Why GDP per capita is becoming the indicator to watch

2023/04/21 Leave a comment

Indeed:

Canada has been the worst performing advanced economy in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development since 1976. Governments of all partisan stripes have tried and failed to reverse the trend. If nothing changes, the OECD projects, our economic growth per capita will continue to stagnate for decades to come. This article is part of an occasional series called Per Capita, which examines how and why policy interventions have come up short – and how fresh approaches to economic growth are urgently needed.

A growing cohort of analysts are tempering their enthusiasm for Canada’s recent economic performance for a simple reason: Strong population growth is bulking up the numbers.

Last week, the Bank of Canada projected that real gross domestic product would increase by 1.4 per cent this year, up from a previous forecast of 1 per cent, and by 1.3 per cent in 2024. The central bank said a key factor in its 2023 upgrade was the surge in population, which is expanding the pool of labour and consumers.

Canada’s population rose by just more than one million people in 2022, an annual increase of 2.7 per cent that was the largest since the late 1950s. This is part of a deliberate plan from the federal government to boost population through higher immigration.

For that reason, some economists say they’re paying more attention to growth in real GDP per capita – or economic output per person, adjusted for inflation – than they used to. And on that front, Canada’s economic performance is decidedly weaker: Per capita output in 2022 was roughly the same as in 2017.

The near-term outlook doesn’t show much upside. Even if population growth cooled to 2019 levels, per-capita GDP would still decline for the next two years, based on the Bank of Canada’s projections for output.

“I don’t see that the federal government is focused on per capita GDP, they’re just focused on GDP,” said David Williams, vice-president of policy at the Business Council of British Columbia.

“If you crank up population growth, sure, the economy gets bigger. But that doesn’t mean that we’re not facing stagnating living standards for the majority of Canadians.”

GDP per capita is often used as a proxy for living standards. The metric is positively correlated with life expectancy and well-being – residents of more productive countries tend to live longer and report being happier.

It is not a perfect measure of prosperity. Per capita output in Canada is around three-quarters of that in the U.S., according to data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, although Canada enjoys an average life expectancy at birth that is roughly five years longer. However, the U.S. is an outlier in life expectancy among wealthier countries.

Canada’s productivity struggles are hardly new and have been debated for decades. Benjamin Reitzes, a macro strategist at Bank of Montreal, recently noted that the average annual growth in real GDP over the past 10 years was 1.8 per cent, but only 0.6 per cent after adjustments were made for population gains.

Ottawa is aware of this issue – and the potential for decades of mediocrity. In the 2022 budget, the federal government mentioned an OECD forecast that predicts Canada will have the weakest per capita growth among its member countries from 2020 to 2060. “The stakes are high. Most Canadian businesses have not invested at the same rate as their U.S. counterparts,” read the budget.

While Ottawa has acknowledged this productivity issue, some economists are calling on governments to focus more on per capita growth and how to bolster it. (The 2023 federal budget did not repeat its mention of the OECD projection.)

“No per capita growth means Canadian living standards are stagnant,” Mr. Reitzes wrote in a recent note to clients. “Historically, policy makers haven’t paid much attention to the per capita metric. Hopefully, that changes soon.”

The federal government is ramping up immigration levels in the coming years, targeting the intake of 500,000 permanent residents annually by 2025. Most of Canada’s population growth last year was driven by temporary residents, including workers and international students.

Ottawa has frequently said that raising immigration levels is necessary to fill jobs and boost economic growth. However, some of its recent policy decisions have made it easier to fill low-wage roles in lower-productivity sectors with temporary foreign workers.

“We’ve normally tried to target the best and brightest,” said Mr. Williams. “But it seems that there’s been a shift in Ottawa toward saying, ‘Hey, let’s fill these very-low-wage, entry-level jobs.’ And that’s a concern.”

Source:Why GDP per capita is becoming the indicator to watch

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Sean Speer: Canada’s ‘big sort’ is breaking down—and the political consequences could be monumental

2023/04/21 Leave a comment

Interesting analysis:

In 2009, American journalist Bill Bishop wrote the influential book, The Big Sort, to describe the growing cultural and political bifurcation of American society based on a process of self-selection which, in broad terms, saw educated professionals with progressive political preferences increasingly concentrated in cities and those in non-professional jobs with more conservative politics disproportionately inhabited in rural and peripheral communities. 

As he explained: 

“What’s happened, however, is that ways of life now have a distinct politics and a distinct geography. Feminist synchronized swimmers belong to one political party and live over here, and calf ropers belong to another party and live over there. As people seek out the social settings they prefer—as they choose the group that makes them feel the most comfortable—the nation grows more politically segregated—and the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups. We all live with the results: balkanized communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible; a growing intolerance for political differences that has made national consensus impossible; and politics so polarized that Congress is stymied and elections are no longer just contests over policies, but bitter choices between ways of life.”

Bishop’s thesis had a powerful influence on academic and popular discussions about the cultural and political life of countries like Canada and the United States. It seemed to offer a conceptually and empirically-rooted explanation for contemporary sociological trends, including, for instance, the growing partisan divide rooted in place. 

A few years ago, American public intellectual Will Wilkinson took up the thesis in a must-read, think-tank paper entitled, “The density divide”, in which he elaborated on the “big sort” in the context of the rise of right-wing populism and Donald Trump’s surprise election. His basic argument was that “spatial sorting” based on a mix of ethnicity, cultural preferences, human capital, and even personality traits had driven a “polarizing wedge between dense diverse populations and white sparse populations.”

As Wilkinson elaborated: 

“By concentrating diversity, human capital, innovation and national economic output in enormous cities, the sorting logic of long-term urbanization has slowly converted the culturally liberalizing power of economic growth into a morally and politically polarizing wedge, driving town and country further apart and feeding the mutual contempt and vitriolic division of negative, affective partisanship.”

Although both Bishop and Wilkinson were writing primarily about the United States, there’s an argument that their thesis also broadly applies to Canada. In recent decades, our economy has similarly come to reflect the rise of so-called “superstar cities” and the growing concentration of economic output in a small number of major cities. 

Consider, for instance, that in the five years prior to the pandemic, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver were responsible for two-thirds of the country’s net new jobs. That share surpasses three-quarters if Ottawa-Gatineau, Calgary, and Edmonton are accounted for. In some rural and remote parts of the country, by contrast, communities still have not even fully recovered the jobs that were lost during the 2008-09 global recession. 

The economic dominance of these major cities has been matched by their political power. That the Conservative Party has won the national popular vote in successive federal elections but failed to ultimately win due to their lack of seats in the country’s major cities is itself an expression of the density divide. 

More than twenty years ago, University of Toronto political scientist David Cameron anticipated the manifestation of “the big sort” in Canadian life: 

“Without quite realizing it, we Canadians are in the process of building a new country within the old one. The new country is composed of the large cities, especially the great metropolitan centres of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver; the old country is all the rest. Life in the former bears little resemblance to life in the latter, whether it is a question of cultural expression, crime, the sense of neighbourhood, price and income levels, traffic or the pace of life.”

The upshot here is that the prevailing narrative about the interplay between culture, politics, and place in Canada and the United States has tended to reflect a widening divide between the metropole and the hinterland. There’s been a powerful sense that sensibilities, priorities, and lived experiences across the density divide are diverging at an inexorable pace. 

Yet an alternative case has emerged in the past few years that “the big sort” is being undone. New economic and social forces are possibly breaking down the density divide by pushing back against the inexorability of urban agglomeration. The cultural and political consequences of these trends are too difficult to predict at this point. But there’s a strong argument that they could be as significant as the ones that they’re ostensibly replacing. 

Let’s start with the data. University of Ottawa economist Mike Moffatt has documented the growing flight of urban professionals from major cities like Toronto to peripheral communities. In 2022, for instance, although Toronto added 138,240 net residents relative to the previous year, it added 159,679 immigrants which means that approximately 78,000 people actually left over the course of the year.

These developments started in about 2015 as a response to high housing prices. City residents, particularly those with young families, have been forced to “drive until they qualify” to purchase homes that can accommodate their needs and expectations.  

The pandemic and its effects on workplace arrangements—including the rise of remote work (or at least hybrid work)—have reinforced these trends. Each year since the pandemic began, Toronto has lost population on a net outflow of residents—the most in a generation. 

These people are relocating to peripheral communities in the Greater Toronto Area as well as increasingly more broadly across the country. Moffatt has in fact argued that what makes these recent migration trends different than in the past is that new workplace arrangements are enabling individuals and households to relocate outside of the economic region of their employers. 

As he set out in a virtual event that I moderated for the Public Policy Forum in March 2023: 

“Before the pandemic, people were still somewhat constrained by commuting distance. So they might end up in a Brantford or a Woodstock or a Kitchener-Waterloo…The places that people moved out of Toronto to were within about 100 or 200 kilometres. That’s changed during the pandemic…As young families are able to work using home-type arrangements, instead of moving to Brantford, they’re moving to Calgary, Halifax, or Moncton. Over the last year, for instance, Ontario has lost more population to other provinces than it has in any time that we have recorded data. Work-from-home so far seems to be allowing people to still have jobs in Toronto, Montreal, or Vancouver but live in a completely different geography.”

His data and analysis resonate with my own experience. We had close friends move from Toronto to Cobourg during the pandemic, for instance, based on the hedged bet that they’ll never have to return to the office on a full-time basis. 

It prompts the question: If “the big sort” is indeed being undone, what are its consequences? They’re multi-faceted and fascinating to think about.

One potential consequence concerns basic politics. Keep in mind, based on Toronto’s voting patterns, that there’s a decent probability that those leaving the city for Cobourg or elsewhere are probably more progressive than the median voter in their new communities. The interplay between their political preferences and the politics of their adopted homes is therefore hard to predict. 

Do urban progressives export their preferences to their new homes? If so, it could possibly, depending on the scale of migration patterns, change the political character of these more conservative communities. The net result could be to put some Conservative ridings on the periphery of the country’s major cities into electoral play. 

Or does the opposite happen: do these communities come to imprint their own cultures and politics on their new inhabitants? If so, it could, in theory, deagglomerate the political power of our major cities and strengthen the relative voice of faster-growing mid-sized and peripheral communities. 

I asked Moffatt to speculate on these political implications at our Public Policy Forum event. Here’s his response: 

“Are the people who are coming into those areas changing the politics of those areas or are those areas changing the politics of the people who move in? Is Tillsonburg becoming more like Toronto or are the Torontonians who will move to Tillsonburg becoming more like the locals? 

I suspect it’s somewhere in between. But I actually do think it’s probably positive overall for society because I think it can develop a better understanding [across the divide]. There may be less polarization in a world in which  you could live in the Tillsonburg, but work in Toronto and you kind of have one foot in both worlds. You talk to your neighbour who might work at the CAMI plant or whatever…I think it can foster more understanding. So I’m cautiously optimistic.”

I put the same question to leading pollster Darrell Bricker in a recent episode of Hub Dialogues. His response was broadly similar: 

“That’s a really interesting question. If you look at the past as prologue, what tends to happen is that the downtown sensibilities tend to find a way to move out. We were talking about Mississauga before. Mississauga never used to vote Liberal. They now vote Liberal pretty overwhelmingly, or NDP where Jagmeet Singh is from. That never was the case before.

Yes, there’s going to be a push-out into the newer suburbs in which that’s the case, but then you see what also happens is when people leave downtown and they move to a place like say further car-commuting suburbs, what tends to happen is the people move there. What we’ve seen is that, actually, the place changes them. They develop the same values as the people who are living around them. This even is new Canadians who do the same kind of thing, which is what makes the 905, we’ll just use Toronto as the example, so volatile. They can vote one way or the other. It’s really in flux. 

Downtown is always going to be orange or red in most major cities, but those commuting suburbs, they’re the ones that tend to flip.”

Setting aside the particularities of feminist synchronized swimmers, rural calf ropers, or Tillsonburg CAMI workers, the main point here is that the neat and tidy geographic segregation reflected in “the big sort” seems to be breaking down. 

The cultural and political consequences may be hard to judge at this point. But the presumptive takeaway is far from nothing—in fact, quite the opposite. If Bishop, Wilkinson, and Cameron are right and “the big sort” has been a defining feature of the past few decades, then its undoing ought to have an oversized influence over the coming years. 

Source: Sean Speer: Canada’s ‘big sort’ is breaking down—and the political consequences could be monumental

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USA: One reason the push for diversity in medicine is lagging

2023/04/21 Leave a comment

Of interest:

Sabina Spigner says she’s always known she wanted to be a doctor. But, as a premed student at the University of Pennsylvania, she found herself struggling to balance a heavy class load while also working as much as 20 hours a week.

“I was always working, because I didn’t have money and I was a work-study student,” says Spigner.

Her grades suffered as a result. In her junior year, she turned to her pre-med adviser for help. “She was like, well, you know, you’re just not going to get into med school with that GPA. so I think you should consider something else. And she didn’t really present me with many resources or options other than just giving up,” Spigner says.

That conversation happened nearly eight years ago. Spigner — who is Black and Southeast Asian-American — says when she recalled the experience on Twitter last month, “unfortunately, a lot of people shared similar stories.”

“You know, this is something that’s happening across the country and it’s very, very common, especially for students of color, to experience discouragement,” she says.

For decades, leading medical organizations have been trying to diversify the ranks of physicians, where Black and Hispanic doctors remain vastly underrepresented relative to their proportion of the U.S. population. That matters, because research has shown that people from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups can have better health outcomes when their doctors look like them.

But a recent study in the journal JAMA Health Forum highlights the factors, including financial pressures and discrimination, that can keep determined students of color from actually making it to medical school.

The study looked at responses from more than 81,000 students who took the Medical College Admission Test. The standardized exam is grueling: People study for it for months, if not years, says the study’s first author, Dr. Jessica Faiz of the University of California Los Angeles.

“You paid for the test. You took all that time to study. You are definitely quite committed to applying” to med school, says Faiz, an emergency physician and fellow with the National Clinician Scholars Program at UCLA.

Even so, Faiz and her colleagues found that Black and Hispanic test takers were significantly less likely to go on to apply and enroll in med school than white test takers. Not only that, but Black, Hispanic and Native American students were more likely to say they faced financial barriers, such as difficulty affording test prep materials and already having large student loans.

“Even further, they’re more likely to face discouragement from advisors when applying to medical school compared to their white counterparts,” says study co-author Dr. Utibe Essien, an assistant professor of medicine and health equity researcher at UCLA.

Another key finding: Black, Hispanic and Native American students were more likely to have parents without a college degree and more likely to go to a low-resourced college, which the researchers defined as a college with a less-selective admissions process and a majority of students living off campus.

Those factors “really trickle down to your social networks that are really integral in succeeding as a medical student,” Faiz says. For instance, the study found that students of color were less likely to have shadowed a physician – an experience that can burnish a med school application. Faiz says that likely reflects a lack of the kinds of connections that make it easier to set up that kind of experience.

Essien notes that decades of research have found that patients of color can benefit from having a doctor of their own racial or ethnic background. For example, studies have found they were more likely to have received preventative care in the prior year and more likely to be satisfied with the health care they receive.

For minorities, says Essien, “Having a doctor who looks like you makes you more likely to accept flu vaccination, to have a colonoscopy, to consider having a more invasive heart procedure.”

There’s even striking new evidence that Black people live longer if they reside in counties with more Black physicians. But that new study came with a sobering discovery: A little over half of U.S. counties were excluded from the national analysis because they didn’t have a single Black primary care physician. Faiz says that finding, which was published on the same day as the study she led, underscores why it’s so critical to better understand the factors that keep students of color from med school.

Adds Essien: “We’re not just advocating diversity out of the goodness of our hearts. It really, literally is saving lives.”

Dr. Jaya Aysola is executive director of Penn Medicine’s Center for Health Equity Advancement. She wrote a commentary that accompanied the study in JAMA Health Forum. Aysola says the study sheds much-needed light on the financial barriers and unconscious biases that can block the path to med school for students of color.

“From who advises you to submit an application to who then eventually helps select your application, to those who interview you, there’s bias all along those processes,” Aysola says.

As for Sabina Spigner? She didn’t let her premed adviser’s discouragement stop her from pursuing her med school dreams. She decided to pursue graduate school first. She ended up with two master’s degrees — in science and public health — before heading to the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. When she graduates next month, she’ll officially be Dr. Spigner at last.

She says she lives by the philosophy that “only you can tell you if you can succeed or not. It’s not somebody else’s job to say that.”

“I’m proof that there’s a way,” she adds.

She’ll start her OB/GYN residency at Northwestern University in June.

Source: One reason the push for diversity in medicine is lagging

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Chris Selley: In Quebec, laïcité’s endless contradictions may be coming home to roost

2023/04/19 Leave a comment

Thanks to Premier Legault:

Quebec’s adventures in state secularism — laïcité — have always been full of contradictions, hypocrisies and flimsy explanations. Thankfully, if belatedly, in recent days, those have been coming to a head over two main issues: The role of the Catholic church as part of Quebec’s history and heritage — its patrimoine — and the provision of rooms in public schools for students (read: Muslim students) to pray.

Education Minister Bernard Drainville banned schools from providing prayer spaces the week before last, deeming them incompatible with laïcité. The National Assembly passed one of its famous unanimous motions: “The putting in place of prayer areas, regardless of confession, in public school rooms goes against the principle of secularism.”

But then came Easter, when  leading-light nationalist columnist Mathieu Bock-Côté took to the pages of Le Journal de Montréal with a surprising defence of the Catholic church. Catholicism provided “particular impetus” and “poetic breath” to the French adventure in North America, he argued, and a sense of “solidarity” that began under British oppression and remains to this day.

Premier François Legault tweeted out the column, quoting the bit about solidarity. It did not go well. A few hours later, digging out from an avalanche of negative responses both online and off, Legault added: “We must distinguish between laïcité and our heritage.” And that didn’t go well either — which is interesting, because until recently that was an entirely mainstream position.

In 2008, the National Assembly unanimously (of course) affirmed Quebecers’ “attachment to our religious and historic heritage represented by the crucifix” — i.e., the crucifix hanging over the Speaker’s chair in the legislature. “The crucifix is about 350 years of history in Quebec that none of us are ever going to erase,” then-premier Jean Charest averred. (Minor clarification: Then-premier Maurice Duplessis had the crucifix installed in 1936. According to University of Montreal historian Jacques Rouillard, Duplessis “wanted to distinguish himself from previous Liberal governments by showing he would be more receptive to Catholic principles.”) Liberal Premier Philippe Couillard left office in 2018 still defending said crucifix, and he defended crucifixes in hospitals as well. “To be open and tolerant, that doesn’t mean we have to erase our history,” he argued.

Legault seems to be getting far more pushback than his predecessors did. Liberal education critic Marwah Rizqy accused him of violating his duty of neutrality “as premier of all Quebecers in our secular state.” Liberal MNA Monsef Derraji accused the premier of a “lack of judgment.” Other provincial and federal Liberals and New Democrats chimed in disapprovingly, along with businessman Mitch Garber and comedian Sugar Sammy.

Some of Bock-Côté’s colleagues at Le Journal weren’t much impressed either. “If the Church allowed the French-Canadian people to survive in America, this influence was also unhealthy,” wrote staunch secularist Elsie Lefebvre. This went for women and homosexuals in particular, she argued, but also for the whole population, which was deliberately kept poorly educated and backward.

“Far from cultivating solidarity, the Church favored charity for the deserving poor, that is, for people who complied with its precepts,” Réjean Parent argued. “It has not contributed to our evolution; on the contrary, it has delayed it.”

In a very interesting column, Philippe Léger argued that Legault revealed himself as simply not very interested in laïcité. Indeed, Legault hasn’t worked very hard to hide that, often framing Bill 21 — the restrictions on public servants’ religious attire — as a sort of social consensus under which Quebec could draw a line and move on. (Lotsa luck!)

Léger made a critical observation, as well: Younger Quebecers, few of them religious but none having lived under the Pope’s thumb, are far more likely to see all these contradictions as simply irreconcilable, just as many in the Rest of Canada do now. They (and we) are asked to believe a ban on religious symbols in the public service was an inevitable offshoot of the Quiet Revolution, but one whose necessity only became clear half a century later —mysteriously enough, at a time of increased Muslim immigration. They (and we) can’t help but see “the inconsistency of prohibiting a prayer room for Muslim students during the week, and celebrating … Catholic heritage on weekends,” as Léger put it.

Indeed, the prayer-room issue is a great litmus test for exactly what people mean by secularism: Is it a matter of the government privileging certain ways of life over others, or a matter of the government simply recusing itself from matters of religion?

There was controversy here in Toronto a few years ago when a public middle school essentially brought congregational Muslim prayers in-house on Fridays, for the dubious sake of convenience. I felt it was an unnecessary and unfortunate mash-up of an important secular place with organized religion — whereas allowing students room to pray individually and privately strikes me as a simple matter of hands-off personal liberty. Drainville arrived at the peculiar position that silent prayer in public schools where others can see you is OK, but not quiet prayer in a dedicated room.

That’s a very difficult position to defend, and in the past, Drainville and Legault might not have had to bother. Unanimous vote in the National Assembly aside, there has been healthy and fearless pushback against the prayer-room decision as well. It almost seems like Legault’s government might accidentally have triggered the honest secularism debate Quebec so desperately needs, and which Legault so hoped to avoid. It’s excellent news, if true.

Source: Chris Selley: In Quebec, laïcité’s endless contradictions may be coming home to roost

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Immigrant families’ babies are healthier in poor neighbourhoods: study

2023/04/19 Leave a comment

Interesting findings, on the “healthy immigrant” effect and how that declines over time (a perverse form of integration):

In Ontario’s poorest neighbourhoods, newborns of non-refugee immigrant mothers face a lower risk of serious illness and death than those born to Canadian-born mothers, according to a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal on Monday.

Both immigration status and living in a low-income neighbourhood are associated with worse outcomes for newborns, write researchers from the University of Toronto, two Toronto hospitals, the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

However, while previous research has looked at the risk of adverse outcomes for newborns in low- versus high-income neighbourhoods, the study’s authors said it has overlooked the comparative risks for babies born to immigrant and non-immigrant parents living in similar low-income neighbourhoods.

“Efforts should be aimed at improving the overall health and well-being of all females residing in low-income areas, and at determining if the risk of adverse birth outcomes can be equitably reduced among immigrant and non-immigrant groups,” wrote co-author Jennifer Jairam.

To compare the risk of severe neonatal illness and death in immigrant- and non-immigrant-born infants, researchers looked at data on all live, in-hospital births of single babies from 20 to 42 weeks’ gestation between 2002 and 2019 in Ontario.

Ontario, they wrote, is the landing place for about 53 per cent of all female immigrants who enter Canada.

They measured severe neonatal illness or disease by looking at breathing support, intravenous fluid use, birth before 32 weeks’ gestation, very low birth weight and respiratory distress.

During the study period, there were 414,241 single babies born to 312,124 mothers aged 15 years and older living in low-income urban neighbourhoods. Of all the live births during this period, 148,050 were to mothers who had immigrated to Canada, and 266,191 to Canadian-born mothers. Most of the mothers who immigrated to Canada came from South Asia and the East Asia and Pacific regions and had lived in Ontario for less than 10 years.

Jairam and her team found the risk of severe neonatal illness and death for newborns of mothers who had immigrated to Canada was significantly lower than for newborns of Canadian-born mothers, at 49.7 per 1,000 live births compared with 65.6 per 1,000 live births.

However, they said that risk varied depending on the country of origin, with a higher risk of severe neonatal illness and death in newborns of immigrants from Jamaica and Ghana, and in those who had lived for a greater length of time in Ontario.

THE ‘HEALTHY IMMIGRANT EFFECT’

Rather than suggesting immigrant mothers and their newborns receive better care in Ontario than Canadian-born mothers and babies, the authors believe their findings might be explained by the “healthy immigrant” effect.

“Immigrant females who are healthier and more resilient may be most capable of migration; the immigration policy of a host country may preferentially select healthy immigrants,” wrote Dr. Joel Ray, a physician at St. Michael’s Hospital and one of the study’s co-authors, adding that, paradoxically, immigrants face greater barriers to health care access.

According to the researchers, the “healthy immigrant” effect wanes relative to the length of time an immigrant spends living in a new country.

Another explanation the researchers suggested is some immigrants have greater net income, educational achievement and health literacy than the average for a low-income neighbourhood.

Either way, Jairam, Ray and their co-authors said the study underscores the importance of paying attention to trends at the neighbourhood level so pregnant parents and babies in low-income communities can hope for better health outcomes.

Source: Immigrant families’ babies are healthier in poor neighbourhoods: study

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Quebec Investing $10m In Immigration-Related Research Projects

2023/04/19 Leave a comment

Of note, some familiar themes:

Quebec’s immigration department is investing $10 million to study immigration-related matters in the francophone province.

The financing is being provided by the province’s immigration department, the Ministère de l’Immigration, de la Francisation et de l’Intégration (MIFI), over two years, starting this fiscal year, but the research projects themselves will be conducted over the coming five years.

The money is being invested through Quebec’s non-profit which funds societal and cultural research projects, the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC).

“I am very happy to announce this partnership with the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture which will address the needs expressed by so many stakeholders in Quebec to identify the factors which enhance the attraction, retention, and the experiences of immigrants in all Quebec’s regions,” said provincial Immigration Minister Christine Fréchette in French.

“This agreement will provide MIFI with the necessary information to put in place innovative programs adapted to the reality and needs of immigrants in Quebec.”

Although the specific details of how the funds are going to be spent will only be revealed once the FRQSC starts issuing requests for research proposals, Quebec’s immigration department has noted there will be two streams.

The first stream will examine cross-cultural practices and the sense of belonging immigrants have for the regions in which they live and the province of Quebec. 

The second stream will look at the migratory patterns of immigrants within Canada, the factors which enhance the attraction and retention of immigrants and their willingness to settle in regions, the existing linguistic dynamics and the capacity of the province to welcome immigrants.

The province is hoping to use the insights it will gain from this research to improve its current policies and programs and also to develop innovative new ones.

Quebec Welcomed Record Numbers Of Permanent And Temporary Residents Last Year

“This support for immigration research by MIFI is an excellent opportunity to contribute to the advancement of our knowledge of this societal challenge, to develop the next generation of researchers interested in this subject, and, in doing so, elaborate on the public policies with regards to settlement services and the integration of immigrants, in French, to Quebec,” said Rémi Quirion, Quebec’s chief scientist.

Last year, Quebec welcomed a record-breaking 68,705 new permanent residents as well as 89,765 temporary foreign workers through the International Mobility Program (IMP) and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), reveals the latest data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).

Quebec welcomed a record-breaking 51,260 foreign nationals through the IMP last year, up almost 18.4 per cent from the 43,295 in 2021.

The province also welcomed a record-breaking 38,505 foreign nationals through the TFWP last year, up 27 per cent from the 30,310 TFWP workers in 2021.

Importance Of Temporary Foreign Workers To Quebec Economy Is Increasing

“The number of temporary foreign workers in Quebec is increasing every year, and particularly since Ottawa has granted us more flexibility in the wake of recent negotiations,” said Quebec Labour Minister Jean Boulet in French.

“This labour force is more and more involved in all sectors of our economy throughout Quebec.”

As immigration levels have risen, Quebec Premier François Legault has gotten antsy about the future of the French language in the francophone province.

During the last provincial election in Quebec, Legault insisted the province must hold the line on immigration. Then, in his inaugural address to open the latest session of the legislature, the premier announced plans to require that all economic immigrants to the province be francophone by 2026.

In her first immigration plan, the Plan d’immigration du Québec 2023, Fréchette tried to hold the line on immigration to between 49,500 and 52,500 new permanent residents to the province, citing the need to be able to provide adequate settlement services and integrate them all. 

“Immigrants bring with them a wide range of talents to Quebec and all the supports must be in place to help them integrate,” said Fréchette in a statement in French.

“This immigration plan contains important measures to help them learn French and integrate. Our government wants immigration to contribute to the Quebec economy in all regions of the province and to also maintain the vitality of the French language.”

Source: Quebec Investing $10m In Immigration-Related Research Projects

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Member of Alberta multiculturalism council resigns over antisemitic posts

2023/04/19 Leave a comment

Poor vetting:
A member of Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s new multiculturalism panel resigned Monday after the Opposition resurrected past antisemitic social media posts.
The Alberta NDP asked Smith to remove Tariq Khan, a Calgary-based Realtor, from the Premier’s Council on Multiculturalism, citing “a documented history” of antisemitic social media posts.Smith’s office said Monday that Khan offered his resignation and the premier has accepted it.

“The premier denounces all forms of intolerance and hate,” Smith’s office said in an email.

Smith announced the new council Friday to promote cultural diversity and inclusiveness in Alberta. Khan was a part of the 30-member council, headed by co-chairs Sumita Anand and Philomina Okeke-Iherjirika.

The Opposition NDP provided The Canadian Press screen grabs of what appears to be Khan’s Facebook account.

One shows an edited image of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with the Star of David on his forehead, feasting on the blood of a child with the words “can’t get enough” written above his head. Another post shows Khan allegedly praising a terrorist convicted for his role in the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament.

The Canadian Press could not independently verify those posts were once on Khan’s Facebook account.The Alberta NDP also shared a screen-grab of a 2018 letter rejecting Khan as a UCP nominee for the constituency of Calgary-North East. In the letter, then-party executive director Janice Harrington refers to a video he allegedly shared that labels the Holocaust a hoax.

Khan was not immediately available for comment.

Deputy premier Kaycee Madu said Monday that it’s “obvious” someone in the vetting process missed the gap.

“We will go back and take a look at our process and show that we close whatever gap that existed that made it impossible for us to catch this serious error,” he said at a news conference at the Alberta Legislature.

“We are humans. I think what is important is that when … it’s brought to our attention, we will fix the problem.”

Alberta Opposition Leader Rachel Notley said she finds the error disturbing.

“It goes beyond odd,” she said in Calgary. “It’s either demonstrative of next-level incompetence from the premier’s office … or it’s demonstrative of a genuine desire to divide and discriminate and promote racism.”

Source: Member of Alberta multiculturalism council resigns over antisemitic posts

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Why do Roma living in Europe flee to Canada? Is life that bad there?

2023/04/18 1 Comment

Of interest:

In Romania, Laurentiu David Cobzaru was called the “tigan” or the untouchable.

Other kids in his neighbourhood weren’t allowed to play with him and his siblings. In school, he and other Roma children were made to sit at the back of the class because of their dark skin.

And that label as an outcast, “Zigeuner” in German, would follow him even after he moved from Bucharest to Berlin, where he found himself the target of the neo-Nazis yet again.

“I was called a ‘gypsy’ and was beaten and pushed down by others my whole life,” says Cobzaru, who arrived in Toronto in November for asylum with his wife, Claudia, and daughter, Eva, after he was attacked by four skinheads in Berlin on his way home after work.

While Canada is a beacon of hope for many Roma seeking protection, equality and a better future, the 39-year-old man says few people understand why he and his people come all the way for asylum from Europe where biases and discrimination against his people still run deep.

And Cobzaru can sympathize with the desperation of Florin Iordache and his wife, Cristina Monalisa Zenaida Iordache, who drowned with their two infants trying to cross into the U.S. by boat near Akwesasne, Que., after learning of their imminent deportation from Canada to Romania.

Cobzaru could see himself in their shoes.

“My heart is broken with all the Romani people who are coming here from all over Europe trying to find a society where they are accepted,” said Cobzaru. “We are coming to Canada because we want to break the chain of discrimination. We don’t want our children to suffer like we did.”

Historically called gypsies, a derogatory label, Roma have endured centuries of discriminatory treatment and slavery in Europe. With a population of 10 to 12 million, it’s the largest minority group in the continent and within the European Union.

Back in 2005, a non-binding pan-European initiative called The Decade of Roma Inclusion was launched to address the discrimination they faced and improve the life of “the world’s most populous marginalized community” so they could share equal opportunities as others.

In 2020, the UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues sounded the alarm over the surge of intimidation and aggression directed at Roma and urged states to do more to prevent hate crimes and incitement to violence against the group so they can live “without fear and stigmatization.”

Last year, in passing a resolution to “urgently” address the conditions of Roma people, the European Parliament said deep-rooted structural and institutional “anti-Gypsyism” continues to exist at all levels of EU society, whether it’s in their access to employment, housing, education, health care, protection or public services.

It referred to surveys that found only one in four Roma age 16 or older was employed; 80 per cent of Roma lived below their country’s at-risk-of-poverty threshold; every third Roma lived in housing without tap water and one in 10 without electricity; every third Roma child had family going hungry at least once a month; and almost half of Roma of the usual school age did not attend.

In many places, said the report, Roma students were segregated in schools; disproportionate numbers of them were also often placed in “special” schools for children with intellectual disabilities.

“Poverty and lack of access to basic services has a considerable impact on children’s physical, mental and emotional development, and increases their chances of lagging behind in all aspects of their adult life,” it noted.

Amid the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine, anti-Roma racism was reported by Ukrainian Roma, who face discrimination in trying to access protection and humanitarian aid.

Faced with blatant discrimination and adversity, Cobzaru said many young Roma are discouraged and made to give up, because they know they don’t get rewarded for their hard work and won’t get the same opportunities.

In grade school, Cobzaru said, his teachers would give him lower grades even though he had the same answers in tests and assignments as non-Roma classmates. Whenever there was an issue between him and others, he was always the one who got punished, he said.

He was one year short of completing an early childhood education program when he decided to quit, because he couldn’t put up with hostile instructors who would be watching him over his shoulder during exams, looking for cheating behaviour.

But his mother, who can’t read or write, recognized the importance of education and encouraged him to return to school. He ultimately earned a bachelor’s degree in Romani language and later a master’s degree in counselling, a rare feat among his peers.

“My mother always prayed on her knees for us to achieve our goals. I got my strength from her,” said Cobzaru, who worked in Berlin as a teacher and social worker for newcomers from eastern Europe.

Gina Csanyi-Robah, co-founder of the Canadian Romani Alliance, said little has improved for the Roma and factors still very much exist to drive them out of Europe.

“I still see the same sad headlines around segregation in schools, the fight for compensation by victims of forced sterilization, police brutality and the lack of accountability for deaths of Roma,” said Csanyi-Robah, whose family came to Canada from Hungary, after the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution; they worked in tobacco farms in Hamilton.

“The human rights are on paper, but they are not in action.”

Although Roma can blend in more easily in Canada’s multicultural fabric, she said they have continued to face entrenched systemic biases especially from more established Canadians.

Back in 1997, the Star reported that Czech Roma refugee claimants staying at a Kingston Road motel in Toronto were confronted by protesters waving swastikas and placards scrawled with “Canada Is Not A Trash Can” and “Honk If You Hate Gypsies.”

Under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, visa requirements were imposed on Eastern European countries amid a surge of Roma refugees arriving here. In response to protest by the EU, those conditions were lifted but replaced by new rules to restrict access to asylum, which advocates said were meant to target Roma refugees on grounds that their claims were bogus.

The Canadian courts later ruled against the new regime, but Csanyi-Robah said Canada then introduced other air travel measures to keep potential Roma refugees from boarding planes. The number of Roma asylum claims declined.

“I feel like the Canadian government has an ongoing campaign of discriminating against the Roma community. They seem to lack knowledge about the situations that Roma have faced historically in Europe and are still facing right now,” she said.

According to the Immigration and Refugee Board, claims from Roma-refugee producing countries — Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia — fluctuated with travel requirement changes in Canada.

The claims from these countries surged to 2,150 in 2018, the year after Ottawa lifted visa requirement against Romania, but it dropped by half to 1,054 right before the pandemic in 2019. Last year, it was down to 919, with more than half of the claimants being Romanians.

Prof. Sean Rehaag of Osgoode Hall Law School said acceptance rates for Roma seeking asylum have risen over the years, which he attributed to the improved quality of legal representation and recognition among refugee judges of the level of persecution and inadequate state protection Roma claimants face. In the past five years, he said, success rates have hovered around 70 per cent.

What critics have failed to recognize is that mobility rights within the EU are tied to employment, Rehaag said: Roma face systemic barriers in accessing quality education and hence the labour market, let alone the fact that residents in one EU country can’t make an asylum claim in another member state.

“Overall, the discrimination and mistreatment seems to be continuing,” said Rehaag, director of York University’s Centre for Refugee Studies. “If anything, in some countries, it’s a doubling down on the kind of racist rhetoric coming out of the far-right countries.”

Source: Why do Roma living in Europe flee to Canada? Is life that bad there?

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Why equity, diversity and inclusion offices are failing us

2023/04/18 Leave a comment

I likely have a lack of innovation but hard to avoid the bureaucratic approach in large organizations as they grapple how to manage and implement policy and programs:

I have been writing and researching about Canada’s history of Blackface for over a decade. This work requires me to travel through history to a time when Black people were not seen as human and we had few rights. Because I do this work, I have a deep understanding of the development of human rights procedures and equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) offices.

I am a knowledge expert. And I unequivocally believe that EDI offices are failing us. Not because of a lack of talented or well-intentioned people, but because of a lack of courage to imagine new ways of problem solving that centre people, not procedures, processes, and paper trails.

By insisting on bureaucratic solutions to execute strategic plans and prioritizing institutional value statements, with well-thought-out bullet-point “action items” these offices take what Benjamin Ginsberg, author of “The Fall of the Faculty” has called, “the neo-liberal all-administrative university” approach.

This model of education privileges economic-based relationships, it treats students as customers — who are always right — and faculty, who are cast in the role of service providers rather than knowledge experts, as failed subjects when students file complaints against them to human rights services embedded within EDI offices.

There is little room, in the current system, for decision-making at the point of intake. Instead, every complaint is treated as a potential threat to the institution’s reputation and as a result, faculty suffer collateral damage in this process.

The ever-expanding “regime of bureaucratization,” as Amna Khalid described in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, has taken as its mission the fulfilment of student EDI demands at all costs, while weakening and undermining more meaningful EDI efforts, such as ongoing community engagement and knowledge-expert-driven ideation and collaboration.

Human rights services at Ontario universities have publicly available statements about their policies and procedures, which are informed and guided by the Ontario Human Rights Code. Created in 1961, Ontario was the first province to create a human rights code and a Human Rights Commission to enforce it.

Daniel G. Hill, a Black American who moved to Canada in the 1950s and who wrote a landmark dissertation, “Negroes In Toronto; A Sociological Study Of A Minority Group,” was the first chairman of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Hill often tackled racism head-on, in public forums, with Black community and the public present to bear witness to what discrimination actually looked like. In doing that, he transformed the human rights process into a community event, rather than a backroom investigation to serve measurable outcomes.

We live in different times. But EDI offices are taking the joy out of education because they resist collaborative, restorative approaches to conflict and instead cling to approaches that are too bureaucratic, dehumanizing, and almost solely focused on the document trail.

Inside these institutions there is a culture of fear and silence among faculty, staff and even decision makers, who are rendered powerless by procedures and policies that are just not working.

At the same time faculty are invaluable to the institution as knowledge experts, once they become embroiled in a complaint process, which can go on for an unspecified number of years, they become voiceless, powerless, and invisible.

I agree with blogger Jodre Datu, who in 2022 declared, “if EDI isn’t igniting joy, we’re doing it wrong.” In that post, they called for an overhaul of EDI that would not create environments in which people are afraid to say the wrong thing but instead EDI work would involve an entire restructuring of our workplaces and a reorganization of power.

I know I don’t speak for all academics and there are EDI people who will disagree with me. But good people are leaving universities — something I have even contemplated — because of the “business as usual” approach to conflict taken by EDI offices. No one wins with this approach. It ultimately feeds into the hands of racists, homophobic and transphobic hate, and in the long run, is harming our institutions.

Cheryl Thompson is an associate professor in Performance at The Creative School. She is also director and creative lead, The Laboratory for Black Creativity. Twitter @DrCherylT

Source: Why equity, diversity and inclusion offices are failing us

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Adolf Eichmann Was Ready for His Close-Up. My Father Gave It to Him.

2023/04/18 Leave a comment

Interesting reflections:

I was 14 the first time I saw Adolf Eichmann in person. He wore an ill-fitting suit and had tortoise shell glasses, with the bearing of a nervous accountant. He did not seem at all like someone who had engineered the deaths of millions of people, except of course that I was at his trial for genocide.


My father, Leo Hurwitz, directed the television coverage of the Eichmann trial, which was held in Jerusalem and broadcast all over the world in 1961. My dad was chosen for the position after the producer convinced both Capital Cities Broadcasting, then a small network that organized the pool coverage, and David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister of Israel, that the trial needed to be seen live. In the 1930s, my father had been one of the pioneers of the American social documentary film. In later years, he had directed two films on the Holocaust and had helped to invent many of the techniques of live television while director of production in the early days of the CBS network. Also, as a socialist, he had been blacklisted from all work in television for the previous decade, so he came cheap.


My mother and I joined my father in Jerusalem. Each day I stood in the control room and watched my father call the coverage — “Ready camera 2, take 2!” For perhaps the first time in history, a trial was being recorded, not as in the style of a newsreel, with its neutrally positioned single camera, but more like a feature film, with concealed cameras placed to cover several points of view — the witnesses’, the judges’, the attorneys’, the public’s, and of course, Eichmann’s. These were cut, one against the other, often in close-up, so that the drama became vastly more personal. The style of my father’s work would come to define this trial, and its place in historical memory, even more than Eichmann’s confession.

The prosecutor confronted Eichmann with his own words: “The fact that I have the death of 5,000,000 Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.” The writer and Holocaust survivor Yehiel Di-nur testified from the witness box about the lines of people selected for death in the different “planet” of Auschwitz. Suddenly, Di-nur collapsed with a stroke. Through it all, Eichmann’s face, as revealed in my father’s close-ups, showed no feeling except the occasional tic.

Each night my father’s work was air-shipped, on 2-inch videotape, to be broadcast in Europe and the United States. It sharpened the way the world saw the anti-Semitic depredations of the Nazis. Meanwhile, my father was plagued by the question of how fascism had risen in the first place, how educated and progressive working classes had left their unions to fall into the lock step of a militarized, authoritarian regime.


It was a question that the West all but ignored. With the end of World War II, the prospect of justice for war criminals quickly dissolved, replaced by the need to build the postwar alliance against Communism. Leaders and thinkers were occupied with rearming for a nuclear future and rooting out leftists, the trend that had made my father unemployable.


He thought that he might use the trial to gather social scientists for a discussion of how fascism took root. During preproduction for the broadcast, he began to cast around for an Israeli institution that could host it. He said he asked a former classmate who was editor of a major Israeli newspaper, but they were not interested. Another outlet, the Israeli equivalent of the BBC, said they were not the place for it. A prestigious university couldn’t see the relevance. As the trial began and his production ramped up, he had to let the idea drop.


Though he did not know it at the time, these institutions showed no interest in the sources of fascism because the trial was not a trial of fascism. Instead, it was an opportunity for Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency to rebrand the Zionist movement. While the early days of Zionism extolled muscular, self-sufficient pioneers in a new, empty and promised land, that image had not aged well in the postwar world. In addition, many Israeli Jews looked down on the Jews of “old Europe,” whom they saw as trembling in their shtetls and walking helplessly to their deaths. Of course, they grieved the Holocaust, and their diplomats used its memory to convince the United Nations to recognize the State of Israel. Still, the ring of shame had settled around the survivors, many of whom had been traumatized to the point of dysfunction.

As witnesses at the trial spoke of crimes and suffering that had never been heard before, Israeli attitudes changed. The survivors of the Nazis — once seen as tattooed strangers, muttering to themselves on street corners in Tel Aviv — now began to be looked upon with more compassion. Their deaths and suffering, the crimes of the Shoah, were moved to the heart of Zionism. It helped point to Israel as the safe haven for the persecuted, with “never again!” as their rallying cry.

As Hannah Arendt famously pointed out, the aim of the prosecutor was to frame the trial as justice for crimes against Jews. The slaughter of Roma, Gays, labor leaders, Socialists, Communists, the disabled, and any opposition was hardly mentioned.

Without meaning to, my father helped to reinforce the emotional aspect of the trial and in so doing weaken its political implications. Though his previous films included a fuller view of the crimes and victims of Nazism, the way he shot the trial did the opposite: His brilliant coverage individualized Eichmann and steered viewers away from a more historical view. The work of studying fascism could not compete with the satisfaction of blaming a villain and imagining that the problems could be solved with his sentencing.

My father helped to make this Nazi into a character in a drama of cinematic confrontation, not of real understanding. It was now the Jewish state against the murderer of Jews. Crimes against other groups were not germane to the purpose to which the State of Israel and its head prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, sought to turn the trial.

The question of how fascism gains power is no less urgent today. As nationalisms multiply around the globe, lies gain supremacy as political weapons and scapegoating minorities proves itself a powerful mobilizing force, danger is burgeoning, here and in Israel itself. What I witnessed as a 14-year-old in that control room, I am witnessing again. The fascination with individual people’s guilt or innocence is obscuring the society-wide re-emergence of fascism. And we appear to be no more interested in viewing the full picture.

Source: Adolf Eichmann Was Ready for His Close-Up. My Father Gave It to Him.

Filed under Antisemitism, Holocaust Tagged with , ,

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