Iranian Lawmakers Aim To Scrap Discriminatory Citizenship Law

2017/07/21 Leave a comment

To watch:

A group of Iranian lawmakers are looking to scrap a longstanding law that denies citizenship and equal rights to Iranian children born to foreign fathers.

If approved by parliament, a recently drafted bill would overturn the discriminatory legislation and affect the lives of thousands of children abroad and inside Iran — especially Iranian children with fathers from the large community of Afghan refugees and migrants living in the Islamic republic.

Iranian rights activists have been campaigning for years to abolish the law, under which only Iranian men can pass their nationality to spouses or children.

For years, the citizenship of children born in marriages between Iranian women and Afghan refugees has been the driving force behind changing the law. To this point, such children are essentially stateless.

In recent days, the campaign to abolish the law was given an unexpected boost following the death of Maryam Mirzakhani, an award-winning Tehran-born mathematician who died of cancer in the United States on July 15. Mirzakhani’s only daughter, 6-year-old Anahita, has a Czech father and is thus ineligible for Iranian citizenship.

Iran’s semiofficial Fars news agency reported that a group of lawmakers made an official request on July 16 to expedite voting on the bill.

The agency claimed that Mirzakhani had asked in her will that Iranian nationality be granted to her daughter. RFERL could not independently verify that claim.

Reza Shiran told the pro-government Mashregh news outlet on July 17 that he was collecting signatures to introduce the bill on the assembly floor. He said he had collected 60 signatures in the 290-seat chamber.

He said the bill was intended to “grant citizenship to Mirzakhani’s daughter,” adding that “equal attention” should be brought to the status of children born to Iranian mothers and Afghan fathers.

His remarks came after the parliamentary cultural committee on July 11 approved the wording of the draft legislation, which would extend the granting of Iranian citizenship to the offspring of foreign fathers.

Before becoming law, the legislation needs to be approved by parliament and ratified by the Guardians Council, the powerful clerical body that must approve all proposed legislation.

Human rights groups have welcomed efforts to repeal the law as a step toward gender equality in Iran.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) researcher Tara Sepehri Far says the current law discriminates against women and denies equal rights to thousands of children in Iran.

“In the case of marriages between Iranian women and Afghan refugees, mostly undocumented refugees, it has left many children who are born and raised in Iran with no path to nationality, which affects their access to many other rights such as education, health care, and jobs,” Far says.

The United Nations estimates the number of Afghan citizens in Iran at just under 1 million, many of whom claim to face violence and injustice in the Islamic republic. Tehran puts the figure of documented and undocumented Afghan refugees and migrants closer to 3 million.

Source: Iranian Lawmakers Aim To Scrap Discriminatory Citizenship Law

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High number of women failing citizenship test reflects barriers they face, advocates say

2017/07/04 Leave a comment

Some good analysis of the effects on gender from some of the earlier policy and program changes to the citizenship program.

Not surprising but now data and evidence-based (disclosure: I have shared my citizenship data and talked with Neighbourhood Legal Services). IRCC does not publish a gender breakdown for citizenship unlike other programs:

According to data obtained under a freedom of information request, far more women than men have their citizenship applications rejected because they are unable to meet the knowledge or language requirements.

Although the Liberal government passed a bill this month to relax some of the more stringent citizenship requirements imposed by its Conservative predecessor, critics say the changes fail to address the barriers faced by immigrant women hoping to acquire Canadian citizenship.

Between 2007 and March 2017, more than 56,000 people had their citizenship applications refused, the majority of them for failing the language and knowledge requirements, said Jennifer Stone of the Neighbourhood Legal Services, who requested the data after spotting a rising number of women coming to her office for help with their applications.

“Women and refugees are disproportionately affected by the language and knowledge requirements. Now we have data that could bear that out,” Stone said. “For them, it’s not a matter of won’t. It’s a matter of can’t.”

Stone said that in recent years the number citizenship cases received by her clinic has skyrocketed and the majority of clients having difficulty obtaining citizenship are refugee women or sponsored spouses.

A gender breakdown of the refusals showed that 24,286 or 60 per cent of the 41,071 who failed the citizenship knowledge test were women. Of the 14,779 who failed the language requirement, 66 per cent or 9,754 of them were female, according to the data.

Refugees appear to be disproportionally affected by the tightened citizenship requirements introduced by the former Conservative government: raising the passing mark for the citizenship exam, demanding proof of language proficiency and drastically increasing the non-refundable citizenship application fee to $530 from $100.

The number refugees who obtained their citizenship dropped by 25 per cent to 20,059 between 2010 and 2015 from 26,725 between 2005 and 2009.

By comparison, the citizenship conversion rate for those who came under family reunification declined by 19.6 per cent while the number of new citizens who immigrated under the economic class went up by 0.9 per cent.

Tenzin Tekan, a community legal worker with Parkdale legal clinic, said she was not surprised by the statistics.

“For someone with no formal education, it’s hard,” Tekan said. “We welcome the news about the changes (by the Liberals), but it’s not going to help everyone.”

Although there is a provision in the Citizenship Act that waives the knowledge requirement based on medical opinions that applicants will “never” pass the exam, it’s a long, tedious process.

Source: High number of women failing citizenship test reflects barriers they face, advocates say | Toronto Star

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The Liberals are talking about gender, and that will change Ottawa

2017/06/27 Leave a comment

Good reporting and analysis by Campbell Clark:

In fact, it’s not easy for the Liberals to show their gender policies will change the day-to-day lives of women here, let alone around the world. And political opponents dismiss a lot of it as branding.

But there’s no doubt that this government’s focus on women will have a lasting impact on Canadian politics and government. Even the symbols: It’s hard to imagine a future prime minister appointing a cabinet where two-thirds of the ministers are men.

Some of the symbols around gender issues that delight Liberals seem to particularly irritate their opponents, such as Mr. Trudeau’s repeated assertions that he’s a feminist. “Pinkwashing,” one New Democrat called it – accusing the Liberals of mounting a marketing exercise when they won’t back substantive policies to address, for example, the gender gap for low-income women. Some Conservatives argue the Liberals spend money on bureaucracy to signal their good intentions, but their plans won’t have concrete effects.

But opponents who dismiss it as political marketing tend to admit it probably works. “Oh, they’re kicking our ass,” said one Conservative. When in power, Conservatives were often reluctant to talk about the representation of women in positions of power; on the left, touting a feminist foreign-aid policy, for example, can help the Liberals compete with the NDP for progressive voters.

And it’s clearly not motivated by just electoral politics. There are true believers, cabinet appointees such as Labour Minister Patty Hajdu and influential senior aides such as Mr. Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford. The government, under Ms. Telford’s eye, has applied gender-equity tools on matters so boringly inside the machinery of government, such as gender analysis in every department and on all initiatives before cabinet, that it can’t possibly be aimed at voters. It’s hard to say if that will really have an impact, but in theory, the government will know if infrastructure funds for hockey arenas or daycares are going to create jobs for men or women, or benefit one gender more.

When an investigation by The Globe and Mail’s Robyn Doolittle found that one in five sexual-assault complaints was dismissed as unfounded, and that the rate of this finding varied dramatically from place to place, it sparked an immediate e-mail chain between Ms. Telford, Ms. Monsef, and Ms. Hajdu. A month later, the budget set aside $100-million for a gender-based violence strategy.

The thing is, gender-based violence is a big, complex problem. Ms. Monsef called it the “greatest barrier to gender equity in this country.” The centrepiece of the government’s new strategy is collecting data, and there have been questions about whether that’s really an adequate response.

Ms. Monsef noted that figures haven’t been collected since 1993 – “We have cyberviolence. That didn’t happen in 1993,” she said. Data will help design effective prevention programs. But a key reason she offers is that they will honour the stories of survivors by collecting “evidence” for policies. Another Liberal government insider suggested that with solid numbers, it’s harder to argue about the scale of the issue.

It’s unclear what impact the strategy will have. But the Liberals have done a key thing to the politics: They’ve raised demand, and expectations.

Source: The Liberals are talking about gender, and that will change Ottawa – The Globe and Mail

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With wider search for soldiers, Canada’s military broadens horizons [in hiring]

2017/06/27 Leave a comment

The The numbers are abysmal as shown above in the dated chart but it does appear that the military is taking more serious steps to address the gaps.

It would also be nice if their annual employment equity report would be posted publicly rather than having to request it from the Library of Parliament:

First, though, comes a significant and persistent challenge: getting more Canadians to join.

The Forces have struggled for years to hit recruiting numbers, resulting in thousands of unfilled positions such as pilots and technicians.

That’s why fixing the recruiting system is a top priority, said Lt.-Gen. Charles Lamarre, the chief of military personnel, whose role is to oversee all aspects of human resources in the Canadian Armed Forces.

Central to that goal is making the military more inclusive, diverse and attractive to all Canadians, regardless of their backgrounds.

“Our population doesn’t look like all white guys,” Lamarre said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

“If you want to get the very best people – the very smartest, most capable, most committed and most ingenious – then you need to look broadly and not exclude groups that would be very useful to you.”

There is more to the push towards increased diversity and inclusiveness than simply recruiting, though that part of the equation is vitally important.

Gen. Jonathan Vance, Canada’s chief of the defence staff, recently released a diversity strategy in which he noted that Canada was becoming more diverse – and the military needed to follow suit.

Doing so would be necessary to attract and retain people, Vance wrote, as well as to ensure the military continued to reflect the society it is sworn to protect, and to increase its effectiveness on missions abroad.

That’s why the Forces appear to be turning a page: leaders are recognizing the real importance of diversity, said Alan Okros, an expert on diversity in the military at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto.

“This idea that people with different views, different experiences, different skill sets are going to make the military stronger has been kind of coalescing and coming together for about a year and a half,” Okros said.

“This isn’t a luxury, this isn’t social engineering, this isn’t political manoeuvring or political correctness. This is now an operational requirement.”

Vance has since taken the unprecedented step of ordering the military to grow the percentage of female personnel to 25 per cent in the next decade, up from 15 per cent.

Recruiters are now launching targeted advertising campaigns and reaching out to women who previously expressed an interest in a military career but didn’t join.

Senior commanders, meanwhile, are reviewing everything from uniforms and ceremonies to food and religious accommodations to see whether they meet the requirements of a more diverse force.

Lamarre plans to speak Monday at a citizenship ceremony in Ottawa in hopes of explaining to new Canadians what he describes as “a tangible way in which they can serve their nation.”

And he hopes to sit down with Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde and other indigenous leaders to talk about ways to reach out and attract people from those communities.

Others within the military are getting in on the action too, with the head of the navy, Vice-Admiral Ron Lloyd, issuing a directive last week encouraging his sailors to attend Pride parades in uniform.

Vance is expected to issue a similar directive to the rest of the military in the coming days.

Not everyone agrees with what the military is doing, Lloyd acknowledged, including some of those who are already in uniform. But changing the face of the Forces isn’t just some feel-good exercise, he said.

“In order to be successful in the future, we need to be able to recruit from the entire population.”

There are other challenges to overcome besides convincing some current personnel of the importance of diversity.

The military is still trying to overcome years of bad headlines about the treatment of women and members of the LGBT community by adopting a zero-tolerance approach to sexual misconduct.

There has also been a historic lack of interest in the Forces by many ethnic communities, particularly those that trace their origins to countries where the military has a bad reputation.

And then there are the problems identified by auditor general Michael Ferguson last year, namely that the recruiting system is struggling with red tape and the effects of Conservative budget cuts.

Source: With wider search for soldiers, Canada’s military broadens horizons – The Globe and Mail

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Toronto: Gender, racial diversity part of city’s tech push

2017/06/17 Leave a comment

Interesting approach that sends a message:

Mayor John Tory says he and other Toronto city officials are less likely to attend tech and innovation events if they feature all-man panels and programming with little ethnic diversity.

Tory made the pledge Thursday at the “Women founders and leaders in technology” event, part of the #MoveTheDial initiative aimed at increasing female participation and leadership in Canadian tech.

“Our city is home to a diverse array of talent that must be represented in the events and programming we put on for each other and for the world. . . ,” Tory said. “Diversity and inclusion are a huge part of our value proposition and I will be supporting and championing those events that help build that reputation at home and globally.”

In written responses to the Star after the event, Tory said he, his “advocate for the innovation economy” Councillor Michelle Holland, economic development chair Councillor Michael Thompson and others at the city will “prioritize” the many events they attend based on the gender and ethnic balance of people being presented.

He said he came up with the idea himself after observing many such events and speaking with people including Jodi Kovitz, founder of #MoveTheDial who was part of his trade delegation last fall to Israel.

“Many rooms contain almost all men in large crowds,” Tory said. “We will try to look at diversity overall in our selection of events with an emphasis on gender since that seems to be the bigger challenge.

“By doing this we are asking everyone to be intentional about the public face we put on our events and our conversations about tech. Our city is diverse and that should be reflected.”

California’s Silicon Valley in particular has been criticized for a “tech bro” culture populated by male, mostly white coders who, when they strike it rich, invest in other startups run by people who look mostly like them.

Source: Gender, racial diversity part of city’s tech push | Toronto Star

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When equality feels like discrimination: Nightingale

2017/06/16 Leave a comment

Great piece by Johnathan Nightingale on the lack of merit in merit arguments:

You can’t run a modern business with a mindset from the Dark Ages.

The idea that there is a war against merit feels like one plucked out of time, full of arguments that have been obliterated for decades. But the unfortunate truth is that many leaders in business today still cling to the same dated ideas. Are you one of them? If you find yourself agreeing that there is such a thing as “reverse discrimination,” understand that you –  and your business –  are at risk of becoming obsolete.

There are no meritocracies

Merit is a funny thing. We all like the sound of a meritocracy. It ought to be the case that a person succeeds based on their hard work, evaluated fairly. There was a time when I believed in it myself.

But your business is made of people, and people are never objective. We do such a bad job of judging merit that we don’t even see our own mistakes. We score the merit of a résumé differently based on how white the name sounds. We assess the merit of computer code differently when we know a woman wrote it. Professional symphony musicians can’t even hear music objectively when they know who’s playing.

Does merit explain your own company’s gender or racial distribution? Are you sure? Bias is like a leaky pipe. It’s tempting to ignore it, and scary to wonder how much damage it’s doing. But eventually you have to confront it, otherwise it can bring your whole house down. Once you start to recognize that we’re all fallible on this stuff, instead of pretending it doesn’t happen, you can start to make repairs.

The ability to see bias is a skill that you can develop. It’s an incredible tool for improving your business, and will allow you to see opportunities everywhere. Some solutions are clear, like using blind résumé screens to avoid up-front biases in hiring. Some take more work to see, and some require creative thinking to undo. But if you’re paying attention  –  if you get curious about where your business has bias leaks  –  you’ll race ahead of the people still crowing about their commitment to meritocracy.

Equality can feel like discrimination

Many business leaders also push back against equality efforts by labelling them “reverse discrimination.” It’s easy to understand why. A program that takes opportunities away from men by imposing a quota of women to be hired sure feels discriminatory.

It’s a silly argument. In science, tech, and business, men have maintained the advantaged position for generations. (White men in particular, and straight white men most particularly.) If we are all interested in building fairer and more just companies, and a better world, we’re going to need to get everyone else caught up. That’s not discrimination, that’s moving towards equality. But equality feels very different when it means giving up an unfair advantage.

In your own company, as Saadia Muzaffar says, “Ask yourself who’s not at the table.” If you can’t stomach the idea of quotas and preferential hiring, can you at least start by looking for representation? Ask yourself where you are missing perspective because of gaps in your hiring and act to fix it. And no, you don’t get to blame a lack of applicants.

Modern employees demand modern employers

Tech is a young industry, and that means we’re often the first to see new employment trends emerge. What we’re seeing right now is a generation of employees who care deeply about the values of the companies they work for. They expect transparency and accountability from their leaders in a way that feels new. They are digital natives, educated and connected. They are very able to walk away when they sense that their employer doesn’t get it.

This is a thing you can either fear or embrace. If you don’t know how to build a more equitable workplace, the onus is on you to get educated first. Once you start taking those steps, you’ll find that this is a generation that understands and respects that work. Don’t ask them to do it for you  –  change in the equality of your company needs to come from the top  –  but they will stick with you and work hard for you when they believe that your efforts are sincere.

It’s tempting, when there are so many frustrations involved in trying to build your business, to see equality work as yet another pain in the behind. I get that. It can be comfortable to roll your eyes at it as more runaway political correctness. But it’s a trap. It stops you from doing the hard work required to understand your own biases, confront them, and be better.

The next time you hear yourself saying “I support diversity, but ….” Pause for a moment. Ask why you’re taking that position, and what fear or discomfort is behind it. And then ask yourself how much better your world would be if you dropped the “but.”

Source: When equality feels like discrimination – The Globe and Mail

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The Universal Phenomenon of Men Interrupting Women – The New York Times

2017/06/16 Leave a comment

Less of an issue in government now given the high percentage of women (about 40 percent) at the DM and ADM level? Comments appreciated!

For women in business and beyond, it was an I-told-you-so day.

The twin spectacles Tuesday — an Uber board member’s wisecrackabout women talking too much, and Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, being interrupted for the second time in a week by her male colleagues — triggered an outpouring of recognition and what has become almost ritual social-media outrage.

Academic studies and countless anecdotes make it clear that being interrupted, talked over, shut down or penalized for speaking out is nearly a universal experience for women when they are outnumbered by men.

A few statistics show that the questions directed at Uber about how women fare in the workplace extend beyond one company, and indeed beyond Silicon Valley. Women make up 6.4 percent of Fortune 500 chief executive officers and 19.4 percent of Congress this year. About a fifth of board members in Fortune 500 companies in 2016 were women, according to research conducted by Deloitte and the Alliance for Board Diversity.

After Arianna Huffington, an Uber director, spoke of how important it was to increase the number of women on the board, David Bondermansaid that would mean more talking. He soon resigned from the board. Even in companies without notorious bro-cultures, however, women have had to struggle to feel heard and, as the numbers make clear, to advance to the top.

“I think every woman who has any degree of power and those who don’t knows how it feels to experience what Kamala Harris experienced yesterday,” said Laura R. Walker, the president and chief executive of New York Public Radio. “To be in a situation where you’re trying to do your job and you’re either cut off or ignored.”

Senator Harris, a former prosecutor, assertively questioned Attorney General Jeff Sessions during his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, interrupted and chided her to let Mr. Sessions answer her questions. Soon after that, Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina and the committee chairman, cut her off, saying her time had elapsed.

…A ream of studies affirm such anecdotes. Researchers consistently find that women are interrupted more and that men dominate conversations and decision-making, in corporate offices, town meetings, school boards and the United States Senate.

Victoria L. Brescoll, associate professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management, published a paper in 2012 showing that men with power talked more in the Senate, which was not the case for women. Another study, “Can an Angry Woman Get Ahead?” concluded that men who became angry were rewarded, but that angry women were seen as incompetent and unworthy of power in the workplace.

“The fact that women are outnumbered in every room puts them in a position where they’re often coming up against gender-based stereotypes,” said Deborah Gillis, president and chief executive of Catalyst, which works for women’s advancement in business. “Women are too hard, too soft, but never just right. What that means is that women are seen as either competent or liked but not both.”

Some women are working to subvert these gender imbalances in their own organizations.

Ms. Walker, of New York Public Radio, said she pressed for more women at its senior level and on its board. “I think this not only empowers women throughout our organization, it also makes for better discussions,” she said. She is also pushing to increase the number of women who host podcasts.

Jacqueline Hinman, chairman and C.E.O. of CH2M Hill Companies, a Colorado-based engineering company that manages projects including light rail in Toronto and Olympic facilities in London, works in a field where women have typically been scarce. Now, however, women make up 30 to 40 percent of her board and are well represented in senior positions.

“Men who come to our companies from competitors are astounded by the number of women everywhere,’’ she said, adding, “They love it.”

It took years of work to get to that point, Ms. Hinman said — and part of the push came from clients, increasingly women, who wanted to see diverse engineering teams. She said she made it clear to subordinates they will be judged partly on how many women and minorities they advance.

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SCOTUS strikes down citizenship law – CNNPolitics.com

2017/06/14 1 Comment

Surprising it took this long for a case to test the discrimination:

The Supreme Court on Monday struck down a federal law that treats children born overseas to unmarried parents differently for purposes of citizenship depending upon whether the biological father or mother is a US citizen.

Under the law, US citizen fathers have to spend at least five years in the states before the child could become a citizen, while the mother only had to spend one year.
The plaintiff in the case, Luis Ramon Morales-Santana, was born in 1962 in the Dominican Republic to unmarried parents. His mother was a citizen of the Dominican Republic and his father was a US citizen who had not spent more than five years in the United States after his 14th birthday.
Morales-Santana was admitted to the US as a lawful permanent resident in 1975. After years of living in the US he was put in removal proceedings after convictions for various felonies. He claimed he was a US citizen because of his father’s citizenship. But the Board of Immigration Appeals denied the claim because the father had not satisfied the physical presence requirements.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who dedicated her career to the issue of gender discrimination before taking the bench, wrote the decision.
The section of the 1952 Nationality Act, she wrote, could not “withstand inspection under a Constitution that requires the government to respect the equal dignity and stature of its male and female citizens.”
But while the law “violates the equal-protection principles,” the court also said it is “not equipped” to grant the relief that Morales-Santana seeks — striking down the law and grant him citizenship. Congress would have to make that determination, Ginsburg wrote.
Under the Immigration and Nationality act of 1952 as originally written, a child born outside of the United States to an unwed citizen father and a non-citizen mother has citizenship at birth only if the father was present in the United States for a period totaling at least 10 years, with at least five of those years occurring after the age of 14. But the statute has since been amendedto decrease the time requirement for those born since November 14, 1986, to 5 years in the United States, at least two of which were after age of 14. A child born abroad to an unwed citizen mother has citizenship if the mother lived in the United States for at least one year at some point prior to the child’s birth.

Source: SCOTUS strikes down citizenship law – CNNPolitics.com

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Trump, Trudeau and the patriarchy: Adams

2017/05/29 Leave a comment

Another interesting piece by Michael Adams on the contrast between the US and Canada:

As icons of masculinity, it would be hard to find a more vivid contrast than that between U.S. President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. One is a macho bully who demands deference, the other a people-pleasing metrosexual. These men are not one-of-a-kind phenomena but very much expressions of the societies that produced them.

This is the obvious conclusion from an analysis of the evolving social values in each country Environics has been conducting every four years since 1992.

In order to understand the orientation to the structure of authority in the family in each country, we periodically ask representative samples of people 15 and older if they agree or disagree with the statement: “The father of the family must be master in his own house.”

In 2016, 50 per cent of the 8,000-plus Americans surveyed agreed with the statement. In Canada, the equivalent proportion (with a sample of 4,000-plus) was 23 per cent.

When we first asked this question in 1992, the proportion in the United States agreeing was 42 per cent. It rose to 44 per cent in 1996, and to 48 per cent in 2000. It remained at that level throughout the post-9/11 George W. Bush years and then declined somewhat during the Barack Obama era, to 41 per cent in 2012.

However, as U.S. Republicans and Democrats were in the process of selecting Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton as their respective presidential candidates, the proportion returned to its historic high.

It will surprise no one that support for Mr. Trump is highly correlated with support for patriarchy and, conversely, support for gender equality is highly correlated with support for Ms. Clinton.

Meanwhile in Canada, the proportion of patriarchy supporters has been hovering in the low 20s throughout the past two decades. This is in spite of the inflows of migrants from more male-dominated countries (35 per cent of foreign-born Canadians believe dad should be on top), as well as a mild backlash against feminism among Generation X men at the ages of 25 to 44 (foreign-born and Canadian-born alike). In the United States, 56 per cent of immigrants opt for patriarchy in the home.

There was a time when informed Canadians felt the values of the two countries were converging, or that any observed differences in average opinion in the two societies were simply the result of the South pulling the U.S. number in a conservative direction and Quebec pulling Canada the other way. When it comes to this measure of patriarchy, neither generalization stands up to the evidence. Yes, in the United States, there is substantial regional variation. In the Deep South (Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi), 69 per cent believe the father must be master chez lui, whereas in New England, the figure is only 42 per cent; other regions fall in-between. In Canada, the range is from a high of 26 per cent in Alberta (birthplace of former Republican contender Ted Cruz) to a low of 18 per cent in Atlantic Canada. Canada’s most patriarchal province is significantly less patriarchal than the least patriarchal region of the United States. So much for the theory that nations don’t have national values.

Digging deeper into the demographics, we see some telling patterns: 60 per cent of American men think father should be master at home compared with 41 per cent of American women. In Canada, only 31 per cent of men think dad should be boss, compared with 16 per cent of women. Presumably some of these people live in the same house; must be interesting.

There is little variation by age in either country, or by income, occupational status or community size (rural to urban). In Canada, there is not much difference by education either – but in the United States education matters a lot: 56 per cent of people with a high-school education or less think father should be boss; among those with postsecondary degrees, it is 39 per cent.

Consensus in Canada; some substantial variations in the United States. Patriarchy is only one of more than 50 values we track, but it is clearly among the most meaningful. It is also a value that is highly correlated with other values such as religiosity, parochialism and xenophobia, and views on issues such as abortion, guns and the death penalty.

In 2002, EKOS asked Canadians if Canada was becoming more like the United States or less like it. At that time, 58 per cent said we were becoming more like the United States and only 9 per cent thought we were becoming less like our American cousins. A few weeks ago, we repeated this question in a national survey and found a change of opinion: Only 27 per cent think Canada is becoming more like the United States and a nearly equal proportion (26 per cent) say we are in fact becoming less like our southern neighbour. Perhaps the latter group read The Globe and Mail.

Source: Trump, Trudeau and the patriarchy – The Globe and Mail

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Canadian passport will have new marker for transgender travellers, justice minister says

2017/05/06 Leave a comment

As expected and good that this is being done government-wide to ensure consistency:

Transgender travellers will soon have another option to tick off on their passport other than “male” or “female.”

Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould said the government is working to update its gender identity policies right across federal departments, and they will include a revamped travel document.

“The prime minister is very mindful of perhaps a third box or an ability to mark something other than male or female. This work is being undertaken at Passport Canada,” she said. “Individual ministers and (people) within their departments are recognizing that this bill has been introduced, that there is work that needs to continue to be taken.”

Wilson-Raybould was testifying before the Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee, which is studying government legislation to protect the human rights and security of Canadians based on gender identity and gender expression.

She said the government has much work to do to ensure its own policies accord with the intent of C-16, including a recognition that “simply ticking a box of male or female” doesn’t comply.

A sex field is mandatory for travel documents under International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) rules. ICAO allows one of three markers: F for female, M for male or X for “unspecified.”

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has already removed a requirement for proof of sex reassignment surgery for persons requesting to change the sex marker on IRCC documents, and the department is taking further steps to change the sex marker on travel documents, citizenship certificates and documentation for temporary and permanent residents, according to a government official.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has pledged to make all government-issued documents more reflective of gender diversity.

Seven countries have issued identification documents, such as a passport, with a third-sex designation.

‘Where does that end?’

But Conservative Senator Don Plett said changing the passport could have implications on international travel.

“When you start putting other boxes in, where does that end? How many boxes are we going to put in? I don’t think it’s a workable solution,” he said.

Bill C-16 would update the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code, making it illegal to discriminate based on gender identity or expression and extending hate speech laws to include the two terms. Under the legislation, judges would also consider it an aggravating factor in sentencing when someone has been targeted for a hate crime based on gender identity or expression.

Wilson-Raybould said the protections are “long overdue” to end discrimination, lift barriers to employment and fill an important gap in the Criminal Code.

The bill has been praised by human rights and transgender advocates, but some senators on the committee raised concerns that there is no definition of the term, leaving it too vague for clear interpretation. Plett said the word “gender expression” could refer to what a person wears or how they comb their hair.

He asked what would happen if a person simply does not recognize more than two genders.

Personal pronouns

“For personal, scientific or faith-based reasons, do you believe they should have to refer to a person by a personal pronoun and should failure to do so constitute discrimination?” he asked.

Wilson-Raybould said Canadians should rest assured the bill will not infringe on freedom of expression, or compel anyone to refer to an individual by a certain personal pronoun.

Source: Canadian passport will have new marker for transgender travellers, justice minister says – Politics – CBC News

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