Australia rejects visa-free immigration deal with UK

2020/01/08 Leave a comment

Canadians advocating for a FTA with a post-Brexit UK should note. In any case, UK will most likely be fixated on addressing all the issues related to the EU to devote much serious time to other countries:

The Australian government has turned down the UK’s offer of a post-Brexit trade agreement that included visa-free work and travel between the two countries.

Trade minister Simon Birmingham said full free movement would not be accepted because it could cause an exodus of highly trained workers to the UK and an influx of unskilled British workers to Sydney and Melbourne. Last year, ministers in New Zealand voiced similar fears of a brain drain.

Last September, international trade secretary Liz Truss, on a visit to Australia, announced that a plan to allow British citizens to live and work in the country visa-free could be just months away.

She said: “We’ve been clear on the fact we want to adopt the Australian-based points system in terms of our new immigration system as we leave the European Union… our two countries have a special link and a historic relationship, and it’s certainly something that we will be looking at as part of our free-trade negotiations.”

But even then, Australia’s prime minister Scott Morrison, said the visa-free arrangement with New Zealand was not something that would be extended to other countries.

Birmingham said yesterday: “Negotiations for an FTA [free trade agreement] between Australia and the UK will prioritise enhancing trade with a market that is already our eighth-largest trading partner.

“Work and visa settings may also form part of discussions but it is important to appreciate that there is a huge spectrum of grey between the black and white of no movement or unfettered movement.

“Once talks are launched with the UK we will work through all of these issues in the usual way,” he said.

Under existing arrangements, Australians can visit the UK for six months as a tourist without a visa.

A visa, however, is required to do paid or unpaid work for those born after 1983 and don’t have a parent who is a UK citizen (or was a UK citizen at the time of the traveller’s birth).

Chetal Patel, partner at City law firm Bates Wells, said the rejection of the UK proposal was a setback for the UK government: “Although bilateral trade discussions are ongoing, the news that the Australian government has rejected a visa-free arrangement serves as another stark reminder of the challenges the UK faces post-Brexit. It’s also a significant rebuke for the new administration considering the introduction of visa-free arrangements seemed to be almost a foregone conclusion just a few weeks ago.

“Surely work visas and other visas should be decided separately from the UK’s trade negotiations?

“This development ultimately begs several questions. What kind of approach will the government take in negotiations with other states given that the Home Office may now be completely restructured? Is the liberalisation of free movement as previously mooted by Boris Johnson and free marketeers going to be the guiding principle of immigration policy? Or does this episode suggest that preferential arrangements with certain other nation states will no longer be pursued?”

Patel said it would be interesting to see the impact of the Morrison government decision on the Australian-style immigration points based system to be implemented in the UK. “We’re expecting the Migration Advisory Committee’s report to be published at the end of this month, so we may know more about what’s in store very shortly,” she said.

About 120,000 people born in Australia are UK residents, with the largest concentration being in south-west London. About 2,000 Australians work in the NHS.

Source: Australia rejects visa-free immigration deal with UK

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What policy issues will define our next 40 years of publishing? Policy Options at 40

2020/01/07 Leave a comment

Good and useful contrast by Jennifer Ditchburn between what has changed and what has remained the same:

Flipping through back copies of Policy Options from 1980, the year the magazine was founded, there’s a distinct feeling of déjà vu.

There are headlines such as,

“How Best to Live with the United States;”

“The Liberal Vacuum in the West;”

“Canada Needs to be Self-sufficient in Oil.”

“The State of the Legislative Process in Canada”

“Since the election there has been more bemoaning than ever of the structural malformation of the Canadian body politics, with one main party rootless in Quebec and the other almost alien to Western Canada,” wrote founding editor-in-chief Tom Kent, the legendary public policy thinker and journalist, of the two main parties.

“What is worrisome is the strengthened fear that the fundamental reason why it seems unchangeable is that people in both those regions increasingly doubt whether federal politics matter much anyway.”

In 1980, as in 2020, the country was in a period of intergovernmental malaise and coming out of an election. The first referendum on Quebec sovereignty was held in May 1980. The notorious National Energy Program was inaugurated that year, and Pierre Trudeau, prime minister at the time, opened the 32nd Parliament with not a single Liberal MP from BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan, and only two in Manitoba.

By the fall of 1980, Trudeau had announced his intention to approach the United Kingdom unilaterally to seek the patriation of the Constitution – sparking more than a year of constitutional negotiations with premiers, and mobilizing Indigenous leaders to make sure their treaty and inherent rights were respected.

There is always something bizarrely comforting about spotting familiar patterns in Canada’s past: How many times do we hear the phrase “plus ça change, plus c’est pareil” in reference to our political history? Meanwhile, people who weren’t yet born during the years of the National Energy Program or The Night of Long Knives can reference those grievances and find the echoes in our contemporary frictions. Yes, old policy and political mistakes can cast long shadows.

But here’s the thing: Canada in 2020 is nothing like the Canada of 1980, and we should be careful not to use old maps to orient ourselves as we move into the next decade. Our country is more urban and suburban, more ethnoculturally diverse, and also getting proportionately older.

Susan Gibson, then with Ontario’s Status of Women Council, wrote in 1980 about the hiring and promotion of women in the public service that, “it is clear that substantive improvement in the status of women Crown employees still lies in the future.” At the time, Gibson said there were no women deputy ministers in Ontario, and only 1.38 percent in senior positions. By 2017, women accounted for 30.4 percent of Ontario deputy ministers and about half of other executive levels, according to an employee survey from that year.

Reading through those issues of Policy Options from 1980, a few things were notably absent.

John F. Graham, the late Dalhousie University professor and economist, was the only person that year to discuss environmental concerns.

“We now…face the prospect in the not very distance future of very low, zero, or negative economic growth resulting from a combination of exhaustion of natural resources and suicidal environmental damage,” he wrote.

The impact of technology is referenced, but in the “boob tube” style of the 1980s – which was to bemoan the impact of television on Canadian public discourse. Who could have envisioned the way our lives and our economy would change with the advent of the smartphone, social media platforms and advancing artificial intelligence?

Indigenous rights and the Crown’s treaty obligations do not figure in the numerous articles about federalism and intergovernmental affairs. Although a vast amount of work remains to be done to fulfil the calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and to restore a true nation-to-nation relationship, decolonization was simply not a topic of policy conversation in non-Indigenous circles 40 years ago.

Plus ça change, well, ça change.

Yes, we are in another phase of discontent within the Canadian federation, but it is impossible to consider this time in Canadian history without also looking outside of our borders. Where the issues eloquently explored in this magazine in 1980 dealt principally with federal-provincial, industrial and Canada-US policy, almost all the challenges before us today have a global dimension.

While the federal government and the premiers tussle over carbon pricing and support for the energy sector, the overarching question is whether the world’s nations collectively will act quickly enough to curb the catastrophic rise in global temperatures. (The results of the COP 25 conference in Madrid last month bode poorly.)

The suitability of the equalization program and stabilization fund are on the First Ministers’ agenda, but the bigger picture about the Canadian economy hinges on the disruptive forces of automation, artificial intelligence and the impact of climate change down the road. As the federal government’s foresight agency Policy Horizons pointed out in a recent report, it’s unclear what skills workers will need in the future, and also how taxes will be collected as jobs becoming increasingly virtual.

Yes, Canada’s relationship with the United States remains a perpetual policy preoccupation, but now it is overlaid with concerns over how to fill the vacuum Washington has left in international multilateral institutions and counterbalance the growing influence of China.

Even when we talk about the health of our democracy, the future leadership of the Conservative Party, and other Canadian political issues, we have to consider the wider context of disinformation and borderless social media platforms, populist trends worldwide, and the microtargeting of voters through the use of their own data.

Over the next year, we will be re-publishing some of the articles that appeared in 1980, along with responses to the material from 2020. As the current editor-in-chief, I can’t help but wonder which issues just barely appearing on our radar now will be fundamentally shaping Canada in the years to come.

Source: What policy issues will define our next 40 years of publishing?Policy Options at 40

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Articles of interest over the holidays – India’s Citizenship Act

2020/01/06 Leave a comment

Northern India’s Uttar Pradesh has been the worst affected in the ongoing protests against a controversial new citizenship law. At least 19 people have died in the state since protests began on 20 December. The BBC’s Vikas Pandey travels to the region to find out why it has witnessed such large-scale and violent protests.

The extremely narrow lanes of Babupurwa in Kanpur city lead me to Mohammed Shareef’s home.

He is sitting outside the small tin-roof house. It has just one room which doubles as a kitchen during the day and bedroom at night. He gets up, hugs me and breaks down. Several minutes pass in silence.

“I have lost everything. I have no will to live. What was my son’s fault? Why did the police shoot him?” he says trying to hold back tears.

Source: Citizenship Act protests: Why fear has gripped Muslims in this Indian state

Protests against a new citizenship law in India risk making investors wary of doing business in Asia’s third-largest economy.

At least 25 people have been killed in nationwide demonstrations against the new rules enacted into law earlier this month. The law bars undocumented Muslims from three neighboring nations seeking Indian citizenship, while allowing people of other faiths to do so.

Source: Protests Against India’s Citizenship Law Risk Spooking Investors Away

As India’s new citizenship law seeks to create a stratified citizenship based on religion, a large number of Indians opposing it are emerging as a people of one book, the country’s Constitution, which came into force on Jan. 26, 1950.

In the past two weeks, diverse crowds across the country have responded to the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act, referred to as the C.A.A., passed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government by chanting the preamble to the Constitution of India, with its promises of social, political and economic justice, freedom of thought, expression and belief, equality and fraternity.

Student protesters being herded into police vans, opposition leaders standing outside the Indian Parliament and ebullient crowds of tens of thousands in Hyderabad, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai have read aloud the preamble and held aloft copies of the Constitution and portraits of B.R. Ambedkar, its chief draftsman.

The C.A.A. offers an accelerated pathway to citizenship for Hindu, Sikh, Zoroastrian, Buddhist and Christian migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan but excludes Muslims. It effectively creates a hierarchical system of citizenship determined by an individual’s religion, reminiscent of Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law, which privileged citizenship for “indigenous races,” excluded the Rohingya and paved the ground for the genocidal violence against them.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/opinion/india-constitution-protests.html

The recently enacted Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, carves out a special pathway to citizenship for non-Muslim immigrants from some countries. This sort of discrimination against Muslims is popularly thought of as being a relatively recent phenomenon. However, at the founding of India’s republic, the citizenship provisions of the Constitution also discriminated against Muslim immigrants and ma

The Permit System

After the partition of the country, two waves of immigration occurred from West Pakistan to India. In the first wave, which started from March 1, 1947, large numbers of Hindus and Sikhs arrived here. In the second wave in 1948, many Indian Muslims who had migrated to West Pakistan sought to return to India because of poor conditions there, especially in Karachi. This second wave

In April 1948, Nehru acknowledged that the “influx … of Muslims to Delhi and other parts of India from Pakistan has raised certain difficulties”. The following month, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel wrote to Nehru that there was “considerable discontent” among the public in general and refugees in particular about the Indian government’s “failure to prevent the inflow of Muslims from Pakistan.” The return of “these Muslims”, he explained, “while we are not yet able to rehabilitate Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan… would again be the breeding ground of communal poison, on which activities of organisation[s] like the RSS thrive.” He believed that returning Indian Muslims were “a great source of danger to the peace and security of Delhi”. Nehru replied and said that this was an “undoubtedly serious” matter.

It was against this backdrop that the Indian government introduced a system on July 19, 1948, under which no person could move from West Pakistan into India without a permit issued by the Indian high commission in Karachi or Lahore.

Read more at: https://www.bloombergquint.com/opinion/citizenship-amendment-act-the-unsecular-origins-of-indian-citizenship-by-abhinav-chandrachud

At 24, Indian transgender Ray has already had to fight many battles for recognition and now faces a new threat – losing her citizenship because of controversial new legislation.

The Delhi-based law student – whose official documents identify her as male – is among tens of thousands of people protesting against the legislation and a mooted nationwide citizens’ register, worried that it will render transgender Indians like herself stateless.

Her fears are not unfounded. In September this year, a petition was filed in India’s Supreme Court after around 2,000 transgenders were left off a citizens’ register in the northeastern state of Assam, throwing their future into doubt.

Despite being legally recognised as a third gender in a historic 2014 Supreme Court ruling, they often live on the extreme fringes of Indian society, with many forced into prostitution, begging or menial jobs.

For a community that already faces severe discrimination in conservative India – much of it from their own families – transgenders feel they are at extra risk from legislation pushed by Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi aimed ostensibly at tackling illegal immigration.

Source: India’s transgenders face losing citizenship with new law

Filed under Citizenship, Government, Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with

Articles of interest over the holidays – USA

2020/01/06 Leave a comment

Source: Is America About to Suffer Its Weimar Moment?

Political impact

Of all the concerns about immigration, perhaps none is more important to politicians than how immigration affects political control. In particular, many Republicans believe that immigration has clearly boosted the Democratic Party and that higher immigration will obviously doom the GOP. But historically (and recently), congressional Republicans have performed much better during periods when the immigrant share of the population is high. By contrast, Democrats dominated the low immigration periods.

GOP Almost Always Controls a House of Congress During High Immigration Periods, Rarely Controls Either House During Low Immigration Periods

The Republican Party came into existence in 1854, and while it quickly dominated, the Civil War and Reconstruction make its early history anomalous. Looking solely at the period since Reconstruction, Republicans have controlled at least one House of Congress 85 percent of years when the immigrant share of the population was greater than 10 percent, while not controlling either House 83 percent of all other years (Fig. 1). Moreover, they have controlled both houses 59 percent of the high immigration years, compared to just 7 percent of the low immigration years.

Source: Congressional Republicans Dominate High Immigration Periods | Cato @ Liberty

Citizenship

The citizenship question the Trump administration wanted to add to the 2020 census would have likely been especially sensitive in areas with higher shares of Latinx residents and noncitizens. That’s among the Census Bureau’s final conclusions from its recent experiment testing public reaction to the question.

If courts had not blocked the question from appearing on census forms, it would have also likely lowered self-response rates in parts of the U.S. where Asian residents make up between 5% and 20% of the population, according to the Census Bureau’s final report on the national experiment conducted earlier this year.

The findings released on Monday flesh out preliminary analysis the bureau put out in October when officials announced the question likely would not have had a significant effect on overall self-response rates.

Digging deeper into specific groups, however, the bureau did find statistically significant differences between certain households asked to fill out a test census form with a citizenship question and those presented with forms without one.

“These differences were small,” wrote Victoria Velkoff, the bureau’s associate director for demographic programs, in a blog post about the bureau’s early findings.

Source: Census Bureau Releases Final Report On 2019 Test Of Citizenship Question

Evangelicals

At the time of year when Christians around the world are supposed to unite in celebration of their savior’s birth, this Christmas has been a particularly fractious time for white evangelicals in America. Last week, Christianity Today, a leading evangelical magazine, published an editorial condemning Trump’s “immoral character” and calling for his removal from office. “That he should be removed,” the editorial, written by outgoing editor-in-chief Mark Galli, contended, “we believe, is not a matter of partisan loyalties but loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments.”

It was a stance that nearly broke the internet — the publication’s website temporarily went down as millions tried to read the piece — and revealed the fault lines in a religious movement that is often viewed as a monolithic political force. No sooner had Christianity Today published its words than the piece drew heavy and vitriolic pushback from other conservative Christian voices. Ralph Reed of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, scoffed on Fox News that the publication ought to be renamed “Christianity Yesterday” for being “out of step with the faith community” when it came to Trump. Shortly after, nearly two hundred evangelical leaders signed a letterexpressing their “dissatisfaction” with the editorial for supporting what it called the “entirely-partisan, legally-dubious, and politically-motivated impeachment.”

Secular media pounced on the controversy, seemingly surprised that an evangelical outlet had taken such a stand while also deeming the fracas as part of what The Daily Beast called the “spiraling evangelical Christian civil war.” That’s an overstated assessment of a rather imbalanced divide, but the Christianity Today editorial does point to a committed and principled NeverTrump evangelical movement that has held steadfast since 2015 and which draws a sharp contrast with the spineless Congressional Republicans who, in toto, have folded in complete submission to Trump.

Source: The evangelical resistance?

Ever since the 1970s and the birth of the Religious Right, white evangelicals have been closely associated with the Republican Party. Generally speaking, this has meant white evangelicals tend to lean conservative on most social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.

But recent political events show that what began as a rightward lean has, on at least one issue, become an area of genuine extremism. Inspired by the Christmastime dustup between Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg and blogger Matt Walsh, Eastern Illinois University political scientist Ryan P. Burge did some data analysis on just how white evangelicals feel about immigration in 2019, and what he found was startling.

Using data from the Cooperate Congressional Election Study, Burge found that on the five immigration questions asked by the survey, white evangelicals had a rightward gap from the mainstream Burge characterized as “humungous” — at least 20 percentage points on four of the five questions.

Source: Study: The Average White Evangelical Is Further Right on Immigration Than Abortion

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Articles of interest over the holidays – China

2020/01/06 Leave a comment

The order from Chinese officials was blunt and urgent. Villagers from Muslim minorities should be pushed into jobs, willing or not. Quotas would be set and families penalized if they refused to go along.

“Make people who are hard to employ renounce their selfish ideas,” the labor bureau of Qapqal, a county in the western region of Xinjiang, said in the directive last year.

Such orders are part of an aggressive campaign to remold Xinjiang’s Muslim minorities — mostly Uighurs and Kazakhs — into an army of workers for factories and other big employers. Under pressure from the authorities, poor farmers, small traders and idle villagers of working age attend training and indoctrination courses for weeks or months, and are then assigned to stitch clothes, make shoes, sweep streets or fill other jobs.

These labor programs represent an expanding front in a major effort by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to entrench control over this region, where these minorities make up about half the population. They are crucial to the government’s strategy of social re-engineering alongside the indoctrination camps, which have held one million or more Uighurs and Kazakhs.

Source: Inside China’s Push to Turn Muslim Minorities Into an Army of WorkersInside China’s Push to Turn Muslim Minorities Into an Army of WorkersThe Communist Party wants to remold Xinjiang’s minorities into loyal blue-collar workers to supply Chinese factories with cheap labor.

The first grader was a good student and beloved by her classmates, but she was inconsolable, and it was no mystery to her teacher why.

“The most heartbreaking thing is that the girl is often slumped over on the table alone and crying,” he wrote on his blog. “When I asked around, I learned that it was because she missed her mother.”

The mother, he noted, had been sent to a detention camp for Muslim ethnic minorities. The girl’s father had passed away, he added. But instead of letting other relatives raise her, the authorities put her in a state-run boarding school — one of hundreds of such facilities that have opened in China’s far western Xinjiang region.

As many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others have been sent to internment camps and prisons in Xinjiang over the past three years, an indiscriminate clampdown aimed at weakening the population’s devotion to Islam. Even as these mass detentions have provoked global outrage, though, the Chinese government is pressing ahead with a parallel effort targeting the region’s children.

Source: In China’s Crackdown on Muslims, Children Have Not Been Spared

 

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Inside the federal bureaucracy, Clarke digs up a ‘creeping culture of excessive silos, hierarchies’ in digital attitudes

2019/12/17 Leave a comment

Reflects basic accountability at both the political and official levels, and that governments, by their very size and broad impact, have to be more cautious given their stewardship role:

What happens when the risk-averse organizational culture of the Government of Canada confronts the freewheeling style of digital culture? A purposeful slow reaction, finds a new book on the topic.

Amanda Clarke is a public administration scholar at Carleton University who specializes in digital government. Opening the Government of Canada: The Federal Bureaucracy in the Digital Age is a result of years of work documenting the Government of Canada’s transition to a digital world. The findings reveal how an organization that is prone to resist change is compelled to deal with global forces propelling innovation.

Opening the Government of Canada documents the digital responsiveness of the federal bureaucracy in the later stages of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. Clarke consults an abundance of what academics call grey literature, namely media coverage, government tweets and blogs, and completed access to information requests. She gains original insights through interviews with 32 Canadian public servants and a special adviser. Those are buttressed by conversations with seven public servants in the United Kingdom. They narrate a consistent theme: that the Canadian government is cautious and hesitant about digital reform.

Provocative questions are asked at various junctures in the book. On page 69: What happens when closed government gets a Twitter account? On page 95: Who should speak for the government? These jarringly simple questions belie the author’s natural curiosity about how government works. The inquisitiveness is an excellent framing device to generate interest in figuring out the answers.

The book begins by summarizing some statistics about digital media. Among the observations are that managerial philosophies shift as digital disruption grows. Conflict ensues, which at its core is an ideological battle about notions of democratic government. On one side of the philosophical divide are valid reasons for government to operate in silos with a centralized hierarchy. On the other side are those advocating for government transparency and accountability. Readers are encouraged to consider a variety of perspectives in the closed doors versus crowd-sourcing debate.

For my part, whenever I think of digital politics scholarship in Canada, one of the subject experts who immediately comes to mind is political scientist Tamara Small of the University of Guelph. Small’s work barely factors into Opening the Government of Canada, likely because she mostly studies political parties. Yet she has repeatedly shown that most Canadian politicians use social media as a broadcasting medium. That is, instead of two-way engagement, they use social media as a digital megaphone. Politicians and their staff are more likely to raise awareness of content from news releases than they are to get into a digital conversation. Clarke discovers the same tendency in the Government of Canada, where tweets are informational one-way broadcasting (pages 82-83). Moreover, Clarke finds that government departments routinely amplify other government departments’ posts, much like MPs from the same party retweet each other. This example shows that studying how politicians behave (political science) can help inform our analysis of what happens in government (public administration). A key difference is that communicating digitally has become a fundamental aspect of what MPs do whereas it is still a work in progress for the government.

The comparison between politics and public administration is a useful reminder about drawing parallels. In government, there is safety in following what other entities are doing. It is much easier for organizations to transpose existing behaviour to new platforms than it is for them to do something radical. Thus we have the creation of GCTools, which is the government’s own social media platform.

This innovation caused Canada to be a global leader in digital government. Despite spotty uptake, public servants could avail of this safe space to discover skilled experts across government (page 131). GCTools is loosely reminiscent of the government seeking to exert control over other forms of communications, such as the Canada Gazette newspaper or any number of public relations activities. A key difference is that GCTools connects people.

GCTools was developed under the Conservative government, which had a well-deserved reputation for top-down communications management. Chapter 3 documents how the government adapted to changing digital norms earlier in this decade. The developments were slow, reserved, measured, and cautious. In society, the Twitterverse came alive with people busily posting about everything from serious questions about government, to the banalities of their personal lives. Meanwhile, within the Government of Canada, a web of policy frameworks and multi-stage workflow processes were implemented to generate social media content. It is clear that the public service struggled to react to changing societal norms.

The command and control approach of the Harper government seems to have aligned well with government’s natural ethos to run a closed shop. Clarke evokes the environment of permanent campaigning that injected a further dose of caution. Permanent campaigning refers to non-stop electioneering—that is, the official election campaign may be over, but many of the same politicized communications activities persist. A non-stop communications mentality is especially evident during periods of minority government and when the dissolution of Parliament is on the horizon. On page 86, we are informed that communications centralization becomes a virtue to avoid the “nightmare” of public servants freelancing on government social media accounts.

There are other challenges with digital government. Striving for public service neutrality in digital communications is a complex proposition (pages 92-94). Questions about who is running public-facing accounts are warranted, given that many public servants have personal social media profiles. Open data is fine in principle, but releasing datasets as PDFs that inhibit running calculations is unhelpful (page 98). Many public servants are not digital natives. This requires re-training and a conscious effort to recruit digital talent (page 158). Ultimately, fewer barriers to public interaction is less about technology than it is about attitude (page 186).

Reading about public administration can be fraught with information that gets lost in a blur of acronyms, dates, and technical writing. Thankfully, Clarke largely spares her readers from those trappings. The more I read, the more I learned and the more I enjoyed going on a journey inside the public service as it responded to digital demands. That said, for her next book I would encourage less quoting of passages from literature in order to free up more room to quote her interview participants. Another pedantic criticism is the inclusion of the U.K. interviews, which was an unusual decision. As well, the book was published in 2019, and it would be interesting to know how the analysis of 2012 Twitter data stands the test of time. We are told that e-government has become flatter, more nimble and responsive (page 157). There is some brief mention of happenings under the Liberal government, however it is unclear how the e-government trend has permeated post-Harper.

What has changed under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau? In some ways quite a lot. Since 2018, Trudeau has churned through three ministers of digital government. The creation of the portfolio is a telling development. The first two, Scott Brison and Jane Philpott, resigned from cabinet for unrelated reasons not long after taking on the portfolio. When Philpott took the helm, Amanda Clarke published some advice in Policy Options (Feb. 8, 2019) about managing the digital file. She and co-author Jonathan Craft of the University of Toronto recommended courageous leadership, more training, and a willingness to embrace experimental approaches. They urged the minister to integrate digital thinking earlier on in the public policy process. Joyce Murray became the latest minister of digital government in March 2019.

The position was secondary to Brison, Philpott, and Murray serving in their primary role of president of the Treasury Board. The post-election cabinet unveiled in November expanded the number of ministers. A lot of the attention has gone to the unusual title of minister of middle class prosperity—a good example of permanent campaigning at work. Digital government was hived off. Jean-Yves Duclos is now exclusively overseeing the Treasury Board while Murray is exclusively minister of digital government. This is mostly about the prime minister spreading political rewards around. But make no mistake: digital government is a much bigger entity than it was even a few years ago. For evidence, one need look only at how the Government of Canada has upended where its advertising dollars go, with an unequivocal preference for digital.

Yet is it unclear whether anything has changed in other areas. For instance, some internet access was blocked in some government departments in 2015 (page 103). To what extent is that the case today? Smartphones seem to present an obvious workaround. Details like this seem fundamental to assessing whether the Government of Canada is fostering a digital culture.

Looking deeper, digital optimists have reason to be frustrated. The Trudeau Liberals imported a spirit of openness into government in 2015. Part of this was to present a contrast with the Harper Conservatives. The longer the Liberals have been in power, the more the have adopted the characteristics of risk-aversion and information secrecy. The Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada has vocalized frustrations with the government’s lack of commitment to access to information. Digital communications creates efficiencies whereas open government creates headaches. It seems likely that it is “corner of the desk work” (page 112) under the Liberals as it was under the Conservatives.

The concluding chapter makes a number of recommendations best left for readers to discover. Suffice it to say, Clarke finishes off by commenting on what her research about digital attitudes in the Government of Canada has found: “a creeping culture of excessive silos, hierarchies, and risk aversion.” Here’s hoping that Minister Murray and her team find time to read Opening the Government of Canada over the holidays.

Source: Inside the federal bureaucracy, Clarke digs up a ‘creeping culture of excessive silos, hierarchies’ in digital attitudes

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Cabinet, Parliamentary Secretary and CPC critic comparison

2019/12/14 Leave a comment

Now that the parliamentary secretaries have been announced, I prepared this chart that compares representation of women, visible minorities and Indigenous peoples in cabinet, parliamentary secretary appointments and Conservative critic roles. Given the relatively small size of the Bloc and NDP caucuses, have not bothered to do the same as virtually every member of those two parties plays a critic role.

The Liberal commitment to a gender-balanced cabinet means that women are comparatively over-represented compared to their share of caucus. Conversely, and likely to balance caucus representation, women parliamentary secretaries are comparatively under-represented. The Conservatives, on the other hand, have compensated for their relative lack of women MPs by ensure that one-quarter have the higher profile critic roles.

For visible minorities, with the reference population adjusted to visible minorities who are citizens, the Liberals not only elected more visible minority MPs but have ensured that cabinet and parliamentary secretary representation is comparable to their caucus representation. The Conservatives have also chosen to highlight their visible minority MPs in their critic appointments.

For Indigenous peoples, the Liberals have slight under-representation in cabinet and parliamentary secretary appointments compared to the population and caucus.

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Federal judiciary edges closer to gender parity, but numbers of minorities drop

2019/11/12 Leave a comment


Hmm. Effect of change in Minister?:

The federal judiciary is edging closer to gender parity after the second consecutive year in which more women than men were appointed judges, new data show. Women now make up 43 per cent of the 905 full-time judges.

But the numbers of minorities dropped, also for the second year in a row. There were just four members of visible-minority groups chosen, and two Indigenous persons, out of 86 new judges.

In the wake of the new statistics, some members of the legal community are urging the government to do more to appoint minorities to the bench.

“I think it is time now to redefine what we mean by merit,” said Daphne Dumont, a former president of the Canadian Bar Association who practises law in Charlottetown.

“I think you can be highly meritorious for all sorts of reasons that aren’t necessarily the reasons given in the application form that you have to fill in.” For instance, Indigenous lawyers who have returned to their home communities to bring them access to justice have shown merit. The process, she and others said, typically rewards those who are perceived as leaders through volunteering, teaching and participating on boards of legal associations.

The Liberal government revised the appointment process in 2016, with a stated emphasis on diversity. For the first time, the government asked judicial applicants whether they are disabled, a member of a visible minority or an ethnic/cultural minority, LGBTQ2 or Indigenous.

Each year, the Office of the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs reports on the numbers of applicants and appointments from each of the groups. The numbers cover federally appointed courts such as the superior courts of provinces, the Federal Court of Canada and the Tax Court.

From October, 2016, to October, 2017, an equal number of men and women – 37 – were appointed to these courts, although men far outnumbered women among applicants. The following year, female applicants for the first time outnumbered males, and the numbers appointed also exceeded those of males – 46 to 33. This year, appointments were 47 women, 39 men.

By contrast, the numbers went down among the minority groups. This year (from October, 2018, to October, 2019), there were 20 appointees – 14 from ethnic/cultural groups; four visible minorities; two Indigenous; and zero categorized as LGBTQ2 or disabled. (There were 19 LGBTQ2 applicants and six disabled ones. Applicants can stay in the pool for two years.) The previous year, there were seven visible minorities, three Indigenous and 29 overall. The first year of the reports, in 2017, there were 32 – including nine visible minorities.

Rachel Rappaport, a spokeswoman for Justice Minister David Lametti, said the minister has met with legal organizations since his appointment early this year to encourage applicants from visible-minority, Indigenous, linguistic-minority and LGBTQ2 communities. The meetings were also a chance to identify barriers and work together on solutions to further expand the pool of candidates, she said.

Lori Anne Thomas, president of the Canadian Association of Black Lawyers, said the appointments of black and Indigenous judges have been “woefully lacking.” She said she was singling out those two groups because they are overrepresented in the criminal-justice system, and among families in the child-protection system.

“The women who are appointed are white women. It shows there have been a lot of efforts in the legal community to create fairness and equality when it comes to gender, but it’s still not there in terms of race, or Indigenous persons,” she said in an interview.

Ms. Thomas said she would like to see “more consideration” given to members of overrepresented communities – for instance, for overcoming obstacles.

“Those who are racialized won’t be given the same kind of opportunities to speak on panels, to lead cases in the same way that especially their white male counterparts would be given.”

On that point, Scott Maidment, president of the Advocates’ Society, a lawyers’ group, said change needs to come from within the legal profession, too. To become a judge, “You need opportunities for leadership within the profession.” The Advocates’ Society has revised its leadership principles to stress inclusivity, he said.

Source: 43 per cent of federal judges

Filed under Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , , ,

Elections Canada tried to beat back ‘implausible’ online rumours about pencils spoiling ballots

2019/11/11 1 Comment

Interesting how these rumours and fake news take on a life of their own and the challenges in combatting them:

A new social media monitoring team at Elections Canada spent more than 10 days responding to online disinformation claiming polling stations were using pencils that could be intentionally smudged to spoil voters’ ballots.

The story started online in Canada with purported first-hand accounts of Canadians voting during advance polling, then went wide on social media platforms — casting doubts in some voters’ minds about election security.

By Oct. 21, Elections Canada was getting angry questions from voters asking why the agency only provides pencils at polling stations, while some people tweeted out claims that the system couldn’t be trusted and the election could be “rigged.”

Elections Canada said the claims are unsubstantiated and implausible. Even if a ballot is smudged, the agency said, it would still be counted.

The department never issued a public alert during the campaign itself — suggesting the agency did not consider it to be a threat to the integrity of the election.

Online disinformation expert Elizabeth Dubois, an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa, said these reports didn’t spread widely enough to trigger voter panic — but they could still undermine public confidence in the democratic process.

“It could lead to people choosing not to cast their ballot,” said Dubois. “It could lead people to believe their system is untrustworthy, illegitimate, that it’s not even worth participating in.”

‘My X was gone’

The 2019 election marked the first time Elections Canada monitored social media during a campaign. The monitoring team’s objective was to detect false information about where, when and how to register and vote. The department reports it only detected 28 pieces of misinformation and impersonation accounts between August and election day.

Elections Canada did spend time during the campaign responding to voters’ social media queries about why pencils were offered at the polls. All the department could do was to point out that, while Elections Canada is required by law to provide black lead pencils at polling stations, voters can bring their own pens, markers or other writing tools to mark their ballots without seeing them discarded.

Some of the early social media posts about the poll pencils appeared in mid-October. One of them was an alleged first-hand account posted on Reddit about a chaotic Toronto polling station. The post said a voter handed their ballot to a clerk who opened it, looked at how they voted and smudged the X on their ballot.

“My X was gone,” said the author of the post, which has since been removed from Reddit but was copied to Facebook. “It looked like one big smudge mark … It was clear my ballot would be considered spoiled.”

The post said that the polling station refused to give the voter a new ballot. It also claimed that few at the polling station spoke English.

“I’m 100% sure the Liberals win my riding. No doubt about it,” said the post. The post was picked up and shared on other social media platforms.

From there, the posts complaining about the poll pencils snowballed.

Shauna McAllister of Nanaimo, B.C. warned voters on social media that their pencilled ballots may have been tampered with.

She told CBC News that she saw some of her Facebook friends in Alberta sharing their own stories of ballots being smudged. She said her daughter also told her about an online story alleging a voter at the Vancouver Conference Centre called police claiming her ballot being spoiled.

“If you voted by pencil. Your vote may have been tampered!,” she posted on Facebook on Oct. 24. “Revote? 1st world countries need a better system?”

McAllister said she filed a complaint with Elections Canada and called the political parties’ offices to spread the word.

CBC News told McAllister that Elections Canada officials have said there is no evidence to suggest a ballot security problem with the pencils. She said she hasn’t changed her mind.

“I don’t agree with the idea of voting in pencil,” McAllister said. “To me, that sounds like an archaic practice and it could be compromised. It’s not rocket science. I do art and I have little children and number 3 pencils. You use them because you can smudge them off.

“I think generally, If there’s a little bit of smoke, there’s a bit of fire there. So potentially there was the possibility that some people’s votes may have been compromised … Why bother trying to make your vote count?”

Why pencils?

Elections Canada said in a statement to CBC News that no part of the allegations has been substantiated.

“The events as described are implausible and do not match our records,” the department wrote.

Pencils are required by law at polling stations because they are “practical,” Elections Canada said.

“Unlike pens, they can be stored between elections without drying out,” the agency said. “Also, ink pens can blot paper; if a blot mark can be seen through the ballot paper, someone else might be able to guess who the elector voted for, thereby compromising the secrecy of the vote.”

Elections Canada added that workers at polling stations work in full view of the public and are never alone: witnesses would have reported seeing poll workers tampering with votes. Two scrutineers and party representatives are posted at every polling station, and as long as there is a mark beside a candidate’s name — even if it’s smudged — the vote counts.

No one charged with altering ballots

The agency said similar stories about poll pencils spread during recent elections in the U.K. and Australia.

CBC News tested an official pencil on a sample Elections Canada ballot. The ‘X’ smudged slightly, but not enough to distort the original mark.

The office of the Commissioner of Elections Canada confirmed it received complaints about ballots being smudged. It said no one was charged with violating the law by altering, defacing or destroying a ballot during this election.

“The complaints received did not provide factual information that would have allowed investigators to pursue the matter further,” the commissioner’s office said in a statement to CBC News.

Dubois studies the impact of disinformation on voters. She said it’s too early to tell what impact the story had without a full analysis.

She warned, however, that such messages can do damage over time, especially if the rumours aren’t dispelled before the next election.

“The vast majority of voters went, cast their ballots, no problem,” she said. “But these kinds of questions that get planted … can erode trust in democracy more broadly.

“We risk next time there being a much larger impact.”

Source: Elections Canada tried to beat back ‘implausible’ online rumours about pencils spoiling ballots

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Parties must work between elections to improve diversity, say MPs, candidates

2019/10/30 Leave a comment

Some of the results of our recent analysis:
The 43rd Parliament will include 51 visible minority MPs, up from 47 after the 2015 election, while the number of Indigenous MPs will remain the same, at 10 out of 338, despite a record number running.

Parties have moved in the right direction when it comes to recruiting and selecting diverse political candidates, but more has to be done between elections to make federal politics accessible, say recent candidates and newly elected MPs.

“It’s not going to cut it,” if parties only focus on bringing in politicians that better reflect Canada’s makeup during pre-election candidate searches, said Liberal MP-elect Han Dong for Don Valley North, Ont.

“Between elections, all parties have to make a deliberate effort to reach out to communities to get them involved in policy discussions,” as a starting point, said Mr. Dong, a former Ontario MPP. “It is so important to generate that interest, to give a sense of involvement in decision-making. That’s how you’re going to get more people step forward and going for public office.”

For Andrea Clarke, who ran unsuccessfully as the NDP’s candidate in Outremont, Que., this year, the question of class and income disparity also makes running for Parliament less accessible to some, often racialized, Canadians.

How to make sure electoral politics are accessible and representative of the population isn’t something that should be discussed for just a few months each campaign season, she said.

“It’s something we need to intentionally build into how we hold our elections, and unfortunately folks who are the farthest have to fight the hardest to make the case that this is what we should be doing,” she said, adding that a lack of representative politics means losing out on having “different voices at the table, advocating for their communities, and their lived experience.”

Flourish logoA Flourish data visualisation

Source: Andrew Griffith, from dataset created by The Hill Times, The Samara Centre for Democracy, and research partners.

The next Parliament will see a slight increase in visible minority representation in the House, with 51 MPs compared to 47 in 2017. The 43rd Parliament has 26 South Asian MPs, eight Chinese, five Black, six Arab, three West Asian, two Latin American, and one Korean, according to data pulled by researcher Andrew Griffith, based on a candidate database he created with The Hill Times, The Samara Centre for Democracy, and researcher Jerome Black, drawing from candidate biographies, media articles, social media, and photo analysis. The data may be missing some MPs, as it’s gleaned from publicly available information, and largely based on self-reported details.

Improving representation means striking a balance between “having candidates that run that reflect the composition nationally and yet making sure nominations are grassroots,” said Conservative MP-elect Marc Dalton, who is Métis and among the 10 MPs who identify as Indigenous in this Parliament.

Though a record number of 65 Indigenous candidates ran this election, the number who made it into the House didn’t budge from the 10 elected in 2015.

That amounts to three per cent of MPs, while 4.9 per cent of Canada’s population identified as Indigenous in the 2016 census. The party make-up has slightly changed, with six MPs in the Liberal caucus, two new MPs for the NDP, one Conservative, and Liberal turned Independent Jody Wilson-Raybould (Vancouver Granville, B.C.) remaining in the House.

The number of visible minority MPs is out also of line with the Canadian population, according to the 2016 census, which puts the visible minority population at 22.9 per cent—compared to 15 per cent of MPs in the 43rd Parliament. The Liberals lead with 38 MPs, followed by 10 in the Conservative Party, and three with the NDP. None of the Green Party’s three MPs or the Bloc Québécois’ 32 MPs are visible minorities.

If that’s the benchmark, Canada has “a serious underrepresentation problem,” said Mr. Griffith, a researcher at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, who uses a narrower comparison, looking instead at the level of Canadian citizens, rather than residents, who are visible minorities—17.2 per cent.

In that respect, he said parties are doing “reasonably well” especially compared to other political systems.

There were also small gains in the number of visible minority candidates who ran overall this election, from 12.9 per cent of candidates running for the main parties in 2015, to 15.7 per cent, including the new People’s Party of Canada, which had more visible minority candidates than the Green Party.

As with women, Samara researcher Paul Thomas said there’s a similar problem with visible minorities being less likely to run in seats where parties have a strong chance of winning. Gains in diversity are more likely made through seats that open up each election when incumbents leave, said Mr. Thomas, but his analysis found that the most competitive seats weren’t as open to diverse candidates.

This was especially true for the Conservative Party, which ran three visible minority candidates out of 42 competitive ridings—those with no incumbent running for re-election, or which were lost by a margin of five per cent or less in 2015.

Mr. Thomas also noted the Bloc’s “very poor performance” on this front. Despite its caucus tripling in size, only four of its 78 candidates were visible minorities, none of whom were ultimately elected.

When breaking down the results by ethnic background, a better picture emerges, noted Mr. Griffith, one that shows clear gaps in federal representation by community. For example, Filipino-Canadians are the fourth-largest visible minority group, but parties fielded only four candidates with that background overall, and none were elected. At 1.5 per cent of the House, Black representation is also low, he said, with five elected of the 49 candidates nominated across the major parties, despite making up 3.5 per cent of Canada’s population.

Mr. Dong is one among a record eight Chinese-Canadians elected to Parliament this year, but he noted it’s still half what it should be to reflect the Chinese-Canadian population, which makes up 4.6 per cent of the country.

“I think all parties, when it comes to candidate searches, are stepping towards the right direction,” said Mr. Dong. “In the beginning, it’s always hard, but when you start generating interest” and bringing candidate numbers into the double digits, as was the case with his community this election, he said it means there’s less of a mystery to political candidacy, and that more will come. Based on Mr. Griffith’s assessment, there were 38 Chinese-Canadian candidates in the running this past election.

…

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