, shareholder activism and other issues and to create health and education programs in Gaza and the West Bank. But the protesters were unmoved and a subgroup of them, apparently, further enraged.

Who among the protesters really thought that Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, and the board of trustees would view the occupation of Hamilton Hall — and the visible destruction of property — and say, “Oh, if the students feel that strongly, then let’s divest from Israel immediately”? The point seemed less to make change than to manifest anger for its own sake, with the encampment having become old news.

The initial protest was an effective way to show how fervently a great many people oppose the war, but the time had come for another phase: slow, steady suasion. This is not capitulation but a change in tactics, with the goal of making the activists’ work pay off. We recall King most vividly in protests, including being imprisoned for his participation. However, his daily life as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was about endless and often frustrating negotiations with people in power, which eventually bore fruit. In this, as much as in marches, he and his comrades created the America we know today. Smoking hot orations about Black Power might have instilled some pride but created little beyond that.

Richard Rorty wrote in “Achieving Our Country” of the sense in our times that self-expression alone is a kind of persuasion. Marc Cooper, describing the left in the George W. Bush years, wrote of the danger of viewing “rebel poses” as substitutes for how “to figure out how you’re actually going to win an election.”

In our times, when the personal is political, there is always a risk that a quest to heal the world morphs into a quest for personal catharsis. Keeping in mind the difference will get the Columbia protesters closer to making the changes they champion.

Source: The Columbia Protests Made the Same Mistake the Civil Rights Movement Did

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Refugees ecstatic over golden opportunity to live in Canada

2024/05/08 Leave a comment

Of note. The purists miss the point:

…Dana Wagner, co-founder of TalentLift, a non-profit recruitment company that matches refugees with employers, said the program gives refugees, welcomed to Canada as skilled employees, a sense of self-worth.

Refugees who have endured extreme hardship also “have remarkable drive and resilience,” she said. But most employers are unaware that the pathway to Canada exists.

Unlike claims for asylum from people fleeing persecution in their home country, the pilot program links refugee resettlement with economic immigration.

It’s a program that raises concerns for Yvonne Su, assistant professor in interdisciplinary refugee and diaspora studies at York University. She warned against creating categories of refugees that are rooted in their economic value, rather than just welcoming people because they are in danger and deserve help.

“If a program like this becomes very popular then we will have refugees that are seen as ‘ideal refugees’ who have a well-founded fear of persecution and have huge economic potential so they are more deserving of a faster visa-immigration process,” she said…

Source: Refugees ecstatic over golden opportunity to live in Canada

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Khan: Ontario’s keffiyeh ban dares to define the scarf’s meaning for everyone, Regg Cohn: Israel and the UN have allowed the kaffiyeh. Why does Queen’s Park need to ban it?

2024/05/08 Leave a comment

More commentary. Not in favour of this kind of one-off decision. If the legislature chamber is going to allow this, it needs to revise the policy to allow symbols with significant political meaning in a consistent manner:

….The ban is a betrayal of the ideals of the Emancipation Act that Mr. Arnott proudly co-sponsored – namely, upholding the “ongoing struggle for human rights.” After calling on independent MPP Sarah Jama to leave the House for wearing a keffiyeh, he sent an official to deliver the message in person. In an iconic photo, a white man leans over the desk of Ms. Jama, a Black woman clad in a hijab and a keffiyeh, and seated in a wheelchair. Let’s hope the Ontario Black History Society, recognized in the Emancipation Day Act, chronicles this shameful event and sends a letter of protest to Mr. Arnott.

Ontario MPPs had two opportunities to reverse this ban by unanimously voting against it. Yet Robin Martin and Lisa MacLeod, two PC MPPs, supported the ban,keeping it in place. It’s reminiscent of the case of the town of Saint-Apollinaire, Que., in 2017, when 19 naysayers were enough to nix plans for a Muslim cemetery run by the Islamic Cultural Centre, which also operated the Quebec City mosque where six worshippers were massacred just a few months before. That vote was rooted in ignorance and prejudice. Plus ça change.

Premier Doug Ford says he personally opposes the keffiyeh ban. But by declining so far to put forward a government motion to end it, he is failing to stand firmly for the basic human rights of all Ontarians. Now it’s up to the rest of us to strive toward a just society with human dignity at its core.

Source: Ontario’s keffiyeh ban dares to define the scarf’s meaning for everyone

From Martin Regg Cohn:

…Put another way, if it walks and talks like a political protest, it’s a protest. When so many people of all backgrounds suddenly don the Palestinian kaffiyeh, it’s no longer merely cultural or sartorial but political.

Yet even if the Speaker was speaking the truth — and Stiles was surely straining credulity by claiming the kaffiyeh isn’t political at this point — Arnott made the wrong call. Technically, he’s right, but practically his ruling was unenforceable and unsupportable.

Which is why no party leader supported him last month — not just Stiles but her Green, Liberal and Progressive Conservative counterparts asked him to reconsider. Yes, even Premier Doug Ford, mindful of a hard-fought byelection last week with many Muslim voters, echoed the NDP’s call.

The Speaker reminded them all that he is merely their servant, and that they are free to overrule him. But when MPPs were asked to give unanimous consent to permit the kaffiyeh, a number of Tories demurred, leading to the present standoff….

Source: Israel and the UN have allowed the kaffiyeh. Why does Queen’s Park need to ban it?

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Fractured futures: Upward mobility for immigrants is a myth as their health declines

2024/05/07 Leave a comment

Odd connection to make between poorer health outcomes and the need for municipal voting rights for permanent residents.

First of all, unclear that this is a priority for most permanent residents compared to more pressing economic and social issues.

Secondly, Canadian citizenship is relatively easy to obtain in terms of residency, language and knowledge requirements.

Third, the author’s general comment on voting rates of immigrants is misleading: the StatsCan study, comparing the 2011 election with recent elections, highlighted small gaps between recent and long-term immigrants and the Canadian-born in the 2019 election before dropping in 2021, but recent immigrant voting rates neverthess increased by 10 points between 2011 and 2021:

Immigrant health research frequently refers to the notion that immigrants are generally healthier than people born in Canadabut that their health worsens with time.

The apparent trend has been attributed to a number of factors, including an unexpected lack of social mobility after immigration. 

The story often goes that immigrant parents willingly make sacrifices for the good of their children, with the widespread assumption that emphasizing good grades and higher education among the next generation will make their sacrifices worth it. 

But recent research finds that this lack of social mobility extends into the second generation.

As someone who’s spent more than a decade conducting immigrant and refugee health research, I am among a growing contingent of researchers who recognize that immigrants in Canada have extremely diverse identities and experiences, all of which affect their experiences with the structural and social determinants of health. 

That, in turn, shapes their health and health-care access, and challenges the notion that immigrants are a monolith with identical health and social trajectories.

This “healthy immigrant effect” and the upward social mobility of subsequent generations are commonly believed theories in academic circles. However, I fear these ideas have caused the nuanced needs of immigrant and diasporic communities to be over-simplified, dismissed and even neglected by policymakers.

The impact of COVID-19

The legacy of this neglect became painfully clear in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic amid a litany of reports about how long-term care workers, taxi drivers, food processors and other essential workers who came to Canada as immigrants were falling victim to the virus.

Statistics have since backed up these reports. 

Toronto Public Health, the first health unit in Canada to collect race-based data during the pandemic, found racialized Torontonians (including mostly immigrants but also those in racialized diasporic communities) were much more likely to be infected or hospitalized due to COVID-19. 

An upcoming study has found that before high-population COVID-19 vaccine coverage was achieved, immigrants in Ontario — particularly those from Central America, Jamaica, parts of South Asia and East Africa — were much more likely to be hospitalized or die from COVID-19 than other residents in the province.

The major contributing factors are a mismatch between their education and the jobs they end up getting, and employer discrimination, which leads to immigrants being over-represented and trapped in essential, low-wage precarious work. These jobs have a higher risk of exposure to COVID-19, and don’t provide employer-paid sick leave.

Thankfully, an Ontario government focus on equitable vaccine distribution, as well as innovative strategies like Toronto’s Community Health Ambassadors program — implemented by immigrant-serving community organizations — led to a remarkably equitable vaccine rollout and equally remarkable reductions in hospitalizations and deaths, according to the upcoming study.

But considering the subsequent elimination of many of these programs and policies, all of which were put in place to address barriers to vaccination for immigrants and their higher exposure to COVID-19 (due, in part, to the absence of employer-paid sick days), it’s possible that once again immigrants are bearing the brunt of the virus that’s still circulating and mutating.

Policy neglect is also responsible for the current primary-care crisis across Canada, with pre-pandemic inequities becoming further entrenched by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Racialized and low-income Canadians are the least likely to report having a primary-care physician. Meanwhile family doctors nearing retirement have a larger number of patients who face multiple social barriers to health and health care access. Both affected groups are likely made up largely of immigrant and diasporic communities.

The importance of elections

So how can the health and well-being of immigrants — widely praised as being the engine of Canada’s economy — and subsequent generations be prioritized?

First, our elected officials should engage meaningfully and respectfully with immigrants from all walks and stages of life, and avoid stoking xenophobic sentiments among the public.

Second, immigrants with Canadian citizenship — particularly those who’ve been in Canada for fewer than 10 years — are less likely than Canadian-born residents to vote in federal elections. There must be civic engagement initiatives connecting immigrants’ priorities with specific political platforms coupled with “get out the vote” campaigns.

Immigrants who are not yet citizens can’t vote in elections at any level of government, so they have no influence over how their tax dollars are spent. That voter gap should be addressed immediately, particularly given the large numbers of permanent and temporary residents who have made Toronto and other Canadian cities their home in recent years.

Right now, it seems these groups of potential future citizens are good enough to fill labour gaps and contribute their time, money and tax dollars to the economy. But they’re not good enough to have their voices and needs recognized in the political decision-making that governs their everyday lives and futures.

The false notion of the healthy immigrant effect and assumption of upward social mobility among the second generation has been reinforced through a lack of recognition of the diversity of identities and experiences of immigrants in big cities like Toronto and beyond. 

These assumptions may have led policymakers to neglect the health and health-care needs of immigrants.

Addressing long-standing inequities in immigrant and migrant voter participation in Canada may finally help shine a spotlight on the social and economic hardships that immigrant and diasporic communities have faced for decades, not to mention the adverse impact on their health and health-care access.

Source: Fractured futures: Upward mobility for immigrants is a myth as their health declines

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Lithuania’s citizenship referendum: what it’s about and what it needs to succeed

2024/05/07 Leave a comment

Of interest, given the considerations at play with respect to Russia and ethnic Russians:

Under the current restrictive rules, Lithuanians who emigrate and become citizens in other countries automatically lose their Lithuanian passports. With the Lithuanian diaspora having ballooned in recent decades, there has been growing pressure to change the constitution. The referendum on “retaining citizenship” is an attempt to do it.

No ordinary referendum

“Citizenship of the Republic of Lithuania is acquired at birth and on other grounds established by law. Except in individual cases provided for by law, no one may be a citizen of the Republic of Lithuania and of another state. The procedure for acquisition and loss of citizenship shall be determined by law,” is the current wording of Article 12 of the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania.

It is this article that will be changed if the referendum is successful.

The proposed new wording is: “Citizenship of the Republic of Lithuania is acquired at birth and on other grounds and in accordance with the procedure laid down by a constitutional law. The constitutional law shall also determine the grounds and procedure for losing citizenship of the Republic of Lithuania.”

Since Article 12 is part of the first section of the constitution, “The State of Lithuania”, changing it requires that more than half of all eligible voters – around 1.2 million people – not only come to the polls but also say yes. The last attempt to amend the article in 2019 failed because even though the turnout was 53 percent and the “yes” vote stood at 72 percent, this was not enough (because it represented only under 40 percent of the total electorate).

Why would this time be different? The initiators have argued that the first attempt to simply lift the ban on dual citizenship may have spooked some voters. The restriction was put into place to alleviate fears that Lithuania’s sizeable Russian-speaking community (about 5 percent of the population) could get Russian citizenship. To avoid that, the current proposal includes a reference to a constitutional law.

This law, which has already been drafted, specifies which nationalities would be compatible with Lithuanian citizenship. These “friendly countries” are the members of the European Union, the European Economic Area, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and NATO.

Meanwhile, Lithuanian citizens could not retain their citizenship if they were also nationals of Russia or Belarus, the member-states of the Eurasian Economic Union, the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Commonwealth of Independent States, or “any other political, military, economic or other alliances established on the basis of the former USSR”.

Will the constitutional law be passed?

This constitutional law, however, is also a target of the opponents of the amendment. They argue that if the referendum succeeds and Article 12 is amended, there is no guarantee the law will actually be passed in its current form.

A constitutional law is not part of the constitution or a constitutional amendment. It is a completely separate document drafted by the parliament and adopted with a special majority – more than half of all MPs.

The parliament would only vote on the new constitutional law after a successful referendum.

But opponents of the referendum doubt whether the special majority will be easy to achieve or that no one will try to change the law.

The initiators of the referendum, meanwhile, assure that the law will be adopted because all parliamentary parties are in agreement and have no objections to the bill. Recall, they argue, that 111 MPs voted in favour of calling the referendum and none voted against it.

The constitutional law cannot be passed before the referendum because it would simply be deemed in violation of the current constitution. However, to make sure people know what they are voting for, the law has already been registered in the Seimas and is available to all who wish to read it.

Source: Lithuania’s citizenship referendum: what it’s about and what it needs to succeed

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Setting the record straight on refugee claims by international students

2024/05/07 Leave a comment

Good analysis of the data and placing it in perspective.

However, makes the mistake of only focussing on the overall numbers and not considering growth rates. For example, an increase of three percent to eight percent over the last 5 years is an increase of about 170 percent, a valid concern particularly if the trend continues given the overburdened refugee determination system (and higher than the overall increase of 150 percent).

While “only one percent” of international students making claims is a small number, given the large number of international students again that understates the issue.

Of course, the media and much commentary focuses on these issues rather than for example, declining naturalization rates. But that’s the reality, and IRCC and Ministers have contributed to that given the policies that got us to this place.

But valid, of course, to assess against low acceptance rates.:

The Canadian government placed a cap on the number of study permits granted to international students earlier this year. The government stated that a rapid increase in the number of international students was putting added “pressure on housing, health care and other services.”

In addition, Immigration Minister Marc Miller criticized some private colleges for the increasing number of refugee claims from their international students, saying the trend was “alarming” and “totally unacceptable.”

Similarly, a recent article in the Globe and Mail stated refugee claims by international students increased by 646 per cent from 2018 to 2023, and raised concerns about students exploiting Canada’s immigration system.

However, focusing on refugee claims, and not refugee claim approvals, obscures the context needed to understand such a complex issue. These comments and statistics are misleading and contribute to fueling xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment.

Given the central place of immigration in heated political debates in Canada, it’s crucial to unpack these claims and understand the implications of perpetuating unfounded criticism of Canada’s refugee and immigration system.

Growing number of displaced people

Amid the war in Ukraine, violence in Haiti and enduring humanitarian crises in Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Venezuela, Sudan and elsewhere, over 114 million people have been displaced worldwide. Accordingly, refugee claims have increased around the world from displaced people; many of whom face the risk of being forcibly returned home or sent to a third country.

The number of refugee claims in Canada fluctuates over time, largely in response to global events. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic there was a notable decline in refugee claims from 58,378 in 2019 to 18,500 in 2020. However, refugee claims in Canada increased from 55,388 in 2018 to 137,947 in 2023.

While the increase in the number of international students making refugee claims is worth investigation, the impact of this increase should not be exaggerated or taken out of context. In 2018, international students made up three per cent of new refugee claims. By 2023, this figure increased to only eight per cent.

Most importantly, these numbers need to be examined as a percentage of all international students in Canada. In 2023, only one per cent of international students sought asylum.

A table showing the number of refugee claims madein canada each of the years along with those that were accepted, rejected and made by international students.
Data on the number of refugee claims made in Canada between 2018 and 2023. (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada), Author provided (no reuse)

Refugee fraud is rare

The large majority of refugee claims in Canada succeed. In recent years the number of refugee claims approved increased from 63 per cent in 2018 to 79 per cent in 2023.

During this same period, fraud in the refugee determination system has been relatively rare. When Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board encounters a claim that is “clearly fraudulent” the Board has a legal obligation to declare that the claim is “manifestly unfounded.” This occurs only a few dozen times per year.

The result is that most refugee claimants in Canada are determined to have a well-founded fear of being sent back home. As such, most will obtain permanent residence in Canada and be on the path to citizenship.

Dangers of alarmist rhetoric

Statistics Canada data indicate that more than 15 per cent of immigrants are deciding to leave Canada within 20 years of immigrating. Meanwhile less than half of permanent residents are deciding to become citizens. There is also a similar trend among international students. More and more international students are contemplating leaving Canada amid declining affordability and diminishing job prospects.

However, these realities are often not as interesting or enraging as the alarmist rhetoric adopted by politicians and media. The fact that fraud is rare in Canada’s refugee system doesn’t sell newspapers or win votes. Declining citizenship rates are not as compelling as tales of international students exploiting loopholes to stay in Canada.

This kind of rhetoric also overlooks the fact that many students do come from countries experiencing political instability and violence, making their refugee claims deserving of consideration. In the face of migration controls and the absence of safe and legal channels, coming to Canada as a student and seeking refuge may be the only viable option for some people seeking protection from persecution.

With that in mind, politicians and media must be careful regarding how they discuss refugee claimants. It is misleading to imply that it is “alarming” and “unacceptable” for someone to make a refugee claim simply because they are an international student. Seeking asylum is a right they have under both international and Canadian law.

Such rhetoric fosters a climate of suspicion and distrust towards newcomers, fueling xenophobia and hostility towards those in need of protection. Instead, politicians, media and the public in general, should recognize that Canada has processes that are well-placed to examine these claims. These include one of the world’s most well-regarded refugee determination systems that assesses each claim on its merits.

When politicians engage in rhetoric that plays into anxieties about migration, the media must act as an informed voice that scrutinizes their comments, instead of amplifying reactionary claims about fraud and the spectre of bogus refugees.

Source: Setting the record straight on refugee claims by international students

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Global Housing Shortages Are Crushing Immigration-Fueled Growth

2024/05/07 Leave a comment

Of note, Canada not alone (but doesn’t excuse the policy and program mistakes….). Money quote: “Canada’s experience shows there’s a limit to immigration-fueled growth:”

For decades, the rapid inflow of migrants helped countries including Canada, Australia and the UK stave off the demographic drag from aging populations and falling birth rates. That’s now breaking down as a surge of arrivals since borders reopened after the pandemic runs headlong into a chronic shortage of homes to accommodate them.

Canada and Australia have escaped recession since their Covid contractions, but their people haven’t with deep per-capita downturns eroding standards of living. The UK’s recession last year looked mild on raw numbers but was deeper and longer when measured on a per-person basis.

All up, thirteen economies across the developed world were in per-capita recessions at the end of last year, according to exclusive analysis by Bloomberg Economics. While there are other factors — such as the shift to less-productive service jobs and the fact that new arrivals typically earn less — housing shortages and associated cost-of-living strains are a common thread.

So is the immigration-fueled economic growth model doomed? Not quite.

In Australia, for instance, the inflow of roughly one million people, or 3.7% of the population, since June 2022 helped plug a chronic shortages of workers in industries such as hospitality, aged care and agriculture. And in the UK — an economy near full employment — arrivals from Ukraine, Hong Kong and elsewhere have made up for a lack of workers after Brexit.

Skills shortages across much of the developed world mean more, not fewer, workers are needed. Indeed, the US jobs market and economy are running hotter than many thought possible as an influx of people across the southern border expands the labor pool — even as immigration shapes up as a defining issue in the November presidential election.

While the US has seen a widely-covered surge in authorized and irregular migration, the scale of the increase actually pales in comparison to Canada’s growth rate. For every 1,000 residents, the northern nation brought in 32 people last year, compared with fewer than 10 in the US.

Put another way: Over the past two years, 2.4 million people arrived in Canada, more than New Mexico’s population, yet Canada barely added enough housing for the residents of Albuquerque.

Canada’s experience shows there’s a limit to immigration-fueled growth: Once new arrivals exceed a country’s capacity to absorb them, standards of living decline even if top-line numbers are inflated. The Bank of Nova Scotia estimates a productivity-neutral rate of population growth is less than a third of what Canada saw last year, which would be more in line with the US pace.

So even as that record population growth keeps Canada’s GDP growing, life is getting tougher, especially for younger generations and for immigrants such as 29-year-old Akanksha Biswas.

Biswas arrived in Canada in the middle of 2022, just as per-capita GDP started plunging amid the start of the post-pandemic immigration boom and the Bank of Canada’s aggressive interest-rate tightening cycle.

The former Sydneysider moved to Toronto for what she believed would be a better life with a lower cost of living and greater career prospects. Instead, she faced higher rent, lower pay and limited job opportunities.

“I actually had a completely different picture in my mind about what life would be like in Toronto,” said Biswas, who works in advertising. “Prices were almost similar, but there’s a lot more competition in the job market.”

Canada’s working-age population grew by a million over the past year but the labor market only created 324,000 jobs. The upshot: The unemployment rate rose by more than a full percentage point, with young people and newcomers again the worst hit.

Biswas spends more than a third of her income on the monthly rent bill of C$2,800 ($2,050), splitting the cost with her partner. She’s dining out less and making coffee at home instead of going to the cafe. She’s also pushing back plans to have children or buy a home.

“I don’t see my future here if I want to raise a family,” she says.

While millions of Americans also face a housing affordability crisis, their real disposable income growth has stayed above the rise in home prices over much of the past two decades. Not so in Canada. The median price for homes in Toronto is now C$1.3 million, nearly three times that of Chicago, a comparable US city.

The chronic underbuilding of homes and decades of continuous rises in prices has drained funds from other parts of the economy toward housing. That lack of investment in capital — combined with firms’ focusing instead on expanding workforces due to cheaper labor costs — has driven down productivity, which the Bank of Canada says is at “emergency” levels.

Growing anxiety around the housing crunch forced Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government to scale back on its immigration ambitions, halting the increase of permanent resident targets and putting a limit on the growth of temporary residents for the first time.

Canada’s goal is now to cut the population of temporary foreign workers, international students and asylum claimants by 20%, or roughly by half a million people, over the next three years. That’s expected to slash the annual population growth rate by more than half to an average of 1% in 2025 and 2026.

Meantime, Biswas and her partner are calling it quits on their Canada experiment and moving to Melbourne, where they reckon they can afford a two-bedroom apartment for less than what they paid for a one-bedroom space in Toronto.

But life won’t be easy Down Under either as many of the same strains are playing out, with Australia facing its worst housing crisis in living memory.

Building permits for apartments and town houses are near a 12-year low and there remains a sizable backlog of construction work, largely due to a lack of skilled workers. The government has tried to plug the labor supply gap by boosting the number of migrants, only to find that’s making the problem even worse.

Just like Canada’s experience, the ballooning population is not only exacerbating housing demand, it’s also masking the underlying weakness in the economy.

GDP has expanded every quarter since a short Covid-induced recession in 2020, yet on a per-capita basis, GDP contracted for a third consecutive quarter in the final three months of 2023 — the deepest decline since the early 1990s economic slump.

In absolute terms, Australia’s per-capita GDP is now at a two-year low — a “material under-performance” versus the US and an outcome that could spur higher unemployment, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Angst about the lack of housing, soaring rents and surging home prices has prompted Anthony Albanese’s ruling Labor government to crack down on student visas.

“It has been proven over many many years that there’s a positive to Australia from a high migration intake,” said Stephen Halmarick, chief economist at the nation’s biggest lender Commonwealth Bank of Australia. “But in the very near term, you can see that it’s putting upward pressure on rents, house prices and clearly that’s a concern for many and the demand for some services is seeing sticky inflation.”

Neighboring New Zealand is grappling with a similar headache.

The government there last month made immediate changes to an employment visa program, introducing an English-language requirement and reducing the maximum continuous stay for a range of lower-skilled roles, citing “unsustainable” net migration. The changes were part of a plan to “create a smarter immigration” that is “self-funding, sustainable and better manages risk,” Immigration Minister Erica Stanford said in the statement at the time.

Calvin Jurnatan, 30, moved to Sydney from Indonesia in December to study construction design as a gateway to becoming a permanent resident. Months later, he still doesn’t have a job. One reason is that migrants face long and expensive processes to get their qualifications recognized.

Jurnatan’s failure to find a part-time role in construction comes despite the sector being high on the skills shortage list, especially after the government set an ambitious goal of building 1.2 million new homes by 2029. That target looks increasingly unachievable, industry players say.

Frustrated, Jurnatan has stopped looking for construction jobs and is instead scouting the retail sector where roles are easier to find. He’s doing some freelance photography to eke out a living and says he wouldn’t recommend Australia to his family and friends back home.

“People are struggling,” he said. “I’m struggling. It’s not cheap and everyone needs to work really, really hard here. So, when people call me and ask, ‘hey, how is living in Sydney right now?’ I tell them the truth.”

Independent think tank the Committee for Economic Development of Australia found in a recent report that the hourly wage gap between recent migrants and Australian-born workers increased between 2011 and 2021. On average, migrants who have been in Australia for 2 to 6 years earn more than 10% less than similar Australian-born workers.

“There are big costs from not making the best use of migrants’ skills,” according to CEDA’s senior economist Andrew Barker.

Over in Europe, its largest economy, Germany, also saw a per-capita recession that comes against a backdrop of rising political tensions over a large number of asylum seekers, housing shortages and a misfiring economy. Bloomberg Economics analysis shows that France, Austria and Sweden are also among those who have suffered per-capita recessions.

In Britain, too, record levels of migration have begun to weigh on the economy. A technical recession in the second half of last year saw headline GDP slip 0.4%, yet the slump was longer and deeper when adjusted for population. Per-capita GDP has contracted 1.7% since the start of 2022, falling in six out of the seven quarters and stagnating in the other.

With Britain close to full employment and over 850,000 dropping out of its workforce since the pandemic, immigration has helped employers fill widespread worker shortages, not least in the health and social care sectors.

“A very good bit of the growth that we saw through the 2010s was down to net migration,” said Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. “In terms of the overall size of the economy, it’s been really important. What’s really hard to say is what impact the net immigration has had on the per-capita numbers.”

UK GDP has expanded 23% since the start of 2010. On a per-person basis, growth in output has been far less impressive at 12%.

Over the same period, the population has surged, growing an estimated 11%, or almost 7 million, to 69 million. The Office for National Statistics expects it to hit close to 74 million in 2036 in updated population projections that now predict faster growth. Over 90% of the increase in the population expected between 2021 and 2036 will come from migrants, it said in January.

“If we hadn’t had such high immigration, housing would be cheaper than it is at the moment, possibly quite significantly,” Johnson said. “But the converse of that is that the problem has been that we simply haven’t built enough houses, given what we know is happening to the size of the population.”

The UK’s post-Brexit immigration system aimed to stop cheap labor from Europe and prioritize high-skilled workers. However, the government allows some foreign workers easier access if they are in shortage-hit sectors.

“Those shortages really are pretty much always caused by poor paying conditions, although the employers will tell you it’s all skills,” said Alan Manning, labor market economist at the London School of Economics. “Then they start complaining about ‘we can’t afford higher wages and so we have to have migrants so we can keep our existing wages.’”

The growing pressures on housing and stretched public services are prompting a backlash among voters against Rishi Sunak’s ruling Conservative government ahead of a general election expected later this year. It has hemorrhaged support to the right-wing populist Reform UK party, which is promising “net zero immigration,” while the Tories are polling in single digits among 18- to 24-year-olds who put housing as their second-most important issue.

The opposition Labour party has promised a “blitz” of planning reforms to unlock construction, as well as restraint on immigration as it heads toward what’s widely anticipated to be a sweeping election victory.

A shortage of properties for the bigger population has sent house prices to over eight times average earnings in England and Wales, and 12 times in London. In 1997, they were 3.5 times earnings and four times, respectively. A lack of supply has also caused rental costs to rocket at a record pace in the last 12 months, worsening a cost-of-living crisis for young Britons especially.

Official figures show that 234,400 homes were added to the UK housing supply in 2022-23, well below the levels needed to meet huge demand and the 300,000-a-year target the Tories promised to reach by the mid-2020s at the last election.

“If we’re looking to grow GDP by throwing more people at it, then we need more housing,” said Peter Truscott, chief executive of FTSE 250 housebuilder Crest Nicholson.

However, UK housebuilders and the government have struggled to boost construction of new homes to the levels needed. A restrictive planning system has been used by Nimbys — “not in my back yard” — to block local developments and efforts to overhaul the system by the ruling Conservatives were scuppered by concerns of a backlash in their rural southern heartlands.

“We have a completely utterly dysfunctional planning system in the UK,” said Truscott. “Forty years in house building, it’s never been so bad, and the rate of decline in planning has been quite incredible over the last couple of years.”

While encouraged by Labour plans, he cautions that it will take two parliamentary terms to make a difference as supply chain constraints will prevent an instant “flood” of new homes.

The longer voters in the UK, Australia, Canada and similar economies see their living standards go backwards, the more their opposition to rapid immigration programs will harden. A lasting fix requires government policies, especially in housing, that convince both would-be migrants and the existing populations of the benefits of immigration-led economic growth.

Source: Global Housing Shortages Are Crushing Immigration-Fueled Growth

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