While I expect most of my readers will have seen the media reports on the latest population projections and will be familiar with the trends, here is the StatsCan summary of their findings.
One of the more striking findings is the likelihood that despite federal and provincial efforts to diversify where immigrants choose to settle and remain, relatively little change is seen from the current concentration in the major census metropolitan areas.
And as is currently the case, Montreal is likely to remain less diverse in terms of immigrants and visible minorities compared not only to Toronto and Vancouver but also Calgary and Winnipeg.
The other finding is the large increase in the number of second generation immigrants, where one in five is expected to be in 2036.
The full report is worth reading given the range of detailed information it provides even if, like all scenarios and projections, a note of caution is required.
And overall, given these trends, it is even more important to ensure that we get our immigration, citizenship and multiculturalism policies right to ensure our continued relative success in integrating newcomers and their children into Canadian society.
Immigrant and second-generation populations
Based on the projection scenarios used, immigrants would represent between 24.5% and 30.0% of Canada’s population in 2036, compared with 20.7% in 2011. These would be the highest proportions since 1871.
In 2036, between 55.7% and 57.9% of Canada’s immigrant population could have been born in Asia, up from 44.8% estimated in 2011, while between 15.4% and 17.8% could have been born in Europe, down from 31.6% in 2011.
The proportion of the second-generation population, i.e., non‑immigrants with at least one parent born abroad, within the total Canadian population would also increase. In 2036, nearly one in five people would be of second generation, compared with 17.5% in 2011.
Together, immigrants and second-generation individuals could represent nearly one person in two (between 44.2% and 49.7%) in 2036, up from 2011 (38.2%).
Languages
According to all scenarios used for these projections, the population whose mother tongue is neither English nor French would be up and could account for between 26.1% and 30.6% of Canada’s population in 2036, versus 20.0% in 2011.
As in 2011, immigrants would make up the majority—close to 70% in all scenarios—of the population whose mother tongue is neither English nor French. However, close to 40% of these other-mother-tongue immigrants would have adopted English or French as the language spoken most often at home, either alone or with other languages.
Visible minority status
According to the results of these projections, in 2036, among the working-age population (15 to 64 years), of special interest for the application of the Employment Equity Act, between 34.7% and 39.9% could belong to a visible minority group, compared with 19.6% in 2011.
In all the projection scenarios, South Asian would still be the main visible minority group in 2036, followed by the Chinese. However, the most rapidly growing groups would be the Arab, Filipino and West Asian groups, given that they represent a higher proportion in the immigrant population than in the population as a whole.
Religion
The proportion of people who report having no religion in the total population would continue to increase, and could represent between 28.2% and 34.6% in 2036 (compared with 24.0% in 2011). This proportion would be similar to Catholics (between 29.2% and 32.8% in 2036, down from 2011 [38.8%]). In 2036, Catholicism would remain the religion with the largest number of followers.
The number of people affiliated with non-Christian religions could almost double by 2036 and could represent between 13% and 16% of Canada’s population, compared with 9% in 2011. The Muslim, Hindu and Sikh faiths, which are over-represented among immigrants compared to their demographic weight in the population as a whole, would see the number of their followers grow more quickly, even if it would continue to represent a modest share of the total Canadian population.
Regional analysis
The results of the different scenarios show that in all provinces and territories, the number and the proportion of immigrants in the population would increase between 2011 and 2036.
Based on all the projection scenarios, the geographic distribution of immigrants among the various regions in 2036 would be similar to the estimate in 2011. The vast majority (between 91.7% and 93.4%) would continue to live in a census metropolitan area (CMA). The three primary areas of residence for immigrants would remain Toronto (between 33.6% and 39.1%), Montréal (between 13.9% and 14.6%) and Vancouver (between 12.4% and 13.1%).
According to all the scenarios for these projections, more than one in two people in 2036 would be an immigrant or the child of an immigrant in Toronto (between 77.0% and 81.4%), Vancouver (between 69.4% and 74.0%), Calgary (between 56.2% and 63.3%) and Abbotsford – Mission (between 52.5% and 57.4%). In 2011, the corresponding proportions were 74.1% in Toronto, 65.6% in Vancouver, 48.0% in Calgary and 49.7% in Abbotsford – Mission.
The results of the projections show that the proportion of the working-age population (aged 15 to 64) who belong to a visible minority group would increase in all areas of the country, in all the scenarios. This proportion would surpass 40% in Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg and Abbotsford – Mission. It would remain lower in non-metropolitan areas.
The results of the projections indicate that religious diversity would be up in all areas considered by 2036. The increase would be more substantial in areas that were the most homogeneous in 2011, i.e., Quebec (excluding Montréal) and in the Atlantic provinces, primarily because of the rise in the proportion of people who reported having no religion.
The most religiously diverse areas in 2011 would remain as such in 2036. Among them, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton, which had a large proportion of immigrants among their population in 2011, would continue to be diverse, in particular as a result of the increase in the proportion of persons reporting a non-Christian religion.
Good in-depth coverage of some of the integration debates in the UK:
In 1966, then-Home Secretary Roy Jenkins of Labour gave a speech setting out a policy of multiculturalism, though he didn’t use the term. “I do not think that we need in this country a ‘melting pot’, which will turn everybody out in a common mould, as one of a series of carbon copies of someone’s misplaced vision of the stereotyped Englishman… I define integration, therefore, not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity,” he said. Katwala [head of U.K.-based think tank on integration and migration British Future] says he was probably right to do so, at a time when immigrants, largely from former colonies, had quite a strong sense of British culture and its expectations anyway. But over time, as immigrant groups grew more diverse and ideas of what British culture was became less clearly defined, this approach looked less satisfactory. By 2011, former Prime Minister David Cameron had declared that multiculturalism had “failed,” but nobody was clear about what was supposed to replace it.
In recent years, politicians and the type of people who read policy reports have been well aware that there’s something of a vacuum between talk and action. As Casey put it in her review, “Numerous reports on community cohesion and integration had been produced in the preceding 15 years but the recommendations they had made were difficult to see in action.” A controversial topic like integration may be guaranteed to grab punchy headlines each time a review is announced, but generally proves far more complex to actually address.
One reason for the absence of government policy on this issue might be that there is less of a problem than it often seems. Buried in the Casey review were plenty of positive statistics: 82 percent of Britons socialize at least once a month with people from a different ethnic and religious background. Over 98 percent of people living in the U.K. speak English. Many supposedly isolated communities turn out on closer inspection to be boringly similar: extensive polling by the center-right London-based Policy Exchange think tank in December, for example, found that “In terms of their everyday concerns and priorities, British Muslims answer [our survey] no differently from their non-Muslim neighbors.”
And, some would argue, as long as people are generally getting along OK, why should they have to subscribe to sets of ill-defined cultural values that nobody can agree on anyway? “There’s a brilliant quote from the rapper Heems where he says: ‘My parents didn’t come here to assimilate, they came here to make money,’” says Nikesh Shukla, editor of The Good Immigrant, an essay collection on the British immigrant experience. “Wherever [people] move in the world, their first thought isn’t ‘I’m moving to integrate into society.’”
Defending her review from critical questioning by MPs in parliament on January 10, Casey gave examples of supposedly British traits Eastern European immigrants had not learned, including taking out the trash on the right evening and being “nice.” Neither is a practice unique to Anglo-Saxon culture.
However overblown the headlines that emerge after reviews like Casey’s, it’s important not to forget that some genuine issues do exist. Katwala points to the problems with integration, particularly how concerns about the topic are a significant driver of the spiraling anti-immigration feeling in Britain. “If you’re a country that’s quite confident about integration…you’re probably a country that’s got more consent for immigration,” he says. To take the issue of language, for example: While the vast majority of people in the U.K. speak English, there were 850,000 immigrants in 2011 who did not, according to the last British census, making it far harder for them to navigate British society by themselves.
So where there are problems, what can the British government do to address them? For the opposite approach to Britain’s—with its own substantial pitfalls—we can look to France, where immigrants have traditionally been expected to sacrifice many aspects of their home culture in the name of becoming French. This more “assimilationist” approach goes back to modern France’s revolutionary origins, as Joseph Downing, a Marie Curie fellow at Aix-Marseille University, explains: “The political elite after the French revolution felt that the ethnic diversity of France itself…was a weakness,” he says. The Constitution of the Year III, adopted by revolutionary France in 1795, enshrined the country’s colonies as “integral parts of the republic.” From that era on, the French approach has broadly been to ignore ethnic differences and maintain a strict separation between religion and government in favor of a shared national identity.
In his report, Umunna [British Labour Party MP] says changing Britain’s approach to integration should stop short of France’s “assimilationist politics.” It’s right to say that the French approach has brought substantial problems, says Downing: “because the state doesn’t recognize difference, it doesn’t have the means to fight…discrimination.” This “colorblind” approach has led to entrenched inequality in a range of areas of French life, from prisons (it is estimated that 70 percent of inmates are Muslim, but the lack of official statistics that confirm that add to the difficulty of tackling the problem), to schools (the equality required by the constitution has made it difficult to pass laws to make it easier for poorer students from different backgrounds to reach the top universities until recent years). At its most extreme, it manifests itself in policies like last summer’s attempted ban on the burkini, Islamic swimwear for women, that sparked condemnation across Europe.
One answer, says Katwala, is to work out what demands should be made of British citizens, and then communicate them not only to immigrants and the descendents of immigrants but to white British people too. Often, as Shukla points out, the integration debate “lacks nuance, because it seems to just go on skin color.” People whose families have lived in the U.K. for generations are lumped in with recent arrivals, while the responsibilities of white British people are ignored. “Integration has now got to become a sort of ‘everybody issue,’” Katwala says. “The majority hasn’t really known what its role or place in integration is.” Any approach to integration in contemporary Britain will need to emphasize the responsibility of all citizens equally, says Katwala, or risk provoking a backlash.
But in more concrete terms, where there are clearly identifiable issues, the problem often comes back to government planning and funds. A report by the think tank Demos published in 2014 blamed language problems among immigrants partly on “a poor understanding of the scale of need, and of the quality of provision” of language classes. The APPG report noted that the economic security of immigrants is one of the most important factors in how easy they find it to integrate, and said there might be a need for government to invest more in helping migrants to enter the labor market. It also said that local government should take more of the responsibility for improving integration, to increase pressure for change and ensure policies are carefully tailored to requirements in an area.
After Brexit, immigration is likely to be at the heart of the British political debate for some time, and it’s essential that the conversation focuses on how British society works, not just on the numbers of people arriving. But any such discussion has to acknowledge Britain’s relative success so far at integrating migrants, and address immigrants arriving in the country as equals, not treat them as problems to be solved. “I don’t think acknowledging that migration and population change can pose challenges means that we need to kowtow to a UKIP agenda,” Umunna says. However, only a genuinely positive and inclusive approach to drawing British society together can solve the problems that do exist, without creating new ones.
Some small signs of a more reasoned approach to immigration:
President Donald Trump will focus immigration enforcement efforts first on criminal immigrants in the country illegally, his administration said on Monday, offering hope to more than three-quarters of a million young immigrants protected from deportation under the Obama administration.
Those protected from deportation under former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program have been worried that Trump would follow through on a campaign pledge to immediately end the “illegal amnesty.”
While White House spokesman Sean Spicer, at his first press briefing, did not explicitly rule out action on the program known as DACA, his comments suggest that Trump’s initial policies will be similar to Obama’s. Spicer noted Trump has said his focus would be on immigrants in the country illegally who have a criminal record or pose a threat.
“That’s where the priority’s going to be, and then we’re going to continue to work through the entire number of folks that are here illegally,” he said.
He added that those immigrants who have overstayed visas will also be among the administration’s enforcement priorities.
Spicer’s comments echo what Trump said in an interview shortly after the election, when he told CBS’ “60 Minutes” that the focus would on “probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million” criminals living in the country illegally. They also suggest continuity with Obama, who also focused on immigrants with criminal records.
Obama created the DACA program in 2012. The program allows young immigrants who were brought to the country as children to apply for a two-year reprieve from deportation and a work permit. The protection and work permit can be renewed.
Information about the program and applications documents remained available online from U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, the Homeland Security agency that manages DACA.
Immigration advocates bracing for elimination of the program are pushing members of Congress to protect the young immigrants after failing to do so in the past. The immigrants, often referred to as Dreamers, are seen as the most sympathetic group among the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the United States illegally.
While the number is relatively small compared to the average 260,000 immigrants (0.5 percent), it is nevertheless significant and part of ensuring overall credibility and support for immigration, another legacy of the Conservative government that should continue.
Hard to understand the regional differences between Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Do these represent the different source countries or are there some CBSA management differences?:
An average of about 1,400 Canadian immigrants are intercepted at the border each year and ordered removed from the country for not fulfilling their residency obligations, the Star has learned.
Although these newcomers can appeal to a tribunal to restore their permanent resident status under humanitarian considerations, only one in 10 succeeds in the process, according to government data.
“The tribunal is supposed to be immigrants’ last resort as the Parliament has given it the discretionary power to give immigrants a second chance if they breach the law,” said immigration lawyer Lawrence Wong, who obtained the data through an access to information request.
“But that second chance in reality is hard to come by. The national sentiment is pretty much the same. If you are an immigrant, don’t make a mistake. If you do, we want to see you kicked out.”
It’s believed to be the first time data about the loss of permanent residency at ports of entry has been made public, revealing the extent of residency noncompliance among immigrants trying to get back to Canada after lengthy stays overseas, said Wong.
Canada’s immigration law requires permanent residents to be physically present in Canada for at least 730 days in every five-year period in order to maintain their status. Otherwise, their residency will be revoked.
According to the Canada Border Services Agency, on average 1,423 permanent residents a year were stopped at the border for failing the requirement from 2010 to 2014, the most recent statistics available. During the period, Canada accepted some 260,000 newcomers annually.
The number of removal orders issued against these individuals had risen sharply to 1,413 in 2014 from 605 in 2008, when former Conservative Immigration Minister Jason Kenney took over the department and cracked down on fraud.
Across Canada, Quebec had the highest detection rate; more than a third of the removal orders were issued in the province against the non-compliant immigrants returning to Canada.
Between 2008 and 2014, a total of 3,575 immigrants were slapped with removal orders for residency non-compliance at Pierre Elliot Trudeau airport in Montreal, dwarfing the 439 and 972 people respectively intercepted at Toronto’s Pearson airport and the Vancouver International Airport.
While all these immigrants who lost their status can appeal to the immigration appeal division based on errors in law or humanitarian and compassionate grounds such as hardship from separation with family in Canada, the border services agency data show their success rate hovers at about 10 per cent — and has declined in the past few years.
Those who successfully restored their permanent resident status dropped significantly from 127 or 17 per cent of 746 appellants in 2008 to 78 or 7.7 per cent of 1,008 people in 2014.
“Once you are issued a removal order, the chances of saving your permanent status are really very limited,” said Wong.
Heinz Christian Strache told an audience in Salzburg that he wanted to see a ban of Muslim symbols, something like the Austrian law that bans Nazi symbols. And he warned that Islam posed an existential threat to Europe. “Let us put an end to this policy of Islamization,” he said. “Otherwise we Austrians, we Europeans will come to an abrupt end.”
The Freedom Party is staunchly anti-immigrant. Stache said Saturday that “we need zero and minus immigration.” The country has received 130,000 claims for asylum since the summer of 2015. Most are former residents of Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.
There are about 600,000 Muslims in Austria, and they’re facing a growing chorus of detractors. Recently, an Austrian cardinal (and a top candidate for pope in previous conclaves) asked in a speech: “Will there be an Islamic conquest of Europe? Many Muslims want that and say: Europe is at the end.” In December, a right-leaning Austrian trade union suggested that Muslims should be denied Christmas bonuses because “they are against all Christian traditions.”
This attitude has made it hard for young Muslims to feel accepted. One recent study of Muslim youth in Vienna found that many do not feel recognized as Austrians, which has increased the risk of radicalization. According to the survey, “85 percent of young people who are in contact with a youth worker have an immigration background,” and “27 percent of those teenagers who are Muslim show strong sympathy for jihadism, and violent and anti-Western thinking.”
The Freedom Party’s anti-Muslim message has been well-received by a nearly a majority of Austria’s electorate. Its presidential candidate Norbert Hofer was defeated in a runoff vote last month, but gained 47 percent support.
In the Netherlands, the Freedom Party is running on a platform of closing mosques and Islamic schools, banning the Koran and Muslim migrants. It also wants to prohibit women from wearing headscarves. The next election is March 2017, and the party is expected to pick up seats to become the most represented party in the Dutch parliament.
Ongoing retention rate problem – only about half remain:
More people are immigrating to Atlantic Canada than ever before, but many do not stay, a new report says.
The Atlantic Provinces Economic Council report released Thursday said a record 8,300 immigrants arrived in 2015, and yet more the following year.
The Halifax-based council said 11,600 immigrants came to Atlantic Canada in the first nine months of 2016, due in part to an influx of Syrian refugees.
“The total numbers have tripled since 2002,” David Chaundy, author of the report, said in a phone interview Thursday.
Chaundy, the council’s research director, attributes the increase to expanded use of provincial nominee programs, which allow provinces to nominate people who wish to immigrate to their region, up to a cap.
“That’s what has really driven the growth,” said Chaundy, adding that this year the region could see closer to 19,000 immigrants, due in part to a new three-year Atlantic immigration pilot project announced by Ottawa and the four provinces last year.
But Chaundy said retention rates for Atlantic Canada are low, and lengthy processing times are a barrier for greater use of immigration in the business community.
“The challenge is on the retention of these immigrants,” said Chaundy. “Although our immigration numbers are rising, we’re still losing close to half of them over a five-year period.”
Although express entry applications are being processed within six months, provincial nominee applications are taking 16 months to be processed by the federal government, he said.
“These can be a challenge for employers looking to bring in a worker fairly quickly,” said Chaundy. “We really need to make sure we have resources to process these applications in a timely manner.”
About 80 per cent of immigrants settle in the region’s major urban centres.
The report is based on information from Statistics Canada and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.
Peter Keleghan, one of Canada’s busier actors, is the creator and narrator of a highly personal documentary called Once an Immigrant, which will have its premiere Thursday on CBC’s documentary series Firsthand. Keleghan – known for his performances in The Newsroom, Slings & Arrows and Street Legal – is our on-screen guide, revealing the saga of how his own family fled Europe and landed in Canada.
Early in the course of the project, Baggage was one of the working titles under consideration. Chatting with me at a Toronto café the other day, along with his collaborator, director Michael McNamara, Keleghan explained what Baggage means. “It’s the stuff immigrants to Canada have to leave behind – what they had been through in their country of origin.”
Such as: racism, sexism, religious persecution, homophobia.
“The lack of all that,” he says, “is what Canada is about.”
Firsthand has replaced a previous CBC series, Doc Zone, which had been a home for general-interest documentaries. Unlike Doc Zone, Firsthand puts the emphasis on point of view and personal perspective. Once an Immigrantis an example of what the series is intended to achieve.
“We are a land of immigrants,” McNamara says. “It’s one of the things that separates us from the rest of the world.”
As the husband of Leah Pinsent, Keleghan has a father-in-law, Gordon Pinsent, who became an immigrant to this country, moving from Newfoundland before it became part of Canada. And Peter’s two children (born in Los Angeles from a previous marriage) were delighted to settle in Canada.
Keleghan describes the film as a cautionary tale. “I loved Meryl Streep’s speech at the Golden Globes,” he says. “We live in an era when Trump – a bigot, racist and misogynist who mocks disabled people – can be elected and become the so-called leader of the free world. And when you look at all the disruption in the rest of the world, you see a swing to the right happening with Brexit and Trump and what’s happening in Europe. It could easily happen here. We have to be very vigilant about protecting Canada’s inclusiveness and progressiveness.”
Suddenly, the unthinkable becomes thinkable. Could there ever be a wall along the world’s longest undefended border preventing immigrants from sneaking into the United States from Canada?
Good commentary by Ibbitson, recalling past debates over removal of ethnic quotas for immigrants:
By calling on immigrants to be screened for adherence to “Canadian values,” Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch has reopened a very old and tired debate over who makes a good Canadian. She may not remember that the answer for many used to be: someone who’s white.
A reader sent an electronic clipping of an article from Legion Magazine printed in 1974, three years after Pierre Trudeau first declared multiculturalism – the celebration and preservation of distinct cultures within a united Canada – as the official policy of the federal government. The Liberals were working on a new immigration plan and sought the Legion’s input. As the organization that represented veterans at a time when there were many more of them, the Canadian Legion was a powerful voice. That voice called on the government to shut the doors.
From Confederation until the 1950s, this country had imposed quotas and other measures to encourage European and prevent Asian immigration. Those quotas “permit a greater flow of immigrants from countries that have historically given fine citizens to Canada,” wrote Robert D. McChesney, the society’s executive vice-president, in a report that was reprinted in the magazine.
But the Diefenbaker government started dismantling those quotas, and the Pearson government replaced them with the colour-blind points system still in use today. Since Europe was now prospering, this meant most new immigrants would have to be recruited from what was then called the “Third World.”
The Legion believed this was a mistake. “Precedents already exist to restrict immigration from certain parts of the world,” McChesney wrote. The Legion’s members “are not yet prepared to see these restrictions lowered, and indeed there is some evidence that they should be extended.”
Rather than using a points system, immigrants should be selected based on “the ethnic composition of the country as recorded in the census.” Since Canada was still overwhelmingly European, this would ensure a European-based intake.
Not wishing to appear intolerant, the 1974 report stressed that “the quality of a prospective immigrant is of prime importance, and that the place of origin and ethnic background should be of a secondary consideration.”
The Legion also opposed admitting refugees because of the impact they might have on “the cultural well-being of the country,” and because “their interest in becoming Canadian citizens is remote or at the best incidental.”
Finally, the report recommended “some system must be devised to screen the applicant more efficiently.”
In 1974, the Legion represented more than 367,000 Canadians, many of them veterans of the Korean War and the First and Second World Wars. Those veterans sacrificed for their country and when the wars ended they built the Canada we live in today.
But the country was changing in ways they found difficult to accept. Already, demographers were warning that the birth rate had fallen to the point that more immigrants from developing countries would be needed to sustain the population in the long term. They were right. Today, one Canadian in five was born elsewhere, and population growth is almost entirely reliant on immigration.
It is only human nature that the Boomers’ parents resented the ethnic transformation of their country. But in demanding strict screening of all immigrants coming into Canada for “Canadian values,” Kellie Leitch is not simply echoing the preachings of Donald Trump; she is evoking a Canada that was already in eclipse half a century ago.
How can she hope to win the party or the country by being so far outside her time?
Makes sense that IRCC is exploring this as a means to improve efficiency and processing times, along with greater consistency of decision-making Richard Kurland, Vic Satzewich and I comment on some of the advantages as well as cautions on the proposed approach:
Ottawa is quietly working on a plan to use computers to assess immigration applications and make some of the decisions currently made by immigration officers, the Star has learned.
Since 2014, the Immigration Department has been developing what’s known as a “predictive analytics” system, which would evaluate applications in a way that’s similar to the work performed by officials today.
The plan — part of the government’s modernization of a system plagued by backlogs and delays — is to use the technology to identify the merits of an immigration application, spot potential red flags for fraud and weigh all these factors to recommend whether an applicant should be accepted or refused.
At the moment, the focus of the project is on building processes that would distinguish between high-risk and low-risk applications, immigration officials said.
“Predictive analytics models are built by analyzing thousands of past applications and their outcomes. This allows the computer to ‘learn’ by detecting patterns in the data, in a manner analogous to how officers learn through the experience of processing applications,” department spokesperson Lindsay Wemp said in an email.
“The goal is to improve client service and increase operational efficiency by reducing processing times while strengthening program integrity.”
The project was approved by the former Conservative government cabinet in February 2013. Wemp said there is no firm timeline on when automated decisions might be a viable option.
“To ensure the accuracy of decisions, models undergo extensive testing prior to being used. Once in service, quality assurance will be performed continually to make sure that model predictions are accurate,” she explained.
“The novelty of the technology and the importance of getting it right make it imperative that we do not rush this project.”
With the proliferation of artificial intelligence in people’s day-to-day lives, from IBM’s Watson (the supercomputer that defeated Jeopardy! champions) to Google’s self-driving cars, immigration experts said they were not surprised by the move toward automation.
“This is the greatest change in immigration processing since the Internet. What requires weeks if not months to process would only take days with the new system. There are going to be cascades of savings in time and money,” said immigration lawyer and policy analyst Richard Kurland.
“A lot of countries have used predictive analytics as a tool but not for immigration processing. Canada Revenue Agency also uses the techniques to identify red flags. It uses artificial intelligence. It is decision-making by machines. The dividends of this exercise are huge.”
The Immigration Department’s Wemp, however, said the department’s plans shouldn’t be classified as artificial intelligence because a predictive model cannot exercise judgment in the same way as a human and officers will always remain central to the process.
“We would be able to catch abnormalities in real time, which would then help us to identify fraud and threats more quickly,” noted Wemp. “Some immigration programs are better suited for predictive analytics than others. The department envisions a phased approach, one program at a time.”
Calling the government’s move evolution rather than revolution, Andrew Griffith, a retired director general of the Immigration Department, said applying the technology to immigration processing is a big deal for the public mostly because of border security concerns.
For Griffith, however, the bigger worry is what algorithms officials use to codify the computer system.
“The more you can bring the government to the 21st century, the better. But we should be using the tools intelligently and efficiently. The challenge is not to embed biases into the system and create extra barriers for applicants,” said Griffith, adding that an oversight body is warranted to constantly monitor the automated decisions.
“My concern is how they are going to operationalize the different factors officers use in weighing their decisions and program a decision-making algorithm. There are no real formulas they use,” said Satzewich.
“Two officers look at an application in different ways. A machine is going to miss things that an officer picks up. I still feel better to have an officer look at every immigration file. Public confidence is important. If Canadians lose confidence in the system, their support for immigration goes down.”
Immigration officials said no job losses are anticipated, as officers who are no longer working on low-risk applications would be reassigned to “higher value-added activities” such as reducing backlogs elsewhere.
Wemp would not reveal how much was budgeted for the project, but said the department has received “modest amounts of funding” to develop proofs of concept by a small team of analysts and no major informational technology investments have been made.
A number of articles I found particularly interesting over the past few weeks.
Starting with Joe Friesen of the Globe’s overview of how increased numbers of urban Indigenous peoples are shaping our cities, particularly but not exclusively in the Prairies:
Look around Winnipeg’s downtown and it’s clear the city is in the midst of a demographic shift. In the elevated walkways that offer shelter from the legendary winds, it seems roughly half the people shopping, walking or stopping to chat, are indigenous. In fact, more than 70,000 residents identify as aboriginal. Like many the other cities with a growing indigenous population, Winnipeg has seen more than its share of racially charged conflict, but the signs of an increasingly prominent indigenous community are apparent.
Storefronts in Winnipeg’s downtown now bear messages of greeting in indigenous languages, ranging from Cree to Dakota, Michif and Inuktitut, distributed by the local business association. At the University of Winnipeg, students who began their studies this year are now required to take a course on indigenous peoples and culture. A community group is petitioning to rename a street in Ojibwe. The national aboriginal broadcaster, APTN, headquartered on Portage Avenue, plans to expand to the United States. On the main street of the predominantly aboriginal North End, Selkirk Avenue, once the heart of the city’s Eastern European communities, schools of social work and urban studies from the province’s two largest universities offer off-campus degree programs for indigenous students, producing a stream of graduates and nourishing a growing middle class.
Every home game for the NHL’s Winnipeg Jets now opens with an announcement recognizing that the MTS Centre is located on Treaty One land, and the homeland of the Métis Nation. It also pledges that the Jets ownership, True North Sports and Entertainment, is committed “to a spirit of reconciliation for the future.” Winnipeg’s mayor, Brian Bowman, is Métis. In the provincial legislature, speculation about who might lead the Official Opposition has swirled almost exclusively around several indigenous contenders.
Winnipeg is the largest of the 28 cities across Canada where the indigenous population has reached the symbolic threshold of 10 per cent of the broader community (including those rounded up from 9.5 per cent and higher), according to the 2011 National Household Survey.
Just 10 years earlier, in 2001, there were only 17 communities with indigenous populations of that size. The list will almost certainly grow once the results of the 2016 long-form census are available, and not just because indigenous people living off-reserve were among the groups considered at risk of being undercounted in 2011. First Nations and Inuit people tend to have higher fertility rates than the rest of the population: In 2006, it was 2.7 children per woman for Inuit women and 2.4 for First Nations women, compared to 1.8 for Métis women, and 1.6 for the population overall.
The city with the highest proportion of indigenous people in Canada is Prince Albert, Sask., a community of roughly 35,000 located 140 kilometres north of Saskatoon. It’s considered a hub for many Northern communities, including 12 nearby First Nations reserves in the Prince Albert Grand Council. Over the decade, the city’s indigenous population grew by 37 per cent, far faster than growth in the city overall.
On the city’s police force, a little less than 40 per cent of officers self-identify as indigenous, and the chief of police is Métis. One member of the eight-seat city council is Métis, and in the last election there was an indigenous candidate for mayor, though he did not win, the city manager, Jim Toye, said.
“The relationship with First Nations is very important to us,” Mr. Toye said. “This is their lands that we are operating on.”
He said the city acknowledges the Treaty relationship at public gatherings and, in its 2016 cultural plan, recognizes its history as a meeting place, known by its Cree name Kistahpinanihk, long before European arrival. The city officially defines itself as a multicultural community with indigenous roots.
As I start to think about my update to Multiculturalism in Canada: Evidence and Anecdote with 2016 Census data, I plan on using more economic, social and political data at the municipal level to help me incorporate this development.
Next, a good long read by Doug Saunders arguing that 1967 marked the emergence of the new Canada, driven largely by the changed and increased diversity by post-war immigration:
Yet to look back from Canada’s 150 th year is to realize that this feeling is not just solipsism: 1967 is the hinge upon which modern Canadian history turns and, in certain respects, the key to understanding the challenges of the next half-century.
Today, we live in the country shaped by the decisions and transformations of 1967, far more than by the events of 1867. Anniversaries are usually symbolic moments of reflection, but Canada’s hundredth was a very real bid to create an almost entirely new country, and, to a large extent, it succeeded. If you spend some time immersed in the Canada of a few years before 1967, and then in the Canada of a few years after, you feel like you’ve visited two countries – the former still colonial, closed, dependent, paternalistic and pretending to be homogeneous, a place whose sleepy streets you’d have to leave if you wanted to make something of yourself; the latter a country of self-invention and iconoclasm, a North American place whose several peoples began to build something much bigger, more complex, but also safer and more educated and urban, and something entirely their own.
Pierre Berton, the historian, famously referred to 1967 twenty years ago as “The Last Good Year” – a book title that appealed to a nostalgic belief in a placid antediluvian Canada that even he admitted had never existed. The centennial euphoria, he argued, gave way in later years to “the very real fear that the country we celebrated so joyously … is in the process of falling apart.”
There’s a better way to express that thought: After the centennial, we started to confront seriously the schisms and divisions and gross inequities that had been masked before beneath a patina of colonial gloss. We would have, over the next 50 years, two secession crises, a battle over our North American economic identity and a hard-fought political reawakening of our indigenous nations. Yet, these were the crucial struggles of becoming a real country, of finding a governing mechanism and a common culture to bring together those long-disparate peoples.
Let me make the case, then, that 1967 was Canada’s first good year. We should spend this year celebrating not the 150 th year of Confederation, but the 50th birthday of the new Canada.
But let me also make the case that our conventional story about the birth of second-century Canada is largely wrong. We like to believe that starting in the late 1960s, a series of political decisions, parliamentary votes, court rulings and royal commissions descended upon an innocent, paternalistic, resource-economy Canada and forced upon it an awkward jumble of novelties: non-white immigration, bilingualism, multiculturalism, refugees, indigenous nationhood, liberation of women and gays, the seeds of free trade, individual rights, religious diversity.
But the explosions of official novelty that were launched in and around 1967 weren’t a cause; they were an effect of profound changes that had taken place in Canadians themselves during the two decades after the war, in their thinking and their composition and their attitude toward their country, in Quebec and English Canada and in indigenous communities.
Canada was not remade by the decisions of 1967; it was reflected by them, for the first time. What began in 1967 was official Canada beginning to catch up with the real Canada. And that is also the lesson to be carried forward to 2017: Canadians tend to be ahead of their institutions, and every few decades it is time for a dramatic catching up, like the explosion of adjustment we saw in ‘67.
A War of Symbols
…Consider the ripples of change that took place on the day of my birth, as the centennial bash roared on.
Eight hours after I was born, the directors of the Canadian National Exhibition filed into a banquet hall for their annual luncheon. The exhibition’s president, W.H. Evans, asked them to remain standing to sing the national anthem – and then chaos ensued, as half the audience broke into God Save the Queen before the pianist had struck the first note of O Canada. A debate over Canada’s true national anthem, begun in 1964, had been winding its way through a special House of Commons-Senate joint committee all year and filling the media with debate. It wouldn’t fully be resolved until a law was passed in 1980, and many people (especially in Toronto) still considered the British national anthem “official.”
National symbols remained subjects of heated contention in 1967. The flag debate had officially been resolved two years earlier with the choice of the Maple Leaf, but defenders of the old colonial Red Ensign remained outspoken in Parliament, the press and even at Expo 67. Everything about the way Canada represented itself to the world was up for grabs.
But something deeper was taking place, involving not just the symbols but the realities they represented.
The postwar decades were defined by large-scale decolonization around the world: Across Africa, Asia and the Americas, scores of countries were freeing themselves from centuries of control by European masters, and struggling, sometimes violently, to find ways to represent and govern themselves as independent entities. People were learning to think of themselves not as colonial subjects but as autonomous individuals within self-created states.
In that light, 1967 can only be seen as the apex of Canada’s postcolonial moment. The wars over symbols were one small manifestation of a larger shift.
It’s worth remembering how new this all was. We still remained, in important ways, a colony. In 1967, Canadian citizenship had only existed for 20 years – before January 1, 1947, everyone in Canada was a British subject and had to travel with a United Kingdom passport. But it still didn’t quite exist: That 1947 law creating Canadian citizenship declared in its main clause that “a Canadian citizen is a British subject” (this would remain in place until 1977).
That idea was still hotly defended by many in the Ottawa of 1967: The Progressive Conservative leadership still opposed Canadian citizenship, and the flag, and the anthem. There was still a sizable political faction in Canada who supported the idea that all Canadians were simply a slightly different, less important flavour of British people.
But the great majority of Canadians had moved on – or moved in – and you could see the centennial struggling to catch up with them.
Two, Three, Many Canadas
The morning of my birth, opposition leader John Diefenbaker (still sitting, anachronistically, in the House four years after his prime ministership had ended) denounced prime minister Lester B. Pearson for having declared the previous week that “we are a nation of two founding peoples” (in French, the prime minister went further and called them “nations”).
Mr. Diefenbaker considered this a catastrophic blow to a country he had always insisted was purely British: “Adoption of the two-nation concept,” he explained to his fellow MPs that day, “would lead to the breakdown of confederation.” But he was swimming against his own party’s tide: a few days earlier, a Progressive Conservative policy conference had gone further than the Liberals by concluding that Canada should be seen as a federal state “composed of two founding peoples (deux nations), with historic rights, who have been joined by people from many lands.”
In other words: A hundred years into Confederation, the leader of the official opposition still did not seem to believe that French Canadians existed. The notion that Canada contained more than one language and people was still hotly contested in some circles.
But that era was ending fast. A day later, Ontario Premier John Robarts would announce that his province was to build a system of French-language secondary schools. This was not an act of expansive idealism: He was recognizing the reality of a population, including millions of Francophones outside of Quebec, who were no longer capable of seeing themselves, or their children, as subjects of a homogenizing foreign ruler.
These debates sprawled across Canada’s newspapers and TV screens all year. Everyone taking part in them knew there was a looming transformation about to take place. There was a name for it: “Bi and Bi,” the household name for the mammoth Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, the largest and most powerful government inquiry Canada had seen. It had been established by Mr. Pearson in 1963 to find a way to address growing Quebecois disenchantment with a Canada that tended to ignore its French fact, and was widely expected to endorse some version of the “two nations” model so hotly discussed that week.
On Oct. 8, 1967, it released its first report – a national event almost rivalling Expo in its media and political attention. And to the great surprise of many, the idea of Canada as two peoples and nations was not its most dramatic proposal – though it certainly did call for a fully bilingual country. That was expected. What was not expected was the very large part of the report, and the subsequent reports over the next two years, devoted to what the commission’s original mandate had called “Other Cultural Groups.” People who were neither British nor French in identity or origin had become a significant share of the Canadian population during the 20 th century.
And while the commission was clear in calling for two official languages, it found a Canada that could no longer be described as having merely one or two or three founding “peoples,” “nations” or “races” (a term still used to describe English and French communities in 1967). Its implication, not quite spelled out, was that Canada was becoming a place that could no longer be defined by its colonial origins.
Over the next several years, that reality would become impossible to ignore. So that when, in 1971, prime minister Pierre Trudeau first used the word “multiculturalism” to define Canadian policy, it was not simply a political ploy to defuse French-English rivalries and rising separatist sentiment (though it was certainly that). It was an inevitable, and perhaps even somewhat late, recognition of what Canada had already been for a long time.
While I would argue that it was a mix of the underlying realities and conscious political decisions that resulted in these changes, not just these realities as other countries were less successful in managing this transition, the contrast is clear.
Lastly, a good primer for Americans trying to understand Canadian immigration and related policies, and their relative success in integrating newcomers by Paul May in the LA Times:
To a lot of commentators, Canada looks like a sanctuary for progressive thinking on immigration, an exception to the nativist wave sweeping the United States and Europe.
A recent cover of the Economist put a maple leaf crown on the Statue of Liberty and proclaimed Canada “an example to the world.” Famously, on election day, the Canadian immigration website crashed because of the number of Americans reportedly considering a move to their northern neighbor as Donald Trump won the presidency. Year after year, polls show that Canadians are, by far, more open and more optimistic about immigration than the citizens in any other Western country.
But such optimism is perhaps easier to achieve in Canada than in other nations: For historical and geopolitical reasons, Canada does not have to cope with the same immigration challenges as the U.S. and Europe.
To start, Canada has pursued a much more selective immigration policy than the United States or any western European country. It accepts far more immigrants legally than most Western nations, but under a policy designed primarily to dovetail with the economic interests of the nation.
In consequence, Canada accepts far fewer immigrants on the basis of family ties than in the U.S., for example, and the proportion of skilled immigrants is much higher. Further, the country sets a higher education standard for immigrants than the U.S. (which is in turn more demanding than Europe). This more-selective immigration policy is likely to lead to fewer integration problems and easier access to jobs.
Canada’s selectivity is helped by its geographical position. It does not share a border with a country where wages are much lower (as the U.S. does with Mexico), and it isn’t next door to unstable regions (as Europe is to North Africa and the Middle East). The result is that few undocumented migrants move across the country’s southern border, as is the case in the U.S.; and few migrants land on its shores by boat, as in Europe.
The points system and geography also have a noticeable effect on where Canada’s immigrants come from.
Official data show that the leading countries among foreign-born residents in Canada are the United Kingdom, China and India. In the U.S., 28% are Mexicans and 24% are from other Latin American countries. In Europe, foreign-born residents originate mainly from the Muslim world (in the Netherlands, for instance, Turkey, Suriname and Morocco; in France — Algeria and Morocco). Consequently, Canada does not have to deal (at least not on the same scale) with the complex problems associated with integrating newcomers from a rural and conservative Muslim background into a highly secular environment.
Not that Canada hasn’t welcomed Muslims. Between November 2015 and November 2016, it resettled more than 35,000 Syrian refugees; most European countries have been much more reluctant to extend permanent status to these immigrants. But again, Canada can and does exert a great deal of control over the process.
While I expect most of my readers will have seen the media reports on the latest population projections and will be familiar with the trends, here is the StatsCan summary of their findings.
Multicultural Meanderings 