Le français est bafoué dans une communication du ministère de l’Immigration

2019/08/13 Leave a comment

Amusing (although I would not assume some of the written French of the federal government is above reproach):

Le ministère de l’Immigration ne prêche pas toujours par l’exemple dans son maniement de la langue française.

C’est ce qu’a pu récemment constater La Presse canadienne, à la lecture d’une communication écrite produite par un service du ministère de l’Immigration et rédigée dans un français très approximatif.

La courte missive d’une quarantaine de mots transmise à l’agence, document officiel affichant le logo du ministère dirigé par Simon Jolin-Barrette, était bourrée de fautes de français.

Pourtant, en cette matière, l’appareil gouvernemental n’a pas le choix : il doit donner l’exemple. La Politique gouvernementale relative à l’emploi et à la qualité du français dans l’administration, rédigée en 1996 et mise à jour en 2011, stipule clairement que les ministères doivent accorder « une attention constante à la qualité de la langue française ».

Dans ses communications écrites, l’appareil de l’État québécois doit utiliser en tout temps un français de qualité irréprochable, selon la politique en vigueur.

Or, le Service de l’accès à l’information et de la gestion des plaintes au ministère de l’Immigration a accompagné sa réponse à une demande d’accès d’une lettre de présentation visiblement rédigée par une employée de l’État maîtrisant mal la langue officielle du Québec.

La missive débutait par ces mots : « En lien avec vous demandes d’accès aux documents ».

« Veuillez, s’il vous plaît, trouvez ci-joint une copie des lettres décisions », écrit-on par la suite. On remarquera que le verbe « trouver » aurait dû être à l’infinitif, et que le style télégraphique des « lettres décisions » a de quoi surprendre le lecteur.

La fonctionnaire notait ensuite avec une ponctuation douteuse que « les lettres originales, sont également, envoyées par la poste » et elle concluait par une formule de politesse, « cordialemente ».

Fait cocasse, à la fin du message, le ministère responsable de la francisation des immigrants faisait la promotion de sa campagne « Apprendre le français, c’est gratuit et c’est gagnant ».

« Inacceptable »

Il n’a pas été possible de savoir si l’écart linguistique observé constituait un incident isolé ou non.

Impossible aussi de savoir dans quelle mesure le français créatif est toléré, voire s’il est devenu la norme dans les communications établies entre le ministère de l’Immigration et ses destinataires, clients ou autres.

Alerté au cours des derniers jours, le ministre Simon Jolin-Barrette a jugé la situation rapportée « inacceptable ». Par la voix de son porte-parole, il a affirmé avoir pris aussitôt les mesures nécessaires pour que les correctifs requis soient apportés, afin que ce genre de bavures ne se reproduise plus.

Source: Le français est bafoué dans une communication du ministère de l’Immigration

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Canadians who hold strong links to political parties more likely to be misinformed about politics, study finds

2019/08/09 Leave a comment

Depressing but not surprising. Strong beliefs lead to more “automatic thinking,” to use Kahneman’s terminology rather than questioning a belief or being more open to different beliefs:

A new study found Canadians who hold strong partisan beliefs are more likely to be misinformed about key political issues than more politically neutral voters.

Data released Wednesday by the Digital Democracy Project found “strong partisan” Canadians were more often incorrect when answering a set of 10 basic questions about current political issues. Those who had no partisan affiliation, or weaker ties to a political party, were less likely to give an incorrect answer.

The study asked 10 questions that had relatively clear answers — like whether or not Canada is currently on track to meet climate change commitments under the Paris Accord (no), or whether the deficit was greater in 2018 than it was in 2015 (yes).

The results suggest the more partisan a voter is, the more likely they are to give an incorrect answer. But they also suggest — perhaps counterintuitively — that the more traditional news Canadians consume, and the more time they spend on social media, the more likely they were to give an incorrect answer.

“Media consumption is as often equipping partisans with arguments to support their position as it is correcting them on facts, because the facts on these things are actually kind of hard to pin down,” said University of Toronto Professor Peter Loewen, one of the academics behind the study, on Wednesday.

“Over the course of the (federal election) campaign I think you’re going to find that people are going to have different sets of facts depending on what their views are, and they’re going to find those informed by what they read in traditional media outlets.”

The Digital Democracy Project is a partnership between the Public Policy Forum and the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. In the weeks leading up to the federal election, the project is tracking Canadians’ media consumption, social media usage, and the digital discussion around Canadian politics to put together a picture of how political information flows through the electorate.

The initial report, released publicly Thursday, found most Canadians trust traditional media organizations to accurately report political news. The survey asked respondents to rank their trust on a scale of zero to 10.

“Canadians trust mainstream news organizations (5.8) at similar levels as their friends and family (6.0). Canadians are comparatively much less trusting of the information provided by major political parties (4.8), and in what they read on social media (3.3 for all respondents, 4.2 for respondents who indicated they used social media for political news in the past week),” the report stated.

And unlike American voters, Canadians don’t seem to choose where they get their news from based on their partisan leanings. Liberal, Conservative and NDP voters reported they get their news from roughly the same outlets, with CTV Online and CBC Online leading across partisan lines.

But the report also found a disconnect between what voters are concerned about and what political issues take up the most oxygen in the press.

Respondents to the survey listed the environment, health care and the economy as the three most pressing issues. Looking at the Twitter conversations of a sample of 300 journalists, the report found that while a lot of discussion was devoted to environmental issues, the journalists paid little attention to health care and almost no attention at all to the economy.

On the other hand, the journalists spent a lot of time talking about ethical issues (think: the SNC-Lavalin affair) and foreign affairs, the public listed both categories as much less important.

Source: Canadians who hold strong links to political parties more likely to be misinformed about politics, study finds

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Trump’s Impact On Federal Courts: Judicial Nominees By The Numbers

2019/08/06 Leave a comment

Significant longer-term impact:

President Trump can be a master of distraction, but when it comes to judges, his administration has demonstrated steely discipline.

In the 2 1/2 years that Trump has been in office, his administration has appointed nearly 1 in 4 of the nation’s federal appeals court judges and 1 in 7 of its district court judges.

The president recently called filling those vacancies for lifetime appointments a big part of his legacy. Given the relative youth of some of his judicial picks, experts say, those judges could remain on the bench for 30 or even 40 years.

Legal observers say Trump and his Republican allies in the Senate have placed an unmistakable stamp on the federal judiciary, not only in ideology but in identity.

“What stands out to me is that President Trump is deliberately nominating the least diverse class of judicial nominees that we have seen in modern history,” said Kristine Lucius, executive vice president for policy at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “It is stunning to me that 2 1/2 years in, he has not nominated a single African American or a single Latinx to the appellate courts.”

In all, around 70% of Trump’s judicial appointees are white men. Dozens of those nominees have refused to answer whether they support the Supreme Court’s holding in Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 opinion that said racial segregation of public schools is unconstitutional.

Civil rights advocates say those nonanswers should be disqualifying. But with Republicans holding 53 seats in the Senate and on board with Trump’s program to confirm as many judges as possible, these nonanswers usually aren’t.

Conservative legal analyst Ed Whelan said there are good reasons why some judicial candidates balk at those questions.

“I think there’s a game being played here, and the critics are part of that game,” said Whelan, who leads the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. “It’s quite clear that what Democratic senators aim to do with that questioning is say, ‘Well, if you can answer questions about Brown, why won’t you answer questions about Roe?”

Whelan was alluding to Roe v. Wade, the decision that legalized abortion.

Consequences of courts transformed

Abortion-rights groups worry that Roe is now in peril from the new generation of judges with ties to the conservative Federalist Society, whose leader has consulted with the White House to select two Supreme Court justices and many other candidates for the lower courts.

With all his judicial appointees, however, Trump has not transformed the courts as much as he could have, legal analysts say. If more Democratic vacancies had been open, Trump’s impact could have been even more dramatic.

Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, said Trump has mostly replaced judges appointed by Republican presidents with his own candidates, adding to conservative majorities in courts based in the South and narrowing the margin in the 9th Circuit in San Francisco — a frequent target of the president’s attacks.

All the same, Wheeler said, the new judges of the Trump era are generally more conservative than the older ones winding down their careers.

“When you replace a 70-year-old George W. Bush appointee who is slightly to the right of center with a 45-year-old movement conservative, obviously you’re not trading apples for apples,” Wheeler said.

A high-water mark?

Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., may have reached a “high-water mark” on the federal appeals courts, Wheeler said.

They may have filled vacancies so quickly that there are unlikely to be many more openings on the circuit courts in the year ahead — unless judges appointed by Democrats decide to retire in large numbers.

Trump Is Reshaping The Judiciary. A Breakdown By Race, Gender And Qualification

That means attention is turning to the lower courts, which handle cases on civil rights, the environment, financial regulation and federal crimes.

On July 30 and 31, the Senate confirmed 13 district court judges before leaving the Capitol for its August recess. The Senate Judiciary Committee, run by Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., is poised to pick up the district court judge process again this fall.

Whelan, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said evangelicals and other conservatives are delighted with that pace — and with the White House for delivering on its promises to prioritize the judiciary.

In a few cases, Republican senators have brought down the president’s own nominees, getting the candidates to withdraw sometimes because they’re not conservative enough.

For progressive activists, that only highlights the need for Democrats to take judicial appointments more seriously. The subject has so far not been a focus in any of the Democratic presidential debates, in which 2020 hopefuls are making the case for why they should be the Democratic Party’s nominee to take on Trump.

But as Brian Fallon of the group Demand Justice pointed out, the Democratic presidential candidates are campaigning on ambitious ideas — climate change policies, health care and financial regulation.

Those things, he said, will be disputed in court and will need to survive judicial review in front of judges — many of whom were appointed by Trump.

Fallon has this to say to Democrats vying for the White House: “They actually owe it to the voters to explain very clearly what they’re going to do to take back the courts and who they’ll nominate in order to do that.”

Source: Trump’s Impact On Federal Courts: Judicial Nominees By The Numbers

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Stephens: The New Conservative Pyrite “National conservatism” is another road to serfdom

2019/07/29 Leave a comment

Good post by Stephens on the bankruptcy of contemporary American conservatives:

Friedrich Hayek, whose thoughts used to count for something among well-educated conservatives, made short work of nationalism as a guiding principle in politics. “It is this nationalistic bias which frequently provides the bridge from conservatism to collectivism,” he wrote in “The Constitution of Liberty.”

That point alone ought to have been enough to dim the right’s new enthusiasm for old-style nationalism. It hasn’t.

A three-day public conference this month on “national conservatism” featured some bold-faced right-wing names, including John Bolton, Tucker Carlson and Peter Thiel. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page published a piece from Christopher DeMuth, a former president of the American Enterprise Institute, on the “nationalist awakening.” Yoram Hazony, an Israeli political theorist, has gained wide attention among U.S. conservatives with his book, “The Virtue of Nationalism.”

And, of course, Donald Trump: “You know, they have a word, it sort of became old-fashioned, it’s called a nationalist,” the president said last October. “And I say, really, we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am, I’m a nationalist.”

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Egyptian minister’s laughing vow in Canada to ‘slice up’ anyone who criticizes her country alarms immigrant groups

2019/07/26 Leave a comment

Even if the expression was made only in jest, unacceptable:

Egyptian-Canadians are incensed over an Egyptian cabinet minister’s promise to “slice up” critics of her country, saying what might have been meant as a joke struck them as a serious threat from a repressive regime.

Those of both Coptic-Christian and Muslim backgrounds — who rarely see eye to eye otherwise — condemned Wednesday the comments made by Immigration Minister Nabila Makram on a visit to Mississauga, Ont.

They cite Cairo’s record of arbitrary detentions, violence against political opponents and other human-rights abuses since President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi seized power six years ago.

Some have complained to police, and the Peel Regional force in Mississauga says it is investigating the matter.

“No one in his or her right mind should take this — although it might be said in a joking manner — as a joke,” said Ehab Lotayef of the Egyptian Canadian Coalition for Democracy. “It really represents the mindset of the current Egyptian government and is totally unacceptable by a minister in a country that respects itself.”

Lotayef urged Global Affairs Canada to make its displeasure known for what he said was at least a diplomatic affront.

Makram was near the end of a short speech to an Egyptian heritage dinner Sunday when she said in Arabic that anyone who criticized Egypt would be “sliced up,” accompanying the remark with a slashing motion across her throat.

She said it with a smile, after talking about Egyptians’ passion for their country, and earned laughter and applause from the audience.

But Egyptian ex-patriates cite evidence that critics of the Sisi government in Canada are already under watch, and note that a visiting Egyptian-Canadian businessman has been imprisoned in Cairo without charge for months.

Canadian-based “dissidents” have been mentioned in government-aligned Egyptian media in negative terms, said Lotayef.

“We are surely being followed and monitored,” he said.

Egypt’s ambassador to Canada routinely makes the trip from Ottawa to attend major events at Mississauga’s main Coptic-Christian church, said Maher Rizkalla, president of Canadian Coptic Association.

“The Egyptian government is always involved and keeps an eye on the churches in Canada,” he said. “I would be concerned to visit Egypt. I know they’re watching us, and they know who is active and inactive outside the country.”

Sisi’s government has been widely criticized for its abuses, with Human Rights Watch writing that “his security forces have escalated a campaign of intimidation, violence, and arrests against political opponents, civil society activists and many others who have simply voiced mild criticism of the government.”

Makram is on a Canadian tour organized in part by the Egyptian embassy.

“Our country is very grand and deserves that all of us work for it and fight for it, because we just have one county – Egypt,” she told the dinner audience. “This country is always inside us, inside our hearts. We cannot accept any word about it. Anyone who says a (bad) word about our country – what will happen to him? Will be sliced up.”

Not everyone interpreted the remarks in a completely negative fashion.

One audience member, who asked not to be named for fear of landing in the midst of a political fight, said the slicing-up expression is a common and usually genial one in Egyptian Arabic, not meant literally.

“Parents say that to their kids all the time,” the person said. “Usually … people say it as an endearing gesture.”

Still, the audience member said the comment was definitely inappropriate in the circumstances.

The Egyptian embassy in Ottawa did not respond to a request for comment.

In response to a complaint from Rizkalla, Peel Regional Police are investigating the matter, and liaising with the department’s “equity and inclusion bureau,” said Const. Lori Murphy, a spokeswoman.

Source: Egyptian minister’s laughing vow in Canada to ‘slice up’ anyone who criticizes her country alarms …

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ANDREW COYNE: It’s time for old-school conservatism and liberalism to defend their common values

2019/07/24 Leave a comment

Good column:

Why would anyone describe himself as a conservative? While we’re at it, why describe yourself as a liberal? Or socialist? Or libertarian? The point is not that there is anything wrong with any of these — only that there is something right with all of them. Each of the traditions, that is, has something to teach us. Why limit yourself to just one?

Still, people do. The desire to belong to a tribe – or perhaps, to quarrel with another – is one of the deepest urges of humanity. But tribalism, ideological or other, is not just self-blinding. On occasion it leads to madness. Consider the present state of conservatism, a tribe that has, as the past week has illuminated, lost its way, if not its mind.

If it were just a matter of Donald Trump’s racist attacks on four racial-minority congresswomen – the latest in a long series, but arguably the worst — it might be put down to his own personal depravity. If it were just the chants (“send her home’’) of the people at his rally in Greenville, N.C., it might be written off as the ravings of a lunatic fringe.

But Trump, it is abundantly clear, stands atop a vast infrastructure: the Republican leaders who shrug off his abuses for the sake of party unity; the commentators who look the other way so long as he champions their pet causes; the base who are content with whatever he does so long as it annoys the liberal media; and underpinning all, a set of beliefs – superstitions, prejudices, call them what you will – that predate Trump, but which he has helped to make the credo of the conservative movement.

It was convenient that in the same week as Trump was issuing such crude appeals to hatred and bigotry, a group of academics, journalists and politicians were meeting at a hotel in Washington in an attempt to give a veneer of intellectual credibility to Trumpism. The “National Conservatism” conference underlined how completely conservatism, at least in the United States, has been turned on its head.

The conservatism of the post-war decades, a sometimes uneasy coalition of social conservatives, free marketers and hawkish internationalists, has been replaced by a populist-nationalist conservatism marked by hatred of “globalist” elites, hostility to immigration and fear of foreign trade, and by its enthusiasm for whichever strongman will protect America from these.

Where conservatives were traditionally advocates of limited government, wary of government intervention and worried about deficits, today’s conservatives embrace many of the same limitless-government approaches as the left – “collectivism rebranded for the right,” as the Republican-turned-independent Congressman Justin Amash calls it.

Where conservatives were skeptics of change, pragmatists seeking to reconcile the necessity of reform with the wisdom of tradition, the Trumpians are as reckless as they are reactionary, heedless to the social and institutional harm they have caused in the name of Making America Great Again.

And as the conference highlighted, the civic nationalism that American conservatives used to cherish – the nation to which anyone could belong so long as they subscribed to the basic ideals of the American political system, not least its reverence for the equality of every individual under the Constitution – has been replaced by a more culturally-specific, if not ethnic definition, majoritarian and monocultural rather than liberal and pluralist, that is not easily distinguished from xenophobia or indeed racism: identity politics for white people.

Canadians will be familiar with this from, for example, the Bill 21 debate. Still, few in this country would go so far as the University of Pennsylvania law professor who told the conference that, as people from certain cultures were more likely to fit into a “modern advanced society” like the United States, and as those people came mostly from Europe and the First World, and as those societies are “mostly white for now,” it followed that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.” But not, you know, in a racist way.

This is, as The Economist put it in a recent issue, “not an evolution of conservatism, but a repudiation of it.” The conservatism I grew up with was basically a species of liberalism, part of the same Western liberal inheritance but more alert to liberalism’s potential for overreach. Its mission was, if you like, to save liberalism from the liberals. As such it represented a continuous tradition that, even as it changed with the times, represented certain enduring ideals. How can the very opposite set of ideas also be called conservatism without doing violence to the language?

Perhaps, as others have suggested, this is naive. Maybe there are no permanent or defining principles of conservatism, independent of its practitioners. Perhaps conservatism is whatever self-described conservatives happen to believe at the time. Trump enjoys the approval of 90 per cent of Republicans; even in Canada, according to a recent Abacus Data poll, 46 per cent of Canadian Conservatives have either a positive or neutral impression of him. Maybe it’s time to concede the point.

If so, then perhaps it is time for a more fundamental political realignment. If conservatism is now to mean its opposite, perhaps it is time for conservatives of the old school to make their peace with liberalism – for the two estranged children of the Enlightenment to reunite in defence of its values. The differences between them that once seemed so great look trivial now, compared to what they have in common, and in light of what they both oppose.

Source: ANDREW COYNE: It’s time for old-school conservatism and liberalism …https://www.thechronicleherald.ca/…/andrew-coyne-its-time-for-old-school-conservati…

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Opinion: Report On Racism, But Ditch The Labels

2019/07/18 Leave a comment

Thoughtful commentary:

Editor’s note: NPR this week has described the language in President Trump’s tweets about a group of Democratic congresswomen as “racist.”

Keith Woods, NPR’s vice president for newsroom training and diversity, argues that journalists should not be using the term “racist” to describe the president’s tweets. He explains why below.

Once again, the president of the United States has used the sniper tower of Twitter to take aim at immigration, race relations and common decency. And once again, journalists are daring their profession to boldly call bigotry what it is: bigotry. Enough of the vacuous “racially charged,” “racially loaded,” “racially insensitive” evasions, they say. It’s racist, and we should just call it that.

I understand the moral outrage behind wanting to slap this particular label on this particular president and his many incendiary utterances, but I disagree. Journalism may not have come honorably to the conclusion that dispassionate distance is a virtue. But that’s the fragile line that separates the profession from the rancid, institution-debasing cesspool that is today’s politics.

It is precisely because journalism is given to warm-spit phrases like “racially insensitive” and “racially charged” that we should not be in the business of moral labeling in the first place. Who decides where the line is that the president crossed? The headline writer working today who thinks it’s “insensitive” or the one tomorrow who thinks it’s “racist?” Were we to use my moral standards, the line for calling people and words racist in this country would have been crossed decades ago. But that’s not what journalists do. We report and interview and attribute.

I am not a journalism purist. I came into the profession 40 years ago to tear down the spurious notion of objectivity used to protects a legacy of sexism, xenophobia and white supremacy. The better ideals of truth telling, accountability, fairness, etc., are what give journalism its power, while the notion of “objectivity” has been used to obscure and excuse the insidious biases we do battle with today.

I’ve been an informed consumer of the media since my days as a paperboy. I read the Times-Picayune as I delivered it, and the distorted view it offered of black and poor New Orleans told me all I needed to know about “objectivity.” We have come miles since then as a profession. But why should I trust that we’re all on the same page with our labels now? Weren’t last week’s tweets racist? Or last year’s? Weren’t some misogynistic? Vulgar? Homophobic? Sexist? The language of my judgment is generous, and they are my opinion, and they belong in the space reserved for opinions.

What’s at stake is journalism’s embattled claim to be the source of credible news grounded in the kind of deep, fair reporting that exposes injustice and holds powerful people to account. It may be satisfying to call the president’s words, or the president himself, racist, given the attacks tweeted from his bully app and so often aimed at our profession. But at what cost?

It’s already nearly impossible to separate actual journalism from the argumentative noise on the cable networks that dominate so much of public perception. There are already too many journalists dancing day and night on the line that once separated fact and judgment. When that line is finally obliterated and we sink into the cesspool beckoning us to its depths, this historically flawed, imperfect tool for revealing and routing racism will look and sound indistinguishable from the noise and become just as irrelevant.

On Sunday, the president wrote this:

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

His words mirror those of avowed racists and xenophobes that date back to the birth of this country. Was that moral judgement, my last sentence? I would argue no. I’d call it context, and it doesn’t require my opinion, just a basic understanding of history. That’s an alternative to labels: Report. Quote people. Cite sources. Add context. Leave the moral labeling to the people affected; to the opinion writers, the editorial writers, the preachers and philosophers and to the public we serve.

We just have to do journalism.

Source: Opinion: Report On Racism, But Ditch The Labels

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ANDREW COYNE: Why Conservatives have more at stake than Liberals in Canada’s class war

2019/07/10 Leave a comment

Coyne, as often happens, nails it. A plague on both houses, but more so for Conservatives:

Liberals, it is true, need to find a way to reach out to less educated voters, but not as badly as Conservatives need to make their peace with the eggheads

Democracy, in G. K. Chesterton’s careful definition, means government by the uneducated, “while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.”

The enduring value of this distinction was suggested by the ruckus stirred up over the weekend by Amir Attaran, professor of law at University of Ottawa. Responding to a recent Abacus Data poll finding the Tories leading the Liberals by a wide margin among Canadians with a high school diploma or less, with the Liberals ahead among those with bachelor degrees or higher, the professor tweeted: “The party of the uneducated. Every poll says this.”

In the ensuing furor, Attaran tried to protest that he was just stating a fact, but the disdain in the tweet was clear enough to most. For their part, while some Tories quibbled with the data (just one poll, within the margin of error, misplaced correlation etc), most seemed less offended by the sentiment — every poll does show the less formal education a voter has, the more likely they are to support the Conservatives — than by the suggestion there was something shameful about it.

It was, in short, another skirmish in the continuing class war: class, now defined not by occupation or birth, as in Chesterton’s time, but by education. Conservatives, true to form, professed outrage at this arrogant display of Liberal elitism, while Liberal partisans protested that they were not snobs, it’s just that Conservatives are such ignorant boobs (I paraphrase).

The professor compounded matters by objecting, not only that he is not a Liberal, but that he is not an elite, since his parents were immigrants. And everyone did their best to be as exquisitely sensitive (“let us respect the inherent dignity of labour”) as they could while still being viciously hurtful (“not uneducated, just unintelligent”).

There is, of course, much to object to in Attaran’s remark. Not all or even most wisdom is to be found in higher education. Lots of people who go to university don’t learn a thing, while much of what they do learn is tendentious rubbish. A society that sneers at tradespeople is a society on its way to the poorhouse.

Today’s populist conservative is prone to dismiss the analysis of experts, on everything from sex education to climate change, not in spite of their expertise but because of it.

But Conservative rhetoric too often seems to go beyond attacking snobbery to attacking education itself: expertise, knowledge, the whole notion that people who know more about a subject than the rest of us ought to be listened to with respect.

There is a rich tradition, to be sure, of conservative skepticism of intellectuals — recall William F. Buckley’s crack about preferring to be governed by “the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory” than the faculty of Harvard. But the target then was the hubris of intellectuals, convinced they could plan an entire economy or overturn the accumulated wisdom of centuries of tradition, not intellectualism itself: scientism, not science.

Today’s populist conservative, by contrast, is prone to dismiss the analysis of experts, on everything from sex education to climate change, not in spite of their expertise but because of it. A society that sneers at “so-called experts” is a society on its way to the madhouse.

As in most wars, there is fault on both sides. If Trump and Ford voters brim with resentment at “liberal elites” looking down their noses at them, it is not entirely without cause.

And yet we should beware of drawing the class lines too starkly. Graduates of apprenticeships and community colleges are themselves relative elites — 46 per cent of adult Canadians have no post-secondary education — and earn more accordingly: a premium of 12 and 18 per cent, respectively, over those with only a high school diploma.

At the same time, universities are for the most part glorified trade schools. Only 12 per cent of today’s university students graduate in the humanities, the object of so much (deserved) conservative ridicule. The rest are there to learn a trade — only trades of a tonier kind, like doctoring and lawyering.

It isn’t so much about the level of education, then, as the kind of education. (Trump, as he likes to boast, is a graduate of Wharton.) There is a high degree of overlap between “liberal elites” and “symbolic analysts” (in Robert Reich’s term) — people who make their living manipulating words, numbers, images, code.

It is Conservatives who have played the class card more heavily, and with more destructive results.

What is common to all those doctors and lawyers, academics and bureaucrats, designers, artists, and, yes, media people is that they deal in ideas — with the abstract versus the physical, representation versus reality — and are typically good at communicating these to others. Not for nothing are they sometimes called the “chattering classes.”

The ability to do so earns not only income, but social and cultural “capital,” at least among their fellow class members, clustered in the centres of our major cities. That there should be some degree of estrangement between them and those outside is not surprising, but one wishes political leaders would seek to bridge these divides rather than exacerbate them.

There is fault, as I say, on either side for this; but there is not equal fault. Liberal “virtue-signalling” may flatter the moral vanity of the educated classes, but it is Conservatives who have played the class card more heavily, and with more destructive results. Class wars are always toxic, but class wars organized around “is education a good thing” are suicidal.

And not only for society. Here’s the thing: the numbers of the higher educated are growing. The 2016 census was the first to show more than half the adult population — 54 per cent — with some kind of postsecondary degree, college or university, up from 48 per cent a decade before. And it is only going to continue: younger Canadians are more likely to have a degree than their parents, and their children will be more likely still.

Liberals, it is true, need to find a way to reach out to less educated voters, but not as badly as Conservatives need to make their peace with the eggheads.

Source: ANDREW COYNE: Why Conservatives have more at stake than Liberals in Canada’s class war

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Ridings with Liberal MPs have the most Canada Summer Jobs approvals on average

2019/07/06 Leave a comment

Good analysis and revealing findings.

Would be curious to know what the numbers were in 2015, whether there was a similar tendency with respect to Conservative-held ridings (many of which, of course flipped to Liberal ridings in that election):

More Canada Summer Jobs program projects were approved this year in ridings held by Liberal MPs than in Conservative- or NDP-represented ridings on average, according to an iPolitics analysis of government data.

As of April 18, five days before the earliest start date of jobs funded through the program, there were 24 per cent more projects approved for the summer in ridings represented by Liberal MPs than Conservative MPs, and 16 per cent more approvals in Liberal-represented ridings than ridings with NDP MPs.

The Canada Summer Jobs program is an initiative of Employment and Social Development Canada providing wage subsidies to employers from not-for-profit organizations, and businesses with less than 50 employees. It helps the organizations hire young people between the ages of 15 and 30 during the summer.

The program provides up to $263 million in subsidies.

Ridings with Liberal MPs had an average of 110 approved programs, while ridings with NDP MPs averaged 95 approved projects, and Conservative-represented ridings had an average of 89 programs receiving the federal cash.

All four ridings where there were approvals for more than 300 programs are held by Liberal MPs. There are 18 ridings where more than 200 programs qualified for the subsidies. Seventeen of those ridings have Liberal MPs, while one is represented by an NDP MP.

Canada Summer Jobs funding is allocated by riding based on government data on how many youth are unemployed in the summer in each region.

MPs play a direct role in the review of projects in their constituencies. According to the department, MPs are invited to review the list of programs that are up to receive funding in their constituency and can recommend changes. Service Canada has the final say after MPs’ suggestions.

Data about the program from the department was tabled in the House of Commons last month. Employment and Social Development Canada said it received 39,933 applications for funding and approved 33,375, as of April 18. The department said that not all funding decisions had been finalized at that time.

Veronique Simard, a spokesperson for Labour Minister Patty Hajdu, said the number of approved projects doesn’t directly reflect how many jobs are subsidized through the program.

“For example, in (Canada Summer Jobs) 2018, approximately 35,500 projects were approved for funding, resulting in 70,083 jobs created. We are delighted that so many good quality summer jobs were provided to young Canadians last summer and hope that this season garners the same results,” Simard told iPolitics in a statement.

The Canada Summer Jobs program has been the subject of controversy before. Earlier this summer, The Canadian Press reported that the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms was taking the government to court because it had rejected a pair of Bible camps’ proposals for funding after restructuring the program to require applicants to show they don’t work against reproductive rights.

It was also reported last month, including by Global News, that a charity that had its licence revoked over concerns it may have funded militants in Pakistan had received a grant through the jobs program.

Asked about the differences between how many programs get cash in Liberal and NDP ridings compared to Conservative ridings, Conservative employment critic John Barlow said it’s “just another instance of Liberals helping themselves.”

“Justin Trudeau’s government has botched the Canada Summer Jobs program since Day 1. They put in place a ‘Liberal values’ attestation, gave funding to an organization linked to terrorism, bankrolled groups that are actively protesting Canada’s critical energy infrastructure, and are now prioritizing their own Liberal ridings,” Barlow said.

Barlow promised that, if elected, a Conservative government would “fix” the Canada Summer Jobs program. He didn’t say how Conservatives would change the program.

Source: Ridings with Liberal MPs have the most Canada Summer Jobs approvals on average

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Public servants handcuffed by unreasonable expectations of political neutrality

2019/07/04 Leave a comment

Or are they unreasonable?

Certainly from my time in government, serving both Liberal and Conservative governments, I believe neutrality essential to government trust in public servants.

Certainly, Amy Kishek expresses valid observations regarding neutrality and how difficult neutrality is. But labelling it completely as a hoax is equally extreme.

Readers may know how I explored the issue in Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism, recounting the challenge of being confronted my biases and preconceptions faced with the challenge of different beliefs and ideology under the Conservatives.

At senior levels (EX and above), really hard to see how providing advice to a Minister while having public positions or learnings cannot harm government trust in the public service.

Price to pay if one wants to rise in the ranks. Post-retirement, of course, one has greater latitude (but I would argue not without limitation).

At lower levels, less of an issue:

On June 25, Blacklock’s Reporter broke a story that a prominent quasi-partisan Twitter personality, Neil Waytowich (a.k.a. “Neil Before Zod” on Twitter), was actually a former public service worker by day and anonymous Twitter political commentator and podcaster by night. Hot on the trail were MPs who quoted the public service code of conduct on political activities, paying no mind to the state of the law and workers’ rights to freedom of expression.

As we near the federal election many public service workers are surely already wondering whether they can play any part in our democratic system, beyond simply casting a hidden ballot.

According to the Public Service Employment Act, an employee can “engage in any political activity so long as it does not impair, or is not perceived as impairing, the employee’s ability to perform his or her duties in a politically impartial manner.” For its part, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that a public service workers’ right to freedom of expression under section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms must be balanced against their duty of loyalty to their employer, the government of Canada. There was a time when, indeed, all public service workers were banned from political activity, a law that was found to be unconstitutional. The court ruled that the government must take into account that the need for impartiality, or its appearance, varies depending on the type of work being performed and the employee’s relative role, level, or importance in the public service.

That balancing act is the crux of this issue. Unfortunately, despite numerous decisions on the question, the Public Service Commission (PSC) continues to actively dissuade public service workers from expressing their political views and exercising their political rights outside of work, via information spread through its online tools, and education materials, as well as in their application of the legislation. Not only has this infringed on the rights of workers, it has had a chilling effect on all employees who self-police to avoid attracting the ire of the PSC. 

“Politics” is a dirty word in the federal public service, and yet it is everywhere.

We need to unpack the notion of what it means to be politically engaged, and ensure that loyalty to the employer, although an integral aspect of any employment relationship, does not override an individual’s right to express themselves, and in particular where to do so is a necessary part of expressing and protecting one’s identity.

Politics is everywhere, and everything is political. Neutrality itself is a hoax. Our experiences, our beliefs, and how we live in the world are political, and they are also politicized without our say. Dammit, even believing in climate change is political, and considered highly partisan by some.

The politics of existing are especially obvious to young people, women, Black, Indigenous, and racialized people, persons with disabilities, religious minorities, and members of LBGTQ2+ communities whose identities and existence are under constant attack in partisan and nonpartisan political spheres alike.

Even those for whom the status quo is peachy keen are engaged in a political act or belief when they uphold existing practices, or even in going about their daily life—say, by unapologetically benefiting from property rights on unceded Indigenous land. Infringements on freedom of expression may then have a disproportionate effect on members of equity-seeking groups.

Yet somehow public service workers are expected to suddenly become apolitical once those golden handcuffs are on.

Showing up at the Women’s March, attended by partisan political leaders, holding a sign with a political slogan, shouldn’t be cause for investigation or discipline. Neither should door-knocking with a political candidate as a volunteer on one’s down time. Nor writing a letter to the editor about a policy issue where one signs the letter without mention of their job in the public service. These are all legitimate and protected forms of expression. In fact, most public service workers, whose work is “completely divorced from the exercise of any discretion that could be in any manner affected by political considerations,” to use the language of the Supreme Court of Canada, would be permitted to engage in these activities based on the legal test set out by the court.

Sadly, most public service workers don’t know this.

The code of conduct and false notions of the “political” are weaponized to silence public service workers, and chill freedom of expression. This has never been easier to do than with social media, where a comment or an Instagram photo can turn into a complaint very quickly.

Why then all the fear-mongering from the PSC to NDP and Conservative MPs alike?

To completely disregard workers’ fundamental right to freedom of expression in favour of a model of subservience to their employer is an injury to the dignity of workers who keep our society running everyday—from the guarding our coasts, inspecting our food, issuing our employment insurance, preserving our parks, the list goes on—and all in the face of their own pay issues and workplace struggles.

Source: Public servants handcuffed by unreasonable expectations of political neutrality

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