The names and faces at Ontario’s ‘call to the bar’ show immigration is working

2023/07/11 Leave a comment

Of note:

The Law Society of Ontario is one of the oldest and, until recently, one of the stodgiest institutions in the country.

Up till 2018, it was still known by its original name, the Law Society of Upper Canada. Founded in 1797, it has its offices in Osgoode Hall, the grand court complex that stands behind an imposing iron fence on Toronto’s Queen Street West. Pictures of its leaders hang on the walls. Until 1983, all of them were men.

But the law trade is changing. Last month, I had the opportunity to see a new crop of lawyers, my daughter among them, being officially admitted to the profession – called to the bar. One by one, they made their way across the stage at Roy Thomson Hall as their names were called out and parents and friends clapped and whooped.

The variety of those names would have astonished the dour men in those Osgoode Hall portraits. Spanish names. Italian names. African names. South Asian names. Eastern European names. Chinese names.

Anglo-Saxon names, too, but they were outnumbered. Three Patels and five Singhs heard their names read out, but not a single Smith, Brown or Taylor.

Remember that this was not a high school or community college graduation, where that sort of diversity is so common now as to be hardly noteworthy. This was a ceremony welcoming new members to one of the country’s leading professions. A law degree opens all kinds of doors. Among the men and women crossing the stage could be future judges, politicians and business leaders (along with a few ambulance chasers).

Law society figures from 2021 shows that just 5.7 per cent of surveyed Ontario lawyers aged 65 and older identify as racialized. That is the old generation, overwhelmingly white and predominantly male. The number rises to 24.3 per cent for those aged 45 to 54, and 35.7 for those under 35. A look at the group that was called to the bar last month suggests it will rise even further in years ahead.

The rise in the representation of women is just as striking. Fifty-six per cent of lawyers under 35 are women, compared with 18.5 per cent for those over 65. It is now routine for women to outnumber men in law school classrooms.

What I saw at Roy Thomson Hall is part of a much bigger story. For decades now, Canada has been taking in high numbers of immigrants, a deliberate policy choice that sets us apart from most other developed countries. Many laboured in menial jobs to make ends meet as they adapted to life in their new country. Others built themselves impressive Canadian careers. The federal government reports that immigrants account for 41 per cent of engineers, 36 per cent of doctors and 33 per cent of business owners with paid staff.

Now their sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters are climbing the ladder of success. In Toronto’s recent by-election for mayor, four of the leading candidates came to Canada from somewhere else when they were young. The winner, Olivia Chow, spent her childhood in Hong Kong.

The law society would no doubt be the first to admit that it has a way to go still. There are fewer Indigenous lawyers than the profession would like. Women are underrepresented in the top ranks of leading law firms. Many leave the practice of law and move to jobs in government, education and other fields.

But the arc of progress is unmistakable and vastly encouraging. Despite all the justified concern about lingering prejudice and continuing barriers for newcomers, Canada’s experience with mass immigration on the whole is a remarkable success story.

You can see it all around. In the schools. In the colleges and universities. In the city councils and the legislatures. In the downtown office towers. Even, yes, in the Law Society of Ontario.

Source: The names and faces at Ontario’s ‘call to the bar’ show immigration is working

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Malik: France has been laissez-faire on race, the US proactive. Clearly, neither of them has it right

2023/07/10 Leave a comment

Another call for greater analysis by class, but one that does not ignore identity and race:

Should public policy be “race conscious” or “colour blind”? Should it target the specific inequalities faced by minority groups or treat all citizens equally without any reference to individuals’ racial and cultural backgrounds?

The contrast between these two approaches has often been seen as that between Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism and French assimilationism, the one “based on the right of ethnic minorities, of communities”, the other “based on individual rights”, as Marceau Long, then the president of France’s Haut Conseil à L’Intégration, put it in 1991, adding that the Anglo-Saxon approach, unlike that of the French, was that of “another way of imprisoning people within ghettos”.

Thirty years on, we can see the issues as more complex and less given to simple binary oppositions. Two recent high-profile events illustrate this complexity: the debates around the US supreme court’s decision to strike down affirmative action and those around the riots that ripped through France after the police killing of teenager Nahel Merzouk.

While affirmative action improved prospects for middle-class black people, it left untouched those of the working-class

The supreme court’s verdict that Harvard’s race-based admission policy was illegal has led many to fear that the progress of African Americans in higher education will now stall. Yet, as the African American writer Bertrand Cooper observed even before the decision: “The reality is that for the Black poor, a world without affirmative action is just the world as it is – no different than before.”

Why? Because while affirmative action has improved prospects for middle-class black people, it has left untouched the lives of working-class African Americans. By 2020, the percentage of African Americans admitted to Harvard stood at almost 16% – higher than the proportion of black people within the US population. Black students in Harvard are, though, anything but representative of the African American community.

In most discussions about race, black Americans are regarded as constituting a singular community. However, black America has been, for most of the past half-century, the most unequal racial or ethnic group in the nation. White Americans in the top income quintile possess 21.3 times the wealth of white people in the lowest income quintile. For black people, that figure stands at a staggering 1,382. The poorest black people earn just 1.5% of the median black income.

This disparity shapes everything from education to incarceration. More than 70% of Harvard students come from the wealthiest 20% of families; 3% come from the poorest 20%. There were almost as many students from the wealthiest 1% as from the poorest 60%.

The greatest lack of diversity in America’s elite universities, in other words, is not racial but class-based. It is, though, one that deeply affects black Americans, because that same pattern of elite recruitment applies to African Americans as it does to the population as a whole. Affirmative action is action largely for the black elite.

This is not a new argument. In his seminal 1978 work, The Declining Significance of Race, the sociologist William Julius Wilson noted the changing contours of race and class and the development of a “deepening economic schism” within African American communities, “with the black poor falling further and further behind higher-income blacks”.

The title of Wilson’s book may seem ironic, given the centrality of race in public debate today. In material terms, Wilson’s thesis has proved largely accurate. Politically, though, there has been an increasing fixation with racial identities. This mismatch between material developments and political perceptions has ill-served the majority of African Americans.

It is not that racism does not continue to play an immense role in the lives of black people. It is rather that, as Cooper has observed: “Ignoring class divisions in Black America over the last 40 years has allowed the benefits of racial progress to be concentrated upon the Black middle and upper classes while the Black poor have largely been excluded.”

Many critics of race-conscious policies argue instead for the pursuit of “colour blind” policies that take no account of an individual’s race or culture. Perhaps the nation that most embodies such an approach is France. It is also the one that most reveals the problems with it.

‘Universalism’ has become a weapon with which to point out the ‘difference’ of particular peoples

French policy is rooted in its republican tradition and universalist principles, and a refusal to recognise racial distinctions in policymaking. The universalist belief that one should treat everyone as citizens, rather than as bearers of specific racial or cultural histories, is a valuable principle.

In practice, however, French policy has entailed being blind to racism in the name of being “colour blind”, and of using the demand for “assimilation” as a means of marking out certain groups – Jews in the past, Muslims and those of North African origin today – as not truly belonging to the nation. “Universalism” has become a weapon with which to point out the “difference” of particular peoples and to justify their marginalisation. France, as much as America, too often treats its citizens not as individuals but as members of racial or ethnic communities.

The French state not only refuses to recognise racial distinctions but also bans the collection of race-based data, making it far more difficult to evaluate the extent of racial discrimination, while providing a free pass to deny that such discrimination exists. A host of academic studies, attitudinal surveys and the use of categories, such as parent’s country of origin, that can act as surrogates for race and ethnicity, have exposed the degree to which France’s race-blind ideals are freighted with race-based assumptions, from racial profiling in policing to racial discrimination in employment.

And then there is the brutality of police violence, Nahel’s killing is but the latest example. Police perceptions of minority communities can be gauged by an extraordinary statement put out by two of France’s police unions during the riots, claiming that the police were “at war” with the “savage hordes” and warning that “tomorrow we will be in resistance” to the government.

In France, the refusal to recognise the social reality of racism in the name of “universalism” has helped create the very “ghettos” for which French politicians used to deride the Anglo-Saxon approach. In America, the preoccupation with policymaking by racial categories has neglected the very communities those policies are supposed to have benefited, by ignoring the many other features, such as class, that shape black lives, while also creating new social frictions – witness the tensions between African Americans and Asian Americans. What needs to be forged, beyond these two approaches, is a universalist perspective that embraces equal treatment but does not deny the reality of racial inequality

Source: France has been laissez-faire on race, the US proactive. Clearly, neither of them has it right

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Paradkar: Muslims who fight against LGBTQ2+ inclusion are hurting many — including themselves

2023/07/08 Leave a comment

Of note:

A viral audio clip of an Edmonton teacher admonishing a Muslim student for avoiding Pride events perfectly encapsulates a dilemma that’s worth wrestling with. How does one tolerate — or, better still, tackle — the intolerance of some members of a group that has itself faced so much intolerance.

At least part of the answer is simple: not with the very discrimination you rail against. 

Less simple, and also wrapped up in the answer, is a layered understanding of how religion, a source of support for many, can also be a basis of discrimination.

In the two-minute audio clip from last month, an unnamed Londonderry Junior High School teacher told a student his behaviour was unacceptable, and referenced Uganda, where intolerance and criminalization of homosexuality has been boosted by evangelical Christians. 

She also pointed out there were no complaints when Ramadan was acknowledged at school. 

“It goes two ways. If you want to be respected for who you are, if you don’t want to suffer prejudice for your religion, your colour of skin or whatever, then you better give it back to people who are different from you. That’s how it works,” said the teacher. 

She should have stopped there.

It’s not uncommon to see individuals from equity-seeking groups aligning with discriminatory actions; the plaintiffs in front of the U.S. Supreme Court that struck down affirmative action last week were Asian-American. 

Of course, Muslims are not a monolith. Nor are they the only faith group to denounce LGBTQ2+ teachings at school. On June 27, a group of Muslim, Jewish and Christian parents of students at a Montgomery county school demanded that their kids be able to opt-out of the sex-ed curriculum.

But Muslim opposition to Pride in Canada and the U.S. is not restricted to one Edmonton student’s choice to skip Pride-related events, or students routinely using provincial exemptions and not attending sex-ed classes, or parents leading protests against school boards for gay-inclusive teachings and other forms of gay expression.

It also affects policy. Residents of Hamtramck, Mich., who celebrated their multiculturalism when they voted in a Muslim-majority city council during Donald Trump’s Islamophobic campaign rhetoric in 2015, were dismayed to find that council passing legislation in June that banned flying the Pride flag on city properties. 

It has become a knotty issue involving religious beliefs, political expediency and flirtation with outright hate. It raises questions about whether freedom of religious expression is more important than freedom from discrimination and paves a pathway to shaking hands with the devil. 

It is notable because individual intolerance was in a way sanctified by a statement by North American Islamic scholars that declared queer life sinful. In addition, at least one senior member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an important civil rights advocacy group, supported parents seeking book bans and opt-out options.

Perhaps these examples of opposition come from a loud minority among Muslims or perhaps the sentiments are more mainstream. In any case, these actions risk being weaponized for a larger, insidious cause that could end up hurting Muslims here in the long run.

Even if sex-ed exemptions are allowed in Alberta, I’m glad the Londonderry teacher challenged the disdain toward LGBTQ2+ groups.

But she didn’t end it there. Instead, what she said next has been gleefully and understandably seized upon by conservatives as proof of hypocrisy among progressives.

She said, “We believe people can marry whoever they want. That is in the law. And if you don’t think that should be the law you can’t be Canadian. You don’t belong here.”

I think we can all agree that we can’t beat homophobia with Islamophobia or racism. What are the odds that a homophobic white child would have been told “You don’t belong in Canada”? 

The National Council for Canadian Muslims lambasted the teacher’s comments as “deeply Islamophobic, inappropriate and harassing behaviour.”

But it did not weigh in on the question of whether the student should have dodged Pride events. 

Intolerance against queer identities has surfaced over fear of a “woke gender ideology” — a fear manufactured and stoked by the white Christian far-right, expressed under the guise of protecting children. 

In this twisted thinking, children being aware that a small minority of people are not heterosexual or that an even smaller minority doesn’t identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, is considered indoctrination or even pornographic corruption. (But gay and trans children and adults being surrounded and ridiculed by heterosexual cis people is apparently totally safe.) A miniscule fraction of that minority who might regret transitioning or might have had bad experiences with gender-affirming medical procedures is amplified as proof positive of hell having broken loose.

And what do Islamic experts say about the issue? Some 300 Islamic scholars and preachers across North America co-signed a statementlate in May to clarify their religious position on sexual and gender ethics. It was damning: homosexuality and transgenderism are not permissible.

“By a decree from God, sexual relations are permitted within the bounds of marriage, and marriage can only occur between a man and a woman,” said the statement titled Navigating Differences: Clarifying Sexual and Gender Ethics in Islam. 

I’m not qualified to offer a theological critique of Islamic beliefs. But this is a column about justice for the most vulnerable, and I don’t believe justice can be served by relying on principles of the past to moralize today.

That sentence by the Islamic scholars echoes the beliefs of the World Congress of Families created by American conservatives back in 1997, which now exists as the International Organization for the Family.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the congress “pushed for restrictions to LGBT rights under the guise of the defense of the ‘natural family’ — defined as heterosexual married couples with their biological children.” 

The organization, which was created by the Christian right-wing, is another example of how religion is used to discriminate against others and it exists today, as the SPLC says, “as a political power broker as an anti-LGBT group in its own right.”

That group of people who blame gay lifestyles and feminist liberation for a declining white population also subscribe to the conspiracy theory of the Great Replacement of white people by Black and brown people.

In this process of rejecting LGBTQ2+ rights, conservative Muslims have linked hands with the very people who demonized them for decades.

But Edward Ahmed Mitchell, a deputy director at CAIR, calls the idea of that alliance “ludicrous,” and said parents were standing up for their religious rights “without prompting from the right and without fear of backlash from the left.”

“What matters is whether the cause itself is just,” he said in a Twitter statement.

Not only does his stance risks isolating gay and trans Muslims, the scholars’ statement that they are sinners could well be psychologically crippling at a time of rising hate against people like them.

The logical extension of the Islamic scholars’ argument is also damaging for all Muslims in North America.

For instance, the statement says, “As a religious minority that frequently experiences bigotry and exclusion, we reject the notion that moral disagreement amounts to intolerance or incitement of violence.”

By that token, could a law banning head coverings — based on a moral disagreement with seeing veiled Muslim women — no longer be criticized as being intolerant?

When it says: “Peaceful coexistence does not necessitate agreement, acceptance, affirmation, promotion, or celebration,” could that not be turned around to mean religious accommodation in schools or celebrating Muslim holidays is not required to signal acceptance of Muslims? 

It says, “there is an increasing push to promote LGBTQ-centric values among children through legislation and regulations, disregarding parental consent,” as if this exact same objection could not be used by the far-right to decry depictions of Muslims in schoolbooks as a sample of wokeness.

But leaders of the white far-right, sensing weakness in the solidarity of rights groups, have switched tacks for the moment.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham, a far-right hero, who once said the “dual loyalties” of Muslim refugees to the Qur’an that would lead them to “to try to blow us up” is now praising Muslim parents who are opposed to their children reading books with LGBTQ2+ themes. 

For white supremacists, expanding their base this way, or even appearing to grow support for their “causes”, offers a two-pronged advantage. One, images with visibly Muslim people in their midst make for an effective cover, similar to when the Proud Boys propped up the African-Cuban Enrique Tarrio as their “chairman” as if to say: See, no white supremacy here. 

And two, it’s an effective divide-and-conquer strategy. When they need to invoke the Great Replacement fear again, the anti-racist rights-seeking groups will have already been disorganized and weakened. 

To be clear, Muslims who support ultra-conservative ideologies around sexuality are not naïve dupes. They are simply being as closed-minded as conservatives of any religion.

Where is the compassion and mercy that religions are so famous for?

I don’t much care for religion nor do I particularly want it flapping in my face. Even so, I stick my neck out to speak up for the freedom of believers.

In times of disaster and injustice, in my experience, Muslims (and Sikhs) are often the first to show up to give support. That may be why I’m doubly disappointed by this not insignificant opposition to LGBTQ2+ rights.

As the Londonderry teacher pointed out, respect is reciprocal. The right to practise religion cannot trump the human right to sexuality. Because ultimately, religion and religiosity are a choice. Sexual orientation and gender identity are not. 

Source: Paradkar: Muslims who fight against LGBTQ2+ inclusion are hurting many — including themselves

Filed under LGBTQ, Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

New Canadians more religious than their natural-born counterparts: study

2023/07/08 Leave a comment

Of note. Earlier studies have also shown this. Not much new here given same observations 10 years ago by Pew Research, Canada’s Changing Religious Landscape:

Newcomers to Canada tend to be more religious than their natural-born counterparts, a new study suggests.

The study, released Thursday by think tank Cardus, suggests many new immigrants to Canada hold deeper religious beliefs than those born in this country, attend religious services more often, and say those in public positions should be free to integrate their faith into their words and actions.

“We’re now anticipating about 1.5 million new immigrants coming into the country by 2025,” said Rev. Dr. Andrew Bennett, Cardus’ faith communities program director.

“If you look at the the data for new immigrants, disproportionately they’re coming from countries where religion is a much more public reality than in most western democracies.”

The report, Bennett said, suggests that religion plays a larger role of in the lives of newcomers compared to those born in Canada.

“New immigrants are more likely to express their religion publicly than non-immigrant Canadians,” he said. “They’re more likely to attend religious services, they’re more likely to desire to have their children educated according to their religious tradition.” 

Data published by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada points to India as this country’s top source of immigrants in 2022, with 118,095 new people arriving from that nation last year.

That was followed by China (31,815), Afghanistan (28,735), Nigeria (22,085) and the Philippines (22,070).

Rounding out the top 10 were France, Pakistan, Iran, the United States and Syria.

The government’s 2023-2025 immigration plan, which was released last November, aims to bestow permanent residency status upon 465,000 new immigrants in 2023, 485,000 in 2024 and an even 500,000 in 2025.

The Cardus report, which used survey data gathered in partnership with the Angus Reid Institute, focused on the differences between contemporary Canadians’ religious beliefs and those of newcomers, and how recent arrivals view the role of faith in everyday life in Canada.

The study’s authors used the poll’s responses to drill down the results into a “spectrum of spirituality” index — classifying respondents into four categories: those who are religiously committed, privately faithful, spiritually uncertain and non-religious.

Among those who consider themselves “religiously committed,” only 14 per cent were born in Canada, while 28 per cent were born outside of the country.

Those who say they are “privately faithful” were a bit more evenly spread — 18 per cent of natural-born Canadians compared to 22 per cent of those born outside of Canada. Nearly half of those born in Canada self-identify as “spiritually uncertain,” compared to 36 per cent of those born elsewhere.

For those who consider themselves non-religious, 15 per cent of foreign-born Canadian residents fell into that category compared to 20 per cent of Canadian-born citizens.

As for those who say they believe in a higher power, 72 per cent of Canadian immigrants say they believe in God, compared to 64 per cent of non-immigrant Canadian citizens.

While data suggests most Canadians consider passing their religious beliefs on to their children to be important, foreign-born Canadians tend to hold this view more frequently than those born here.

A little over a quarter of those who strongly agree with the importance of teaching religion to their children were born outside of Canada, compared to 18 per cent of those born here.

Of those who strongly disagreed, 20 per cent were born in Canada compared to 16 per cent who weren’t.

Immigrants are also more likely to read sacred texts such as the Bible, Adi Granth or Qu’ran — around 20 per cent of immigrants say they consult their holy books between every day or a few times per week, a three-fold increase compared to Canada-born citizens who hold the same beliefs.

Just under 60 per cent of Canadian-born respondents say they never read sacred texts, compared to 36 per cent of those born outside of the country.

A growing number of foreign-born residents also see more importance in public figures integrating their faith into their work.

When asked if Canadians who hold public office should feel free to both speak and act based on their religious beliefs, 44 per cent of respondents who agreed with that sentiment were born outside of Canada, compared to 33 per cent who were born in Canada.

Maintaining a firm separation between church and state is a sentiment shared by 67 per cent of respondents born in Canada, while 56 per cent of those born outside of Canada agreed.

Canada’s ambitious immigration targets are sparking concern over the strain these new residents will put on our country’s already stretched infrastructure.

“The population (growth) is positive, but our infrastructure has to catch up and has to be able to keep pace, or else all of the types of frustrations and issues that we’re seeing today are only going to be magnified,” University of Toronto’s School of Cities’ Matti Siemiatycki told National Post in December.

Source: New Canadians more religious than their natural-born counterparts: study

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with ,

Labour shortage narrows the pay gap between white and racialized workers — but for Black workers, things are worse

2023/07/07 Leave a comment

Notes impact of occupation patterns and educational attainment levels, which correlate with race:

Lower unemployment rates and higher wages in 2022 helped to narrow the employment gap between racialized workers and workers who identify as white, but not for Black workers, according to a new report.

The report, released Wednesday by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, found that the benefits of the pandemic recovery, such as wage increases, have been unevenly distributed for racialized workers, as the wage and employment gap widened between Black workers and their white counterparts.

According to the report, racialized workers, or visible minorities, are defined as those who are “non-Caucasian in race or non‑white in colour,” excluding Indigenous groups. The data indicates that anti-Black racism is a dominant force in the labour market, the report’s authors told the Star.

“Despite some progress for racialized workers as a whole, Black workers continue to bear a disproportionate burden of employment inequality,” said Grace-Edward Galabuzi, a professor in the department of politics and public administration at Toronto Metropolitan University and report co-author. “These data demonstrate the need for continued policy efforts to combat anti-Black racism in the workplace.”

The research found that racialized workers are overall more likely to be working in industries with high employment growth and faster wage growth than Black workers. In lower-wage occupations there is an overrepresentation of Black workers. Fifty-two per cent of racialized workers are in occupations in the bottom half of the wage distribution compared with 48 per cent of white workers and 60 per cent of Black workers.

“There’s a structural problem here that starts with our education system,” said Galabuzi. “Especially with Black youth, they’re not encouraged to go into higher-earning professions in the same way as their white counterparts, and tackle prejudices in grade school and post-secondary education.”

In 2022, the unemployment rate fell by 2.9 percentage points for all racialized workers, 2.1 percentage points for white workers, but only 1.6 percentage points for Black workers, the report said.

And though wages increased during the pandemic, racialized and Black men still earn less than their white counterparts, and Black and racialized women face even greater hurdles.

In 2022, comparing average weekly wages in Ontario, racialized men earned 90 cents and Black men earned 77 cents for every dollar white men earned.

Racialized women earned 71 cents and Black women earned 68 cents for every dollar white men earned.

“The pandemic recovery has been uneven, and while wages are up, racialized men and women and Black men and women still don’t make their fair share,” said Sheila Block, senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and report co-author.

“We started this research because we were curious about the tight labour market and who stands to benefit from it. And this data shows us marginalized communities continue to face barriers.”

Black men’s employment continues to be concentrated in lower-wage industries and in industries that have experienced employment losses since 2019, the report said, while Black women have the smallest share of their employment in occupations with the fastest wage growth.

Black workers are overrepresented in retail; accommodation and food; and arts and entertainment, which were the hardest-hit industries during the pandemic, said Galabuzi, and are experiencing the most gradual recovery.

However, finance, administration jobs, and professional, scientific and technical services (scientists, accountants, marketing) all received higher wages and lower unemployment rates, accounting for greater representation of white workers and non-Black racialized groups, he added.

“There’s been a shift in the labour market as people moved from food service and accommodation to professional, scientific and technical services,” Galabuzi said. “So Black workers are left behind in industries where there is job loss (and more precarious work).”

The report also highlights how Bill 124 — which was introduced in 2019 by the Ford government to cap wage increases for nurses and other public sector workers at one per cent a year for three years — had a disproportionate impact on low-wage racialized women.

In November 2022, the bill was ruled unconstitutional, though the government is appealing the decision.

Black women make up 15 per cent of nurse aides, orderlies and patient services associates while they make up only three per cent of total employment. All racialized women make up 36 per cent of social and community service workers but account for only 17 per cent of total employment.

“The racialized and gendered labour market gap persists, and further policy interventions are needed,” said Block.

“The first and most obvious step to take would be for the Ontario government to repeal its wage restraint legislation. Workplaces also need to review their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. And the education system needs to better support and guide Black students. It requires a much larger societal approach to tackle anti-Black racism in the workforce.”

Source: Labour shortage narrows the pay gap between white and racialized workers — but for Black workers, things are worse

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Mandates aim to tackle discrimination in public service, unions say it’s not enough

2023/07/07 Leave a comment

Well, of course it isn’t. But it reflects continuous improvement as hiring, promotion and separation data attests (How well is the government meeting its diversity targets? An intersectionality analysis) while the media generally only reports on the activist perspective:

Federal government departments and agencies will now have to evaluate whether their hiring practices are discriminatory after changes to the Public Service Employment Act came into effect this week.

Public Service Commission spokeswoman Elodie Roy said the changes will strengthen diversity and inclusion in the federal government workforce.The amendments were first introduced in the budget implementation process in 2021.

They require the public service to evaluate how staffing methods, such as interviews and written exams, might discriminate against women, people with a disability, or those who identify as Black, Indigenous or LGBTQ.

The Public Service Commission will also have more resources to investigate mistakes or misconduct that affect hiring processes.

Previous amendments revised the job qualifications for members of equity-seeking groups and ensured permanent residents were given the same hiring preferences as Canadian citizens.

But a group representing thousands of Black public servants who filed a class-action lawsuit against the government alleging decades of discriminatory hiring practices said the changes do not go far enough.

The Black Class Action Secretariat, which formed when the $2.5-billion suit was filed in 2020, has been calling on the federal government to settle claims for financial compensation and to create a mental health fund for trauma caused by racial discrimination in the public service.

The creation of that fund, which was promised in the 2022 federal budget, has also been mired in complaints of racist behaviour.

Back in March, the Treasury Board Secretariat ruled that the Canadian Human Rights Commission discriminated against Black and racialized employees.

Nicholas Marcus Thompson, the executive director of the Black Class Action Secretariat, said the agencies responsible for implementing the new changes have also contributed to systemic discrimination within the workplace.

“Frankly, there’s no trust,” said Thompson.

He pointed out that individual employers within the government separately control their staffing processes.

“If you look at the legislation, and if you look at the direction that the Public Service Commission is now empowered to take action on, it doesn’t appear to have any teeth,” he said.

“It’s mind-boggling that employers who have discriminated against workers — you have employers like the Canadian Human Rights Commission that has been discriminatory towards its own Black employees — would now be the subject of this system.”

Thompson called for more accountability in the public service, and said agencies that have engaged in discriminatory practices should take responsibility.

He said the government and public service sector have displayed that they have the willpower to make meaningful changes toward diversity and inclusion, citing the increase of women in the federal workforce.

“So the excuse that there is no magic bullet to this problem, it’s quite frankly nonsense,” he said.

The Public Service Alliance of Canada, a union that represents more than 120,000 federal workers, called the changes a good start but said more is need to address systemic barriers.

In a written statement, the union said legislative changes are also needed to overhaul to managerial powers in hiring practices, and that the Public Service Commission should have the authority to ensure transparency and make changes to hiring practices

Source: Mandates aim to tackle discrimination in public service, unions say it’s not enough

Filed under Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Terry Glavin: ‘Killers’ poster points to Canada’s failure to crack down on Khalistani extremism

2023/07/07 Leave a comment

Of note and concern:

It’s a good thing that Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly is making an effort to reassure India’s diplomats in Canada that her government is taking the latest bloodcurdling threats against them seriously. A good thing, because Canada’s track record on keeping a lid on Khalistani extremism is abysmal, and the Indian government has little reason to trust Canada’s intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to do their jobs.

The latest threat comes in the form of a pro-Khalistan “Sikhs for Justice” poster advertising an upcoming rally at India’s Toronto consulate featuring photographs of Indian High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma and Toronto Consul General Apoorva Srivastava. The poster describes Verma and Srivastava as the “killers” of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Sikh separatist in British Columbia.

The poster comes only a few weeks after Canadian diplomats in India were scrambling with earnest disavowals following a parade in Brampton, Ont., that featured a float with mannequins in a grotesque replication of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984.

The president of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in Surrey, B.C., Nijjar was gunned down in the temple’s parking lot on June 18. He was closely associated with the Sikhs for Justice group, which has been organizing an international “referendum” on Sikh independence in an independent Khalistan (“land of the pure”) carved out of India’s Punjab state.

While Nijjar’s friends and associates deny his alleged terrorist affinities and claim CSIS had warned him to be careful, Indian police authorities say Nijjar led a group called the Khalistan Tiger Force and was a key figure in Babbar Khalsa International (BKI), the terror-listed entity in Canada that carried out the bombing of an Air India jetliner that fell into the sea off the coast of Ireland in 1985, killing all 329 on board. That atrocity was plotted and planned in Canada under the noses of the RCMP and the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service.

Nijjar was wanted in India on a variety of criminal charges going back to the bombing of a Hindu temple in the Punjabi city of Patiala in 2010. Punjab police had also issued an arrest warrant for Nijjar on dubious charges that he was plotting the murder of religious leaders, and on the unlikely claim that he was organizing a training camp for Khalistani militants in a rural area near Mission, B.C.

While Punjab’s police authorities are notoriously paranoid about the Khalistani movement, which is almost entirely a phenomenon of diaspora Sikh communities — especially in Canada — Indian authorities have good reason to be concerned about Canada’s determination to keep a lid on a recent upsurge in Khalistani violence.

Khalistani terrorism literally exploded onto the scene in India in the early 1980s, with Canada serving as haven for the separatist movement’s government-in-exile. Babbar Khalsa was perhaps the most bloodthirsty terror group that had holed up in the Golden Temple Complex in Amritsar, Sikhism’s Vatican. The organization was commanded by the Air India atrocity mastermind Talwinder Singh Parmar from his home in Burnaby, B.C.

The Khalistani movement has undergone a revival in recent years, with Canada again providing a haven for several key figures wanted on terror-related charges in India. On Monday, India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar drew attention to the Sikhs for Justice “Killers” poster that singled out Indian diplomats in Canada. “We have requested our partner countries like Canada, U.S., U.K. and Australia where sometimes Khalistani activities happen, not to give space to the Khalistanis. Because their radical, extremist thinking is neither good for us nor them nor our relations.”

Similar posters identifying Indian diplomats in the style of a “wanted” poster and describing Nijjar as a shaheed jathedar (martyred commander) have also turned up in San Francisco and Australia. Last Sunday, a fire was set outside India’s consular offices in San Francisco in an incident condemned by the U.S. State Department on Monday.

In March, during a severe clampdown on separatist agitation in Punjab, Indian embassies were the sites of sometimes violent protests in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., London and Ottawa. The San Francisco consulate was subjected to an arson attack. The fence of the High Commission in London was scaled and an Indian flag was ripped down. In Washington, a journalist was allegedly assaulted, and in Ottawa, “grenades” that turned out to be just smoke bombs were thrown at the High Commission.

Surrey RCMP say they are exploring all leads related to Nijjar’s murder, which took the shape of a typical Surrey gangland hit job — two heavy-set masked men were spotted fleeing the scene and are believed to have absconded in a nearby getaway car. The local Integrated Homicide Investigation Team would not say whether a stolen car found torched a few kilometres away was part of the investigation, but it would be consistent with gangland murders in Metro Vancouver.

Nijjar was known to have been feuding with the former Khalistani militant Ripudaman Singh Malik, the multimillionaire implicated in Babbar Khalsa’s 1985 Air India bombing who was murdered in a hit job in July last year. Malik, who was acquitted on Air India charges, had made his peace with the Indian government and had his name removed from India’s visa blacklist as a result. Malik went on to express support for India’s authoritarian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is wildly unpopular among India’s Sikhs and has become notorious for his civil rights abuses and close relationships with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping.

The two men charged with first-degree murder in Malik’s shooting have lengthy criminal records and were well known to police agencies keeping tabs on Metro Vancouver’s organized-crime underworld.

While Nijjar’s murder exhibits fairly routine signs of a revenge killing, New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh, who has publicly indulged in a conspiracy theory proposing an Indian intelligence-agency plot behind the Air India bombing, has asked Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino to look into the case in light of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s national security adviser’s identification of India as a source of foreign interference in Canada.

This is the sort of thing that gives the Indian government cause to distrust Ottawa’s seriousness in coming to terms with threats to India’s security that come from Canada. As recently as 2018, the convicted former Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Singh Atwal showed up in Trudeau’s entourage in the prime minister’s tour of India, which had already become a public-relations disaster owing to Trudeau’s weird wardrobe choices, and Modi snubbing him for several days before agreeing to meet with him.

The RCMP later conceded that Atwal’s background should have been brought to the prime minister’s attention. Atwal was convicted for his role as the triggerman in the attempted assassination of a visiting Punjabi cabinet minister on a Vancouver Island backroad in 1986. When the controversy blew up, Trudeau’s national security adviser at the time, Daniel Jean, insinuated that the whole affair had been orchestrated by India’s foreign intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing.

Maybe Mélanie Joly’s sternly reassuring words about Canada’s duty under the Vienna Convention to protect foreign diplomats in Canada are the sign of a changed attitude in Ottawa. If so, that would be very good news.

Source: Terry Glavin: ‘Killers’ poster points to Canada’s failure to crack down on Khalistani extremism

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McWhorter: On Race and Academia

2023/07/06 Leave a comment

Another advocate of class and adversity-based policies, sharing his personal experiences:

The Supreme Court last week outlawed the use of race-based affirmative action in college admissions. That practice was understandable and even necessary 60 years ago. The question I have asked for some time was precisely how long it would be required to continue. I’d personally come to believe that preferences focused on socioeconomic factors — wealth, income, even neighborhood — would accomplish more good while requiring less straightforward unfairness.

But many good-faith people believed, and continue to believe, that it is a clear boon to society for universities to explicitly take race into account. The arguments for and against have been made often, sometimes by me, so here I’d like to do something a little bit different. As an academic who is also Black, I have seen up close, over decades, what it means to take race into account. I talked about some of these experiences in interviews and in a book I wrote in 2000, but I’ve never shared them in an article like this one. The responses I’ve seen to the Supreme Court’s decision move me to venture it.

The culture that a policy helps put into place can be as important as the policy itself. And in my lifetime, racial preferences in academia — not merely when it comes to undergraduate admissions but also moving on to grad school and job applications and teaching careers — have been not only a set of formal and informal policies but also the grounds for a culture of perceptions and assumptions.

I grew up upper-middle-class in Philadelphia in the 1980s. As early as high school, I picked up — from remarks of my mother’s, who taught at a university, as well as comments in the air at my school — that Black kids didn’t have to achieve perfect grades and test scores in order to be accepted at top colleges. As a direct result, I satisfied myself with being an A- or B+ student, pursuing my nerdy hobbies instead of seeking the academic mountaintop. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t affect my future in the way that it might for my white peers.

I have no reason to think affirmative action played much of a role in the colleges I went to for undergraduate and graduate work, as neither was extremely selective at the time. In the latter case, I was told by a mentor, a Black man, that race had been the reason I wound up in the top 20 pile of applicants for graduate study in linguistics in the department where I got my Ph.D. I had minimal experience with linguistics proper, and my G.P.A. was very good but nowhere near perfect. (Those hobbies!) But I have always thought of that as racial preferences the way they should have been, merely additive around the margins. I’d done well on tests like the G.R.E., my grades in language courses were top level and I had written a senior thesis that made it clear I had a linguistics frame of mind.

But things got different later. When I was a grad student in linguistics going on the market for jobs, I was told that I needn’t worry whether I would get bids for tenure track positions because I was Black and would therefore be in great demand. Deep down, to me, it felt like I was on my way to being tokenized, which I was, especially given that my academic chops at the time did not justify my being hired for a top job at all.

I was hired straight out of my doctoral program for a tenure-track job at an Ivy League university in its august linguistics department. It became increasingly clear to me that my skin color was not just one more thing taken into account but the main reason for my hire. It surely didn’t hurt that, owing to the color of my skin, I could apparently be paid with special funds I was told the university had set aside for minority hires. But more to the point, I was vastly less qualified by any standard than the other three people who made it onto the list of finalists. Plus, I was brought on to represent a subfield within linguistics — sociolinguistics — that has never been my actual specialty. My interest then, as now, was in how languages change over time and what happens when they come together. My dissertation had made this quite clear.

At the time I was not very politicized, and I assumed that my race had merely been a background bonus to help me get hired. Only later did the reality become more apparent, when I learned just who else had been on that shortlist. (I will never forget how awkward it was when I met one of them — older than me, with more gravitas in the field — some years later. I sensed that we both knew what had happened and why.) I had been hired by white people who, quite innocently, thought they were doing the right thing by bringing a Black person onto the faculty. I bear them no malice; under the culture we were all living in, I would have done the same thing.

Around this time I gave some really good talks, and some just OK ones; I always knew the difference. But I couldn’t help noticing that I would get high praise even for the mediocre ones, by white people who were clearly gratified to acknowledge a Black academic. And in the meantime, I was hopelessly undercooked for the position I had been hired for. I was not utterly clueless, but I simply didn’t know enough yet — and especially not enough to be in a position to counsel graduate students.

 needed some years of postdoctoral study. They say you don’t really know it till you teach it, and that’s largely true: Having never actually taught a class, I needed to teach some. I needed to hang around linguistics for a longer time in general. There are formative experiences key to being a real linguist that I had not yet had, such as long-term work with speakers of my language of focus, Saramaccan.

The doctoral program I had been in had gone through a phase of allowing students perhaps too much leeway in deciding which courses to take. Many students took this as an occasion to sit at the feet of their mentors and drink in what they knew. But my natural orientation has always been autodidactic, and so I basically went off into a corner and focused like a laser on one issue that particularly interested me — how creole languages form — while developing only a passing acquaintance with linguistics beyond it. With undergrads, I could coast on stage presence, but grad students know the real thing when they see it — and when they don’t. I looked like a fool.

I didn’t like it. But because I am obsessive, I ultimately dedicated myself to boning up and then some. I read and read and read. I spoke closely with as many linguists as I could. I took up new interests within the field. I did intense study of my language of focus. I taught classes outside my comfort zone. That is, I became a normal academic.

But it all felt like a self-rescue operation, an effort to turn myself into a good hire after the fact. That backfilling of needed skills is a lot to ask of someone who also needs to do the forward-looking research necessary to get tenure.

Of course, not everyone endeavors this Sisyphean task, and the culture I refer to has a way of ensuring others don’t have to. There is a widespread cultural assumption in academia that Black people are valuable as much, if not more, for our sheer presence as for the rigor of what we actually do. Thus, it is unnecessary to subject us to top-level standards. This leads to things happening too often that are never written as explicit directives but are consonant with the general cultural agenda: people granted tenure with nothing approaching the publishing records of other candidates, or celebrated more for their sociopolitical orientations than for their research.

I had uncomfortable experiences on the other side of the process as well. In the 1990s, I was on some graduate admissions committees at the university where I then taught. It was apparent to me that, under the existing cultural directive to, as we have discussed, take race into account, Black and Latino applicants were expected to be much more readily accepted than others.

I recall two Black applicants we admitted who, in retrospect, puzzle me a bit. One had, like me, grown up middle-class rather than disadvantaged in any salient way. The other, also relatively well-off, had grown up in a different country, entirely separate from the Black American experience. Neither of them expressed interest in studying a race-related subject, and neither went on to do so. I had a hard time detecting how either of them would teach a meaningful lesson in diversity to their peers in the graduate program.

Perhaps all of this can be seen as collateral damage in view of a larger goal of Black people being included, acknowledged, given a chance — in academia and elsewhere. In the grand scheme of things, my feeling uncomfortable on a graduate admissions committee for a few years during the Clinton administration hardly qualifies as a national tragedy. But I will never shake the sentiment I felt on those committees, an unintended byproduct of what we could call academia’s racial preference culture: that it is somehow ungracious to expect as much of Black students — and future teachers — as we do of others.

That kind of assumption has been institutionalized within academic culture for a long time. It is, in my view, improper. It may have been a necessary compromise for a time, but it was never truly proper in terms of justice, stability or general social acceptance. Whatever impact the Supreme Court’s ruling has on college admissions, its effects on the academic culture of racial preference — which by its nature often depends less on formulas involving thousands of applicants than on individual decisions involving dozens — will take place far more slowly.

But the decision to stop taking race into account in admissions, assuming it is accompanied by other efforts to assist the truly disadvantaged, is, I believe, the right one to make.

Source: On Race and Academia

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

U.S. maternal deaths keep rising. Here’s who is most at risk

2023/07/06 Leave a comment

Likely similar variations in Canada although hopefully there has not been a comparable increase:

The number of people dying in the U.S. from pregnancy-related causes has more than doubled in the last 20 years, according to a new study, published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.

And while the study found mortality rates remain “unacceptably high among all racial and ethnic groups across the U.S.,” the worst outcomes were among Black women, Native American and Alaska Native people.

The study looks at state-by-state data from 2009 to 2019. Co-author Dr. Allison Bryant, an obstetrician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, says maternal death rates in the U.S. just keep getting worse.

“And that is exacerbated in populations that have been historically underserved or for whom structural racism affects them greatly,” she says.

Maternal death rates have consistently been the highest among Black women, and those high rates more than doubled over the last twenty years. For Native American and Alaska Native people, the rates have tripled.

Dr. Gregory Roth, at the University of Washington, also co-authored the paper. He says efforts to stop pregnancy deaths have not only stalled in areas like the South, where the rates have typically been high. “We’re showing that they are worsening in places that are thought of as having better health,” he says.

Places like New York and New Jersey saw an increase in deaths among Black and Latina mothers. Wyoming and Montana saw more Asian mothers die. And while maternal mortality is lower for white women, it is also increasing in some parts of the country.

“We see that for white women, maternal mortality is also increasing throughout the South, in parts of New England and throughout parts of the Midwest and Northern Mountain States,” he says.

The steady increase in maternal mortality in the U.S. is in contrast to other high-income countries which have seen their much lower rates decline even further.

“There’s this crystal clear graph that’s been out there that’s very striking,” Bryant says. With countries like the Netherlands, Austria and Japan with a clear decrease. “And then there is the U.S. that is far above all of them and going in the opposite direction,” she says.

Most maternal deaths are deemed preventable by state review committees. Dr. Catherine Spong, at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, says pregnancy-related deaths can be caused by different things. The biggest risk factors are conditions like cardiovascular disease, severe pre-eclampsia, maternal cardiac disease and hemorrhage, she says.

Continuing heart problems and mental health conditions can also contribute to the death of a new mother.

The researchers say doctors would have a better chance of dealing with these health conditions, if more women had access to healthcare after their babies were born.

About half the births in the U.S. are paid for by Medicaid and “the majority of the deaths are in the immediate postpartum period,” Roth says. “If you don’t have easy access to health care in this period, you’re at very high risk.”

For those who get their healthcare through Medicaid, medical coverage lasts at least two months after the birth of a child. Since 2021, states have had the option to extend that coverage for a year. So far, 36 states and Washington D.C. have done so. States like Alabama and Mississippi, which saw some of the highest maternal death increases, did not.

Source: U.S. maternal deaths keep rising. Here’s who is most at risk

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Matas: Canada urgently needs to release its Holocaust-related records 

2023/07/06 Leave a comment

Agree:

The Canadian Access to Information system has broken down. The dysfunctional nature of the system is highlighted by the difficulty in accessing Holocaust records.

The Holocaust ended in 1945, more than 78 years ago. The Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, headed by Justice Jules Deschênes, completed its work in 1986, almost 37 years ago. The Canadian effort to bring Nazi war criminals to justice has ended. The survivors are fast disappearing.

Though the records in Canada of the Holocaust and its perpetrators are old, their release is urgent. We will soon no longer be able to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive through the testimony of survivors – we will have to rely on the records. Yet, efforts to get the release of Holocaust-related records have gone nowhere.

Remembering the Holocaust means not just remembering the victims. It means also remembering their murderers. We need access to the report written by Alti Rodal for the Deschênes Commission, titled Nazi War Criminals in Canada: The Historical and Policy Setting from the 1940s to the Present. It was written to be public in its entirety, but has been released subject only to inexplicable extensive deletions. Part II of the Deschênes Commission report, addressing individual cases, has not been made public. And the hundreds of Nazi war crimes files originally held by the Department of Justice and Royal Canadian Mounted Police are inaccessible.

Canada is a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The Alliance’s 2000 Stockholm Declaration commits the signatories to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the opening of archives in order to ensure that all documents bearing on the Holocaust are available to researchers.” The Alliance’s Monitoring Access to Archives Project recommended in 2017 that governmental archival institutions “release Holocaust related records, irrespective of any personal identifying information or national security classifications.” Yet, Canada is not respecting these commitments.

B’nai Brith Canada filed a request for Nazi war crimes related records in January, 2022, to Library and Archives Canada. A year and a half later, the institution has yet to provide a date by which the request would be processed.

In February, 2022, B’nai Brith Canada asked the Department of Justice for the files of all Nazi war crimes relating to people who died more than 20 years ago, the period after which privacy protection expires. The department replied that “it does not have the capabilities” to respond to the request.

B’nai Brith Canada then modified its request to ask for only those Nazi war crimes files of the people named by the Deschênes Commission, excluding cases that went to court, and persons not yet dead for 20 years. The Department of Justice responded in July, 2022, that it would take 1,285 days, that is to say more than three-and-a-half years, to answer the request

The House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, in its report dated June 20, made a number of welcome recommendations, one of which was the automatic release of historical documents that are more than 25 years old. The federal government has so many documents and so little staff and budget allocated to deal with them that the only way to make the access to information system work is to automatically release whole categories of records. Requiring consideration of each and every document to determine whether any one of a long list of exemptions to disclosure applies is a recipe for inaction.

Philosopher George Santayana wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Yet, we cannot remember a past that remains hidden from us. To remember the past, we have to know the past.

Only through public access to Holocaust archives can we learn lessons from those archives. Learning lessons from the Holocaust is a legacy we can create for the victims, giving meaning to the senseless death of innocents. To learn those lessons, we need access to the archives.

David Matas is senior counsel to B’nai Brith Canada. He is a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Monitoring Access to Archives Project.

Source: Canada urgently needs to release its Holocaust-related records

Filed under Antisemitism, Holocaust, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

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