As Trudeau takes power, judge adjourns citizenship court battle

2015/11/05 Leave a comment

No surprise as expected. New government under Minister McCallum committed to repeal revocation provisions:

As Justin Trudeau makes his way to Rideau Hall this morning, federal lawyers appear ready to act on one of his key campaign promises: scrapping the controversial Conservative law that gives Ottawa the power to strip convicted terrorists of their Canadian citizenship.

The Justice Department last week requested an indefinite adjournment in five high-profile court challenges targeting the Harper-era revocation law, saying federal lawyers assigned to the cases can’t move forward without direction from the incoming Trudeau Liberals. “Given the election outcome resulting in a new government, we are seeking instructions on next steps in this litigation,” says an Oct. 27 letter from senior counsel Angela Marinos, sent to the Federal Court office in Toronto. “Given that there will be a transition period after the Cabinet is sworn in, we cannot confirm, at this time, when those instructions will be conveyed.”

Lawyers for all sides consented to the adjournment request, and the order was rubber-stamped by Justice Russel Zinn on Monday—48 hours before Trudeau and his ministers were to be officially sworn in by Governor General David Johnston.

The adjournment essentially hits the pause button on a cluster of court cases that triggered intense debate during the election, giving the new PM and his advisors plenty of time to determine how best to repeal the Tory law, as promised. All parties to the court actions are scheduled to reconvene Dec. 9 for a case management conference in Toronto; by then, the Liberals’ specific intentions should be evident.

Source: As Trudeau takes power, judge adjourns citizenship court battle – Macleans.ca

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Lawyer in niqab case says Canada must confront anti-Muslim sentiment

2015/11/02 1 Comment

Good profile of Lorne Waldman, the lawyer for Zunera Ishaq (and a number of other immigration and refugee cases that went against the Conservative government):

For Mr. Waldman, who unexpectedly found himself and his clients at the centre of the election, the e-mail itself was a tipping point: Even though the niqab controversy ended with the victory of Justin Trudeau, who opposed the ban, an undercurrent of anti-Muslim feeling remains, and needs to be confronted.

“I see the seeds of a huge problem that we in Canada have been able to avoid for many years – some of the worst aspects of the anti-immigrant sentiment that’s existed in Europe,” he said in an interview. “And we avoided it for a long time because we had responsible leaders who didn’t try to stir the pot. All we need is another election where someone else chooses to use these types of wedge issues.”

If it was a very good election for the Liberals, it was a strangely eventful one for Mr. Waldman, even by his own busy standards. He represented Zunera Ishaq, a Pakistani immigrant who successfully fought a Conservative ban on wearing a niqab during the citizenship oath. The niqab became a major election issue. He also represented a Canadian-born convicted terrorist facing the loss of his citizenship; the government’s fight against terrorism was another big election issue. And he was a spokesman for a national refugee lawyers’ group on the Syrian refugee crisis – a third key issue – urging that the government speed up the process by emphasizing the reunification of families.

“I’ve never had an experience like this,” said the 63-year-old father of three, who runs an 11-lawyer firm that includes his daughter. “I’ve done lots of high-profile cases but my God …”

The end of the election may have brought him a respite. Getting tough on refugee claimants perceived to be taking advantage of Canada’s laws and social supports was, like crime and terrorism, a major focus for the Conservatives. Last year, Mr. Waldman won a case against the government’s cuts to refugee health care; a Federal Court judge called them “cruel and unusual treatment.” Shortly after the election, the government’s appeal was adjourned. He doesn’t expect the Liberal government to fight the Federal Court ruling.

… Many of his friends, acquaintances and fellow lawyers also opposed his stand on the niqab. Even his sister and mentor, Ontario Family Court Judge Geraldine Waldman, who died of brain cancer on the same day he received the e-mail, disagreed with his stand.

“The last real conversation I had with her about anything political was about the niqab. She was a diehard feminist. She opened the first all-female law practice in Ontario in the seventies with Harriet Sachs, Lynn King and Mary Cornish. She couldn’t get around the niqab.”

Standing up for the niqab surprised even him.

“It was a bit strange, to be honest, to defend the right of a woman to wear the niqab. It’s not one of the things to have high on my list of rights that I would defend. But it had nothing to do with the niqab. It was defending the right of Canadians to express themselves as they saw fit. It was also opposing an abuse of power by the minister who clearly was acting illegally when he issued this policy statement.” (Both the Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal pointed to the wording of the Citizenship Act, which says only cabinet can make changes to the citizenship ceremony. Mr. Kenney had simply issued a directive banning the niqab.)

Mr. Waldman comes from a refugee background – two grandparents came to Canada to escape Russian pogroms in the early 1900s. He says he became a refugee lawyer in response to the Jewish experience with anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, which he called “my defining thing.”

“We have pictures at home of all my mother’s uncles and aunts. On my mother’s side there were at least 12 or 13 uncles and aunts. They all had kids and the kids were married, and so we’re talking about probably 80 or 90 people – three survived.”

Source: Lawyer in niqab case says Canada must confront anti-Muslim sentiment – The Globe and Mail

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Why the Conservative ethnic outreach strategy fell apart: Cardozo

2015/10/31 Leave a comment

Andrew Cardozo on the reasons the Conservative ethnic outreach strategy failed:

It was that they assumed the ethnic voters were too stupid to hear the Liberal promise and could be easily scared by hot button words.

After years of visiting thousands of parades, temples, gurdwaras and the occasional mosque, and chasing around with foreign leaders like Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Filipino President Benign Aquino and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the 416, the 905, the 604—all those “heavily ethnic” ridings went Liberal.  How could they?

The first pillar of the Conservative ethnic policy was in part that they identified the more conservative elements within each of the communities, no matter how large or small, and in doing so not only expanded their base, but deepened the conservativism of the party.  They were able to attract the many traditional-minded Christians from various countries in addition to conservative elements of others from China, India and all the non-Christian religious groups.

The second pillar of the strategy was to play home-country politics.  All governments have done this, but the Conservatives took it to new heights—an extent to which it was becoming distasteful.  There will always be leaders in each community who will bask in the glow of a visiting head of state, but at a different level, members of the community are saying,  “No, Mr. Modi is not my Prime Minister, it’s you damn it.”

So on both these approaches, the Conservatives were smart enough to understand that they were not going to get the whole community but they could get the support of the more conservative segments of each community.  The sad part of it though was that they had no compunction about racing into a community and aggressively addressing issues on which there were divisions.  Unlike any other political party, they inserted their wedge politics that they use in the wider society, and have left those communities divided like never before. For example, you got a handful of demonstrators from the Jewish Defence League outside a fundraiser for a Jewish Liberal candidate in Toronto.

The third pillar of the strategy has been to play communities off each other, by resurrecting divisions from the old countries.  Taking a principled stand is what they said it was about.  They actively reached out to minority Christian communities from the South Indian and Middle East regions—people who left those countries to escape Islamic fundamentalism only to find that fundamentalism growing here, be they homegrown terrorist or the niqab and hijab.

But here is where the Liberals and New Democrats need to look deeply.  Just because the Conservatives were appearing to be overly bombastic, the other parties should not race to the complete opposite position.  There remains a need to counter radicalism within Canada and we do need to work towards gender equality in all communities.  While some women might cover by their own choice, others are certainly forced to.  So finding that balance should not be eschewed just because of the Conservative’s ugly approach.

In the end the Conservative approach was to focus on the conservative minded segments, cater to home-country politics, divide communities and scare them.  They will have earned the more hard-core conservative supporters for life, but by and large the strategy fell apart and even backfired, as they lost the vast majority in these communities to the Liberals’ positive campaign of hope and inclusiveness.

Source: Why the Conservative ethnic outreach strategy fell apart | hilltimes.com

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The [Texas] Border War on Birthright Citizenship | Rolling Stone

2015/10/31 Leave a comment

One of the nastier and meaner policies:

In 2013, an estimated 295,000 children were born in the U.S. who had at least one undocumented immigrant parent, according to the Pew Research Center, accounting for eight-percent of all domestic births. And Texas is home to 1.65 million undocumented immigrants, nearly 15 percent of the national total. It is reasonable to assume that tens of thousands of children are born to undocumented immigrants in Texas every year, and that a great many of them now lack birth certificates. “These quasi-citizens, outcasts, will likely experience the harsh effects of being unable to prove their true status for many years to come,” reads the Mexican government’s amicus brief. “We are witnessing the creation of a vulnerable citizenry: undocumented citizens.”

Texas is an outlier in this regard, even among states that refuse to accept matrículas. In Arizona, parents can get a birth certificate for their children with a credible witness to attest to their identity and a notorized signature. In Arkansas, they can present a foreign passport without a U.S. visa. In Virginia, they can use a hospital birth letter. Even Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for harsher immigration restrictions, told the Austin-American Statesman that “the more I think of it, the more I come down against the Texas argument, reluctantly.”

No one supporting the plaintiffs has been able to point to a smoking gun that reveals the state had a pre-meditated anti-immigrant agenda. In 2010, when Arizona enacted its sweeping SB 1070 law targeting undocumented immigrants, the legislature declared “the intent of this act is to make attrition through enforcement the public policy of all state and local government agencies in Arizona.” In other words, by cracking down on undocumented immigrants, the state hoped many would leave and fewer would come. But there has been no such declaration in Texas — the state describes its policy as “facially neutral and non-discriminatory.” Despite the fact that Texas politicians take apparent glee in talking tough on immigration and giving Washington the finger, no email has surfaced between state officials that reads, “Let’s squeeze ’em all out.” Even Harbury admits that — unlike in Arizona — the Texas policy grew in fits and starts. “It’s not like someone flipped a switch,” she says.

Still, the timing seems awfully suspicious. The decision to deny foreign passports that lacked a U.S. visa came on the heels of President Obama’s Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals, a 2012 policy that lifted the threat of deportation for as many as 1.7 million undocumented immigrants. The increasing rejection of the matrícula as a valid ID coincided with the Central American immigration “surge” in 2013 and 2014. And what appeared to be a widening crackdown on the matrícula this year followed a Texas-led lawsuit filed last December to block President Obama’s new executive actions on immigration, one of which — the Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA) — offers immigration deferrals and work authorizations to the undocumented parents of U.S. citizens.

Source: The Border War on Birthright Citizenship | Rolling Stone

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The Franco-American Flophouse: Flophouse Citizenship and International Migration Reading List

2015/10/31 2 Comments

The usual impressive list from Victoria Ferauge.

Source: The Franco-American Flophouse: Flophouse Citizenship and International Migration Reading List

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OCASI Statement: Priorities For The New Government Of Canada | OCASI

2015/10/30 Leave a comment

No real surprises here.

Do not expect, however, that all will be met (e.g., increased settlement funds) but many are aligned to the Liberal platform and/or public statements (and OCASI appears to have taken this into account):

Refugees

  • Fully restore Interim Federal Health Program for refugees and refugee claimants;
  • Expand and expedite government and private sponsorship of refugees including Syrians;
  • Remove the arbitrary and unfair Designated Country of Origin scheme, which has created a two-tier refugee determination system

Family reunification 

  • Grant permanent resident status to sponsored spouses upon arrival, eliminating Conditional Permanent Residence which has increased the vulnerability of women immigrants.
  • Restore maximum age for sponsorship of immigrant dependents to age 22 from 19;
  • Increase parent and grandparent sponsorship applications, at a minimum doubling them to 10,000 a year (Liberal party commitment);
  • Make family reunification faster by increasing resources to process sponsorship applications, particularly at visa posts with the longest delays; and by introducing Express Entry for family reunification (processing within 6 months);

Citizenship

  • Repeal the revocation of citizenship of dual citizens, and remove barriers to citizenship introduced through Bill C-24 including longer residency period to qualify, expansion of language and knowledge test requirements and no right of appeal to courts;
  • Reduce delays to acquire citizenship and reduce costs (which have tripled as a result of Bill C-24);

Migrant workers

  • Give all migrant workers (at all skill levels) a pathway to permanent residency;
  • Remove the four-year-in four-year-out limitation on migrant workers;

Francophone immigration

  • Support more francophone immigration to Ontario and the rest of Canada, meeting the 4% target (outside Quebec) as a minimum;

Immigrant and refugee settlement

  • Support immigrants and refugees to get jobs that match their experience and education through foreign credential recognition, enforcement of employment equity legislation and through bridging, mentoring and job placement programs;
  • Reverse the deep funding cuts to settlement services in Ontario.

Source: OCASI Statement: Priorities For The New Government Of Canada | OCASI

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Paul Calandra says it was a ‘mistake’ to focus on niqab, barbaric practices

2015/10/29 Leave a comment

Interesting coming from Calandra, who was one of the more obnoxious practitioners of repeating inane and irrelevant talking points.

Yet he shows more awareness than defeated CIC Minister Alexander (see this short video Catching up with outgoing cabinet minister Chris Alexander).

Perhaps if he and his colleagues engaged in more discussion with Canadians before the election, allowing for a better balance of witnesses during committee hearings, rather than ramming through changes, a more solid basis would have been laid:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s handpicked parliamentary secretary says the Conservative Party’s focus on identity issues — the niqab, stripping citizenship from dual nationals and launching a barbaric cultural practices hot line — was a mistake that cost the party votes among new Canadians.

“There was a lot of confusion and a lot of first-generation Canadians said ‘OK, we’re not ready to endorse that,'” Paul Calandra said in an interview with Rosemary Barton on CBC News Network’s Power & Politics.

“Obviously, yeah, in retrospect [it was a mistake],” he said, and one that likely led to his defeat at the hands of his Liberal opponent, Jane Philpott, in the riding of Markham–Stouffville.

“We had our challenges, obviously, in the early goings — we had the Duffy trial, then the Syrian refugee crisis — but through it all we were still in a very good spot,” Calandra said.

Voters were responding to Conservative messaging around low taxes, the economy and public safety, he said, but then the party started to stray into identity politics, and doubled down on rhetoric about Islamic face coverings and homegrown terrorism.

The Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act was a particular sticking point. The Conservative-drafted law, known during the legislative process as Bill C-24, strips dual nationals of their citizenship if they are convicted of terrorism or high treason, among other serious offences.

It was not that voters disagreed with what the Conservatives had enacted, but that they were “confused” about how widely the law could be applied, Calandra said, and the Liberals pounced, shrewdly denouncing the policy as a slippery slope that created two classes of citizenship.

“‘What does it mean for me? How will that impact my family,'” Calandra said, reciting some of the questions he heard from voters at the door. “I had a call … ‘If I’m caught shoplifting does that mean my family has to go?'”

Source: Paul Calandra says it was a ‘mistake’ to focus on niqab, barbaric practices – Politics – CBC News

Aaron Wherry of Macleans provides comments by Conservative MPs:

C-24, the bill that allows the federal government to revoke the Canadian citizenship of dual citizens if an individual is convicted of treason or terrorism or takes up arms against Canada, was a similarly problematic issue, unexpectedly raising concerns for immigrants and their families. “Somehow we missed stuff, because I would have been one hundred percent behind it,” says [Brad] Trost [re-elected in Saskatchewan], “but for some reason people who should’ve understood that it wasn’t meant at them were a little bit insecure.” …
In Toronto, the Prime Minister made two appearances in the company of the Ford brothers, Rob and Doug, but, according to a national Innovative Research poll conducted shortly after the election, that did far more harm than good. Almost 10 times as many potential Conservative voters were less likely (49 per cent) than more likely (6.4 per cent) to vote Conservative because of Harper’s appearance with the Fords, who have practically become a worldwide monument to bad behaviour. “It’s hard to see a more self-destructive move by a campaign,” says Innovative Research owner Greg Lyle. This was a bigger turnoff for these voters than the trial of disgraced former Conservative Senator Mike Duffy (30 per cent), the party’s negative ads (26 per cent) or its anti-niqab stance (23 per cent.)

Source: How the Conservative campaign got it so spectacularly wrong – Macleans.ca

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Economy? Health care? No, the deciding factor of this election was Canadian values: Adams

2015/10/28 Leave a comment

Good reflections on the deeper values of Canadians by Michael Adams:

While polls in this election may have indicated that the economy and health care were the campaign’s top issues, Stephen Harper wasn’t defeated last week because he was seen as a poor steward of the economy or an enemy of Canadians’ beloved public health care system. Rather, he offended the values of two-thirds of Canadians. Despite some suggestions to the contrary, these values did not change much during Harper’s time in office. Canada’s political centre of gravity has not shifted.

In addition to a divided centre-left, Stephen Harper’s success could mainly be traced to deft riding-by-riding tactics and to the use of wedge values issues to build out incrementally from his base (not very far, but enough for a majority in 2011). In addition to customized offerings for specific groups of voters (such as targeted foreign policy gestures and boutique tax cuts), our outgoing PM did find a few issues on which he could appeal to large majorities of Canadians.

On crime, Harper took populist positions that were out of step with the evidence about crime reduction and represented sharp departures from both Liberal and Progressive Conservative policies of the past. Public opinion has historically been more punitive than government policy. Mr. Harper saw an opportunity and took it: his government gave the people (especially his base) what they wanted: a tough stance on bad guys.

During this campaign, another values issue came to the fore when a decision by the federal court of appeal enabled Zunera Ishaq to swear her citizenship oath while wearing a niqab. A government-sponsored poll had shown that 82 per cent of Canadians agreed with the Conservative government’s attempt to prevent her from doing so – including 93 per cent in Quebec, where secularism and gender equality have become religion. While Ms. Ishaq exercised her clear Charter right to cover her face, the government put its impotent – but widely shared – objection on prominent display.

Crime and punishment, the niqab, revoking the citizenship of convicted terrorists, establishing a “barbaric cultural practices” hotline, foot-dragging on Syrian refugees (and, earlier, revoking refugees’ health care) – all these symbolic gestures appealed to the Conservative base, but some in fact appealed to large majorities of Canadians.

If some of these moves were so popular, why didn’t they gain Conservatives more traction in the election?

The reason is that other Canadian values run deeper. Research by the Environics Institute tells us that Canadians deeply value their pluralistic society; they believe government has a role to play in building a fair country; they believe in empathy and compromise as social habits.

Many Canadians might be uncomfortable with the niqab, but they take the Charter seriously and in the grand scheme they want a just, inclusive society. Most Canadians’ thinking on sentencing for offenders might be driven more by emotion than by reviews of criminology literature, but traditionally most have not objected when governments have acted on data rather than gut. Over time, a collection of wedge-politics gestures, however cleverly designed, were no longer able to hold back the tide of public sentiment that wanted another kind of big picture.

American poet Walt Whitman wrote: “Do I contradict myself?/Very well then, I contradict myself/(I am large. I contain multitudes.)” Like Whitman, the Canadian public contains multitudes. We have lesser angels and better angels. When we are not fearful we try to be inclusive, fair, and generous. And perhaps even when we are fearful, we try to find our way back to being otherwise.

Source: Economy? Health care? No, the deciding factor of this election was Canadian values – The Globe and Mail

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Erna Paris: Canada is not immune to the most dangerous tactic in politics

2015/10/27 Leave a comment

Like Michelle Gagnon, I think Erna Paris overstates the risk.

Let us also not forget that the Conservatives lost decisively in the 33 visible majority ridings (GTA and BC’s Lower Mainland mainly), only winning two ridings to the Liberals 30 (the NDP won one), the overall popular vote for all of these ridings 31 percent compared to 52 percent for the Liberals (see my analysis 2015 Election – Visible Minority MPs Analytical Note).

One cannot win an election in Canada without being successful in these and other ridings with large numbers of visible minorities.

So yes, while the risks are always present, and one can never take things for granted, the political realities temper these as the Conservatives found out to their cost:

There’s a new narrative at play in post-election Canada. The past was dim, but the future is bright. We were worn down after a decade of authoritarian one-man rule and we voted for sunny change.

We also defied the worst of identity politics, we tell ourselves. We collectively rejected Stephen Harper’s opportunistic attacks on vulnerable Muslim women whose religion requires them to cover their face in the public square. “We’re back!” as Justin Trudeau told us.

I hope so. We’ll know soon enough.

But let’s not gloss over how close we came to the sort of majority-minority hostilities that have disrupted other diverse societies, with dangerous results. When the prime minister himself targeted a minority, creating “us” and “them” distinctions over who was, or was not, “Canadian”; when he reinforced these divisions by calling for a snitch line to report “barbaric cultural practices,” we were immediately catapulted into a new social space. In spite of longstanding legal protections for religious practices and laws that penalize defined criminal acts, more than 80 per cent of Canadians sided with Harper. Within days, a woman wearing a niqab was physically assaulted in Toronto. In Montreal, a pregnant woman was pushed to the ground. Social media exploded with anti-Muslim hatred.

None of this should have come as a surprise. I’ve studied the breakdown of multicultural societies, both past and present, and asked myself whether it is possible to pinpoint the steps along the way. And I’ve concluded that, allowing for small differences, the process is always the same. It starts with propaganda – with language purposely designed to marginalize a minority – and it is usually initiated by a respected leader who’s seeking to enhance his power. The shift from peaceful cohabitation into violence can happen quickly. Fortunately, in our case, the election results nipped the movement in the bud.

Source: Erna Paris: Canada is not immune to the most dangerous tactic in politics | Ottawa Citizen

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Citizenship: “Harder to get and easier to lose” Deck

2015/10/26 2 Comments

For those interested, my deck presented at a workshop at the Canadian Ethnic Studies Association, October 24th (updated and expanded from my May presentation to the Canadian Bar Association immigration lawyers conference).

Citizenship – Canadian Ethnic Studies 24 Oct 2015

Other speakers included John Carlaw on how the Conservatives pragmatically adjusted their ideology and language to be more in favour of immigration, citizenship and multiculturalism, which he calls ‘Kenneyism’ (while making overall policies more restrictive – see his paper A party for new Canadians? The rhetoric and reality of neoconservative citizenship and immigration policy) and Christina Gabriel, who examined the rhetoric and language around spousal immigration.

 

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