Working site on citizenship and multiculturalism issues.
2026/05/12 Leave a comment
My latest analysis. Short version in the Hill Times.
Source: Dissecting 2024-25 data on the public service, early cuts, and equity goals
Full detailed version below:
2026/05/11 Leave a comment
Not the principle but the details need to be fixed:
…Very simply, the problems with the CAF’s recruiting system have not yet been remedied. Yes, permanent residents and naturalized citizens should be encouraged to join the military, but not until they can speak, read, and understand French and/or English and are adapted to Canadian life and the military’s expectations. Yes, those with medical problems should be enlisted, but only if they have been properly screened in the recruitment process. And certainly, the CAF should not accept candidates who cannot read, write, or comprehend instruction at an acceptable standard.
To judge by his long memorandum with its substantiated recommendations, Kieley is a very able officer doing his best to deal with the difficulties he and his understrength staff face. The generals in Ottawa had changed the rules to speed up recruiting with good intentions but had failed to consider the possible consequences. The recruiting officers across the country too often pushed the unqualified to Saint-Jean, and Kieley had to clean up the mess. It’s almost as if NHL scouts sent those who cannot skate to training camp. This cannot work.
This matters because such applicants at the CAF’s Leadership and Training School cost DND money and take spots from better-qualified candidates. It also matters because General Carignan is studying options to expand the CAF to as many as 85,500 regular force members. “In the next month or so,” the CDS told the CBC in April, “we will be able to present various options, and the discussion is going very well,” Carignan said. “There is a lot of interest in doing this.”
Canada needs a bigger and better Canadian Armed Forces, and the Carney government is putting much money (and much of its credibility) into getting this program right. But if the recruitment process does not speed up and function properly, that investment will achieve little. The generals at National Defence Headquarters and officers in recruiting centres across Canada must fix these problems now.
Source: The CAF recruitment system is failing everyone: J.L. Granatstein for Inside Policy
2026/05/08 Leave a comment
Of note:
…At Queen’s Park on Wednesday, the Black Women’s Institute of Health pushed for urgent action on equity for Black women’s health, based on these experiences, shared by women in a report completed by the institute. The report, “Voices UnHeard,” was based on the findings of a first-of-its-kind national survey that focused on the experiences of Black women and girls and health care.
“There’s nothing in this report that I would say I haven’t lived or experienced,” said Kearie Daniel, who spearheaded the report and is the executive director of Black Women’s Institute for Health.“This is the first time ever that we had anyone survey Black women across this country to this extent in a cohesive way,” Daniel said.
Researchers say there’s a lack of data about the experiences of Black women and girls in Canada when accessing health-care — that’s why a report like this is desperately needed. A health system ill-equipped to provide a basic standard of care for a community group that already disproportionately faces higher rates of certain chronic illnesses and medical conditions could lead to worse health outcomes and higher mortality.
The briefing Wednesday “was part of taking the report from just a report into action,” Daniel said.
The “Voices UnHeard” report was published in November. The report served as an anchor for the policy and legislative moves Daniel is advocating for at Queen’s Park.
The briefing followed Tuesday’s tabling by the NDP of the Black Health Equity and Accountability Act, 2026 (Bill 115), which Daniel says aligns with many of the 70 recommendations in the report….
…At Queen’s Park on Wednesday, the Black Women’s Institute of Health pushed for urgent action on equity for Black women’s health, based on these experiences, shared by women in a report completed by the institute. The report, “Voices UnHeard,” was based on the findings of a first-of-its-kind national survey that focused on the experiences of Black women and girls and health care.
“There’s nothing in this report that I would say I haven’t lived or experienced,” said Kearie Daniel, who spearheaded the report and is the executive director of Black Women’s Institute for Health.“This is the first time ever that we had anyone survey Black women across this country to this extent in a cohesive way,” Daniel said.
Researchers say there’s a lack of data about the experiences of Black women and girls in Canada when accessing health-care — that’s why a report like this is desperately needed. A health system ill-equipped to provide a basic standard of care for a community group that already disproportionately faces higher rates of certain chronic illnesses and medical conditions could lead to worse health outcomes and higher mortality.
The briefing Wednesday “was part of taking the report from just a report into action,” Daniel said.
The “Voices UnHeard” report was published in November. The report served as an anchor for the policy and legislative moves Daniel is advocating for at Queen’s Park.
The briefing followed Tuesday’s tabling by the NDP of the Black Health Equity and Accountability Act, 2026 (Bill 115), which Daniel says aligns with many of the 70 recommendations in the report….
2026/05/08 Leave a comment
Will be interesting to see whether there is any impact on the diversity and political leanings of Carney appointments. Trudeau appointments: 55.2 percent women, 19.8 percent visible minorities, and 12.5 percent Indigenous:
Prime Minister Mark Carney said Wednesday he will continue to rely on the independent advisory board created by Justin Trudeau to suggest Senate appointments, but gave no timeline for filling a growing number of vacancies.
After more than a year in office Mr. Carney has yet to make a single Senate appointment. Vacancies are mounting not just among senators but also on the board tasked with selecting new members of the Senate.
There are currently nine vacancies in the 105-member Senate and another six senators are planning to retire by the end of 2026. The Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments, consisting of federal, provincial and territorial representatives, currently has just five members. It has 24 vacancies, leaving most provinces without representation on the board.
At a Montreal-area press conference, Mr. Carney gave no indication of when he would begin addressing the vacancies in the Senate. “We will be appointing senators in due course, and I will take into account the advice of the independent advisory committee that was established by my predecessor,” he said.
Source: Carney to continue using Trudeau-era advisory board to suggest Senate appointments, Carney not planning to allow senators in Liberal caucus, senior government official says
2026/05/07 2 Comments
Understand the concerns but on the other hand, as someone whose cancer treatment impaired my hearing, both physically and mentally, this would be an improvement:
…For labour representatives, the feature is another concern among many when it comes to the effects of AI on their members.
At a hearing before the parliamentary standing committee on industry and technology last week, Roch Leblanc, Unifor telecommunications director, called on government to require companies to inform Canadians when AI was being used.
He told members of Parliament that the union was aware of at least one Big Three telco using AI to mask the accents of offshore agents, “altering how customers perceive who they’re talking to.”
“The use of AI technology to deceive Canadians in any way should be prohibited,” he said.
United Steelworkers Local 1944 president Michael Phillips said he is aware of Telus using the technology internally, between agents based in Canada and overseas.
He said that he was informed by a B.C.-based Telus employee that they had spoken with an agent in the Philippines. According to that employee, “this overseas agent was laughing about it, turning the accent masker on and off, revealing their Filipino accent, and then, taking the accent away when they turned on the AI technology,” Mr. Phillips said.
“As we’re trying to figure out what the parameters around AI and AI limitations are, I think that a very clear right that Canadians should insist on is the right to not be deceived by AI, especially not by folks that they are paying to provide telephone services for,” he said….
Source: Telus using AI to alter the accents of customer service agents
2026/05/05 Leave a comment
Indeed:
C’est ce que je me suis dit en prenant connaissance du tableau explicatif byzantin que le centre de services scolaire de Montréal a présenté cette semaine à son comité de parents qui voulait comprendre comment serait appliquée la loi 94 pour les parents et les élèves.
On se rappellera que cette loi adoptée dans la foulée du scandale de l’école Bedford ne fait pas qu’élargir l’interdiction de porter un signe religieux aux membres du personnel scolaire. Elle s’étend aussi aux parents bénévoles et à toute personne qui fournit régulièrement des services aux élèves.
Dans quels cas un signe religieux est-il autorisé ?
On apprend donc en consultant le tableau explicatif qu’un parent portant un signe religieux, c’est-à-dire en l’occurrence une mère voilée, pourrait préparer un gâteau pour une fête à l’école de ses enfants, mais ne pourrait pas servir elle-même ledit gâteau. Elle pourrait participer à l’organisation d’une sortie scolaire, mais elle ne pourrait pas y accompagner les enfants. Elle pourrait assister à un spectacle de fin d’année comme parent. Mais elle ne pourrait pas donner un coup de main durant le spectacle comme bénévole. Elle pourrait tricoter des mitaines pour la classe le soir, mais pas participer à un atelier de tricot à l’école le jour. Vous suivez la logique ?
La loi suscite son lot d’inquiétudes sur le terrain. Elle semble à bien des égards inapplicable. Comment des directions d’école qui ont déjà leur lot de défis quotidiens vont-elles gérer la chose ? Qui aura l’odieux d’annoncer à une mère enthousiaste et appréciée de tous qu’en raison de son signe religieux, elle peut continuer à être présente à l’école comme mère, mais plus comme bénévole ? …
Mais quel message envoie-t-on aux enfants quand on leur dit que certaines éducatrices, aussi compétentes et professionnelles soient-elles, et certaines mères, aussi impliquées soient-elles, sont désormais infréquentables par leur seule présence auprès des enfants, sans avoir commis aucune faute ? Si infréquentables qu’il faudrait ériger un « cordon sanitaire » entre elles et l’école de peur qu’elles contaminent l’esprit des enfants ?
Je suis désolée, mais le principal message que j’y vois est un message raciste et paternaliste qui a été normalisé ces dernières années. Un message qui tient pour acquis que ces femmes sont incapables de faire leurs propres choix et que l’on devrait donc choisir pour elles. Soumettez-vous à nous ou retournez à la maison, mesdames ! On fait ça pour votre bien, afin de favoriser l’égalité homme-femme… Parce qu’au Québec, c’est comme ça qu’on vit. Vraiment ?
Source: La loi qui renforce l’absurdité
This is what I thought to myself when I read the Byzantine explanatory table that the Montreal school service center presented this week to its parents’ committee who wanted to understand how Bill 94 would be applied to parents and students.
It will be remembered that this law passed in the wake of the Bedford School scandal does not only extend the ban on wearing a religious sign to members of school staff. It also extends to volunteer parents and anyone who regularly provides services to students.
In which cases is a religious sign allowed?
We therefore learn by consulting the explanatory table that a parent wearing a religious sign, that is to say in this case a veiled mother, could prepare a cake for a party at her children’s school, but could not serve said cake herself. She could participate in the organization of a school trip, but she could not accompany the children. She could attend an end-of-year show as a parent. But she couldn’t help out during the show as a volunteer. She could knit mittens for the class in the evening, but not participate in a knitting workshop at school during the day. Do you follow the logic?
The law raises its share of concerns on the ground. It seems in many ways inapplicable. How will school principals who already have their share of daily challenges handle this? Who will have the hate to announce to an enthusiastic and appreciated mother that because of her religious sign, she can continue to be present at school as a mother, but no longer as a volunteer? …
But what message do we send to children when we tell them that some educators, no matter how competent and professional they are, and some mothers, no matter how involved they are, are now infrequent by their sole presence with the children, without having committed any fault? So infrequent that a “sanitary cordon” should be erected between them and the school for fear that they contaminate the minds of children?
I’m sorry, but the main message I see in it is a racist and paternalistic message that has been normalized in recent years. A message that takes for granted that these women are unable to make their own choices and that we should therefore choose for them. Submit to us or return home, ladies! We do this for your good, to promote gender equality… Because in Quebec, that’s how we live. Really?
2026/05/04 Leave a comment
Disturbingly:
…Not that I was alone in this regard. Theodor Adorno decreed after the war that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”; 15 years later he made an exception for those who had lived through it. Nothing had changed in the culture he was describing. What changed was his understanding that witnesses possess a seemingly unimpeachable answer to most arguments, including his: “I was there.” That is an exercise not in logic or persuasion, but of authority – one of the few places it persists in modern culture. Even if that witness’s recollections are mistaken, even if they are influenced by preconceived ideas, we give that person special consideration. Rightly, and sometimes wrongly, a witness tells us things no one else can, and that no one else dares. And my grandmother was daring – only she regarded her daring as common sense.
To read the news, or walk down to Yonge and Bloor (or Bathurst and Sheppard) on some Sunday afternoons in Toronto, is to watch embryonic versions of the types that made my grandmother’s life so full of history. Once again they are transgressing society’s limits, seeing what Canadians will tolerate and against whom we’ll tolerate it. In a way I did not foresee, the world today resembles my grandmother’s much more than my parents’. She would be the ideal interlocutor. But to the many questions I would ask her – for example, when precisely did you no longer find yourself at home in the country where you were born? – I have no sense of what she would pick out of her thoughts and memories as a response….
Now when I think back to my grandmother’s stories, it is not as an adult armoured with so-called experience and education. It is as the child of eight or nine, listening for the first time, at about the same age my grandmother was when she experienced this history herself. Both of us too young to make any sense of the experience.
All the subsequent listening, recording, teaching, writing, remembering: They were, as I imagined, a battle, but now I see they were not against some notion of collective amnesia or falsification of history, but against helplessness of that first encounter.
While alive, my grandmother represented, among many other things to me, the idea that a person can contain and disseminate a witness’s idiosyncratic, fragile and irreplaceable knowledge. I believed this because she had done this herself, in her person. I thought I could take on some part of this. It took only a few years of her absence to show me that this was an illusion.
Source: The world today resembles my grandmother’s much more than my parents’
2026/05/04 2 Comments
Have forthcoming analysis of the 2024-25 EE desegregated data, representation, hirings, separations, promotions that demonstrates that no negative impact compared to the previous year. So warnings may be overstated and public service may already considering equity impact:
As the public service moves to shed thousands of jobs, unions and a newly formed national coalition say equity gains may be more fragile than they appear, and warn leaving departments to monitor representation creates a “serious gap” in tracking where the cuts fall.
The federal public service entered 2026 looking more representative than it did a decade ago, according to the government’s latest Employment Equity Annual Report. The March report showed racialized workers made up 23.9 per cent of the core public administration in 2024-25, slightly above the 22.7 per cent workforce-availability benchmark. Black employees accounted for 5.1 per cent of the public service, up from 2.8 per cent in 2016-17.
Unions and advocates say the latest report can offer a useful snapshot, but it may not fully capture if employment equity efforts have been damaged. Their concern is less about whether the public service still looks representative on paper than about which workers are most exposed as job cuts deepen.
A newly formed group, the National Employment Equity Council, is calling on the government to require mandatory equity impact assessments before any further staffing decisions. Nicholas Marcus Thompson, its co-chair, warns the government’s current approach means signs of inequities tied to job losses may arrive “too late.”
Though departments have sent workforce adjustment notices tied to 17,000 job cuts, the federal government has not publicly released data to show if equity-seeking groups will be affected….
Andrew Griffith, a former senior federal official who has analyzed Treasury Board employment equity data for years, said the latest data does not support the conclusion that racialized public servants are being disproportionately harmed.
Representation of visible minorities rose slightly in 2024–25, while hiring rates for visible minorities and Indigenous staff remained above their internal representation.
Still, advocates say the TBS response to The Hill Times suggests a worrying approach.
“This doesn’t address the concern,” Thompson said by email.
“It leaves departments to monitor themselves, with no central tracking, under a law the government has acknowledged is outdated. That’s how inequities continue, and by the time we see it, it’s too late.”…
The council’s central demand is implementation of the 2023 Employment Equity Act Task Force report, including formal recognition of Black workers and 2SLGBTQI+ people as distinct designated groups under the law.
For Thompson, one of the most urgent unresolved issues is how Black workers remain folded into the broader visible minorities category. Under that approach, the government can meet aggregate targets while leaving subgroup disparities untouched, he argued.
“When it is lumped in with everyone else, Black people almost always get left behind,” Thompson said.
Due to ongoing cuts, Thompson said Black workers contacting the council have described fear, declining trust in internal systems, and frustration with what they see as a lack of clarity and transparency in how restructuring decisions are being made….
2026/05/01 Leave a comment
Good intentions but problematic selection and integration processes. Some of the details are indeed disturbing…:
The success rate for basic training in the Canadian military has dropped to 77 per cent over the past fiscal year as the Canadian Armed Forces grapple with the impact of recruiting changes designed to boost enrolment, according to a leaked internal report.
That compares with a historical average of 85 per cent, according to an internal January, 2026, report by Lieutenant-Colonel Marc Kieley, commandant of the Canadian Forces Leadership and Recruit School (CFLRS) in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que.
His report covers the first three quarters of the 2025-26 fiscal year, which began on April 1 last year.
The number of candidates requiring multiple attempts to graduate rose to 14.89 per cent, far higher than 8.44 per cent in the previous year and significantly above other recent annual rates.
The school conducts basic military qualification (BMQ) training and basic military officer qualification (BMOQ) training for the Forces.
In recent years, the federal government, in an effort boost the size of the military, has opened recruiting to foreign nationals who are permanent residents, begun accepting recruits with certain pre-existing medical conditions and dropped aptitude test requirements, among other changes….
Source: Success rate for basic training in Canadian military drops, Juno, who uncovered the memo, more sensationalist take: EXCLUSIVE: CAF training platoon with 83% non-citizens devolved into ethnic infighting
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