Canadian soccer proves the power of citizenship

2022/02/08 Leave a comment

Sharp contrast.

While I have little patience with the Ottawa protesters/occupiers, there is a range between the organizers, who are extremists, and others who are frustrated (as all of us are).

But given the nature of the organizers, the many symbols of hate and the aggressive and abusive behaviour of many of those protesting, those who tolerate r don’t call out that behaviour are complicit:

It was a tale of two screens last Sunday.

On my phone, I was watching a stream of mostly white protesters rampaging around Ottawa, brandishing swastikas and Confederate flags, desecrating monuments, harassing journalists, assaulting homeless people and hurling racial slurs at those who stood in their way — even attacking ambulances rushing to patients in distress.

On TV, I watched the Canadian men’s soccer team pull off a gutsy, determined 2-0 victory over the United States — epitomizing the very best of the Canadian spirit and inching ever closer to qualifying for Canada’s first World Cup since 1986.

Two screens. Two Canadas. One closed to the world, fearful, and drenched in hate. The other, open to the world, confidently competing with the best in the world, made up of people from around the world who are proud Canadians by choice.

Canada’s new-found soccer success would not be possible without our ambitious immigration policy, which both Conservative and Liberal governments have supported over decades.

Just look at the makeup of the team. Canada’s star player, Alphonso Davies, was born in a Ghanaian refugee camp after his parents fled civil war in Liberia. Sunday’s goals were scored by Cyle Larin (Jamaican parents) and Sam Adekugbe (U.K.-born to Nigerian parents), with assists by Jonathan Osorio (Columbian parents) and Jonathan David (U.S.-born to Haitian parents). The Americans had a golden chance to tie the game late in the first half, but were denied by a highlight-reel save from Canada’s Yugoslavian-born goalkeeper, Milan Borjan, who celebrated emphatically before the sold-out crowd in his family’s chosen hometown of Hamilton, Ont.

But Canada’s immigration story is not the immaculate success we might think. This year marks the 75th anniversary of Canada having its own citizenship independent of Great Britain, yet the proportion of immigrants who become citizens dropped by 20 per cent between 1996 and 2016, the latest year for which data is available. It doesn’t help that, right now, more than 400,000 citizenship applications are sitting in a warehouse somewhere, awaiting processing by an outmatched bureaucracy that is only just getting around to allowing online applications. Citizenship applications now take more than two years to process — which doesn’t seem like evidence of a country eager to welcome new citizens.

Canadians continue to strongly support immigration, but too often it’s framed in purely economic terms. For example, in her last fall economic statement, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland devoted $85 million to reduce processing times. This is because “immigration is critical for Canada’s economic growth, especially when it comes to attracting top global talent, meeting the needs of employers and addressing labour shortages,” as the government’s Economic and Fiscal Update 2021 put it.

But immigrants aren’t just workers. They are future citizens, future voters and future owners of our society. If we believe that to be true, we need to behave accordingly.

The immigrant-rich Canadian team I watched on TV last Sunday proves that when people believe in Canada and feel an equal part of it, they will give their heart and soul to make it great, no matter where they were born. These wonderful athletes have inspired the nation with their toughness, togetherness and talent. They and their families have done so much more for Canada than simply “meeting the needs of employers and addressing labour shortages.”

The second screen, though, was no less true. The hateful bunch in Ottawa — and the MPs who still stand by them — show another side of Canada that we cannot simply wish away. And they demonstrate very clearly the attitudes newcomers often encounter, alongside racialized people born in Canada. Maybe that’s one reason why citizenship rates are falling.

Maybe immigrants see the rise in hate and xenophobia, and take it more seriously than some Canadian-born citizens, who have only known democracy and don’t understand its fragility. Maybe they see their paperwork languishing in bureaucratic limbo for years and conclude that Canada doesn’t care.

But the soccer stars show that we have reason to care, and that we ought to get serious about respecting newcomers as citizens-to-be from day one. Because when newcomers believe in Canada and seem themselves in our future, we can take on the best in the world, and win.

Source: Canadian soccer proves the power of citizenship

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Court lets Priti Patel keep charging children £1012 for citizenship

2022/02/08 Leave a comment

Of note, law should to be changed from this “profiteering:”

The Home Office will continue to make a £640 profit on each child charged for British citizenship, as of a court ruling on 2 February.

The Supreme Court ended the four-year long fight against fees charged for children, some of whom were born in the UK, to become British citizens. Even if they were born in the UK, some children whose parents have a certain immigration status are not automatically British citizens – their families have to apply for citizenship for them.

While the court recognised that the £1,012 charged for each child was far above the administration cost of registering them as British citizens (£372) it concluded that parliament had allowed the government to set a fee above the ability of applicants to pay – which means it’s up to MPs or peers to change it.

The previous home secretary, Sajid Javid, described the fee as “a huge amount of money for a child to pay”, but failed to change it while in office.

Members of the House of Lords last week attempted to amend the Nationality and Borders Bill to reduce the fee to £372, covering the administrative costs, and to scrap it for children in care.

Child O, who was at the centre of the case, was born in the UK and has never left the country but their family was unable to pay the fee when applying for citizenship when Child O was ten. The now 14-year-old said they felt “very let down and alone”.

Campaigners say excluding these children and young people from British citizenship causes them to feel alienated, excluded and isolated in their home country, and are calling for the fee to be lowered or scrapped entirely for children in care or who are unable to afford it.

Their case was taken up by Amnesty International UK, and the Project for the Registration of Children as British Citizens (PRCBC).

“This fee deprives thousands of children of their citizenship rights, yet the Home Office has chosen to keep overcharging, despite the alienation and exclusion this is causing,” said Steve Valdez-Symonds, Amnesty International UK’s refugee and migrant rights director.

Sam Genen, the lawyer who represented Amnesty in the case, said: “It is disappointing that the Supreme Court granted permission to hear arguments [on international law] but chose not to decide them.”

He added that the current composition and judgments by the court “show a reductive approach to the rights of the vulnerable. There is a general sense that the court seems less interested [in] individual rights and expertise.”

Amnesty and PRCBC had appealed a ruling by the Court of Appeal last year, which followed a ruling by the High Court in 2020 that the fee was excluding children from their citizenship rights.

Both lower courts found the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, had not given consideration to the best interests of children when setting the fee.

While the Home Secretary continues to have discretion in setting the citizenship fee for vulnerable children, parliament could choose to change that – all eyes are now on whether the Nationality and Borders Bill could be amended to reduce or remove the fee for children in care or who cannot afford to pay.

The Supreme Court ruling paradoxically highlighted the importance of British citizenship, noting: “It can contribute to one’s sense of identity and belonging, assisting people, and not least young people in their sensitive teenage years, to feel part of the wider community. It allows a person to participate in the political life of the local community and the country at large.”

Source: Court lets Priti Patel keep charging children £1012 for citizenship

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Ethnic and immigrant Chinese have range of feelings toward Beijing Olympics

2022/02/08 Leave a comment

Not that surprising to find a diversity of views:

Shuyu Kong recalls being a new Asian studies professor at a Canadian university when Beijing hosted the Summer Olympics in 2008.

Now, in 2022, with many years of seeing students explore their identity and a sense of belonging, the Simon Fraser University academic is once again thinking about the feelings of those with ethnic, heritage or immigrant ties to China as the Winter Olympics unfold in Beijing.

Source: Ethnic and immigrant Chinese have range of feelings toward Beijing Olympics

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Senator Woo: Election disinformation claims and Kenny Chiu’s Richmond riding

2022/02/07 Leave a comment

It was striking that the Conservatives lost three ridings with large Chinese Canadian populations: Steveston-Richmond East (which has flipped between the Conservatives and Liberals) and ridings which have been held by Conservatives for some time, Richmond Centre (2008-21) and Markham—Unionville (2015-21).

I tend to put more stock in claims of disinformation than Senator Woo, given his public record of being relatively uncritical of the Chinese regime.

And his critique of the article by Sze-Fung Lee and Benjamin Fung that prompted his rebuttal, for their comment that riding voters have “weak critical thinking skills and . . . (lack of) prior training or experience in dealing with disinformation” seems unwarranted given that we know that most voters, whatever their origins, are equally inexperienced in dealing with disinformation (nor are necessarily politicians).

And as to his concerns regarding Chiu’s proposed bill, they could be addressed in the Commons and Senate committees should the bill have proceeded to review:

Canadians are not generally sore losers, but the 2021 general election has produced a long tail of speculation about why certain ridings voted the way they did – but shouldn’t have. The latest is from two McGill academics in a recent Policy Options article, Misinformation and Chinese interference in Canada’s affairs. Sze-Fung Lee and Benjamin Fung claim that Kenny Chiu, a Conservative candidate in Steveston-Richmond East in B.C., was the target of a disinformation campaign via social media posts about a private member’s bill he proposed that did not get approved before the September federal election.

The Globe and Mail reported on the Lee and Fung article and questioned whether the campaign had cost him the election.

Neither the Globe nor Lee and Fung pointed to a “smoking gun” connecting Beijing to what happened in the Greater Vancouver riding, whose population is about 50 per cent ethnic Chinese. But both share the view that, in the words of Lee and Fung, “whoever was responsible for disseminating the fake news had a clear motive in reshaping the narratives in favour of Beijing’s interests.”

But was it disinformation – in the sense of false information that is intended to mislead – or legitimate debate within the Chinese-Canadian community?

Chiu’s Bill C-282, the Foreign Influence Registry Act, would have set up a registry for people or entities who contacted Canadian politicians or senior federal public officials in cases where they were or could be perceived to be acting on behalf of certain foreign governments or entities.

As Tarun Krishnakumar noted last July in a Policy Options article: “C-282 is also limited in that it only applies to agents acting on behalf of principals located in countries specifically designated by the Canadian government. In other words, it does not apply to foreign influence writ large. While politically expedient, this is problematic from a broader policy perspective as it opens up the framework to claims that it is discriminatory and unfairly targeted at certain countries.”

Lee and Fung don’t demonstrate the falsity of the social media posts they deem to be problematic but have instead taken at face value Chiu’s belief that he was the victim of disinformation.

One WeChat post that Chiu cited as misleading claims that the bill “is going to have extremely negative consequences for immigrants from mainland China. It will also harm economic, cultural and technological exchanges between Canada and China.”

The post goes on: “Although the bill doesn’t list which countries belong to the foreign forces, considering the soured relationship between Canada and China…(and Chiu’s) anti-China background, undoubtedly this bill is targeting mainland Chinese associations and aims to control or monitor mainland Chinese speech and behaviours.”

In Chiu’s proposed bill, a foreign principal was defined as “a foreign government, an individual or entity related to a foreign government, a foreign political organization that exists primarily to pursue political objectives or an individual or entity related to such an organization.”

It defined a related entity – among several criteria – as one in which the leadership is “accustomed or under an obligation, whether formal or informal, to act in accordance with the directions, instructions or wishes of the foreign government or foreign political organization.”

Given that the People’s Republic of China (the PRC) is an authoritarian state, one could reasonably argue that all legally constituted entities in China – including corporations, educational institutions, alumni organizations, cultural groups, and municipalities – fall under the definition of foreign principal. If that is the case, any individual in Canada acting on behalf of such an entity would be subject to registration if he or she were to speak with a parliamentarian or senior public official on a public policy matter.

The Globe editors dismiss the idea that anyone attending a Chinese cultural event would be subject to registration under the proposed act. That may be so, but what if a Canadian representative of that Chinese cultural group were to speak with me as a senator about cultural services trade between Canada and China?

If the bill had passed, what would have stopped Canadian officials from declaring the cultural group to be under the control of the Chinese state and requiring that any representative of that group register under the act to consult with a parliamentarian or senior official about a public policy matter?

The “related entity” argument is what lies behind the calls to ban Huawei from involvement in Canada’s 5G telecommunications network. On the face of it, Huawei is a privately held company with no formal ties to the Chinese state. But critics of Huawei say it is tantamount to a foreign principal because the company is headquartered in China and could be required by the Chinese state to hand over data that would compromise Canadian security.

The same logic is behind the recent forced divestiture of China Mobile’s assets in Canada on the grounds that those assets could be leveraged by the Chinese state for non-commercial purposes. China Mobile does not actually own or operate any network infrastructure in Canada but rather uses the Telus network to deliver telecommunications services.

A badly written law such as C-282 would open the door to a similarly broad interpretation of many Chinese entities on the basis that they could theoretically be subject to direction from the Chinese state.

It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that many recent PRC immigrants who have enduring ties with their native country feared Chiu’s bill would have negative consequences for them, and that it would “harm economic, cultural and technological exchanges between Canada and China.” That they felt this way is less about “reshaping the narratives in favour of Beijing’s interests,” as Lee and Fung assert, as it is about self-protection.

None of the above is a defence of the Chinese system of government or Xi Jinping’s drift toward autocracy. But a badly drafted Canadian law on foreign influence does not advance democracy in China. It does, however, set back democracy in Canada by stigmatizing Canadians with institutional ties to the PRC.

It is bad enough to cry election disinformation without proper scrutiny. What is worse is Lee and Fung’s insinuation that some Steveston-Richmond East voters cast their ballots against Chiu because of “weak critical thinking skills and . . . (lack of) prior training or experience in dealing with disinformation.”

We harm the body politic by projecting our insecurities onto fellow citizens, especially Chinese-Canadians, and assuming that they are unwitting receptacles for disinformation from Beijing.  And we undermine the integrity of our elections by casting doubt on the legitimacy of voters’ intentions simply because their views don’t align with ours.

Lee and Fung are correct in saying that “taking a stand against . . . the Chinese Communist Party does not make the Conservatives or Canada anti-China.” They should have added the corollary that voting against a Conservative position on China does not make the elector a disinformation dupe or Chinese Communist Party sympathizer.

Source: Election disinformation claims and Kenny Chiu’s Richmond riding

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Serwer: Whoopi Goldberg’s American Idea of Race

2022/02/05 Leave a comment

Good thoughtful analysis and commentary, and the importance of understanding historical experiences:

It made sense, to the New York Daily News sports editor, that these guys dominated basketball. After all, “the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smartalecness,” not to mention their “God-given better balance and speed.”

He was referring, of course, to the Jews.

In the 1930s, Paul Gallico was trying to explain away Jewish dominance of basketball. He came up with the idea that the game’s structure simply appealed to the immutable traits of wily Hebrews and their scheming minds. It sounds strange to the ear now, but only because our stereotypes about who is inherently good at particular sports have shifted. His theory is not any more or less insightful now than it was then; his confidence should remind us to be skeptical of similar, supposedly explanatory arguments that abound today.

Looking back at old stereotypes is a useful exercise; it can help illustrate the arbitrary nature of the concept of “race,” and how such identities shift even as people insist on their permanence and infallibility. Because race is not real, it is malleable enough to be made to serve the needs of those with the power to define it, the certainties of one generation giving way to the contradictory dogmas of another.

Whoopi Goldberg, the actor and a co-host of The View, stumbled into a public-relations nightmare for ABC on Monday when she insisted that “the Holocaust wasn’t about race.” After an episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert aired in which she opined that “the Nazis were white people, and most of the people they were attacking were white people,” she was temporarily suspended from The View. She has apologized for her remarks.

I don’t mean to pile on Goldberg here, who I think is struggling with an American conception of “race” that renders the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust illegible. I regard her remarks not as malicious, but as an ignorant projection of that American conception onto circumstances to which it does not apply. In America, distinctions among European immigrants that were once considered deeply significant dissolved in the melting pot, leaving an absence in popular memory that might explain their salience elsewhere, and how someone could be seen as white in America and yet still be subject to persecution based on their “race.”

The Nazi Holocaust in Europe and slavery and Jim Crow in the United States are outgrowths of the same ideology—the belief that human beings can be delineated into categories that share immutable biological traits distinguishing them from one another and determining their potential and behavior. In Europe, with its history of anti-Jewish persecution and violent religious divisions, the conception of Jews as a biological “race” with particular characteristics was used by the Nazis to justify the Holocaust. In the United States, the invention of race was used to justify the institution of chattel slavery, on the basis that Black people were biologically suited to permanent servitude and unfit for the rights the nation’s Founders had proclaimed as universal. The American color line was therefore much more forgiving to European Jews than the divisions of the old country were. But they are branches of the same tree, the biological fiction of race.

In the United States, physical distinctions between most Black and most white people have misled some into thinking that the American conception of race is somehow more “real” than the racial fictions on which the Nazis based their campaign of extermination. Applying the American color line to Europe, the Holocaust appears merely to be a form of sectarian violence, “white people” attacking “white people,” which seems nonsensical. But those persecuting Jews in Europe saw Jews as beastly subhumans, an “alien race” whom they were justified in destroying in order to defend German “racial purity.” The “racial” distinctions between master and slave may be more familiar to Americans, but they were and are no more real than those between Gentile and Jew.

Adherence to religious belief was not required to be subject to Nazi persecution, and unlike some prior moments in European history, conversion was insufficient to escape danger. Jewish ancestry was enough, because it was ancestry—a person’s “race”—that made someone inescapably Jewish. In his infamous memoir, Adolf Hitler regretted that, early in life, he’d seen anti-Semitism as persecution of a people on the basis of religious belief, which he thought wrong. He later came to think of this as a Jewish lie to hide the reality that the Jewish people were a separate “race” whose goal was to enslave the rest of mankind. It should not be lost that enslaving all of mankind is a concise summary of Hitler’s own political project.

“Judaism predates Western categories. It’s not quite a religion, because one can be Jewish regardless of observance or specific belief,” my colleague Yair Rosenberg wrote. “But it’s also not quite a race, because people can convert in! It’s not merely a culture or an ethnicity, because that leaves out all the religious components.”

This is all true, but Black Americans are not really a “race” either, and the borders of Black American identity can also be difficult to define or agree upon. To some extent, shared history, culture, and ancestry exist, but as the scholars Karen and Barbara Fields write in Racecraft, the very concept of race implies a material reality where none exists. Most American descendants of the emancipated have white ancestry, and millions of white Americans with African ancestry have no knowledge of it. “Race is not an idea but an ideology. It came into existence at a discernible historical moment for rationally understandable historical reasons,” the Fieldses write, “and is subject to change for similar reasons.”

It is not necessary for race to be real for racism to be real. It is only necessary that people believe race to be real. When people act on fictions, those actions have repercussions even if the underlying belief is false—even if the people know that the underlying belief they are acting on is false. The fact that anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the media, of governments, and of financial institutions are untrue does not rob them of their explanatory power for those who choose to believe in them. For Thomas Jefferson to know, somewhere in the disquiet of his own conscience, that slavery was a “cruel war against human nature itself” did not in and of itself grant freedom to those he owned as property.

“The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn’t—I mean you can tell, they knew he wasn’t—anything else but a man; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he was not a man,” James Baldwin wrote in 1964. “For if he wasn’t a man, then no crime had been committed.”

To this, we could add Jean-Paul Sartre’s observation that “if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” Race allows humanity to keep inventing, in language that can bend the most rational minds, groups of people whose supposed characteristics justify whatever cruelty we might wish to indulge.

Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics.

Source: Whoopi Goldberg’s American Idea of Race

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

USA: From slavery to socialism, new legislation restricts what teachers can discuss

2022/02/05 Leave a comment

Age of ignorance?

Across the U.S., educators are being censored for broaching controversial topics. Since January 2021, researcher Jeffrey Sachs says, 35 states have introduced 137 bills limiting what schools can teach with regard to race, American history, politics, sexual orientation and gender identity.

Sachs has been tracking this legislation for PEN America, a writers organization dedicated to free speech. He says the recent flurry of legislation has created a “minefield” for educators trying to figure out how to teach topics such as slavery, Jim Crow laws or the Holocaust. One proposed law in South Carolina, for instance, prohibits teachers from discussing any topic that creates “discomfort, guilt or anguish” on the basis of political belief.

“That means that a teacher would have to be very, very careful about how they discuss something like, let’s say, fascism or racism or antisemitism,” Sachs says. “These are political beliefs, and it means that teachers are going to have to second-guess whether they can describe that political belief in as forthright and honest a way as we wish for fear of falling afoul of this bill.”

Critical race theory, an academic approach that examines how race and racism function in American institutions, has inspired a backlash in conservative circles across the United States. In one of his first acts in office, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of Virginia, established a hotline to allow parents or members of the community to report critical race theory in the classroom. Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, a conservative mom’s group is offering a $500 bounty to catch teachers who break a state law prohibiting certain teachings about racism and sexism.

“I think it must be a very terrifying time to be an educator at any level in higher ed or in K-12,” Sachs says.

“You have, unfortunately, the kinds of daily stressors that we’ve all become used to because of COVID,” he says. “And now on top of that, these educators are trying to negotiate outraged parents and media pundits. … When you listen to what educators are saying, they’re burned out, and many of them, I think, will head for the exits.”

Interview highlights

On how some of the proposed bills would be impossible to comply with

Some of the bills — I would say many now — include a provision that says something to the effect of: Teachers cannot be compelled to discuss a controversial contemporary issue, but if they do, they must do so evenhandedly and without any kind of favoritism. However, many of those same bills also would require teachers to denounce, in the strongest possible terms, ideas like Marxism or socialism.

For instance, a bill in Indiana that is currently under consideration would require, among other things, that in the run-up to any general election in the state, students must be taught “socialism, Marxism, communism, totalitarianism or similar political systems are incompatible with and in conflict with the principles of freedom upon which the United States was founded.” And it goes on to say as such, “socialism, Marxism, communism, totalitarianism or similar political systems are detrimental to the people of the United States.”

The issue there, among many others, is that it’s a bill requiring students to be exposed to this litany of claims about different ideologies. And it also requires that in doing so, teachers cannot show favoritism or bias in any one direction. In other words, it’s a bill that can’t possibly actually work. Teachers are being pulled in two different directions, and the consequence is going to be a kind of self-censorship.

Another Indiana bill … prohibits teachers from including in their class any “anti-American ideologies.” Now that term is never defined, and again, it’s not that teachers can’t endorse or promote anti-American ideologies — they’re just simply forbidden from even discussing them.

On bills that address sexuality, gender and LGBTQ issues

It differs bill to bill. But again, many do include language prohibiting teachers from discussing concepts like gender fluidity. It prohibits them from discussing “nontraditional gender identities” and in many cases forbid[s] teachers from discussing controversial events that would presumably include, in many cases, ones like gay marriage or LGBTQ rights.

We see as well many bills requiring teachers to report to parents if their children are asking questions about their gender identity, and in many cases as well — for instance, in a Florida bill — that prohibit teachers from “encouraging any conversation about sex and sexuality.”

So it really puts teachers in an impossible situation. In a contemporary high school or middle school, even earlier in elementary school, these sorts of topics arise. And in particular, it would put LGBTQ teachers in a really difficult situation where they’re forced, essentially, to disguise their identity or the status of their relationships in order to fend off running afoul of these bills.

On how these laws are similar to what’s going on in authoritarian countries

It often gets dismissively described as “woke ideas,” and more broadly, I think we would just describe these ideas that we’re talking about as socially liberal ideas. And unfortunately, what we’re seeing is in countries like Russia, China, in Turkey, in Hungary, we are seeing these regimes targeting educational institutions and other sites of cultural production like museums or the media, [as] an attempt to drive these ideas out — to signal that to be a “real” Russian or to be a “true” Hungarian, one must be straight, one must be socially conservative. These efforts underway in these regimes, that are either authoritarian or unfortunately trending in that direction, all signal the kind of political energy that leaders believe they can get by attacking these ideas.

On a new law that addresses the concept of systemic racism

There’s a law currently on the books in North Dakota that was passed last November after just five days of consideration that has me up at night. This is a law that attempts to prohibit critical race theory in K-12 schools, and I just want to reemphasize here this is not a law that prohibits people from endorsing or promoting critical race theory. It’s a law that forbids them from even including critical race theory in the classroom. And the way that that law defines critical race theory is what has me so concerned: … “critical race theory, which is defined as the theory that racism is not merely the product of learned individual bias or prejudice, but that racism is systemically embedded in American society and the American legal system to facilitate racial inequality.” In other words, the law now is saying that whenever a teacher talks about racism, they may only describe it as a product of an individual’s own biases or prejudices. They cannot describe it — even when the facts command them to — as something more endemic or embedded within American society. It’s a way essentially of preventing teachers, I think, from being honest about a lot of the uglier sides of American history and contemporary society.

Whenever you discuss slavery, your teacher would have to essentially say, “These slaveholders were racist.” The system that they were in, the laws that supported them, the economy that made that business profitable, you’d have to separate those institutional features and describe slavery purely as a product of individual bias, which does violence to the topic. It fails to educate students, and I think might discourage students from thinking critically about contemporary institutions and identifying whether or not they also might be guilty of systemic racism.

On how the idea for these restrictive teaching bills first came about

The origins here … go back to that summer of 2020. There’s a researcher there named Christopher Rufo, who was then with the Discovery Institute in Seattle. This is in a conservative educational institute centered around the promotion of intelligent design. And Christopher Rufo wrote a series of articles for an online website called City Journal. And in his City Journal articles, he detailed what he described as indoctrination in K-12 schools or in employee training programs in businesses or state agencies, programs that he said were training people to become critical race theorists.

Those articles caught the attention of Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, and Rufo appeared on his program in early September of 2020. The very next day, he received a phone call from Mark Meadows, then chief of staff for the Trump administration. Apparently, Trump had watched the program that evening. He’d seen what Rufo had to say, and within a matter of days, Rufo was in conversation with the Trump administration on some sort of legislative or executive response. The product of that conversation was Trump’s executive order in late September, where he prohibited any state agency from discussing certain ideas as part of employee training or [training for] a state contractor that wishes to do business with the federal government.

Source: From slavery to socialism, new legislation restricts what teachers can discuss

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Black parliamentarians say protest convoy is a venue for ‘white supremacists’

2022/02/05 Leave a comment

Indeed:

A group representing Black MPs and senators is calling the protest convoy that’s been encamped for a week around Parliament Hill a venue for “white supremacists” and other extremists.

“The ‘Freedom Convoy’ protest became an opportunity for white supremacists and others with extreme and disturbing views to parade their odious views in public,” the Black parliamentary caucus said in a news release Thursday.

“This is unacceptable. These displays of hatred and violence offend Canadians and have no place in our country.”

Source: Black parliamentarians say protest convoy is a venue for ‘white supremacists’

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Cohen: Truck convoy — An American-style protest, a limp Canadian response

2022/02/04 Leave a comment

Good commentary, money quote:
“The prissy city that issues parking tickets on Christmas Eve and makes kids shut down lemonade stands is afraid to ticket truckers blocking downtown, because, you know, they might get angry.”
It is easy to talk of the Americanization of Canada, particularly in our political institutions. We now set fixed election dates, we ask appointees to the Supreme Court to appear before Parliament, we embrace attack advertising in elections.

More than anything, the tone of our politics has changed. Parliament does not have the congeniality or collegiality of a generation ago. Members clash in raw personal terms. Parliament sounds like Congress.

The Conservative Party is no longer the Progressive Conservative Party. Increasingly, it is what was once the now-defunct liberal wing of the Republican Party. It has acquired a hard-edged social conservatism, which makes winning hard in a moderate, centrist country.

Source: Cohen: Truck convoy — An American-style protest, a limp Canadian response

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Heckbert: Advice to Well-Meaning Protestors: Don’t Stand with Nazis

2022/02/01 Leave a comment

Really good piece:

A quick primer for those who wanted to “support the truckers” with this protest:

  1. It wasn’t really truckers – any more than it was carpenters, or nurses, or bricklayers. Calling it a Freedom Convoy – rather than “bunch of white guys in pickup trucks going for a long drive” – is the mistake.
  2. If you want to know why Erin O’Toole, Pierre Poilievre and others were quick to support this movement – there are eight million reasons why. A GoFundMe effort raised $8 million in a week – to Conservative fundraisers, that was their money. Or worse, it’s money that could have gone to Maxime Bernier. Until politicians say, “if these are your beliefs, you are not my people” to groups like this, the temptation to stay with the money is there.
  3. Numbers don’t matter – just because 10,000 people, or 100,000 people, or even a million people support something – that doesn’t mean you’re on the right side of the issue. The earth, for example, is round. You can get a million people to believe it isn’t, and yet, there it is – still round.  Look around you when you’re angry about something – is your anger focused on the right thing, or are you howling in the wind? Are people frustrated with the pandemic and government responses to it? Absolutely. Does that mean yelling at a teenager at a hotel in downtown Ottawa, and honking your horn as you drive around yelling “Freedom!” will convince others of the rightness of your viewpoint? Ummm, no, it won’t.
  4. If you’re a parent and you brought your child out to support this yesterday, maybe some shame wouldn’t kill you. Again, admitting you were wrong is a sign of intelligence – take your child and say, “I misunderstood what we were supporting – we, in fact, are not in favour of the things that represented.”
  5. It’s time for social media companies to be held accountable, and here’s a quick way to start: no more anonymous accounts. Zero. Every account verified. “But that will be hard to do,” say the people at Meta, Twitter, Google, et al. The truth? Your revenues suggest you can afford it.
  6. Expectation management matters – people can see, with their own eyes, when your numbers don’t come anywhere near what you said they would, and while, yes, there was some support along the route, it wasn’t nearly as evident as people said it would be.
  7. Once the Nazi and Confederate flags show up, once you desecrated the Terry Fox statue and the National War Memorial, and once you started harassing the young men and women just trying to do their jobs, your protest turned into a national embarrassment, not a movement. And, please, if you want to tell me about “the good people there who aren’t like that,” let me quote Chris Rock – if ten white guys are standing somewhere with a Nazi, that’s 11 Nazis.

Some basic facts: more than 80 per cent of truckers are vaxxed, a percentage not out of line with the general population. A large percentage of those truckers come from a very diverse background – if this were really a Freedom Convoy, it would have looked a little more like Canada and a little less like a rural Albertan’s idea of Canada.

My father was a diesel mechanic. My father, in 1980, let a young man park his van beside our small business and handed him all the money out of his wallet while he was early in his Marathon of Hope. I grew up around truckers. The ones I grew up around would not have had the time, nor the desire, to spend any time with the bros on the Hill this weekend. So, please, thank a trucker – a real trucker – for their ongoing efforts. And don’t let this group claim to represent truckers.

Finally – it bears repeating you have to spend time understanding someone – or some group – before you give them your support and your money. For anyone prone to blame the “media” for “not covering the real story” – I can’t hear you because of where you’re standing. Don’t stand with Nazis, and maybe then we can talk.

The co-author, with Phil Gaudreau, of “Headliner,”and the co-host of Headliner: The Podcast, Stephen Heckbert is a professor of public relations at Algonquin College.

Source: Advice to Well-Meaning Protestors: Don’t Stand with Nazis

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

Lisée: Le graphique du déclin

2022/02/01 Leave a comment

While Lisée and Lacroix’s critique of declining French among immigrants suffers from the fallacy that the decline reflects increased use of immigrant mother tongues at home, not a shift from French to English (see Allison Hanes: Challenging the orthodoxy that French is in free fall in Quebec). Concerns over language usage by international students is more justified, but hard to see how any government would reduce the numbers given the financial needs of post-secondary institutions:

Décomposons ensemble ce stupéfiant graphique, élaboré par Frédéric Lacroix, auteur récemment de l’excellent ouvrage Un libre choix ?, sur la situation linguistique en éducation supérieure.

Immigration permanente. C’est la ligne pleine qui montre que, bon an mal an, avant la pandémie, entre 50 000 et 55 000 immigrants devenaient résidents au Québec. Tout le débat se concentre sur cette donnée des « seuils d’immigration ». Nous savons déjà qu’à ce niveau, le Québec reçoit davantage d’immigrants par habitantque les États-Unis, la France ou le Royaume-Uni, mais moins que l’Australie, l’Allemagne et le Canada. (La baisse de 2019 sera compensée par un rattrapage, à 70 000, cette année.)

Immigration temporaire. C’est la ligne en pointillé qui monte inexorablement et qui rend caduque — sans objet ou risible, au choix — le débat sur les seuils. Cette immigration, gérée par le fédéral, est constituée pour plus de moitié d’étudiants étrangers, le reste étant des travailleurs temporaires de tous les secteurs. Une partie d’entre eux deviendront des immigrants permanents (donc un jour comptés parmi les 55 000), mais le nombre de permis délivrés augmente sans cesse. Alors si vous pensiez que le Québec accueillait par an environ 55 000 personnes, vous sous-estimiez le nombre de 150 000.

En arrivant, le français ? No thanks ! Sur le graphique, l’espace bleu représente la proportion de tous les immigrants qui déclarent connaître le français, l’espace rouge, ceux qui déclarent ne pas le connaître. En détail, la proportion des permanents qui avouent ne pas le maîtriser au point d’entrée est passée de 42 % en 2015 à presque 50 % en 2019. Cette donnée est assurément sous-évaluée, car chaque contrôle opéré a posteriori, par le vérificateur général ou les agents d’immigration, révèle qu’il y a toujours moins de français que ce qui est affiché. Chez les étudiants étrangers, l’ignorance du français est passée de 35 % en 2014 (44,5) à 43 % (45,2) en 2019. Parmi les travailleurs temporaires du programme de la mobilité internationale (ne parlons pas de la main-d’œuvre agricole, massivement hispanophone), 37 % déclaraient en 2019 ne pas connaître la langue de Molière et pour 40 % d’entre eux, on ne le sait pas ! Faut-il même croire ces chiffres ? Aucune preuve n’est requise. Plus largement, l’objectif du gouvernement Legault est de faire croître de 15 % le nombre de travailleurs temporaires d’ici 18 mois.

Une fois arrivés, toujours no thanks ! Peut-être les étudiants étrangers tombent-ils amoureux du français, une fois plongés dans notre métropole francophone ? Une étude de Statistique Canada vient détremper nos espoirs et nous détromper : « Malgré leurs intentions initiales d’apprendre le français, la plupart des étudiants n’ont pas réellement amélioré leurs compétences linguistiques à cause de contraintes temporelles, d’un manque de motivation, ou parce qu’ils interagissent principalement avec des étudiants anglophones. »

L’impact sur Montréal. Le graphique indique les entrées annuelles, mais — sauf pour les étudiants étrangers — pas le nombre cumulatif. Pour faire simple, si on ne compte pour 2019 que ceux qui déclarent ne parler que l’anglais et qui sont à Montréal, au moins 26 500 jeunes étrangers alimentent l’anglicisation montréalaise. Ajoutons ceux qui ne parlent que l’anglais parmi les étudiants canadiens-anglais (5363), les cadres et professionnels temporaires (9300) et les immigrants permanents (8860), et cela fait 50 000 personnes. C’est l’équivalent de plus de deux fois la ville ontarienne de Brockville. Il s’agit de l’hypothèse basse. Comme l’écrit Frédéric Lacroix parlant des maisons d’éducation publiques et privées anglophones, la politique d’immigration temporaire canadienne est en train de créer, « centrée sur McGill, Dawson, Concordia, Matrix, Herzing, etc., une cité-État anglophone au cœur de Montréal ».

Mais le projet de loi 96 ? J’aimerais pouvoir dire que, face à cet afflux, le projet caquiste offrira un rempart. Mais on n’y trouve pas le début d’une tentative de correction. Le gouvernement Legault, qui autorise les agrandissements de Dawson et de McGill, ne prévoit rien pour réclamer, par exemple, une connaissance préalable du français dans la sélection des étudiants étrangers ou une obligation de formation en français pendant leur séjour. Pire : le PLQ, lui, nous avait habitués à fixer, pour l’immigration permanente, des cibles de connaissance du français qu’il échouait à atteindre. Le premier ministre Legault, ses ministres, son caucus n’ont même plus de cible. Ils observent ce déclin, cet engloutissement linguistique du centre-ville, en spectateurs désintéressés.

Source: https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/chroniques/666720/le-graphique-du-declin?utm_source=infolettre-2022-01-29&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=infolettre-quotidienne

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

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