Blogging break
2022/04/08 Leave a comment
Traveling. Blog will resume in May.
Douglas Todd: The painful demographics of homelessness
2022/04/07 Leave a comment
Some interesting data:
They are injured construction workers who need to kill the pain, ex-soldiers with trauma, spouses escaping conflict and First Nations members who can’t get housing on their reserves.
Such histories are common among the men who make up 68 per cent of all homeless in British Columbia, according to Judy Graves, who spent three decades as a champion for people forced onto the street and into shelters, including as the city of Vancouver’s full-time homeless advocate.
“Many men become disposable at certain times in their lives,” said Graves. They wind up surviving in shelters, in tents or couch surfing because their jobs or families have fallen apart and they have been struck down by despair or succumbed to addiction.
Graves put forth many reasons why men are so overrepresented in B.C.’s latest homeless count, which was released this month and focused more than in the past on demographics. The count discovered 8,665 people in the province without shelter, a rise of 11 per cent from 2018.
Many of the men, according to 25 counts across the province, come from the unusually high proportion of Indigenous people, former military personnel and Black Canadians who are homeless.
Almost two of five homeless residents are Indigenous, even though Indigenous people make up only one in 20 of the population. Six per cent served with the military or the RCMP, which makes them “vastly overrepresented” among those without a home.
For the first time, the provincewide count included data on race. While it found 63 per cent of the homeless are white people, which is roughly equivalent to the overall ratio, it discovered three per cent were Black people, even though only one per cent of B.C.’s population is Black.
South Asian people comprised only two per cent of the homeless, which is much lower than the overall cohort of 11 per cent. And East Asians, including ethnic Chinese, accounted for just two per cent, even though they make up 12 per cent of all residents. Graves owed such findings in part to “strong cultural support for families.”
As someone who has taken part in many homeless counts and continues to meet with street people across Metro Vancouver, Graves has talked with men from a range of ethnic backgrounds and nationalities who have ended up desperate for provisional shelter.
Many had become addicted to opioids after becoming repeatedly injured in construction, the military, policing or other physically dangerous jobs, which are mostly held by men, she said. “They get caught between their pain and being out of the workforce.”
A lot of men she’s come to know have also left their homes because of conflict with a spouse or partner, which is the reason 14 per cent of B.C. residents reported they’re homeless. “That’s a really big one.”
While there is already a large amount of government housing provided exclusively for women, including transition shelters for those facing domestic violence, Graves said there is none specifically for men, including for fathers and their children. She believes there should be.
“I think marriage break up is actually harder on men than women,” she said, explaining that many women quickly gain support from their social network, while men often turn to drinking alone. “Men really need support and counselling right after a domestic conflict.”
The Ministry of Housing did not respond directly to many Postmedia questions about homelessness, including why there are no shelters distinctly for males given the government’s emphasis on putting every policy through a “gender lens.”
Instead, spokesperson Sarah Budd maintained the NDP government believes homeless women are undercounted; so it wants to provide them with more housing.
Graves calls Victoria’s approach “reverse gender politics.”
One of the reasons, Graves added, that such a large proportion of Indigenous men and women end up on the streets, living in tents or in shelters is a lack of housing on reserves across Canada.
“A lot of the housing on reserves was built 40 years ago and is falling apart,” she said, noting First Nations people on reserves aren’t permitted to own their own dwellings.
“It was also built only for families and is often unbelievably crowded.” There are, she said, almost no small housing units on reserves for single people, who are the most likely to need a place to live.
The number of foreign-born people who are homeless in B.C. almost doubled compared to the last count in 2018, rising to eight per cent of the total.
But that is far below their provincial average, which has immigrants, refugees and those seeking permanent resident status making up one out of three residents. Graves suggested that foreign-born homeless people might be undercounted since those who have “uncertain immigration status” would tend to hide from counters.
“People have to be trained on where to look.”
The Housing Ministry said in this year’s budget spending on “housing and homelessness supports reached more than $1.2 billion a year for the next three years — three times the level of funding in 2017.”
Source: Douglas Todd: The painful demographics of homelessness
Richard: La loi sur la laïcité de l’état marque un progrès pour la société
2022/04/07 Leave a comment
An example of Quebec rhetoric in favour of Bill 21:
Bientôt, la Loi sur la laïcité de l’État sera à nouveau débattue en cour. Au crépuscule de ma vie et à l’occasion de mes 88 ans, permettez-moi d’appuyer publiquement cette loi amplement justifiée et visant un meilleur vivre-ensemble. On accuse la loi 21 d’être contre les religions. Elle est pourtant un instrument de paix, car la laïcité unit alors que les religions divisent. L’Histoire le prouve. Ceux qui sont contre la loi 21 font passer les religions avant la laïcité par ignorance.
Il n’y a pas que les Québécois de souche qui veulent la loi 21. De nombreux musulmans et musulmanes le veulent aussi. Ferid Racim Chikhi, un Algéro-Canadien immigré au Québec, connaît bien l’islamisme. En tant que musulman, il veut voir et vivre la laïcité au Québec. Dans son tout récent livre Fenêtre sur l’Islam, ses musulmans, ses islamistes, M. Chikhi sonne l’alarme et donne l’heure juste quant à l’aveuglement de nos gouvernements en ce qui a trait à une infiltration des islamistes qui est voulue et sournoise, avec en tête un plan défini pour imposer un jour à la société d’accueil rien de moins que la charia ! En 2005, Fatima Houda-Pepin, d’origine musulmane et alors députée libérale de La Pinière, était intervenue à la Chambre des députés pour que la demande pour la charia soit refusée.
La nécessité de la laïcité et de la loi 21 est une évidence. Refuser la loi 21, c’est s’opposer au progrès de la société, c’est revenir aux siècles passés, où le pouvoir des décisions était entre les mains des chefs religieux comme les imams, les rabbins et les évêques plutôt que sous la responsabilité des gouvernements élus par le peuple. Si c’est cela que le Canada veut, pas le Québec, qui, au prix d’une longue lutte, a réussi à séparer l’Église et l’État. Il n’est pas question de retourner en arrière !
Un des problèmes est aussi le préambule de la Constitution canadienne, qui évoque la suprématie de Dieu. C’est une honte ! Un texte d’une telle importance pour la nation doit être inclusif et respecter le fait qu’au Canada et dans toutes les provinces, il n’y a pas que des croyants, mais aussi des agnostiques et des athées.
Ce que l’on ignore aussi, c’est que, bien qu’il y ait des femmes qui revendiquent le droit de porter le voile pendant les heures de travail, il y a aussi des femmes musulmanes qui espèrent pouvoir enfin l’enlever grâce à l’application de la loi 21. C’est ce que plusieurs d’entre elles auraient confié secrètement à une autorité scolaire. Et cela, elles ne peuvent le dire ouvertement sous peine de représailles.
Le maire de Brampton, Patrick Brown, qui se présente comme candidat dans la course à la direction du Parti conservateur du Canada, a organisé une levée de fonds pour financer la contestation de la loi québécoise sur la laïcité. Il soutient qu’un jour, au Canada, un premier ministre sera forcé de présenter des excuses officielles pour l’adoption et l’application au Québec de la loi 21. Or, si un jour, l’ignorance fait place au savoir, il se pourrait fort bien que ce soit lui qui doive s’excuser auprès du peuple québécois pour avoir tenté de l’empêcher de l’appliquer !
Les opposants à la laïcité disent ne pas vouloir briser le rêve d’une femme voilée, mais ils sont prêts à briser l’espoir de millions de citoyennes et de citoyens du Québec, dont le mien.
Pourquoi favoriser une société théocratique, laquelle est contraire à la vérité de la science, plutôt que de consentir au gain sociétal apporté par la loi 21 ? La laïcité comporte une neutralité commune consentie par les Québécoises et les Québécois, qui construit lentement mais sûrement la paix du Canada, dont tous pourront bénéficier.
Source: La loi sur la laïcité de l’état marque un progrès pour la société
Expert says genocide is part of humanity, often result of propaganda
2022/04/07 Leave a comment
Unfortunately true, as recent history illustrates, whether Rwanda, China in Xinjiang, or as Russia is trying to do in Ukraine:
As the images of mass graves and murdered civilians in Ukraine flash across our screen, we think of those who commit genocide as pure evil.
But a man who has dedicated his life to fighting the bigotry that causes genocide and has discovered more than 3,100 execution sites and interviewed more than 7,400 victims around the world knows better.
“A human being has the capacity to heal people, to save people, but also the capacity to do the worst crimes,” Father Patrick Desbois said. “The first thing to accept is that genocide is inside humanity.”
Desbois, an author and founder of Yahad-In Unum (Together In One), a non-profit organization dedicated to discovering genocidal practices, spoke Monday night inside the Arizona Ballroom of the Memorial Union as part of Genocide Awareness Week, put on by Arizona State University’s School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies.
Desbois, who has received several awards for his work documenting the Holocaust, including the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest honor, said the perpetrators of genocide often are ordinary people who become embroiled in extraordinary situations.
He cited the case of Sabrina Harmon, a former U.S. Army reservist who was convicted of war crimes for her involvement in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Baghdad during the Iraq war.
“I always say to my students (at Georgetown University) that I’m sure she was a normal girl,” Desbois said. “I’m sure she was not a monster. Genocide is not in a hell place away from everything. It’s not true.”
Genocide often is the result, Desbois said, of propaganda feeding brainwashed minds. It was that way in Nazi Germany, in Angola in the 1970s, in Sudan and in Ukraine, where Russian president Vladimir Putin justified his country’s invasion with the propaganda that Ukraine is “openly pro-Nazi.”
“Hitler never missed people to do the job,” Desbois said. “There is no country where Hitler said, ‘Oh, nobody wants to do the job for killings. He found people to do everything, to dig the mass graves, to fill the mass graves, and even if Jews are not dead, they are buried alive, to take the belongings and sell them by auction, etc. etc.
“Because when you brainwash people, when you make propaganda to designate a target, you wake up the criminals. And you find clients for everything … Why are young soldiers coming from Russa doing awful things in public, under cameras from CNN? Why can Putin deny it every day?
“Propaganda is still strong. Propaganda has a capacity to whitewash the brain. And when people are brainwashed, any violence is possible … Everybody can be a victim. Everybody can be a killer. It depends where you are.”
Desbois said propaganda – and the resulting Neo-Nazi movement — is in part responsible for the rise in anti-Semitism around the world, including the United States. According to FBI statistics in 2020, Jews living in America are the target of 58% of all religiously motivated hate crimes.
Desbois said that when he posts something about the Holocaust on his Facebook page, “there’s always somebody who denies it, for any reason.”
“I will never forget the first time I went to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.,” he said. “I took a cab from the airport and had an Arab driver. I gave the address, and he brought me to the museum. After I went to pay, he told me, ‘You go to a place which shows the genocide that never existed.’”
That attitude, Desbois said, is why it’s important to teach high school and college students about the Holocaust. Already, he said, the Holocaust is not taught in schools in Mexico, Asia, China, India, Russia, most African countries and most Arab countries.
“I see year after year students (at Georgetown) know nothing about the Holocaust,” Desbois said. And the young generation, they will have very few chances to meet a (Holocaust) survivor. They will meet people who say, ‘Ha, it never existed. It’s a Jewish trick to make money to build Israel.’
“So, it’s a strong responsibility to teach, to train a generation of leaders and to do it so that they have the capacity to resist the huge movement of hate.”
“Holocaust by Bullets,” a program and exhibit by Yahad-In Unum, can be seen in the Hayden Library through April 17. Members of the ASU community can access the free exhibit any time during library hours. Non-ASU community members can access the exhibit during docent-led tours from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. on Sundays and from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Mondays.
Source: Expert says genocide is part of humanity, often result of propaganda
America’s culture wars distract from what’s happening beneath them
2022/04/06 Leave a comment
Interesting take. Culture wars as the opium of the people in contrast to some of the underlying structural factors:
The neoliberal order that triumphed in America in the 1990s prized free trade and the free movement of capital, information, and people. It celebrated deregulation as an economic good that resulted when governments could no longer interfere with the operation of markets. It hailed globalization as a win-win position that would enrich the west (the cockpit of neoliberalism) while also bringing an unprecedented level of prosperity to the rest of the world. A remarkable consensus on these creedal principles came to dominate American politics during the heyday of the neoliberal order, binding together Republicans and Democrats and marginalizing dissenting voices to the point where they barely mattered.
Somewhat paradoxically, this broad agreement on matters of political economy nurtured two strikingly different moral perspectives, each of them consonant with the commitment to market principles that underlay the neoliberal order. The first perspective was ‘neo-Victorian’, celebrating self-reliance, strong families, and disciplined attitudes toward work, sexuality, and consumption.
These values were necessary, this moral perspective argued, to gird individuals against market excess – accumulating debt by buying more than one could afford and indulging appetites for sex, drugs, alcohol, and other whims that free markets could be construed as sanctioning. Since neoliberalism frowned upon government regulation of private behavior, some other institution had to provide it. Neo-Victorianism found that institution in the traditional family – heterosexual, governed by male patriarchs, with women subordinate but in charge of homemaking and childrearing.
Such families, guided by faith in God, would inculcate moral virtue in its members and prepare the next generation for the rigors of free market life. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol, George Gilder, and Charles Murray were among the intellectuals guiding this movement, the legions of evangelical Christians mobilized in Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority its mass base.
The other moral perspective encouraged by the neoliberal order was cosmopolitan. A world apart from neo-Victorianism, it saw in market freedom an opportunity to fashion a self or identity that was free of tradition, inheritance, and prescribed social roles. In the United States this moral perspective drew energy from liberation movements originating in the new left – black power, feminism, multiculturalism, and gay pride among them.
Cosmopolitanism was egalitarian and pluralistic. It rejected the notion that the patriarchal, heterosexual family should be celebrated as the norm. It embraced globalization and the free movement of people, and the transnational links that the neoliberal order had made possible. It valorized the good that would come from diverse peoples meeting each other, sharing their cultures, and developing new and often hybridized ways of living. It celebrated the cultural exchanges and dynamism that increasingly characterized the global cities – London, Paris, New York, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Toronto, Miami among them – flourishing under the aegis of the neoliberal order.
The existence of two such different moral perspectives was both a strength and a weakness for the neoliberal order. The strength lay in the order’s ability to accommodate within a common program of political economy very different constituencies with radically divergent perspectives on moral life. The weakness lay in the fact that the cultural battles between these two constituencies might threaten to erode the hegemony of neoliberal economic principles.
The cosmopolitans attacked neo-Victorians for discriminating against gay people, feminists, and immigrants, and for stigmatizing the black poor for their so-called “culture of poverty”. The neo-Victorians attacked the cosmopolitans for tolerating virtually any lifestyle, for excusing what they deemed to be deplorable behavior as an exercise in the toleration of difference, and for showing a higher regard for foreign cultures than for America’s own. The decade of the neoliberal order’s triumph – the 1990s – was also one in which cosmopolitans and neo-Victorians fought each other in a series of battles that became known as the “culture wars”. In fact, a focus on these cultural divisions is the preferred way of writing the political history of these years.
Just beneath this cultural polarization, however, lay a fundamental agreement on principles of political economy. This intriguing coexistence of cultural division and economic accord manifested itself in the complex relationship between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. In the media, they were depicted (and depicted themselves) as opposites, sworn to each other’s destruction. Clinton offered himself as the tribune of the new America, one welcoming of racial minorities, feminists, and gays. He was thought to embody the spirit of the 1960s and something of the insurgent, free-spirited character of the new left. Gingrich presented himself as the guardian of an older and “truer” America, one grounded in faith, patriotism, respect for law and order, and family values. Gingrich publicly pledged himself and his party to obstructing Clinton at every turn. Clinton, meanwhile, regarded Gingrich as the unscrupulous leader of a vast right-wing conspiracy to undermine his presidency.
Yet, despite their differences and their hatred for each other, these two Washington powerbrokers worked together on neoliberal legislation that would shape America’s political economy for a generation. They both supported the World Trade Organization, which debuted in 1995 to turbocharge a global regime of free trade. Their aides jointly engineered the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which did more than any other piece of legislation in the 1980s and 1990s to free the most dynamic sector of the US economy from government regulation.
Major pieces of legislation deregulating the electrical generation industry and Wall Street followed closely in the telecom bill’s wake. Clinton and Gingrich also worked together to pare back the welfare state, sharing a conviction that the tough, disciplining effects of job markets would benefit the poor more than state-subsidized “handouts”. Clinton’s collaboration with Gingrich had facilitated the neoliberal order’s triumph.
That order is now on the wane, its once unassailable principles of free trade, free markets, and the free movement of people now disputed on a daily basis. Meanwhile, public attention focuses on yet another chapter in the culture wars, with the American people divided, irredeemably it seems, over vaccination, critical race theory, and whether Donald Trump should be lauded as an American hero or jailed for acts of treason.
Yet, beneath the churn, one can detect hints of new common ground on economic matters emerging. Trump and Bernie Sanders have both worked to turn the country away from free trade and toward a protectionist future promising better jobs and higher wages. Senators Josh Hawley and Amy Klobuchar have both been warning the American people about the dangers of concentrated corporate power and the “tyranny of high tech”; and bipartisanship is driving movements in Congress to commit public funds to the nation’s physical infrastructure and to industrial policies deemed vital to economic wellbeing and national security. It is too soon to know whether these incipient collaborative efforts indicate that a new kind of political economy is in fact taking shape and, if it is, whose interests it will serve. But these developments underscore, once again, the importance of looking beyond and beneath the culture wars for clues as to where American politics and society might be heading.
Gary Gerstle is a Guardian US columnist. Excerpted and adapted from The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (Oxford University Press, 2022)
Source: America’s culture wars distract from what’s happening beneath them
Canada’s big six banks almost came together to help Black entrepreneurs – but then they went their separate ways
2022/04/06 Leave a comment
Of note. Visions are easier than implementation:
The Black Entrepreneurship Loan Fund started with a vision: bring government and financial institutions together to provide a pool of money that would help Black business owners, who disproportionately face systemic barriers to accessing capital.
When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau launched the program on May 31, 2021, he was joined by members of his government, representatives of financial institutions and leaders in the Black business community. No one from Canada’s big six banks spoke, but Small Business Minister Mary Ng said the banks were on board and were putting up $128-million to help fund the program – nearly half its budget.
Although the banks had been at the table for months, they had all walked away just days before the launch. And the millions of dollars they had supposedly committed to the fund never arrived.
Instead of a single fund, what has evolved is a patchwork system, where it’s largely public money that is at stake and the big six banks – Bank of Montreal, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, National Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, Bank of Nova Scotia and Toronto-Dominion Bank – offer their own individual programs that vary widely in how generous they are and how vigorously they try to get funding into the hands of Black entrepreneurs who need it.
Those who cheer the current system say Black business owners are given a wider choice of loan programs than they would have been offered under a centralized government program. And they argue that, if all the private money that has been promised is spent, there will be a larger total amount of funds available.
But, others say, the scattered approach means there is no national standard for how to reform access to credit – a long-standing concern of Black entrepreneurs – and little transparency concerning what the various programs have to offer.
When the pandemic started, in spring 2020, Tiffany Callender was executive director of the Côte-des-Neiges Black Community Association, in Montreal. At the time, she said, she and other leaders at nonprofits serving the Black business community watched the federal government roll out the Canada Emergency Business Account (CEBA), a loan program for companies affected by COVID-19. She worried that the loans – which were backed by the government but distributed through banks – would be just as inaccessible to Black entrepreneurs as traditional bank loans were.
“The criteria that were set, we knew innately that a lot of Black entrepreneurs would not qualify,” Ms. Callender said.
Black business owners have long said lack of access to capital is one of their biggest challenges. Last year, in an Abacus Data survey of more than 300 Black entrepreneurs, nearly eight in 10 said it would be difficult or impossible to find even $10,000 to support their companies. Fewer than one in five said they trusted banks to do what is right for them.
Black Canadians have a much lower rate of homeownership than the national average, which means they are less likely to be able to use houses as collateral on businesses loans. And, according to Statistics Canada, more than half of Canada’s Black population is made up of first-generation immigrants, many of whom have low credit scores simply because they haven’t had much time to build up their credit history in this country.
Ms. Callender said she and representatives of other Black-led community organizations met with MPs during the early months of the pandemic. George Floyd had just been murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minn., and there was widespread public discussion about racial discrimination. Institutions wanted to make changes to address those issues, and be seen to be making changes.
Ms. Ng became the lead minister on the file. Her office recruited representatives from Canada’s big six banks to sit with members of the Black business community and craft an ambitious lending program that would make an unprecedented amount of funding available to Black entrepreneurs.
What followed were months of talks that, participants said, included frank discussions about the barriers Black entrepreneurs face, and also about the constraints banks in the heavily regulated financial sector felt they were up against in making change.
“The kinds of conversations that took place over that year were, really, between the Black entrepreneurs and the financial institutions, with the federal government at the table. It was really to begin to understand where some of those challenges really were,” Ms. Ng said.
A key issue for the banks was what level of risk they were prepared to take on if, for example, they were to accept loan applicants with credit scores lower than their usual minimums.
Four sources with knowledge of or involvement in the talks said the financial institutions wanted the government to guarantee the loans. The government had done so with CEBA, but did not want to extend similar protections to the Black entrepreneurship program.
The Globe and Mail is not identifying the sources because they were not authorized to discuss the private negotiations publicly.
One of the sources, a senior government official, said the minister’s office was concerned that, if the changes were linked to full loan guarantees, they would last only as long as the guarantees were in place. The official said the government did explore options for guaranteeing portions of the loans, but did not settle with the banks on how that would work.
As talks continued for months, the banks grew more uncomfortable with collaborating with one another and with the government.
Ultimately, with the public announcement of the program just days away, the banks raised concerns about whether they could co-operate on a lending program without violating the law, four sources said.
The Competition Act contains criminal and civil provisions that prohibit collusion between financial institutions. But the act also spells out some circumstances in which financial institutions can collaborate. For example, one exception allows banks to work together on guaranteed loan programs created by Parliament – such as CEBA. Another exception allows the federal finance minister to endorse a collaboration if it is in service of a financial policy.
The government did not want to guarantee the loans, so the first option was out. The senior government official said the government considered the second option. But it had never been used before, and officials were reluctant to set a precedent.
The banks pulled out. The government quickly instructed the Business Development Bank of Canada, a Crown corporation, to provide $130-million to back the loan program, along with $33-million from the government itself. The government publicly said the banks would join in a second phase of the program and provide $128-million, so that the total budget of the fund would be $291-million.
The second phase was never announced. For much of the past year, the government’s website continued to say it was coming.
When The Globe began to inquire about that claim in late February, the government said the banks were still considered the program’s partners. But it was at this point that the website changed. Mention of the big banks was removed. And the overall budget of the program, once touted as $291-million, was revised down to $160-million, meaning the bank money was no longer being counted.
The Globe contacted each of the big six banks, but all declined to explain why they left the program.
The Black Entrepreneurship Loan Fund launched in two parts: a large loan program, and a microcredit program.
The large loans provide up to $250,000 to each applicant, with financial backing from the government. The microcredit stream provides privately funded loans of between $10,000 and $25,000, and is run through two credit unions: Alterna, in Ontario, and Vancity, in British Columbia.
The microloan programs are modelled after similar programs the two credit unions have run for years, which aim to get money into the hands of people who might be denied traditional bank loans.
Bill Cunningham, Vancity’s vice-president of community, business and real estate, said his organization will consider low credit scores by looking at what contributed to them. He said there is a difference between an applicant whose low score is because of negative factors – such as a bankruptcy – and someone whose score is low because they are a new Canadian who hasn’t had time to build up their credit history.
The large loans are reviewed and administered by the Federation of African Canadian Economics (FACE), a Black-led organization created for the purpose and led by Ms. Callender. It’s a coalition of five Black business groups: the Côte-des-Neiges Black Community Association and Groupe 3737, in Montreal; the Black Business and Professional Association, in Toronto; the Africa Centre, in Edmonton; and the Black Business Initiative, in Halifax.
The launch was rocky. The announcement and the promised millions of dollars for Black businesses led to thousands of applications. But FACE, which had just been built from scratch, was woefully understaffed and unprepared for the surge. The organization is still digging through the backlog.
Cheryl Sutherland, a Toronto entrepreneur who owns an e-commerce stationery business called PleaseNotes, said she applied for a loan shortly after the program launched and still hasn’t received an update on her file, more than nine months later.
She said the BBPA, one of the groups that helped found FACE, recently sent out a mass e-mail to loan applicants inviting them to a webinar. But the organization forgot to hide the addresses of recipients, which led to a group e-mail chain full of complaints
“It’s kind of, unfortunately, indicative of what ends up happening for a lot of things that they create for people of colour,” she said, referring to government programs in general. “It’s like, yeah, we’re doing something, but it’s all smoke and mirrors.”
FACE said it has received 16,000 applications and approved $14-million in loans.
One of the recipients is Margaret Adekunle, the founder and chief executive officer of City Lending Centres, in Edmonton. Her company provides credit cards and credit-education services to Black Canadians and immigrants in the area.
Ms. Adekunle, who has a background in financial services, said she faced skepticism from banks when she began to inquire about a startup loan in 2021. She said she felt much more supported when she applied for the federal loan.
“I think they understood what I was trying to do for the community and they believed in it from the beginning,” she said.
In the year since the federal loan fund launched, the big six banks have pursued their own programs.
National Bank said it had made a $1.25-million donation to the Black Opportunity Fund, an endowment started in 2020 by a group of Bay Street executives, and that it had also partnered with the BOF to create a $5-million investment fund. The bank said it had also given $10-million to EVOL, a Quebec-based organization that supports diverse business ownership.
Scotiabank said it is spending $500-million over 10 years on its ScotiaRISE initiative, which aims to direct money toward underrepresented groups, including the Black community.
TD said it would donate $10-million to the BOF over five years. The bank said it is focusing on its Black Customer Experience Strategy, which aims to improve relations with Black clients.
Three banks have unveiled programs similar to the federal one.
In October, RBC launched the RBC Black Entrepreneur Business Loan, which provides up to $250,000 to each applicant. RBC said the program is part of a five-year, $100-million commitment the bank made in 2020 to supporting Black communities.
In January, CIBC launched the CIBC Black Entrepreneur Program, which provides loans of up to $250,000 as part of a $15-million investment. The bank said it was working with the BOF and the Canadian Black Chamber of Commerce.
And in February, BMO launched Business Within Reach: BMO for Black Entrepreneurs, which provides loans of up to $250,000 as part of a $100-million commitment. The bank said it was also working in partnership with the BOF.
All the federal and bank loans are repayable in 10 years. The federal loans have interest rates of between 6 and 8 per cent. CIBC said its interest rate is the bank’s prime rate plus 1.25 to 3 per cent. RBC and BMO wouldn’t reveal their interest rates.
None of the three banks would say how many applications they have received so far, or how many loans they have disbursed.
Craig Wellington, executive director of the BOF, said his organization has spoken to hundreds of Black entrepreneurs about the financial barriers they face and has shared those lessons with some of the banks.
He said the BOF is working closely with CIBC on its program, and he encouraged Black business owners who had previously been denied loans to try again.
“Because they were declined a year, a year and a half ago by CIBC does not mean they will be declined from this current program,” he said.
But some entrepreneurs say any change hasn’t gone far enough.
Before launching her business last year, Ms. Adekunle had worked as a branch manager for three different banks over the course of 20 years. She said she looked into the terms of the banks’ Black entrepreneur programs and spoke to former colleagues to get a better sense of how they worked.
“What I was trying to figure out was, what really makes what they’re offering a Black entrepreneurship program? What is different? What is new?” she said.
She came away with the impression that the only thing different was the word “Black” in the names. “It’s the same criteria,” she said.
Australia: ‘Beyond the pale’: PM rocked by new claims
2022/04/05 Leave a comment
Difference of interpretation or dog whistle?
Scott Morrison has been hit with fresh claims he sought to exploit anti-Muslim sentiment, with two witnesses to a shadow cabinet meeting in 2010 insisting there was a “blow up” with Malcolm Turnbull over the issue.
The Prime Minister has previously confirmed the discussion in an interview with The Project’s Waleed Aly, but insisted he sought to cool voter concerns over Muslim migration, not exploit it.
However, two people who attended the meeting on December 1, 2010 have told news.com.au they did not believe he raised the issue purely to address voter sentiment.
“Malcolm Turnbull genuinely ripped into him. Said it was ‘beyond the pale’,” a Liberal source said.
Another Liberal shadow cabinet member at the time told news.com.au: “He absolutely did talk about the Muslim migration.”
“He flagged it and I remember Phillip Ruddock was very scathing about it,” they said.
Reports of the meeting first emerged in 2011, with claims Mr Morrison urged the shadow cabinet to capitalise on the electorate’s growing concerns about “Muslim immigration”, “Muslims in Australia” and the “inability” of Muslim migrants to integrate.
Then-opposition leader Tony Abbott was not at the meeting, but deputy leader, Julie Bishop, and the former immigration minister, Philip Ruddock, strongly disagreed with the suggestion, pointing out the Coalition had long supported a non-discriminatory immigration policy.
Liberal sources said at the time Mr Morrison told the shadow cabinet meeting on December 1 at the Ryde Civic Centre that the Coalition should ramp up its questioning of “multiculturalism” amid deep voter concerns.
Three years ago, when the claims surfaced again, Prime Minister Scott Morrison described them as “a disgusting lie”.
Mr Morrison abruptly shut down a press conference when he was asked, “Those that did attend the meeting told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2011, quote, that Scott said, ‘What are we going to do about multiculturalism?’”
“I’m going to stop you there. I’ve already addressed this issue today. It is an ugly and repugnant lie,” Mr Morrison said.
“I reject it absolutely 100 per cent and my record of working with the Muslim community in Sydney in particular speaks volumes for my track record. Any suggestion to the contrary, I find utterly offensive. Thank you.”
But just 24 hours later, he confirmed he had raised concerns over the “anti-Muslim” sentiment of voters during a 2010 shadow cabinet meeting, but insisted it was only to “address them, not exploit them”.
Mr Morrison confirmed the discussions with The Project’s Waleed Aly in March 2019.
It was the first time the PM has admitted the discussions on “anti-Muslim” sentiments occurred, after describing claims he had sought to capitalise on the fears as “an ugly and disgusting lie” just 24 hours earlier.
In the interview, Aly asked: “Who is lying? You say that this never happened. You’ve called it a smear and a lie. Who is lying?”
Mr Morrison then blamed two “unnamed sources” in shadow cabinet – Liberal MPs – for twisting the truth of the meeting into “a lie”.
“What is suggested is that I said that we should exploit – exploit – concerns about Islam in the community to our political advantage,” Mr Morrison said.
“Well, I was the shadow immigration minister at the time. And I was very concerned about these issues and the way people were feeling in the community.”
In 2011, Liberal finance spokesman Andrew Robb confirmed that “Scott did talk about the strong feelings in the general community about Muslim immigration and he said that we as a party had to engage with that sentiment”.
“But I’m sure he meant we should engage in a constructive way,” Mr Robb said.
The story first emerged after Mr Morrison questioned the cost of asylum-seeker funerals in 2011. Mr Morrison later apologised for the “timing” of his comments, saying it was “inappropriate” and “insensitive”.
When Aly asked the Prime Minister about Mr Robb’s on-the-record confirmation that he had discussed anti-Muslim sentiment, Mr Morrison confirmed he had discussed it in the meeting.
“I was concerned that we needed to address them. Which is what I have been doing inside and outside of the Parliament for the last 10 years of my life,’’ he said.
“Yes – to lower them. I was acknowledging that there were these fears in the community and we had to address them, not exploit them.”
“I want to rule a line under this issue. It never happened. I have always been deeply concerned about attitudes towards people of Muslim faith in our community.”
Mr Morrison ended the interview with a plea for voters to respect his sincerity on fostering good relationships with the Muslim community.
“Don’t pre-judge me. I know what my values are,” he said.
Helping Hollywood Avoid Claims of Bias Is Now a Growing Business
2022/04/04 Leave a comment
Business will find a way…
In the summer of 2020, not long after the murder of George Floyd spurred a racial reckoning in America, Carri Twigg’s phone kept ringing.
Ms. Twigg, a founding partner of a production company named Culture House, was asked over and over again if she could take a look at a television or movie script and raise any red flags, particularly on race.
Culture House, which employs mostly women of color, had traditionally specialized in documentaries. But after a few months of fielding the requests about scripts, they decided to make a business of it: They opened a new division dedicated solely to consulting work.
“The frequency of the check-ins was not slowing down,” Ms. Twigg said. “It was like, oh, we need to make this a real thing that we offer consistently — and get paid for.”
Though the company has been consulting for a little more than a year — for clients like Paramount Pictures, MTV and Disney — that work now accounts for 30 percent of Culture House’s revenue.
Culture House is hardly alone. In recent years, entertainment executives have vowed to make a genuine commitment to diversity, but are still routinely criticized for falling short. To signal that they are taking steps to address the issue, Hollywood studios have signed contracts with numerous companies and nonprofits to help them avoid the reputational damage that comes with having a movie or an episode of a TV show face accusations of bias.
“When a great idea is there and then it’s only talked about because of the social implications, that must be heartbreaking for creators who spend years on something,” Ms. Twigg said. “To get it into the world and the only thing anyone wants to talk about are the ways it came up short. So we’re trying to help make that not happen.”
The consulting work runs the gamut of a production. The consulting companies sometimes are asked about casting decisions as well as marketing plans. And they may also read scripts to search for examples of bias and to scrutinize how characters are positioned in a story.
“It’s not only about what characters say, it’s also about when they don’t speak,” Ms. Twigg said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, there’s not enough agency for this character, you’re using this character as an ornament, you’re going to get dinged for that.’”
When a consulting firm is on retainer, it can also come with a guaranteed check every month from a studio. And it’s a revenue stream developed only recently.
“It really exploded in the last two years or so,” said Michelle K. Sugihara, the executive director of Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment, a nonprofit. The group, called CAPE, is on retainer to some of the biggest Hollywood studios, including Netflix, Paramount, Warner Bros., Amazon, Sony and A24.
Of the 100 projects that CAPE has consulted on, Ms. Sugihara said, roughly 80 percent have come since 2020, and they “really increased” after the Atlanta spa shootings in March 2021. “That really ramped up attention on our community,” she said.
Ms. Sugihara said her group could be actively involved throughout the production process. In one example, she said she told a studio that all of the actors playing the heroes in an upcoming scripted project appeared to be light-skinned East Asian people whereas the villains were portrayed by darker-skinned East Asian actors.
“That’s a red flag,” she said. “And we should talk about how those images may be harmful. Sometimes it’s just things that people aren’t even conscious about until you point it out.”
Ms. Sugihara would not mention the name of the project or the studio behind it. In interviews, many cited nondisclosure agreements with the studios and a reluctance to embarrass a filmmaker as reasons they could not divulge specifics.
Sarah Kate Ellis, the president of GLAAD, the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy organization, said her group had been doing consulting work informally for years with the networks and studios. Finally, she decided to start charging the studios for their labor — work that she compared to “billable hours.”
“Here we were consulting with all these content creators across Hollywood and not being compensated,” said Ms. Ellis, the organization’s president since 2013. “When I started at GLAAD we couldn’t pay our bills. And meanwhile here we are with the biggest studios and networks in the world, helping them tell stories that were hits. And I said this doesn’t make sense.”
In 2018, she created the GLAAD Media Institute — if the networks or studios wanted any help in the future, they’d have to become a paying member of the institute.
Initially, there was some pushback but the networks and studios would eventually come around. In 2018, there were zero members of the GLAAD Media Institute. By the end of 2021, that number had swelled to 58, with nearly every major studio and network in Hollywood now a paying member.
Scott Turner Schofield, who has spent some time working as a consultant for GLAAD, has also been advising networks and studios on how to accurately depict transgender people for years. But he said the work had increased so significantly in recent years that he was brought on board as an executive producer for a forthcoming horror movie produced by Blumhouse.
“I’ve gone from someone who was a part-time consultant — barely eking by — to being an executive producer,” he said.
Those interviewed said that it was a win-win arrangement between the consultancies and the studios.
“The studios at the end of the day, they want to produce content but they want to make money,” said Rashad Robinson, the president of the advocacy organization Color of Change. “Making money can be impeded because of poor decisions and not having the right people at the table. So the studios are going to want to seek that.”
He did caution, however, that simply bringing on consultants was not an adequate substitute for the structural change that many advocates want to see in Hollywood.
“This doesn’t change the rules with who gets to produce content and who gets to make the final decisions of what gets on the air,” he said. “It’s fine to bring folks in from the outside but that in the end is insufficient to the fact that across the entertainment industry there is still a problem in terms of not enough Black and brown people with power in the executive ranks.”
Still, the burgeoning field of cultural consultancy work may be here to stay. Ms. Twigg, who helped found Culture House with Raeshem Nijhon and Nicole Galovski, said that the volume of requests she was getting was “illustrative of how seriously it’s being taken, and how comprehensively it’s being brought into the fabric of doing business.”
“From a business standpoint, it’s a way for us to capitalize on the expertise that we have gathered as people of color who have been alive in America for 30 or 40 years,” she said.
Source: Helping Hollywood Avoid Claims of Bias Is Now a Growing Business
Immigration Canada acts to end racism, cultural bias among employees
2022/04/04 Leave a comment
Of note:
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) is conducting a study to explore potential cultural bias shown by its employees when it comes to processing visa applications at the country’s points of entry, according to a department spokesperson.
The study comes in response to a survey examining workplace racism at IRCC released last year that revealed multiple reports of racist “microagressions” by employees and supervisors.
Participants interviewed said that some of the overt and subtle racism they have witnessed by both employees and decision makers at IRCC “can and probably must impact case processing.”
The department has also made it mandatory for employees and executives to take unconscious bias training, and instituted a requirement for senior staff to take a specific course on inclusive hiring practices as a prerequisite for obtaining their delegated authority to sign financial and staffing decisions.
In addition, said spokesperson Jeffrey MacDonald, IRCC is appointing anti-racism representatives in each sector of the department to support the work of a newly-established Anti-Racism Task Force and has created a Black Employee Network to ensure Black voices are heard in driving change.
“We must actively fight racism and continue to work tirelessly to foster a culture of inclusion, diversity, and respect…but actions speak louder than words,” MacDonald told New Canadian Media through email.
MacDonald said IRCC will be hiring an independent firm to do an Employment System Review (ESR). The ESR will identify new solutions in core areas such as people management practices and accountability.
IRCC also plans to release its Anti-Racism Strategy and action plan later this year.
Source: Immigration Canada acts to end racism, cultural bias among employees
Cuts in Britain Could Cause a Covid Data Drought
2022/04/04 Leave a comment
Unfortunately, many governments are short sighted.
Canada did the same when it disbanded the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) the year before the pandemic, many provinces are no longer carrying out regular testing and reducing the frequency of reporting etc.
Interesting example of South Africa and how it is able to maintain monitoring at a reasonable cost:
The British government on Friday shut down or scaled back a number of its Covid surveillance programs, curtailing the collection of data that the United States and many other countries had come to rely on to understand the threat posed by emerging variants and the effectiveness of vaccines. Denmark, too, renowned for insights from its comprehensive tests, has drastically cut back on its virus tracking efforts in recent months.
As more countries loosen their policies toward living with Covid rather than snuffing it out, health experts worry that monitoring systems will become weaker, making it more difficult to predict new surges and to make sense of emerging variants.
“Things are going to get harder now,” Samuel Scarpino, a managing director at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute, said. “And right as things get hard, we’re dialing back the data systems.”
Since the Alpha variant emerged in the fall of 2020, Britain has served as a bellwether, tracking that variant as well as Delta and Omicron before they arrived in the United States. After a slow start, American genomic surveillance efforts have steadily improved with a modest increase in funding.
“This might actually put the U.S. in more of a leadership position,” said Kristian Andersen, a virologist at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.
At the start of the pandemic, Britain was especially well prepared to set up a world-class virus tracking program. The country was already home to many experts on virus evolution, it had large labs ready to sequence viral genes, and it could link that sequencing to electronic records from its National Health Service.
In March 2020, British researchers created a consortium to sequence as many viral genomes as they could lay hands on. Some samples came from tests that people took when they felt ill, others came from hospitals, and still others came from national surveys.
That last category was especially important, experts said. By testing hundreds of thousands of people at random each month, the researchers could detect new variants and outbreaks among people who didn’t even know they were sick, rather than waiting for tests to come from clinics or hospitals.
“The community testing has been the most rapid indicator of changes to the epidemic, and it’s also been the most rapid indicator of the appearance of new variants,” said Christophe Fraser, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford. “It’s really the key tool.”
By late 2020, Britain was performing genomic sequencing on thousands of virus samples a week from surveys and tests, supplying online databases with more than half of the world’s coronavirus genomes. That December, this data allowed researchers to identify Alpha, the first coronavirus variant, in an outbreak in southeastern England.
A few other countries stood out for their efforts to track the virus’s evolution. Denmark set up an ambitious system for sequencing most of its positive coronavirus tests. Israel combined viral tracking with aggressive vaccination, quickly producing evidence last summer that the vaccines were becoming less effective — data that other countries leaned on in their decision to approve boosters.
But Britain remained the exemplar in not only sequencing viral genomes, but combining that information with medical records and epidemiology to make sense of the variants.
“The U.K. really set itself up to give information to the whole world,” said Jeffrey Barrett, the former director of the Covid-19 Genomics Initiative at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Britain.
Even in the past few weeks, Britain’s surveillance systems were giving the world crucial information about the BA.2 subvariant of Omicron. British researchers established that the variant does not pose a greater risk of hospitalization than other forms of Omicron but is more transmissible.
On Friday, two of the country’s routine virus surveys were shut down and a third was scaled back, baffling Dr. Fraser and many other researchers, particularly when those surveys now show that Britain’s Covid infection rates are estimated to have reached a record high: one in 13 people. The government also stopped paying for free tests, and either canceled or paused contact-tracing apps and sewage sampling programs.
“I don’t understand what the strategy is, to put together these very large instruments and then dismantle them,” Dr. Fraser said.
The cuts have come as Prime Minister Boris Johnson has called for Britain to “learn to live with this virus.” When the government released its plans in February, it pointed to the success of the country’s vaccination program and the high costs of various virus programs. Although it would be scaling back surveillance, it said, “the government will continue to monitor cases, in hospital settings in particular, including using genomic sequencing, which will allow some insights into the evolution of the virus.”
It’s true that life with Covid is different now than it was back in the spring of 2020. Vaccines drastically reduce the risk of hospitalization and death — at least in countries that have vaccinated enough people. Antiviral pills and other treatments can further blunt Covid’s devastation, although they’re still in short supply in much of the world.
Supplying free tests and running large-scale surveys is expensive, Dr. Barrett acknowledged, and after two years, it made sense that countries would look for ways to curb spending. “I do understand it’s a tricky position for governments,” he said.
But he expressed worry that cutting back too far on genomic surveillance would leave Britain unprepared for a new variant. “You don’t want to be blind on that,” he said
With a reduction in testing, Steven Paterson, a geneticist at the University of Liverpool, pointed out that Britain will have fewer viruses to sequence. He estimated the sequencing output could drop by 80 percent.
“Whichever way you look at it, it’s going to lead very much to a degradation of the insight that we can have, either into the numbers of infections, or our ability to spot new variants as they come through,” Dr. Paterson said.
Experts warned that it will be difficult to restart surveillance programs of the coronavirus, known formally as SARS-CoV-2, when a new variant emerges.
“If there’s one thing we know about SARS-CoV-2, it’s that it always surprises us,” said Paul Elliott, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London and a lead investigator on one of the community surveys being cut. “Things can change really, really quickly.”
Other countries are also applying a live-with-Covid philosophy to their surveillance. Denmark’s testing rate has dropped nearly 90 percent from its January peak. The Danish government announced on March 10 that tests would be required only for certain medical reasons, such as pregnancy.
Astrid Iversen, an Oxford virologist who has consulted for the Danish government, expressed worry that the country was trying to convince itself the pandemic was over. “The virus hasn’t gotten the email,” she said.
With the drop in testing, she said, the daily case count in Denmark doesn’t reflect the true state of the pandemic as well as before. But the country is ramping up widespread testing of wastewater, which might work well enough to monitor new variants. If the wastewater revealed an alarming spike, the country could start its testing again.
“I feel confident that Denmark will be able to scale up,” she said.
Israel has also seen a drastic drop in testing, but Ran Balicer, the director of the Clalit Research Institute, said the country’s health care systems will continue to track variants and monitor the effectiveness of vaccines. “For us, living with Covid does not mean ignoring Covid,” he said.
While Britain and Denmark have been cutting back on surveillance, one country offers a model of robust-yet-affordable virus monitoring: South Africa.
South Africa rose to prominence in November, when researchers there first discovered Omicron. The feat was all the more impressive given that the country sequences only a few hundred virus genomes a week.
Tulio de Oliveira, the director of South Africa’s Centre for Epidemic Response & Innovation, credited the design of the survey for its success. He and his colleagues randomly pick out test results from every province across the country to sequence. That method ensures that a bias in their survey doesn’t lead them to miss something important.
It also means that they run much leaner operations than those of richer countries. Since its start in early 2020, the survey has cost just $2.1 million. “It’s much more sustainable,” Dr. de Oliveira said.
In contrast, many countries in Africa and Asia have yet to start any substantial sequencing. “We are blind to many parts of the world,” said Elodie Ghedin, a viral genomics expert at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The United States has traveled a course of its own. In early 2021, when the Alpha variant swept across the country, American researchers were sequencing only a tiny fraction of positive Covid tests. “We were far behind Britain,” Dr. Ghedin said.
Since then, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has helped state and local public health departments start doing their own sequencing of virus genomes. While countries like Britain and Denmark pull back on surveillance, the United States is still ramping up its efforts. Last month, the C.D.C. announced a $185 million initiative to support sequencing centers at universities.
Still, budget fights in Washington are bringing uncertainty to the country’s long-term surveillance. And the United States faces obstacles that other wealthy countries don’t.
Without a national health care system, the country cannot link each virus sample with a person’s medical records. And the United States has not set up a regularly updated national survey of the sort that has served the United Kingdom and South Africa so well.
“All scientists would love it if we had something like that,” Dr. Ghedin said. “But we have to work with the confines of our system.”
Multiculturalism in Canada: Evidence and Anecdote
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Multicultural Meanderings 